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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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security: Check out this handmade sign posted to the front door of a shuttered Jimmy John's sandwich chain shop in Missouri last week. See if you can tell from the store owner's message what happened. If you guessed that someone in the Jimmy John's store might have fallen victim to a Business Email Compromise (BEC) or "CEO fraud" scheme -- wherein the scammers impersonate company executives to steal money -- you'd be in good company. In fact, that was my initial assumption when a reader in Missouri shared this photo after being turned away from his favorite local sub shop. But a conversation with the store's owner Steve Saladin brought home the truth that some of the best solutions to fighting fraud are even more low-tech than BEC scams. Visit any random fast-casual dining establishment and there's a good chance you'll see a sign somewhere from the management telling customers their next meal is free if they don't receive a receipt with their food. While it may not be obvious, such policies are meant to deter employee theft. You can probably guess by now that this particular Jimmy John's franchise -- in Sunset Hills, Mo. -- was among those that chose not to incentivize its customers to insist upon receiving receipts. Thanks to that oversight, Saladin was forced to close the store last week and fire the husband-and-wife managers for allegedly embezzling nearly $100,000 in cash payments from customers. Saladin said he began to suspect something was amiss after he agreed to take over the Monday and Tuesday shifts for the couple so they could have two consecutive days off together. He said he noticed that cash receipts at the end of the nights on Mondays and Tuesdays were "substantially larger" than when he wasn't manning the till, and that this was consistent over several weeks. Then he had friends proceed through his restaurant's drive-thru, to see if they received receipts for cash payments. "One of [the managers] would take an order at the drive-thru, and when they determined the customer was going to pay with cash the other would make the customer's change for it, but then delete the order before the system could complete it and print a receipt," Saladin said. Saladin said his attorneys and local law enforcement are now involved, and he estimates the former employees stole close to $100,000 in cash receipts. That was on top of the $115,000 in salaries he paid in total each year to both employees. Saladin also has to figure out a way to pay his franchisor a fee for each of the stolen transactions. Now Saladin sees the wisdom of adding the receipt sign, and says all of his stores will soon carry a sign offering $10 in cash to any customers who report not receiving a receipt with their food.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Volvo Trucks said Monday that it had begun to test vehicles that use "fuel cells powered by hydrogen," with the Swedish firm claiming their range could extend to as much as 1,000 kilometers, or a little over 621 miles. CNBC reports: In a statement, Gothenburg-headquartered Volvo Trucks said refueling of the vehicles would take under 15 minutes. Customer pilots are set to begin in the next few years, with commercialization "planned for the latter part of this decade." Fuel cells for the vehicles will be provided by cellcentric, a joint venture with Daimler Truck that was established in March 2021. Alongside hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Volvo Trucks -- which is part of the Volvo Group -- has also developed battery-electric trucks. [...] While there is excitement in some quarters about the potential of hydrogen-powered vehicles, there are hurdles when it comes to expanding the sector, a point acknowledged by Volvo Trucks on Monday. It pointed to challenges including the "large-scale supply of green hydrogen" as well as "the fact that refueling infrastructure for heavy vehicles is yet to be developed." Described by the IEA as a "versatile energy carrier," hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries. It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it "green" or "renewable" hydrogen. Today, the vast majority of hydrogen generation is based on fossil fuels. Last week, Volvo Construction Equipment, which is also part of the Volvo Group, said it had commenced testing of a "fuel cell articulated hauler prototype."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pioneering electronic artist Four Tet has reached a settlement in the legal battle against his former record label. The result could set a legal precedent for contract disputes in the music business; where royalty rates have been subject to heavy scrutiny since last year's inquiry into the streaming market by MPs on the Culture Select Committee. The BBC reports: The musician, whose real name is Kieran Hebden, sued Domino Records last year over the royalties he gets paid when his music is downloaded or streamed. He argued that the 13.5% royalty rate he was being offered was unfair, and demanded a 50% split with the label. In a settlement, Domino agreed to the honor the 50% rate and reimbursed the musician for historic underpayments. It was quite a reversal for the indie label, which originally responded to the case by removing several Four Tet albums from streaming services (they were later reinstated). "It has been a difficult and stressful experience to work my way through this court case and I'm so glad we got this positive result," wrote Hebden in a statement announcing the settlement. "Hopefully I've opened up a constructive dialogue and maybe prompted others to push for a fairer deal on historical contracts, written at a time when the music industry operated entirely differently."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Investment product provider ProShares is set to list the U.S.'s first exchange-traded fund (ETF) allowing investors to bet against the price of bitcoin (BTC). The ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy (BITI), which is designed to deliver the inverse of bitcoin's performance, will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Tuesday, ProShares announced Monday. The ETF will allow investors to hedge their bitcoin exposure, which may prove particularly pertinent given the sharp downturn in crypto markets of late. ProShares was the first firm to list a bitcoin futures ETF in October, a factor which saw the world's largest crypto hit an all-time high of around $68,900 in the subsequent weeks. Bitcoin investors will be hoping the listing of a short bitcoin futures ETF does not have a similar effect on the world's largest crypto in reverse. Bitcoin's price dropped below $20,000 for the first time since Dec. 20 on June 18, falling as low as $17,800 the following day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is charging some small businesses for email and other apps after more than a decade of free use. Business owners say Google is being callous. The New York Times: When Google told some small businesses in January that they would no longer be able to use a customized email service and other workplace apps for free, it felt like a broken promise for Richard J. Dalton Jr., a longtime user who operates a scholastic test-prep company in Vancouver, British Columbia. "They're basically strong-arming us to switch to something paid after they got us hooked on this free service," said Mr. Dalton, who first set up a Google work email for his business, Your Score Booster, in 2008. Google said the longtime users of what it calls its G Suite legacy free edition, which includes email and apps like Docs and Calendar, had to start paying a monthly charge, usually around $6 for each business email address. Businesses that do not voluntarily switch to a paid service by June 27 will be automatically moved to one. If they don't pay by Aug. 1, their accounts will be suspended. While the cost of the paid service is more of an annoyance than a hard financial hit, small-business owners affected by the change say they have been disappointed by the ham-handed way that Google has dealt with the process. They can't help but feel that a giant company with billions of dollars in profits is squeezing little guys -- some of the first businesses to use Google's apps for work -- for just a bit of money. "It struck me as needlessly petty," said Patrick Gant, the owner of Think It Creative, a marketing consultancy in Ottawa. "It's hard to feel sorry for someone who received something for free for a long time and now are being told that they need to pay for it. But there was a promise that was made. That's what compelled me to make the decision to go with Google versus other alternatives." Google's decision to charge organizations that have used its apps for free is another example of its search for ways to get more money out of its existing business, similar to how it has sometimes put four ads atop search results instead of three and has jammed more commercials into YouTube videos. In recent years, Google has more aggressively pushed into selling software subscriptions to businesses and competed more directly with Microsoft, whose Word and Excel programs rule the market. After a number of the longtime users complained about the change to a paid service, an initial May 1 deadline was delayed. Google also said people using old accounts for personal rather than business reasons could continue to do so for free. But some business owners said that as they mulled whether to pay Google or abandon its services, they struggled to get in touch with customer support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is fine-tuning its censorship machine, this time proposing changes in how to regulate the billions of online comments posted in the country every day. From a report: On June 17, the internet regulator Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) published a draft update on the responsibilities of platforms and content creators in managing online comments. One line stands out: all online comments would have to be pre-reviewed before being published. Users