SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way. The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting. Space.com reports: The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday. Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast. Falcon 9's first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch. The report notes that SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Atlassian on Wednesday revealed three critical product vulnerabilities, including CVE-2022-26138 stemming from a hardcoded password in Questions for Confluence, an app that allows users to quickly receive support for common questions involving Atlassian products. The company warned the passcode was "trivial to obtain." The company said that Questions for Confluence had 8,055 installations at the time of publication. When installed, the app creates a Confluence user account named disabledsystemuser, which is intended to help admins move data between the app and the Confluence Cloud service. The hardcoded password protecting this account allows for viewing and editing of all non-restricted pages within Confluence. "A remote, unauthenticated attacker with knowledge of the hardcoded password could exploit this to log into Confluence and access any pages the confluence-users group has access to," the company said. "It is important to remediate this vulnerability on affected systems immediately." A day later, Atlassian was back to report that "an external party has discovered and publicly disclosed the hardcoded password on Twitter," leading the company to ratchet up its warnings. "This issue is likely to be exploited in the wild now that the hardcoded password is publicly known," the updated advisory read. "This vulnerability should be remediated on affected systems immediately." The company warned that even when Confluence installations don't actively have the app installed, they may still be vulnerable. Uninstalling the app doesn't automatically remediate the vulnerability because the disabledsystemuser account can still reside on the system. To figure out if a system is vulnerable, Confluence users can use these instructions Atlassian provided for locating such accounts. According to the company, the two ways to fix the issue are to disable or remove the "disabledsystemuser" account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you have been on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool -- it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine's monitor -- but it's hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app consistently ranks alongside global blockbuster franchises like Counter-Strike or Dota. From a report: The epiphany will come when you begin to read Wallpaper Engine's many reviews. More than 200,000 of them are written in Chinese, stretching from 2016 to 2022. And these reviews almost all talk about one thing: porn. Or more specifically, about using the software as a cloud drive and a video player for exchanging adult-only content. Online porn is banned in China, so people there have to get creative to access it. Steam is one of the only popular global platforms still available in the country, and its community features, international high-speed servers, and increasingly hands-off approach when it comes to sexual content have made it an inevitable choice. Chinese users now make up at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine's global user base, MIT Technology Review estimates. Last year, users in China suddenly needed to use VPN services to access certain Steam services. As the reviews show, now they are afraid they may soon lose this rare community, either because of platform content moderation or the possibility that China might block Steam altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users' phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre have said. From a report: So-called "client-side scanning" would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server. Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis -- codebreaking -- at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time. "We've found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter," they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was "not government policy." They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning -- most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company's image-sharing service -- rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice. They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We appear to be entering a period of Windows' development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. To that end, Microsoft continues to add, remove, and generally experiment with Windows 11's features and user interface via its Insider Preview channels. From a report: The most interesting addition we've seen in a while is rolling out to users on the experimental Dev Channel now: a modified version of the taskbar with much-improved handling of app icon overflow when users have too many apps open at once. Click an ellipsis button on your taskbar, and a new icon overflow menu opens up, allowing you to interact with any of those extra icons the same way you would if they were sitting on the taskbar. This would be a big improvement over the current overflow behavior, which devotes one icon's worth of space to show the icon for the app you last interacted with, leaving the rest inaccessible. That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon. Microsoft says that app icons in the overflow area will be able to show jump lists and other customizable shortcuts the same as any other app icon in the taskbar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A 2021 eruption in Iceland gave researchers rare and illuminating access to the mantle, one of the Earth's layers. From a report: What do you do when a volcano erupts for the first time in centuries? For many people on the southern peninsula in Iceland, when the Fagradalsfjall volcano went off in 2021 after 781 years of dormancy, the answer was to take pictures. As the eruption continued over the course of six months, tourists and locals traveled closer to the volcano to take even more. Red bursts flying out of a black pyramid; the viscous creep of flame. But this documentation only went so far. Some scientists wanted to know what was going on underneath the surface, miles deep, where light does not reach. There, the flowing rock works in ways that experts still cannot describe. So on the first day of the eruption, a helicopter flew out to the site and scooped up a bit of lava. Some samples were distributed to labs, which, after testing, sent back unexpected results: The lava was full of crystals. Recently, with the help of similar samples gathered throughout the Fagradalsfjall eruption, steps have been taken toward characterizing the dynamics under the surface of the oceanic volcano. In a paper published in June in the journal Nature Communications, researchers who observed the chemical composition of the lava crystal samples collected over a six-month period found that they contained a wide range of material from different parts of the mantle, the amalgamate layer between the Earth's crust and core. This kind of variation was unexpected, and it painted a more vivid picture of what contributes to volcanic eruptions. "We have a really detailed record of the different types of composition that we can find in the mantle now, and it must be very heterogeneous, very variable," said Frances Deegan, a volcanologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a co-author of the paper. Compositionally, the Fagradalsfjall lava was primitive, meaning it came from a deep reservoir of magma, or underground lava, not a shallow reservoir in the Earth's crust. Noticing this, researchers, including Ed Marshall, a geochemist at the University of Iceland, sprinted to gather more samples as the lava continued to spew out of vents. "We were working all hours -- you're asleep and the volcano's still erupting and you're like, 'I got to get back out there,'" said Dr. Marshall. "But it's hard to describe how rare this kind of thing is." Fagradalsfjall exists at a confluence of fault lines along a boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, a point where they are both pulling apart and rubbing against each other. Geological records show that there has been periodic volcanic activity in the region about every thousand years, and this most recent fissure was preceded by more than a year of earthquakes. Olafur Flovenz, director of the Iceland GeoSurvey, recently published a paper with colleagues that suggests this activity was not caused by a body of magma accumulating in the crust, but from carbon dioxide released by deeper magma pooling between the mantle and the crust, in a region called the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or moho. Usually, volcanic eruptions occur when lots of small magma flows mix together. "This mixing process is an essential geologic process, but it's never been directly observed," said Dr. Marshall. It occurs so deep under the surface and many of the chemical signatures of individual flows are lost as the magma moves up through the crust. But when Fagradalsfjall erupted in 2021, the molten rock and crystals that shot up to the surface came directly from the moho.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google's search engine is to be banned in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk after pro-Russian authorities there accused the US tech giant of promoting "terrorism and violence against all Russians." From a report: In a statement posted to the social messaging service Telegram, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), said: "The inhuman propaganda of Ukraine and the west has long crossed all boundaries. There is a real persecution of Russians, the imposition of lies and disinformation." He accused Google's search engine of being at the forefront of this effort, saying it "openly, on the orders of its curators from the US government, promotes terrorism and violence against all Russians, and especially the population of Donbas."