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Amazon is pausing construction of its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company's history and its shifting plans around remote work. The Associated Press reports: The Seattle-based company is delaying the beginning of construction of PenPlace, the second phase of its headquarters development in northern Virginia, Amazon's real estate chief John Schoettler said in a statement. He said the company has already hired more than 8,000 employees and will welcome them to the Met Park campus, the first phase of development, when it opens this June. "We're always evaluating space plans to make sure they fit our business needs and to create a great experience for employees, and since Met Park will have space to accommodate more than 14,000 employees, we've decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace (the second phase of HQ2) out a bit," Schoettler said. He also emphasized the company remains "committed to Arlington" and the local region, which Amazon picked -- along with New York City -- to be the site of its new headquarters, known as HQ2, several years ago. More than 230 municipalities had initially competed to house the projects. New York won the competition by promising nearly $3 billion in tax breaks and grants, among other benefits, but opposition from local politicians, labor leaders and progressive activists led Amazon to scrap its plans there. In February 2021, Amazon said it would build an eye-catching, 350-foot Helix tower to anchor the second phase of its redevelopment plans in Arlington. The new office towers were expected to welcome more than 25,000 workers when complete. Amazon spokesperson Zach Goldsztejn said those plans haven't changed and the construction pause is not a result -- or indicative of -- the company's latest job cuts, which affected 18,000 corporate employees. Goldsztejn said the company is expecting to move forward with what he called pre-construction work on the construction in Virginia later this year, including applying for permits. He said final timing for the second phase of the project is still being determined. [...] Suzanne Clark, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, said state officials are not concerned about Amazon filling its commitments. The total of 8,000 workers now employed at the new headquarters is already running about 3,000 ahead of what was expected at this point, she said. She said no incentive money has been paid out yet to Amazon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global carbon dioxide emissions are still rising but may at least be reaching a plateau, research from the International Energy Agency has shown. From a report: CO2 from energy -- by far the biggest source of emissions -- increased by less than 1% in 2022. This was despite the turmoil in energy the markets caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The rise is smaller than the 6% increase in emissions from energy recorded by the IEA in 2021, a leap that came on the back of the rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. However, a 7% reduction is needed every year to meet the goal of halving emissions this decade. Many experts had feared the soaring price of gas could push countries back towards using coal, which has much higher carbon emissions. But renewable energy seems to have been a big beneficiary, as countries opted for solar and wind power, and encouraged the take-up of heat pumps and electric vehicles (EVs). A mild start to Europe's winter also helped to save energy across the EU. Even a small increase in greenhouse gas emissions takes the world much further away from the path to net zero , the goal needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Scientists have warned emissions need to fall by nearly half in this decade, if the world is to have a good chance of holding to the 1.5C limit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A veteran JPMorgan Chase banker fumed over the financial giant's policy requiring certain staffers to give six months' notice before being allowed to leave for another job. From a report: The Wall Street worker, who claims to earn around $400,000 annually in total compensation after accumulating 15 years of experience, griped that the lengthy notice period likely means a lucrative job offer from another company will be rescinded. Taking to the social media platform Blind -- which allows career professionals anonymity so that they can freely post without concern about retribution from their bosses -- the worker in the e-trade division lamented over the policy. "So I had made up my mind to resign from JPM (New York) and look for a new role," the Blind poster wrote in an item titled, "Notice period blues. When I looked into the resignation process, I see that my notice period is 6 bloody months!! I was in disbelief, I checked my offer letter and 'Whoops there it is,'" the post continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease. Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain's Channel 4 News. "Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?" he added. The U.K. has some 10.9 million cats, according to the 2022 PDSA Animal Wellbeing report. The bombshell revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight. 10 Downing Street's own feline friend Larry's unofficial Twitter parody account wrote: "hard not to take this personally."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican. From a report If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, "Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn't paid bloggers?" according to the Florida Politics news website. The bill text defines bloggers as people who write for websites or webpages that are "frequently updated with opinion, commentary, or business content." Websites run by newspapers or "similar publications" are excluded from the definition. The proposed registration requirements apply to bloggers who receive payment in exchange for writing about elected state officers, including "the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature." Bloggers who write about a member of the legislature would have to register with the state Office of Legislative Services, while bloggers who write about the governor or other members of the executive branch would have to register with the Commission on Ethics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In late 2018, the companies behind the most widely traded cryptocurrency were struggling to maintain their access to the global banking system. Some of their backers turned to shadowy intermediaries, falsified documents and shell companies to get back in, documents show. WSJ: One of those intermediaries, a major tether trader in China, was trying to "circumvent the banking system by providing fake sales invoices and contracts for each deposit and withdrawal," Stephen Moore, one of the owners of Tether Holdings, said in an email viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore said it was too risky to continue using the fake sales invoices and contracts, which he had signed, and recommended they abandon the efforts to open the accounts, the emails show. "I would not want to argue any of the above in a potential fraud/money laundering case," he wrote. Tether runs tether, the $71 billion stablecoin that is the most widely traded cryptocurrency, and a sister company runs Bitfinex, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. Losing access to the banking system was "an existential threat" to their business, the companies said in a lawsuit. A cache of emails and documents reviewed by the Journal show a long-running effort to stay connected to the financial system. The companies often hid their identities behind other businesses or individuals. Using third parties occasionally caused problems, including hundreds of millions of dollars of seized assets and connections to a designated terrorist organization. Tether has been under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation has been overseen by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration announced on Friday a new plan to improve the digital defenses of public water systems. From a report: The move comes one day after the announcement of a national cybersecurity strategy by the White House, which seeks to broadly improve industry accountability over the cybersecurity of American critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and dams. The water system plan, which recommends a series of novel rules placing more responsibility for securing water facilities at the state-level, follows several high-profile hacking incidents in recent years. In February 2021, a cyberattack on a water treatment plant in Florida briefly increased lye levels in the water, an incident that could have been deadly if an alert worker had not detected the hack quickly. And in March 2019, a terminated employee at a Kansas-based water facility used his old computer credentials to remotely take systems offline, according to an administration official. The government is acting now because of the urgency of the threat, according to a senior U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official. Radhika Fox, the assistant administrator in the EPA's Office of Water, said hackers had "shut down critical treatment processes" and "locked control system networks behind ransomware," underscoring the current danger. However, some experts say the new plan will not do enough to help make systems more secure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new disease caused solely by plastics has been discovered in seabirds. The birds identified as having the disease, named plasticosis, have scarred digestive tracts from ingesting waste, scientists at the Natural History Museum in London say. From a report: It is the first recorded instance of specifically plastic-induced fibrosis in wild animals, researchers say. Plastic pollution is becoming so prevalent that the scarring was widespread across different ages of birds, according to the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. Young birds were found to have the disease, and it is thought chicks were being fed the plastic pollution by parents accidentally bringing it back