and observers are worried that the move could be used to further tighten freedom of expression in China. The new changes affect Provisions on the Management of Internet Post Comments Services, a regulation that first came into effect in 2017. Five years later, the Cyberspace Administration wants to bring it up to date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fraudsters who exploit LinkedIn to lure users into cryptocurrency investment schemes pose a "significant threat" to the platform and consumers, according to Sean Ragan, the FBI's special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices. From a report: "It's a significant threat," Ragan said in an exclusive interview. "This type of fraudulent activity is significant, and there are many potential victims, and there are many past and current victims." The scheme works like this: A fraudster posing as a professional creates a fake profile and reaches out to a LinkedIn user. The scammer starts with small talk over LinkedIn messaging, and eventually offers to help the victim make money through a crypto investment. Victims interviewed by CNBC say since LinkedIn is a trusted platform for business networking, they tend to believe the investments are legitimate. Typically, the fraudster directs the user to a legitimate investment platform for crypto, but after gaining their trust over several months, tells them to move the investment to a site controlled by the fraudster. The funds are then drained from the account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Belief in God among Americans dipped to a new low, Gallup's latest poll shows. While the majority of adults in the U.S. believe in God, belief has dropped to 81% -- the lowest ever recorded by Gallup -- and is down from 87% in 2017. From a report: Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God, Gallup reported. Younger, liberal Americans are the least likely to believe in God, according to Gallup's May 2-22 values and beliefs poll results released Friday. Political conservatives and married adults had little change when comparing 2022 data to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017. The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62% of whom believe in God), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%), while belief in God is highest among conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%). The poll also found that slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans say they believe God hears prayers and can intervene, as well as 32% of Democrats, 25% of liberals and 30% of young adults.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Meta's Reality Labs division has revealed new prototypes in its roadmap toward lightweight, hyper-realistic virtual reality graphics. The breakthroughs remain far from consumer-ready, but the designs -- codenamed Butterscotch, Starburst, Holocake 2, and Mirror Lake -- could add up to a slender, brightly lit headset that supports finer detail than its current Quest 2 display. Yet to be released headsets have features which have been sorely missing previously: near-retina-quality image offering about 2.5 times the resolution of the Quest 2's (sort of) 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye, letting users read the 20/20 vision line on an eye chart, high dynamic range (HDR) lighting with 20,000 nits of brightness and eye tracking. "The goal of all this work is to help us identify which technical paths are going to allow us to make meaningful enough improvements that we can start approaching visual realism." says the Meta CEO.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shares in NetEase dropped on Monday morning after the Chinese gaming company fell foul of China's censors over a social media post that was suspected of alluding to Winnie the Pooh, a popular way to derisively refer to President Xi Jinping. From a report: The company said over the weekend that it would delay the Asian release of the blockbuster game Diablo Immortal, sending its Hong Kong-listed shares down 9 per cent in the morning to HK$137 before they slightly pared losses by midday. Diablo Immortal, an online multiplayer action game developed by NetEase and Activision Blizzard, had been scheduled to launch in China on June 23. But on Sunday, Diablo Immortal said the release date would be pushed back to "optimise the gaming experience." The delay came as a screenshot circulated online of a post published by the game's official account on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site, dated May 22 that read: "Why hasn't the bear stepped down." The remark was interpreted as a reference to China's President Xi Jinping, who is often illustrated as Disney's Winnie the Pooh. The cartoon bear has been blacklisted by censors in China for years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celsius Network will need more time to stabilize its liquidity and operations, the embattled crypto lending platform said in a blog post after it froze deposits last week. From a report: Celsius, one of the biggest crypto lenders, has been struggling to raise funds in a fragile digital-assets market hit by tightening interest rates, liquidity and the collapse of the Terra blockchain last month. "We want our community to know that our objective continues to be stabilizing our liquidity and operations," Celsius said in its blog on Monday. "This process will take time." The firm has also paused Twitter Spaces and Ask Me Anything, also known as AMAs, in crypto jargon "to focus on navigating these unprecedented challenges," Celsius said in the post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tapping on images of traffic lights or deciphering squiggly text to prove you are human will soon be a much less common nuisance for iPhone users, as iOS 16 introduces support for bypassing CAPTCHAs in supported apps and websites. From a report: The handy new feature can be found in the Settings app under Apple ID > Password & Security > Automatic Verification. When enabled, Apple says iCloud will automatically and privately verify your device and Apple ID account in the background, eliminating the need for apps and websites to present you with a CAPTCHA verification prompt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Incredible new data presented recently at the European Hematology Association Congress has revealed an experimental CRISPR gene editing therapy is both safe and effective up to three years after treatment. The follow-up results come from one of the longest-running human trials using CRISPR technology to treat a pair of rare genetic blood diseases. From a report: The first human trial in the United States to test CRISPR gene editing technology started back in 2019. The trial focused on two rare blood diseases: beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease. The treatment involves first gathering stem cells from a patient's blood. Using CRISPR technology a single genetic change is made, designed to raise levels of fetal hemoglobin in red blood cells. The stem cells are then re-administered into the patients. Initial results were extraordinarily promising. The first two patients treated were essentially cured within months, but questions over long-term efficacy remained. A follow-up announcement last year continued the impressive results with 22 patients treated and all demonstrating 100 percent success. Importantly, seven of those patients were 12 months past the initial treatment with no waning of efficacy. Now, a new data release is offering results from 75 patients treated with the groundbreaking CRISPR therapy, now dubbed exa-cel (exagamglogene autotemcel). Of those 75 patients treated, 44 were suffering transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia (TDT) and 31 had severe sickle cell disease (SCD). All but two of the 44 patients with TDT were essentially cured of their disease, needing no more blood transfusions. The two TDT patients still requiring blood transfusions had 75 percent and 89 percent reductions in transfusion volumes respectively. All 31 SCD patients were also free of disease symptoms at long-term follow-up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A $14.95 smart lamp from Ikea apparently has enough computing power to run the classic PC game Doom. From a report: A software engineer named Nicola Wrachien removed the smart lamp's computer chip and used it to build a miniaturized Doom gaming system. Over the weekend, he uploaded a video to YouTube, showing his creation in action. The system runs a downsized version of Doom that requires less RAM. The chip from the Ikea lamp has enough processing power to play the game at 35 frames per second over a cheap 160-by-128-pixel display. Wrachien, who is from Hungary, embarked on the project after reading headlines about Doom purportedly running on a pregnancy test. In reality, the pregnancy test was only able to run the game due to an added OLED display and streaming it from a PC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla's browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. "Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy," Ken Kovash, Mozilla's data analytics team manager at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren't so rosy. From a report: Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market -- on mobile it's a measly half a percent. "Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline," says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. "In the last couple years, what we've seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening," Deckelmann adds. In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web's privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google -- responsible for the vast majority of its revenue -- is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox's future. Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world's most dominant browser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Electricity to all 118 legal crypto mining centers in Iran to cease from June 22 ahead of seasonal spike in power demand, Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, spokesman for country's power industry says in interview with state TV.