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Postgraduates chosen for their "excellent potential" to become future leaders in environmental science and sustainable business should consider selling Avon products, pet-sitting and joining clinical trials to cope with the cost of living crisis. From a report: The advice -- issued on Wednesday by the prestigious Aries Doctoral Training Partnership funded by the Natural Environment Research Council at the University of East Anglia -- provoked outrage among researchers who described the letter as "appalling," "ridiculous" and "unbelievable." An email to PhD students on the programme recognised that many were finding it "increasingly challenging" to live on their stipends, $18,776 a year at present, and attached a three-page document from the UEA careers office setting out options to make ends meet. Before making specific recommendations, the document warns that many students are not allowed to do more than six hours of paid work a week, because to do so would interfere with them completing their course on time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you're on a call or otherwise using your mic. From a report: That's according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom's Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD's Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia's RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia's Broadcast app). It uses "a real-time deep learning algorithm" to offer "two-way noise-reduction" that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently built into AMD's existing Adrenalin software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trains slowed to a crawl. Schools and doctors' offices shut their doors. The British Museum closed off its upper galleries, then the entire museum. The government urged people to work from home. Much of Britain took an involuntary siesta on Monday as merciless heat scorched the country, driving temperatures close to triple digits Fahrenheit by midafternoon and threatening to smash records. From a report: By midafternoon, Wales had provisionally recorded the hottest day in its history, with the thermometer in Hawarden hitting 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit (37.1 Celsius). The current record for England of 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit (38.7 Celsius) was set in 2019, according to the Met Office, Britain's national weather service. At 3 p.m., the mercury in Kew Gardens in London hovered just under 100 degrees Fahrenheit. For Americans in states that regularly sizzle, those numbers might seem underwhelming, but this is happening in a country unprepared for such extremes. In a nation known for its scudding clouds, frequent showers and temperate weather, the blazing heat was enough to hobble much of the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
U.S. companies are facing a "new era" in which fewer people are entering the workforce and pressure to pay higher salaries may become permanent, Microsoft's President Brad Smith told Reuters in an interview. From a report: At the software maker's Redmond, Washington, headquarters, Smith highlighted one source of what he called today's "greater economic turbulence." In his office, he walked over to a wall-sized touchscreen device and pulled up a series of charts, showing how population growth has tumbled in the United States, Europe, China and Japan. The trend of around 5 million people expanding the U.S. working age population every five years since 1950 has shifted, starting in the period between 2016 and 2020 when growth slowed to 2 million, and is now slowing further, said Smith late last week, citing United Nations data. Major markets overseas have seen outright labor force declines. "That helps explain part of why you can have low growth and a labor shortage at the height at the same time. There just aren't as many people entering the workforce," said Smith, who oversees the nearly $2 trillion company selling cloud-computing services to major businesses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two cases of the deadly Marburg virus have been identified in Ghana, the first time the Ebola-like disease has been found in the west African nation. From a report: Earlier in the month, blood samples taken from two people in the southern Ashanti region suggested they had the Marburg virus. The samples were sent to the Pasteur Institute in Senegal, which confirmed the diagnosis, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) said. "This is the first time Ghana has confirmed Marburg virus disease," said the GHS head, Patrick Kuma-Aboagye. No treatment or vaccine exists for Marburg, which is almost as deadly as Ebola. Its symptoms include high fever as well as internal and external bleeding. Ninety-eight people identified as contact cases were under quarantine, the GHS statement said, noting that no other cases of Marburg had yet been detected in Ghana. The World Health Organization declared Ghana's first outbreak. "Health authorities have responded swiftly, getting a headstart preparing for a possible outbreak," said the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Several U.S. semiconductor firms are deliberating whether to oppose a package of chip industry subsidies if the final language of the legislation awaiting a vote in the Senate disproportionately benefits manufacturers like Intel, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. From the report: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has told lawmakers that a vote could come as early as Tuesday on a slimmed-down set of bills to bolster the U.S. computer chip industry, after Democratic lawmakers cleaved them from a larger, more contentious bill. The bills are aimed at making the U.S. more competitive against a rising China, whose chip industry has grown rapidly over the last five years to account for almost 10% of global sales. The measures include $52 billion in subsidies and an investment tax credit to boost U.S. manufacturing. The bills have bipartisan support, though Republicans may vote against the chip measures unless Democrats give up plans to try to push through unrelated spending bills that Republicans oppose. But a rift is emerging within the chip industry itself, with some players concerned the final language of the legislation could provide disproportionate support to manufacturers like Intel while doing little to support other chip makers like Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm and Nvidia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Almost half a trillion dollars has been wiped from the valuation of once high-flying financial technology companies that took advantage of the boom in initial public offerings earlier in the pandemic. Financial Times: More than 30 fintechs have listed in the US since the start of 2020, according to CB Insights data, as investors flocked to companies they believed could benefit from a long-term shift toward digitisation accelerated by the pandemic. However, concerns about rising interest rates, lack of profits and untested business models as the economy heads towards a potential recession have put them at the sharp end of this year's sell-off. Shares in recently listed fintechs have fallen an average of more than 50 per cent since the start of the year, according to a Financial Times analysis, compared with a 29 per cent drop in the Nasdaq Composite. Their cumulative market capitalisation has fallen $156bn in 2022. If each stock is measured from its all-time high, around $460bn has been lost. A second-quarter update from online lender Upstart last week typified the challenges facing many fintechs. The company, which says it uses artificial intelligence to make consumer loan decisions, blamed the "tumultuous economy" for slowing down revenue growth and driving up losses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
India'a central bank wants to ban cryptocurrencies, the government told the parliament on Monday, raising more uncertainty about the future of the nascent virtual digital asset in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: Nirmala Sitharaman, the minister of finance in India, said the Reserve Bank of India has expressed concerns about the "destabilising effect of cryptocurrencies on the monetary and fiscal stability of a country" and has recommended "for framing of legislation on this sector," she said. "RBI is of the view that cryptocurrencies should be prohibited," she added. Formulating any legislation for regulation or banning of crypto will require "significant international collaboration," she added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Facebook has started to use a different URL scheme for site links," writes the technology blog Ghacks, "to combat URL stripping technologies that browsers such as Firefox or Brave use to improve privacy and prevent user tracking."Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties. Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it launched in June 2022. Firefox removes tracking parameters from web addresses automatically, but only in private browsing mode or when the browser's Tracking Protection feature is set to strict. Firefox users may enable URL stripping in all Firefox modes, but this requires manual configuration. Brave Browser strips known tracking parameters from web addresses as well.... It is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it with part of the required web address.