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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.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted on Wednesday along party lines to give President Joe Biden the power to ban Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, in the latest setback for the popular video sharing site. From a report: Lawmakers voted 24 to 16 to approve the measure to grant the administration new powers to ban the ByteDance-owned app -- which is used by over 100 million Americans -- as well as other apps considered security risks. Democrats on the committee opposed the bill, which was sponsored by Republican committee chair Michael McCaul. TikTok has come under increasing fire in recent weeks over fears that user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's Chinese suppliers are likely to move capacity out of the country far faster than many observers anticipate to pre-empt fallout from escalating Beijing-Washington tensions, according to one of the US company's most important partners. From a report: AirPods maker GoerTek is one of the many manufacturers exploring locations beyond its native China, which today cranks out the bulk of the world's gadgets from iPhones to PlayStations. It's investing an initial $280 million in a new Vietnam plant while considering an India expansion, Deputy Chairman Kazuyoshi Yoshinaga said in an interview. US tech companies in particular have been pushing hard for manufacturers like GoerTek to explore alternative locations, said the executive, who oversees GoerTek's Vietnamese operations from northern Bac Ninh province. "Starting from last month, so many people from the client side are visiting us almost every day," Yoshinaga said from his offices at GoerTek's sprawling industrial complex north of Hanoi. The topic that dominates discussions: "When can you move out?" The expanding conflict between the US and China, which began with a trade war but has since expanded to encompass sweeping bans on the exchange of chips and capital, is spurring a rethink of the electronics industry's decades-old supply chain. The world's reliance on the Asian nation became starkly clear during the Covid Zero years, when Beijing's restrictions choked off the supply of everything from phones to cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China says a ban on the use of TikTok by official European Union institutions will harm business confidence in Europe. From a report: In the latest salvo in the battle over the Chinese-owned video sharing app, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the EU Council have banned TikTok from being installed on official devices. [...] China has been pushing back, though its ruling Communist Party has long blocked many foreign social media platforms and messaging apps, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram -- and TikTok. A Chinese version of the app, Douyin, is permitted, but its content is not the same as that found on TikTok. "The EU claims to be the most open market in the world, but recently it has been taking restrictive measures and unreasonably suppressing other countries' companies on the grounds of national security," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Wednesday. "This will dampen the international community's confidence in the business environment in the EU. The EU should match its words with deeds, respect the market economy and fair competition, stop overstretching and abusing the concept of national security and provide an open, fair, transparent and non-discriminatory business environment for all companies," Mao said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Revolut's auditor BDO was not able to independently verify three-quarters of the 636 million pounds ($765 million total revenue reported by the fintech firm in its long-delayed 2021 accounts, Revolut's annual report showed. From a report: The 2021 accounts were signed off this week after months of delays, following a revamp of Revolut's internal accounting systems and heavy regulatory scrutiny. But BDO flagged concerns that it could not verify 477 million pounds of revenue, nor vouch for their "completeness or occurrence". The company's "IT systems weren't designed in such a way that would allow for IT or business process controls to be effectively tested throughout the year," BDO added. "Verification procedures are not able to provide sufficient appropriate assurance" over Revolut's main revenue generators which include subscriptions, cards delivery, foreign exchange and wealth, it added. BDO warned that some information may be "materially misstated." Revolut was valued at around $33 billion in its last funding round in 2021, making it then Britain's most valuable start-upRead more of this story at Slashdot.

In the land of patent litigation, all patent trolls want to file in the US Western District of Texas Court. This court is infamous for being sympathetic to patent plaintiffs. That's why patent litigator WSOU Investments, aka Brazos Licensing and Development, went after Dell, EMC, and VMware in this Court. Usually, this would have been the smart move. Not this time. District Judge Alan Albright granted the defendants a directed verdict, and that was the end of the matter. From a report: What happened was this: WSOU, although successful before with their carpet bombing patent lawsuit strategy, failed this time. According to the lead defense counsel and Gibson Dunn partner, Brian A. Rosenthal, "This case got to trial because the plaintiff refused to come to their senses before trial. We obtained a number of serious exclusions of evidence prior to trial, and told them very early on the case had no merit." The judge agreed. That came as a surprise to those of us who watch patent lawsuits, so you don't have to. As Heather Meeker, the well-known open-source and intellectual property (IP) lawyer, said, "This is surprisingly defendant-friendly from Judge Albright, who has received a lot of criticism for making Waco such a patent plaintiff-friendly docket." Until now, WSOU had been very successful. As a Patent Assertion Entity (PAEs), its only goal is to profit by acquiring patents and then suing companies that might be using the patents' intellectual property (IP) assets. It does this by using its portfolio of technology patents to file numerous individual suits involving different patents against companies. WSOU's main tactic, as Unified Patents put it, "forces operating companies to either settle or fight, on average, eight lawsuits at once." Most companies faced with the financial burden of struggling with so many lawsuits settle rather than fight. Not this time. For the first time, companies decided to take the issues to court. In this particular set of cases, WSOU claimed in a June 2020 