British researchers have developed a biodegradable gel to repair damage caused by a heart attack in a breakthrough that could improve the health of millions of survivors worldwide. The Guardian reports: Now after years of efforts searching for solutions to help the heart repair itself, researchers at the University of Manchester have created a gel that can be injected directly into the beating heart -- effectively working as a scaffold to help injected cells grow new tissue. Until now, when cells have been injected into the heart to reduce the risk of heart failure, only 1% have stayed in place and survived. But the gel can hold them in place as they graft on to the heart. To prove the technology could work, researchers showed the gel can support growth of normal heart muscle tissue. When they added human cells reprogrammed to become heart muscle cells into the gel, they were able to grow in a dish for three weeks and the cells started to spontaneously beat. Echocardiograms (ultrasounds of the heart) and electrocardiograms (ECGs, which measure the electrical activity of the heart) on mice confirmed the safety of the gel. To gain more knowledge, researchers will test the gel after mice have a heart attack to show they develop new muscle tissue. The study is being presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HBO Max has canceled the sci-fi TV show Raised by Wolves after two seasons. From a report: Originally ordered to series for the cable channel TNT, its first season premiered in 2020, and four months after HBO Max launched, it ranked as the service's top streaming series. The first two episodes were directed by Ridley Scott, and the plot, which focused on two androids raising human children on a desolate alien planet, aligned well with the hallmarks of his style. [...] Before the cancellation, cast members were calling on watchers to advocate for the show's future. Abubakar Salim, who played "Father" in Raised by Wolves, hinted in a Twitter thread last week that the show's fate was in jeopardy with the hashtag #RenewRaisedByWolves, while referring to the merger of HBO Max parent company WarnerMedia and Discovery, which was completed in April. HBO Max said in a statement to Variety, which first broke the news: "While we are not proceeding with a third season of Raised by Wolves, we are beyond grateful to the stellar cast and crew, our creators Aaron Guzikowski, Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, and the entire team at Scott Free Productions, for their beautiful artistry and unique ability to immerse fans into the world of Kepler-22b."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers in Australia have been able to use trace amounts of liquid platinum to create cheap and highly efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening a pathway to dramatic emissions reductions in crucial industries. When combined with liquid gallium, the amounts of platinum required are small enough to significantly extend the earth's reserves of this valuable metal, while potentially offering more sustainable solutions for CO2 reduction, ammonia synthesis in fertilizer production, and green fuel cell creation, together with many other possible applications in chemical industries. These findings, which focus on platinum, are just a drop in the liquid metal ocean when it comes to the potential of these catalysis systems. By expanding on this method, there could be more than 1,000 possible combinations of elements for over 1,000 different reactions. Platinum is very effective as a catalyst (the trigger for chemical reactions) but is not widely used at industrial scale because it's expensive. Most catalysis systems involving platinum also have high ongoing energy costs to operate. Normally, the melting point for platinum is 1,700C. And when it's used in a solid state for industrial purposes, there needs to be around 10% platinum in a carbon-based catalytic system. It's not an affordable ratio when trying to manufacture components and products for commercial sale. That could be set to change in the future, though, after scientists at UNSW Sydney and RMIT University found a way to use tiny amounts of platinum to create powerful reactions, and without expensive energy costs. The team, including members of the ARC Center of Excellence in Exciton Science and the ARC Center of Excellence in Future Low Energy Technologies, combined the platinum with liquid gallium, which has a melting point of just 29.8C -- that's room temperature on a hot day. When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts, and without firing up a hugely powerful industrial furnace. For this mechanism, processing at an elevated temperature is only required at the initial stage, when platinum is dissolved in gallium to create the catalysis system. And even then, it's only around 300C for an hour or two, nowhere near the continuous high temperatures often required in industrial-scale chemical engineering. The results have been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony said Tuesday that Nobuyuki Idei, its former chairman and CEO who led the Japanese giant's push into the digital network business, has died of liver failure. He was 84. Kyodo News reports: In addition to enhancing Sony's presence in the digital and communications fields, he also focused on the entertainment business, such as movies, music and game consoles, laying the foundation for its current operations. Idei joined Sony in 1960, becoming president in 1995 and CEO in 1998. He served as both chairman and chief executive from 2000 to 2005. He stepped down as chairman and CEO amid lackluster sales in its appliance business, making headlines for naming Howard Stringer as his successor at a time when it was still rare for a Japanese company to be led by a non-Japanese CEO. Idei also contributed to the advancement of the internet environment in Japan, having been appointed to head the government's IT strategy council in 2000. [...] Under Idei's tenure as CEO, the conglomerate launched its Vaio-brand personal computers and domestic internet service provider So-net. It also ventured into online-based banking services and the nonlife insurance business. But after its earlier success with sales of bulky CRT televisions, Sony was slow to transition to flat screens and was outpaced amid intense competition with South Korean and other overseas rival manufacturers. Company stocks plunged in 2003 in what was referred to as the "Sony shock," and sluggish growth for much of the following decade led Sony to focus on corporate restructuring initiatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo and Uber, former legal foes and bitter rivals in the autonomous vehicle space, are teaming up to speed up the adoption of driverless trucks. The Verge reports: Waymo is integrating Uber Freight, the ride-hail company's truck brokerage, into the technology that powers its autonomous big rigs. This "long-term strategic partnership" will enable fleet owners to more quickly deploy trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous "driver" for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the companies said. Waymo describes the team-up as a "deep integration" of each company's products, including a jointly developed "product roadmap" to outline how autonomous trucks will get deployed on Uber's network once they are commercial ready. Until then, Waymo says it will use Uber Freight with its own test fleet to better understand how driverless trucks will receive and accept delivery orders. But the partnership goes beyond just beta testing each other's technology. Waymo said it will reserve "billions of miles of its goods-only capacity for the Uber Freight network" in a capacity commitment meant to underscore the seriousness of this partnership. The report notes that Alphabet's Waymo sued Uber in early 2017 over allegations of trade secret theft and patent infringement. The two sides reached a settlement agreement about a year later. "Uber later admitted that it misappropriated some of Waymo's tech and vowed to license it for future use," adds The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Besides new language features and other improvements, Python 3.11 performance is looking fantastic with very nice performance uplift over prior Python 3.x releases," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: Python 3.11 has been baking support for task groups in asyncio, fine-grained error locations in tracebacks, the self-type to return an instance of their class, TypeVarTuple for variadic generics, and various other features. Besides changes affecting the Python language itself, Python 3.11 has been landing performance work from the "Faster Cython Project" to speed-up the reference implementation. Python 3.11 is 10~60% faster than Python 3.10 according to the official figures and a 1.22x speed-up with their standard benchmark suite. The Python Docs cover some of the significant performance improvements made for this upcoming release. The formal Python 3.11.0 release isn't expected until October while multiple betas will come through July and then at least two release candidates in the following months before early October.