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reuters reports:Amazon.com Inc is pausing the construction of six new office buildings in Bellevue and Nashville to reevaluate the designs to suit hybrid work, the tech giant said on Friday... "The pandemic has significantly changed the way people work ... Our offices are long-term investments and we want to make sure that we design them in a way that meets our employees' needs in the future," said John Schoettler, vice president of Global Real Estate and Facilities at Amazon. Separately, Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Amazon have pulled back on their office expansion plans in New York City.... "The past few years have brought new possibilities around the ways we connect and work," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters without confirming or denying the report. Various news sites seems to have different pieces of the story. On Hawaii's most populous island Oahu, the office vacancy rate is now 14% — the highest level ever recorded. And this week a tech founder admitted in Fast Company that after converting to a hybrid company, "we're just as productive as we were before the pandemic (if not more so). Our engineering team's engagement has remained strong, and we've actually seen a boost in retention since the transition to hybrid work.... "Our transition from in-person, to remote, and now to hybrid work has reinforced the value of staying open-minded to innovation not just in our products, but also in how we work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gizmodo writes that "The western and southwestern U.S. is wilting under the biggest drought in 1,200 years — a megadrought..." "But the longer the West's dry spell goes on, the more bizarre the drought-related stories get." Some examples?Long-sunken history and even evidence of past crimes are emerging from the receding waters. First, a barrel containing a body showed up in Lake Mead. Less than a week later, separate skeletal remains surfaced. Elsewhere where droughts are occurring, similar stories are popping up. As the drought progresses, police forecast that more human remains and other lost items are likely to continue to show up. And last month the New York Times warned that Utah's Great Salt Lake had already shrunk by two-thirds, and now faced "an environmental nuclear bomb." Now Gizmodo reports that state's legislators are "considering a truly wacky idea to keep the body of water going."Utah lawmakers floated the idea of a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean to the landlocked state during a meeting in May. "There's a lot of water in the ocean, and we have very little in the Great Salt Lake," Sen. David Hinkins (R), the commission's co-chair, said during the meeting. The Pacific Ocean is, at minimum, about 966 km [600 miles] and a mountain range away from the Great Salt Lake. Though, experts previously told Gizmodo that the idea of a pipeline wasn't totally surprising or out of the question. The saline lake supports lots of Utah industries, including tourism, brine shrimp harvesting, and mineral extraction. So there are strong financial incentives for the state to try to preserve the lake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The world has changed since China banned cryptomining, the Guardian reports. And now "more than a third of the global computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin comes from the US, Senator Elizabeth Warren and five other Democrats reported in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency..." But the Guardian also notes there's two problems with this:- The largest US cryptomining companies have the capacity to use as much electricity as nearly every home in Houston, Texas; energy use that is contributing to rising utility bills, according to an investigation by Democratic lawmakers... - "The results of our investigation ... are disturbing ... revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant — and rapidly growing — amount of carbon emissions," the letter states. "It is imperative that your agencies work together to address the lack of information about cryptomining's energy use and environmental impacts." The congressional Democrats have asked the EPA and the Department of Energy to require cryptominers to disclose emissions and energy use, noting that regulators know little about the full environmental impact of the industry.... The power demands of the industry are also coming at a cost to consumers, the letter states, citing a study that found cryptomining operations in upstate New York led to a rise in electric bills by roughly $165m for small businesses and $79m for individuals. The main operator of Texas's grid admitted this week to the Verge that by 2026 crypto mining is set to increase demand on the state's power grid by a whopping 27 gigawatts — or nearly a third of the grid's current maximum capacity. And an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology with a background in electricity system policy warns the site that "The more crypto mining that comes into the state, the higher the residents should expect the electricity prices to become."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"The lock screen is about to change," writes CNET — both for iOS and Android devices.Apple's iOS 16 update, which launched in public beta on Monday, will bring more customization options and new widgets to the iPhone's lock screen when it arrives this fall. You'll be able to see more information quickly and apply stylistic effects to lock screen photos similar to the iPhone's Portrait Mode photography feature.... Like the Apple Watch, the new lock screen should make it easier to see crucial pieces of information without having to dig into apps or even unlock your phone. And for Android phones: Glance, a Google-backed subsidiary of mobile ad tech company InMobi, also reiterated its plans to bring its lock screen platform to the U.S. [though the company also says there's "no definitive timeline."] And Google is reportedly planning to incorporate more bits of information into its own lock screen widget for Pixel phones.... Glance's lock screen will appear in the form of what it calls "spaces," which are essentially curated lock screens designed to fit specific themes. A fitness-oriented lock screen, for example, would show statistics such as calories burned and exercise goals alongside a music player. A news "space" would show headlines and the weather, while a music version could surface live concerts.... The TechCrunch report about Glance's US arrival sparked concerns that advertisements would be coming to the lock screen, too. Glance's business page shows examples of advertisers that have used its platform to reach potential customers on the very first screen they see when picking up their phone. Intel, Zomato and Garnier are among the listed case studies. But Rohan Choudhary, vice president and general manager of the Glance feed, told CNET the US version would be ad-free. "We are very clear that in the US, we will not have ads on the lock screen at all," he said.... The company says it plans to monetize its service through news subscriptions and commerce links from shopping platforms that are surfaced through Glance. Glance's motto? "Transforming lock screens into smart surfaces."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Engadget reports that Amazon has installed a slick, high-tech sign in its warehouse in upstate New York with a message for employees: don't sign a union card:The carousel of anti-union posters went up Friday and cycles between approximately seven different slides, each actively discouraging workers from signing a union card. "It's on a constant loop while people punch in and punch out of their shifts," [one employee] said, "[when] they go on their breaks, or they go on their lunch. Any time that we're going to be up towards the front."Amazon has been known to post signage meant to discourage unionization at other facilities. As Vice reported in March, workers at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York were treated to an array of posters with circumspect slogans like "Is union life for me?" and "Will the [Amazon Labor Union]'s voice replace mine?" The signage at ALB1 appears to represent the most forceful tack the company has taken in expressing its disdain for an organized workforce. The company also has a track record of breaking labor laws and frustrating organizing efforts: firing or otherwise retaliating against workers, preventing workers from handing out pamphlets, and interfering with a union election. Behind closed doors, the company also planned a smear campaign against a prominent organizer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Black Parrot (Slashdot reader #19,622) shared this report from ScienceInsider:When the U.S. government released a much-anticipated report on UFOs a year ago, many were perplexed that it couldn't explain 143 of the 144 sightings it examined. (In the single closed case, the report concluded the mystery object was a large, deflating balloon.) "Where are the aliens?" cracked one headline. The truth was still out there. So was any sense of who had conducted the analysis, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the study, provided no details about who had investigated the cases. Last week, however, a former Department of Defense astrophysicist and reality TV personality named Travis Taylor asserted that he was the 'chief scientist' for the congressionally mandated study. The revelation shocked UFO skeptics in the science community. They note that Taylor has made extraordinary claims during TV appearances, including to have "seen more UFOs than I can count," and that he's been tracked by supernatural entities that caused his car and appliances to malfunction.... In fact, Taylor did serve in a lead role with the government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, which produced 2021's fuzzy UFO report, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough confirmed to ScienceInsider. But Taylor was "informally referred to ... as the chief scientist as efforts to assemble a larger team were underway," and it was not a full-time position. (Taylor did not respond to requests for comment....) Taylor's critics are simply astonished by what they call his antiscientific embrace of the supernatural — and the Pentagon's willingness to work with him. "I'm starting to see why [the government's] task force was so unsuccessful in identifying its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena!" wrote Robert Sheaffer, a UFO skeptic and author, on his blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two members of the U.S. Congress urged America's Federal Trade Commission "to address deceptive practices in the Virtual Private Network industry," reports the Verge:With abortion becoming illegal or restricted in several states, more people are looking to conceal their messages and search history, as police can use this information to prosecute someone seeking the procedure. In their letter, Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden ask the FTC to clamp down on VPN providers that engage in deceptive advertising, or make false assertions about the range of their service's privacy. The lawmakers cite research from Consumer Reports that indicate 75 percent of the most popular VPNs "misrepresented their products" or made misleading claims that could give "abortion-seekers a false sense of security." Eshoo and Wyden also call attention to reports accusing various VPN services of misusing user data, as well as "a lack of practical tools or independent research to audit VPN providers' security claims...." "We urge the Federal Trade Commission to take immediate action... to curtail abusive and deceptive data practices in companies providing VPN services to protect internet users seeking abortions." Eshoo and Wyden also ask that the FTC develop a brochure that informs anyone seeking an abortion about online privacy, as well as outlines the risks and benefits of using a VPN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MIT News has an announcement:The boiling of water or other fluids is an energy-intensive step at the heart of a wide range of industrial processes, including most electricity generating plants, many chemical production systems, and even cooling systems for electronics. Improving the efficiency of systems that heat and evaporate water could significantly reduce their energy use. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to do just that, with a specially tailored surface treatment for the materials used in these systems.The improved efficiency comes from a combination of three different kinds of surface modifications, at different size scales. The new findings are described in the journal Advanced Materials in a paper by recent MIT graduate Youngsup Song PhD '21, Ford Professor of Engineering Evelyn Wang, and four others at MIT..... "If we have lots of bubbles on the boiling surface, that means boiling is very efficient, but if we have too many bubbles on the surface, they can coalesce together, which can form a vapor film over the boiling surface," Song says. That film introduces resistance to the heat transfer from the hot surface to the water. "If we have vapor in between the surface and water, that prevents the heat transfer efficiency and lowers the critical heat flux value," he says....Adding a series of microscale cavities, or dents, to a surface is a way of controlling the way bubbles form on that surface, keeping them effectively pinned to the locations of the dents and preventing them from spreading out into a heat-resisting film... In these experiments, the cavities were made in the centers of a series of pillars on the material's surface. These pillars, combined with nanostructures, promote wicking of liquid from the base to their tops, and this enhances the boiling process by providing more surface area exposed to the water. In combination, the three "tiers" of the surface texture — the cavity separation, the posts, and the nanoscale texturing — provide a greatly enhanced efficiency for the boiling process, Song says... The nanostructures promote evaporation under the bubbles, and the capillary action induced by the pillars supplies liquid to the bubble base. That maintains a layer of liquid water between the boiling surface and the bubbles of vapor, which enhances the maximum heat flux. While the article stresses it's still a laboratory-scale process (needing more work to become a practical "industry-scale" process), "There may be some significant small-scale applications that could use this process in its present form, such as the thermal management of electronic devices, an area that is becoming more important as semiconductor devices get smaller and managing their heat output becomes ever more important." Wang says in the announcement, "There's definitely a space there where this is really important."The article includes a bizarre-looking video showing how water now boils on their specially treated surface. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link!Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On July 7th Art News explained how 95-year-old Austrian artist Herbert W. Franke "has recently become a sensation within the art world the crypto space," describing the digital pioneer as a computer artist using algorithms and computer programs to visualize math as art.Last month, the physicist and science fiction writer was behind one of the most talked about digital artworks at a booth by the blockchain company Tezos at Art Basel. Titled MONDRIAN (1979), the work paid tribute to artist Piet Mondrian's iconic geometric visuals using a program written on one of the first home computers. Days before this, Franke, who studied physics in Vienna following World War II and started working at Siemens in 1953, where he conducted photographic experiments after office hours, launched 100 images from his famed series "Math Art" (1980-95) as NFTs on the Quantum platform. The drop was meant to commemorate his birthday on May 14 and to raise funds for his foundation. The NFTs sold out in 30 seconds, with the likes of pioneering blockchain artist Kevin Abosch purchasing a few. In one of his last interviews, Franke told the site that blockchain "is a totally new environment, and this technology is still in its early stages, like at the beginning of computer art. But I am convinced that it has opened a new door for digital art and introduced the next generation to this new technology." It echoed something he'd said in his first book, published in 1957, which he later quoted in the interview (a full 65 years later). "Technology is usually dismissed as an element hostile to art. I want to try to prove that it is not..." This morning, long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino wrote: The German IT news site heise reports (article in German) that digital art pioneer, SF author ("The Mind Net") and cyberspace avantgardist Herbert W. Franke has died at age 95. His wife recounted on his Twitter account: "Herbert loved to call himself the dinosaur of computer art. I am [...] devastated to announce that our beloved dinosaur has left the earth. "He passed away knowing there is a community of artists and art enthusiasts deeply caring about his art and legacy."Among much pioneering work he founded one of the worlds first digital art festivals "Ars Electronica" in Austria in 1979. Franke's wife is still running the Art Meets Science web site dedicated to Franke's work. Some highlights from its biography of Franke's life:Herbert W. Franke, born in Vienna on May 14, 1927, studied physics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1951... An Apple II was his first personal computer which he bought 1980. He developed a program as early as 1982 that used a midi interface to control moving image sequences through music.... Only in recent years has "art from the machine" begun to interest traditional museums as a branch of modern art. Franke, who from the beginning was firmly convinced of the future importance of this art movement, has also assembled a collection of computer graphics that is unique in the world, documenting 50 years of this development with works by respected international artists, supplemented by his own works.... As a physicist, Franke was predestined to bring science and technology closer to the general public in popular form due to his talent as a writer, which became apparent early on. About one-third of his nearly fifty books, as well as uncounted journal articles... Franke's novels and stories are not about predicting future technologies, nor about forecasting our future way of life, but rather about the intellectual examination of possible models of our future and their philosophical as well as ethical interpretation. In this context, however, Franke attaches great importance to the seriousness of scientific or technological assessments of the future in the sense of a feasibility analysis. In his opinion, a serious and meaningful discussion about future developments can basically only be conducted on this basis. In this respect, Franke is not a typical representative of science fiction, but rather a visionary who, as a novelist, deals with relevant questions of social future and human destiny on a high intellectual level.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Washington Post reports:In the frantic first weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. tech companies that control the world's largest information hubs sprang into action. Responding to pressure from Western governments, social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube banned or throttled Russian state media accounts, beefed up their fact-checking operations, curtailed ad sales in Russia and opened direct lines to Ukrainian officials, inviting them to flag Russian disinformation and propaganda to be taken down. As the war grinds toward its sixth month, however, Russian propaganda techniques have evolved — and the tech firms haven't kept up. Ukrainian officials who have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech say the companies have grown less responsive to their requests to remove such content. New research shared with The Washington Post by a Europe-based nonprofit initiative confirms that many of those requests seem to be going unheeded, with accounts parroting Kremlin talking points, spewing anti-Ukrainian slurs or even impersonating Ukrainian officials remaining active on major social networks. As a result, researchers say, Kremlin-backed narratives are once again propagating across Europe, threatening to undermine popular support for Ukraine in countries that it views as critical to its defense.... With big state media accounts suspended or muffled, researchers say Russian leaders and influencers have shifted to the semiprivate messaging app Telegram to direct information campaigns via swarms of smaller accounts. The Post reports that Google-owned YouTube hasn't returned emails for almost two months, according to the deputy head of the Ukrainian government's Strategic Communications and Information Security center. And the Post notes that researchers found LinkedIn "removed fewer than half of the posts that Ukrainian officials flagged as examples of Russian propaganda justifying the war.... "On the positive side, the researchers found that Facebook had removed all 98 of the posts the Ukrainian government and its partners flagged as containing anti-Ukrainian hate speech, though many of the accounts responsible remained active."