lawsuit that the defendants had infringed on three cloud infrastructure networking patents, and sought $435 million in damages. Rosenthal argued that the patents in question were old and irrelevant to the defendants' interests. The defense team had informed WSOU in October 2020 that there was no proof of direct infringement, but the plaintiff persisted with the case, leading to exclusions of evidence prior to trial. So it was that on the first day of the trial, two of the patents were tossed out on evidentiary rulings, and the plaintiff rested its case on the third day. The defense then requested a directed verdict, which was granted by Albright, resulting in a win for the defendants. In short, even this patent-friendly court could find no evidence at all for WSOU's assertions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Alex Heath: Meta plans to release its first pair of smart glasses with a display in 2025 alongside a neural interface smartwatch designed to control them, The Verge has learned. Meanwhile, its first pair of full-fledged AR glasses, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted will eventually be as widely used as mobile phones, is planned for 2027. The details were shared with thousands of employees in Meta's Reality Labs division on Tuesday during a roadmap presentation of its AR and VR efforts that was shared with The Verge. Altogether, they show how Meta is planning to keep investing in consumer hardware after a series of setbacks and broader cost cutting across the company. With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don't fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. [...] There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. In 2024, he said that Meta plans to ship a more "accessible" headset codenamed Ventura. "The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market." During Tuesday's roadmap presentation, Alex Himel, the company's vice president for AR, laid out the plan for a bevy of devices through 2027. The first launch will come this fall with the second generation of Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses it released in 2021 with Luxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban. In 2025, Himel said the third generation of the smart glasses will ship with a display that he called a "viewfinder" for viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes, and translating text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a "neural interface" band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow. While Meta halted development of its smartwatch with dual cameras,Himel said that the company is still working on another smartwatch to accompany its 2025 glasses. "We don't want people to have to choose between an input device on their wrist and smartwatch functionality that they've come to love," he said. "So we are building a neural interfaces watch. Number one, this device will do input: input to control your glasses, input to control the functionality on your wrist, and input to control the world around you." The Verge's Alex Heath adds: "Meta's first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world." These glasses will "won't be released to the public until 2027," but an "internal launch" for employees will begin in 2024. As for advertising, Meta is planning to utilize its existing business model for these future devices. "We should be able to run a very good ads business," he said. "I think it's easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent." "If we're hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business," he said. "A business unlike anything we've seen on mobile phones before."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing. TechCrunch reports: We haven't heard much from Bluesky since October 2022, when the team behind the project shared an update on the Bluesky blog, detailing the status of the social protocol that powers its new Twitter-like app, also called Bluesky. AT (originally called ADX, or "Authenticated Transfer Protocol,") is Bluesky's main effort while the Bluesky mobile app serves to showcase the protocol in action. [...] We received an invite to the service and found it to be a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience. Users create a handle which is then represented as @username.bsky.social as well as the display name that appears more prominently in bold text, as on Twitter. As a brand-new app, Bluesky's suggested user list didn't immediately impress with big names of public figures during onboarding. The app itself presents a simplified user interface where you can click a plus button to create a post of 256 characters, which can include photos. Where Twitter asks "What's happening?," Bluesky asks "What's up?" You can search for and follow other individuals, much like on Twitter, then view their updates in a Home timeline. User profiles contain the same sort of features you'd expect: a profile pic, background, bio and metrics, like the number of followers and posts a user has, as well as how many people they're following. Profile feeds are also divided into two sections, like Twitter: posts and posts & replies. Bluesky users can share, mute and block accounts, but advanced tools, like adding them to lists, are not yet available. The discover tab in the bottom center of the app's navigation is useful, offering more "who to follow" suggestions and a running feed of recently posted Bluesky updates. The latter gives you the opportunity to find more people who you might like to follow, based on their posts rather than just a bio. Posts themselves can be replied to, retweeted, liked and, from a three-dot menu, reported, shared via the iOS Share Sheet to other apps, or copied as text. Another tab lets you check on your Notifications, including likes, reposts, follows and replies, also much like Twitter. There are no DMs. You can download the app here, but you're still going to need an invite code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) is now generally available for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers. BleepingComputer reports: The feature was first introduced in Gmail on the web as a beta test in December 2022, after being available in Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Meet, and Google Calendar (in beta) since last year. Once enabled, Gmail CSE ensures that any sensitive data sent as part of the email's body and attachments (including inline images) will be unreadable and encrypted before reaching Google's servers. It's also important to note that the email header (including subject, timestamps, and recipients lists) will not be encrypted. "Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys -- and thus complete control over all access to their data," Googled