This week CNN published an article chronicling how 35 countries "have come together to try and master nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun — and all stars — but is painfully difficult to replicate on Earth. "Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy that, unlike fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases and, unlike the nuclear fission power used today, produces no long-life radioactive waste. Mastering it could literally save humanity from climate change, a crisis of our own making."If it is mastered, fusion energy will undoubtedly power much of the world. Just 1 gram of fuel as input can create the equivalent of eight tons of oil in fusion power. That's an astonishing yield of 8 million to 1. Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it's always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true.... The main challenge is sustaining it. The tokamak in the UK — called the Joint European Torus, or JET — held fusion energy for five seconds, but that's simply the longest that machine will go for. Its magnets were made of copper and were built in the 1970s. Any more than five seconds under such heat would cause them to melt. ITER uses newer magnets that can last much longer, and the project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.... The dimensions are mind-blowing. The tokamak will ultimately weigh 23,000 tons. That's the combined weight of three Eiffel towers. It will comprise a million components, further differing into no fewer than 10 million smaller parts. This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. Their staggering size — some of them have diameters of up to 24 meters — means they are are too large to transport and must be assembled on site in a giant hall.... Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. That's the same amount of space you could save more than 160 million one-page Word documents on. Behind hundreds of workers putting the ITER project together are around 4,500 companies with 15,000 employees from all over the globe... Now commercial businesses are preparing to generate and sell fusion energy, so optimistic they are that this energy of the future could come online by mid-century. But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn't bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel... First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues. "This article has some nice photography," writes Slashdot reader technology_dude. "It really makes it hit home on the incredible amount of design and planning work that is required." The article notes that when Stephen Hawking was asked which scientific discovery he'd like to see in his lifetime, Hawking answered, "I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"C++ allows for writing high-performance applications but this comes at a price, security..." So says Google's Chrome security team in a recent blog post, adding that in general, "While there is appetite for different languages than C++ with stronger memory safety guarantees, large codebases such as Chromium will use C++ for the foreseeable future." So the post discusses "our journey of using heap scanning technologies to improve memory safety of C++."The basic idea is to put explicitly freed memory into quarantine and only make it available when a certain safety condition is reached. Microsoft has shipped versions of this mitigation in its browsers: MemoryProtector in Internet Explorer in 2014 and its successor MemGC in (pre-Chromium) Edge in 2015. In the Linux kernel a probabilistic approach was used where memory was eventually just recycled. And this approach has seen attention in academia in recent years with the MarkUs paper. The rest of this article summarizes our journey of experimenting with quarantines and heap scanning in Chrome. In essence the C++ memory allocator (used by new and delete) is "intercepted."There are various hardening options which come with a performance cost: - Overwrite the quarantined memory with special values (e.g. zero); - Stop all application threads when the scan is running or scan the heap concurrently; - Intercept memory writes (e.g. by page protection) to catch pointer updates; - Scan memory word by word for possible pointers (conservative handling) or provide descriptors for objects (precise handling); - Segregation of application memory in safe and unsafe partitions to opt-out certain objects which are either performance sensitive or can be statically proven as being safe to skip; - Scan the execution stack in addition to just scanning heap memory... Running our basic version on Speedometer2 regresses the total score by 8%. Bummer... To reduce the regression we implemented various optimizations that improve the raw scanning speed. Naturally, the fastest way to scan memory is to not scan it at all and so we partitioned the heap into two classes: memory that can contain pointers and memory that we can statically prove to not contain pointers, e.g. strings. We avoid scanning memory that cannot contain any pointers. Note that such memory is still part of the quarantine, it is just not scanned.... [That and other] optimizations helped to reduce the Speedometer2 regression from 8% down to 2%. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hari Pota for sharing the linkRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"An actively exploited Microsoft zero-day flaw still has no patch," Wired wrote Friday (in an article they've designated as "free for a limited time only.") Microsoft first received reports of the flaw on April 21st, the article points out, and researchers have now seen malicious Word documents exploiting Follina for targets in Russia, India, the Philippines, Belarus, and Nepal. Yet "The company continues to downplay the severity of the Follina vulnerability, which remains present in all supported versions of Windows."Researchers warned last weekend that a flaw in Microsoft's Support Diagnostic Tool could be exploited using malicious Word documents to remotely take control of target devices. Microsoft released guidance on Monday, including temporary defense measures. By Tuesday, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had warned that "a remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability," known as Follina, "to take control of an affected system." But Microsoft would not say when or whether a patch is coming for the vulnerability, even though the company acknowledged that the flaw was being actively exploited by attackers in the wild. And the company still had no comment about the possibility of a patch when asked by WIRED [Thursday]. The Follina vulnerability in a Windows support tool can be easily exploited by a specially crafted Word document. The lure is outfitted with a remote template that can retrieve a malicious HTML file and ultimately allow an attacker to execute Powershell commands within Windows. Researchers note that they would describe the bug as a "zero-day," or previously unknown vulnerability, but Microsoft has not classified it as such. "After public knowledge of the exploit grew, we began seeing an immediate response from a variety of attackers beginning to use it," says Tom Hegel, senior threat researcher at security firm SentinelOne. He adds that while attackers have primarily been observed exploiting the flaw through malicious documents thus far, researchers have discovered other methods as well, including the manipulation of HTML content in network traffic.... The vulnerability is present in all supported versions of Windows and can be exploited through Microsoft Office 365, Office 2013 through 2019, Office 2021, and Office ProPlus. Microsoft's main proposed mitigation involves disabling a specific protocol within Support Diagnostic Tool and using Microsoft Defender Antivirus to monitor for and block exploitation. But incident responders say that more action is needed, given how easy it is to exploit the vulnerability and how much malicious activity is being detected. The Register adds that the flaw works in Microsoft Word even when macros are disabled. (Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the story!) Friday Microsoft went into the vulnerability's official CVE report and added this update. "Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change:About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas. In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion.... [T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts... As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate. Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse. "Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website. "Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Linux Mint is taking over development of Timeshift, a popular open-source backup tool," reports the blog OMG! Ubuntu:Anyone familiar with Mint will be familiar with this utility. Timeshift is, as the distro's own lead Clement Lefebvre says in the latest monthly update, a central plank in the system's backup and update 'strategy'. Sadly, as happens, the creator of Timeshift is unable to keep working on it owing to other responsibilities. Not keen to see it stagnate, Mint says it 'got in touch' to see how they could help. Long story short: Linux Mint is assuming maintenance of the app henceforth. And as part of the process Timeshift is becoming an official member of the XApp family (this is Mint's stable of home-grown software it designs and develops to be distro-agnostic for widest possible use).