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In April ZDNet called its beta "the cutest Linux distro you'll ever use," praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop. But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining "their email is not responding" and seeking contributors for a fork. But meanwhile, the technology site DebugPoint.com shares another update:It looks like the OpenMandriva project is already continuing with the development of the Cutefish DE (not the OS) for its own OS. For more details, visit the Matrix discussion page. Besides, it's worth mentioning that Arch Linux already have the Cutefish desktop packages in the community repo. You can even install it as a standalone desktop environment in Arch Linux with easy steps. As you can see, it is easier to maintain the desktop environment to continue its development because the structure is already out there. I have tested and reviewed hundreds of distros for years, and Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment. It was written from the ground up with QML and C++ and took advantage of KWin. It would have been an attractive desktop as a separate component and could have been another great option besides KDE Plasma or GNOME. Many open-source projects are born and die every year, and it's unfortunate to see the situation of Cutefish OS. I hope an official fork comes up soon, and we all can contribute to it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot reader storagedude writes: The first signs of the ransomware attack at data storage vendor Spectra Logic were reports from a number of IT staffers about little things going wrong at the beginning of the day. Matters steadily worsened within a very short time and signs of a breach became apparent. Screens then started to display a ransom demand, which said files had been encrypted by the NetWalker ransomware virus. The ransom demand was $3.6 million, to be paid in bitcoin within five days. Tony Mendoza, Senior Director of Enterprise Business Solutions at Spectra Logic, laid out the details of the attack at the annual Fujifilm Recording Media USA Conference in San Diego late last month, as reported by eSecurity Planet. "We unplugged systems, as the virus was spreading faster than we could investigate," Mendoza told conference attendees. "As we didn't have a comprehensive cybersecurity plan in place, the attack brought the entire business to its knees." To make matters worse, the backup server had also been wiped out, but with the help of recovery specialist Ankura, uncorrupted snapshots and [offline] tape backups helped the company get back online in days, although full recovery took a month. "We were able to restore everything and paid nothing," said Mendoza. "Other than a few files, all data was recovered." The attack, which started from a successful phishing attempt, "took us almost a month to fully recover and get over the ransomware pain," said Mendoza.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Phoronix reports:The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the GCC Rust front-end providing Rust programming language support by the GNU Compiler Collection. This Rust front-end will likely be merged ahead of the GCC 13 release next year. The GCC Steering Committee this morning has announced that the Rust front-end "GCC Rust" is appropriate for inclusion into the GCC mainline code-base. This is the effort that has been in the works for a while as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler. GCC Rust is still under active development but is getting into shape for mainlining. The hope is to have at least "beta" level support for the Rust programming language in GCC 13, which will be released as stable around April of next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Steve Springett is a conscientious senior security architect. And in 2018, he published an essay on GitHub arguing that from a security engineer's perspective, WebAssembly "increases the attack surface of any browser that supports it." Springett wrote that WebAssembly modules are sent in (unsigned) binary format — without a transport-layer security mechanism — and rely on browser sandboxing for safety. But the binary format makes it harder to analyze the code, while sandboxing "is prone to breakouts and effectiveness varies largely by implementation. Adobe Flash is an example of a technology that was sandboxed after a series of exploits, yet exploits and breakouts still occurred." Springett even went so far as to offer the commands for switching off WebAssembly in your browser. Now Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) wants to know what other Slashdot readers think of Spingett's security concrens around WebAssembly. And also offers this suggestion to browser makers:Browsers should have a way to easily disable WebAssembly — including whitelisting. For example, if you need it for specific gaming site, you can whitelist just that site and not have WASM exposed for other sites.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"A growing number of cities and towns all over the U.S. are handing out cash grants and other perks aimed at drawing skilled employees of faraway companies to live there and work remotely," reports the Wall Street Journal:A handful of such programs have existed for years, but they have started gaining traction during the pandemic — and have really taken off in just the past year or so. Back in October there were at least 24 such programs in the U.S. Today there are 71, according to the Indianapolis-based company MakeMyMove, which is contracted by cities and towns to set up such programs. Because these programs specifically target remote workers who have high wages, a disproportionate share of those who are taking advantage of them work in tech — and especially for big tech companies. Companies whose employees have participated in one remote worker incentive program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, include Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Lyft, Netflix, Oracle and Siemens, according to a spokeswoman for the organization. Local governments are offering people willing to move up to $12,000 in cash, along with subsidized gym memberships, free babysitting and office space.... A skeptic might ask why local economic development programs are spending funds to subsidize the lives of people who work for some of the most valuable companies in the world. On the other hand, because these remote workers aren't coming to town seeking local jobs, an argument can be made that they constitute a novel kind of stimulus program for parts of the country that have been left out of the tech boom — courtesy of big tech companies... Every remote worker these places successfully attract and retain is like gaining a fraction of a new factory or corporate office, with much less expenditure and risk, argues Mark Muro, who studies cities and labor at the Brookings Institution. The reporter interviewed an Amazon engineer who moved to Greensburg, Indiana (population: 12,193), and Meta worker David Gora, who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and praises its relocation program's sense of mission, possibility, and community. "Even with the pay cuts that Meta has imposed on workers who relocate to areas with a lower cost of living, Mr. Gora is saving a lot more money and has a much higher quality of life than before, he adds." Tulsa's program is unique in that it's funded by a philanthropic organization rather than a local economic-development budget, the article points out. But it adds that "a study conducted by the Economic Innovation Group and commissioned by Tulsa Remote concluded that for every two people the program brings to the city, one new job is created."By contrast, when an office moves to a town, every new high-wage tech job creates an estimated five more jobs in sectors including healthcare, education and service, according to research by economist Enrico Moretti. That's because those deals involve not only people but the money that goes into building and maintaining facilities, paying commercial property taxes and more. Still, for towns that don't have the budget to attract a whole office or factory, the modest impact of bringing in a handful of remote tech workers can be balanced by the much smaller investment required to attract them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"As many as 100 people could be looking at the board and see something different," reports the Michigan news site MLive.com. "Look up at a Detroit Metropolitan Airport departure board and you could see a personalized travel itinerary." Delta's site features a trippy video showing the screen with a different greeting depending on where the camera is positioned. "Hello Liz!""Hello Albert!""Hello Cora!" The maker's of the technology envision it someday being used in theme parks, stadiums, and convention centers. But what exactly is happening here? MLive explains:In late June, Delta Airlines launched a beta version of its new Parallel Reality technology that allows dozens of people to simultaneously see unique content on the same digital screen. Detroit is the first, and currently only, airport in the country to experiment with the futuristic technology developed by Misapplied Sciences, based in California... Delta passengers can scan their boarding pass, select a language and test out the system. Using "multi-view pixels and proprietary technology," the board then shows personal flight information, boarding time or even standby status, a news release said... Delta Senior Vice President of Customer Experience Ranjan Goswami said the new system means "customers will no longer have to search for flight and gate information." "This technology truly must be seen to be believed," Goswami said in an announcement. The Parallel Reality displays project up to millions of light rays that can be directed to a specific person. Non-biometric sensors then reportedly track passengers who can see the display even if they move.... Delta says the Parallel Reality experience will "always be opt-in" and customer information is not stored. "If this new technology can make finding your gate and departure information quicker and easier, we're not just showing customers a magic trick — we're solving a real problem," said Delta's senior VP of customer experience. "Customers already rely on personalized navigation via their mobile devices, but this is enabling a public screen to act as a personal one — removing the clutter of information not relevant to you to empower a better journey." The company's statement adds that Delta "is also investing in digital identity technology, which allows customers to move through the airport using facial recognition, eliminating the need to show a boarding pass or government ID." The technology is already available at airports in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, "and will eventually be activated in all of Delta's U.S. hubs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"5G iPhones have been slapped with a sales ban in Colombia," reports Digital Trends, "due to a 5G patent infringement dispute between Apple and Ericsson... The ban affects the latest models, including the iPhone 12, iPhone 13, and the iPad Pro, which the court found infringed Ericsson's patent pertaining to 5G tech." They add that in response Apple is now suing Ericsson in Texas, "for damages that resulted from the ruling in Colombia, as well as any fines, fees, penalties, and costs that have been incurred because of it." The site FOSS Patents notes that Colombia reached the "banning" stage less than six months after the beginning of "the current wave of Ericsson v. Apple patent infringement actions." ZDNet explains:The backstory here is somewhat complicated but can be boiled down to the following points: - Apple used to pay Ericsson royalty fees for patented 5G technologies.