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new security feature in Apple's upcoming macOS 13 Ventura will automatically block new USB-C devices from communicating with the operating system until the accessory can be approved by the user. Apple dropped details of the new security feature in its release notes, which appears to be aimed at protecting newer Apple laptops that run its bespoke M1 or M2 chips from potentially malicious accessories. According to Apple's description, the feature will be enabled by default and will require the user to approve a USB-C accessory before it can talk to the operating system -- essentially an on-screen pop-up asking the user for permission. Apple says this doesn't apply to power adapters, standalone displays, and connections to an approved hub -- and devices can still charge even if you don't approve the accessory. Apple says that accessories that are already connected will automatically work when updating to the new macOS software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal announced on Tuesday that the service now "supports the native transfer of cryptocurrencies between PayPal and other wallets and exchanges." Decrypt reports: The ability to conduct external transfers on PayPal's crypto platform, an image of which can be seen below, will start rolling out to users today and be available to everyone in the U.S. in the next week or two. PayPal first launched its crypto offering in late 2020, allowing users to buy, sell, and hold four cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin -- but not to move the funds to external destinations like MetaMask, Coinbase, or hardware wallets. The fact users now can do this is significant because PayPal, which also owns the popular app Venmo, is used by hundreds of millions of people across the world to move money, and is increasingly used by merchants as a payment platform. It's also notable that PayPal is not backing off its ambitious crypto plans despite a financial downturn that's seen the company's share price get battered in recent months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China should seize Taiwan to gain control of TSMC if the US and its allies impose sanctions against the Middle Kingdom like those now in place against Russia, according to a prominent Chinese economist. The Register reports: This latest development comes in a speech by Chen Wenling, chief economist for the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, delivered at the China-US Forum hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China at the end of May. The text of the speech was posted to the Guancha (Observer) online news site. In the speech, Chen opened by saying that China and the US needs to ease the hostile relations between them, and that a confrontation between the two powers would be "a disaster for mankind." However, she then claimed the US was seeking to isolate China, citing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreements as attempts by the US to create two large "anti-China" trade bodies, although the US pulled out of the former and the latter was cancelled because of disagreements. Echoing many concerns in the West, Chen said that China needs to take steps to secure its industrial chain and supply chain, and make strategic preparations to "deal with the United States' insistence on breaking the chain and containing it," according to a translation of the text. This means that if the US and allies imposed sanctions on China like those deployed against Russia, China "must recover Taiwan" and "seize TSMC, a company that originally belonged to China." Chen claimed that "they are speeding up the transfer to the United States, and to build six factories in the United States. We must not let all the goals of the transfer be achieved," a possible reference to the US CHIPS Act, which seeks to encourage the building of semiconductor fabrication plants on US soil, which may include funding going to TSMC for chipmaking facilities it is building in Arizona. While alarming, Chen's speech appears to suggest that China should only take this action as retaliation to threats against its economic security, and there is no reason to believe that sanctions comparable to those on Russia are likely unless China becomes involved in a similar act of hostility against another country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel or AMD processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs. Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system -- it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code. Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set. As Martin points out, this isn't strictly legal because of macOS's licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta's full capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bozhidar Batsov writes: Every now and again I come across some discussion on making Emacs "modern". The argument always go more or less like this - Emacs doesn't look and behave like and the world will end if we don't copy something "crucial" from it. [...] If you ask me -- there's pretty much nothing we can do that would suddenly make Emacs as popular as VS Code. But you know what -- that's perfectly fine. After all there are plenty of "modern" editors that are even less popular than Emacs, so clearly being "modern" doesn't make you popular. And there's also our "arch-nemesis" vim, that's supposedly as "dated" as Emacs, but is extremely popular.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hirrolot's blog: When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you find an issue with an explanation that it is theoretically impossible to design your API in this way, owing to some subtle language bug. The issue is Open and dated Apr 5, 2017. I entered Rust four years ago. To this moment, I co-authored teloxide and dptree, wrote several publications and translated a number of language release announcements. I also managed to write some production code in Rust, and had a chance to speak at one online meetup dedicated to Rust. Still, from time to time I find myself disputing with Rust's borrow checker and type system for no practical reason. Yes, I am no longer stupefied by such errors as cannot return reference to temporary value - over time, I developed multiple heuristic strategies to cope with lifetimes... But one recent situation has made me to fail ignominiously. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world appears to be at an inflection point. Foreign Affairs: Business leaders have declared the acceleration of deglobalization and sounded the alarm about a new period of stagflation. Academics have decried the return of conquest and hailed the renewal of transatlantic ties. And countries are rethinking almost every aspect of their foreign policies, including trade, defense spending, and military alliances. These dramatic shifts have overshadowed another profound transformation in the global energy system. For the last two decades, the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions has gradually reshaped the global energy order. Now, as a result of the war in Ukraine, energy security has returned to the fore, joining climate change as a top concern for policymakers. Together, these dual priorities are poised to reshape national energy planning, energy trade flows, and the broader global economy. Countries will increasingly look inward, prioritizing domestic energy production and regional cooperation even as they seek to transition to net-zero carbon emissions. If countries retreat into strategic energy blocs, a multidecade trend toward more energy interconnectedness risks giving way to an age of energy fragmentation. But in addition to economic nationalism and deglobalization, the coming energy order will be defined by something that few analysts have fully appreciated: government intervention in the energy sector on a scale not seen in recent memory. After four decades during which they generally sought to curb their activity in energy markets, Western governments are now recognizing the need to play a more expansive role in everything from building (and retiring) fossil fuel infrastructure to influencing where private companies buy and sell energy to limiting emissions through carbon pricing, subsidies, mandates, and standards. This shift is bound to invite comparisons to the 1970s, when excessive government intervention in energy markets exacerbated repeated energy crises. The dawning era of government intervention won't be a bad thing, however, if managed correctly. Appropriately limited and tailored to address specific market failures, it can forestall the worst effects of climate change, mitigate many energy security risks, and help manage the biggest geopolitical challenges of the coming energy transition. The current energy crisis has refocused the world's attention on geopolitical energy risks, forcing a reckoning between tomorrow's climate ambitions and today's energy needs and offering a preview of the tumultuous era ahead. How governments respond to these challenges, brought into sharp relief by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, will shape the new energy order for decades to come.