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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Twitter is testing a new feature that would eliminate the constraints of its 280-character tweet limit and allow users to publish long-form tweets. Twitter confirmed the test via a tweet. When this will become available to all Twitter users? It's unclear. Twitter noted: "We're excited for the moment when everyone can use Notes, but for now, our focus is on building it right. A large part of that is engaging with writers and building community." For now, Twitter plans to test it over the next two months with a small group of writers from Canada, Ghana, the UK and the U.S. In Twitter Notes, it looks like you will be able to add: - Formatting: Bold, italic and strikethrough text; insert ordered/unordered lists; add links. - Media: You can add one GIF, one video, or up to four images. - Tweets: You can either embed tweets by pasting URLs or from bookmarked tweets. Notes also has a "Focus mode," that makes the article composer full-screen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eBay made its biggest move yet into the world of digital collectibles with news today of the company acquiring NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. The online auction company is keeping lips sealed on the deal's value but confirmed in the press release that the deal is closed as of June 21st. The Verge reports: "This partnership will help us attract a new wave of NFT creators and collectors," said KnownOrigin co-founder David Moore. KnownOrigin describes itself as "one the world's first, and largest, NFT Marketplaces," and it currently ranks No. 12 on all-time trading volume for Ethereum-backed NFTs at $7.8 million, according to DappRadar. Higher ranked, more popular marketplaces include OpenSea (No. 1) with an all-time trading value at $30.43 billion and Decentraland (No. 8) at $155.66 million. eBay started allowing NFT sales on its site last year. With the KnownOrigin acquisition, eBay has the opportunity to control a proper digital marketplace where NFT transactions can be both monitored and controlled -- not just offered with the fingers-crossed hope the seller transfers an NFT to the buyer's wallet correctly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA announced on Tuesday that it's contracting three suppliers to provide concept designs for nuclear fission energy systems designed for use on the moon. TechCrunch reports: The winning bids for this award came from Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse and IX (a joint venture from Intuitive Machines and X-Energy). Each will be working with a few partners to develop their systems, which will be "initial concepts" only for the purposes of satisfying this particular contract, and each will receive roughly $5 million for their work, expected to take around 12 months. NASA is aptly partnering with the Department of Energy (DOE) on this project, and the specs include a 40-kilowatt power generation capability, capable of generating that for at least a decade. That's about what a full charge on a current entry-level Nissan Leaf contains -- but as a fission generator it would obviously provide that continuously. It may not seem like much, but deployed singularly or in groups to support a lunar base, it could solve a lot of the challenges of the kind of prolonged occupancy of the moon that NASA plans to eventually establish through its Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to our largest natural satellite for ongoing science missions. NASA also notes that the work done for this contract could have other future applications for propulsion systems for long-range spacecraft for deep space explorations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey. Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis. There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favor, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age. Younger generations were far more in favor of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their child's height and eye and hair color. In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is preparing to order Juul Labs Inc to take its e-cigarettes off the market in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters reports: Juul has faced heightened scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers and state attorneys general over the appeal of its nicotine products to teenagers. Under pressure, the company in late 2019 had halted U.S. sales of several flavors. "This clearly comes as a surprise to the market ... we would expect that Juul would appeal the decision, and remain on the market through that process, which would likely take a year or more," Cowen analyst Vivien Azer said. The looming verdict comes nearly two years after Juul had applied for approval to keep selling e-cigarettes in the country. The FDA's review of the applications was based on whether the e-cigarettes are effective in getting smokers to quit and, if so, whether the benefits to smokers outweigh the health damage to new users, including teenagers. [...] The estimated fair value of Altria's investment in Juul was $1.6 billion as of March end, a fraction of the $12.8 billion it paid in 2018, as a crackdown on vaping has upended the once fast-growing industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monica Alleven writes via Fierce Wireless: So much for the "win-win-win" scenario that Dish Network envisioned for the 12 GHz band. Dish and fellow MVDDS licensee RS Access have argued that the 12 GHz band can be used by both satellite players like SpaceX's Starlink and by companies like Dish that want to use it for 5G, all for the public's benefit. SpaceX on Tuesday submitted its own analysis (PDF) of the effect of terrestrial mobile deployment on non-geostationary orbit fixed satellite service (NGSO FSS) downlink operations. The upshot: The SpaceX study shows terrestrial mobile service would cause harmful interference to SpaceX's Starlink terminals in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band more than 77% of the time, resulting in full outages 74% of the time. Although entities like RS Access note that SpaceX has access to plenty of other spectrum to accomplish its broadband mission, SpaceX insists that the 12 GHz band has become one of the most important and intensely used spectrum bands for Americans who depend on satellite services. In fact, SpaceX said it depends on the 12 GHz band for the workhorse frequencies in critical downlink services to serve Americans "in every corner of the nation." [...] SpaceX would like the FCC to drop the 12 GHz proceeding, but Dish and RS Access have been urging the FCC for years to change the rules so that their MVDDS licenses can be used for two-way 5G services. In response to SpaceX's submission, the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition, issued the following statement: "We understand that SpaceX has -- after 18 months and both a robust comment and reply period -- just filed its own in-house technical submission to the 12 GHz proceeding. Our engineers and technical experts are reviewing the filing in depth and remain committed to working in good faith with the FCC and stakeholders to ensure that the American public is able to reap the immense benefits of 5G services in this band."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase shares fell almost 10% on Wednesday after rival crypto exchange Binance.US said it's dropping certain trading fees for customers. CNBC reports: Binance.US, the U.S. affiliate of the largest crypto exchange in the world by trading volume, said it will allow users to make spot bitcoin trades for the U.S. dollar and stablecoins tether, USD Coin and Binance USD without paying spot trading fees. Shares of Coinbase were down 9.7%. Robinhood slipped by less than 1%. In a separate report, Barron's Daren Fonda speculates that a price war could be next. "It's the beginning of the end of Coinbase's high-fee business model," says Mizuho Securities analyst Dan Dolev. "We've said that the fees will eventually go close to zero. And it could be pretty rapid -- it may be months. The market is very competitive and getting tighter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon's Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company's smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech. In the scenario presented at the event, the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story. Prasad notes that, using the new technology, the company is able to accomplish some very impressive audio output, using just one minute of speech. Details are scant, at the moment. There's no timeline or further specifics, but -- at very least -- this is the kind of news that will likely invite all manner of scrutiny over potential applications beyond something as banal or even heartwarming as reading a child The Wizard of Oz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto's structural flaws make it an unsuitable basis for a monetary system, according to the Bank for International settlements (BIS). Instead, monetary systems could be built around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are digital representations of central bank money. CoinDesk reports: The BIS, an association of the world's major central banks, dedicates a 42-page chapter in its "2022 Annual Economic Report" to laying out a blueprint for the future of the global monetary system. In that vision, there is room for only some of crypto's underlying technical features, like programmability and tokenization, not for cryptocurrencies themselves. "Our broad conclusion is captured in the motto, "Anything that crypto can do, CBDCs can do better,'" said Hyun Song Shin, an economic adviser and head of research at the BIS, during a press briefing on Monday. The chapter, which will be published Tuesday ahead of the full report, identifies a number of limitations of crypto, including the lack of a stable nominal anchor. In monetary policy that is a variable -- such as a currency peg -- that can be used to control price levels. Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of assets like sovereign currencies, are the crypto world's search for such an anchor, Shin said. Stablecoins attempt to "piggyback on the stability of real money issued by central banks." Shin said the recent crash of terraUSD, a dollar stablecoin with a market capitalization of $18 billion in early May that rapidly lost its peg, illustrated how stablecoins, despite their name, are unstable and don't make good units of account. Unlike other leading stablecoins, such as USDC and USDT, which are reportedly backed by dollar-denominated reserves, terraUSD is an algorithmic stablecoin backed by another cryptocurrency (in this case LUNA) with an algorithm in place to regulate supply and demand of the stablecoin and maintain its peg. "The second important finding is that crypto and stablecoins fail to achieve the full network effects that we normally expect of money," Shin said. Money, Shin said, is the perfect example of a virtuous circle of greater use and greater acceptance. Crypto's decentralized nature, on the other hand, achieves exactly the opposite, namely fragmentation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mullvad has taken the decision to completely remove the ability to create new subscriptions -- all in the name of storing less data about their users. TechRadar reports: "Subscriptions clearly offer a lot of convenience but as we've seen that convenience comes at a cost and we no longer think this is an acceptable trade-off. We care deeply about usability but when it comes down to it, privacy has to win," wrote the provider in a blog post. This move is a step forward in Mullvad's commitment to its users' privacy. It's actually one of the few services not to ask for any email address or other personal information to create an account. However, when it came to recurring subscription, the provider was forced to retain record of payments in order to provide refunds, charge the user again after their initial period of cover or recover a missing account. Therefore, one-time payments appear to be the only solution. "We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service. Nowhere is the tension between privacy and usability more apparent than in the area of payments." Mullvad's monthly fee has always been the same on every plan - around $5.50. This is very different than almost every other consumer VPN, but there's no need to stress about a price rise. What's more, those who currently have an active Mullvad subscription do not need to worry either. Their account will keep running as usual for at least six months, or until their subscription comes to the end of a term.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Copyright law cannot be used as a shortcut around the First Amendment's strong protections for anonymous internet users, a federal trial court ruled on Tuesday. The decision by a judge in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California confirms that copyright holders issuing subpoenas under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act must still meet the Constitution's test before identifying anonymous speakers. The case is an effort to unmask an anonymous Twitter user (@CallMeMoneyBags) who posted photos and content that implied a private equity billionaire named Brian Sheth was romantically involved with the woman who appeared in the photographs. Bayside Advisory LLC holds the copyright on those images, and used the DMCA to demand that Twitter take down the photos, which it did. Bayside also sent Twitter a DMCA subpoena to identify the user. Twitter refused and asked a federal magistrate judge to quash Bayside's subpoena. The magistrate ruled late last year that Twitter must disclose the identity of the user because the user failed to show up in court to argue that they were engaged in fair use when they tweeted Bayside's photos. When Twitter asked a district court judge to overrule the magistrate's decision, EFF and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed an amicus brief in the case, arguing that the magistrate's ruling sidestepped the First Amendment when it focused solely on whether the user's tweets constituted fair use of the copyrighted works. [...] EFF is pleased with the district court's decision, which ensures that DMCA subpoenas cannot be used as a loophole to the First Amendment's protections. The reality is that copyright law is often misused to silence lawful speech or retaliate against speakers. For example, in 2019 EFF successfully represented an anonymous Reddit user that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society sought to unmask via a DMCA subpoena, claiming that they posted Watchtower's copyrighted material. We are also grateful that Twitter stood up for its user's First Amendment rights in court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cyborg locust brains can help spot the telltale signs of human cancer in the lab, a new study has shown. The team behind the work hopes it could one day lead to an insect-based breath test that could be used in cancer screening, or inspire an artificial version that works in much the same way. From a report: Other animals have been taught to spot signs that humans are sick. For example, dogs can be trained to detect when their owners' blood sugar levels start to drop, or if they develop cancer, tuberculosis, or even covid. In all cases, the animals are thought to be sensing chemicals that people emit through body odor or breath. The mix of chemicals can vary depending on a person's metabolism, which is thought to change when we get sick. But dogs are expensive to train and look after. And making a device that mimics a dog's nose has proved extremely difficult to do, says Debajit Saha, one of the scientists behind the latest work, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. "These changes are almost in parts per trillion," says Saha, a neural engineer at Michigan State University. This makes them hard to pick up even with state-of-the-art technologies, he adds. But animals have evolved to interpret such subtle changes in scents. So he and his colleagues decided to "hijack" an animal brain instead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has levied dozens of cyber espionage campaigns in 42 countries since it invaded Ukraine in February, according to a new Microsoft report. From a report: The report says those efforts have targeted entities across six continents and primarily focused on NATO allies and groups supporting Ukraine. "The Russian invasion relies in part on a cyber strategy that includes at least three distinct and sometimes coordinated efforts -- destructive cyberattacks within Ukraine, network penetration and espionage outside Ukraine and cyber influence operations targeting people around the world," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in the report. The tech giant previously detailed Russian cyber operations against Ukraine itself during the invasion in April. Sixty-three percent of the observed Russian activity in the 42 countries beyond Ukraine targeted NATO members, according to the new report. The United States has been Russia's top target, but the company also noted a large amount of activity in Poland -- which borders Ukraine and has provided significant military and humanitarian assistance to the country -- as well as the Baltic states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave blog: One year ago, we launched Brave Search to give everyone online a real choice over Big Tech: a privacy-protecting, unbiased alternative to Google and Bing, and a truly independent alternative to providers -- such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage -- that rely on Big Tech to run. Today, Brave Search is exiting its beta phase. [...] Brave Search has grown faster than any search provider since Bing. Some numbers: 2.5 billion queries in the past 365 days, a high of 14.1 million queries per day, 5 billion queries annualized (projection based on current monthly totals).