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sheryl Sandberg started at a company called Facebook, but stepped down from a changed company called Meta. So who will replace her? No one, suggests the New York Times. CEO/co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted Wednesday on Facebook that he didn't "plan to replace Sheryl's role in our existing structure." Instead, the Times notes, around 2020 his company has been structured with "four executives who have equally large responsibilities and who answer to and run major decisions by him." (There's the "public face" ambassador, the Metaverse man, and then the overseer of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook — with another executive handling analytics, infrastructure and growth.) "But none of them have as much power as Ms. Sandberg used to, when she effectively ran all of the business operations while Mr. Zuckerberg focused on developing Facebook's products..."Mr. Zuckerberg made the structural shift because he wanted to consolidate his control over all arms of the company, three people close to him said. While Mr. Zuckerberg has always been the undisputed boss, with a majority of the company's voting shares, he shared power with Ms. Sandberg when he was a younger businessman and needed help expanding the company. But with more than 18 years of experience under his belt, he wants to exercise all of his power and be identified more clearly as Meta's sole leader, the people said.... For years, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg had clear-cut responsibilities, which employees often referred to as the "Sandberg side" and "Mark side." Ms. Sandberg ran the business, policy and legal teams with a lot of autonomy, while Mr. Zuckerberg was responsible for the engineering and product teams. That began changing in 2020 after Facebook dealt with scandals involving privacy, misinformation and other toxic content on the platform. Mr. Zuckerberg told his teams that he was done apologizing and wanted to focus more time and attention on innovative products that the company was designing. Since then, Mr. Zuckerberg has assumed more control over public messaging and policy decisions, which Ms. Sandberg used to handle. He also brought in hires with public policy expertise and promoted longtime executives who were loyal to his vision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Google's Open Source blog:The Google Hardware Toolchains team is launching a new developer portal, developers.google.com/silicon, to help the developer community get started with its Open MPW shuttle program. This will allow anyone to submit open source integrated circuit designs to get manufactured at no-cost. Since November 2020, when Skywater Technologies announced their partnership with Google to open source their Process Design Kit for the SKY130 process node, the Hardware Toolchains team here at Google has been on a journey to make building open silicon accessible to all developers. Having access to an open source and manufacturable PDK changes the status-quo in the custom silicon design industry and academia: — Designers are now free to start their projects liberated from NDAs and usage restrictions — Researchers are able to make their research reproducible by their fellow peers — Open source EDA tools can integrate deeply with the manufacturing process Together we've built a community of more than 3,000 members, where hardware designers and software developers alike, can all contribute in their own way to advance the state of the art of open silicon design.... We need to go beyond cramming more transistors into smaller areas and toward more efficient dedicated hardware accelerators. Given the recent global chip supply chain struggles, and the lead time for popular ICs sometimes going over a year, we need to do this by leveraging more of the existing global foundry capacity that provides access to older and proven process node technologies.... By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world. Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other's works rather than reinventing the wheel.... To help you on-board on future shuttles, we created a new developer portal that provides pointers to get started with the various tools of the open silicon ecosystem: so make sure to check out the portal and start your open silicon journey!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Ukraine's battlefields, the simple act of powering up a cellphone can beckon a rain of deathly skyfall," reports the Associated Press. "Artillery radar and remote controls for unmanned aerial vehicles may also invite fiery shrapnel showers." And the same technology can also be used to target navigation, guidance, and communications systems "to blind and deceive the enemy."This is electronic warfare, a critical but largely invisible aspect of Russia's war against Ukraine. Military commanders largely shun discussing it, fearing they'll jeopardize operations by revealing secrets.... It is used against artillery, fighter jets, cruise missiles, drones and more. Militaries also use it to protect their forces. It's an area where Russia was thought to have a clear advantage going into the war. Yet, for reasons not entirely clear, its much-touted electronic warfare prowess was barely seen in the war's early stages in the chaotic failure to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. [A former U.S. Army commander tells the AP "What we're learning now is that the Russians eventually turned it off because it was interfering with their own communications so much."] It has become far more of a factor in fierce fighting in eastern Ukraine, where shorter, easier-to-defend supply lines let Russia move electronic warfare gear closer to the battlefield. "They are jamming everything their systems can reach," said an official of Aerorozvidka, a reconnaissance team of Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle tinkerers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. "We can't say they dominate, but they hinder us greatly." A Ukrainian intelligence official called the Russian threat "pretty severe" when it comes to disrupting reconnaissance efforts and commanders' communications with troops. Russian jamming of GPS receivers on drones that Ukraine uses to locate the enemy and direct artillery fire is particularly intense "on the line of contact," he said. Later the article says Ukraine's Aerorozvidka has also modified camera-equipped drones "to pinpoint enemy positions and drop mortars and grenades. Hacking is also used to poison or disable enemy electronics and collect intelligence." So far Ukraine has captured "captured important pieces of hardware — a significant intelligence coup — and destroyed at least two multi-vehicle mobile electronic warfare units." They've been aided by technology and intelligence from NATO members (including from satellites and surveillance aircraft). But the article also calls Elon Musk's Starlink "a proven asset."Its more than 2,200 low-orbiting satellites provide broadband internet to more than 150,000 Ukrainian ground stations. Severing those connections is a challenge for Russia. It is far more difficult to jam low-earth orbiting satellites than geostationary ones. Musk has won plaudits from the Pentagon for at least temporarily defeating Russian jamming of Ukrainian satellite uplinks with a quick software fix. But he has warned Ukrainians to keep those terminals powered down when possible — they are vulnerable to geolocation — and recently worried on Twitter about redoubled Russian interference efforts. The article points out that to "stay nimble," Ukraine is also using cutting-edge technologies including software-defined radio and 3D printing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In molecular biologist David Sinclair's lab at Harvard Medical School, old mice are growing young again," reports CNN:Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves. In his team's first breakthrough, published in late 2020, old mice with poor eyesight and damaged retinas could suddenly see again, with vision that at times rivaled their offspring's. "It's a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age," said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time. "If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer's in your 90s." Sinclair told an audience at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. "This is the world that is coming. It's literally a question of when and for most of us, it's going to happen in our lifetimes," Sinclair told the audience.... Sinclair said his lab has reversed aging in the muscles and brains of mice and is now working on rejuvenating a mouse's entire body. The article points out that he's building on research by Japan's Dr. Shinya Yamanaka (which in 2007 won a Nobel prize). But one key caveat: "Studies on whether the genetic intervention that revitalized mice will do the same for people are in early stages, Sinclair said. It will be years before human trials are finished, analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for a federal stamp of approval."