explained. "Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla has finally started to open some Supercharger stations to non-Tesla electric cars owners in the US and it explained how it works. Electrek reports: As we previously reported, everything is handled through the app. Non-Tesla EV owners simply have to download the Tesla app, create an account, add a credit card for payment, and then they can roll up to some of the select few Supercharger stations now equipped with a Magic Dock -- primarily in New York for now. In the app, electric car owners can see the station and select the stall where they park. After, they simply have to grab the handle where the CCS adapter will come out of the Magic Dock: At the moment, it appears that only half a dozen stations in the state of New York are available to non-Tesla EV owners, but the number is expected to grow rapidly as Tesla deploys the Magic Dock (the integrated CCS adapter to work with non-Tesla EVs) at more stations and builds new ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Erythritol, a zero-calorie sugar substitute used to sweeten low-cal, low-carb and "keto" products, is linked to higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death, according to a new study. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic studied over 4,000 people in the U.S. and Europe and found those with higher blood erythritol levels were at elevated risk of experiencing these major adverse cardiac events. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, also found erythritol made blood platelets easier to form a clot. "Our study shows that when participants consumed an artificially sweetened beverage with an amount of erythritol found in many processed foods, markedly elevated levels in the blood are observed for days -- levels well above those observed to enhance clotting risks," said Dr. Stanley Hazen, senior author of the study and chairman for the department of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences at Cleveland Clinic, in a press release. While the study doesn't definitively show causation, CBS News medical contributor Dr. David Agus says there's "certainly enough data to make you very worried." "Most artificial sweeteners bind to your sweet receptors but aren't absorbed. Erythritol is absorbed and has significant effects, as we see in the study," Agus explains. Sweeteners like erythritol have "rapidly increased in popularity in recent years," Hazen noted, and the researchers say more in-depth study is needed to understand their long-term health effects. "Cardiovascular disease builds over time, and heart disease is the leading cause of death globally. We need to make sure the foods we eat aren't hidden contributors," he said. "In the study, researchers looked at the levels of erythritol in the blood of around 4,000 people from the United States and Europe and found that those with the highest blood concentration of the sugar substitute were more likely to have a stroke or heart attack," adds the New York Times in their reporting. "The participants, who mostly were over the age of 60, either already had or were at high risk for cardiovascular diseases because of conditions like diabetes and hypertension." "The researchers also found that when they fed mice erythritol, that promoted blood clot formation. Erythritol appeared to induce clotting in human blood and plasma as well. Among eight people who consumed erythritol at levels typical in a pint of keto ice cream or a can of an artificially sweetened beverage, the sugar alcohol lingered in their blood for longer than two days." Dr. Hazen said: "Every way we looked at it, it kept showing the same signal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia is releasing new GPU drivers today that will upscale old blurry web videos on RTX 30- and 40-series cards. The Verge reports: RTX Video Super Resolution is a new AI upscaling technology from Nvidia that works inside Chrome or Edge to improve any video in a browser by sharpening the edges of objects and reducing video artifacts. Nvidia will support videos between 360p and 1440p up to 144Hz in frame rate and upscale all the way up to 4K resolution. This impressive 4K upscaling has previously only been available on Nvidia's Shield TV, but recent advances to the Chromium engine have allowed Nvidia to bring this to its latest RTX 30- and 40-series cards. As this works on any web video, you could use it to upscale content from Twitch or even streaming apps like Netflix where you typically have to pay extra for 4K streams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dish Network, one of the largest television providers in the United States, confirmed on Tuesday that a previously disclosed "network outage" was the result of a cybersecurity breach that affected the company's internal communications systems and customer-facing support sites. CNBC reports: "Certain data was extracted," the company said in a statement Tuesday. The acknowledgment is an evolution from last week's earnings call, where it was described as an "internal outage." Dish Networks' website was down for multiple days beginning last week, but the company has now disclosed that "internal communications [and] customer call centers" remain affected by the breach. Dish said it had retained outside experts to assist in evaluating the problem. The intrusion took place on the morning of Feb. 23, the same day the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings. "This morning, we experienced an internal outage that's continuing to affect our internal servers and IT telephony," Dish CEO W. Erik Carlson said at that time. "We're analyzing the root causes and any consequences of the outage, while we work to restore the affected systems as quickly as possible." According to Bleeping Computer, the Black Basta ransomware gang is behind the attack, first breaching Boost Mobile and then the Dish corporate network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes quotes a report from Ars Technica: Did you ever see that movie The Ring? People who watched a cursed, creepy video would all mysteriously die in seven days. Somehow Google seems to have re-created the tech version of that, where the creepy video is this clip of the 1979 movie Alien, and the thing that dies after watching it is a Google Pixel phone. As noted by the user 'OGPixel5" on the Google Pixel subreddit, watching this specific clip on a Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 will cause the phone to instantly reboot. Something about the clip is disagreeable to the phone, and it hard-crashes before it can even load a frame. Some users in the thread say cell service wouldn't work after the reboot, requiring another reboot to get it back up and running. The leading theory floating around is that something