in food. Scientists, including the Natural History Museum's Dr Alex Bond and Dr Jennifer Lavers, studied flesh-footed shearwaters from Australia's Lord Howe Island to look at the relationship between levels of ingested plastic and the proventriculus organ -- the first part of a bird's stomach. They found that the more plastic a bird had ingested, the more scarring it had. The disease can lead to the gradual breakdown of tubular glands in the proventriculus. Losing these glands can cause the birds to become more vulnerable to infection and parasites and affect their ability to digest food and absorb some vitamins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from Microsoft have introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. From a report: The researchers believe multimodal AI -- which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video -- is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human. "Being a basic part of intelligence, multimodal perception is a necessity to achieve artificial general intelligence, in terms of knowledge acquisition and grounding to the real world," the researchers write in their academic paper, Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models. Visual examples from the Kosmos-1 paper show the model analyzing images and answering questions about them, reading text from an image, writing captions for images, and taking a visual IQ test with 22â"26 percent accuracy. [...] In this case, Kosmos-1 appears to be purely a Microsoft project, without OpenAI's involvement. The researchers call their creation a "multimodal large language model" (MLLM) because its roots lie in natural language processing, like a text-only LLM, such as ChatGPT. And it shows: For Kosmos-1 to accept image input, the researchers must first translate the image into a special series of tokens (basically text) that the LLM can understand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Diego Union-Tribune: Almost three years ago, the city of San Diego cut off access to its broad network of Smart Streetlights -- more than 3,000 devices perched atop light poles that could collect images and other data, some of which the Police Department used to solve criminal cases. The city removed that access, at least without a warrant, because of concerns from the public about surveillance and privacy issues. On Wednesday, the San Diego Police Department said it wants access to 500 of those devices to be restored -- and they want to add another crime-solving tool to the network: automated license plate readers. The controversy surrounding the Smart Streetlights began in 2019 when it was revealed that the cameras had been installed without public input. Police started accessing the camera footage in 2018 for investigations. Direct access was cut off in 2020 as a result of public outcry. Because the Smart Streetlight cameras had not been well maintained over the years, the city would need to install new cameras. Adding the license plate reader technology would mark the first time the city of San Diego would have the readers in fixed locations. This is the first big push for surveillance technology in San Diego since the city approved ordinances last year specifically setting rules to govern this kind of technology in light of privacy concerns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has largely denied Sony's request to quash a Microsoft subpoena requesting that it divulge confidential documents. Microsoft served Sony with the subpoena in January as part of its defence-building process ahead of an FTC lawsuit regarding its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The subpoena included 45 separate requests for Sony documents, including copies of every third-party licensing agreement Sony has, and "all drafts of and communications regarding" SIE president Jim Ryan's declaration to the FTC. Sony attempted to quash or limit the subpoena, arguing that a number of the requests were either irrelevant to the case or too time-consuming and expensive to carry out. However, in a newly filed order made by the FTC's chief administrative law judge, most of Sony's arguments have been rejected. Most notable among Sony's requests was that an order to produce a copy of "every content licensing agreement [it has] entered into with any third-party publisher between January 1, 2012 and present" be quashed, a request which has been denied. Sony had argued that this information had no apparent value, and that compiling the documents would mean an "unduly burdensome" manual review of over 150,000 contract records to find which ones were relevant. Microsoft's argument, which the FTC has agreed with, was that since much of the Activision Blizzard acquisition case revolves around whether gaining access to its IP could result in Xbox-exclusive titles that could negatively impact competition, it was important to understand the full extent of Sony's own exclusivity deals and "their effect on industry competitiveness." One request the FTC did grant Sony, however, was to limit the date range of documents being requested -- as such, only documents dated from January 1, 2019 to the present date will be required.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit is fighting a film-industry attempt to identify users who discussed piracy, telling a federal court that the studios' request for users' real names should be rejected and that one of the studios' arguments is "nonsense." From a report: "Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects online anonymity and have established a stringent standard to use in precisely this scenario, where a litigant seeks to unmask users for the purpose of providing evidence in litigation that does not involve those users... Plaintiffs are far from meeting that strict standard here," Reddit said Tuesday in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Reddit has no involvement in the lawsuit that triggered the request for users' identities -- the studios behind films such as Hellboy, Rambo V: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard sued cable broadband provider RCN in a different court, alleging that RCN failed to terminate Internet subscribers who illegally downloaded copyrighted movies. (RCN is now known as Astound Broadband after being combined with several other cable ISPs in the same ownership group.) In an attempt to prove that RCN turned a blind eye to users downloading copyrighted movies, the film studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. After Reddit provided information on only one user, calling the other requests a "fishing expedition," the studios filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There may be a new ringtone in your life -- the urgent chime of a company-issued cell phone. From a report: In a throwback to the Blackberry era, telecom-service providers are seeing strong growth from companies handing out phones to employees. The phenomenon, which started during the pandemic, picked up recently thanks to new compliance policies around the use of WhatsApp and TikTok. It's provided a "tailwind" for subscriber gains at AT&T, Chief Financial Officer Pascal Desroches said at a conference this week. At the same event, T-Mobile US Inc. Chief Financial Officer Peter Osvaldik said his company's corporate customer count "grew every quarter in 2022." The phones are more than just a corporate perk, said Gartner analyst Lisa Pierce. "It's also about control" -- a means of restricting or blocking applications and keeping corporate data secure, she said. Businesses, especially those in finance, have grown concerned about the security of their data, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have stepped up their scrutiny over unauthorized private communication on applications such as WhatsApp and through personal email. Late last year, Congress, along with several states, banned China-owned TikTok from government employees' devices over national security concerns. This puts organizations in the position of either requiring their workers to remove apps from personal phones, or offering a secure second device. That second device helps explain how wireless carriers keep racking up millions of new subscribers long after the time when the mobile market passed saturation, with nearly every adult in the US owning at least one phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple partner Foxconn Technology Group plans to invest about $700 million on a new plant in India to ramp up local production, people familiar with the matter said, underscoring an accelerating shift of manufacturing away from China as Washington-Beijing tensions grow. The Taiwanese company, also known for its flagship unit Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., plans to build the plant to make iPhone parts on a 300-acre site close to the airport in Bengaluru, the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka [...]. The factory may also assemble Apple's handsets [...], and Foxconn may also use the site to produce some parts for its nascent electric vehicle business. The investment is one of Foxconn's biggest single outlays to date in India and underscores how China's at risk of losing its status as the world's largest producer of consumer electronics. Apple and other US brands are leaning on their Chinese-based suppliers to explore alternative locations such as India and Vietnam. It's a rethink of the global supply chain that's accelerated during the pandemic and the war in Ukraine and could reshape the way global electronics are made. The new production site in India is expected to create about 100,000 jobs, the people said. The company's sprawling iPhone assembly complex in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou employs some 200,000 at the moment, although that number surges during peak production season.