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During his weekly Ask Me Anything today, CEO Adam Mosseri confirmed that Instagram will begin testing ultra-tall 9:16 photos "in a week or two." The Verge reports: "You can have tall videos, but you cannot have tall photos on Instagram," Mosseri said. "So we thought maybe we should make sure that we treat both equally." Currently, Instagram tops out around 4:5 when displaying vertical images that've been cropped accordingly. But introducing support for slimmer, taller 9:16 photos will help them fill the entire screen as you scroll through the app's feed. Further reading: 'Stop Trying To Be TikTok': User Backlash Over Instagram ChangesRead more of this story at Slashdot.

With annual CG confab SIGGRAPH slated to start Monday in Vancouver, DreamWorks Animation announced its intent to release its proprietary renderer, MoonRay, as open-source software later this year. Hollywood Reporter reports: MoonRay has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Croods: A New Age, The Bad Guys and upcoming Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. MoonRay uses DreamWorks' distributed computation framework, Arras, also to be included in the open-source code base. "We are thrilled to share with the industry over 10 years of innovation and development on MoonRay's vectorized, threaded, parallel, and distributed code base," said Andrew Pearce, DWA's vp of global technology. "The appetite for rendering at scale grows each year, and MoonRay is set to meet that need. We expect to see the code base grow stronger with community involvement as DreamWorks continues to demonstrate our commitment to open source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo. Etienne Klein, research director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission posted the photo last week, claiming it showed the closest star to the sun. "This level of detail," Klein wrote. "A new world is revealed day after day." But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world's most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage. "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth," he said after apologizing for tricking so many people. "Like an idiot, I got screwed," tweeted one French user. "Same," replied another, "the source was so credible" Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online, adding that "I also think that if I hadn't said it was a James Webb photo, it wouldn't have been so successful."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried," writes Mukund Rathi via the Electronic Frontier Foundation (DFF). "Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the student's expulsion violated his First Amendment rights. The court's opinion affirms what we argued in an amicus brief last year." From the report: We strongly support the Tenth Circuit's holding that schools cannot regulate how students use social media off campus, even to spread "offensive, controversial speech," unless they target members of the school community with "vulgar or abusive language." The case arose when the student and his friends visited a thrift shop on a Friday night. There, they posted a picture on Snapchat with an offensive joke about violence against Jews. He deleted the post and shared an apology just a few hours later, but the school suspended and eventually expelled him. [...] The Tenth Circuit held the First Amendment protected the student's speech because "it does not constitute a true threat, fighting words, or obscenity." The "post did not include weapons, specific threats, or speech directed toward the school or its students." While the post spread widely and the school principal received emails about it, the court correctly held that this did not amount to "a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption" that would allow regulation of protected speech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offense will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. The Guardian reports: In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver "non-fitted devices" to monitor "specific cohorts" as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of 6 million pounds. A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. Photographs taken using the smartwatches will be cross-checked against biometric facial images on Home Office systems and if the image verification fails, a check must be performed manually. The data will be shared with the Home Office, MoJ and the police, with Home Office officials adding: "The sharing of this data [to] police colleagues is not new." The number of devices to be produced and the cost of each smartwatch was redacted in the contract and there is no mention of risk assessments to determine whether it is appropriate to monitor vulnerable or at-risk asylum seekers. The Home Office says the smartwatch scheme will be for foreign-national offenders who have been convicted of a criminal offense, rather than other groups, such as asylum seekers. However, it is expected that those obliged to wear the smartwatches will be subject to similar conditions to those fitted with GPS ankle tags, with references in the DPIA to curfews and inclusion and exclusion zones. Those who oppose the 24-hour surveillance of migrants say it breaches human rights and may have a detrimental impact on their health and wellbeing. Lucie Audibert, a lawyer and legal officer for Privacy International, said: "Facial recognition is known to be an imperfect and dangerous technology that tends to discriminate against people of color and marginalized communities. These 'innovations' in policing and surveillance are often driven by private companies, who profit from governments' race towards total surveillance and control of populations. "Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanizing and invasive technology against migrants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the help of SpaceX and a Falcon 9 rocket, South Korea launched its first mission to the moon. "The successful launch of Danuri, officially known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, takes the country beyond Earth's orbit for the first time," reports Nature. From the report: Danuri should arrive at its destination around mid-December. Its trajectory means it will take longer than most past missions to the Moon, which typically arrived in days, but will require minimal fuel. About an hour after lift-off, the spacecraft detached from the Falcon 9 rocket on which it launched. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's control centre in Daejeon then took command and made contact with the spacecraft. The bulk of the mission's scientific observations will take place once Danuri reaches the Moon, which it will orbit for a year at 100 kilometres above the lunar surface. KGRS has a broader energy range than previous y-ray detectors sent to the Moon, and scientists hope that it will create the clearest maps yet of the distribution of elements including iron, titanium, uranium and thorium. [...] [T]he spectrometer is also sensitive enough to detect hydrogen, which can be used to infer the presence of water on the surface, and create a water-resource map of the entire Moon. Previous probes have struggled to map the presence of water beyond the poles, where it is relatively more abundant [...]. KMAG will take precise measurements of the magnetic field on the surface. It will also study electric currents induced by the magnetic field of the solar wind, which streams out into space from the Sun, says Garrick-Bethell, who is part of the instrument's science team. Studying how these currents pass through the Moon could reveal what the Moon is made of deep inside. To do this, Danuri will make use of simultaneous measurements by two NASA probes currently circling the Moon, says Garrick-Bethell. This "will make a beautiful experiment that was only briefly attempted in the Apollo era, but not over the entire Moon," he says. You can watch a recording of the launch here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Department of Homeland Security is warning of vulnerabilities in the nation's emergency broadcast network that makes it possible for hackers to issue bogus warnings over radio and TV stations. "We recently became aware of certain vulnerabilities in EAS encoder/decoder devices that, if not updated to the most recent software versions, could allow an actor to issue EAS alerts over the host infrastructure (TV, radio, cable network)," the DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned. "This exploit was successfully demonstrated by Ken Pyle, a security researcher at CYBIR.com, and may be presented as a proof of concept at the upcoming DEFCON 2022 conference in Las Vegas, August 11-14." Pyle told reporters at CNN and Bleeping Computer that the vulnerabilities reside in the Monroe Electronics R189 One-Net