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity," reported the team lead for NASA's Mars helicopter, Teddy Tzanetos, in a blog post last week.As detailed in our last blog post, for the first time in our yearlong extended mission we had a loss of communications with Ingenuity from the downlink of May 3 (Sol 427) and May 4 (Sol 428). After a week of anomaly investigation, two sols dedicated to data collection, and the heroic efforts of the Perseverance and Ingenuity operations teams, I am very happy to report that we have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity. Based on all available telemetry, the helicopter appears healthy, and we have resumed a modified form of operations. Assuming winter recommissioning activities complete nominally, Ingenuity's 29th flight may occur in the next few sols.... All telemetry downlinked so far suggests that Ingenuity is healthy, with no signs of damage from the overnight cold cycles. That's the good news. The bad news?Telemetry from Ingenuity confirmed that the loss of communications was due to insufficient battery state-of-charge (SOC) going into the night, which resulted in a reset of our mission clock. This daily state-of-charge deficit is likely to persist for the duration of Martian winter (until September/October). Challenges like these are to be expected: After hundreds of sols and dozens of flights beyond the five flights originally planned, the solar-powered helicopter is in uncharted terrain. We are now operating far outside our original design limits. Historically, Mars is very challenging for spacecraft (particularly solar-powered spacecraft). Each sol could be Ingenuity's last.... We have reached the point in Martian late fall/early winter at which Ingenuity can no longer support the energy demands of nominal operations. Starting on the evening of Sol 426, we believe Ingenuity started experiencing overnight battery brownouts (drops in the battery's voltage), which reset the electronics. Due to the seasonal decrease in available solar energy, increases in airborne dust density, and the drop in temperatures, the energy demand to keep the electronics powered and warm throughout the night has surpassed Ingenuity's available energy budget.... We expect to be in this challenging winter energy paradigm until around Sol 600, at which point we expect to return to being power-positive from sol to sol. The blog post says NASA can cope with a resetting mission clock. But the helicopter's battery (and other electronics) are now facing overnight ambient temperatures of about minus 80 degrees C (minus 112 degrees F), "a lifetime risk to our electronic components."Although component failure has always been a risk that we have carried since rover deployment, that risk is now magnified... We do have limited electronics core module (ECM) component testing to suggest that select components may survive through the winter, but we cannot predict how the entire ECM will fare throughout winter. Cold-soaking electronics is believed to have caused the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions. Given our elevated risk posture, our focus in the last several sols has been to prioritize data downlink from Ingenuity to the Helicopter Base Station (HBS). We have a handful of Heli-to-HBS transfer activities left before all unique data are copied from Ingenuity to the HBS. Specifically, we are copying flight performance logs, electronics logs, and high-resolution color images from the last eight flights that are still onboard Ingenuity. After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity's flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta. In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter. Mashable notes that Ingenuity recently sent back new footage showing its April 8th flight — calling it Ingenuity's "farthest and fastest flight yet." Flying 33 feet above the surface of Mars on April 8, "it traveled 2,310 feet — a bit less than half a mile — at 12 mph."The whole record-breaking feat lasted a little over 2.5 minutes, but that's much longer than its first flight of 39 seconds in the spring of 2021. NASA increased the new video's speed fivefold, reducing its runtime to less than 35 seconds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Yes, it's possible to get the game Doom running atop this system firmware," reports Phoronix. Tom's Hardware explains:Originally known as LinuxBIOS, which provides a better clue to its utility value, Coreboot 4.17 supports new motherboards, delivers a new bootloader, supports AMD Platform Secure Boot (PSB), comes with a handful of fixes, and... a port of Doom. Coreboot is a free and open-source BIOS implementation that supports numerous extensions known as Payloads. These Payloads add functionality to the minimal code that is the basis of Coreboot. Therefore, a great deal of customizability is available to Coreboot users to determine exactly what their BIOS ROMs contain via Payload choices. To configure Coreboot for a usable setup, one might typically start by adding a bootloader, with a choice of eight available currently according to the official Wiki. Then there is support for various popular OSes, a handful of utilities provided as Payloads, and even some games. If your BIOS flash memory space is large enough, you could even shoehorn in a Linux distribution. There's a few caveats. (There's no sound or "save game" feature, "and your system will hang on exiting the game.") But their article still calls Doom "a great new choice if you are bored of the Grub Invaders (Space Invaders) and Tint (Tetris) clone Payloads, bringing 3D gaming to your BIOS."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last summer Chinese market analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported the iPhone 13 would include satellite communication capability, remembers long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley, who adds that the prediction was denied by Apple. "This, in itself, was weird because Apple generally doesn't react to rumors. But beyond the mere reaction, the way Apple responded to Ming's prediction was especially odd."An unattributed leak from Cupertino said that the iPhone 13 definitely would not include satellite communication capability. And even if some iPhone could communicate with satellites, the leak continued, it wouldn't be offering satellite voice service (which Ming had mentioned), limiting iPhones to satellite text or iMessage.... This was making less and less sense, but it clearly meant there was something happening. Then came the iPhone 13 launch and Ming was wrong for a change — no satellite communications. So the Cupertino rumor mill went about its business, Ming's satellite rumor apparently forgotten. But not by me.... And this leads Cringley to another prediction of his own:I am convinced an announcement will be coming soon. Apple will shortly enter the satellite business by acquiring GlobalStar and its 24 satellites. They will use those 24, plus 24 more satellites that Apple has already commissioned, to offer satellite service for iMessage and Apple's Find My network just like they implied in their denial last year. These apps are proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole. IoT is already a big business that is going to get even bigger even faster because of Apple. Adding that satellite connection to iMessage and Find My offers the possibility of ubiquity for IoT, though only on Apple's network. Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business.... While Apple's stated goals will be only iMessage and Find My, followed by IoT, in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company. That will require shifting over additional Globalstar bandwidth plus launching another 300-600 satellites, so it is several years away but IS coming. Apple will compete not just with every other mobile carrier including Cupertino's own customers, they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper. Apple can compete with Starlink with so many fewer satellites because GlobalStar has vastly more licensed spectrum than does SpaceX, which has to reuse the same spectrum over and over again with thousands of satellites.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sega has announced a sequel to its miniature Mega Drive (otherwise known as the Sega Genesis), and this one will feature both cartridge games and titles from the Mega CD add-on. In total, the tiny console will feature 50 built-in games, including the likes of Silpheed, Shining Force CD, Sonic the Hedgehog CD, Virtua Racing, and Shining in the Darkness. Unfortunately, as of now the device has only been announced for Japan; it's expected to launch on October 27th for 9,980 yen (about $75).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA said this week that it plans to purchase five additional Crew Dragon missions from SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. Ars Technica reports: Although the space agency's news release does not specifically say so, these may be the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. As of now, there is no signed international agreement to keep the station flying until then, but this new procurement sends a strong signal that the space agency expects the orbital outpost to keep flying that long. The announcement also suggests that SpaceX will fly more than twice as many crews to the space station than the other partner in NASA's commercial crew program, Boeing. Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A team of scientists at Canada's Concordia University are using sound waves to print intricate three-dimensional objects. The technology is known as direct sound printing (DSP). New Atlas reports: In the current version of the technique, a transducer is used to send focused pulses of ultrasound through the sides of a chamber, into liquid polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) resin contained within. Doing so produces ultrasonic fields, which cause rapidly oscillating microscopic bubbles to temporarily form at specific points in the resin. As those bubbles oscillate, the temperature inside them rises to about 15,000 degrees Kelvin (14,727C or 26,540F) and the pressure within them climbs to over 1,000 bar (14,504 psi). Although this sudden increase in temperature and pressure only lasts for picoseconds (trillionths of a second), it causes the resin to solidify at the exact location of the bubble. Therefore, by incrementally moving the transducer along a predetermined path, it's possible to build up an intricate three-dimensional object -- one tiny pixel at a time. Along with its ability to produce very small, detailed items, DSP also allows structures to be non-invasively printed inside other structures that have opaque surfaces. [...] Besides the PDMS resin, the scientists have also successfully used DSP to print objects made of ceramic material. They now plan on experimenting with polymer-metal composites, followed by pure metal. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A 20-year-old woman who was born with a small and misshapen right ear has received a 3-D printed ear implant made from her own cells, the manufacturer announced on Thursday. Independent experts said that the transplant, part of the first clinical trial of a successful medical application of this technology, was a stunning advance in the field of tissue engineering. The new ear was printed in a shape that precisely matched the woman's left ear, according to 3DBio Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company based in Queens. The new ear, transplanted in March, will continue to regenerate cartilage tissue, giving it the look and feel of a natural ear, the company said. The results of the woman's reconstructive surgery were announced by 3DBio in a news release. Citing proprietary concerns, the company has not publicly disclosed the technical details of the process, making it more difficult for outside experts to evaluate. The company said that federal regulators had reviewed the trial design and set strict manufacturing standards, and that the data would be published in a medical journal when the study was complete. The clinical trial, which includes 11 patients, is still ongoing, and it's possible that the transplants could fail or bring unanticipated health complications. But since the cells originated from the patient's own tissue, the new ear is not likely to be rejected by the body, doctors and company officials said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bumblebees are eligible for protection as endangered or threatened "fish" under California law, a state appeals court held in a win for environmental groups and the state's Fish and Game Commission. From a report: The Sacramento-based California Court of Appeal reversed a lower court's ruling Tuesday for seven agricultural groups who argued that the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) expressly protects only "birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and plants" -- not insects. While "fish" is "commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature ... is not so limited," Associate Justice Ronald Robie wrote for the appeals court. CESA itself does not define "fish," but the law is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The code's definition includes any "mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate (or) amphibian," Robie wrote. All those categories "encompass terrestrial and aquatic species," and the state legislature has already approved the listing of at least one land-based mollusk, the opinion said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There is enough energy in the nuclear waste in the United States to power the entire country for 100 years with clean energy, says Jess C. Gehin at the Idaho National Laboratory. CNBC reports: There are 93 commercial nuclear reactors at 55 operating sites in the United States, according to Scott Burnell, spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Twenty-six are in some stage of decommissioning process. All of the nuclear reactors that operate in the U.S. are light-water reactor designs [...]. In a light-water reactor, uranium-235 fuel powers a fission reaction, where the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller nuclei and releases energy. The energy heats water, creating steam which is used to power a generator and produce electricity. The nuclear fission reaction leaves waste, which is radioactive and has to be maintained carefully. There are about 80,000 metric tons of used fuel from light-water nuclear reactors in the United States and the existing nuclear fleet produces approximately an additional 2,000 tons of used fuel each year, Gehin told CNBC. But after a light-water reactor has run its reactor powered by uranium-235, there is still tremendous amount of energy potential still available in what is left. "Fundamentally, in light-water reactors, out of the uranium we dig out of the ground, we use a half a percent of the energy that's in the uranium that's dug out of the ground," Gehin told CNBC in a phone interview. "You can get a large fraction of that energy if you were to recycle the fuel through fast reactors." Fast reactors don't slow down the neutrons that are released in the fission reaction, and faster neutrons beget more efficient fission reactions, Gehin told CNBC. "Fast neutron reactors can more effectively convert uranium-238, which is predominantly what's in spent fuel, to plutonium, so you can fission it," Gehin said. Even as private companies are working to innovate and commercialize fast reactor designs, there are significant infrastructure hurdles. Before nuclear waste can be used to power fast reactors, it has to go through reprocessing. Right now, only Russia has the capacity to do this at scale. France, too, has the capacity to recycle used nuclear waste, Gehin said, but the country generally takes its recycled fuel and puts it back into existing light water reactors. For now, the Idaho National Lab can reprocess enough fuel for research and development, Gehin told CNBC, but not much more. Private companies commercializing fast reactor technology are pushing for domestic fuel supply chains to be developed. TerraPower says it's investing in supply chains and working with elected leaders to build political support, while Oklo has received three government awards and is working with the government to commercialize fast reactor fuel supply chains domestically. The other option to power fast reactors is to create HALEU fuel, which stands for high-assay low-enriched uranium, from scratch, rather than by recycling nuclear waste. (Where conventional reactors use uranium enriched up to 5%, HALEU is uranium enriched up to 20%.) It's arguably easier to produce HALEU directly than by recycling spent waste, says Gehin, but ultimately, the cheaper option will win out. "It will be largely be driven by what makes sense economically." Regardless, Russia is the only country that has the capacity to make HALEU at commercial scale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Task & Purpose: A fan of the popular mechanized combat simulator 'War Thunder' shared the specs of China's Type 99 Main Battle Tank online in order to win an argument over the game. [...] The latest incident, first reported by the OSINTtechnical Twitter account, involves information in Mandarin on the penetrator section of a Chinese tank round along with a technical diagram. While many of the original images have been taken down, they were essentially the schematics for a Chinese tank munition, presumably revealed to the world so a video game could more accurately depict what would happen if a Chinese tank and an American tank -- or British, French, Russian, German or Israeli tank -- met in combat. And this isn't the first time these forums have become an outlet for technical leaks. [...] The most recent leak, the latest leak, from someone with access to the latest technical manuals from China's People's Liberation Army, occurred because a user wanted the game's Chinese battle tanks to have better in-game stats. While most of the information about the Chinese tank round was already known, it was still apparently more important for one gamer to prove another gamer wrong on a message board than it was to consider the implications of publishing the technical details of military munitions online. The video game developer, Gaijin Entertainment, banned the user, telling Kotaku that, "Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China. Publishing classified information on any vehicle of any nation at War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and the game developers never use it in their work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China aims to double its wind and solar capacity by 2025, according to a new road map that also allows for more coal-fired power plants to bolster energy security. From a report: The world's biggest polluter earlier estimated it needs to double wind and solar use by 2030 to deliver on its pledges under the Paris climate accord. The latest plan -- if implemented -- means China might reach that goal earlier. But Beijing has also ramped up reliance on coal-fired power plants in recent months to support its ailing economy as the Ukraine war pushes up global energy prices. The country's central economic planner said 33 percent of power supply to the national grid will come from renewable sources by 2025, up from 29 percent in 2020, in a document released Wednesday. "In 2025, the annual power generation from renewable energy will reach about 3.3 trillion kilowatt-hours... and the wind power and solar power generation will double," the plan said. China, already the world's largest producer of renewable energy, has accelerated investment in solar and wind projects to tackle pollution at home, which researchers say kills millions every year. Beijing has pledged to peak emissions by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Google Assistant is losing the ability to create location-based reminders. Ars Technica reports: These were incredibly useful commands you could tell Google Assistant, like, "remind me to take the trash out when I get home," and your phone, which is always tracking your location, would ping you when you walked in the door. You could also say things like, "remind me to buy milk next time I'm at Walmart," and it would just work. Google is sending out notifications telling users the feature is dead. A message on a Google support page says: "The option to create reminders for a certain location is going away soon. You can still create reminders at a certain time and set routines for a location." Suggesting routines as a replacement is a ludicrous suggestion, since routines are, well, routine, and want to repeat after a set period of time. They also are meant to trigger smart-home automation or alarm clocks; they aren't simple notifications. Another reminder feature getting the ax is a fairly new one, probably dying due to a lack of usage. In 2019 Google announced the ability to send reminders to other people. Actually doing this was pretty difficult, though. You would have to either be in the Google "Family" ecosystem and have them set up in the family link or have that person be someone you share an Assistant device with, like a roommate. It's not clear why the company is suddenly gutting a useful and easy-to-use feature. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amazon's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit, brought by one of its senior software engineers, asking it to reimburse workers for internet and electricity costs racked up while working from home in the pandemic, has been rejected by a California judge. David George Williams sued his employer for refusing to foot his monthly home office expenses, claiming Amazon is violating California's labor laws. The state's Labor Code section 2802 states: "An employer shall indemnify his or her employee for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer." Williams reckons Amazon should not only be paying for its techies' home internet and electricity, but also for any other expenses related to their ad-hoc home office space during the pandemic. Williams sued the cloud giant on behalf of himself and over 4,000 workers employed in California across 12 locations, arguing these costs will range from $50 to $100 per month during the time they were told to stay away from corporate campuses as the coronavirus spread. [...] Amazon's lawyers, however, believe the broadband and utility bills, and similar expenses, aren't the company's problem since it was following shelter-at-home orders, which require employees to stay away from the office. But Vince Chhabaria, a US federal district judge in northern California, slapped down Amazon's attempt to kill off the lawsuit, and said the local government's orders don't necessarily absolve the company from liability. "What matters is whether Williams incurred those expenses 'in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer'," Judge Chhabaria ruled [PDF] this week. "According to the complaint, Amazon expected Williams to continue to work from home after the stay-at-home orders were imposed. That is sufficient to plausibly allege liability, even if Amazon itself was not the but-for cause of the shift to remote work. Williams also plausibly alleges that his expenditures were necessary to do his job." Chhabaria did grant Amazon's request to dismiss the engineer's claims that it violated California's laws alleging "unfair business practices," but gave Williams's legal team 14 days to file an amended complaint.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York state legislature has passed the United States' first "right to repair" bill covering electronics. The Verge reports: Called the Fair Repair Act, the measure would require all manufacturers who sell "digital electronic products" within state borders to make tools, parts, and instructions for repair available to both consumers and independent shops. Having passed the legislature, it is awaiting signature by Governor Kathy Hochul, who is expected to support the measure. The measure will take effect one year after it passes into law. Self-repair groups like iFixit have applauded the ruling, calling it "one giant leap for repairkind" in a blog post following the announcement. "The passage of this bill means that repairs should become less expensive and more comprehensive: people who want to fix their own stuff can," the post reads. "Where before, manufacturers could push consumers to use manufacturer-authorized shops, now they'll have to compete."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Clark, CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer business and a top lieutenant of CEO Andy Jassy, will resign July 1, after 23 years at the company, Amazon announced in a regulatory filing Friday. Amazon did not name a replacement for Clark. CNBC reports: In a blog post announcing his exit, Jassy said Amazon is in the process of firming up a succession plan for Clark, and will announce an update "over the next few weeks." "The past few years have been among the most challenging and unpredictable we've faced in the history of Amazon's Consumer business, and I'm particularly appreciative of Dave's leadership during that time," Jassy said. In a tweet, Clark said he felt it was the right time to leave Amazon. "As much as I have loved the ride, it is time for me to say goodbye to start a new journey," Clark said in an email to employees, which he shared on Twitter. "For some time, I have discussed my intent to transition out of Amazon and with my family and others close to me, but I wanted to ensure the teams were set up for success. I feel confident that time is now." Clark is one of a handful of the most important executives at Amazon, overseeing the company's sprawling retail business, and a member of Jassy's S-Team, a tight-knit group of over a dozen senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon's business. He took over the role in 2020 after Jeff Wilke stepped down. As CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, Clark oversees a number of key units, including online stores, physical stores, the marketplace of third-party sellers, and the Amazon Prime subscription business, all of which generated more than 75% of Amazon's revenue in the quarter ended March 31.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: California regulators on Thursday gave a robotic taxi service the green light to begin charging passengers for driverless rides in San Francisco, a first in a state where dozens of companies have been trying to train vehicles to steer themselves on increasingly congested roads. The California Public Utilities Commission unanimously granted Cruise, a company controlled by automaker General Motors, approval to launch its driverless ride-hailing service. The regulators issued the permit despite safety concerns arising from Cruise's inability to pick up and drop off passengers at the curb in its autonomous taxis, requiring the vehicles to double park in traffic lanes. The ride-hailing service initially will consist of just 30 electric vehicles confined to transporting passengers in less congested parts of San Francisco from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Those restrictions are designed to minimize chances of the robotic taxis causing property damage, injuries or death if something goes awry. It will also allow regulators to assess how the technology works before permitting the service to expand. Cruise and another robotic car pioneer, Waymo, already have been charging passengers for rides in parts of San Francisco in autonomous vehicles with a back-up human driver present to take control if something goes wrong with the technology. But now Cruise has been cleared to charge for rides in vehicles that will have no other people in them besides the passengers -- an ambition that a wide variety of technology companies and traditional automakers have been pursuing for more than a decade. The driverless vehicles have been hailed as a way to make taxi rides less expensive while reducing the traffic accidents and deaths caused by reckless human drivers. Gil West, Cruise's chief operating officer, in a blog post hailed Thursday's vote as "a giant leap for our mission here at Cruise to save lives, help save the planet, and save people time and money." He said the company would begin rolling out its fared rides gradually.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook is in the early stages of developing a product that wouldn't rely on any anonymized personal info from users, two ad buyers from different ad agencies told Insider. From a report: "Basic ads," as Facebook engineers have been calling it, is aimed at brand advertisers that are trying to build awareness and shape perception of products. One of the buyers, who are known to Insider but spoke anonymously to preserve their relationship with Facebook, said it would be measured by basic metrics including engagement and video views. Vice reported in April that Meta was working on this product and planned to have it ready to test by January in Europe, home to the strict General Data Protection Regulation; the ad buyers said it hasn't been rolled out yet and that they're unclear when it will. It's expected to be tested in the US after an EU launch. The product would seem antithetical to the targeting tools that advertisers use Facebook for. "Their 'basic ads' does contrast one of the biggest attributes of Facebook's ad platform: the granular of targeting," the first ad buyer said. "But ads that can still deliver scale while also able to usurp data regulations like CCPA and GDPR would still get dollars invested into Facebook."