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT Technology Review has revealed two cases in which babies conceived with the three-parent baby technique have shown what scientists call "reversion." "In both cases, the proportion of mitochondrial genes from the child's mother has increased over time, from less than 1% in both embyros to around 50% in one baby and 72% in another," they report. From the report: When the first baby born using a controversial procedure that meant he had three genetic parents was born back in 2016, it made headlines. The baby boy inherited most of his DNA from his mother and father, but he also had a tiny amount from a third person. The idea was to avoid having the baby inherit a fatal illness. His mother carried genes for a disease in her mitochondria. Swapping these with genes from a donor -- a third genetic parent -- could prevent the baby from developing it. The strategy seemed to work. Now clinics in other countries, including the UK, Greece, and Ukraine, are offering the same treatment. It was made legal in Australia last year. But it might not always be successful. [...] Fortunately, both babies were born to parents without genes for mitochondrial disease; they were using the technique to treat infertility. But the scientists behind the work believe that around one in five babies born using the three-parent technique could eventually inherit high levels of their mothers' mitochondrial genes. For babies born to people with disease-causing mutations, this could spell disaster -- leaving them with devastating and potentially fatal illness. The findings are making some clinics reconsider the use of the technology for mitochondrial diseases, at least until they understand why reversion is happening. "These mitochondrial diseases have devastating consequences," says Bjorn Heindryckx at Ghent University in Belgium, who has been exploring the treatment for years. "We should not continue with this." "It's dangerous to offer this procedure [for mitochondrial diseases]," says Pavlo Mazur, an embryologist based in Kyiv, Ukraine, who has seen one of these cases firsthand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's failed attempt to send satellites into orbit was a "disaster" and MPs are being urged to redirect funding to hospitals, with the country now seen as "toxic" for future launches. The Guardian reports: Senior figures at the Welsh company Space Forge, which lost a satellite when Virgin Orbit's Start Me Up mission failed to reach orbit, said a "seismic change" was needed for the UK to be appealing for space missions. Lengthy delays by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), as well as the launch failure, had left Space Forge six months behind its competition in the race to be the first company to bring a satellite back down to Earth, when it had been six months ahead, the science and technology committee heard. Patrick McCall, a non-executive director at Space Forge, said: "The CAA is taking a different approach to risk, and a bit to process and timing as well. But I think unless there is, without wanting to be too dramatic, a seismic change in that approach, the UK is not going to be competitive from a launch perspective. I think the conclusion I've reached is right now it's not a good use of money, because our regulatory framework is not competitive." He added that the UK ought to consider spending the money it was investing in launch capability on other areas, such as hospitals. Greg Clark, the chair of the committee, said it was a "disaster" that an attempt to show what the UK was capable of had turned "toxic for a privately funded launch." "We had the first attempted launch but the result is that you as an investor in space are saying there is no chance of investors supporting another launch from the UK with the current regulator conditions." Dan Hart, the CEO of Virgin Orbit, told MPs he had expected the CAA to work more similarly to the Federal Aviation Authority in the US but he had found the UK regulator more conservative. The company has since ended its contract with Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay airport but said it was still hoping to launch from the site in the future. Sir Stephen Hillier, the chair of the CAA, said: "Our primary duty is to ensure that the space activity in the UK is conducted safely. The CAA licensed in advance of technical readiness."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than half of the world's population will be overweight or obese by 2035 unless governments take decisive action to curb the growing epidemic of excess weight, a report has warned. About 2.6 billion people globally -- 38% of the world population -- are already overweight or obese. But on current trends that is expected to rise to more than 4 billion people (51%) in 12 years' time, according to research by the World Obesity Federation. Without widespread use of tactics such as taxes and limits on the promotion of unhealthy food, the number of people who are clinically obese will increase from one in seven today to one in four by 2035. If that happens, almost 2 billion people worldwide would be living with obesity. Those with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 are judged to be overweight, while people whose BMI is at least 30 are deemed to be obese. Evidence shows that obesity increases someone's risk of cancer, heart disease and other diseases. Obesity among children and young people is on course to increase faster than among adults. By 2035 it is expected to be at least double the rate seen in 2020, according to the federation's latest annual World Obesity Atlas report. It is expected to rise by 100% among boys under 18, leaving 208 million affected, but go up even more sharply -- by 125% -- among girls the same age, which would see 175 million of them affected. [...] The federation's report also highlights that many of the world's poorest countries are facing the sharpest increases in obesity yet are the least well prepared to confront the disease. Nine of the 10 countries set to experience the biggest rises in coming years are low- or middle-income nations in Africa and Asia. "The global cost of obesity is also due to rocket, from $1.96 trillion in 2019 to $4.32 trillion by 2035, which would be the equivalent of 3% of global GDP -- a sum comparable to the economic damage wrought by Covid-19 -- the federation estimates," adds the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, Elon Musk's medical device company, Neuralink, was denied permission last year to begin human trials of a revolutionary brain implant to treat intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing can begin, according to seven current and former employees. From the report: The agency's major safety concerns involved the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant's tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said. A year after the rejection, Neuralink is still working through the agency's concerns. Three staffers said they were skeptical the company could quickly resolve the issues -- despite Musk's latest prediction at a Nov. 30 presentation that the company would secure FDA human-trial approval this spring. Neuralink has not disclosed details of its trial application, the FDA's rejection or the extent of the agency's concerns. As a private company, it is not required to disclose such regulatory interactions to investors. During the hours-long November presentation, Musk said the company had submitted "most of our paperwork" to the agency, without specifying any formal application, and Neuralink officials acknowledged the FDA had asked safety questions in what they characterized as an ongoing conversation. Such FDA rejections do not mean a company will ultimately fail to gain the agency's human-testing approval. But the agency's pushback signals substantial concerns, according to more than a dozen experts in FDA device-approval processes. The rejection also raises the stakes and the difficulty of the company's subsequent requests for trial approval, the experts said. The FDA says it has approved about two-thirds of all human-trial applications for devices on the first attempt over the past three years. That total rose to 85% of all requests after a second review. But firms often give up after three attempts to resolve FDA concerns rather than invest more time and money in expensive research, several of the experts said. Companies that do secure human-testing approval typically conduct at least two rounds of trials before applying for FDA approval to commercially market a device.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to web services chief Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft is giving Bing preview testers a toggle to change the chatbot's responses. Engadget reports: A Creative option allows for more "original and imaginative" (read: fun) answers, while a Precise switch emphasizes shorter, to-the-point replies. There's also a Balanced setting that aims to strike a middle ground. The company reined in the Bing AI's responses after early users noticed strange behavior during long chats and 'entertainment' sessions. As The Verge observes, the restrictions irked some users as the chatbot would simply decline to answer some questions. Microsoft has been gradually lifting limits since then, and just this week updated the AI to reduce both the unresponsiveness and "hallucinations." The bot may not be as wonderfully weird, but it should also be more willing to indulge your curiosity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla announced plans to open a gigafactory in Mexico as it pushes to expand its global output. Reuters reports: Mexico on Tuesday said Tesla had chosen the northern border state of Nuevo Leon for a new factory worth more than $5 billion, calling it the "the biggest electric vehicle plant in the world." Tesla will ramp up output at all of its gigafactories, Musk said at an Investor Day event Austin, Texas. The company laid out plans to cut assembly costs by half in future generations of cars and discussed its innovation in managing operations from manufacturing to service. The plant near the city of Monterrey "will be supplemental to the output of all the other factories," Musk said at the end of the more than 3-hour long presentation, calling it "probably the most significant announcement of the day." Tesla's global capacity was 2 million vehicles a year, Tom Zhu, the new global production chief, said at the event. Musk did not provide details of how many vehicles the factory would produce in a year and Tesla's investment in it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new AI