DASDEC EAS, an emergency alert system encoder and decoder. TV and radio stations use the equipment to transmit emergency alerts. The researcher told Bleeping Computer that "multiple vulnerabilities and issues (confirmed by other researchers) haven't been patched for several years and snowballed into a huge flaw." "When asked what can be done after successful exploitation, Pyle said: 'I can easily obtain access to the credentials, certs, devices, exploit the web server, send fake alerts via crafts message, have them valid / pre-empting signals at will. I can also lock legitimate users out when I do, neutralizing or disabling a response,'" Bleeping Computer added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's AI research labs have created a new state-of-the-art chatbot and are letting members of the public talk to the system in order to collect feedback on its capabilities. The Verge reports: The bot is called BlenderBot 3 and can be accessed on the web. (Though, right now, it seems only residents in the US can do so.) BlenderBot 3 is able to engage in general chitchat, says Meta, but also answer the sort of queries you might ask a digital assistant, "from talking about healthy food recipes to finding child-friendly amenities in the city." The bot is a prototype and built on Meta's previous work with what are known as large language models or LLMS -- powerful but flawed text-generation software of which OpenAI's GPT-3 is the most widely known example. Like all LLMs, BlenderBot is initially trained on vast datasets of text, which it mines for statistical patterns in order to generate language. Such systems have proved to be extremely flexible and have been put to a range of uses, from generating code for programmers to helping authors write their next bestseller. However, these models also have serious flaws: they regurgitate biases in their training data and often invent answers to users' questions (a big problem if they're going to be useful as digital assistants). This latter issue is something Meta specifically wants to test with BlenderBot. A big feature of the chatbot is that it's capable of searching the internet in order to talk about specific topics. Even more importantly, users can then click on its responses to see where it got its information from. BlenderBot 3, in other words, can cite its sources. By releasing the chatbot to the general public, Meta wants to collect feedback on the various problems facing large language models. Users who chat with BlenderBot will be able to flag any suspect responses from the system, and Meta says it's worked hard to 'minimize the bots' use of vulgar language, slurs, and culturally insensitive comments." Users will have to opt in to have their data collected, and if so, their conversations and feedback will be stored and later published by Meta to be used by the general AI research community. "We are committed to publicly releasing all the data we collect in the demo in the hopes that we can improve conversational AI," Kurt Shuster, a research engineer at Meta who helped create BlenderBot 3, told The Verge. Further reading: Microsoft's 'Teen Girl' AI Experiment Becomes a 'Neo-Nazi Sex Robot'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ChromeOS 104 is rolling out starting today with several big interface updates that improve how you use the operating system. 9to5Google reports: ChromeOS 104 introduces proper dark and light themes that touch every aspect of the user interface. This includes the shelf, app launcher, Files app, and the backgrounds of various settings pages. You can enable the dark theme from the second page of Quick Settings. Google also created wallpapers that "subtly shift from light to dark," depending on the set theme. After updating, you'll notice that the month and day now appear to the left of the time in the shelf. Tapping opens a monthly calendar with the ability to tap a day to see all events, with an additional click opening the Google Calendar PWA. You can see other months and quickly return to "Today." This takes up the same size as Quick Settings, while any available alerts appear just above. Notifications from the same sender are now grouped together, while there are bigger touch targets for alert actions. The redesigned Launcher that's more compact and does not take up your entire screen is seeing wider availability. Additionally, some might be able to quickly search for Android apps from the Play Store with an inline rating. Version 104 of ChromeOS introduces a more full-featured Gallery app (with a new purple icon) that can open PDFs with the ability to fill out forms, sign documents, and make text annotations, like highlights. There's also a new Wallpaper & style application that's accessed by right-clicking the shelf and selecting the last option. Besides the collections curated by Google, you can set wallpapers from your Google Photos library. There's the ability to select an album and have a new background appear daily. This experience also lets you set the device theme (auto-switching available), and Screen saver with three styles available: Slide show, Feel the breeze, and Float on by.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Riot Blockchain earned about $9.5 million in credits last month from shutting down its Bitcoin mining rigs at a Texas facility while the region weathered a historic heat wave. The amount will be credited against the company's power usage. The value of the credit is equal to around 439 Bitcoin. Riot also mined 318 coins during the month, according to the company's monthly production and operations update. The publicly traded miner has a 750-megawatt facility and is building another one-gigawatt site in the Lone Star State. The sites are two of the largest mining farms in the world. Nearly all industrial scale miners shut down their rigs in Texas while the state experienced a severe power crunch during the record heat wave in early July. While the power crunch sent electricity prices soaring and made Bitcoin mining operations unprofitable, some large-scale miners such as Riot were able to sell electricity purchased earlier at a lower price back to the grid with a premium. Riot is participating in the 4 Coincident Peak program from the state power operator known as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Riot's 750-megawatt Whinstone Facility in Rockdale, Texas, is encouraged, though not required, to curtail consumption when called during the four summer months of peak energy demand. The company sold 275 mined coins for about $5.6 million in July. The 318 Bitcoin mined represents a decrease of 28% in production compared to the prior month, according to the update.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered throughout the oil-rich Permian Basin. What's not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, primarily methane, billowing from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky. From a report: The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas, was observed releasing an estimated 870 kilograms of methane -- an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas -- into the atmosphere each hour. That's the equivalent impact on the climate of burning seven tanker trucks full of gasoline every day. But Mako's outsized emissions aren't illegal, or even regulated. And it was only one of 533 methane "super emitters" detected during a 2021 aerial survey of the Permian conducted by Carbon Mapper, a partnership of university researchers and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The group documented massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the bottom of a shallow sea. Hundreds of those sites were seen spewing the gas over and over again. Ongoing leaks, gushers, going unfixed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olivia Meehan, who worked on the web archiving team at the US Library of Congress, evaluates how well online archives of the Papal Transition 2005 Collection from 2005 have survived: Based on the results I have so far and conversations I've had with other web archivists, the lifecycle of websites is unpredictable to the extent that accurately tracking the status of a site inherently requires nuance, time, and attention -- which is difficult to maintain at scale. This data is valuable, however, and is worth pursuing when possibleÂ. Using a sample selection of URLs from larger collections could make this more manageable than comprehensive reviews. Of the content originally captured in the Papal Transition 2005 Collection, 41% is now offline. Without the archived pages, the information, perspectives, and experiences expressed on those websites would potentially be lost forever. They include blogs, personal websites, individually-maintained web portals, and annotated bibliographies. They frequently represent small voices and unique perspectives that may be overlooked or under-represented