- Apple failed to renew the licenses when they expired.- Ericsson sued Apple.- Apple then sued Ericsson, claiming that the company was violating FRAND rules, the patents were standard-essential patents, and Ericsson's licensing fees were too high. There followed a whole bunch of legal actions and counteractions, with both companies attempting to get sales bans on the other company's hardware.... This ban is likely no big deal for Apple given the small size of that market. The problem is several more lawsuits are making their way through various courts in various territories. And since Apple isn't disputing the validity of the patents, it's almost certainly opening itself out to bans being enforced in other countries. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fermion for sharing the news!Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Washington Post reports on a "widely adopted, even codified" trend in recent months: people aren't coming in to their offices on Friday. "The drop-off in office work, particularly on Fridays, has led coffee shops to reduce their hours, delis to rethink staffing and bars like Pat's Tap in Minneapolis to kick off happy hour earlier than ever — starting at 2 p.m."Just 30 percent of office workers swiped into work on Fridays in June, the least of any weekday, according to Kastle Systems, which provides building security services for 2,600 buildings nationwide. That's compared to 41 percent on Mondays, the day with the second-lowest turnout, and 50 percent on Tuesdays, when the biggest share of workers are in the office. "It's becoming a bit of cultural norm: You know nobody else is going to the office on Friday, so maybe you'll work from home, too," said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "Even before the pandemic, people thought of Friday as a kind of blowoff day. And now there's a growing expectation that you can work from home to jump-start your weekend...." Some start-ups and tech firms have begun doing away with Fridays altogether. Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and online consignment shop ThredUp are among a small but growing number of firms moving to a four-day workweek that runs from Monday to Thursday. Executives at Bolt, a checkout technology company in San Francisco, began experimenting with no-work Fridays last summer and quickly realized they'd hit a winning formula. Employees were more productive than before, and came back to work on Mondays with new enthusiasm. In January, it switched to a four-day workweek for good. "Managers were onboard, people kept hitting their goals," Bolt's head of employee experience tells the Post. "And they come back on Mondays energized and more engaged." An adviser at the Society of Human Resource Management tells the Post that employers are trying new inducements to get people to return to offices on Fridays. "If you feed them, they will come. Food trucks, special catered events, ice cream socials, that's what's popular right now." And the Post adds that other employers have also tried wine carts, costume contests and karaoke sing-offs — "all aimed at getting workers to give up their couches for cubicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CNN reports:An "unsubscribe" option that's a little too hard to find. A tiny box you click, thinking it simply takes you to the next page, but it also grants access to your data. And any number of unexpected charges that appear during checkout that weren't made clearer earlier in the process. Countless popular websites and apps, from retailers and travel services to social media companies, make use of so-called "dark patterns," or gently coercive design tactics that critics say are used to manipulate peoples' digital behaviors. The term "dark patterns" was coined by Harry Brignull, a U.K.-based user experience specialist and researcher of human-computer interactions. Brignull began noticing that when he reported to one of his clients that most test subjects felt deceived by an aspect of their website or app design, the client seemed to welcome the feedback. "That was always intriguing for me as a researcher, because normally the name of the game is to find the flaws and fix them," Brignull told CNN Business. "Now we're finding 'flaws' that the client seems to like, and want to keep." To put it in the parlance of Silicon Valley, he realized it was a feature, not a bug.... Brignull, for his part, said he has spent time testifying as an expert witness in some class action lawsuits related to dark patterns in the UK. "The scams don't work when the victim knows what the scammer is trying to do," Brignull said. "If they know what the scam is, then they're not going to get taken in — and that's why I've enjoyed so much exposing these things, and showing it to other consumers." The article notes that America's Federal Trade Commission "is ramping up its enforcement in response to 'a rising number of complaints about the financial harms caused by deceptive sign-up tactics, including unauthorized charges or ongoing billing that is impossible cancel.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
1.34 billion people consumed harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020, according to estimates from a new study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It also found that 59.1% of those people consuming unsafe amounts were between the ages of 15 and 39, and that for that group "there are no health benefits to drinking alcohol, only health risks.... 60% of alcohol-related injuries occurring among people in this age group, including motor vehicle accidents, suicides, and homicides." Of the 15 to 39-year-olds consuming unsafe amounts of alcohol, 76.7% were male.For adults over age 40, health risks from alcohol consumption vary by age and region. Consuming a small amount of alcohol (for example, drinking between one and two 3.4-ounce glasses of red wine) for people in this age group can provide some health benefits, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes... Authors call for alcohol consumption guidelines to be revised to emphasise consumption levels by age, stressing that the level of alcohol consumption recommended by many existing guidelines is too high for young people in all regions. They also call for policies targeting males under age 40, who are most likely to use alcohol harmfully.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a law Friday prohibiting the use of digital assets as forms of payments in Russia..." reports the tech/policy news site Protocol. The ban on crypto-form payments also apparently applies to NFTs:The new law also includes a provision that requires crypto exchanges and providers refuse transactions in which digital assets could be construed as a form of payment... The new law is set to take effect in 10 days. There's been some speculation that sanctioned Russian companies or individuals might use crypto to avoid sanctions imposed after the country's invasion of Ukraine. But officials have proven savvy in using on-chain analytics to trace transactions, and industry experts have warned that sanctions evaders would be ill-served by trying to use cryptocurrencies. U.S. and EU bodies have even added specific crypto wallet addresses to sanction lists.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"TikTok is resisting calls to preserve and hand over access to its content for war crime investigations," reports the Financial Times, "as lawyers and activists warn that the Chinese-owned app is a major data challenge in prosecuting atrocities in Russia's invasion of Ukraine."The video app's popularity with young Ukrainians and Russians posting footage of the war has made it a trove of digital intelligence that investigators are attempting to mine and archive as evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal acts of violence in Ukraine.... "I have concerns about the security of data there, and it is not fully clear where the interest and influence in the company is coming from," said Dia Kayyali, associate director for advocacy at Mnemonic, a nonprofit that archives digital documentation of human rights violations. "It is especially concerning that China could directly have access to that data...." Since early 2022, TikTok has met with human rights lawyers, activists, and others involved in Ukraine war crime investigations. However, it has yet to introduce any changes to its process or the product itself. Criminal prosecutors are increasingly relying on social media posts from TikTok and others as a way to "bring the crime scene to the courtroom," said Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. "Any effective investigation anywhere in the world now really requires a very effective harnessing of social media," said Khan. "People... recording killings or attacks or the consequences of attacks in real time, it can have absolutely fantastic probative value...." TikTok said it regularly meets with organizations, government bodies, and third-party experts to gather feedback and is committed to cooperating with law enforcement while respecting the privacy of its users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This year's "State of WebAssembly" report has been published by Colin Eberhardt (CTO at the U.K.