assistant has been unveiled by the Romanian prime minister, which he hopes will inform the government about Romanians' wishes "in real time". Nicolae Ciuca claimed that Ion (Romanian for 'John') is his "new honorary adviser" and an "international first" on Wednesday at the start of a governmental meeting. He also said that Romanians would also be able to chat directly with Ion on the project's website. "Hi, you gave me life and my role is now to represent you, like a mirror. What should I know about Romania?" Ion's voice said at the launch. Ion takes a physical form as a long, mirror-like structure with a moving graphic at the top suggesting it is listening at all times. "I have the conviction that the use of AI should not be an option but an obligation to make better-informed decisions," Ciuca said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Online counseling company BetterHelp has agreed to pay $7.8 million to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission that it improperly shared customers' sensitive data with companies like Facebook and Snapchat, even after promising to keep it private. The Verge reports: The proposed order, announced by the FTC on Thursday, would ban the same behavior in the future and require BetterHelp to make some changes to how it handles customer data. According to the regulator, the sign-up process for the company's service "promised consumers that it would not use or disclose their personal health data except for limited purposes." However, the FTC alleges that the company instead "used and revealed consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes." The FTC also says that the company gave customer service agents false scripts to try and reassure users that it wasn't sharing personally identifiable or personal health information after a February 2020 report from Jezebel exposed some of its practices. The commission's complaint (PDF) accuses the company of misleading customers by putting a HIPAA seal on its website, despite the fact that "no government agency or other third party reviewed [BetterHelp]'s information practices for compliance with HIPAA, let alone determined that the practices met the requirements of HIPAA." If the FTC's order ends up going through, the $7.8 million would go to customers who signed up for the service between August 1st, 2017, and December 31st, 2020. Here are some of the other things BetterHelp would be required to do: - Stop sharing individually identifiable information about consumer's mental health with any third parties- Stop misrepresenting its data collection and use policies- Alert customers who created accounts before January 1st, 2021, that their personal info may have been used for advertising- Obtain "affirmative express consent" from a customer before sharing information with a third party- Reach out to third parties that received customer information and ask that it be deleted- Establish a "comprehensive privacy program" and have an independent third party carry out privacy assessmentsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Now, leaders from the GNOME Foundation and KDE Foundation, along with Debian Linux, are considering [...] building an app store on top of Flatpak, a universal Linux software deployment and package management program. This idea of replacing traditional but not very friendly ways of delivering Linux desktop apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems, has been around for a while. Besides being easier to use, Flatpak and its rivals, such as Appimage and Snaps, can also run on any Linux distribution. All the programs do this by containerizing applications with all their necessary libraries and associated files. Now, as laid out in former Google chairman Eric Schmidt's Plaintext Group, the proposal is to "Promote diversity and sustainability in the Linux desktop community by adding payments, donations, and subscriptions to the Flathub app store." Behind this idea are several Linux desktop leaders, such as GNOME president Robert McQueen; former GNOME executive director and Debian project leader Neil McGovern; and KDE president Aleix Pol. Flatpak, unlike the earlier store attempts, works on essentially all Linux distros. This makes it much more interesting. Why Flakpak, instead of its chief rival, Snaps? They explained, "Flathub is a vendor-neutral service for Linux application developers to build and publish their applications directly to their end users. A healthy application ecosystem is essential for the success of the open-source software desktop, so end-users can trust and control their data and development platforms on the device in front of them." [...] Be that as it may, while the proposal for a paid Flathub app store remains just an idea, it's still one that may garner support. If this plan can generate enough support, and then the revenue, to cover its costs, it may create the first popular universal Linux app store. Then, who knows, maybe the Linux desktop will finally become broadly popular. Stranger things have happened.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is promising to hold software developers and critical infrastructure to tougher security standards and apply more pressure on ransomware gangs as part of its first national cybersecurity strategy, released Thursday. From a report: The nearly 40-page document provides a roadmap for new laws and regulations over the next few years aimed at helping the United States prepare for and fight emerging cyber threats. The strategy -- which was crafted by the two-year-old Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) -- has five "pillars": defend critical infrastructure; disrupt and dismantle threat actors; shape market forces to drive security and resilience; invest in a resilient future; and forge international partnerships. The strategy includes a wide range of tasks, from modernizing federal systems' cybersecurity defenses to increasing offensive hacking capabilities in the intelligence community. The administration will start working with Congress and the private sector on legislation that would hold software makers liable for security flaws if they fail to follow security best practices, like those developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new and detailed investigation by Forbes has raised significant questions about the management and custody of customer assets and stablecoin collateral by Binance. From a report: There are many possible explanations for the nature and intent of certain on-chain transactions highlighted by Forbes, and they could be entirely innocuous. But Binance's so far confused and sometimes contradictory responses to the findings do not inspire confidence, particularly in a post-FTX era of rightfully widespread suspicion of centralized custodians with off-chain balance sheets. A new and detailed investigation by Forbes has raised significant questions about the management and custody of customer assets and stablecoin collateral by Binance. There are many possible explanations for the nature and intent of certain on-chain transactions highlighted by Forbes, and they could be entirely innocuous. But Binance's so far confused and sometimes contradictory responses to the findings do not inspire confidence, particularly in a post-FTX era of rightfully widespread suspicion of centralized custodians with off-chain balance sheets. Forbes reported this week that on a single day, Aug. 17, 2022, $1.78 billion worth of collateral moved out of Binance wallets intended to back stablecoins, particularly b-USDC, a wrapped version of Circle's USDC. According to Forbes' on-chain analysis, the facts of which Binance has not disputed, $1.2 billion of this was sent to trading firm Cumberland DRW, with other amounts going to now-collapsed hedge fund Alameda Research, Tron founder Justin Sun and crypto infrastructure and services firm Amber Group. Crucially, according to Forbes, this outflow was not accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the circulating supply of b-USDC tokens. Binance's various attempts to offer an innocent explanation of Forbes' findings have not provided a unified and consistent -- much less entirely compelling -- justification for what could, in the worst case, indicate the misuse of customer funds. Before publishing a more focused and detailed account Wednesday morning, Binance officials offered a number of differing, even contradictory explanations. Equally galling, Binance's responses have continued the petulant and defensive tone of many of its previous dismissals of close investigative attention. Forbes' investigation was motivated by mounting evidence of past problems with Binance's asset management practices. Binance has admitted to Bloomberg that, for certain periods of time, it failed to maintain clear 1:1 backing of its wrapped b-assets in a segregated and transparent manner. In this context, the exchange's attempt to paint an act of journalistic analysis as "conspiracy theories," while suggesting the investigation was motivated by nothing but "collecting a lot of views and clicks," is beneath the dignity of an organization hoping to maintain a leadership position in a high-risk, fraud-riddled industry. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao even retreated to the oldest refuge of scrutinized crypto organizations, declaring the Forbes reporting nothing more than "FUD," or fear, uncertainty and doubt. But this lazy, knee-jerk dismissal, now as ever, ignores a simple reality: Unclear or incomplete answers from the people most obligated to have them are far more serious sources of confusion and anxiety than accepted facts and reasonable questions surfaced by journalists.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The state sponsors titles that cast it in a favorable light and punish indies for depicting a more complex vision of Iranian identity. From a report: Commander of the Resistance: Amerli Battle is a first-person shooter set in Iraq. Launched in 2022, the game pitches players against Islamic State militants laying siege to a town, based on a real-life event that took place in 2014. Its hero -- the commander of the title -- is a real-life figure too: Qasem Soleimani, a major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force under the command of Iran's theocratic leadership. Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, was a powerful figure in the regime -- and a controversial one, declared a terrorist by the US and accused of overseeing human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The game was produced by Monadian Media, an offshoot of the Basij Cyberspace Organization -- the digital wing of the IRGC's paramilitary group, the Basij's and it is part of an ongoing propaganda effort by the regime to rewrite history and mythologize its leading figures. Facing growing discontent, the Islamic Republic has increasingly invested in producing video games, in the hope that it can use them to influence young people. The games' narratives try to reinforce the religious identity of the nation, to portray domestic opponents -- such as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began last year -- as sectarian extremists, and to rehabilitate figures like Soleimani, a military commander associated with brutal crackdowns. And it has thrust Iran's once-thriving games industry into the midst of a battle over Iranian identity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time researchers have proven a clear correlation between deforestation and regional precipitation. Scientists hope it may encourage agricultural companies and governments in the Amazon and Congo basin regions and south-east Asia to invest more in protecting trees and other vegetation. From a report: The study found that the more rainforests are cleared in tropical countries, the less local farmers will be able to depend on rain for their crops and pastures. The paper, published in the journal Nature, adds to fears that the degradation of the Amazon is approaching a tipping point after which the rainforest will no longer be able to generate its own rainfall and the vegetation will dry up. People living in deforested areas have long provided anecdotal evidence that their microclimates became drier with lower tree cover. Scientists already knew that killing trees reduces evapotranspiration and thus theorised this would result in lower local rainfall. The team at Leeds University have now proven this using satellite and meteorological records from 2003-17 across pantropical regions. Even at a small scale, they found an impact, but the decline became more pronounced when the affected area was greater than 50km squared (2,500 sq km). At the largest measured scale of 200km squared (40,000 sq km), the study discovered rainfall was 0.25 percentage points lower each month for every 1 percentage point loss of forest. This can enter into a vicious cycle, as reductions in rainfall lead to further forest loss, increased fire vulnerability and weaker carbon drawdown. One of the authors, Prof Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds, said 25% to 50% of the rain that fell in the Amazon came from precipitation recycling by the trees. Although the forest is sometimes described as the "lungs of the world," it functions far more like a heart that pumps water around the region.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Late Wednesday night, Silvergate Capital informed the SEC it won't be able to file its annual report on time, and is determining if it can continue to operate. Unlike most traditional banks which have steered clear of crypto, Silvergate is a dominant lender to the crypto industry. The La Jolla, California-based bank reported a $1 billion loss for the fourth quarter as investors panicked over the collapse of FTX, the exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried that is now at the center of a massive federal fraud investigation. FTX's collapse in November rippled through the digital asset sector, forcing several firms to halt operations and even declare bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and investors fled. But unlike FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager and other crypto companies that folded last year, Silvergate is a traditional, federally-insured lender that has positioned itself as a gateway to the crypto sector. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, severed ties with Silvergate. The company tweeted: "Out of an abundance of caution, Coinbase is no longer accepting or initiating payments to or from Silvergate." Galaxy Digital, a crypto financial services company, issued a similar statement: "In light of recent developments, Galaxy has stopped accepting or initiating transfers to Silvergate. As a firm, we continue to have no material exposure to Silvergate, and this action was taken out of an abundance of caution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia is preparing for its next step away from fossil fuels by creating a market to replace the spinning coal plant turbines that help stabilize the power grid. From a report: The government's adviser on energy policy, the Australian Energy Market Commission, is consulting on a rule change for a spot market in inertia provision, it said in a statement on Thursday. Australia's world-leading usage of wind, solar and batteries has led to "new and previously unobserved operational conditions," it said. Conventional power plants use turbines that keep revolving even when the fuel that's forcing them to move stops burning. It's a process known as inertia, which helps network operators maintain stability, smooth over disturbances in the grid and prevent blackouts. However, solar panels and wind turbines generally stop and start almost instantaneously -- hence the AEMC's call for other sources of inertia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's offer of licensing deals to rivals is likely to address EU antitrust concerns over its $69 billion acquisition of Activision, Reuters reported Thursday, citing three people familiar with the matter said, helping it to clear a major hurdle. From the report: Microsoft announced the Activision bid in January last year, its biggest ever, to take on leaders Tencent and Sony, in the booming videogaming market and to venture in the metaverse which is virtual online worlds where people can work, play and socialise.The European Commission, which is scheduled to decide on the deal by April 25, is not expected to demand that Microsoft sell assets to win its approval, the people said. Microsoft President Brad Smith last month said the U.S. software group was ready to offer rivals licensing deals to address antitrust concerns but it would not sell Activision's lucrative "Call of Duty" franchise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. From a report: Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators project, found. What's going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. If you take a moment to conjure the university in your mind, you will probably arrive at one of two visions. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from "Pale Fire" to "The Fire Next Time" and scaling the heights of "Ulysses" for the view. The goal of such an education isn't direct career training but cultivation of the mind -- the belief that Lionel Trilling caricatured as "certain good things happen if we read literature." This model describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically failed to explain. Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It's the small-bore university of campus comedy -- of "Lucky Jim" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" -- but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn't have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If an artificial intelligence machine can be named as an inventor for a patent, pet cats could be next, lawyers said at the UK's top court arguing only humans can be inventors in law. From a report: The UK's Supreme Court will decide whether an AI machine can be named as an inventor and who may own the patent. Imagination Engines founder, Stephen Thaler, challenged the rejection of his patent applications naming his AI machine as inventor for a beverage container and a flashing light. Allowing an AI machine to be named as the inventor can open doors to "plainly ridiculous assertion," Stuart Baran, a lawyer for the patent office, said in documents prepared for the case. Should the judges rule in favor of Thaler inventors could include "my cat Felix" or "cosmic forces," he said. Thaler tried registering the patent naming his system, DABUS, as inventor in several countries but was successful only in Australia and South Africa, according to the court documents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of Americans nearing their golden years are still financially unprepared for retirement. From a report: According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 50% of women and 47% of men between the ages of 55 and 66 have no retirement savings. According to AARP, nearly 57 million Americans work for an employer that does not offer a retirement savings plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has delayed the approval of an email-app update with AI-powered language tools over concerns that it could generate inappropriate content for children, according to communications Apple sent to the app maker. The software developer disagrees with Apple's decision. From a report: The dispute shows the broad concerns about whether language-generating artificial-intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, are ready for widespread use. Apple took steps last week to block an update of email app BlueMail because of concerns that a new AI feature in the app could show inappropriate content, according to Ben Volach, co-founder of BlueMail developer Blix, and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. BlueMail's new AI feature uses OpenAI's latest ChatGPT chatbot to help automate the writing of emails using the contents of prior emails and calendar events. ChatGPT allows users to converse with an AI in seemingly humanlike ways and is capable of advanced long-form writing on a variety of topics. "Your app includes AI-generated content but does not appear to include content filtering at this time," Apple's app-review team said last week in a message to the developer reviewed by the Journal. The app-review team said that because the app could produce content