about the format of the video (it's 4K HDR) is causing the phone to crash. It wouldn't be the first time something like this happened to an Android phone. In 2020, there was a cursed wallpaper that would crash a phone when set as the background due to a color space bug. The affected phones all use Google's Exynos-derived Tensor SoC, so don't expect non-Google phones to be affected by this. Samsung Exynos phones would be the next most-likely candidates, but we haven't seen any reports of that. According to CNET, the issue has been addressed and a full fix will be deployed in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting today, Google is rolling out fall detection to all Pixel Watches. The Verge reports: Google's version of fall detection is similar to those you'll find on other smartwatches, like the Apple Watch and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and 5 lineups. It uses the device's motion sensors and machine learning to figure out when someone's taken a tumble and might need some help. The feature will purportedly kick in about 30 seconds after it detects a hard fall. At that point, the watch will vibrate, sound an alarm, and flash a notification asking if the Pixel Watch owner needs help. If users don't respond after a minute, the watch will automatically call emergency services and share their location. According to Google, the Pixel Watch ought to be able to differentiate between a hard fall, stumble, or physical activity that may mimic falling -- like the dreaded burpee. Whether that claim holds water is another matter that we'll have to test for ourselves. [...] The feature is opt in, so you'll have to turn it on manually if it's something you want. Google says Pixel Watch owners may see a promotional card pop up in the Updates page within the Watch Companion app. If you don't see it there, you can also check directly from the wrist in the Personal Safety app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After widely rolling out an Energy Saver mode, Google has made four optimizations to Chrome for Mac that allows the browser to match the battery life you get when using Safari. 9to5Google reports: Google conducted testing on a MacBook Pro (13", M2, 2022 with 8 GB RAM running macOS Ventura 13.2.1) with Chrome 110.0.5481.100 in February of 2023. It showed that you can "browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours." For comparison, Apple touts up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing, and up to 20 hours Apple TV app movie playback. Meanwhile, Google uses this open-source benchmarking suite to run tests, and says that users will also "see performance gains on older models." Four changes from waking the CPU less often to tuning memory compression are specifically credited: - Eliminating unnecessary redraws: "We navigated on real-world sites with a bot and identified Document Object Model (DOM) change patterns that don't affect pixels on the screen. We modified Chrome to detect those early and bypass the unnecessary style, layout, paint, raster and gpu steps. We implemented similar optimizations for changes to the Chrome UI."- Fine tuning iframes: "...we fine-tuned the garbage collection and memory compression heuristics for recently created iframes. This results in less energy consumed to reduce short-term memory usage (without impact on long-term memory usage)."- Tweaking timers: "...Javascript timers still drive a large proportion of a Web page's power consumption. As a result, we tweaked the way they fire in Chrome to let the CPU wake up less often. Similarly, we identified opportunities to cancel internal timers when they're no longer needed, reducing the number of times that the CPU is woken up."- Streamlining data structures: "We identified data structures in which there were frequent accesses with the same key and optimized their access pattern."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTX ex-engineering head Nishad Singh pleaded guilty to criminal charges in New York on Tuesday, becoming the latest member of Sam Bankman-Fried's former leadership team to agree to a deal. CNBC reports: The six charges against Singh include conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. FTX spiraled into bankruptcy in November after the crypto exchange, founded by Bankman-Fried, couldn't meet customers' withdrawal demands. "Today's guilty plea underscores once again that the crimes at FTX were vast in scope and consequence," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "They rocked our financial markets with a multibillion dollar fraud. And they corrupted our politics with tens of millions of dollars in illegal straw campaign contributions. These crimes demand swift and certain justice and that is exactly what we are seeking in the Southern District of New York." The Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission both filed related civil complaints against Singh on Tuesday. The SEC said in a release that Singh is cooperating with the agency's ongoing investigation, and he has separately agreed to settle with the CFTC. Two of the criminal charges against Singh are related to wire fraud and another is conspiracy to commit commodities fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user's text messages and phone calls to another device. The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at "SIM-swapping," which involves temporarily seizing control over a target's mobile phone number. Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone's phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target's entire digital life in short order -- including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number. All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities. Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief "Tmobile up!" or "Tmo up!" message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber. The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target's phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number. Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various "Tmo up!" posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022. But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year's timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days -- often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days. In a written statement to KrebsOnSecurity, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry. "And we are constantly working to fight against it," the statement reads. "We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) issued a DMCA notice to a GitHub repo that contained a playlist that let viewers watch Pluto TVs streams on their own apps, such as VLC, MPV, and Tvheadend. From a report: The move was first noticed by TorrentFreak, and GitHub has complied and removed the repo, which ultimately does nothing. If you still have a tiny text file, you can still do exactly what the MPA tried to stop. Pluto TV, for those who do not watch it, is a service owned by Paramount that allows users to legally stream movies and TV shows free of charge on many devices. They have a mobile app, apps for Xbox and PlayStation, smart TVs, and dongles. Users do not even need to sign up to use it. In turn, Pluto's business model is predicated on serving ads and tracking user behavior. It's part of a newer breed of streaming product called free ad-supported television, or FAST. The GitHub repo in question contained M3U playlists to watch Pluto TV's content via an app like VLC. The repo basically took links that were already available and gathered them in one place. It should be noted that M3U files aren't torrent files; it's just a simple playlist file that can direct to local files and web sources.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is today unrecognizable, with multi-billion-dollar deals and corporate partnerships. From a report: OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization by Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, among other tech leaders. In its founding statement, the company declared its commitment to research "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." The blog stated that "since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact," and that all researchers would be encouraged to share "papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world." Now, eight years later, we are faced with a company that is neither transparent nor driven by positive human impact, but instead, as many critics including co-founder Musk have argued, is powered by speed and profit. And this company is unleashing technology that, while flawed, is still poised to increase some elements of workplace automation at the expense of human employees. Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers. When OpenAI first began, it was envisioned as doing basic AI research in an open way, with undetermined ends. Co-founder Greg Bockman told The New Yorker, "Our goal right now...is to do the best thing there is to do. It's a little vague." This resulted in a shift in direction in 2018 when the company looked to capital resources for some direction. "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission," the company wrote in an updated charter in 2018. By March 2019, OpenAI shed its non-profit status and set up a "capped profit" sector, in which the company could now receive investments and would provide investors with profit capped at 100 times their investment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wikimedia Foundation was fined 2 million roubles ($27,000) by a Russian court on Tuesday after the authorities accused it of failing to delete "misinformation" about the Russian military from Wikipedia, the courts service said. From a report: Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Russia introduced sweeping new laws restricting what people can report about the conflict, fining or blocking websites that spread information at odds with the Kremlin's official narrative. Wikimedia, which owns Wikipedia, was already fined last year after it failed to delete two articles related to the war, including one on "evaluations of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine." The latest fine was imposed after the authorities accused Wikipedia of "spreading misinformation" in articles about Russian military units, Wikimedia Russia said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel on Tuesday released a software platform for developers to build quantum algorithms that can eventually run on a quantum computer that the chip giant is trying to build. From a report: The platform, called Intel Quantum SDK, would for now allow those algorithms to run on a simulated quantum computing system, said Anne Matsuura, Intel Labs' head of quantum applications and architecture. Matsuura said developers can use the long-established programming language C++ to build quantum algorithms, making it more accessible for people without quantum computing expertise. "The Intel Quantum SDK helps programmers get ready for future large-scale commercial quantum computers," Matsuura said in a statement. "It will also advance the industry by creating a community of developers that will accelerate the development of applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada has announced it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app. From a report: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it might be a first step to further action or that it might be it. "I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices," Trudeau said. "I'm always a fan of giving Canadians the information for them to make the right decisions for them," he added. The European Union's executive branch said last week it has temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure. The EU's action follows similar moves in the U.S., where more than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok from official government devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More countries shut down the internet in 2022 than ever before, according to a new report by digital rights researchers, as the threat of "digital authoritarianism" races up the agenda of many governments worldwide. From a report: Authorities in 35 countries instituted internet shutdowns at least 187 times, according to the New York-based digital rights watchdog Access Now. Nearly half of these shutdowns occurred in India, and if that nation is excluded, 2022 saw the most number of shutdowns globally since the group began monitoring disruptions in 2016. Access Now relied on technical assessments as well as news articles and personal accounts to compile its report, which spans complete blackouts, suspensions of specific phone networks or social media apps, and the slowing down of internet speeds. Triggers for shutdowns have included large protests, conflict situations, elections and even examinations. Whatever the situation, they make it substantially more difficult for people to communicate and receive or send news, and they incur significant economic costs, which prompted the United Nations last year to call for governments to avoid using such a blunt tactic. "This can be a big warning sign of how the human rights situation is deteriorating, and shutdowns are often associated with increased levels of insecurity and other restrictions," said Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman at the U.N. Human Rights Office in Geneva. India is the most prolific at suspending the internet, topping Access Now's list for the fifth year in a row.