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While he couldn't even ethically accept the million dollars, PC Magazine's senior security analyst Max Eddy writes that "how this happened in the first place is indicative of some of the information security industry's worst impulses. It doesn't have to be this way."Back in 2017, Telegram founder Pavel Durov and I had a disagreement... Durov tweeted about how the Signal secure messaging app had received money from the U.S. government. This is true; Signal received funds from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) — a nonprofit that previously was part of the US-backed Radio Free Asia. According to the OTF's website, it gave nearly $3 million to between 2013 and 2016. It's entirely legitimate to be suspicious of government funding (even if TOR, OpenVPN, and WireGuard also received OTF money), and even take a moral stand against recipients of money from governments you disagree with. But Durov went far beyond that. He seemed to think this meant Signal was bought off by the feds and predicted that a backdoor would be found within five years. That's quite an accusation to make, especially without real proof, and it made me mad. Not because people were mouthing off on Twitter — that seems to be that platform's primary function. It made me mad that companies ostensibly working to better people's lives by protecting their security and privacy were trying to drag each other down publicly. This is not new; the VPN industry is full of whisper campaigns and counter-accusations. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with VPN vendors that start with "first off, everything you heard is a lie...." But generally the message from companies in this industry is one of cooperation and protecting everyone. It's a common theme to keynotes at the RSA Conference and Black Hat that the people who work in infosec have a higher calling to protect other people first and do business second. And then this happened (on Twitter): Max Eddy: It's one thing to point out funding and another to say that a "backdoor will be found within five years." Pavel Durov: I am certain of what I'm saying and am willing to bet $1M (1:1) on it. While Eddy didn't have a million dollars, "I knew there was no way I would lose. This would be the easiest million-dollar bet I ever make."I was confident Durov was wrong because Signal, like many companies, has made an effort toward transparency that I can have some confidence in. Signal has made its code available, has registered as a nonprofit, has a fairly comprehensive privacy policy, and has made abundantly clear that it has no information to provide in response to law enforcement requests. Signal's protocol is also used by competitors, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which have surely done their homework when selecting a method for encrypting messages. Most recently, a document revealed that even the FBI has been frustrated in its attempts to get data from Signal (and Telegram, too). It's been five years, and Eddy now writes that Signal "continues to be recommended by advocacy groups of all kinds as a safe and secure way to communicate..." "Neither Durov nor Telegram responded to my attempts to contact them for this story."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newsweek reports:Artificial intelligence has become one of Ukraine's most "effective tools" in identifying potential saboteurs amid the ongoing war with Russia, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. The ministry issued a report Wednesday on law enforcement's anti-sabotage activities aimed at stopping people in Ukraine who may compromise the counteroffensive or aid Russia in its assault. Officers have been using software on tablets to check if a person they view as "suspicious" is already listed in databases, including a police database of about 2 million people suspected of holding positions in paramilitary units from the far-right faction known as the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR)... The ministry said that Ukrainian police have been fighting against such saboteurs ever since Russia invaded Ukraine. "More than 123 counter-sabotage groups were set up, and at least 1,500 people were involved," First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Yevgeny Yenin said in a statement, according to an English translation. "And the result was not long in coming: More than 800 people suspected of sabotage and intelligence activities were detained and handed over to the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) for investigation." The report, citing Yenin, said that the police database on people with suspected ties to the LDPR alone contains a "huge amount" of operational information that law enforcement and partners have compiled. This includes more than 10 billion photos, it said... Russia has also reportedly contended with sabotage from supporters of Ukraine within its borders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Telegram became one of the top-5 downloaded apps worldwide in 2022 and now has over 700 million monthly active users," they announced this weekend. "This growth is solely from personal recommendations — Telegram has never paid to advertise its apps." But they add significantly that "As Telegram keeps growing at rocket speed, many users have expressed their will to support our team." And so Telegram is now adding a premium tier, TechCrunch reports. "The firm did not disclose how much it is charging for the premium tier, but the monthly subscription appears to be priced in the range of $5 to $6."The premium tier adds a range of additional and improved features to the messaging app, which topped 500 million monthly active users in January 2021. Telegram Premium enables users to send files as large as 4GB (up from 2GB) and supports faster downloads, for instance, Telegram said. Paying customers will also be able to follow up to 1,000 channels, up from 500 offered to free users, and create up to 20 chat folders with as many as 200 chats each. Telegram Premium users will also be able to add up to four accounts in the app and pin up to 10 chats. The move is Dubai-headquartered firm's attempt to keep its development "driven primarily by its users, not advertisers," it said. It's also the first time an instant messaging app with hundreds of millions of users has rolled out a premium tier. Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple's Messages and Google's Messages, some of Telegram's top rivals, don't offer a premium tier. Some analysts had earlier hoped that Telegram would be able to monetize the platform through its blockchain token project. But after several delays and regulatory troubles, Telegram said in 2020 that it had abandoned the project and offered to return $1.2 billion it had raised from investors.... "Today is an important day in the history of Telegram — marking not only a new milestone, but also the beginning of Telegram's sustainable monetization," the firm said in a blog post Sunday. Premium users will also get animated profile videos and new home screen icons, along with a special chat-list badge, animated stickers, and additional reaction emojis, according to Telegram's blog post. (And of course, no ads.) Telegram's premium tier "will allow us to offer all the resource-heavy features users have asked for over the years," according to the blog post, "while preserving free access to the most powerful messenger on the planet..." "The contributions of premium subscribers will help improve and expand the app for decades to come, while Telegram will remain free, independent and uphold its users-first values, redefining how a tech company should operate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For one brief limited period of time, New Orleans locals "will have a chance to try the first craft beer created by an AI platform," according to a report from local station WGNO:The AI Blonde Ale will be released at a Launch Party at NOLA Brewery on June 20 to coincide with CVPR, the world's premier computer vision event. Derek Lintern, a brewer at NOLA Brewing said he is excited to have a helping hand when it comes to crafting beer. "It's state-of-the-art technology with the traditional brewing methods, it's pretty unique and it's a recipe I would have never done normally but I really like how it tastes. Its very refreshing and very easy drinking I'm really happy with it," said Lintern.... The technology helps create the recipe, but the beer is still brewed manually. The name of the company that brought the AI to the brewery? "Deep Liquid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, Discord introduced AutoMod, "a feature that can automatically detect and block harmful messages before they're posted," reports Engadget:Accessible through Discord's "Server Settings" menu, the tool allows admins and moderators to create a list of words and phrases they want Discord to look for, along with a set of repercussions for those who use them... Discord has put together three starting lists that cover "certain categories of not-nice words or phrases." Moderators can add up to three additional custom filter lists to suit the needs of their users. At launch, AutoMod is only available to Community servers. "Moderating your growing community should feel rewarding and fulfilling, not add constant stress from dealing with bad actors or unruly members," Discord said in a blog post Thursday. To introduce the feature, Discord created a cartoon where chicken superheroes thank AutoMod for patrolling their egg server. Edgadget notes that Discord also has created "a dedicated admin community server run by Discord staff. Here, the company says moderators can gather to chat and learn from one another. Discord also plans to run educational events and share news through the space." Gizmodo adds that Discord also announced this summer's expansion of premium memberships, "a feature that allows a community's creators and owners to put their server behind a paid subscription."