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Colombia has elected its first left-wing president, setting the Latin American nation on a path to wind down its fossil fuel production. From a report: Leftist Gustavo Petro was voted in Sunday night alongside Goldman prize-winning environmental campaigner Francia Marquez, the nation's first black and second female vice-president. In his manifesto, Petro committed to "undertake a gradual de-escalation of economic dependence on oil and coal." He committed not to grant any new licenses for hydrocarbon exploration during his four-year mandate and to halt all pilot fracking projects and the development of offshore fossil fuels. "These are not baby steps but huge steps towards the transition and reducing fossil fuels," said Colombian environmentalist Martin Ramirez. If Petro formalises his commitments to phasedown fossil fuel production, Colombia could become the largest fossil fuel producer to do so. At the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow last year, Costa Rica and Denmark launched an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, collectively accounting for 0.2% of global oil production. Colombia produces around 1% of the world's coal, oil and gas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wimbledon is turning to big data to help improve fans' tennis knowledge, after discovering even ticket holders at the Championships were not aware of most of the players in the game. From a report: Crowds at this year's tournament -- expected to return to sold-out levels with easing of coronavirus restrictions -- are to be exposed to more facts and figures organisers hope will help get them "closer to the sport." AI-powered stats will seek to better explain the strengths and weaknesses in players' games but also predict upsets and rising stars, with data built in part from trawling newspaper headlines. Alexandra Willis, the All England Club's director of communications and marketing, said the idea had come about before Covid. "We found that most fans didn't watch tennis the rest of the year," she said. "They also hadn't heard of most of the players [and] this was a specific barrier to engagement." Spectators at Wimbledon fortnight, as well as television viewers and app users, will have access to Win Factor, a tool that will aggregate data from a number of sources to better predict a player's chances of victory in a given match. Fans will be able to input their own match predictions while being encouraged to scour more information on some of the game's lesser-known players.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites -- microbial mats -- thrived. Now a study may have solved the "faint young Sun paradox," showing that saltier oceans could have prevented Earth from freezing over during Archean times, 3bn years ago. From a report: We all know that the composition of the atmosphere (particularly the abundance of greenhouse gases) plays a crucial role in tempering Earth's climate, but what about the composition of the oceans? To answer this question researchers used an ocean-atmosphere general circulation model to investigate the impact of salinity. They show that saltier oceans result in warmer climates, partly because the salt depresses the freezing point of seawater and inhibits sea-ice formation, but mostly because the greater density of salty water alters ocean circulation patterns and aids heat transport to the poles. Under their Archean scenario they show that present-day levels of salinity produce a severely glaciated world with only a narrow strip of open water at the equator. But pushing salinity up to 40% greater than today revealed a warmer Archean world, with average surface temperatures of more than 20C, and ice only appearing seasonally at the poles. Their findings are reported in Geophysical Research Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese President Xi Jinping chaired a meeting Wednesday that approved promoting the "healthy" development of the payment and fintech sectors, a sign that a broad crackdown on tech companies like Ant Group may be easing. From a report: The meeting of the central commission for deepening overall reform also backed enhancing regulation of major payment platforms, state broadcaster China Central Television reported, adding that companies would be encouraged to return to their roots while the authorities will improve regulation. As part of the plans, China would ensure the security of payment and financial infrastructure, and work to prevent and defuse systemic financial risks, CCTV said. The government will also enhance oversight of financial holding companies and financial institutions invested by platform firms, the report said, without adding details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada approved legislation that targets what video- and audio-sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok can broadcast to a Canadian audience, as the country follows in Europe's footsteps in imposing a heftier regulatory burden on the digital sector. From a report: This marks the second attempt in as many years by Canada's Liberal government to compel digital platforms, including streaming companies like Netflix, to prominently feature Canadian artists on their services when users with a Canadian internet-protocol address log in. As contemplated under the new measures, users who search for music, television programming, films or do-it-yourself video shorts would get results incorporating a certain quota of Canadian-made content. YouTube, a unit of Alphabet, TikTok, and the big streaming companies, among them Netflix, as well as legal experts and some Canadian artists, have either opposed Canada's move or warned of unintended consequences -- such as hurting the people the new policy is intended to help. Countries like Canada are increasingly turning to regulatory changes to protect domestic interests in light of the big inroads the world's biggest digital companies have made in transforming how households watch programs, listen to music, conduct day-to-day business and consume news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report finds that blockchain systems might not be working as well as many crypto enthusiasts assume. From a report: The report was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the work was done by the software security research company Trail of Bits. Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido says blockchain -- the public ledgers that keep track of cryptocurrencies, which are replicated on computers around the world -- isn't the egalitarian tech its advocates claim. "It's been taken for granted that the blockchain is immutable and decentralized, because the community says so," says Guido. But in practice, he says, these networks have evolved in ways that concentrate power in the hands of certain people or companies, including the large pools of "miners" whose computers earn virtual currency by maintaining the blockchains. Guido's team calls these potential situations "unintended centralities" -- situations in which someone gains leverage over the decentralized system, creating opportunities for tampering with the record of who owns what. Another example in the report of this kind of concentration is the fact that 60% of Bitcoin traffic is handled by just three internet service providers. "Let's say somebody with great top-down control of the internet in their country starts to interfere with that network," Guido says. By slowing down or stopping legitimate blockchain traffic, an attacker could become the "majority" voice in the consensus of what's written to a blockchain at that moment. "They can rewrite history. They can censor transactions. They can make it so that you can't spend your Bitcoin," says Guido. "It's definitely something people would want to do if they want to 'grief' the network."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey. From a report: Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis. There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favour, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age. Younger generations were far more in favour of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their child's height and eye and hair colour. In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases. Genome editing has been hailed as a potential gamechanger for dealing with a raft of heritable diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy to Tay-Sachs, a rare condition that progressively destroys the nervous system. In principle, the faulty genes that cause the diseases can be rewritten in IVF embryos, allowing those embryos to develop into healthy babies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the decade since larger-than-life character Kim Dotcom founded Mega, the cloud storage service has amassed 250 million registered users and stores a whopping 120 billion files that take up more than 1,000 petabytes of storage. A key selling point that has helped fuel the growth is an extraordinary promise that no top-tier Mega competitors make: Not even Mega can decrypt the data it stores. On the company's homepage, for instance, Mega displays an image that compares its offerings to Dropbox and Google Drive. In addition to noting Mega's lower prices, the comparison emphasizes that Mega offers end-to-end encryption, whereas the other two do not. Over the years, the company has repeatedly reminded the world of this supposed distinction, which is perhaps best summarized in this blog post. In it, the company claims, "As long as