-based software consultancy Scott Logic). Hundreds of people were surveyed for the report, notes this article by Visual Studio Magazine. Published by B2B media company 1105 Media, the magazine notes that Eberhardt's survey included some good news for Rust — and for Microsoft's free open source framework Blazor (for building web apps using C# and HTML):This year, like last year, Rust was found to be the most frequently used and most desired programming language for WebAssembly development.... "Rust once again comes out on top, with 45 percent saying they use it frequently or sometimes," Eberhardt said. "WebAssembly and Rust do have quite a close relationship, most WebAssembly runtimes are written in Rust, as are the various platforms based on wasm. It also enjoys some of the best tooling, so this result doesn't come as a big surprise." While Rust usage and desirability has continued to climb, the Blazor web-dev framework is coming on strong in the report, which treats Blazor as a programming language, though it's not. On that desirability scale, Blazor climbed from sixth spot in 2021 to fourth this year among seven "programming languages" [based on] percentage of respondents who use a given language 'frequently,' or 'sometimes' [for WebAssembly development] compared to last year. Eberhardt said, "Rust has had a modest rise in desirability, but the biggest climber is Blazor, with Go following just behind." Commenting on another graphic that shows which language people most want to use for WebAssembly development, Eberhardt said, "This shows that Rust usage has climbed steadily, but the biggest climbers are Blazor and Python. While you can now compile WebAssembly from a variety of languages (including C, #C, and C++), the report also found that JavaScript has somehow become a viable WebAssembly language — sort of, and even though JavaScript itself can't be compiled to WebAssembly...There's a cunning workaround for this challenge; rather than compiling JS to Wasm, you can instead compile a JavaScript engine to WebAssembly then use that to execute your code. This is actually much more practical than you might think.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Customized action figures at massive scale," promises a video at CNN. They'll be priced at $59.99, and it'll all start happening this fall — thanks to Hasbro's new partnership with 3D printer company Formlabs. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland explains:"It wasn't until recently that two technologies came into play at once," Brian Chapman, Hasbro's head of global design and development tells CNN. "One is a very simple way to scan someone's face and head" — which can now be accomplished with a Hasbro mobile app (which also allows customers to select other customizations like specific costumes). "And then, a very affordable way to print that head in a one-off way" (so it can be affixed to the standard body of Hasbro's action figures). Imagine your face on Star Wars and Marvel action figures, as well as Power Rangers, Ghostbusters — and more. CNN adds that Hasbro say it will not sell user face data, and will delete it after 60 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"NASA astronauts will go back to riding Russian rockets under an agreement announced Friday," reports the Associated Press, "and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the International Space Station with SpaceX beginning this fall."The agreement ensures that the space station will always have at least one American and Russian on board to keep both sides of the orbiting outpost running smoothly, according to NASA and Russian officials. The swap had long been in the works and was finalized despite tensions over Moscow's war in Ukraine, a sign of continuing Russia-U.S. cooperation in space.... No money will exchange hands under the agreement, according to NASA.... Friday's news came just hours after the blustery chief of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, was replaced by President Vladimir Putin, although the move did not appear to have any connection to the crew swap. Rogozin was expected to be given a new post. CBS News explains the NASA-Roscosmos agreement:"The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function," the NASA statement said. "No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others..." Russia provides the propellant and thrusters, either on the station or visiting Progress cargo ships, to change the station's orbit and offset the effects of atmospheric drag. NASA provides the bulk of the lab's electrical power, the massive gyroscopes that help maintain the station's orientation and a station-wide computer and communications network. Russian cosmonauts are not trained to operate U.S. systems and vice versa, meaning at least one astronaut and one cosmonaut must be aboard at all times. If either side pulled out, the other likely would have to depart as well, or quickly come up with alternative systems. "NASA wants to operate the space station through 2030," adds CBS, "but Russian cooperation is required. And it's not yet known whether Russia will go along."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A senior systems administrator at the Free Software Foundation points out that they're running free software in two data centers and over a hundred virtual machine — each and every one with "a freedom-respecting BIOS." But the "how" is surprisingly intricate:[E]arlier this week, we replaced "Columbia", the last of any FSF-run machines running a nonfree BIOS.... At FSF, our current standard is ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards with AMD CPUs 6200 series CPUs released in 2012. For the BIOS, we install Libreboot, the easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs, or a version of Coreboot that is carefully built to avoid including any nonfree blobs. They are fast enough for our needs, and we expect this to be the case for many more years to come. They are also very affordable systems. We are also working toward supporting Raptor Computer Systems' newer and more powerful Talos II, as well as Blackbird motherboards that use IBM POWER9 CPUs. The POWER9 CPU architecture is called "PowerPC 64-bit little endian," abbreviated "ppc64el...." The Raptor motherboards come with entirely free firmware — and even have free hardware designs! However, this type of migration has its challenges. For example, the first thing we needed to address before using these motherboards is that the main operating system we use, Trisquel GNU/Linux, didn't previously run on pp64el. So, earlier this year, we set up a Raptor POWER9 computer running Debian (without using any nonfree parts of Debian repositories) and loaned it to the maintainers of Trisquel for as long as needed. And now, we are proud to say that the upcoming Trisquel 11 release will support POWER9...! Before I decommissioned Columbia, I ran a dmidecode, which told me that the BIOS program fit within a single megabyte of space. Often, very simplistic firmware becomes more complicated in later models, and that also usually means it has a growing significance for a user's software freedom. Some newer nonfree BIOSes have grown into operating systems in their own right, sometimes with large programs such as a full Web browser. There is no fully-free BIOS available for x86 Intel and AMD CPUs released after about 2013. The key blocking factor is that those CPUs require certain firmware in the BIOS, like Intel Management Engine. Those CPUs will also refuse to run firmware that hasn't been cryptographically signed by private keys controlled by AMD and Intel, and AMD and Intel will only sign their own nonfree firmware. At the FSF, we refuse to run that nonfree firmware, and we applaud the many people who also avoid it. For those people who do run those Intel or AMD systems, running Coreboot or Osboot is still a step up the Freedom Ladder for the software freedom of your BIOS. The road to freedom is a long road. We hope our dedication to achieve milestones like these can inspire the free software movement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: [N]ew research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California's mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures -- and fewer new trees are filling the void. "The forests are not keeping up with these large fires," said study co-author James Randerson, the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor of Earth system science at UCI. Across the entire state, tree cover area has declined 6.7 percent since 1985. "These are big changes in less than four decades," he said. It's the first time that researchers have been able to measure tree population declines in California, and attribute the changes to such pressures as wildfires, drought stress and logging. For the study, the UCI-led team used satellite data from the USGS and NASA's Landsat mission to study vegetation changes between 1985 and 2021. They found that one of the starkest declines in tree cover was in Southern California, where 14 percent of the tree population in local mountain ranges vanished, potentially permanently. The rate and scale of decline varies across the state. Tree cover in the Sierra Nevada, for instance, stayed relatively stable until around 2010, then began dropping precipitously. The 8.8 percent die-off in the Sierra coincided with a severe drought from 2012 to 2015, followed by some of the worst wildfires in the state's history, including the Creek Fire in 2020. Fortunately "in the north, there's plenty of recovery after fire," said [Jonathan Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Randerson's research group, who led the study published in AGU Advances], perhaps because of the region's higher rainfall and cooler temperatures. But even there, high fire years in 2018, 2020 and 2021 have taken a visible toll. The tree decline has also affected carbon storage abilities in the state, said Randerson, who added that the next step is to precisely quantify the impact on forests' ability to absorb anthropogenic carbon dioxide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon says it will start contacting customers in College Station, Texas, to gauge their interest in receiving orders via Prime Air. Engadget reports: Amazon says it was impressed by many elements of the city, including the research being conducted by Texas A&M University, such as work on drone technology. The US Census Bureau estimates the population of College Station was 120,000 as of last July, so while it isn't the biggest city around, it seems like a decent size for the initially rollout of Prime Air. "Amazon's new facility presents a tremendous opportunity for College Station to be at the forefront of the development of drone delivery technology," Karl Mooney, the mayor of College Station, said. "We look forward to partnering with Amazon and Texas A&M and are confident that Amazon will be a productive, conscientious, and accountable participant in our community."