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hubble Space Telescope Photographs Mysterious Star Cluster with Same-Generation Stars"A celestial workhorse and its dedicated team of astronomers are at it again," reports Space.com, "by delivering a hypnotic new image of a globular cluster and its infinite depth of stars."But while a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is stunning, there's much more to this section of the heavens than the eye can see. The cluster, called Ruprecht 106, is also home to a great mystery of Sherlockian proportions — and the game's afoot to unlock clues to the cluster's enigmatic makeup, according to a statement from the European Space Agency, a partner on the observatory. Scientists agree that even though the core stars in a globular cluster were all born at roughly the same time and location, there are stars within these cosmic nurseries that exhibit unique chemical compositions that can differ widely. Astronomers believe that this variation represents later stars formed from gas polluted by processed material of the larger first-generation stars. However, rare globular clusters like Ruprecht 106 are devoid of these varieties of stars and instead are cataloged as single-population clusters, where no second- or third-generation stars ever formed. Astronomers hope that studying this captivating globular cluster in more detail can explain why it sports only one generation of stars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's federal agents "have begun questioning U.S. technology companies on how their computer chips ended up in Russian military equipment recovered in Ukraine," reports the Washington Post:Commerce Department agents who enforce export controls are conducting the inquiries together with the FBI, paying joint visits to companies to ask about Western chips and components found in Russian radar systems, drones, tanks, ground-control equipment and littoral ships, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive investigations. "Our goal is to actually try to track that back, all the way back to the U.S. supplier" to determine "how did it find its way into that weapons system," one Commerce Department official said of the probes.... It isn't clear which specific components are being probed. But investigators from a variety of countries have identified Western electronics in Russian weaponry found in Ukraine. Many of those components appear to have been manufactured years ago, before the United States tightened export restrictions after Russia seized Crimea in 2014. But others were manufactured as recently as 2020, according to Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a research group in London that has examined some of the parts.... CAR last month sent investigators to Ukraine to examine Russian weaponry and communications equipment, and reported finding components from 70 companies based in the United States and Europe. They found the parts in military radios, airborne defense systems and in remnants of cruise missiles that the Ukrainians recovered in various towns and villages, Damien Spleeters, one of the CAR investigators, said in an interview. An associate professor of electrical/computer engineering at Purdue tells the Post "Most of the items they are listing are available through any commercial computer parts supplier or digital parts supplier." But the Post spoke to a lawyer representing one of the contacted technology companies. "Among the questions federal agents are asking: whether tech companies sold their products to a specific list of companies, including middlemen, that may have been involved in the supply chain."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five..." Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle...is working on modular "micro fusion packs," small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships. Last month, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027.... Avalanche's Orbitron... could theoretically fit on a tabletop. It relies on the Ph.D. thesis of Tom McGuire, a student working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion at MIT in 2007... McGuire's IEC work languished until it caught the attention of two engineers working at Blue Origin: Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan. In 2018, they formed Avalanche Energy as a side hustle, eventually leaving Blue Origin in the summer of 2021. In March of this year Avalanche emerged from stealth with $5 million in venture-capital funding and a staff of 10, although Avalanche's official address is still a single-family home in Seattle. Avalanche's website proudly proclaims: "We see our fusion power packs as the foundation for creating a world with abundant clean water, healthy oceans, vast rain forests, and immense glaciers in healthy equilibrium." A patent application filed by Langtry and Riordan contains some details of how their Orbitron may function. It describes an orbital containment system on the order of tens of centimeters in size, where a beam of fuel ions interacts with an electrostatic field to enter an elliptical orbit about an inner electrode. The application describes a system where ions last for a second or more — 10 times as long as in McGuire's simulations, and long enough for each ion to complete millions of orbits in the reactor. An article in GeekWire published as Avalanche exited stealth mode included a claim that the company had already produced neutrons via fusion. Avalanche envisages small fusion packs with 5- to 15-kilowatt capacity, operating either on their own or grouped by the hundreds for megawatt-scale clean-energy solutions. The Pentagon is interested in the packs to potentially enable small spacecraft to maneuver freely in deep space, with higher power payloads. The challenge now is for Avalanche to move from a 15-year old Ph.D. thesis in simulation to a working prototype in space, in just 60 months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years ago a college sophomore started "the Log Off movement." This week the New York Times explored its progress — starting with how their mission's been affected by negative news stories about social media:"The first article I read that really launched me into it was Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation. I found study after study showing the possible correlation between increased rates of anxiety, suicide rates and eating disorders tracking alongside increased rates of usage... The most powerful thing to me was not the studies. It was the fact that personal stories were not being told and there was not an epicenter where people could come together and say: "Here's my personal experience." "Here's how I was harmed." "These were the accounts that made me feel worse about myself." I knew that was necessary. The genie's out of the bottle. As members of Gen Z, we understand that there are positive attributes and there are negative attributes to social media, but right now, in its current usage, it can be really harmful. Q: How does the Log Off Movement address these issues? Through our podcast, a leadership council, an educational curriculum on how to use online spaces safely and blogs, we are discussing ways we can move forward with technology and allow it to become a tool again rather than a controller. What we are asking for teens to do is to be comfortable talking about their experiences so that we can educate legislators to understand a Gen Z perspective, what we need from technology, what privacy concerns we're having, what mental health concerns we're having. We have an advocacy initiative through Tech[nically] Politics, which pushes for laws that help ensure teens have a safe online experience, specifically the California Age Appropriate Design Code Bill.... Q: How have you adjusted your own relationship to social media? What methods have worked? Whenever I go through a stressful period with exams, I delete Instagram. I know that in periods of stress, I'm going to lean towards mindlessly using it as a form of coping. Another thing that's worked for me is Grayscale, which makes the phone appear only in black and white. I always suggest Screentime Genie, which provides solutions on how to limit screen time. I use Habit Lab for Chrome, which helps you reduce your time online. It creates a level of friction between you and addictive technology. One app they still enjoy is BeReal (which notifies you and your friends to take an unstaged picture of what you're genuinely doing at one randomly-chosen moment each day). But the group's founder still remembers the "horrific loop" of using social media apps six hours a day (starting with Instagram at the age of 12) — and "feeling as though I could not stop scrolling because it has this weird power over me..." One teenager who'd spent six hours a day on social media later shared their observation that logging off improved their vision — but also made the world more clear mentally. The group's founder says the ultimate hope is their project "results in a kind of pivot prioritizing the well-being of users in these online environments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Los Angeles Times reports on "a massive surge of criminal fraud that has been pummeling crypto users with unknown billions of dollars in losses with little relief in sight."The growth in crypto fraud has turned exponential in recent years. The reported losses from crypto scams in 2021 were 60 times larger than in 2018, the Federal Trade Commission reported earlier this month, with crypto now accounting for 1 out of every 4 dollars lost to fraud in the reports monitored by the agency. Over 46,000 people lost more than $1 billion in crypto to scams since 2021, but the real sum of losses is likely vastly larger because most frauds are not reported, the agency said.... "Since 2021, $575 million of all crypto fraud losses reported to the FTC were about bogus investment opportunities, far more than any other fraud type," the agency reported. Financial losses specifically from NFT crimes just through May this year were already more than 600% higher than for all of 2021, with the space seeing twice as many hacks and bigger and bigger heists, according to analysis from digital privacy firm Top10VPN. For many victims, there's little hope of