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it. Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it. From a report: The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as "health span." The sum, if the Saudis can spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging -- and how it might be slowed down with drugs. The foundation hasn't yet made a formal announcement, but the scope of its effort has been outlined at scientific meetings and is the subject of excited chatter among aging researchers, who hope it will underwrite large human studies of potential anti-aging drugs. The fund is managed by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the onetime chief scientist at PespsiCo, who was recruited to the CEO job in 2020. "Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan," Khan said in an interview. "There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one." The idea, popular among some longevity scientists, is that if you can slow the body's aging process, you can delay the onset of multiple diseases and extend the healthy years people are able to enjoy as they grow older. Khan says the fund is going to give grants for basic scientific research on what causes aging, just as others have done, but it also plans to go a step further by supporting drug studies, including trials of "treatments that are patent expired or never got commercialized."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IRA Financial Trust, a platform that lets users save for retirement in alternative assets like cryptocurrency, is suing the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange over an alleged failure to protect its customers from a heist that resulted in the theft of $36 million in crypto. The financial platform partners with Gemini, owned by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, to allow customers to trade and store cryptocurrency. From a report: In February, IRA was the victim of a major attack that drained the millions in funds customers had stored with Gemini. The company was reportedly swatted, the act of calling the police to report a fake crime at someone's location, when the cyberattack occurred. Police showed up at IRA's South Dakota headquarters after false reports of a robbery, while bad actors made off with millions in crypto. At the time, a source close to Gemini told CoinDesk it wasn't hacked and that it makes various security controls available to its partners. "Gemini knew about the risks attendant to crypto assets," IRA's complaint states. "In fact, it built its public image around purportedly mitigating those risks. But like so much else in the world of crypto, Gemini's image is just that: an image. In reality, Gemini brushes security aside when there is a chance to earn more revenue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The developers behind the open source MongoDB, and its commercial service counterpart MongoDB Atlas, have been busy making the document database easier to use for developers. From a report: Available in preview, Queryable Encryption provides the ability to query encrypted data, and with the entire query transaction be encrypted -- an industry first according to MongoDB. This feature will be of interest to organizations with a lot of sensitive data, such as banks, health care institutions and the government. This eliminates the need for developers to be experts in encryption, Davidson said. This end-to-end client-side encryption uses novel encrypted index data structures, the data being searched remains encrypted at all times on the database server, including in memory and in the CPU. The keys never leave the application and the company maintains that the query speed nor overall application performance are impacted by the new feature. MongoDB is also now supporting time series data, which are important for monitoring physical systems, quick-moving financial data, or other temporally-oriented datasets. In MongoDB 6.0, time-series collections can have secondary indexes on measurements, and the database system has been optimized to sort time-based data more quickly. Although there are a number of databases specifically geared towards time-series data specifically, such as InfluxDB, many organizations may not want to stand-up an entire database system for this specific use, a separate system costing more in terms of support and expertise, Davidson argued. Another feature is Cluster-to-Cluster Synchronization, which provides the continuous data synchronization of MongoDB clusters across environments. It works with Atlas, in private cloud, on-premises, or on the edge. This sets the stage for using data in multiple places for testing, analytics, and backup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple announced some major new features for Mail that finally bring the email app closer to parity with Gmail and other popular email clients. From a report: Perhaps the most useful will be an undo send feature, which will let you call back an email within 10 seconds of hitting the send button. A "remind me" feature will let you set a time for an email to come back to the top of your inbox. A new scheduled send feature that allows you to specify exactly when an email should go out. And Mail will even tell you when it thinks you've forgotten to include an attachment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is going to force smartphone manufacturers like Apple and other electronics makers to equip their devices with a standard USB-C charging port. From a report: EU lawmakers on Tuesday agreed to a single mobile charging port for mobile phones, tablets and cameras. It means equipment makers will have to comply with the new terms by 2024. "We have a deal on the #CommonCharger!" EU commissioner Thierry Breton said via Twitter. The legislation is designed to cut waste and make life easier for consumers who would theoretically be able to use one charger for multiple devices. It could have a huge impact on Apple, as the company still uses its own Lightning connector to charge iPhones. The company has recently equipped iPads and MacBooks with USB-C ports. Apple did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. However, a spokesperson for the company said last September that the firm stands for "innovation and deeply cares about the customer experience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon's new head of artificial intelligence wants to speed up technological modernization after an onslaught of what he calls "valid" criticism from recently departed senior leaders who expressed frustration at slow progress. From a report: Craig Martell, who was previously head of machine learning at Lyft and Dropbox and led AI initiatives at LinkedIn, told Bloomberg News in his first interview since starting his job as the Pentagon's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer that he wanted to make progress despite the department's labyrinthine "bureaucratic inertia." Martell's arrival is a boost for the Pentagon, which is seeking to attract expert talent from the private sector. Martell, who said his first day at the Pentagon on Monday was "overwhelming," added he had taken a "not trivial" pay cut to do the job. "It's not my goal to come in here and change the entire culture of the DoD. It's my goal to demonstrate that with the right cultural changes, we can have really big impact," he said, adding that the opinions of senior leaders who had left were "mostly correct."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report from the Department of Justice proposes more international cooperation among law enforcement agencies on the crypto and blockchain front. From a report: Information sharing and the harmonization of anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules were also proposed in the DOJ report, which was developed in conjunction with other US agencies in the wake of the Biden White House's executive order on crypto. That EO was released in March. The report itself was drafted in response to that executive order. In the introduction, US Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that "the growing use of digital assets in the global financial system has profound implications for investors, consumers, and businesses and increases the risk of crimes such as money laundering, ransomware, terrorist financing, fraud and theft, and sanctions evasion."