you ensure that your password is sufficiently strong and unique, no one will ever be able to access your data on MEGA. Even in the exceptionally improbable event MEGA's entire infrastructure is seized!" (emphasis added). Third-party reviewers have been all too happy to agree and to cite the Mega claim when recommending the service. Research published on Tuesday shows there's no truth to the claim that Mega, or an entity with control over Mega's infrastructure, is unable to access data stored on the service. The authors say that the architecture Mega uses to encrypt files is riddled with fundamental cryptography flaws that make it trivial for anyone with control of the platform to perform a full key recovery attack on users once they have logged in a sufficient number of times. With that, the malicious party can decipher stored files or even upload incriminating or otherwise malicious files to an account; these files look indistinguishable from genuinely uploaded data. After receiving the researchers' report privately in March, Mega on Tuesday began rolling out an update that makes it harder to perform the attacks. But the researchers warn that the patch provides only an "ad hoc" means for thwarting their key-recovery attack and does not fix the key reuse issue, lack of integrity checks, and other systemic problems they identified. With the researchers' precise key-recovery attack no longer possible, the other exploits described in the research are no longer possible, either, but the lack of a comprehensive fix is a source of concern for them. "This means that if the preconditions for the other attacks are fulfilled in some different way, they can still be exploited," the researchers wrote in an email. "Hence we do not endorse this patch, but the system will no longer be vulnerable to the exact chain of attacks that we proposed." Mega has published an advisory here. However, the chairman of the service says that he has no plans to revise promises that the company cannot access customer data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense plans to begin testing of a Medium Robotic Combat Vehicle (M-RCV) next year. New Atlas reports: Developed by the Ministry of Defense's Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D), the Tank and APC Directorate, and Israeli security industries, the robotic tank is based on a new robotic platform type BLR-2 made by Israeli firm BL. It features a 30-mm autonomous turret originally developed by the Tank and APC Directorate for the Eitan armored personnel carrier; the Elbit Iron Fist Active Protection System, which is a smaller, mountable version of the Iron Dome anti-projectile defense system; fire control and mission management systems; a robotic autonomous operations kit; and active and passive sensors for situational awareness. In addition, the robotic vehicle carries a capsuled drone that it can deploy and retrieve for forward reconnaissance missions. It can also carry a variety of heavy loads, as well as an Israeli Aerospace Industries missile launcher and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Spike missiles. According to Elbit, the robot can operate in all weathers in a largely autonomous mode and can integrate with uncrewed battlefield arrays. Field tests in representative scenarios are scheduled to start in 2023. You can view the M-RCV in action here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nasa has begun turning off the spacecraft Voyager's systems, signaling the beginning of the end of the probe's 50-year career. The Independent reports: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- two identical probes -- were launched in 1977 and travelled across interstellar space to the edge of the solar system, giving humanity its closest look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now, however, Nasa must start limiting the Voyagers' processes in order to keep them operating until 2030. "We're at 44 and a half years," says Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Scientific American. "So we've done 10 times the warranty on the darn things." The first Voyager craft has four remaining functioning instruments, while Voyager 2 has five, all of which are powered by converting decaying plutonium into electricity. This battery has had its output decreasing by approximately four watts every year, leading to Nasa making some tough choices about what to disable; in 2019, engineers had to turn off the heater for the cosmic-ray detector, a key piece of equipment for detecting when Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere- the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. The final instruments Nasa will disable are likely to be the magnetometer and the plasma science instrument, which are contained in the body of the spacecraft. These are warmed by the excess heat of the computers, while the others are suspended on a 13 meter fiberglass boom, meaning that they are likely to take the longest to get cold. Both craft remain so far from Earth that it takes a radio signal almost 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and just over 18 for Voyager 2 -- even when traveling at the speed of light.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Aviation Administration says it finally has a plan for the industry to replace or retrofit airplane altimeters that can't filter out transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The altimeter problem has prevented AT&T and Verizon from fully deploying 5G on the C-Band spectrum licenses the wireless carriers purchased for a combined $69 billion. The FAA was urging airlines to retrofit or replace altimeters in recent months and now says it has finalized a plan. An FAA statement on Friday said that "airlines and other operators of aircraft equipped with the affected radio altimeters must install filters or other enhancements as soon as possible." AT&T and Verizon said they will be able to accelerate 5G deployments near airports in the coming months, but the carriers agreed to continue some level of "voluntary mitigations" in the airport areas until July 2023. Altimeters are used by airplanes to measure altitude. The FAA said a new "phased approach requires operators of regional aircraft with radio altimeters most susceptible to interference to retrofit them with radio frequency filters by the end of 2022. This work has already begun and will continue on an expedited basis." Additionally, "filters and replacement units for the mainline commercial fleet should be available on a schedule that would permit the work to be largely completed by July 2023," the FAA said, continuing: "The radio-altimeter manufacturers have worked at an unprecedented pace with Embraer, Boeing, Airbus and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to develop and test filters and installation kits for these aircraft. Customers are receiving the first kits now. In most cases, the kits can be installed in a few hours at airline maintenance facilities. Throughout this process, the FAA will work with both industries to track the pace of the radio altimeter retrofits while also working with the wireless companies to relax mitigations around key airports in carefully considered phases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new breakthrough has allowed physicists to create a beam of atoms that behaves the same way as a laser, and that can theoretically stay on "forever." ScienceAlert reports: At the root of the atom laser is a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. A BEC is created by cooling a cloud of bosons to just a fraction above absolute zero. At such low temperatures, the atoms sink to their lowest possible energy state without stopping completely. When they reach these low energies, the particles' quantum properties can no longer interfere with each other; they move close enough to each other to sort of overlap, resulting in a high-density cloud of atoms that behaves like one 'super atom' or matter wave. However, BECs are something of a paradox. They're very fragile; even light can destroy a BEC. Given that the atoms in a BEC are cooled using optical lasers, this usually means that a BEC's existence is fleeting. Atom lasers that scientists have managed to achieve to date have been of the pulsed, rather than continuous variety; and involve firing off just one pulse before a new BEC needs to be generated. In order to create a continuous BEC, a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands realized something needed to change. "In previous experiments, the gradual cooling of atoms was all done in one place. In our setup, we decided to spread the cooling steps not over time, but in space: we make the atoms move while they progress through consecutive cooling steps," explained physicist Florian Schreck. "In the end, ultracold atoms arrive at the heart of the experiment, where they can be used to form coherent matter waves in a BEC. But while these atoms are being used, new atoms are already on their way to replenish the BEC. In this way, we can keep the process going -- essentially forever." The research has been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Unlike practically every major game console that's come before it, the Steam Deck, from