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A sheriff's office in Illinois said it was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen's Car-Net service refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired. From a report: "While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen." Volkswagen Car-Net lets owners track and control their vehicles remotely. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article, "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. payment giants Visa and Mastercard are slamming the brakes on plans to forge new partnerships with crypto firms after a string of high-profile collapses shook faith in the industry, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Both Visa and Mastercard have decided to push back the launch of certain products and services related to crypto until market conditions and the regulatory environment improve, said the people, who asked not to be named as talks were confidential.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is releasing an update to Windows 11 today that adds the company's new AI-powered Bing search to the taskbar. From a report: The new Windows 11 update will offer quick access to the new Bing chat feature alongside a bunch of new features. Windows 11 is also getting improvements to widgets, a better touch mode, a screen recording feature, tabs inside Notepad, and more. The new Bing integration is a surprise addition that Microsoft hasn't been testing with its Windows Insiders. A new Bing icon will appear within the search box in the taskbar, with Microsoft highlighting the new chat answers experience in the search flyout. While chat answers won't be available directly within the search flyout, Windows 11 users will be able to quickly start a Bing chat in Edge from here -- providing they have access to the Bing preview. Microsoft is also opening up a preview of its Phone Link app for iOS, meaning iPhone users can link their devices to Windows. This will include access to send and receive messages (yes, even iMessage), calls, and notifications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists propose to develop a biological computer powered by millions of human brain cells that they say could outperform silicon-based machines while consuming far less energy. From a report: The international team, led by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, published in the journal Frontiers in Science on Tuesday a detailed road map to what they call "organoid intelligence." The hardware will include arrays of brain organoids -- tiny three-dimensional neural structures grown from human stem cells -- connected to sensors and output devices and trained by machine learning, big data and other techniques. The aim is to develop an ultra-efficient system that can solve problems beyond the reach of conventional digital computers, while aiding development in neuroscience and other areas of medical research. The project's ambition mirrors work on the more advanced quantum computing but raises ethical questions around the "consciousness" of brain organoid assemblies. "I expect an intelligent dynamic system based on synthetic biology, but not constrained by the many functions the brain has to serve in an organism," said Professor Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins, who has gathered a community of 40 scientists to develop the technology. They have signed a "Baltimore declaration" calling for more research "to explore the potential of organoid cell cultures to advance our understanding of the brain and unleash new forms of biocomputing while recognising and addressing the associated ethical implications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is considering revoking export licenses issued to U.S. suppliers for sales to Chinese telecom company Huawei, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, part of a broader tightening of technology trade over national security concerns. From a report: The administration previously indicated that it was considering not granting any new export licenses to companies such as Qualcomm and Intel, which provide chips needed for smartphones and other devices. The action would cover products that use advanced 5G technology as well as older 4G products. The new action would take that a step further by revoking existing licenses. It comes amid heightened U.S.-China tensions triggered by a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversing the U.S. and intelligence suggesting Beijing is considering provision of lethal aid to Russia for its Ukraine war. "The policy that had allowed exports to Huawei, notwithstanding the entity listing, is being wound down," said a former senior security official familiar with the administration's policy deliberations. "The White House is now telling Commerce, 'Cut off the 4G sales, the time has come to do more pain to Huawei, to try to finish their demise,'" the former official said. Huawei was placed on the Commerce Department's so-called entity list in 2019 by the office that oversees export controls, the Bureau of Industry and Security. The BIS cited potential national-security threats when it issued the punitive listing, which requires exporters to secure special licenses approving the sale of U.S. technology to the firm. U.S. officials say they are concerned China's government could use Huawei's telecommunications tech for spying.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week in Barcelona, OnePlus showcased a concept smartphone with liquid cooling technology, dubbed "Active CryoFlux." While the headset may never see the light of day, at least in its current form, it serves to show how serious OnePlus hopes to get about mobile gaming. From a report: A 0.2 square centimeter piezoelectric ceramic micropump moves the coolant up and down a pipeline near the rear of the device and around the massive camera array. The rear of the device is covered in a transparent material, showcasing the process as a kind of light show. It's a cool effect, and one that invariably shares comparisons to Phone (1), released by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei's Nothing last year. "A lot of young people like playing games," said OnePlus President and COO Kinder Liu. "Gaming plays an important role in their digital life, and in the future, we will continuously improve their gaming experience. Currently, we definitely engage with our users about gaming development. We are talking about how to improve the gaming experience, and in the future, we believe we will have more time to talk to them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is now force-installing the Microsoft Defender for Individuals application when installing or updating the Microsoft 365 apps. BleepingComputer reports: It was first unveiled for Windows 11 Insiders in March 2022 and has been available for customers with Personal or Family subscriptions since June 2022. However, starting earlier this month, it will also be automatically installed when first running the Microsoft 365 installer or after the next update, as spotted by WindowsLatest. "Starting in late February of 2023, the Microsoft Defender app will be included in the Microsoft 365 installer," the company says in a support document updated last week. "That means that when you install the Microsoft 365 apps on your Windows device, the Microsoft Defender app will automatically be installed for you along with the other apps. If you have an active Microsoft 365 subscription and have already installed the Microsoft 365 apps, then the Microsoft Defender app will be automatically installed for you with the next update."