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Committee leaders in both the House and Senate are poised to introduce an online privacy bill, with key lawmakers releasing a bipartisan draft Friday. From a report: The U.S. has lagged behind the E.U. and China in establishing national privacy rules for online platforms, but this bipartisan effort shows signs of life even as the looming midterms mark the unofficial end of legislating. House Energy & Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on Friday unveiled a discussion draft of their American Data Privacy and Protection Act. The bill would require companies to minimize the data they collect, ban targeted advertising to children under 17 years old and allow people to sue companies for violations under certain circumstances.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York lawmakers have passed a bill that would temporarily ban new bitcoin mining operations. Early on Friday, state senators voted 36-27 to pass the legislation. It's now bound for the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, who will sign it into law or veto the bill. The law would come into effect immediately after it's signed. From a report: An attempt to enact similar legislation last year hit a wall when the New York State Senate passed it but Assembly members did not. The latest bill passed the Assembly in April. The legislation seeks to establish a two-year moratorium on licenses for cryptocurrency mining operations that use power-hungry proof-of-work authentication methods for validating blockchain transactions. Right now, bitcoin and ethereum (the two largest cryptocurrencies) fall under that category, though the latter is shifting to a different setup. The moratorium only covers mining operations that run on carbon-based power sources. Any that harness entirely renewable energy sources or an alternative to proof of work that requires less power won't be affected. Existing operations and those already going through a permit renewal process won't be impacted either.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a trait best seen in the eager pub quizzer -- a tendency to leap to an answer without a shadow of a doubt. Now researchers have suggested that while people who have little difficulty making decisions are more confident in their choices, they are no more accurate than those who feel more torn. From a report: Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers revealed how they conducted experiments to explore potential differences between people who tend to be decisive, known as action-oriented people, and those who struggle to commit to a choice, known as state-oriented people. "What we found is that confidence was the only thing that was different," said Dr Wojciech Zajkowski, the first author of the research, who is now based at the Riken social decision science laboratory in Japan. "Meaning state-oriented people were just as good, and as fast at making those small choices, as were the action-oriented people. The action-oriented people were, however, much more confident." The team asked participants, who had been assessed -- through screening questionnaires -- to be either very decisive or not, to complete a number of tasks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illinois residents are eligible to receive part of a $100 million class-action settlement after Google was accused of violating privacy laws in the state. From a report: The tech giant was accused of violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act regarding its use of a face regrouping tool in the Google Photos app. Google used the tool to sort faces it spots in photographs by similarity. However, according to the suit, the company did not receive consent from millions of users before using the technology. As a result, Illinois residents who appeared in a photo on the app between May 1, 2015, and April 25, 2022, may be eligible for payment. What each claimant will be paid isn't known although a similar settlement involving Facebook saw 1.6 million users receive between $200 and $400. Payment amounts will depend on the number and validity of claims. Snapchat was also accused on violating Illinois privacy laws in a class-action lawsuit filed last month. It is still unclear when (or if) the case will move forward and potentially lead to a settlement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harini Logan won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, claiming victory in a blistering, first-of-its-kind spell-off that capped a marathon duel of one arcane term after another. From a report: Harini, 14, an eighth grader from San Antonio, beat Vikram Raju, 12, a seventh grader from Denver, after she rattled off word after word in a 90-second speed round. Both students spelled so fast that the judges had to go to video to determine a winner: Harini spelled 21 words correctly, compared with 15 for Vikram. It was a tense victory that came after she was briefly eliminated and then reinstated earlier in the finals, when the judges decided that a definition she had given for the word pullulation was acceptable. Harini, who was making her fourth and final eligible appearance in the Bee, said winning felt "so surreal." "This is just such a dream," she said, holding the trophy on national television. Vikram stood nearby with his family, visibly trembling and his head bowed with the high emotions of the three-hour contest. But when the Bee's host, LeVar Burton, asked Vikram if he would return to the Bee next year, in what would be his own last eligible year, the boy, shaking but sounding resolute, gave a decisive "yes." It was the first time the Bee has used a spell-off since the national contest's inception, in 1925, and it came after Harini and Vikram took turns spelling a series of words incorrectly, meaning a winner could not be crowned. To viewers, the pressure of the moment felt akin to penalty kicks in a high-stakes soccer tournament.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EU countries and EU lawmakers are set to agree on a common charging port for mobile phones, tablets and headphones on June 7 when they meet to discuss a proposal that has been fiercely criticised by Apple, Reuters reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The proposal for a single mobile charging port was first broached by the European Commission more than a decade ago after iPhone and Android users complained about having to use different chargers for their phones. The former is charged from a Lightning cable while Android-based devices are powered using USB-C connectors. The trilogue next Tuesday will be the second and likely the final one between EU countries and EU lawmakers on the topic, an indication of a strong push to get a deal done, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission -- a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will "only" get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team. The new record was set by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores -- the glass tubes that transmit the signals -- instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands -- the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov writes: "In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot," writes Mozilla Speech and AI engineer Andre Natal in a blog post. "The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user's computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private..." The result of this work is the translations add-on that is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release. It currently supports 14 languages. You can test the translation engine without installing the add-on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, workplace robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022, and were up 21% overall in 2021. The robot industry is now valued at $1.6 billion. Business Insider reports: Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil. [...] Advanced technology, however, is allowing machines to assist a growing number of industry sectors, while at the same time becoming more accessible. But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases. "Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a featured TechCrunch article, written by Christine Hall: Where the Olentangy and Scioto rivers come together lies the city of Columbus, Ohio, a bedrock town famously known as "Test City, USA," boasting demographics that mirrored the country's population, and the home of The Ohio State University. It is steadily becoming an emerging tech scene in the Midwest where startups are finding all the tools needed to develop burgeoning businesses. Venture capitalists injected over $3 billion into the city over the past 20 years, particularly in healthcare and insurance startups, according to Crunchbase data. Investment into the city startups started picking up around 2017 and really peaked in 2021. That's when investment essentially doubled, going from $583 million in 2020 to just over $1 billion, with half of those dollars going into two companies: healthcare technology company Olive and autonomous robotics company Path Robotics. So far in 2022, $110 million has gone into Columbus startups. Olive is now valued at over $4 billion and is among Columbus success stories like CoverMyMeds, a healthcare software company that was acquired by the McKesson Corp. in 2017 for $1.4 billion, which represents Central Ohio's first $1 billion exit. Root Insurance, which raised over $800 million since 2015, went public in 2020. Other notable raises include Forge Biologics' $120 million Series B round, which was thought to be Ohio's largest Series B to date. Forge plans to add 200 new jobs by 2023. Columbus has also caught the eye of enterprises, including Facebook, Amazon and now Intel, which announced earlier this year that it will build two chip factories outside of the city that will provide 3,000 company jobs and many more thousands of indirect jobs. Meanwhile, therapeutics company Amgen announced last November that it is building a new biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, one of Columbus' suburbs, providing 400 jobs for assembling and packaging medicines. All of this activity, plus a low cost of living, availability of a young, skilled talent pool and public/private partnerships eager to support entrepreneurs, research and innovation, is why TechCrunch has chosen to spotlight Columbus' growing startup scene with a special episode of TechCrunch Live.