PC gaming giant Valve, doesn't lock users into one ecosystem," writes Fast Company's Jared Newman. "While Valve's own Steam store is the default way to buy and play games, the Steam Deck also lets users install whatever software they want on the device's Linux-based operating system. The experience has been liberating..." From the report: In recent weeks, I've gorged on weird indie creations from itch.io, classic games from GOG.com, and free games from the Epic Games Store. I've used Plexamp to stream my personal music collection in place of in-game soundtracks, and I've used Vivaldi to browse the web in the Steam Deck's desktop mode. You don't have to use your Steam Deck this way, but just being knowing that it's an option makes the device more capable and personal. The tech industry is filled with companies that seem deathly afraid of this model, either because they don't trust their users or don't want to risk weakening their own ecosystems. By taking the opposite approach, Valve is proving that open platforms aren't so catastrophic, and it elevates the Steam Deck from yet another gadget into the most exciting consumer electronics device in years. [...] Valve could have easily used the Steam Deck to lock players into its own ecosystem. It could have opted not to include a desktop mode and withheld instructions on how to lift its read-only restrictions. It could have discouraged users from installing different operating systems and made its recovery tools unavailable to the public. Console makers have long insisted that such restrictions are necessary for the good of their platforms. In 2020, for instance, Microsoft argued that because console makers sell their hardware at or below cost to create a market for their software, they shouldn't have to accommodate third-party app stores or sideloading. Similar arguments have spilled out into the broader mobile app business as well. In response to a lawsuit from Epic Games, Apple has claimed that its investments in the App Store wouldn't be feasible if it couldn't force developers to use its in-app purchase mechanisms. Some defenders of Apple's viewpoint, such as Daring Fireball's John Gruber, have argued that iOS is more like a game console than a PC platform. So, it's all the more remarkable that Valve ignored all this hand-wringing and made the Steam Deck a haven for tinkerers. Instead of trying to shut out competitors, the company is betting that its own store will prevail on quality. If the Steam Deck successful -- as it appears to be so far -- it could upend years of conventional wisdom around walled gardens and become a threat to other consoles in more ways than one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwanese research firm TrendForce said Monday that DRAM pricing for commercial buyers is forecast to drop around three to eight percent across those markets in the third quarter compared to the previous three months. Even prices for DDR5 modules in the PC market could drop as much as five percent from July to September. The Register reports: This could result in DRAM buyers, such as system vendors and distributors, reducing prices for end users if they hope to stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned. We suppose they could try to profit on the decreased memory prices, but with many people tightening their budgets, we hope this won't be the case. The culprit for the DRAM price drop is one that we've been hearing a great deal about in the past few months: weaker demand for consumer electronics, including PCs and smartphones, as a result of high inflation and Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, according to TrendForce. The weaker consumer demand means DRAM inventories are building up at system vendors and distributors, which means they don't need to buy as much in the near future. This, in turn, is why memory prices are dropping, the research firm said. On the PC side, DDR4 memory pricing is expected to drop three to eight percent in the third quarter of 2022 after only seeing a zero to five percent decline in the second quarter. DDR5 pricing, on the other hand, is set to drop by only zero to five percent in Q3 after seeing a three to eight percent plummet in the previous quarter. For certain DRAM products, prices could see a steeper decline of more than eight percent, according to TrendForce, though the firm didn't say which products this would include. TrendForce said PC makers are focused on getting rid of their existing DRAM inventories, and a continuously "sluggish" market means they'll be reticent to buy much more memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Security researchers found that Adobe Acrobat is trying to block security software from having visibility into the PDF files it opens, creating a security risk for the users. Adobe's product is checking if components from 30 security products are loaded into its processes and likely blocks them, essentially denying them from monitoring for malicious activity. [...] In a post on Citrix forums on March 28, a user complaining about Sophos AV errors due to having an Adobe product installed said that the company "suggested to disable DLL-injection for Acrobat and Reader. Replying to BleepingComputer, Adobe confirmed that users have reported experiencing issue due to DLL components from some security products being incompatible with Adobe Acrobat's usage of the CEF library: "We are aware of reports that some DLLs from security tools are incompatible with Adobe Acrobat's usage of CEF, a Chromium based engine with a restricted sandbox design, and may cause stability issues." The company added that it is currently working with these vendors to address the problem and "to ensure proper functionality with Acrobat's CEF sandbox design going forward." Minerva Labs researchers argue that Adobe chose a solution that solves compatibility problems but introduces a real attack risk by preventing security software from protecting the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive -- and doing relatively well for its age. The Register reports: In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at $982 and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review (PDF) for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: "It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye." Arthur was loosely related to Acorn's earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called "technicolor." Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 -- the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for $10,800). RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point. One fork of RISC OS still supports Acorn-era Arm's odd 26-bit mode, meaning that today it mostly runs on the commercial Virtual Acorn emulator. The other branch, designed for the 32-bit mode of more recent Arm chips, is now owned by RISC OS Developments, which made it fully open source back in 2018. Development and maintenance is done by the team at RISC OS Open Ltd -- ROOL for short -- which offers downloads for a variety of current Arm hardware, such as the Titanium desktops. [...] RISC OS Developments are still working on new functionality for the OS. Notably, it recently released a new TCP/IP stack, derived from OpenBSD. Right now, the main benefit is IPv6 support. A feature more significant to most users is still in development: Wi-Fi support. Also still under development, but available to paid backers, is a new RISC OS web browser, Iris. RISC OS does come with a choice of browsers -- NetSurf and Otter -- but the plan is that the new Iris browser will be a native app, with the RISC OS look and feel, but using the WebKit engine for better compatibility with the modern web. The main remaining limitation is SMP. As an OS from the 1980s, long before the 21st-century technology of mainstream multicore processors, RISC OS practically only supports a single CPU core. Various experimental efforts are under way to address this. One has got NetBSD running on another core, and another has the experimental Genode OS running alongside RISC OS. Another effort is working on adding SMP support into the RISC OS kernel itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto lending platform BlockFi announced that it has secured a $250 million revolving credit facility from FTX, BlockFi CEO Zac Prince said in a tweet on Tuesday, and the company subsequently announced in a press release. CoinDesk reports: Prince said the move "bolsters our balance sheet and platform strength." He added that "the proceeds of the credit facility are intended to be contractually subordinate to all client balances across all account types (BIA, BPY & loan collateral) and will be used as needed." This is not the first time FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has stepped in to bail out a major crypto company impacted by the recent market downturn. Last week, crypto broker Voyager Digital (VOYG) secured a revolving line of credit with Bankman-Fried-founded quant trading shop Alameda Research. Though it is now in the position of backstopping a broader market crash, FTX is reportedly one of the firms that liquidated Celsius -- the troubled decentralized crypto lending platform that was forced to halt all user withdraws last week. Celsius, one of BlockFi's competitors, reportedly ran out of funds to repay depositors due to a series of risky decentralized finance bets. In the press release, BlockFi said the credit facility is contingent on the execution of "definitive documents," which the two companies expect to be completed in "the coming days."