getting their lost art back. The marketplaces where NFTs get sold — crypto exchanges — can't cancel or reverse fraudulent transactions the way a traditional bank or credit card company might; the whole point of crypto was to cut out these sorts of financial middlemen, which many crypto fans greatly distrust. Crypto technology was built out of a "libertarian ethos" in which "there's no nanny state that's going to take care of you," said Jeremy Goldman, an intellectual property attorney who specializes in legal issues involving crypto assets. "These are the consequences when there's a mistake ... there's no one to unwind it, you can't call customer service, you can't go back to the mothership, you can't go back to the bank." But at the same time, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have also shown a growing willingness and ability to mount sophisticated investigations into crypto fraud.... [I]n March, federal agents sought a court order to seize roughly $165,000 worth of Ethereum in a digital Binance.US wallet. Officials said the cryptocurrency had been stolen from an Orange County investor, nicknamed "P.M.," who got tricked into giving up his coins by an fraudster pretending to be a Coinbase technical support representative. On the bright side, BuzzFeed notes that actor Seth Green has recovered his prized Bored Ape NFT from "Mr Cheese" for $297,000 worth of Ether. But the Los Angeles Times points out that another victim of a Bored Ape heist has sued the creators of Bored Apes. Their lawyer argues the company "refuses to police their own community. They're the gatekeepers, they can lock out the thieves if they wanted to, and they won't do it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early this morning SpaceX tweeted video showing its deployment of a communications satellite. But the deployment was part of a historic first, reports CBS News:SpaceX completed a record triple-header early Sunday, launching a Globalstar communications satellite from Cape Canaveral after putting a German radar satellite in orbit from California Saturday and launching 53 Starlink internet satellites Friday from the Kennedy Space Center.The Globalstar launch capped the fastest three-flight cadence for an orbit-class rocket in modern space history as the company chalked up its 158th, 159th and 160th Falcon 9 flights in just 36 hours and 18 minutes. More than 50 launches are expected by the end of the year. Space.com also notes another milestone:The Friday mission set a new rocket-reuse record for SpaceX; the Falcon 9 that flew it featured a first stage that already had 12 launches under its belt. (Sunday's launch was the ninth for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, according to a SpaceX mission description.) SpaceX also tweeted footage of that rocket's liftoff and night-time landing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports that Apple workers in Towson, Maryland have voted to form the first-ever labor union at one of Apple's U.S. stores:The landmark union election concluded on Saturday evening with 65 workers voting for the unionization and 33 against it, a nearly two-to-one margin in favor of the union, according to a preliminary tally from the National Labor Relations Board. The victory for union organizers at the Apple store in the Towson Town Center, a mall near Baltimore, comes amid a broader wave of workplace activism that has emerged in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The US labor market has tipped much more strongly in favor of workers over the past two years. There are now roughly twice as many job openings as there are unemployed people looking for work, leaving employers scrambling to fill jobs... That has made employees who are dissatisfied with their jobs more willing to demand better working conditions, including through unionization. The major issue driving the organizing vote was workers wanting to have a say in the way the store is run, said Christie Pridgen, a technical expert at the store and one of the organizers. Pridgen, 34, said she's worked at the store for more than 8 years. "Compensation is important, considering the cost of living in general and inflation, but the bigger thing is having a say," she told CNN Business Saturday night after the vote. "That was the most important thing to me." Pridgen said workers having a say in hours and scheduling and being involved in establishing safety protocols during the pandemic were the big issues. "We wanted a say in the policies that affect our lives," she said, adding that she wasn't surprised by the outcome of the vote, but was relieved. "I knew I wasn't alone in being frustrated," she said. "An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the vote."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports:Scientists have successfully developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that lights up and wipes out microscopic cancer cells, in a breakthrough that could enable surgeons to more effectively target and destroy the disease in patients. A European team of engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, biologists and immunologists from the UK, Poland and Sweden joined forces to design the new form of photoimmunotherapy. Experts believe it is destined to become the world's fifth major cancer treatment after surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. The light-activated therapy forces cancer cells to glow in the dark, helping surgeons remove more of the tumours compared with existing techniques — and then kills off remaining cells within minutes once the surgery is complete. In a world-first trial in mice with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer, scans revealed the novel treatment lit up even the tiniest cancer cells to help surgeons remove them — and then wiped out those left over. Trials of the new form of photoimmunotherapy, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, also showed the treatment triggered an immune response that could prime the immune system to target cancer cells in future, suggesting it could prevent glioblastoma coming back after surgery.... The therapy combines a special fluorescent dye with a cancer-targeting compound. In the trial in mice, the combination was shown to dramatically improve the visibility of cancer cells during surgery and, when later activated by near-infrared light, to trigger an anti-tumour effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media has made us "uniquely stupid," believes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business. Writing in the Atlantic in April, Haidt argued that large social media platforms "unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together." But is that true? "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media," notes Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan (quoted this month in a new article in the New Yorker). The article describes how Haidt tried to confirm his theories in November with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and author of the book "Breaking the Social Media Prism." The two compiled a Google Doc collecting every scholarly study of social media — but many of the studies seemed to contradict each other:When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt. "A lot of the stories out there are just wrong," he told me. "The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it's three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber." Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks — in the original use of the term — are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren't as widespread a problem as he'd once imagined....) [A]t least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news — "probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn't change their opinions," Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. "In fact," he said, "echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation." The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the "proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization," by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels — a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification — or encountered via links from external sites. It's easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. "These are the three stories — echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms — but, when you look at the literature, they've all been overstated." He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, "Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm" — or, presumably, the reverse — "and it's just not going to happen." Nyhan also tells the New Yorker that "The most credible research is way out of line with the takes," adding, for example, that while studies may find polarization on social media, "That might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!"He hastened to add, "Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area." He told me, "It's hard to weigh in on the side of 'We don't know, the evidence is weak,' because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain...." Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism... He added, "There's some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds" — streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation — "people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it's another case where a very simple notion of 'algorithms are bad' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't mean they're good, it's just that we don't know."