by large online publications with the resources to maintain legacy pages and articles. The internet is impermanent in a way that is difficult to quantify. The constant creation of new information obscures what is routinely deleted, overwritten, and lost. While the scope of this project is small within the context of the wider internet, and even within the context of the Library's Web Archive collections as a whole, I hope that it effectively demonstrates the value of web archives in preserving snapshots of the online world as it moves and changes at a record pace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief architect of Solana's once mighty stablecoin exchange Saber hid behind anonymous developer accounts to pump billions of dollars into his DeFi empire, a CoinDesk investigation has found. From the story: Something about Sunny Aggregator felt off-kilter to the cryptocurrency user known as Saint Eclectic. Sunny was the newest decentralized finance (DeFi) app to hit Solana during that blockchain's scorching bull run last summer, when its native token jumped fivefold. Sunny was barely two weeks old by early September, but billions of dollars in crypto were flooding this yield farm. Still, Saint and others had questions: Who was behind Sunny? Why was its developer, one "Surya Khosla," pseudonymous? Was its codebase audited? Would users' cash be safe? "There was no indication of who Surya was," Saint recalled recently, "so many users didn't feel comfortable" putting their crypto in. Their suspicions proved prescient. CoinDesk has learned who Surya was: Ian Macalinao, the chief architect of Saber, a stablecoin exchange built on top of Solana. In turn, he built Sunny Aggregator on top of Saber. And that's just the top of the pile. Coding as 11 purportedly independent developers, Ian, a 20-something computer wiz from Texas, created a vast web of interlocking DeFi protocols that projected billions of dollars of double-counted value onto the Saber ecosystem. That temporarily inflated the total value locked (TVL) on Solana, as the network was racing toward its zenith last November. The DeFi faithful regard TVL as a barometer for on-chain activity. "I devised a scheme to maximize Solana's TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times," Ian wrote in a never-published blog post reviewed by CoinDesk. The blog post was prepared on March 26, three days after Cashio, one of Ian's secretly built protocols, lost $52 million in a hack. People close to the matter confirmed the draft's authenticity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FCC may have just advanced the industrialization of space. Commissioners have voted in favor of an inquiry that will explore in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM). The move would both help officials understand the demands and risks of current in-space production technology while facilitating new projects. This could help companies build satellites and stations in orbit, for instance, while finding new ways to deal with growing volumes of space debris. From a report: The vote helps open a new "Space Innovation" docket at the FCC. It also comes two days after the regulator updated its rules to create more breathing room for satellite broadband frequencies. Expect considerably more space-related developments going forward, then. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel saw the inquiry as vital. Existing rules were made for "another era" where space programs were exclusively government-run, she said. The support ISAM will ideally help the FCC adapt to space tourism, huge private satellite constellations and a larger general shift toward commercial spaceflight.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of 10 U.S. House Democrats asked the Biden administration on Friday to use funding to build out broadband internet and electric vehicle charging infrastructure simultaneously. From a report: Congress as part of the $1 trillion infrastructure law approved in November 2021 set aside $42.45 billion in grants to expand broadband, including building fiber or other networks and $5 billion for EV charging. The lawmakers led by Representatives Doris Matsui and Anna Eshoo urged officials to coordinate broadband and EV charging infrastructure efforts to encourage "co-location" of EV and broadband, especially in underserved areas "This approach can address multiple national priorities simultaneously and avoid duplicative efforts," the lawmakers wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doctors have identified a protein in the blood they believe could serve as an early warning sign for patients who are at risk of diabetes and death from cancer. From a report: Researchers in Sweden and China analysed two decades of health records from more than 4,500 middle-aged adults on the Malmo diet and cancer study. They found that those with the highest levels of prostasin, a protein that circulates in the blood, were almost twice as likely to have diabetes than those with the lowest levels. Some of those enrolled on the study already had diabetes, so the scientists looked at who among those without the disease went on to be diagnosed later. People in the top quarter for prostasin levels turned out to be 76% more likely to develop diabetes than those in the bottom quarter. Dr Xue Bao, the first author on the study at the Affiliated hospital of Nanjing University medical school in China, said prostasin was a potential new "risk marker" for diabetes, but also death from cancer, particularly in people who have high blood sugar. Prostasin plays several roles in the body, such as regulating blood pressure and blood volume, and it also suppresses the growth of tumours that are fuelled by high blood sugar. While type 2 diabetes is known to raise the risk of certain cancers, including pancreatic, liver, bowel and endometrial tumours, the biological mechanisms are far from clear.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a revelation in May that DuckDuckGo's (DDG) privacy-focused web browser allows Microsoft tracking scripts on third-party websites, the company now says it will start blocking those too. From a report: DuckDuckGo's browser had third-party tracker loading protection by default that already blocked scripts embedded on websites from Facebook, Google, and others, but until now Microsoft's scripts from the Bing and LinkedIn domains (but not its third-party cookies) had a pass. A security researcher named Zach Edwards pointed out the exclusion that he apparently uncovered while auditing the browser's privacy claims, and noted it is especially curious because Microsoft is the partner that delivers ads in DDG's search engine (while promising not to use that data to create a monitored profile of users to target ads, instead relying on context to decide which ones it should show). DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said at the time that the reason for it was a search syndication agreement with Microsoft, and that more updates on third-party tracker preventions were coming. A backlash ensued, with some seizing on DuckDuckGo's own words that "tracking is tracking," a phrase the company used against Google's cookie-replacing "privacy sandbox" ad technology. Now Weinberg writes in a blog post, "I've heard from a number of users and understand that we didn't meet their expectations around one of our browser's web tracking protections." DuckDuckGo is vowing to be more transparent about what trackers its browser and extensions are protecting users from, making its tracker blocklists available and offering users more information on how its tracking protections with a new help page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said on Friday it doesn't own India-based platform WazirX despite disclosing the acquisition two and a half years ago. From a report: Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, said in a series of tweets that the company has been "trying to conclude the deal for the past few years," but hasn't completed the transaction yet citing "a few issues" that he declined to elaborate. Binance announced the acquisition of WazirX in late 2019 in a blog post. The official blog post, which carried a picture of Zhao and WazirX founders, also featured the Binance executive's enthusiasm about the deal. "The acquisition of WazirX shows our commitment and dedication to the Indian people and strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in India as well as another step forward in achieving the freedom of money," the 2019 post cited him as saying. WazirX also reported that it had been "successfully acquired by Binance" in a separate blog post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. From a report: In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver "non-fitted devices" to monitor "specific cohorts" as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of $7.24m. A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. Those obliged to wear the devices will need to complete periodic monitoring checks throughout the day by taking a photograph of themselves on a smartwatch, with information including their names, date of birth, nationality and photographs stored for up to six years. Locations will be tracked "24/7, allowing trail monitoring data to be recorded."