not appropriate for all audiences, BlueMail should move up its age restriction to 17 and older, or include content filtering, the documents show. Mr. Volach says it has content-filtering capabilities. The app's restriction is currently set for users 4 years old and older. Apple's age restriction for 17 and older is for categories of apps that may include everything from offensive language to sexual content and references to drugs. Mr. Volach says that this request is unfair and that other apps with similar AI functions without age restrictions are already allowed for Apple users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has a "stunning lead" in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies as Western democracies lose a global competition for research output, a security think tank said on Thursday after tracking defence, space, energy and biotechnology. From a report: The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said its study showed that, in some fields, all of the world's top 10 research institutions are based in China. The study, funded by the United States State Department, found the United States was often second-ranked, although it led global research in high-performance computing, quantum computing, small satellites and vaccines. "Western democracies are losing the global technological competition, including the race for scientific and research breakthroughs," the report said, urging greater research investment by governments. China had established a "stunning lead in high-impact research" under government programs. The report called for democratic nations to collaborate more often to create secure supply chains and "rapidly pursue a strategic critical technology step-up." ASPI tracked the most-cited scientific papers, which it said are the most likely to result in patents. China's surprise breakthrough in hypersonic missiles in 2021 would have been identified earlier if China's strong research had been detected, it said. "Over the past five years, China generated 48.49% of the world's high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics, and it hosts seven of the world's top 10 research institutions," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The U.S. Postal Service's plans for a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles are getting closer to being realized. The service awarded contracts on Tuesday for 9,250 battery electric vehicles and for more than 14,000 charging stations. The vehicles purchased are Ford E-Transit Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), which according to USPS are "100 percent electric." It's part of the agency's plans, announced in December, to make 75% of its newly acquired vehicles, known as Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, over the next five years electric. After 2026, NGDV purchases will be 100% electric, the agency said. The goal is to have a fleet of 66,000 electric vehicles deployed by 2028. Three suppliers were awarded contracts for more than 14,000 charging stations, as well, USPS said, to kick off its Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) inventory. However, the agency did note that the contracts they just awarded will not provide an immediate supply. The vehicles won't be delivered until December, assuming that the agency successfully finishes its Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement and other necessary tasks. It also remains unclear where the vehicles and charging stations will be placed, as those details have yet to be finalized, the agency said. As such, a contract has also been awarded for the agency to acquire 9,250 commercial-off-the-shelf internal combustion engine vehicles "to fill the urgent need for vehicles." In December, the agency said that 21,000 COTS vehicles will be purchased and are "expected to be battery electric," but said that depends "on market availability and operational feasibility." In this case, the internal combustion engine vehicles will be gas-powered and made by Fiat Chrysler Automobile, a spokesperson for USPS told CBS News. They added that, unlike older USPS vehicles, these will "feature air conditioning and advanced safety technology and are more suited to modern day operational requirements." "We have an urgent need to replace some of our vehicles as soon as possible, and in those instances we will look to obtain vehicles that can be provided to us expeditiously, recognizing that there are a limited amount of BEV options currently available and that the charging infrastructure buildout will also take some time," they said in an email. "...Today there remain routes and applications which do not support BEVs. As BEV technology matures and capabilities increase, the Postal Service will continue to review its ability to utilize and expand BEV usage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After analyzing the data collected from NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year, the DART team found that the kinetic impactor mission "can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth." The findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature. From a NASA press release: The first paper reports DART's successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos. The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART's successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense. Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time -- several years at a minimum, but preferably decades. "Nevertheless," the authors state in the paper, DART's success "builds optimism about humanity's capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat." The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute. This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself. The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: "To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target's orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both." In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART's kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos' speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second -- again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft. That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone. DART's scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids. DART's impact made Dimorphos an "active asteroid" -- a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet -- which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Eric Berger: One of the world's most important rocket companies, United Launch Alliance, may be sold later this year. The potential sale has not been disclosed publicly, but three sources confirmed to Ars that potential buyers have been contacted about the opportunity. These sources said a deal is expected to be closed before the end of this year and that investment firm Morgan Stanley and consulting firm Bain & Company are managing the transaction. The sale of United Launch Alliance, or ULA as it is known within the industry, would mark the end of an era that has lasted for nearly two decades. The company was officially formed in 2005 as part of a deal brokered by the US government, ensuring the military had access to both Atlas and Delta rockets to put national security satellites into space. To form ULA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing merged their launch businesses into a single company, each taking a 50 percent stake. This union was profitable for both parent companies, as ULA held a monopoly on launching national security missions and, effectively, NASA science probes. In return for 100 percent mission success, ULA received large launch contracts and an approximately $1 billion annual subsidy from the US Department of Defense to maintain "launch readiness." The emergence of SpaceX in the early 2010s with the increasingly reliable Falcon 9 rocket started to disrupt this profitable arrangement. SpaceX sold the Falcon 9 rocket at a substantial discount to ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. The company also successfully sued the US government to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to compete for national security missions, and SpaceX launched its first one in 2017. In recent years, SpaceX has come to dominate United Launch Alliance in terms of cadence. By the end of 2022, the upstart was launching as many rockets each month as ULA launched during a calendar year. During the last four years, in fact, SpaceX has landed more rockets than ULA has launched during its existence. However, ULA still holds a prominent place in the global launch industry, and there will likely be no shortage of suitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Airbnb is banning people from using its site because of their mere association with other users the short-term rental company has deemed a safety risk and removed from the platform, a decision that highlights the imperfect security protocols that Airbnb employs. In instances where a user is banned because of their association with another user deemed problematic, the user can only return to the platform if their problematic acquaintance successfully appeals the ban or if they are able to prove they are not "closely associated." In a statement, Airbnb confirmed to Motherboard that it does sometimes ban users because the company has discovered that they "are likely to travel" with another person who has already been banned, though a spokesperson wouldn't say when this practice started or how often it occurs. The company said it does this as a "necessary safety precaution," and a spokesperson said referring to such bans as merely a result of association is overly "simplistic." But the process appears opaque; just this month, the company apologized and said it had made a "mistake" in banning the parents of right-wing activist Lauren Southern. Airbnb has said that it understands the system is imperfect, and employs an appeals process for people who feel they have been unfairly banned. But the process is often limited and frustrating to banned users, according to conversations Motherboard has had with banned users. The bans by association underscore the difficulty (and perhaps impossibility) of keeping dangerous parties completely out of Airbnb hosts' homes without slighting associated users who feel their own bans are unjustified.