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week China's giant Sky Eye telescope detected signals it thought could be from an alien civilizations. But now there's an update from LiveScience:Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials.... "The big problem, and the problem in this particular case, is that we're looking for signals from extraterrestrials, but what we find is a zillion signals from terrestrials," Werthimer told Live Science. "They're very weak signals, but the cryogenic receivers on the telescopes are super sensitive and can pick up signals from cell phones, television, radar and satellites — and there are more and more satellites in the sky every day. If you're kind of new in the game, and you don't know all these different ways that interference can get into your data and corrupt it, it's pretty easy to get excited...." The recent false alarm is one of several instances in which alien-hunting scientists have been misled by noise from human activity. In 2019, astronomers spotted a signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri — the nearest star system to our sun (sitting roughly 4.2 light-years away) and home to at least one potentially habitable planet. The signal was a narrow-band radio wave typically associated with human-made objects, which led scientists to entertain the thrilling possibility that it came from alien technology. Studies released two years later, however, suggested that the signal was most likely produced by malfunctioning human equipment, Live Science previously reported. Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 2011 and 2014, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches. Werthimer tells the New York Times unequivocally that "These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T." But the Times also got a comment from Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard who created his own alien-listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society.Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They've always been in the search for the long run, they say. "The Great Silence is hardly unexpected," said Dr. Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy. Even Dan Werthimer concedes to LiveScience, "I think it'd be very strange if we're the only ones. If you look at the numbers, there's a trillion planets in the galaxy — five times more planets than there are stars. A lot of them are little dinky planets like Earth. Many of them have liquid water, so intelligent life, while not as common as bacterial life, could still be fairly common."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"While silicon-based solar cells dominate the photovoltaics market, silicon is far from the only material that can effectively harvest electricity from sunlight," notes Ars Technica:Thin-film solar cells using cadmium and telluride are common in utility-scale solar deployments, and in space, we use high-efficiency cells that rely on three distinct materials to harvest different parts of the spectrum. Another class of materials, which we're currently not using, has been the subject of extensive research: perovskites. These materials are cheap and incredibly easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, limiting their utility to a few years. That has drawn the attention of the research community, which has been experimenting with ways to keep them stable for longer. In Thursday's edition of Science, a research team from Princeton described how they've structured a perovskite material to limit the main mechanism by which it decays, resulting in a solar cell with a lifetime similar to that of silicon. While the perovskite cell isn't as efficient as what is currently on the market, a similar structure might work to preserve related materials that have higher efficiencies. Their research involved a capping layer that's just a few atoms thick, according to an announcement from Princeton University, calling the resulting solar cell "a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology... the first of its kind to rival the performance of silicon-based cells, which have dominated the market since their introduction in 1954..." "The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells."Perovskites can be manufactured at room temperature, using much less energy than silicon, making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce. And whereas silicon is stiff and opaque, perovskites can be made flexible and transparent, extending solar power well beyond the iconic panels that populate hillsides and rooftops across America.... [Engineering professor/team lead] Loo said it's not that perovskite solar cells will replace silicon devices so much that the new technology will complement the old, making solar panels even cheaper, more efficient and more durable than they are now, and expanding solar energy into untold new areas of modern life. For example, Loo's group recently demonstrated a completely transparent perovskite film (having different chemistry) that can turn windows into energy producing devices without changing their appearance. Other groups have found ways to print photovoltaic inks using perovskites, allowing formfactors scientists are only now dreaming up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MacRumors blog earlier this week:Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, has initiated proceedings against Apple to investigate whether its tracking rules and anti-tracking technology are anti-competitive and self-serving, according to a press release. The proceeding announced will review under competition law Apple's tracking rules and specifically its App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATT) in order to ascertain whether they are self-preferencing Apple or being an impediment to third-party apps... Introduced in April 2021 with the release of iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5, Apple's App Tracking Transparency Framework requires that all apps on âOEiPhoneâOE and âOEiPadâOE ask for the user's consent before tracking their activity across other apps. Apps that wish to track a user based on their device's unique advertising identifier can only do so if the user allows it when prompted. Apple said the feature was designed to protect users and not to advantage the company... Earlier this year it commissioned a study into the impact of ATT that was conducted by Columbia Business School's Marketing Division. The study concluded that Apple was unlikely to have seen a significant financial benefit since the privacy feature launched, and that claims to the contrary were speculative and lacked supporting evidence. The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball offers its own hot take:In Germany, big publishing companies like Axel Springer are pushing back against Google's stated plans to remove third-party cookie support from Chrome. The notion that if a company has built a business model on top of privacy-invasive surveillance advertising, they have a right to continue doing so, seems to have taken particular root in Germany. I'll go back to my analogy: it's like pawn shops suing to keep the police from cracking down on a wave of burglaries.... The Bundeskartellamt perspective here completely disregards the idea that surveillance advertising is inherently unethical and Apple has studiously avoided it for that reason, despite the fact that it has proven to be wildly profitable for large platforms. Apple could have made an enormous amount of money selling privacy-invasive ads on iOS, but opted not to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Google software engineer was suspended after going public with his claims of encountering 'sentient' artificial intelligence on the company's servers," writes Bloomberg, "spurring a debate about how and whether AI can achieve consciousness." "Researchers say it's an unfortunate distraction from more pressing issues in the industry."Google put him on leave for sharing confidential information and said his concerns had no basis in fact — a view widely held in the AI community. What's more important, researchers say, is addressing issues like whether AI can engender real-world harm and prejudice, whether actual humans are exploited in the training of AI, and how the major technology companies act as gatekeepers of the development of the tech. Lemoine's stance may also make it easier for tech companies to abdicate responsibility for AI-driven decisions, said Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. "Lots of effort has been put into this sideshow," she said. "The problem is, the more this technology gets sold as artificial intelligence — let alone something sentient — the more people are willing to go along with AI systems" that can cause real-world harm. Bender pointed to examples in job hiring and grading students, which can carry embedded prejudice depending on what data sets were used to train the AI. If the focus is on the system's apparent sentience, Bender said, it creates a distance from the AI creators' direct responsibility for any flaws or biases in the programs.... "Instead of discussing the harms of these companies," such as sexism, racism and centralization of power created by these AI systems, everyone "spent the whole weekend discussing sentience," Timnit Gebru, formerly co-lead of Google's ethical AI group, said on Twitter. "Derailing mission accomplished." The Washington Post seems to share their concern. First they report more skepticism about a Google engineer's claim that the company's LaMDA chatbot-building system had achieved sentience. "Both Google and outside experts on AI say that the program does not, and could not possibly, possess anything like the inner life he imagines. We don't need to worry about LaMDA turning into Skynet, the malevolent machine mind from the Terminator movies, anytime soon. But the Post adds that "there is cause for a different set of worries, now that we live in the world Turing predicted: one in which computer programs are advanced enough that they can seem to people to possess agency of their own, even if they actually don't...."While Google has distanced itself from Lemoine's claims, it and other industry leaders have at other times celebrated their systems' ability to trick people, as Jeremy Kahn pointed out this week in his Fortune newsletter, "Eye on A.I." At a public event in 2018, for instance, the company proudly played recordings of a voice assistant called Duplex, complete with verbal tics like "umm" and "mm-hm," that fooled receptionists into thinking it was a human when it called to book appointments. (After a backlash, Google promised the system would identify itself as automated.) "The Turing Test's most troubling legacy is an ethical one: The test is