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The next generation of CarPlay will be compatible with a variety of aspect ratios -- from portrait to landscape -- and can even adapt to multidisplay dashboards, including vehicles with digital instrument clusters or with ultrawide pillar-to-pillar displays. CarPlay will be more integrated with all the host vehicle's systems. Beyond its current navigation and media consumption functionalities, Apple CarPlay will handle traditional instrumentation like speedometer, tachometer, temperature gauges and fuel or EV battery level displays. Users will be able to adjust their climate controls, activate seat heaters, monitor air quality and even tie into Apple's smart home technologies directly from the CarPlay interface. As with the next generation of iOS on the phone, Apple is also giving CarPlay users the ability to customize how CarPlay looks with selectable themes, backgrounds and widgets. From loud pink analog-style gauges to slick numerical displays and bar graphs, CarPlay will be able to match a wide range of vehicle interior designs and personal aesthetic tastes. Perhaps most interestingly, Apple says that this new full-fat approach to CarPlay as a complete vehicle interface will continue to be powered entirely by the connected iPhone, giving Apple an unprecedented amount of control over the vehicle's operation as well as access to data generated by each host vehicle. According to Apple, the first vehicles to support the new CarPlay update should be announced in late 2023. It lists Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar-Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Volvo and Polestar as partners that are "excited to bring this new vision of CarPlay to customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo described the sentencing of a hacker earlier this year as a "unique opportunity" to send a message to all gamers about video game piracy. Axios reports: A newly released transcript of the Feb. 10 sentencing of Gary Bowser provides rare insight, directly from Nintendo, about the company's grievances. Bowser, a Canadian national, pled guilty last year to U.S. government cybercrime charges over his role as a top member of Team Xecuter. The group sold tech that circumvented copyright protections and enabled the Nintendo Switch and other systems to play pirated games. Authorities estimated the piracy cost Nintendo upward of $65 million over nearly a decade and even compelled the company to spend resources releasing a more secure model of the Switch. "This is a very significant moment for us," Nintendo lawyer Ajay Singh told the court at the time, as he laid out the company's case against piracy and awaited the sentencing. "It's the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile," Singh said. "It's for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen." He noted Nintendo's losses from Team Xecuter's piracy and sounded a note of sympathy for smaller non-Nintendo game makers whose works are also pirated.And he wove in a complaint about cheating, which he said Team Xecuter's hacks enabled. Cheating could scare off honest players and upset families: "Parents should not be forced to explain to their children why people cheat and why sometimes games are not fair, just because one person wants an unfair advantage." At the hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik noted that TV and movies glorify hackers as "sticking it to the man," suggesting that "big companies are reaping tremendous profits and it's good for the little guy to have this." "What do you think?" Lasnik asked Nintendo's lawyer at one point. "What else can we do to convince people that there's no glory in this hacking/piracy?" "There would be a large benefit to further education of the public," Singh replied. In brief remarks directly to Lasnik, Bowser said longer prison time wouldn't scare off hackers. "There's so much money to be made from piracy that it's insignificant," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, the SEC is looking into whether Binance's initial coin offering of its Binance coin (BNB) token in 2017 was an unregistered security offering that should have been registered with the regulatory agency. CoinDesk reports: Without commenting on the details of the reported probe, a spokesperson for Binance told CoinDesk via email, "As the industry has grown at a rapid pace, we have been working very diligently to educate and assist law enforcement and regulators in the U.S. and internationally, while also adhering to new guidelines. We will continue to meet all requirements set by regulators." BNB was trading down 4% after news of the report came out. The SEC is also investigating market-making companies owned or partially owned by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao that do business with Binance.US, a U.S.-based affiliate of the global exchange, [...]. According to the report, one of the SEC's focuses is on whether Binance.US is wholly independent of the global exchange and whether employees may be involved in insider trading.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Independent: The biggest ever four-day working week pilot is set to begin in the UK, with over 70 companies and 3,300 workers ready to take part. The trial will result in no loss of pay for employees, based on the principle of the 100:80:100 model. Employees will receive 100 percent of the pay for 80 percent of the time in exchange for a commitment to maintaining 100 percent productivity. An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more. The pilot is running for six months and is being organized by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with leading think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College. [...] Researchers will work with each participating organization to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality. Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling. Ars Technica reports: The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made "Neural Engine" system. By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction -- even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones. The report notes that Metal 3 also includes "a new 'resource-loading' API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games." The same Metal 3 API benefits will also come to iPadOS 16 later this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday he is investigating Twitter over its reporting of how many accounts on the platform are from bots and fake users, saying the company may be misrepresenting the number to inflate its value and raise its revenue. The Texas Tribune reports: Twitter has claimed in its financial regulatory filings that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts. But Paxton on Monday alleged that spam accounts could make up as much as 20% of users or more. "Bot accounts can not only reduce the quality of users' experience on the platform but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming Texas consumers and businesses," Paxton said. False reporting of fake users could be considered "false, misleading, or deceptive" under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, he said. Paxton sent Twitter a civil investigative demand, requiring the social media company to turn over documents related to how it calculates and manages its user data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LastPass says they're now the first password manager with a passwordless sign-in feature. Engadget reports: Grant permission through the LastPass Authenticator mobile app and you can update account info on the web without entering your master password. The approach relies on FIDO-compliant password-free technology. The feature is available to both personal and business users. LastPass is also promising options beyond the Authenticator app in the future, such as relying on biometric scans or hardware security keys.