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Indian Express: The US should do more to attract overseas chipmakers to build plants on its territory as a matter of national security, former Google chief Eric Schmidt wrote in an opinion piece published Monday.Pointing to China's accelerating investment in chip fabrication technology and capacity, Schmidt urged the US to reduce its dependence on Taiwan and South Korea for the most advanced semiconductors powering everything from smartphones to ballistic missiles and build out its own capabilities. Instead, it should be incentivizing national champions Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. to partner with US chip designers and build more on US soil, he said. International relations scholar Graham Allison, who shares the byline on the Wall Street Journal article with Schmidt, previously warned that the US and China could be on a path to war that neither country wants. The two men set out policy recommendations for improving American competitiveness in the chipmaking race so as to avoid a drastic imbalance between the two superpowers. "If Beijing develops durable advantages across the semiconductor supply chain, it would generate breakthroughs in foundational technologies that the U.S. cannot match," they wrote. "The U.S. can't spend its way out of this predicament." In addition to President Joe Biden's proposed $52 billion investment plan -- which is still under consideration by US legislators -- the US should lean into its strengths of research and development, manufacturing less-advanced but more widely used slower chips through the likes of Intel Corp. and GlobalFoundries Inc., and redouble its efforts to bring TSMC and Samsung on shore. Both Asian companies are constructing fabs in the US, but Schmidt and Allison's message is that more needs to be done to ensure long-term US prosperity. "America is on the verge of losing the chip competition," they said, urging that "the U.S. government mobilizes a national effort similar to the one that created the technologies that won World War II."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's chip industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, after US sanctions on local champions from Huawei to Hikvision spurred appetite for home-grown components. From a report: Nineteen of the world's 20 fastest-growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters, on average, hail from the world's No. 2 economy, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compared with just 8 at the same point last year. Those China-based suppliers of design software, processors and gear vital to chipmaking are expanding revenue at several times the likes of global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. or ASML Holding NV. That supercharged growth underscores how tensions between Washington and Beijing are transforming the global $550 billion semiconductor industry -- a sector that plays an outsized role in everything from defense to the advent of future technologies like AI and autonomous cars. In 2020, the US began restricting sales of American technology to companies like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, successfully containing their growth -- but also fueling a boom in Chinese chip-making and supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikimedia Enterprise, a first-of-its-kind commercial product designed for companies that reuse and source Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume, today announced its first customers: multinational technology company Google and nonprofit digital library Internet Archive. Wikimedia blog: Wikimedia Enterprise was recently launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, as an opt-in product. Starting today, it also offers a free trial account to new users who can self sign-up to better assess their needs with the product. As Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects continue to grow, knowledge from Wikimedia sites is increasingly being used to power other websites and products. Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content at scale in ways that best suit their needs: from an educational company looking to integrate a wide variety of verified facts into their online curricula, to an artificial intelligence startup that needs access to a vast set of accurate data in order to train their systems. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects, guaranteed uptime, and other system requirements that extend beyond what is freely available in publicly-available APIs and data dumps. Organizations and companies of any size can access Wikimedia Enterprise offerings with dedicated customer-support and Service Level Agreements, at a variable price based on their volume of use. Interested companies can now sign up on the website for a free trial account which offers 10,000 on-demand requests and unlimited access to a 30-day Snapshot. Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have worked together on a number of projects and initiatives to enhance knowledge distribution to the world. Content from Wikimedia projects helps power some of Google's features, including being one of several data sources that show up in its knowledge panels. Wikimedia Enterprise will help make the content sourcing process more efficient.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unidentified operatives have been using the fitness tracking app Strava to spy on members of the Israeli military, tracking their movements across secret bases around the country and potentially observing them as they travel the world on official business. From a report: By placing fake running "segments" inside military bases, the operation -- the affiliation of which has not been uncovered -- was able to keep tabs on individuals who were exercising on the bases, even those who have applied the strongest possible account privacy settings. In one example seen by the Guardian, a user running on a top-secret base thought to have links to the Israeli nuclear programme could be tracked across other military bases and to a foreign country. The surveillance campaign was discovered by the Israeli open-source intelligence outfit FakeReporter. The group's executive director, Achiya Schatz, said: "We contacted the Israeli security forces as soon as we became aware of this security breach. After receiving approval from the security forces to proceed, FakeReporter contacted Strava, and they formed a senior team to address the issue." Strava's tracking tools are designed to allow anyone to define and compete over "segments," short sections of a run or bike ride that may be regularly raced over, like a long uphill climb on a popular cycling route or a single circuit of a park. Users can define a segment after uploading it from the Strava app, but can also upload GPS recordings from other products or services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The regional powerhouses of Australia's industrial economy could slash their greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% and become centres for multibillion-dollar investments in renewable energy, according to a report backed by some of the country's biggest companies. From a report: Bringing down emissions from producing iron, steel, aluminium, chemicals and liquefied natural gas is seen as one of the most challenging parts of Australia's efforts to reach net zero. But the report from the Australian Industry Energy Transitions Initiative (ETI), a partnership between heavy industry and experts working on decarbonisation, says the transition is possible using a range of known technologies, and would bring a jobs bonanza. By introducing a range of technologies along the supply chain, most of them proven and some already commercially available, the report says greenhouse gas emissions could be cut annually by 69.5m tonnes of CO2-equivalent -- about 14% of Australia's current total emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DocuSign CEO Dan Springer is stepping down, the company announced Tuesday. The decision comes after the e-signature software maker lost more than 60% of its value year to date. From a report: The company didn't provide a reason for his departure but said Springer "has agreed to step aside," effective immediately. Chairman of the Board Maggie Wilderotter will serve as interim CEO as the company begins its search for the next executive. Shares were up about 1% when markets opened. Springer took on the role of chief executive in 2017 and took the company public in 2018. DocuSign was able to capitalize on the Covid-19 pandemic as more consumers shifted to online transactions and deals. But its business has been slowing in recent quarters, especially as it faces tough comparisons to its dramatic growth in 2020 and early 2021. The deteriorating macro environment has also impacted the company. Shares were off 80% from their 52-week high as of Friday's close.