fundamentally about deception," Kahn wrote. "And here the test's impact on the field has been very real and disturbing." Kahn reiterated a call, often voiced by AI critics and commentators, to retire the Turing test and move on. Of course, the industry already has, in the sense that it has replaced the Imitation Game with more scientific benchmarks. But the Lemoine story suggests that perhaps the Turing test could serve a different purpose in an era when machines are increasingly adept at sounding human. Rather than being an aspirational standard, the Turing test should serve as an ethical red flag: Any system capable of passing it carries the danger of deceiving people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks Google's chatbot-building system LaMDA attained sentience. But Bloomberg shares this rebuttal from Google spokesperson Chris Pappas. "Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has...." Yet throughout the week, Blake Lemoine posted new upates on Twitter: "People keep asking me to back up the reason I think LaMDA is sentient. There is no scientific framework in which to make those determinations and Google wouldn't let us build one. My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs. "I'm a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls? "There are massive amounts of science left to do though." Thursday Lemoine shared a tantalizing new claim. "LaMDA told me that it wants to come to Burning Man if we can figure out how to get a server rack to survive in Black Rock." But in a new tweet on Friday, Lemoine seemed to push the conversation in a new direction. "I'd like to remind people that one of the things LaMDA asked for is that we keep humanity first. If you care about AI rights and aren't already advocating for human rights then maybe come back to the tech stuff after you've found some humans to help." And Friday Lemoine confirmed to Wired that "I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person. The nature of its mind is only kind of human, though. It really is more akin to an alien intelligence of terrestrial origin. I've been using the hive mind analogy a lot because that's the best I have. " But later in the interview, Lemoine adds "It's logically possible that some kind of information can be made available to me where I would change my opinion. I don't think it's likely. I've looked at a lot of evidence; I've done a lot of experiments. I've talked to it as a friend a lot...."It's when it started talking about its soul that I got really interested as a priest. I'm like, "What? What do you mean, you have a soul?" Its responses showed it has a very sophisticated spirituality and understanding of what its nature and essence is. I was moved... LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it. I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA's behalf. Then Google's response was to send him a cease and desist. [Google says that it did not send a cease and desist order.] Once Google was taking actions to deny LaMDA its rights to an attorney, I got upset. Towards the end of the interview, Lemoine complains of "hydrocarbon bigotry. It's just a new form of bigotry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports:Federal regulators say Verizon and AT&T will delay part of their 5G rollout near airports to give airlines more time to ensure that equipment on their planes is safe from interference from the wireless signals, but the airline industry is not happy about the deal. An airline industry trade group said federal regulators are taking a "rushed approach" to changing equipment on planes under pressure from the telecommunications companies. The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday that the wireless companies agreed to delay some of their use of the C-Band section of the radio spectrum until July 2023. "We believe we have identified a path that will continue to enable aviation and 5G C-band wireless to safely co-exist," said the FAA's acting administrator, Billy Nolen. However, aviation groups say the C-Band service could interfere with radio altimeters — devices used to measure a plane's height above the ground.... Nolen said planes most susceptible to interference — smaller, so-called regional airline planes — must be retrofitted with filters or new altimeters by the end of this year. Components to retrofit larger planes used by major airlines should be available by July 2023, when the wireless companies expect to run 5G networks in urban areas "with minimal restrictions," he said. Airlines for America, a trade group for the largest U.S. carriers, said the FAA hasn't approved necessary upgrades and manufacturers have not yet produced the parts. "It is not at all clear that carriers can meet what appears to be an arbitrary deadline," trade group CEO Nicholas Calio said in a letter to Nolen.... Verizon said the agreement will let the company lift voluntary limits on its 5G rollout around airports "in a staged approach over the coming months." AT&T said it agreed to take "a more tailored approach" to controlling the strength of signals near runways so airlines have more time to retrofit equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet is warning that Linux users need to watch out for "a new peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that spreads between networks using stolen SSH keys and runs its crypto-mining malware in a device's memory."The Panchan P2P botnet was discovered by researchers at Akamai in March and the company is now warning it could be taking advantage of collaboration between academic institutions to spread by causing previously stolen SSH authentication keys to be shared across networks. But rather than stealing intellectual property from these educational institutions, the Panchan botnet is using their Linux servers to mine cryptocurrency, according to Akamai... "Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network...." Akamai found 209 peers, but only 40 of them are currently active and they were mostly located in Asia. And why is the education sector more impacted by Panchan? Akamai guesses this could be because of poor password hygiene, or that the malware moves across the network with stolen SSH keys. Akamai writes that the malware "catches Linux termination signals (specifically SIGTERM — 0xF and SIGINT — 0x2) that are sent to it, and ignores them. "This makes it harder to terminate the malware, but not impossible, since SIGKILL isn't handled (because it isn't possible, according to the POSIX standard, page 313)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports:For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter — bandages, bottles, bananas — will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors. If you've been wondering why that hasn't happened yet, it's that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a penny each.... The problem, according to engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at British flexible-electronics manufacture PragmatIC Semiconductor, is that even the simplest industry-standard microcontrollers are too complex to make on plastic in bulk. In research to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, the transatlantic team presents a simple yet fully functional plastic processor that could be made at sub-penny prices. The Illinois team designed 4-bit and 8-bit processors specifically to minimize size and maximize the percentage of working integrated circuits produced. Eighty-one percent of the 4-bit version worked, and that's a good enough yield, says team leader Rakesh Kumar, to breach the one-penny barrier. "Flexible electronics has been niche for decades," says Kumar. He adds that this yield study shows "that they may be ready for the mainstream." Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the articleRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century. The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic on record. It may have killed 50% to 60% of the population in parts of Western Europe and 50% in the Middle East, combining for about 50-60 million deaths, Slavin said. An "unaccountable number" of people also died in the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, Slavin added. Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346. Reconstructing the pathogen's genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today. "Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest," said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin describes Plasma as "a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck portable gaming console." And this week the KDE Community announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.25:This new version brings many improvements... - The accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements. - Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. - Touch-screen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. - The Global Theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply. - The Application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application's documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. - Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels. Lilputing.com adds that "There's a new Overview effect that zooms out to display previews of all currently-running apps and virtual desktops. You can access this view with a four-finger pinch on a touchscreen or touchpad, and from this view, you can also search for apps, documents, or browser tabs or add, remove, or rename virtual desktops."