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has asked suppliers to ensure that shipments from Taiwan to China strictly comply with Chinese customs regulations after a recent visit by senior U.S. lawmaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei stoked fears of rising trade barriers. From a report: Apple told suppliers on Friday that China has started strictly enforcing a long-standing rule that Taiwanese-made parts and components must be labeled as being made either in "Taiwan, China" or "Chinese Taipei," sources familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia, language that indicates the island is part of China. The U.S. tech titan urged suppliers to treat the matter with urgency to avoid possible disruptions caused by goods and components being held for scrutiny, the people said. The timing is sensitive for Apple, as its suppliers are preparing components that will go into its next iPhones and other new products set to launch this autumn. Using the phrase "Made in Taiwan" on any import declaration forms, documents or cartons could cause shipments to be held and checked by Chinese customs, the sources added. Penalties for violating such a rule is a fine of up to 4,000 yuan ($592) or, in the worst-case scenario, the shipment being rejected, one of the sources said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon this morning announced plans to acquire iRobot for an all-cash deal valued at $1.7 billion. From a report: The home robotics firm, best known for pioneering the robotic vacuum, was founded in 1990 by MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab members Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks and Helen Greiner. Twelve years after its founding, the company introduced the Roomba, a brand that has since become synonymous with the branding, selling more than 30 million units as of 2020. Brooks and Greiner have gone on to found and lead several other companies, while Angle has remained on-board as CEO -- a position he will maintain post-acquisition. "Since we started iRobot, our team has been on a mission to create innovative, practical products that make customers' lives easier, leading to inventions like the Roomba and iRobot OS," CEO Colin Angle said in a release. "Amazon shares our passion for building thoughtful innovations that empower people to do more at home, and I cannot think of a better place for our team to continue our mission. I'm hugely excited to be a part of Amazon and to see what we can build together for customers in the years ahead."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is a key overseas market for several global tech giants including Meta and Google. Now the South Asian nation is gearing up to have its voice heard for global M&A deals. From a report: New Delhi has proposed amendments to its Competition Act, 2002, to introduce a number of changes including requiring the permission of local watchdog (Competition Commission of India) for all overseas deals exceeding $252 million in value for firms with "substantial business operations in India." India, the world's second largest internet market that has drawn investments of tens of billions of dollars from Meta, Google and Amazon and venture capitalists including SoftBank, Sequoia and Tiger Global, has traditionally scrutinized deals based on asset size and not the transaction value. According to law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, Indian regulator approved over 700 fillings in the past decade alone. But things appear to be taking a shift and attempting to bring parity between India's position to those of China, U.S., and Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Winamp, the premiere music player of the late 1990s and early 2000s that was acquired by Radionomy from AOL in 2014, has received a major new update for the first time in four years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the work done in this build focuses on behind-the-scenes work that modernizes the codebase, which means it still looks and acts like a turn-of-the-millennium Windows app. The entire project has been migrated from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019, a wide range of audio codecs have been updated to more modern versions, and support for Windows 11 and https streams have both been improved. The final release will be version 5.9, with some features targeted for release in version 5.9.1 "and beyond" (version 6.0 goes unmentioned). It requires Windows 7 SP1 or newer, dropping support for Windows XP. That said, in our limited testing the "new" Winamp is still in many ways an ancient app, one not made for the age of high-resolution, high-density displays. This may cause usability problems, depending on what you're trying to run it on. But hey, for all you people out there still trying to keep hope alive, it's nice to see something on Winamp.com that isn't a weird NFT project and a promise of updates yet to come.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoundCloud CEO Michael Weissman told employees in an email that the company "will be making reductions to our global team that will impact up to 20% of our company." "Making changes that affect people is incredibly hard. But it is one that is necessary given the challenging economic climate and financial market headwinds," he added. "Today's change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability. We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company and that now extends to a reduction to our team." Billboard reports: In a statement, a rep for SoundCloud confirmed that the company "announced an approximate 20% reduction of its global workforce due to a significant company transformation and the challenging economic and financial environment." "During this difficult time," the rep added, "we are focused on providing the support and resources to those transitioning while reinforcing our commitment to executing our mission to lead what's next in music." Back in 2017, the company cut around 40% of its workforce, which then-CEO Alex Ljung said was necessary for the company to "control" its "independent future." Billboard notes that SoundCloud has moved towards profitability in the five years since. "The company obtained a $170 million infusion led by The Raine Group and Temasek and a $75 million investment from Pandora parent SiriusXM." This led to SoundCloud announcing its first profitable quarter in 2020. Earlier this year, the company said its annual revenue run rate was around $300 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warner Bros announced that HBO Max and Discovery+ will launch in the U.S. as a single service in the summer of 2023. Variety reports: "At the end of the day, putting all the content together was the only way we saw to make this a viable business," [said JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and interactive for Warner Bros. Discovery, on the company's Q2 earnings call]. Bringing HBO Max and Discovery+ together is aimed at cutting churn so "there's something for everyone in the household," he said. WBD did not announce what the new brand name for the merged service will be, nor did execs discuss pricing for the unified streamer. Warner Bros. Discovery is initially focused on the ad-supported and ad-free versions of the combined HBO Max-Discovery+, Perrette said, but is also "exploring how to reach customers in the free, ad-supported space" with content that is totally different from what's on the premium VOD services. HBO may or may not be part of the name of the unified direct-to-consumer WBD platform; Perrette said the company is doing research on consumer perception of the HBO Max name. But, HBO will continue to be a major brand: "HBO will always be the beacon and the ultimate brand that stands for television quality," he said on the call. The merged HBO Max-Discovery+ will combine the best elements of both services, said Perrette. He said HBO Max has had "performance and customer" issues but offers a rich set of features; Discovery+ has more limited features but provides a more robust underlying delivery capability. The media company plans to take the unified HBO Max-Discovery+ platform to Latin America following the summer 2023 rollout in the United States, adds Variety. Europe will see it in early 2024; Asia Pacific in mid-2024; and additional markets in fall 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet's Stephanie Condon spoke with Red Hat's new CEO, Matt Hicks, a veteran of the company that's been working there for over 14 years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from their discussion: Matt Hicks, Red Hat's new CEO, doesn't have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company's new leader, Hicks says. "The markets are changing really quickly," he tells ZDNet. "And just having that intuition -- of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering -- I know that's intuition that I'll lean on... Around that, there's a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition." Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference -- they really start to define people's careers." Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier -- then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO -- moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...] "As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge," writes Condon. "Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It's working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and it's partnering with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025." "There'll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that," Hicks says. "And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries -- because it's newer, and it's evolving."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Attorneys General of all 50 states have joined forces in hopes of giving teeth to the seemingly never-ending fight against robocalls. Engadget reports: North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana AG Todd Rokita and Ohio AG Dave Yost are leading the formation of the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. In Stein's announcement, he said the group will focus on taking legal action against telecoms, particularly gateway providers, allowing or turning a blind eye to foreign robocalls made to US numbers. He explained that gateway providers routing foreign phone calls into the US telephone network have the responsibility under the law to ensure the traffic they're bringing in is legal. Stein said that they mostly aren't taking any action to keep robocalls out of the US phone network, though, and they're even intentionally allowing robocall traffic through in return for steady revenue in many cases. Stein said in a statement: "We're... going to take action against phone companies that violate state and federal laws. I'm proud to create this nationwide task force to hold companies accountable when they turn a blind eye to the robocallers they're letting on to their networks so they can make more money. I've already brought one pathbreaking lawsuit against an out-of-state gateway provider, and I won't hesitate to take legal action against others who break our laws and bombard North Carolinians with these harmful, unlawful calls."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's upcoming entry-level iPad is rumored to cut the 3.5mm headphone jack, joining the iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad Mini, and the entire iPhone lineup. The Verge reports: MySmartPrice says the CAD renders are sourced from a case maker working on accessories for what will be the 10th-generation iPad. It's a substantial redesign from the classic iPad design that has been left largely untouched for years; Apple increased the display size slightly in 2017 and has made other internal hardware upgrades, but the overall look has remained consistent. It appears that's about to change, with the new iPad sharing the same flat-sides aesthetic as recent iPhones, iPads, the 14-inch / 16-inch MacBook Pro, and 2022 MacBook Air. Both 9to5Mac and MacRumors reported on the renders. But as always, treat these easily faked images with a healthy amount of skepticism. The home button remains present, which means so do the sizable bezels above and below the display. MySmartPrice reports that the screen should be larger than the current 10.2-inch model, and there's a redesigned camera on the iPad's back reminiscent of the module from the iPhone X. The revamped iPad has a USB-C port, which would complete the transition for Apple's tablet line. These renders also include quad speakers, and that's where I get somewhat doubtful of what we're seeing: only the iPad Pro is currently outfitted with four speakers, so if this pans out, the base-level iPad would be leapfrogging both the iPad Air and Mini in the audio department. That strikes me as unlikely, but it could also serve as Apple's justification for nixing the headphone jack from a product used in many classrooms and other scenarios where support for affordable wired headphones has been meaningful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crunchyroll announced that it's acquired Right Stuf, one of the world's leading online anime superstores. "Expanding Crunchyroll's eCommerce offerings, the acquisition aims to serve anime fans and collectors an even wider array of merchandise for online purchase including manga, home video, figures, games, music and everything in between," writes the company in a post. From the report: Founded in 1987, Right Stuf is a leading consumer source for anime pop culture merchandise online. By visiting its eCommerce portal, enthusiasts and collectors can find thousands of products, including Blu-rays, manga books, music, figurines, collectables, and more. Right Stuf also offers licensed anime home video products through its own label. "For 35 years, Right Stuf's mission has been to connect anime fans with the products they love," said Shawne Kleckner, CEO of Right Stuf. "Joining forces with Crunchyroll allows us to accelerate and scale this effort more than ever before. There has never been a more exciting time to be an anime fan than today!" Kleckner and the Right Stuf team will join Crunchyroll's Emerging Businesses organization, led by Terry Li. Sony acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175 billion from AT&T, in a deal that closed in August 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable Internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that claimed the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. They filed another lawsuit against Charter in the same court in August 2021. Both cases were settled. The record labels and Charter told the court of their settlements on Tuesday in filings (PDF) that said (PDF), "The Parties hereby notify the Court that they have resolved the above-captioned action." Upon the settlements, the court vacated the pending trials and asked the parties to submit dismissal papers within 28 days. Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks also settled (PDF) a similar lawsuit in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida this week. The record labels' case in Florida was settled one day before a scheduled trial, as TorrentFreak reported Tuesday. The case was dismissed with prejudice (PDF) after the settlement. No details on any of the settlements were given in the documents notifying the courts. A three-week jury trial in one of the Colorado cases was scheduled to begin in June 2023 but is no longer needed. The question for Internet users is whether the settlements mean that Charter will be more aggressive in terminating subscribers who illegally download copyrighted material. Charter declined to comment today when we asked if it agreed to increase account terminations of subscribers accused of piracy. "Even if the settlements have no specific provision on terminating subscribers, Charter presumably has to pay the record labels to settle the claims," adds Ars' Jon Brodkin. "That could make the country's second-biggest ISP more likely to terminate subscribers accused of piracy in order to prevent future lawsuits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is being called out for blocking users of the end-to-end encrypted email service Tutanota from registering an account with its cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams, if they try to do that using a Tutanota email address. TechCrunch reports: The problem, which has been going on unrectified for some time -- with an initial complaint raised with Microsoft support back in January 2021 -- appears to have arisen because it treats Tutanota as a corporate email, rather than what it actually is (and has always been), an email service. This misclassification means that when a Tutanota email user tries to use this email address to register an account with Teams they get a classic "computer says no' response -- with the interface blocking the registration and suggesting the person "contact your admin or try a different email." "When the first Tutanota user registered a Teams account, they were assigned the domain. That's why now everyone who logs in with Tutanota address should report to their 'admin' (see screenshot)," explains a spokeswoman for Tutanota when asked why they think this is happening. To get past this denial -- and register a Teams account -- the Tutanota user has to enter a non-Tutanota email. (Such as, for example, a Microsoft email address.) To get past this denial -- and register a Teams account -- the Tutanota user has to enter a non-Tutanota email. (Such as, for example, a Microsoft email address.) In a blog post detailing the saga, Tutanota co-founder, Matthias Pfau, dubs Microsoft's behavior a "severe anti-competitive practice." "Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are discussing stronger antitrust legislation to regulate Big Tech. These laws are badly needed as the example of Microsoft blocking Tutanota users from registering a Teams account demonstrates," he writes. "The problem: Big Tech companies have the market power to harm smaller competitors with some very easy steps like refusing smaller companies' customers from using their own services." "This is just one example of how Microsoft can and does abuse its dominant market position to harm competitors, which in turn also harms consumers," he adds. [...] "As earlier discussed, we are unable to make your domain a public domain. The domain has already been used for Microsoft Teams. If teams have been used with a specific domain, it can't work as a vanity/public domain," runs another of Microsoft's support's shrugging-off responses. Tutanota kept on trying to press for a reason why Microsoft could not reclassify the domain for weeks -- but just hit the same brick wall denial. Hence it's going public with its complaint now. "The conversation went back and forth for at lest six weeks until we finally gave up -- due to the repeated response that they would not change this," the spokeswoman added. In an update, a Microsoft spokesperson said: "We are currently looking into the issue raised by Tutanota."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visa and Mastercard said Thursday card payments for advertising on Pornhub and its parent company MindGeek would be suspended after a lawsuit stoked controversy over whether the payments giants could be facilitating child pornography. CNBC reports: A federal judge in California on Friday denied Visa's motion to dismiss a lawsuit by a woman who accuses the payment processor of knowingly facilitating the distribution of child pornography on Pornhub and other sites operated by parent company MindGeek. Visa CEO and Chairman Al Kelly said in a statement Thursday that he strongly disagrees with this court and is confident in his position. "Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse," Kelly said. "It is illegal, and Visa does not permit the use of our network for illegal activity. Our rules explicitly and unequivocally prohibit the use of our products to pay for content that depicts nonconsensual sexual behavior or child sexual abuse. We are vigilant in our efforts to deter this, and other illegal activity on our network." Kelly said the court decision created uncertainty about the role of TrafficJunky, MindGeek's advertising arm, and accordingly, the company will suspend its Visa acceptance privileges until further notice. During this suspension, Visa cards will not be able to be used to purchase advertising on any sites, including Pornhub or other MindGeek-affiliated sites, Kelly said. "It is Visa's policy to follow the law of every country in which we do business. We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers, and we respect the rightful role of lawmakers to make decisions about what is legal and what is not," Kelly said. "Visa can be used only at MindGeek studio sites that feature adult professional actors in legal adult entertainment." Separately, Mastercard told CNBC it's directing financial institutions to suspend acceptance of its products at TrafficJunky following the court ruling. "New facts from last week's court ruling made us aware of advertising revenue outside of our view that appears to provide Pornhub with indirect funding," a statement from Mastercard said. "This step will further enforce our December 2020 decision to terminate the use of our products on that site." At that time, Visa also suspended sites that contained user-generated content and acceptance on those sites has not been reinstated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by Jody Serrano: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know -- which in those days was anime -- the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here's a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn't exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994. The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites. Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok." Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?" "We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Real problems are what legislators are supposed to be solving. The Philippines has plenty of those, ranging from (government-endorsed) extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and drug users to abuses of state power to silence journalists to the actual murders of human rights activists. But legislators with their own axes to grind will always find ways to hone this edge, even if it means subjecting themselves to international ridicule. Enter Representative Arnolfo "Arnie" Teves, Jr. The rep has introduced a bill that would criminalize the act of "ghosting." For those unfamiliar with internet slang, it may appear Teves is trying to criminalize the act of being a ghost. (Webster's Ye Olde English Dictionary, perhaps.) But ghosts actually engage in "haunting," which is not the same thing as "ghosting." Ghosting is something else. Ghosting is disengaging from a relationship (short-term or long-term) by ignoring all calls, IMs, text messages, emails, etc. from a paramour until the problem ultimately solves itself. If one interested person can't get a response from a disinterested person, sooner or later the interested person stops trying.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit giant Equifax sent lenders incorrect credit scores for millions of consumers this spring, in a technology snafu with major real-world impact. From a report: In certain cases the errors were significant enough -- the differential was at least 25 points for around 300,000 consumers -- that some would-be borrowers may have been wrongfully denied credit, the company said in a statement. The problem occurred because of a "coding issue" when making a change to one of Equifax's servers, according to the company, which said the issue "was in place over a period of a few weeks [and] resulted in the potential miscalculation" of credit scores. While Equifax did not specify dates or figures, a June 1 alert from housing agency Freddie Mac to its clients said Equifax told the agency that about 12% of all credit scores released from March 17 to April 6 may be have been incorrect. Equifax wrote that "there was no shift in the vast majority of scores" and that "credit reports were not affected." But the company declined to comment to CNN Business about how people can learn whether they were among those whose credit scores were incorrectly reported -- and what recourse they may have if they were issued loans at a higher rate or denied a loan outright because of the snafu.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration declared monkeypox a public health emergency on Thursday as cases topped 6,600 nationwide. From a report: The declaration could facilitate access to emergency funds, allow health agencies to collect more data about cases and vaccinations, accelerate vaccine distribution and make it easier for doctors to prescribe treatment. "We're prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus," Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a Thursday briefing about the emergency declaration. A quarter of U.S. cases are in New York state, which declared a state of emergency last week. California and Illinois followed suit with emergency declarations Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they've been inactive for a year and are owned by users of its free tier, The Register reported Thursday. From the report: The Register has learned that such projects account for up to a quarter of GitLab's hosting costs, and that the auto-deletion of projects could save the cloudy coding collaboration service up to $1 million a year. The policy has therefore been suggested to help GitLab's finances remain sustainable. People with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity as they are not authorized to discuss it with the media, told The Register the policy is scheduled to come into force in September 2022. GitLab is aware of the potential for angry opposition to the plan, and will therefore give users weeks or months of warning before deleting their work. A single comment, commit, or new issue posted to a project during a 12-month period will be sufficient to keep the