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 other companies and organizations have formed a standards group for "metaverse" tech. The Metaverse Standards Forum is supposed to foster open, interoperable standards for augmented and virtual reality, geospatial, and 3D tech. From a report: According to a press release, the Metaverse Standards Forum will focus on "pragmatic, action-based projects" like hackathons and prototyping tools for supporting common standards. It's also interested in developing "consistent terminology" for the space -- where many players can't even agree on what a "metaverse" is. In addition to the companies above, the group's founding members include major pre-metaverse entities like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Unity, in addition to newer ones like Lamina1, a blockchain payments startup co-founded by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google is under investigation by Germany's antitrust watchdog amid concerns over potentially illegal terms for the use of its maps platform. From a report: The Federal Cartel Office said Tuesday it opened a formal probe after initial findings suggest that the US giant is limiting options to use alternative map providers when app developers and other businesses seek to combine their offerings with maps. The regulator is also looking at the terms for Google's Automotive Services, according to the statement. Officials are concerned Google limits the option to embed position data from Google Maps, Street View or the search function on maps of other providers, Andreas Mundt, the agency's president said. "We will check whether Google could extent its predominance in certain map services via this practice," Mundt said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, activists and academics have been raising concerns that facial analysis software that claims to be able to identify a person's age, gender and emotional state can be biased, unreliable or invasive -- and shouldn't be sold. From a report: Acknowledging some of those criticisms, Microsoft said on Tuesday that it planned to remove those features from its artificial intelligence service for detecting, analyzing and recognizing faces. They will stop being available to new users this week, and will be phased out for existing users within the year. The changes are part of a push by Microsoft for tighter controls of its artificial intelligence products. After a two-year review, a team at Microsoft has developed a "Responsible AI Standard," a 27-page document that sets out requirements for A.I. systems to ensure they are not going to have a harmful impact on society. The requirements include ensuring that systems provide "valid solutions for the problems they are designed to solve" and "a similar quality of service for identified demographic groups, including marginalized groups." Before they are released, technologies that would be used to make important decisions about a person's access to employment, education, health care, financial services or a life opportunity are subject to a review by a team led by Natasha Crampton, Microsoft's chief responsible A.I. officer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea said it successfully launched a small but working satellite into orbit using its first homemade rocket on Tuesday, bringing the country closer to its dream of becoming a new player in the space industry and deploying its own spy satellites to better monitor North Korea. From a report: The three-stage Nuri rocket, built by the government's Korea Aerospace Research Institute together with hundreds of local companies, blasted off from the Naro Space Center in Goheung on the southwestern tip of South Korea at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Seventy minutes after the liftoff, South Korea announced that Nuri had succeeded in its mission of thrusting a 357-pound working satellite, as well as a 1.3-ton dummy satellite, into orbit 435 miles above the Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon today announced a new effort in bringing quantum computing to its cloud -- at least in the long term. The company today launched the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, a new research effort that aims to push forward the science and engineering of networking quantum computers together, both for building more powerful, multi-processor networks for computation and for creating secure quantum communication networks. From a report: In recent years, Amazon and its AWS cloud computing unit made a number of major investments in quantum computing. With Amazon Braket, the company offers developers access to quantum computers from the likes of IonQ, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Rigetti and D-Wave, as well as other software tools and simulators. In addition to that, the company is also already running two more research-centric efforts: the AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, California, which focuses on basic science like building better qubits and error correction algorithms, and the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, which puts an emphasis on helping enterprises prepare for the future of quantum computing. Basically, while Braket and the Quantum Solutions Lab focus on near-term practical solutions, the Center for Quantum Computing and now the Center for Quantum Networking focus on long-term research efforts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony might be ready to announce a new lineup of gaming headsets, according to a report from 91Mobiles based on information provided by OnLeaks. From a report: Rather than being specifically PlayStation-branded, like Sony's Pulse headset, the three headsets will apparently be part of a new gaming hardware brand from Sony called "Inzone," which could also include a pair of gaming displays. Leaked images show the three so-called H-series headsets with a similar white color scheme to the existing Pulse headset. The H3 is wired, and has a USB-C port with a physical volume dial. There's a button marked "NC/AMB" shown in renders of the H3, which suggests it might support noise cancellation and have an ambient audio mode to allow players to hear what's going on around them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paige Thompson, a former Amazon employee accused of stealing the personal information of 100 million customers by breaching banking giant CapitalOne in 2019, has been found guilty by a Seattle jury on charges of wire fraud and computer hacking. From a report: Thompson, 36, was accused of using her knowledge as a software engineer working in the retail giant's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, to identify cloud storage servers that were allegedly misconfigured to gain access to the cloud stored data used by CapitalOne. That included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, email addresses and phone numbers, and other sensitive financial information, such as credit scores, limits and balances. Some one million Canadians were also affected by the CapitalOne breach. Thompson also accessed the cloud stored data of more than 30 other companies, according to a superseding indictment filed by the Justice Department almost two years after Thompson was first charged, which reportedly included Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The percentage of U.S. adults saying they use their smartphone "too much" has increased markedly in recent years, rising from 39% when Gallup last asked this in 2015 to 58% today. Gallup News reports: This sentiment was strongly age-contingent in 2015 and remains so now; however, all age groups have become more likely to express this concern. Also, this belief is pervasive not only among 20-somethings; smartphone users aged 30 to 49 (74%) are nearly as likely as those 18 to 29 (81%) to say they are on their phone too much. This contrasts with 47% of those 50 to 64 and 30% of those 65 and older. As in 2015, there is little difference by gender in whether adults think they overuse their smartphone, with 60% of women and 56% of men now saying this. The latest findings are from a self-administered web survey of over 30,000 U.S. adults conducted in January and February of this year, using the probability-based Gallup Panel. Nearly all adults who took the poll, 97%, report they have a smartphone, up from 81% in the 2015 survey. Even as Americans believe they use their smartphone too much, nearly two-thirds think their smartphone has made their life better -- 21% say it has made their life "a lot" better and 44% "a little" better. This has declined slightly from the 72% perceiving a net benefit in 2015. Only 12% say smartphones have made their life worse to any degree, although this is double the rate in 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jupiter's innards are full of the remains of baby planets that the gas giant gobbled up as it expanded to become the behemoth we see today, scientists have found. The findings come from the first clear view of the chemistry beneath the planet's cloudy outer atmosphere. Space.com reports: In the new study, researchers were finally able to peer past Jupiter's obscuring cloud