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China. White House officials said Biden's actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production -- even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...] The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration's clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple brought its iPad tablet a bit closer to the Mac computers in spirit on Monday at WWDC 2022, announcing new features for its iPadOS 16 software that add better multitasking features. From a report: The new changes to the iPad represent another key shift to the device, aiming to advance the "pro" capabilities of Apple's tablets. While Apple's added to the power and capabilities of its iPads, the software has been criticized by many reviewers, including us at CNET, for not offering enough functionality. [...] Apple also has a collaborative workspace app called Freeform, coming later this year, that will work like a giant whiteboard. Invited collaborators could can start adding stuff at the same time. iPadOS 16 is also aiming to make better use of more advanced iPads that feature Apple's M1 chip. Metal 3 promises better graphics, but Apple's also aiming to add more desktop-like features in apps: Some will have customizable toolbars, and the Files app looks like it's finally getting a little more versatile for file management. M1 iPads are getting display scaling to create an effectively larger-feeling display, allowing more app screen space (but with smaller text and images). There's also free-form window resizing, along with external display support. Both features have been overdue on iPadOS. Stage Manager, a MacOS feature that's coming later this year, is also on iPadOS. The result looks to be windows that can overlap and be different sizes, just like a Mac.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palermo in Southern Italy, home to about 1.3 million people, has shut down all its services, public websites, and online portals following a cyberattack on Friday. BleepingComputer reports: It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public offices. Moreover, tourists cannot access online bookings for tickets to museums and theaters (Massimo Theater) or even confirm their reservations on sports facilities. Finally, limited traffic zone cards are impossible to acquire, so no regulation occurs, and no fines are issued for relevant violations. Unfortunately, the historical city center requires these passes for entrance, so tourists and local residents are severely impacted. Italy recently received threats from the Killnet group, a pro-Russian hacktivist who attacks countries that support Ukraine with resource-depleting cyberattacks known as DDoS (distributed denial of service). While some were quick to point the finger at Killnet, the cyberattack on Palermo bears the signs of a ransomware attack rather than a DDoS. The councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo, Paolo Petralia Camassa, has stated that all systems were cautiously shut down and isolated from the network while he also warned that the outage might last for a while.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple demonstrated "passkeys" at WWDC 2022, a new biometric sign-in standard that could finally kill off the password for good. TechCrunch reports: Passkeys are based on the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn), a standard that uses public-key cryptography instead of passwords for authenticating users to websites and applications, and are stored on-device rather than on a web server. The digital password replacement uses Touch ID or Face ID for biometric verification, which means that rather than having to input a long string of characters, an app or website you're logging into will push a request to your phone for authentication. During its WWDC demo of the password-free technology, Apple showed how passkeys are backed up within the iCloud Keychain and can be synced across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV with end-to-end encryption. Users will also be able to sign in to websites and apps on non-Apple devices using an iPhone or iPad to scan a QR code and Touch ID or Face ID to authenticate. "Because it's just a single tap to sign in, it's simultaneously easier, faster and more secure than almost all common forms of authentication today," said Garrett Davidson, an Apple engineer on the Authentication Experience team.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The phones of Ukrainian officials have been targeted by hackers as Russia pursues its invasion of Ukraine, a senior cybersecurity official said Monday. Reuters: Victor Zhora, the deputy head of Ukraine's State Special Communications Service, said that phones being used by the country's public servants had come under sustained targeting. "We see a lot of attempts to hack Ukrainian officials' phones, mainly with the spreading of malware," Zhora told journalists at an online news conference meant to mark the 100 days since Russian forces poured across the border. Zhora said his service had, so far, not seen any evidence that Ukrainian devices had been compromised. The hacking of government leaders' devices crept up the international agenda following a cascade of revelations last year around the how phones used by presidents, ministers, and other government officials had been targeted or compromised.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its WWDC event today, Apple previewed several new features coming with iOS 16, which will debut this fall after spending the summer in beta testing. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The lock screen is at the center of Apple's iOS 16 updates, starting with the ability to customize fonts and colors used. It will be possible to add widgets and configure multiple lock screens that you can switch between by swiping across the screen. Different focus modes can also be assigned to different lock screens. Apple-supplied wallpapers get a refresh too, with animated and Pride-themed choices. Notifications appear on the lock screen differently, too. Instead of piling up across the screen, they "roll in" at the bottom of the screen. There's also a "live activities" feature to display notifications associated with an event like an Uber ride or sporting event in a single tile. There's a major update coming to messages, too: iOS 16 adds the ability to edit typos out of sent messages, recall messages that you didn't mean to send, and the ability to mark a message thread as unread so you can come back to it later. SharePlay is also coming to messages. Apple's powerful Live Text feature will be coming to video. Additionally, there will be more actions available when you use Live Text in photos or videos. Wallet gets some expanded features too, with a way to share saved IDs securely by supplying only necessary information. It'll be easier to share saved keys, too. Apple Pay gets a new "Pay Later" feature, adding the option to split a bill into four equal payments without interest or fees. Apple Maps will get multi-stop routing in iOS 16, and six more cities will be added to the "detailed city experience" introduced in iOS 15. Apple is also adding shared iCloud photo libraries, in an effort to make it easier to share certain photos across family and friends' accounts. Up to six users can access a shared library. Photos will include sharing suggestions, and image edits and keywords will be synced for all users. There's also a new feature called Safety Check, which is aimed to protect people in abusive situations. It allows you to easily revoke access to certain information, like location, that you may have shared with someone else previously. In order to download iOS 16, you'll need an iPhone 8 or later, meaning Apple is "more or less ending support for the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and original iPhone SE," reports The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers have shared the following report: Messaging apps that offer end-to-end encryption can claim that they're protecting their users by saying that they've thrown away the key -- metaphorical and literal -- and can't undo what's been scrambled in transmission. Telegram, however, claims it protects every user whether they use E2EE or not, saying that government data requests have to pass an especially high muster before they would comply and that they have never acceded to such request. Not so, a report claims. Der Spiegel reports from sources that Telegram has fulfilled a number data requests from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office involving terror and child abuse suspects. Still more data requests for other criminal cases have been more or less ignored. [...] The German government has been pressuring Dubai-based Telegram to cooperate with its investigations into right-wing extremist groups who have been using the messaging platform to spread their cause and coordinate action. Telegram has ramped up its own enforcement actions recently, but its user and group bans have been as comprehensive as lawmakers have been looking for.