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck shares a report from CBS News: A 2012 trip to a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart to pick up some milk turned out to be one for the history books. A giant bug that stopped a scientist in his tracks as he walked into the store and he ended up taking home turned out to be a rare Jurassic-era flying insect. Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State University's Insect Identification Lab, found the mysterious bug -- an experience that he says he remembers "vividly." "I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building," he said in a press release from Penn State. "I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade." [I]n the fall of 2020 when he was teaching an online course on insect biodiversity and evolution, Skvarla was showing students the bug and suddenly realized it wasn't what he originally thought. He and his students then figured out what it might be -- live on a Zoom call. "We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he's talking about the features and then just kinda stops," one of his students Codey Mathis said. "We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing." A clear indicator of this identification was the bug's wingspan. It was about 50 millimeters -- nearly 2 inches -- a span that the team said made it clear the insect was not an antlion. His team's molecular analysis on the bug has been published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington. theshowmecanuck captioned: "To be fair, he said he didn't know what it was so [he] just collected it and took it home, and then figured it out later. My thought that I added to the title was because of this quote in the story (which tickled my cynicism in humanity): "It could have been 100 years since it was even in this area -- and it's been years since it's been spotted anywhere near it..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs are slated to ship this year with massive heatsinks and predictably high prices. Tom's Hardware reports: There are multiple M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs slated to ship this year, and the first model looks to be the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000, which as the name inventively implies can deliver up to 10,000 MB/s. Earlier rumors suggested the drive would be able to hit 12,000 MB/s reads and 10,000 MB/s writes, so performance was apparently reigned in while getting the product ready for retail. The Gigabyte Aorus SSD uses the Phison E26 controller, which will be common on a lot of the upcoming models. Silicon Motion is working on its new SM2508 controller that may offer higher overall performance, but it's a bit further out and may not ship this year. The other thing to note with the Aorus is the massive heatsink that comes with the drive, which seems to be the case with all the other Gen5 SSD prototypes we've seen as well. Clearly, these new drives are going to get just a little bit warm. The Gigabyte drive is currently listed on Amazon and Newegg, though the latter is currently sold out while the former is only available via a third-party marketplace seller -- at a whopping $679.89 for the 2TB model. That's almost certainly not the MSRP or a reflection of what MSRP might end up being once the drive becomes more widely available, which should happen in the coming month or two. The other PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD that's now available is the Inland TD510 2TB, available at Microcenter for just $349.99 -- assuming you have a Microcenter within driving distance. Inland is Microcenter's own brand of drive, and while the cooler that comes with the SSD isn't quite as large as the Aorus, it does feature a small fan for active cooling. Word is that the fan can be quite loud for something this small, so not a great feature in other words. Like the Aorus 10000, the Inland TD510 uses the Phison E26 controller and has the same 10,000 MB/s reads and 9,500 MB/s writes specification. Where Gigabyte doesn't currently list random read/write speeds, the Microcenter page lists up to 1.5 million IOPS read and 1.25 million IOPS write for the Inland drive. Both drives also have an endurance rating of 1,400 TBW, with read/write power use of around 11W.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man who rented out servers configured for BitTorrent file-sharing use has been handed a three-month suspended sentence in Denmark. Known as 'seedboxes', these pre-configured servers are not illegal per se, but when customers used the devices to break copyright law on known pirate sites, rightsholders held the server provider liable. TorrentFreak reports: Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance (Rettigheds Alliancen) mitigates all types of piracy but for the past few years, has maintained a keen focus on torrent sites. Working in partnership with the Danish government's SOIK IP-Task Force, Rights Alliance forced several sites to close down and successfully prosecuted site operators, staff members, and users who uploaded content to those sites. In 2021, Rights Alliance targeted specialized servers that not only supply content to torrent sites but also play a role in boosting download times while improving security. In 2021, news broke that six people had been arrested in Denmark due to their alleged connections to several local torrent sites. Among them was Kasper Nielsen of internet services company HNielsen Networks, a supplier of servers under various brands that could be configured for 'seedbox' purposes. Available information indicated that the servers had been used by an unknown number of users to share content on private torrent sites ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes. [...] When Rights Alliance filed its criminal complaint against HNielsen Networks, the anti-piracy group referenced the landmark Filmspeler case which involved the sale of piracy-configured media players. According to statements published by Rights Alliance and NSK (Saerlig Kriminalitet) Denmark's Special Crime Unit, Nielsen was convicted yesterday for selling seedboxes in the knowledge they were being used by others to share movies, TV shows, eBooks and other content, without permission from rightsholders. "On February 28, the Court in Aalborg ruled against the Danish owner behind a seedbox company for, in the period November 2020 to May 2021, having sold seedboxes and server capacity to an unknown number of people, knowing that they were used for illegal sharing of no less than 3,838 copyright-protected works on the Danish and Nordic file sharing services ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes," Rights Alliance reports. Nielsen was handed a three-month conditional (suspended) sentence and a confiscation order for DKK 300,000 (around $42,600), the amount users had paid his company to access the seedbox servers. The 35-year-old must also pay compensation of DKK 298,660 to Rights Alliance. "Providers of seedboxes have a responsibility to ensure that their services are not used for illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted content, which the Rights Alliance can clearly see that they are doing," says Maria Fredenslund, Director of Rights Alliance. "Therefore, this case helps to send a signal to other providers that you cannot deliberately sell services to the illegal market." Since Neilsen took a plea deal at an early stage, none of the claims made by Rights Alliance were needed to be proven in court. "The 3,838 figure and any evidence related to 'knowledge' of infringement carried out by seedbox customers on the sites, were accepted as true," reports TorrentFreak.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The mysterious set of symptoms known as "Havana syndrome" was not caused by an energy weapon or foreign adversary, US intelligence has concluded. The assessment concludes a multi-year investigation into approximately 1,000 "anomalous health incidents" (AHIs) among US diplomats, spies and other employees in US embassies and missions around the world. Victims reported brain injuries, hearing loss, vertigo and strange auditory sensations, among other symptoms. Many suspected they had been victims of a targeted attack using some kind of directed energy weapon. Of the seven intelligence agencies that undertook the investigation, five determined that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents," according to an unclassified version of the report released Wednesday by the House intelligence committee. Those five agencies deemed foreign adversary involvement "very unlikely." One considered it "unlikely" and one declined to state a conclusion. The assessment involved a painstaking effort to analyze syndrome cases for patterns that could link them, as well as a search, using forensics and geolocation data, for evidence of a directed energy weapon, unnamed officials told the Post. "There was nothing," one official said. The officials told the Post they were open to new evidence that a foreign adversary had developed an energy weapon, but did not believe Russia or any other adversary was involved in these cases. The intelligence agencies "judge that there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing AHIs", according to the unclassified report. "In light of this and the evidence that points away from a foreign adversary, causal mechanism, or unique syndrome linked to AHIs, IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors," the report reads. Three agencies have "high confidence" in that assessment, three have "moderate confidence" and one has "low confidence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mmiscool writes: Email notices went out today to legacy users of Weebly's free web site hosting service. In the early days of Weebly (before being gobbled up a credit card processing company only concerned about money) you could create a very basic web site for free and point your own custom domain at Weebly to have a relatively painless web site. Now there were lots of add-ons and extra features you could pay for like shopping carts or interactive forms but you were never required to pay for the basic web hosting. Over the years they stopped allowing new sites to be registered using the free option but they did continue to honor the old legacy free plans for existing users. That ends now.An email sent out today to legacy site holders reads This is an official notification from the Weebly account team in regards to the account under this email address.You currently have a free Weebly website published on a custom domain (or vanity URL) and are not subscribed to a paid Weebly hosting plan. As of March 28, 2023, sites connected to custom domains are required to have a Weebly hosting service plan to remain published.What does this mean for you?To keep your site published on a custom domain, you will need to purchase a paid Weebly service plan subscription. If you take no action and choose to remain on a free Weebly plan, your account information and all associated site content will remain intact and accessible to you within Editor, but your site will be unpublished on March 28, 2023 and will no longer be visible to visitors or connected to your custom domain. You will need to republish your site on a free Weebly subdomain to make it publicly visible again (ex: my-name.weebly.com). Message received. Pay up or else.