project alive. The Register understands some in the wider GitLab community worry that the policy could see projects disappear before users have the chance to archive code on which they rely. As many open-source projects are widely used, it is feared that the decision could have considerable negative impact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 writes: A record amount of seaweed is smothering Caribbean coasts from Puerto Rico to Barbados as tons of brown algae kill wildlife, choke the tourism industry and release toxic gases.More than 24 million tons of sargassum blanketed the Atlantic in June, up from 18.8 million tons in May, according to a monthly report published by the University of South Florida's Optical Oceanography Lab, which noted it as "a new historical record." July saw no decrease of algae in the Caribbean Sea, said Chuanmin Hu, an optical oceanography professor who helps produce the reports. "I was scared," he recalled feeling when he saw the historic number for June. He noted that it was 20% higher than the previous record set in May 2018. Hu compiled additional data for the Associated Press that showed sargassum levels for the eastern Caribbean at a near record high this year, second only to those reported in July 2018. Levels in the northern Caribbean are at their third-highest, following July 2018 and July 2021, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of Solana users collectively lost about $4.5 million worth of SOL and other tokens from Tuesday night into early Wednesday, and now there's a likely explanation for why: it's being blamed on a private key exploit tied to mobile software wallet Slope. From a report: On Wednesday afternoon, the official Solana Status Twitter account shared preliminary findings through collaboration between developers and security auditors, and said that "it appears affected addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications." "This exploit was isolated to one wallet on Solana, and hardware wallets used by Slope remain secure," the thread continues. "While the details of exactly how this occurred are still under investigation, but private key information was inadvertently transmitted to an application monitoring service." "There is no evidence the Solana protocol or its cryptography was compromised," the account added. Some Phantom wallets were also drained of their SOL and tokens in the attack, however it appears that those wallets' holders had previously interacted with a Slope wallet. "Phantom has reason to believe that the reported exploits are due to complications related to importing accounts to and from Slope," the Phantom team tweeted today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starbucks will unveil its web3 initiative, which includes coffee-themed NFTs, at next month's Investor Day event. From a report: The company earlier this year announced its plans to enter the web3 space, noting its NFTs wouldn't just serve as digital collectibles, but would provide their owners with access to exclusive content and other perks. At the time, Starbucks was light on details as to what its debut set of NFTs would look like, specific features they'd provide or even what blockchain it was building on. It said the plan was likely to be multichain or chain-agnostic, hinting at plans that weren't yet finalized. Overall, the coffee retailer kept its web3 news fairly high level, explaining simply that it believed digital collectibles could create an accretive business adjust to its stores and that more would be revealed later in 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company is beginning its international expansion of NFT support on Instagram. The expansion follows the social network's initial NFT test launch in May. With this expansion, users and businesses in more than 100 countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas will now be able to share their NFTs on Instagram. Prior to the expansion, the support was only available to select creators in the United States. From a report: The company also announced today that Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet are now accepted as a third-party wallet compatible for use. Instagram is also expanding its supported blockchains to include Flow. Instagram's NFT functionality allows users to connect a digital wallet, share NFTs and automatically tag both a creator and collector for attribution. You can share NFTs in your main Instagram Feed, Stories or in messages. Once you post a digital collectible, it will have a shimmer effect and can display public information, such as a description of the NFT. In order to post a digital collectible on Instagram, you need to connect your digital wallet to Instagram. As of today, Instagram supports connections with third-party wallets including Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Coinbase Wallet, with Dapper Wallet coming soon. Supported blockchains include Ethereum, Polygon and Flow. The social network notes that there are no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Nadis, reporting for Quanta Magazine: In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein's equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn't be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six decades since his achievement, researchers have tried to show that these so-called Kerr black holes are stable. What that means, explained Jeremie Szeftel, a mathematician at Sorbonne University, "is that if I start with something that looks like a Kerr black hole and give it a little bump" -- by throwing some gravitational waves at it, for instance -- "what you expect, far into the future, is that everything will settle down, and it will once again look exactly like a Kerr solution." The opposite situation -- a mathematical instability -- "would have posed a deep conundrum to theoretical physicists and would have suggested the need to modify, at some fundamental level, Einstein's theory of gravitation," said Thibault Damour, a physicist at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in France. In a 912-page paper posted online on May 30, Szeftel, Elena Giorgi of Columbia University and Sergiu Klainerman of Princeton University have proved that slowly rotating Kerr black holes are indeed stable. The work is the product of a multiyear effort. The entire proof -- consisting of the new work, an 800-page paper by Klainerman and Szeftel from 2021, plus three background papers that established various mathematical tools -- totals roughly 2,100 pages in all. The new result "does indeed constitute a milestone in the mathematical development of general relativity," said Demetrios Christodoulou, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Shing-Tung Yau, an emeritus professor at Harvard University who recently moved to Tsinghua University, was similarly laudatory, calling the proof "the first major breakthrough" in this area of general relativity since the early 1990s. "It is a very tough problem," he said. He did stress, however, that the new paper has not yet undergone peer review. But he called the 2021 paper, which has been approved for publication, both "complete and exciting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has scaled back production at its massive smartphone plant in Vietnam, employees say, as retailers and warehouses grapple with rising inventory amid a global fall in consumer spending. From a report: America's largest warehouse market is full and major U.S. retailers such as Best Buy and Target warn of slowing sales as shoppers tighten their belts after early COVID-era spending binges. The effect is acutely felt in Vietnam's northern province of Thai Nguyen, one of Samsung's two mobile manufacturing bases in the country where the world's largest smartphone vendor churns out half of its phone output, according to the Vietnam government. Samsung, which shipped around 270 million smartphones in 2021, says the campus has the capacity to make around 100 million devices a year, according to its website. "We are going to work just three days per week, some lines are adjusting to a four-day workweek instead of six before, and of course no overtime is needed," Pham Thi Thuong, a 28-year-old worker at the plant told Reuters. "Business activities were even more robust during this time last year when the COVID-19 outbreak was at its peak. It's so tepid now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tencent plans to raise its stake in French video game group Ubisoft Entertainment as the Chinese gaming giant pivots to the global gaming market, Reuters reported Thursday, citing four sources with direct knowledge of the matter. From the report: China's largest social network and gaming firm, which bought a 5% stake in Ubisoft in 2018, has reached out to the French firm's founding Guillemot family and expressed interest in increasing its stake in the firm, the sources