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura. From a report: Ventura's headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It's being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop -- enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column. Spotlight also gets some handy quality-of-life updates, adding the ability to Quick Look search results directly from the Spotlight window, and the ability to run Shortcuts from within Spotlight. Safari picks up the ability to share groups of tabs with other users, letting all users add and remove tabs. The browser is also adding a FIDO-compliant security technology called PassKeys, which aim to replace passwords with cryptographically generated keys that sync between devices using iCloud Keychain. Sites that support PassKeys can be opened using TouchID or FaceID. Apple's cross-device Continuity features were also updated. FaceTime calls can be handed off seamlessly between different Macs and iDevices, while Continuity Camera allows you to use an iPhone as a webcam (your iPhone's LED can even be used as a makeshift ring light). Continuity Camera supports Center Stage and Portrait Mode effects, too, though presumably they will require newer iPhones with hardware that supports those features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's WWDC isn't an event that traditionally packs in several hardware announcements, but nevertheless, a new MacBook Air took the stage during the keynote. From a report: The new 2022 model has been designed around the more powerful M2 processor, and its design comes closer to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, with a more squared-off look than the traditional wedge shape. It features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack. It's 11mm thick and comes in at 2.7 pounds. It will be available in silver, space grey, and new "starlight" gold and "midnight" blue colors. This MacBook Air will be available in July starting at $1,199. The M1-based Air will continue to be available for $999. The 2022 MacBook Air features a larger 13.6-inch display with smaller bezels surrounding it. Apple says it has 500 nits of peak brightness. It features a silent, fan-less design, which is impressive given the performance gains that Apple is claiming to squeeze from the M2. Apple says that it's 40-percent faster than the previous model, but that performance boost likely varies depending on the app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today announced a major update to Apple Pay, called Apple Pay Later, which will allow users to split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments without interest or late fees. From a report: The new financial product -- which was rumored ahead of its debut at Apple's 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference -- marks Apple's move into the enormous and growing buy now, pay later industry. Apple Pay Later is available everywhere Apple Pay is available, both in apps and on the web -- it requires no additional integration from the developer or merchant side. Upcoming payments are made, and can be tracked or managed, through Apple Wallet on iOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After a long, long month of laptop releases, Computex 2022 is finally over. In some ways, it's the Computex that wasn't. The early part of this year was an exciting time to be a laptop reporter. Every company and its mother announced that big ideas were on the way. Wacky products abounded, from monitors to phones. LG Display (which supplied the 13.3-inch panel for Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Fold) showed off a 17-inch foldable OLED screen. We saw RGB, OLEDs, and haptics galore. Chipmakers promised architectural innovations and performance gains. We were told that these were all coming soon. At the end of May was Computex, the biggest laptop-specific show of the year. This would've been the perfect time for some of these innovative releases to be, you know, released -- or get a release date. But we didn't get them at Computex 2022. The show was, in fact, aggressively unexciting. We got a heck of a lot of chip bumps. We got some higher refresh rate displays. We got an HP Spectre x360 with rounder corners. Don't get me wrong: incremental upgrades, both to internal specs and external elements, are important. They will make a difference in people's lives. Companies do not need to reinvent the wheel with every single laptop they release. But it is still worth noting that a number of devices that truly seem poised to expand or redefine their categories are not yet here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has halted businesses from using RCS for promotion in India, the company's biggest market by users, following reports of rampant spam by some firms in a setback for the standard that the company is hoping to help become the future of SMS messaging. From a report: Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption. Google, Samsung and a number of other firms including telecom operators have rolled out support for RCS to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in recent years. Google said last month that RCS messaging in the Messages app for Android had amassed over 500 million monthly active users. The problem, however, is that scores of businesses in India including top banks and other lending firms have been abusing the feature to send unsolicited promotional materials to any individual's phone number they can find in the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some startups are bold and original. And some, like Nate, had more modest goals: automatically filling out shoppers' contact and payment information on retailers' websites. In exchange for sparing them a minute or two of data entry on their phones, Nate charged shoppers $1 per transaction. But it struggled to turn even that vision into reality. The Information: While the company said it was using artificial intelligence to populate customer information during the checkout process, it had actually hired workers in the Philippines to manually enter the data on retailers' sites for a significant portion of the transactions Nate facilitated in 2021, according to two people with direct knowledge of the company's practices. That meant customers' orders were sometimes placed hours after they clicked the buy button through the Nate app. Nate didn't disclose its decidedly low-tech methods to at least some of the investors from whom the startup tried to raise money, according to a person with direct knowledge of fundraising discussions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kim Yong-rae is the CEO of Speefox, South Korea's biggest manufacturer of capacitors, and he thinks robots are key to the company's survival. On his factory floor, free-standing machines squeal as they spit out gleaming sheets of aluminum that roll into coils. The air is filled with the rhythmic thud of stamping and the buzzing of machinery moving continuously, on the ground and overhead. Capacitors are essential to almost every electronic device, and these will end up in thousands of smartphones, cameras, and home appliances. "Throughout our history, we've always had to find ways to stay ahead," Kim told Rest of World. "Automation is the next step in that process." Speefox's factory is 75% automated, representing South Korea's continued push away from human labor. Part of that drive is labor costs: South Korea's minimum wage has climbed, rising 5% just this year. But the most recent impetus is legal liability for worker death or injury. In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison. Experts and local media say that the law has shaken the heavy industry and construction sectors. Along with pushing the companies to invest to make workplaces safer, they point out, it's triggered a ramp-up of automation in order to require fewer workers -- or, ideally, none at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked President Joe Biden's administration to weigh in on whether the justices should hear a case on whether Meta Platforms' WhatsApp can pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software. From a report: The justices are considering NSO's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the lawsuit to move forward. NSO has argued that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the "Pegasus" spyware. WhatsApp has said the software was used for the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents. The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Justice Department to file a brief offering its views on the legal issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ASML has pressed IP theft allegations against two firms created by 'flagbearer' for China's semiconductor industry. From a report: Few companies are better positioned to benefit from the crippling shortage of computer chips than ASML, a Dutch manufacturer whose equipment plays an integral role in making the world's most advanced semiconductors. But four lines tucked halfway into an otherwise upbeat, 281-page annual report from February hinted at a potentially incendiary problem. ASML accused a Beijing-based firm, regarded by Chinese officials as one of the country's most promising tech ventures, of potentially stealing its trade secrets. Behind the brief disclosure is an extraordinary multiyear tale of intellectual property theft and a broader threat facing the $556 billion semiconductor industry. In the report, ASML said the Chinese company, Dongfang Jingyuan Electron, is related to a defunct Silicon Valley firm, Xtal, which ASML sued for intellectual property theft. A 2018 trial in California, which received scant attention at the time, provided more detail. Dongfang and Xtal were essentially the same, created a month apart in 2014 by a former ASML engineer named Zongchang Yu, ASML's attorney told the court. The two companies worked in tandem toward the same goal: obtaining ASML's technology and transferring it to China, which is seeking to foster its own semiconductor industry, often at the expense of Western companies, the attorney argued. That technology was secured in sometimes audacious fashion: one engineer was accused of stealing all 2 million lines of source code for critical ASML software and then sharing part of it with Xtal and Dongfang employees in the US and China, according to transcripts of the proceedings. "It's not an accident. It's not anything else," Patrick Ryan, ASML's lead attorney, told the court. "But it is a plot to get technology for the Chinese government."