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Starlink speeds slowing due to a growing capacity crunch, SpaceX said a launch happening as soon as today will deploy the first "V2 Mini" satellites that provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions. Starlink's second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn't quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket. "The V2 Minis are smaller than the V2 satellites (hence the name) but don't let the name fool you," SpaceX said in a statement provided to Ars yesterday. "The V2 Minis include more advanced phased array antennas and the use of E-band for backhaul, which will enable Starlink to provide ~4x more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations." SpaceX didn't specify the amount of data that each V2 Mini satellite can provide, but its first-generation satellites were designed for an aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps per satellite. The Federal Communications Commission recently gave SpaceX approval to launch 7,500 of the 30,000 planned second-generation satellites. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch tentatively scheduled for today would put 21 V2 Minis into orbit. The larger V2 satellites that can't launch until Starship is ready will be able to send signals directly to cell phones, a capability that'll be used by SpaceX and T-Mobile in a partnership announced in August 2022. "Each Starlink V2 Mini satellite weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) at launch, nearly three times heavier than the older Starlink satellites," notes Spaceflight Now. "They are also bigger in size, with a spacecraft body more than 13 feet (4.1 meters) wide, filling more of the Falcon 9 rocket's payload fairing during launch." UPDATE: SpaceX successfully launched the first batch of "V2 Mini" Starlink satellites. "A Falcon 9 rocket hauled the 21 Starlink satellites into a 230-mile-high (370-kilometer) orbit after lifting off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:13:50 p.m. EST (2313:50 GMT) Monday," reports Spaceflight Now. "SpaceX delayed the launch from earlier Monday afternoon to wait for radiation levels to abate following a solar storm that sparked dramatic auroral displays visible across Northern Europe and Canada." You can watch the launch here. Elon Musk also shared video of the first V2 satellites to reach orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a spokesperson for the United States Marshals Service (USMS), the agency was hit with a ransomware attack last week that compromises sensitive information. NBC News reports: In a statement Monday, U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson Drew Wade acknowledged the breach, telling NBC News: "The affected system contains law enforcement sensitive information, including returns from legal process, administrative information, and personally identifiable information pertaining to subjects of USMS investigations, third parties, and certain USMS employees." Wade said the incident occurred Feb. 17, when the Marshals Service "discovered a ransomware and data exfiltration event affecting a stand-alone USMS system." The system was disconnected from the network, and the Justice Department began a forensic investigation, Wade said. He added that on Wednesday, after the agency briefed senior department officials, "those officials determined that it constitutes a major incident." The investigation is ongoing, Wade said. A senior law enforcement official familiar with the incident said the breach did not involve the database involving the Witness Security Program, commonly known as the witness protection program. The official said no one in the witness protection program is in danger because of the breach. Nevertheless, the official said, the incident is significant, affecting law enforcement sensitive information pertaining to the subjects of Marshals Service investigations. The official said the agency has been able to develop a workaround so it is able to continue operations and efforts to track down fugitives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Password management software firm LastPass says one of its DevOps engineers had a personal home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud storage resources. LastPass on Monday fessed up a "second attack" where an unnamed threat actor combined data stolen from an August breach with information available from a third-party data breach, and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated attack. [...] LastPass worked with incident response experts at Mandiant to perform forensics and found that a DevOps engineer's home computer was targeted to get around security mitigations. The attackers exploited a remote code execution vulnerability in a third-party media software package and planted keylogger malware on the employee's personal computer. "The threat actor was able to capture the employee's master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer's LastPass corporate vault," the company said. "The threat actor then exported the native corporate vault entries and content of shared folders, which contained encrypted secure notes with access and decryption keys needed to access the AWS S3 LastPass production backups, other cloud-based storage resources, and some related critical database backups," LastPass confirmed. LastPass originally disclosed the breach in August 2022 and warned that "some source code and technical information were stolen." SecurityWeek adds: "In January 2023, the company said the breach was far worse than originally reported and included the theft of account usernames, salted and hashed passwords, a portion of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) settings, as well as some product settings and licensing information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Lenovo demoed a laptop and smartphone with rollable screens that "can gradually expand to offer more screen real-estate, rather than needing to be completely unfolded like books," writes Jon Porter from The Verge. These are early proof of concept devices that don't have any public release dates as of yet. From the report: Before we get into the concept laptop's signature feature, it's worth pointing out just how unassuming the device looks before its screen unrolls. Lenovo had the device sitting alongside its other laptops in a conference suite, and not a single one of the dozen-or-so journalists in attendance clocked that it was anything other than a standard ThinkPad. In its unextended form, it's got a regular looking 12.