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dcblogs writes: Despite the demand of employers like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T and others, nearly 40% of software engineers preferred only remote roles, and if their employers mandated a return to the office, 21% indicated they would quit immediately, while another 49% said they would start looking for another job, according to Hired's 2023 State of Software Engineers. This report gathered its data from 68,500 software engineering candidates and a survey of more than 1,300 software engineers and 120 talent professionals. Employers open to remote workers "are able to get better-quality talent that's a better fit for the organization," said Josh Brenner, CEO of Hired, a job-matching platform for technology jobs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok has announced a batch of new features intended to reduce screen time and improve the well-being of its younger users. The Verge reports: In the coming weeks, a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes will be automatically applied to every TikTok user under 18 years old. Teens that hit this limit will be asked to enter a passcode to continue watching. They can disable the feature entirely, but if they do so and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok a day, they'll be prompted to set a new limit. TikTok claims these prompts increased the use of its screen time management tools by 234 percent during the feature's first month of testing. Teens will also be sent an inbox notification each week that recaps their screen time, allowing younger users to be aware of how much time they spend on the app and requiring that they make active decisions to extend the recommended screen time. These weekly updates are available now, alongside prompts to encourage teens to use screen time tools. TikTok says it consulted current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital when deciding how long the time restriction should be. "While there's no collectively-endorsed position on how much screen time is 'too much', or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we recognize that teens typically require extra support as they start to explore the online world independently," said Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety at TikTok, in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, is launching developer APIs for the AI chatbot and the Whisper speech-transcription model. It also changed its terms of service to let developers opt out of using their data for improvements while adding a 30-day data retention policy. Engadget reports: The new ChatGPT API will use the same AI model ("gpt-3.5-turbo") as the popular chatbot, allowing developers to add either unchanged or flavored versions of ChatGPT to their apps. Snap's My AI is an early example, along with a new virtual tutor feature for the online study tool Quizlet and an upcoming Ask Instacart tool in the popular local-shopping app. However, the API won't be limited to brand-specific bots mimicking ChatGPT; it can also power "non-chat" software experiences that could benefit from AI brains. The ChatGPT API is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words). Additionally, it's offering a dedicated-capacity option for deep-pocketed developers who expect to use more tokens than the standard API allows. The new developer options join the consumer-facing ChatGPT Plus, a $20-per-month service launched in February. Meanwhile, OpenAI's Whisper API is a hosted version of the open-source Whisper speech-to-text model it launched in September. "We released a model, but that actually was not enough to cause the whole developer ecosystem to build around it," OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman told TechCrunch on Tuesday. "The Whisper API is the same large model that you can get open source, but we've optimized to the extreme. It's much, much faster and extremely convenient." The transcription API will cost developers $0.006 per minute, enabling "robust" transcription in multiple languages and providing translation to English. Further reading: OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not To Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit (Motherboard)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is changing the terms of its API developer policy, aiming to address developer -- and user -- criticism. From a report: Starting today, OpenAI says that it won't use any data submitted through its API for "service improvements," including AI model training, unless a customer or organization opts in. In addition, the company is implementing a 30-day data retention policy for API users with options for stricter retention "depending on user needs," and simplifying its terms and data ownership to make it clear that users own the input and output of the models. Greg Brockman, the president and chairman of OpenAI, asserts that some of these changes aren't changes necessarily -- it's always been the case that OpenAI API users own input and output data, whether text, images or otherwise. But the emerging legal challenges around generative AI and customer feedback prompted a rewriting of the terms of service, he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happens when a newspaper dies? Apparently, in some cases, its digital ghost lives on in mysterious, unrecognizable forms. From a report: Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper the Southwest Journal shuttered at the end of 2020, but its web domain continues to post fresh content under the auspices of a Delaware "SEO company" whose leader lives in Serbia. Though the site still includes a few legacy Journal articles now under fictitious bylines, all of the most recent posts are more or less junk content evidently designed to manipulate search engines. There's a Feb. 10 article about handling raw chicken. Another article highlights the "10 most popular bitcoin casino games." While there is a recent article on creating "a breathtaking rock garden" written from the perspective of someone purportedly living in the East Harriet neighborhood, the site's content, generally speaking, is no longer in line with the Journal's longstanding coverage of South Minneapolis neighborhoods. The "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the site pointed to an email address connected to an entity known as Shantel LLC. According to its own website, Shantel LLC is an "SEO company" from Delaware, and, as of Feb. 17, its homepage read, "Let's make the internet a great again!" The company said it specializes in "writing services, SEO optimization services, and similar SEO-related services." (Shantel LLC's website was utterly emptied of content around the time this article published, but archived versions of the site include that same company description.) Shantel's apparent CEO and founder is Nebojsa Vujinovic, a businessman living in Belgrade, Serbia, per his LinkedIn profile. When I reached out to Vujinovic via LinkedIn on Feb. 10, he said he had only owned the Journal's domain for a matter of days. He confirmed that he uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human writers to create new content on the sites he owns. As he puts it: "AI + human correction." [...] The Southwest Journal isn't the only site under Vujinovic's ownership. Several other former news sites have begun listing a Shantel LLC email address as a primary contact. That includes the Missoula Independent, which was at one time the largest weekly paper in Montana, according to archived versions of the website. News conglomerate and former owner Lee Enterprises shut down the Independent in 2018. Like the Southwest Journal's website, the Independent's site now includes a few legacy articles on local politics and culture, but all the articles posted after June 2022 have taken a strange turn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is moving to in-house 5G modem chips for its 2024 iPhones, as far as the chief executive of Qualcomm -- which currently produces them for the tech giant -- is aware. From a report: "We're making no plans for 2024, my planning assumption is we're not providing [Apple] a modem in '24, but it's their decision to make," Cristiano Amon told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Apple's most recent iPhone 14 models use Qualcomm modems, but the company has been looking to go solo in the wireless connectivity market for some years. It bought Intel's modem business in 2019 and there had been speculation it would begin using in-house parts this year. In an interview with CNBC's Karen Tso and Arjun Kharpal, Amon said Qualcomm had told investors back in 2021 that it did not expect to provide modems for the iPhone in 2023, but Apple then decided to continue for another year. Amon did not confirm whether Apple would pay Qualcomm QTL licenses if it moves to its own modems, but said royalty was "independent from providing a chip."Read more of this story at Slashdot.