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I do want to shift the culture away from crypto being associated only with cryptocurrency," Chelsea Manning recently told a digital assets news site named the Block.In a world where celebrities are coughing up more than half a million dollars for a jpeg of a cartoon ape, Manning says that the sector has "unequivocally" been overrun by greed... She says this has resulted in a huge misunderstanding of crypto by critics, drawing it away from its privacy-focused roots. "Without cryptography, my entire life history wouldn't have been able to take place," she says. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, used encrypted communication services to disclose classified information to Julian Assange, which was later posted on WikiLeaks. Now, she's a part of privacy blockchain startup Nym as both a security analyst and serving in a hardware optimization role. The Switzerland-based Nym is a decentralized network that uses blockchain technology to mix and scramble packets of metadata — e.g. your IP address, who you talk to, and when and where.... Manning sees Nym as the successor to privacy tech such as the Tor browser and VPNs. Tor, however, has been used both as a way for people in unstable countries to access information and by bad actors looking to access dark web marketplaces such as The Silk Road. Nym says that there are disincentives put in place to stop such abuse via the validation and verification of actors running the nodes on the network. And while blockchain technology is often associated with transparency as opposed to privacy, Nym says it is only the nodes of the so-called mixnet that are ledger-based — and none of the data itself is stored on the ledger. Manning and her colleagues at Nym hope that its mixnet can act as the infrastructure upon which applications can be built to create a privacy-focused internet. By doing this, they hope to foster an alternative to surveillance capitalism — a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff to describe the tracking and commodification of personal data shared online for profit by big tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in 2029," reports Gizmodo, adding that a new paper "details this upcoming journey, a daring mission that could shed new light on the scorching hot planet's mysterious, and potentially habitable, past."Upon its arrival at the second planet from the Sun, the probe will plunge through Venus' atmosphere, ingesting its gases for approximately one hour before landing on the planet's surface, according to the paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. DAVINCI is designed to act as a flying chemistry lab, and it will use its built-in instruments to analyze Venus's atmosphere, temperatures, pressure and wind speed, while taking a few photos of its trip through planetary hell... If it survives the atmospheric entry, the probe will — hopefully — land in the Alpha Regio mountains, which are roughly the size of Texas, according to the researchers behind the new paper. Under ideal conditions, the probe will operate for 17 to 18 minutes once it sticks the landing, but it isn't really required to operate on Venus since all the precious data will have already been collected during its atmospheric plunge. Digital Trends calls Venus "a frontier in planetary science about which very little is known" — then explains why that is.The biggest issue for any potential mission to Venus is the heat, as the surface temperatures can be as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius). That's hot enough to melt lead, and it wreaks havoc with electronics... The pressure at the surface is around 95 bars, or nearly 100 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth's surface, so engineering a probe for this kind of environment is kind of like building a submarine... To keep the probe active for as long as possible, it is spherical and covered in a thick titanium shell to withstand the pressure and insulate against the heat. Then there's more insulation inside this shell, made of special materials including astroquartz, a type of fiber made from fused quartz... It's then filled with carbon dioxide gas to protect the high-voltage electronics from sparking and to stop any Earth gases from leaking in during launch.... The descent sphere will also have a camera that will be snapping high-contrast images of the surface, which can then be built up into 3D maps. For a camera to operate from inside a metal sphere, though, you need a window. And glass isn't a great material for dealing with intensely high-pressure environments. That's why DAVINCI's window will be made not of glass but sapphire... "Our final images will have 10-centimeter resolution," said the team's principal investigator, Jim Garvin. "That's the scale you'd see looking out across your living room...." Researchers know that the clouds of Venus have drops of sulfuric acid in them — and sulfuric acid eats through materials. It's a particular concern for the Kevlar lanyard that will attach the descent sphere to the parachute. So to test whether the lanyard can withstand the acidic environment, the engineers don't just suspend it in a few drops of acid — they coat the entire surface in acid, then test the lanyard's pull strength to make sure it can survive long enough to take the probe through the atmosphere even in the worst possible case. SciTechDaily notes DAVINCI "is the first mission to study Venus using both spacecraft flybys and a descent probe.... "It will also provide the first descent imaging of the mountainous highlands of Venus while mapping their rock composition and surface relief at scales not possible from orbit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Venus crossed the sun's face 10 years ago today," writes Space.com. "Most people alive will never see the sight again." Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr is still thinking about it:Slashdot, what are your memories of the 2012 or 2004 transits? What about other celestial events that you probably won't live long enough to see again? At Space.com, astronomer Tom Kress points out Mercury transits are more common, occurring about 13 times each century — and supplies some context (along with some cool photos):In 1639, English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks had improved on Kepler's tables using his own observations and aptitude for mathematics. He predicted a transit of Venus in December of that year with just a few weeks' notice, and sure enough it occurred. Kepler had miscalculated, and Horrocks became one of the only people in the world to have seen a transit of Venus.... Only six Venus transits have occurred since: in 1761 (as predicted by Kepler), 1769, 1874, 1882, 2004 and 2012. They come in pairs separated by eight years, but with more than a century between each set. The next transit won't occur until 2117 and, with this in mind, I made every effort to witness the entirety of the last one 10 years ago.... Shortly after noon local time, the black edge of the silhouette of Venus emerged on the face of the sun... A chorus of vocal awe erupted across the crowd of skywatchers, culminating in cheers of excitement as Venus' night-side began its rapid ingress onto the disk of the sun — a process that took just over 15 minutes.... I couldn't help but feel closer to Venus than I really was, standing on a huge terrestrial volcano and looking out at the most volcanic planet in the solar system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports on "a crewless robotic boat that had tried to retrace the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower" from the U.K. to Massachusetts' Plymouth Rock. And after five weeks it finally did reach North America. Halifax, Canada. "The technology that makes up the autonomous system worked perfectly, flawlessly," an IBM computing executive involved in the project told the Associated Press. But "Mechanically, we did run into problems." It's especially disappointing because they'd tried the same voyage last year. (Slashdot had noted that "Unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger 'had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem,' reports the Associated Press...") So what happened this year? A new article from the Associated Press reports:It set off again from England nearly a year later on April 27, bound for Virginia — but a generator problem diverted it to Portugal's Azores islands, where a team member flew in to perform emergency repairs. More troubles on the open sea came in late May when the U.S.