said. It is not clear how much more Tencent wants to own in Ubisoft, valued at $5.3 billion, but Tencent aims to become the single largest shareholder of the French company with an additional stake purchase, two of the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Tencent is hoping to buy a part of the additional stake in Ubisoft, the maker of the blockbuster "Assassin's Creed" video game franchise, from the Guillemot family, which owns 15% of the firm, three of the sources said. Tencent could offer up to 100 euros ($101.84) per share to acquire the additional stake, two of the sources with knowledge of the internal discussions, said. It paid 66 euros per share for the 5% stake in 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has recently tried to justify its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard by telling regulators that the deal with the Call of Duty publisher will not negatively impact the market and other platforms because it does not release "unique" or "must have" games. From a report: In a document presented to the New Zealand Business Acquisitions and Authorisations Commerce Commission, Microsoft claimed that no Activision Blizzard game has "unique" characteristics, so its rivals would do well without Activision Blizzard titles and would be able to compete in the gaming market. "With respect to Activision Blizzard video games, there is nothing unique about the video games developed and published by Activision Blizzard that is a "must have" for rival PC and console video game distributors that could give rise to a foreclosure concern," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors' Super Cruise advanced driver assistance network will soon double in size to 400,000 miles across the U.S. and Canada by the end of the year. Engadget reports: The Super Cruise system -- and its successor, Ultra Cruise -- relies on a mix of high-fidelity LiDAR maps, GPS, and onboard visual and radar sensors to know where the vehicle is on the road. So far, those maps, which dictate where features like Hands-Free Driving can operate, have only included major, divided highways like interstates with the big median barriers. Smaller, undivided public highways -- aka State Routes -- were not included, in part because of the added ADAS challenges presented by oncoming traffic, until now. "This expansion will enable Super Cruise to work on some additional divided highways, but the big news is this the bulk of the expansion will allow Super Cruise to operate on non-divided highways," David Craig, GM's Chief of Maps, said during Tuesday's call. "These non-divided highways are typically the state and federal highways... that connect the smaller cities and townships across the US and Canada." These will include Route 66, the Pacific Coast Highway (aka CA Route 1), the Overseas Highway (aka US Route 1) and the Trans-Canada Highway. "if you look at I-35 which is the interstate that runs North and South up the middle of the United States, and look to the West, you will see that the Super Cruise coverage currently is just the major interstates, which is fairly sparse," Craig continued. "But in the expansion, you can see that it's just a spiderweb of roads covering the entire area. All the little townships are going to be connected now." The company said that every new Super Cruise-enabled GM vehicle will be equipped with the full 400,000-mile capabilities, as will 2021 and 2022 GM vehicles outfitted with the VIP (Vehicle Intelligence Platform) architecture. Vehicles with Super Cruise but without VIP will receive a smaller update.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexis Ong writes via The Verge: It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you build something on the internet, people will find ways to creatively break it. This is exactly what happened with cohost, a new social media platform that allows posts with CSS. Digging through the #interactables hashtag on cohost reveals a bounty of clickable, CSS-enabled experiments that go far beyond GIFs -- there's a WarioWare mug-catching game, an interactive Habbo tribute, magnetic fridge poetry, this absolutely bananas cog machine, and even a "playable" Game Boy Color (which was, at one point, used for a "GIF plays Pokemon" event). Yes, there's also Doom. The cohost team embraced the madness. It was the beginning of a creative avalanche that simply isn't possible on other social media sites -- a phenomenon that the cohost community has since dubbed "CSS crimes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink -- though not the only problem -- is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat, which says Starlink lacks the capacity and speed to meet FCC obligations. In a new FCC filing, SpaceX denounced Viasat's "misguided campaign" against the Starlink funding. "Viasat is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology," SpaceX told the FCC. The new SpaceX filing was submitted on Friday and posted to the FCC's website Monday, as pointed out by Light Reading. Viasat submitted an analysis (PDF) to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction. Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites." Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing [...]. In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance." SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 (PDF) and December 2021 (PDF). The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review. "Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff -- not competitors -- to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An innocent tweet about a wildly popular online multiplayer game led to a terrifying real-life campaign of doxxing and death threats against employees of game company Bungie. The Record reports: Two employees of Bungie, the American company behind "Destiny 2" -- a first-person shooter with 40 million users -- recently convinced an Ontario judge to order Waterloo-based TextNow to name its customers who made "racist and serious physical threats" against them. TextNow offers users anonymous phone service. [...] The two employees sought an "urgent and confidential" court order requiring TextNow to name the customers who made the threats. The judge agreed on June 15 but waited a month before releasing his reasons due to "the serious nature of the allegations of danger." TextNow collects information about each user, including email address, phone number, IP address, credit card number and logs of calls and texts. The judge said the employees don't plan to sue the users in Ontario. "Whether they sue in the U.S. or just give the name to the police, I am satisfied that the exceptional equitable remedy ought to be available to identify people who harass others, with base racism, who dox, abuse personal information, and make overt threats of physical harm and death," he said. "Our mission is to provide everyone with an affordable way to communicate, and we place a high value on the safety and privacy of our users," a TextNow spokesperson said in an email to The Record. "From time to time, we receive lawful requests for information. We comply with all valid requests as required by law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robinhood is letting go of nearly a quarter of its staff, CEO Vlad Tenev said in a message posted to the company's blog. The Verge reports: "As part of a broader company reorganization into a General Manager (GM) structure, I just announced that we are reducing our headcount by approximately 23%," Tenev wrote. "While employees from all functions will be impacted, the changes are particularly concentrated in our operations, marketing, and program management functions." Robinhood's chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada is also stepping down from her post as part of the restructuring, according to a filing (PDF) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though she'll "remain employed in an advisory role to the CEO or his designee through January 2, 2023." Chennapragada joined the company from Google in March 2021. The announcements came as Robinhood released its Q2 2022 earnings information a day earlier than scheduled, reporting total revenue of $318 million over the three months, which is 44 percent lower than the same period in 2021. In April, Robinhood said it planned to cut 9 percent of its full-time staff, but "this did not go far enough," Tenev said. The company had staffed up assuming that the increased trading after things like the GameStonk phenomenon and bullish crypto markets would carry into 2022 but has run into the headwinds of inflation and the so-called "crypto winter" that are affecting other companies. Those who are affected by the cuts will be able to stay at Robinhood through October 1st at their regular pay and benefits alongside a severance package, Tenev says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.