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis, at which point you can hear some motors whirring and the screen extends upwards. That switch causes a couple of motors in the laptop to spring into action, pulling the screen out from underneath the laptop's keyboard to hoist it up more or less vertically in front of you. It's an admittedly slow process on this concept device (from our footage it seems to take a little over ten seconds to fully extend) but eventually you're left with an almost square 15.3-inch display with an 8:9 aspect ratio. The device brings to mind LG's fancy (and eye-wateringly expensive) rollable TV that's designed to roll away when you're not using it. Only in Lenovo's case the screen is rolling down into the laptop's keyboard rather than a small box, and it also can't roll away entirely. Once fully extended, Lenovo's laptop screen has a small crease where its screen originally bent underneath the keyboard. But again -- it's a prototype. Lenovo's other rollable device it's demoing at MWC is a Motorola smartphone. We've seen numerous companies including Samsung Display, Oppo, TCL, and even LG (RIP) show off rollable concept devices in various stages of development over the years, but we're yet to see the technology break through in a consumer device. Like a foldable, the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable, and big when you need more screen to get the job at hand done. Lenovo's phone -- which it's calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept -- is all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer. It's almost like a foldable flip phone, but without a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time. When all neatly rolled up, Lenovo's Motorola rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15:9 aspect ratio. Then, with a small double tap of a side button, the screen unfurls to give you a remarkably tall 6.5-inch display with a 22:9 aspect ratio. [...] "In 2019, it seemed like foldable phones were about to become the next big thing in the world of smartphones," writes Porter, in closing. "But four years later, it feels like we're still waiting for this future to become a mainstream reality. Lenovo would be the first to admit that its rollable concept devices are far from ready for prime time, but they offer a compelling argument for an alternative, rollable future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a Facebook post today, Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to develop "AI personas" for Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. He also announced that the company is "creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI." Engadget reports: It's currently investigating helpers for multiple media formats. You could see advanced chat features in Messenger and WhatsApp, or unique Instagram filters and ads. Video and "multi-modal" content could also benefit, Zuckerberg says. In the near future, you'll see an emphasis on tools for creation and expression. The social media giant is also pooling its generative AI teams into a single group to help "turbocharge" efforts in the emerging field, the executive adds. He doesn't provide more details, and cautions that there's a "lot of foundational work to do" before the most advanced projects come to fruition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Ford applied for a patent to make the repossession process go smoother. For the bank, that is. The patent document was submitted to the United States Patent Office in August 2021 but it was formally published Feb. 23. It's titled "Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle." It describes several ways to make the life of somebody who has missed several car payments harder. It explicitly says the system, which could be installed on any future vehicle in the automaker's lineup with a data connection would be capable of "[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle." Everything from the engine to the air conditioning. For vehicles with autonomous or semi-autonomous driving capability, the system could "move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle... move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency," or, if the lending institution considers the "financial viability of executing a repossession procedure" to be unjustifiable, the vehicle could drive itself to the junkyard. No other automakers have recently attempted to patent a similar system, and indeed the Ford patent doesn't reference any other legal document for the sake of clarifying its idea. All of this being said, patent documents, especially applications like this one, do not necessarily represent an automaker's intent to introduce the described feature, process, or technology to its vehicles. Ford might just be attempting to protect this idea for the sake of doing so. The document does go into a lot of detail as to how such a system might work, though.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: At CES 2023, AMD unveiled an array of Ryzen 7000 series Zen 4 processors, including new gaming-targeted X3D models that featured integrated 3D V-Cache, similar to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The processors go on sale tomorrow, but review embargos for AMD's latest socket AM5 flagship, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, lifted today. As its name implies, the new Ryzen 9 7950X3D has a similar core configuration to the existing Ryzen 9 7950X (16-cores/32-threads), but this specialized CPU also packs an additional 64MB of 3D V-Cache, fused to one of its 8-core compute core dies (CCD). The CCD without 3D V-Cache operates like a standard AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, while the 3D V-Cache enabled CCD will have a more conservative voltage and frequency curve. Gaming performance received a massive boost with this new CPU, while multi-threaded content creation tests are roughly in-line with the standard 7950X. Power efficiency also shows a large, measurable improvement due to the chip relying less often on system memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.