-bound boat developed a problem with the charging circuit for the generator's starter batteries. AI software is getting better at helping self-driving machines understand their surroundings and pilot themselves, but most robots can't heal themselves when the hardware goes awry. Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the ship, switched to a back-up navigation computer on May 30 and charted a course to Halifax — which was closer than any U.S. destination. And unlike the real Mayflower, "the boat's webcam on Sunday morning showed it being towed by a larger boat as the Halifax skyline neared — a safety requirement under international maritime rules, IBM said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR reports:Just last month [Apple] decided to postpone its plan after more than 1,000 current and former employees signed an open letter called the plan inefficient, inflexible and a waste of time. "Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do," they wrote. It was yet more evidence of the shift in the balance of power between management and rank and file, as demand for workers has hit record highs in the past year. Companies are finding it hard to enforce unpopular policies and mandates when they fear their workers could just walk away.... Google maps workers, who are employed by the tech company Cognizant, also decided to fight back. They connected with the Alphabet Workers Union and signed a petition citing COVID fears, the costs of commuting amid $5 gas, and the increase in productivity and morale that employees have experienced while working from home.... "Our first day back to the Bothell office full-time will now be September 6," the company said in a statement released on Thursday. Even as some companies seek to bring back some semblance of office life, others are asking: What is the office for anyway? In an iconic moment, NPR's reporter also visited a management consulting firm, where their new human resources worker (who started in May) admits that "It's hard to even fathom going into the office 100%. I don't think I could do it ever again." Saturday the New York Times also reported that some corporate leaders "might find themselves fighting a culture shift beyond their control.... [Non-paywalled version here] "If the pandemic's two-plus years of remote work experimentation have taught us anything, it's that many people can be productive outside the office, and quite a few are happier doing so."Even as the pandemic has changed course, there are signs that the work-from-home trend is actually accelerating. One recent survey published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers are now saying they will allow employees to work from home an average of 2.3 days per week, up from 1.5 days in the summer of 2020. It's not just the office — it's also the commute. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that almost all of the major cities with the biggest drops in office occupancy during the pandemic had an average one-way commute of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with the smallest drops had shorter commutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft on Thursday announced a new strategy for dealing with organized labor..." reports the Washington Post (in a story republished on MSN.com): In a blog post shared with The Washington Post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote that the company will respect workers' rights to unionize and plans to work collaboratively with organized labor organizations to "make it simpler rather than more difficult" for employees to unionize if they so choose. Microsoft is in the process of completing a $69 billion acquisition of Activision, a video game company where employees of a small subsidiary voted to unionize in March. That union, the Game Workers Alliance, is a division of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which in a statement called Microsoft's announcement "encouraging and unique among the major tech companies." CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens added that "to truly give workers a legally protected voice in decisions that affect them and their families, these principles must be put into action and incorporated into Microsoft's day-to-day operations and its expectations for its contractors...." Rebecca Givan, a Rutgers University professor of labor relations, said Microsoft's announcement could mean the company is trying to smooth things over with employees interested in unionizing. "There's a lot of actual organizing or talk or desire in the video game sector, and that's a piece of what Microsoft does. That might be what they're trying to get out in front of," Givan said. The article argues that Microsoft is "attempting to set itself apart from other Big Tech firms like Google and Amazon that have clashed publicly with employees seeking union representation." And it provides specific examples where other big tech companies have "gotten into trouble" with America's National Labor Relations Board:"The labor board has repeatedly found that Amazon wrongfully terminated or retaliated against workers who were involved with union organizing.""Google, too, has had to settle charges with workers who said the company fired them in response to union organizing.""Workers at Apple told The Post in April that they were targeted by management for supporting the union and threatened with the loss of certain benefits and opportunities for promotion."The president of America's largest federation of union, the AFL-CIO, tells the Post in a statement that "Microsoft's collaborative approach to working with its employees who seek to organize is a best practice that we look forward to seeing implemented at Microsoft and other companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened after U.S. prosecutors indicted an NFT marketplace's product manager for insider trading? Vice reports:The reaction among crypto investors was largely characterized by surprise, and an acknowledgement that trading on insider information (considered by some to be A-OK in private markets) is rampant in the space. "Bro they are prosecuting insider trading on NFTs. we're all fucked," said one pseudonymous user in reply to a tweet about the case by Steven Zheng, director of research at The Block. "This is pretty shocking. I can't imagine any NFT or DeFi developer doesn't somehow profit from insider trading," said another. Of course, not every NFT investor sees this kind of activity as acceptable. Traders themselves first brought Chastain's activity to light in September using blockchain records. A pseudonymous NFT trader, who goes by Zuwu, pointed out those trades, which were easily traceable to Chastain's publicly-known Etheruem address. Unlike Chastain, other NFT traders involved in potential insider trades are often too careful to leave traces. When they do, blockchain sleuths are quick to uncover those signs of unsavory behavior and call them out — a recent phenomenon that attempts to bring some justice to an otherwise permissive market. As a result, that surprise move by the U.S. Department of Justice has NFT traders wondering what's on the horizon for this largely unregulated industry. "Insider trading is a pretty common problem in the NFT space, especially in the case of hyped-up NFT collections as lots of stuff on the market is being driven by FOMO," Fedor Linnik, an NFT trader and creator, told Motherboard. The article also explores the question of whether the NFT marketplace falls under same restrictions as stock trading, with a professor of securities law calling it "somewhat misleading" to label this an "insider trading" case. Even to call it a wire fraud case is a stretch, the professor tells them, adding "If it goes to a jury they will wonder why they should care whether someone traded jpegs ahead of them being moved around on a webpage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.