cover using gravitational data collected by NASA's Juno space probe. This data enabled the team to map out the rocky material at the core of the giant planet, which revealed a surprisingly high abundance of heavy elements. The chemical make-up suggests Jupiter devoured baby planets, or planetesimals, to fuel its expansive growth. [...] [T]he researchers built computer models of Jupiter's innards by combining data, which was predominantly collected by Juno, as well as some data from its predecessor Galileo. The probes measured the planet's gravitational field at different points around its orbit. The data showed that rocky material accreted by Jupiter has a high concentration of heavy elements, which form dense solids and, therefore, have a stronger gravitational effect than the gaseous atmosphere. This data enabled the team to map out slight variations in the planet's gravity, which helped them to see where the rocky material is located within the planet. The researcher's models revealed that there is an equivalent of between 11 and 30 Earth masses of heavy elements within Jupiter (3% to 9% of Jupiter's mass), which is much more than expected. The new models point to a planetesimal-gobbling origin for Jupiter because the pebble-accretion theory cannot explain such a high concentration of heavy elements. If Jupiter had initially formed from pebbles, the eventual onset of the gas accretion process, once the planet was large enough, would have immediately ended the rocky accretion stage. This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet. This curtailed rocky accretion phase would likely have given Jupiter a greatly reduced heavy metal abundance, or metallicity, than what the researchers calculated. However, planetesimals could have glommed onto Jupiter's core even after the gas accretion phase had begun; that's because the gravitational pull on the rocks would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas. This simultaneous accretion of rocky material and gas proposed by the planetesimal theory is the only explanation for the high levels of heavy elements within Jupiter, the researchers said. The study also revealed another interesting finding: Jupiter's insides do not mix well into its upper atmosphere, which goes against what scientists had previously expected. The new model of Jupiter's insides shows that the heavy elements the planet has absorbed have remained largely close to its core and the lower atmosphere. Researchers had assumed that convection mixed up Jupiter's atmosphere, so that hotter gas near the planet's core would rise to the outer atmosphere before cooling and falling back down; if this were the case, the heavy elements would be more evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, it is possible that certain regions of Jupiter may have a small convection effect, and more research is needed to determine exactly what is going on inside the gas giant's atmosphere. The researchers' findings could also change the origin stories for other planets in the solar system. The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: More than half of the 24.6 billion stolen credential pairs available for sale on the dark web were exposed in the past year, the Digital Shadows Research Team has found. Data recorded from last year reflected a 64 percent increase over 2020's total (Digital Shadows publishes the data every two years), which is a significant slowdown compared to the two years preceding 2020. Between 2018 and the year the pandemic broke out, the number of credentials for sale shot up by 300 percent, the report said. Of the 24.6 billion credentials for sale, 6.7 billion of the pairs are unique, an increase of 1.7 billion over two years. This represents a 34 percent increase from 2020. With all those credentials available for sale online, account takeover attacks have proliferated as well, the report said. Seventy-five percent of the passwords for sale online were not unique, noted Digital Shadows, which said everyone needs to be wary. Proactive account protection, consistent application of good authentication habits, and awareness of one's organizational digital footprint are necessary to protect against account takeover attacks, the study found. Individuals, the report said, should "use multi-factor authentication, password managers, and complex, unique passwords."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aiming to produce environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic food wrap and containers, a Rutgers scientist has developed a biodegradable, plant-based coating that can be sprayed on foods, guarding against pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms and transportation damage. From a report: Their article, published in the science journal Nature Food, describes the new kind of packaging technology using the polysaccharide/biopolymer-based fibers. Like the webs cast by the Marvel comic book character Spider-Man, the stringy material can be spun from a heating device that resembles a hair dryer and "shrink-wrapped" over foods of various shapes and sizes, such as an avocado or a sirloin steak. The resulting material that encases food products is sturdy enough to protect bruising and contains antimicrobial agents to fight spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms such as E. coli and listeria. The research paper includes a description of the technology called focused rotary jet spinning, a process by which the biopolymer is produced, and quantitative assessments showing the coating extended the shelf life of avocados by 50 percent. The coating can be rinsed off with water and degrades in soil within three days, according to the study. [...] The paper describes how the new fibers encapsulating the food are laced with naturally occurring antimicrobial ingredients -- thyme oil, citric acid and nisin. Researchers in the Demokritou research team can program such smart materials to act as sensors, activating and destroying bacterial strains to ensure food will arrive untainted. This will address growing concern over food-borne illnesses as well as lower the incidence of food spoilage [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The most impactful change to come out of WWDC had nothing to do with APIs, a new framework or any hardware announcement," writes Jordan Morgan via Daring Fireball. "Instead, it was a change I've been clamoring for the last several years -- and it's one that's incredibly indie friendly. As you've no doubt heard by now, I'm of course talking about iCloud enabled apps now allowing app transfers." 9to5Mac explains how it works: According to Apple, you already could transfer an app when you've sold it to another developer or you would want to move it to another App Store Connect account or organization. You can also transfer the ownership of an app to another developer without removing it from the App Store. The company said: "The app retains its reviews and ratings during and after the transfer, and users continue to have access to future updates. Additionally, when an app is transferred, it maintains its Bundle ID -- it's not possible to update the Bundle ID after a build has been uploaded for the app." The news here is that it's easier for developers to transfer the ownership of apps that use iCloud. Apple said that if your app uses any of the following, it will be transferred to the transfer recipient after they accept the app transfer: iCloud to store user data; iCloud containers; and KVS identifiers are associated with the app. The company said: "If multiple apps on your account share a CloudKit container, the transfer of one app will disable the other apps' ability to read or store data using the transferred CloudKit container. Additionally, the transferor will no longer have access to user data for the transferred app via the iCloud dashboard. Any app updates will disable the app's ability to read or store data using the transferred CloudKit container. If your app uses iCloud Key-Value Storage (KVS), the full KVS value will be embedded in any new provisioning profiles you create for the transferred app. Update your entitlements plist with the full KVS value in your provisioning profile." You can learn more about the news via this Apple Developer page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Tencent has officially announced the formation of an "extended reality" unit, "formally placing its bets on the metaverse concept of virtual worlds," reports Reuters. From the report: The unit is tasked with building up the extended reality business for Tencent including both software and hardware, the sources said, adding that it will be led by Tencent Games Global's Chief Technology Officer Li Shen and will be part of the company's Interactive Entertainment business group. Two of the sources said the unit will eventually have over 300 staff, a generous figure given how Tencent has been cost cutting and slowing down hiring. However, they also cautioned that the hiring plans are still fluid, as the company will adjust the unit's headcount based on its performance. The unit was first formed earlier this year but remained shrouded in secrecy, the three sources said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.