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet have unveiled a new portable cartridge prototype for hydrogen. "The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment," reports Engadget. From the report: The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them "portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes.. [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging." They could be useful for "mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine," Toyota said. It didn't mention any specific uses, but it said that "one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours." In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it'll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues. Toyota plans to test that theory by conducting proof of concept trials in various places, including its "human-centered smart city of the future," Woven City in Susono City, Zhizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The company is also "working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Older iPads with the Apple A7- and A8-based chips may soon be able to run Linux. "Developer Konrad Dybcio and a Linux enthusiast going by "quaack723" have collaborated to get Linux kernel version 5.18 booting on an old iPad Air 2, a major feat for a device that was designed to never run any operating system other than Apple's," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The project appears to use an Alpine Linux-based distribution called "postmarketOS," a relatively small but actively developed distribution made primarily for Android devices. Dybcio used a "checkm8" hashtag in his initial tweet about the project, strongly implying that they used the "Checkm8" bootrom exploit published back in 2019 to access the hardware. For now, the developers only have Linux running on some older iPad hardware using A7 and A8-based chips -- this includes the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, and a few generations of iPad mini. But subsequent tweets imply that it will be possible to get Linux up and running on any device with an A7 or A8 in it, including the iPhone 5S and the original HomePod. Development work on this latest Linux-on-iDevices effort is still in its early days. The photos that the developers shared both show a basic boot process that fails because it can't mount a filesystem, and Dybcio notes that basic things like USB and Bluetooth support aren't working. Getting networking, audio, and graphics acceleration all working properly will also be a tall order. But being able to boot Linux at all could draw the attention of other developers who want to help the project. Compared to modern hardware with an Apple M1 chip, A7 and A8-powered devices wouldn't be great as general-purpose Linux machines. While impressive at the time, their CPUs and GPUs are considerably slower than modern Apple devices, and they all shipped with either 1GB or 2GB of RAM. But their performance still stacks up well next to the slow processors in devices like the Raspberry Pi 4, and most (though not all) A7 and A8 hardware has stopped getting new iOS and iPadOS updates from Apple at this point; Linux support could give some of these devices a second life as retro game consoles, simple home servers, or other things that low-power Arm hardware is good for. Further reading: Linux For M1 Macs? First Alpha Release Announced for Asahi LinuxRead more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study, dogs were able to better detect COVID-19 than PCR antigenic tests in both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Slashdot Falconhell shares the report via The Guardian: In the study, trained dogs were able to detect Covid in 97% of symptomatic cases and nearly 100% of asymptomatic cases. The study featured 335 participants from Covid screening centers in Paris. Of the participants, 109 were positive with Covid, including 31 who were asymptomatic. The detection dogs, provided by French fire stations and the United Arab Emirates, received three to six weeks of training, depending on if a dog was previously trained for odor detection. The dogs sniffed samples of human sweat placed in an olfaction cone. If a dog detected Covid, it sat down in front of the cone. Ultimately, the trained dogs were more sensitive to positive cases. Nasal PCR tests were better able to better detect negative cases. In two false positive cases, dogs falsely identified other coronavirus respiratory illness strains that were not Covid. While there have been previous studies on the capability of dogs to detect Covid, this is believed to be the first to compare the accuracy of dogs to antigenic tests. The study has been published in the journal Plos One.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Platforms such as YouTube and Uploaded could be directly liable for the copyright-infringing uploads of their users. The German Federal Court of Justice came to this conclusion based on advice from the EU's top court. Several liability lawsuits will now be sent back to the lower court to decide whether damages are indeed warranted. The Federal Court's decision opens the door to a potential liability ruling. Whether damages are indeed warranted depends on the situation, which will require review by the lower courts. In essence, the courts will now have to decide whether the measures YouTube and Uploaded have taken in response to the reported copyright infringements are sufficient. As such, it will be among the first cases where the "upload filter" requirements of the Copyright Directive will be put to the test.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ExpressVPN has removed its servers from India, becoming the first major virtual private network (VPN) provider to do so in the aftermath of the recent cybersecurity rules introduced by the country's cybersecurity agency. The rules require VPN providers to store user data for a period of five years. ExpressVPN said it "refuses to participate in the Indian government's attempts to limit internet freedom." The India Express reports: In a blog post, the British Virgin Island-based company said that with the introduction of the new cybersecurity rules by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), it has made a "very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers." While ExpressVPN is the first to pull its services from India, other VPN providers like NordVPN have also taken a similar stance. The guidelines, released by CERT-In on April 26, asked VPN service providers along with data centers and cloud service providers, to store information such as names, e-mail IDs, contact numbers, and IP addresses (among other things) of their customers for a period of five years. The government said it wants these details to fight cybercrime, but the industry argues that privacy is the main selling points of VPN services, and such a move would be in breach of the privacy cover provided by VPN platforms. ExpressVPN described the cybersecurity rules as "broad" and "overreaching." "The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it," ExpressVPN said. It added that while CERT-In's rules are intended to fight cybercrime, they are "incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users' online activity private." Indian users of ExpressVPN will still be able to use its service via "virtual" India servers located in Singapore and the UK. "We will never collect logs of user activity, including no logging of browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. We also never store connection logs, meaning no logs of IP addresses, outgoing VPN IP addresses, connection timestamps, or session durations," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Billionaire bitcoiners Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are laying off 10% of the workforce at Gemini, a first for the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange and custodian. CNBC reports: The twins announced in a blog post on Thursday morning that the industry is in a "contraction phase" known as "crypto winter," which has been "further compounded by the current macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil." "We are not alone," the memo continued. Fellow crypto exchange Coinbase recently reported that revenue had fallen 27% from a year ago, as had overall usage. Gemini -- which has been around since 2014 and is valued at $7.1 billion as of its last funding round -- has 1,033 people on its payroll, according to PitchBook, which translates to about 100 employees affected by today's layoffs. CNBC reached out to Gemini to ask for the exact figure, but the press team declined to comment beyond the blog post. As for next steps, Gemini has closed its physical offices today in order to protect employee privacy. Impacted team members will receive a calendar invite for individual conversations about separation packages and health care benefits. On Friday, remaining employees will take part in a "company-wide standup" to talk about its future. The memo says that Gemini wants to focus only on products that are critical to its mission -- and team leaders will assess whether their teams are "right-sized" for the "current, turbulent market conditions that are likely to persist for some time." "Today is a tough day, but one that will make Gemini better over the long