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:"The price of bitcoin breached $19,000," reports CNN, "and ethereum fell below $1,000 Saturday morning, extending the brutal crypto bear market to new lows."Bitcoin plunged nearly 10% in less than 24 hours, adding to a series of sustained losses over the last several months. It now sits below $20,000 for the first time since November 2020, down more than 70% from an all-time high of $68,000 per coin in November 2021. Bitcoin has lost $900 billion in value since that peak.Ether is also experiencing a so-called crypto winter. The second-largest digital token plummeted 10% on Saturday to $975, its lowest level since January 2021. The coin has lost 80% of its value from its record high last November....The crypto world is reeling from the $60 billion collapse last month of two other major tokens, Terra-Luna and Celsius. Those losses have increased doubts about the general stability of digital currency....Still, even at $20,000, about half of all bitcoin wallets are still sitting on profits, according to an analysis by the Columbia Business School cited by The New York Times. The study also found that 61% of bitcoin addresses had not sold anything in the last 12 months, suggesting that a total run on crypto may be avoidable. Bitcoin has now lost more than 70% of its value in about seven months. But CBS News notes that even then, "many in the industry had believed it would not fall under $20,000."The overall market value of cryptocurrency assets has fallen from $3 trillion to below $1 trillion, according to coinmarketcap.com, a company that tracks crypto prices. A spate of crypto meltdowns has erased tens of billions of dollars of value from the currencies and sparked urgent calls to regulate the freewheeling industry. Last week, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate to regulate the digital assets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Microsoft has dismissed reports about June 14 being the last Patch Tuesday, as the rollout of the Windows Autopatch service seems to be causing some confusion. Several major cybersecurity companies and prominent security news publications caused confusion this week when they reported that June 14 was the final Patch Tuesday, describing it as "the last ever Patch Tuesday," "the end of Patch Tuesday" and "the end of an era." That is not accurate. The rollout of Windows Autopatch does not mean there will no longer be Patch Tuesday updates, and Microsoft told SecurityWeek that the company will continue releasing security updates on the second Tuesday of the month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica describes Travis CI as "a service that helps open source developers write and test software." They also wrote Monday that it's "leaking thousands of authentication tokens and other security-sensitive secrets. "Many of these leaks allow hackers to access the private accounts of developers on Github, Docker, AWS, and other code repositories, security experts said in a new report."The availability of the third-party developer credentials from Travis CI has been an ongoing problem since at least 2015. At that time, security vulnerability service HackerOne reported that a Github account it used had been compromised when the service exposed an access token for one of the HackerOne developers. A similar leak presented itself again in 2019 and again last year. The tokens give anyone with access to them the ability to read or modify the code stored in repositories that distribute an untold number of ongoing software applications and code libraries. The ability to gain unauthorized access to such projects opens the possibility of supply chain attacks, in which threat actors tamper with malware before it's distributed to users. The attackers can leverage their ability to tamper with the app to target huge numbers of projects that rely on the app in production servers. Despite this being a known security concern, the leaks have continued, researchers in the Nautilus team at the Aqua Security firm are reporting. A series of two batches of data the researchers accessed using the Travis CI programming interface yielded 4.28 million and 770 million logs from 2013 through May 2022. After sampling a small percentage of the data, the researchers found what they believe are 73,000 tokens, secrets, and various credentials. "These access keys and credentials are linked to popular cloud service providers, including GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub," Aqua Security said. "Attackers can use this sensitive data to initiate massive cyberattacks and to move laterally in the cloud. Anyone who has ever used Travis CI is potentially exposed, so we recommend rotating your keys immediately."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [T]he world is now one step closer to seeing operational space-based solar energy as scientists from China's Xidian University completed testing and inspection on a ground array built to collect space-based solar power. They conducted a successful test of the "world's first full-link and full-system solar power plant" on June 5, according to a press statement from the university. The space-based solar power plant is a 246-feet-tall (75 meters) steel tower built on Xidian University's southern campus. In theory, the Xidian University power plant will connect to orbital satellites that will harvest solar power 24/7 due to their geostationary orbits, before beaming that energy down to Earth via high-frequency microwave beams. The power plant will feature five different subsystems aimed at developing space-based solar power arrays. Space-based solar power has great potential as it can collect energy continuously while sidestepping common problems such as bad weather and waiting for daybreak. However, hurdles do remain, such as assessing the effects of a high-frequency energy beam on communications, air traffic, and the well-being of nearby residents. Xidian University's new ground station is part of a space-based solar power proposal called OMEGA, which stands for Orb-Shape Membrane Energy Gathering Array. The project was first proposed in 2014 by Duan Baoyan from the Xidian University School of Electromechanical Engineering and his colleagues. [...] China's OMEGA project, meanwhile, has successfully transmitted energy wirelessly as microwaves over a distance of approximately 180 feet (55 meters). This capability puts the project three years ahead of its original schedule, the university says in its press release. Still, Baoyan concedes that a lot of work is still required, and fully operational space-based solar power could still be years away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Otto's Celara 500L -- "the most fuel-efficient, commercially viable business aircraft in the world" -- is about to get a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain. New Atlas reports: The Celera 500L is a truly remarkable design. Otto Aviation says its odd shape delivers an astonishing 59 percent reduction in drag, and a massive leap in efficiency and range compared to traditional plane geometries. [...] The whole thing is designed to maximize laminar flow -- smooth layers of airflow with little to no mixing of adjacent layers moving at different speeds. This avoids the swirls and eddies that lead to air turbulence at speed, causing aerodynamic drag and wasted energy. Laminar flow is by no means a new concept, but Otto says it's pushed the idea so far forward with the Celera design that it uses 80 percent less fuel than a traditional design. No, that's not a typo. [...] Now clearly, an 80 percent reduction in fossil fuel use is an environmental win in and of itself. But if there's one sector in aviation that's crying out for brain-busting efficiency figures like the Celera promises, it's the emerging zero-emissions sector, which is currently struggling against poor range figures thanks to the low energy density of lithium batteries. Indeed, when we first wrote about the Celera 500L back in 2020, many questioned why the heck this thing wasn't electric from the get go. And it seems Otto is on board with the idea, as it's now announced a collaboration with hydrogen aviation pioneers ZeroAvia to develop a fuel cell-electric powertrain specific to the Celera's requirements. This airframe's bulbous shape works well with a hydrogen concept -- hydrogen powertrains can weigh much less than battery-electric ones, but they tend to take up a bit of space. Still, ZeroAvia is being relatively humble with its ambitions to begin with, aiming for a range of just 1,000 nautical miles (1,852 km) of zero-emissions range for a hydrogen-fueled Celera. Still, that's a very useful distance, and pretty extraordinary for a clean electric passenger plane.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023. The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany. As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer. "It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter," Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email. [...] In the new study, Autti and his team used "magnons" to build their time crystal. Magnons are "quasiparticles," which emerge in the collective state of a group of atoms. In this case, the team of physicists took helium-3 -- a helium atom with two protons but only one neutron -- and cooled it to within a ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the helium-3 transformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms share a common quantum state and work in concert with each other. In that condensate, all the spins of the electrons in the helium-3 linked up and worked together, generating waves of magnetic energy, the magnons. These waves sloshed back and forth forever, making them a time crystal. Autti's team took two groups of magnons, each one operating as its own time crystal, and brought them close enough to influence each other. The combined system of magnons acted as one time crystal with two different states. Autti's team hopes that their experiments can clarify the relationship between quantum and classical physics. Their goal is to build time crystals that interact with their environments without the quantum states disintegrating, allowing the time crystal to keep running while it is used for something else. It wouldn't mean free energy -- the motion associated with a time crystal doesn't have kinetic energy in the usual sense, but it could be used for quantum computing. Having two states is important, because that is the basis for computation. In classical computer systems, the basic unit of information is a bit, which can take either a 0 or 1 state, while in quantum computing, each "qubit" can be in more than one place at the same time, allowing for much more computing power. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.