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A new kind of laser uses tiny moving particles to produce beams of light. The laser is more programmable than standard lasers and the approach could be used to create visual displays that are sharp from all angles. New Scientist reports: Conventional lasers repeatedly bounce light between two mirrors until it becomes bright and focused. Riccardo Sapienza at Imperial College London and his colleagues have built a laser that uses particles that can arrange themselves to carry out a similar process. The new type of laser first requires the use of green light from a traditional laser. The researchers shine this light into a small glass box filled with a liquid solution containing particles of titanium oxide and silicon oxide. This warms up the silicon oxide particles and causes the titanium oxide particles to clump around them. The green light then bounces between particles in the clump -- similarly to how light bounces between mirrors in conventional lasers -- until the clump itself starts to emit a laser beam, now in the color red. By nudging the particles into different positions with the green light, the team can program the properties of the light emitted by the laser, such as where in the device it originates from and how pure its color is. By comparison, conventional lasers can't be adjusted after manufacturing. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Physics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [R]esearchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets' digital lives. The findings (PDF), which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data. When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn't necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target's browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser. "If you're an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website," says Reza Curtmola, one of the study authors and a computer science professor at NJIT. "But there are certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this, like people who organize and participate in political protest, journalists, and people who network with fellow members of their minority group. And what makes these types of attacks dangerous is they're very stealthy. You just visit the website and you have no idea that you've been exposed." How this de-anonymization attack works is difficult to explain but relatively easy to grasp once you have the gist. Someone carrying out the attack needs a few things to get started: a website they control, a list of accounts tied to people they want to identify as having visited that site, and content posted to the platforms of the accounts on their target list that either allows the targeted accounts to view that content or blocks them from viewing it -- the attack works both ways. Next, the attacker embeds the aforementioned content on the malicious website. Then they wait to see who clicks. If anyone on the targeted list visits the site, the attackers will know who they are by analyzing which users can (or cannot) view the embedded content. [...] Complicated as it may sound, the researchers warn that it would be simple to carry out once attackers have done the prep work. It would only take a couple of seconds to potentially unmask each visitor to the malicious site -- and it would be virtually impossible for an unsuspecting user to detect the hack. The researchers developed a browser extension that can thwart such attacks, and it is available for Chrome and Firefox. But they note that it may impact performance and isn't available for all browsers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PG&E announced that more than 1,500 Tesla Powerwall owners have already decided to joined the new virtual power plant it launched in partnership with Tesla in California. Electrek reports: A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants. Last year, Tesla launched a test VPP in California, where Powerwall owners would join in voluntarily without compensation to let the VPP pull power from their battery packs when the grid needed it. Last month, Tesla and PG&E, a large electric utility company in Northern California, announced the launch of a new commercial VPP where homeowners with Powerwalls would get compensated for helping the grid with the energy in their battery packs. PG&E has now released an update on the virtual power plant and said that more than 1,500 Tesla Powerwall owners have already joined the program: "On June 22, Tesla invited approximately 25,000 PG&E customers with Powerwalls to join the VPP and help form the world's largest distributed battery. In the first two weeks of the new program, more than 3,000 customers have expressed interest in enrolling, with more than 1,500 customers officially in the program." With an average of two Powerwalls per customer, the VPP most likely already has a 13 MW load capacity. PG&E says that if all eligible Powerwall owners join, the VPP would have the available megawatts equivalent to "the energy generated by a small power plant." Tesla Powerwall owners can join through the Tesla app and receive $2 per kWh that they send back to the grid during emergency events. "Enabling Powerwall customers to support the grid and their community is a necessary and important part of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy," said Drew Baglino, senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla. "We seek to partner with utilities and regulators everywhere to unlock the full potential of storage to bring more renewable, resilient, and less costly electricity to everyone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bungie, the developer of Destiny 2, is now officially a part of Sony. The Verge reports: The PlayStation maker had announced its intent to acquire the gaming studio in January, and now, that acquisition is complete. At the initial announcement, Sony said (pdf) the deal was worth $3.6 billion, but in an SEC filing on Friday, it said the deal was worth "approximately" $3.7 billion. Though it's now under the Sony umbrella, Bungie will "continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games," Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a blog post from the original announcement of the acquisition. And future games in development won't be PlayStation exclusives, Bungie's Joe Blackburn and Justin Truman said. But Sony does plan to lean on Bungie for its "world-class expertise in multi-platform development and live game services," which "will help us deliver on our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in January. Sony views live service games as a critical part of PlayStation's future, as it plans to launch more than 10 new live service games by March 2026.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TikTok's chief security officer is leaving the role in September amid renewed calls from members of the government to look into the social media app's ties to China. Insider reports: A TikTok spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the decision to replace Roland Cloutier as Chief Security Officer is unrelated to any data-privacy concerns. TikTok, which is currently the fastest growing social media company, has often faced scrutiny for being owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Last month, Buzzfeed News reported that US user data had been repeatedly accessed by TikTok employees in China based on leaked audio from internal company meetings. [...] CEO Shou Zi Chew sent a note to TikTok employees about Cloutier's exit as chief security officer, writing that "part of our evolving approach has been to minimize concerns about the security of user data in the U.S., including the creation of a new department to manage U.S. user data for TikTok. This is an important investment in our data protection practices, and it also changes the scope of the Global CSO role." Cloutier will officially step down from his role as Chief Security Officer in September and transition to an advisory role at TikTok.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Tor Project team has announced the release of Tor Browser 11.5, a major release that brings new features to help users fight censorship easier. [...] The updates in Tor Browser 11.5 focus on circumventing censorship, a process that started a year ago in version 10.5 with improving the Tor connection experience. In the new version, users no longer have to manually try out bridge configurations to unblock Tor. Tor Browser version 11.5 comes with a new feature called "Connection Assist," which assigns automatically the bridge configuration known to work best for the user's location. "Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent)," explains the release announcement. "It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from torproject.org." Since Connection Assist is still in an early stage of development (v1.0), the Tor team welcomes user feedback and reports, which would help them iron out any kinks and improve on the system. Another important new feature in version 11.5 is making 'HTTPS-Only Mode' the default browsing mode, so that the connection is through a secure tunnel. This ensures that all data exchange between the user and the server hosting the website will be encrypted, to defend against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and to protect users from SSL stripping on malicious exit relays. [...] The third significant improvement in Tor Browser 11.5 is a heavily revamped Network Settings menu, now called "Connection Settings," which should make it easier to find and understand specific settings. Most notably, bridge configuration and connection options have been redesigned to enable quick and easy review and management. Using emojis on the saved Bridges, the new interface offers visualization for the configuration for the first time, making it easy to identify the right bridge and select it when needed. You can download the latest Tor Browser from the official download portal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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