run," the brothers wrote in the staffwide memo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [B]uying a Ford electric vehicle might be a lot less painful in the future, if Ford CEO Jim Farley gets his way. On Wednesday, Farley said that he wants the company's EVs to be sold online-only, with no dealer markups or other price negotiations, according to the Detroit Free Press. "We've got to go to non-negotiated price. We've got to go to 100 percent online. There's no inventory (at dealerships), it goes directly to the customer. And 100 percent remote pickup and delivery," Farley said while speaking at a conference in New York. One of Tesla's most popular innovations was to eschew traditional dealerships and sell its products directly to customers. But traditional manufacturers like Ford are usually prohibited from selling their products directly to customers, a legacy of fears over vertical integration written into state laws during the early 20th century. As such, Ford's franchised dealers will almost certainly still have a role to play. "Then we have this opportunity to use our physical presence to outperform [competitors]. I think our dealers can do it. But the standards are going to be brutal. They're going to be very different than they are today," he said. The move away from dealerships carrying extensive inventories of cars should save Ford money; the company says that its current distribution model adds around $2,000 in extra costs per car compared to Tesla. A third of that cost is tied up in inventory, and another third is spent on advertising.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Buy now, pay later" companies promised a credit revolution that would change the way people pay for things. Rising delinquencies and a slowing economy are clouding that outlook. From a report: Payment plans that allow shoppers to split up the cost of things such as clothing, makeup and home appliances were all the rage last year. The companies behind the plans saw their valuations surge. Scores of retailers rushed to add them at checkout. Block in August announced a roughly $29 billion all-stock deal for Afterpay, one of the biggest companies in the business. But late payments or related losses are piling up for the industry's biggest players -- Affirm, Afterpay and Zip. Their borrowing costs, meanwhile, are rising. Buy-now-pay-later companies sometimes rely on credit lines whose rates rise and fall along with the Federal Reserve's benchmark rate, which has risen 0.75 percentage point so far this year and is poised to go up even more. Investors, once enamored with the business, are backing away. Affirm went public in January 2021 at $49 a share and rose to more than $170 by November. The stock closed at $28.50 Tuesday. SoftBank-backed Klarna Bank is looking to raise as much as $1 billion in a deal that could value it in the low $30 billion range, far below the roughly $46 billion valuation it achieved last year. The young industry finds itself in a tricky spot at a time when the economy is slowing and, some fear, headed for a recession. Buy-now-pay-later companies boomed when consumers were flush with cash and buying goods at a feverish pace. How they fare in a downturn, when savings evaporate, spending slows and bad debts mount, is untested. To weather the storm, Afterpay and Zip are slowing their new originations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, the open source community was abuzz with excitement following a shocking announcement from System76 that HP was planning to release a laptop running the Pop!_OS operating system. This was significant for several reasons, but most importantly, it was a huge win for Linux users as yet another hardware option was becoming available. Best of all, HP employees have been trained by System76 to offer high-quality customer support. If you aren't aware, System76 support is legendary. At the time of the announcement, details about the hardware were a bit scarce, but I am happy to report we now have full system specifications for the 14-inch HP Dev One laptop. Most interestingly, there is only one configuration to be had. The developer-focused computer is powered by an octa-core AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U APU which features integrated Radeon graphics. The notebook comes with 16GB RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage, both of which can be user-upgraded later if you choose. The laptop is priced at $1,099.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amateur astronomers are preparing for a heavenly treat from Friday as the five planets visible to the naked eye line up in order of their distance from the sun across the pre-dawn sky. From a report: For those who can face the early start, and have an unobstructed view of the horizon to the east and south-east, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, could all be visible before the faintest, Mercury, vanishes in the glare of sunrise. It is not uncommon to see two or three planets close together, but the five that can be spotted with the naked eye have not appeared in order, as viewed from the northern hemisphere, since December 2004. "This is really cool," said Prof Beth Biller, personal chair of exoplanet characterisation at Edinburgh University's institute for astronomy. "We now know of many other stars hosting multiple planets. This is a rare opportunity to see the same thing closer to home, with all five 'naked eye' planets in our solar system visible at once." The planets of the solar system orbit the sun in a remarkably narrow plane, meaning that when viewed from Earth, they appear to lie close to an imaginary line in the sky called the ecliptic. The five planets will rise above the horizon in the early hours of Friday, though it may be hard to see them all until later in the month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A notorious Russian cybercrime group has updated its attack methods in response to sanctions that prohibit US companies from paying it a ransom, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The security firm Mandiant said Thursday it believes that the Evil Corp gang is now using a well-known ransomware tool named Lockbit. Evil Corp has shifted to using Lockbit, a form of ransomware used by numerous cybercrime groups, rather than its own brand of malicious software to hide evidence of the gang's involvement so that compromised organizations are more likely to pay an extortion fee, researchers said. The US Treasury Department in 2019 sanctioned the alleged leaders of the Evil Corp gang, creating legal liabilities for American companies that knowingly send ransom funds to the hackers. While cybersecurity firms have associated Evil Corp with two kinds of malware strains, known as Dridex and Hades, the group's use of LockBit could cause hacked organizations to believe that another hacking group, other than Evil Corp, was behind the breach. Evil Corp is believed to be behind some of the worst banking fraud and computer hacking schemes of the past decade, stealing more than $100 million from companies across 40 countries, according to the US government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Cyber Command Director Gen. Paul Nakasone confirmed for the first time that the U.S. had conducted offensive cyber operations in support of Ukraine. From a report: "We've conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations," Nakasone said in an interview Wednesday with Sky News, a British television news channel. Although the general did not provide specifics, he said the operations were lawful and conducted with civilian oversight of the military. "My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of Defense and the president, and so that's what I do," he told Sky News. Nakasone previously said his agency deployed a "hunt forward" team in December to help Ukraine shore up its cyber defenses and networks against active threats. But his latest remarks appear to be the first time that a U.S. official said publicly that the U.S. has been involved in offensive cyber operations in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

That morning cup of coffee may be linked to a lower risk of dying, researchers from a study published Monday in The Annals of Internal Medicine concluded. From a report: Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn't drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers. Researchers analyzed coffee consumption data collected from the U.K. Biobank, a large medical database with health information from people across Britain. They analyzed demographic, lifestyle and dietary information collected from more than 170,000 people between the ages of 37 and 73 over a median follow-up period of seven years. The mortality risk remained lower for people who drank both decaffeinated and caffeinated coffee. The data was inconclusive for those who drank coffee with artificial sweeteners. "It's huge. There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30 percent," said Dr. Christina Wee, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a deputy editor of the scientific journal where the study was published. Dr. Wee edited the study and published a corresponding editorial in the same journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon will shut its Chinese ebook store next year, pulling a small but prominent business from a market where it's failed to make major inroads against local rivals. From a report: The e-commerce giant will discontinue the Kindle eBook store on June 30, 2023, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. It promised to continue supporting Kindle readers or refund any device purchases made after January this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.