Slashdot

Watch a rare launch of SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket livestreamed on SpaceX's YouTube channel. "Nearly five years have passed since the massive Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful debut launch in February 2018," writes Ars Technica. "Since then, however, SpaceX's heavy lift rocket has flown just three additional times."Why? It's partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense. But now this trickle of Falcon Heavy launches may turn into a flood. [Sunday's launch is the first of potentially five launches this year] SpaceX completed a hot fire test of the rocket on Tuesday, and declared that the vehicle was ready for liftoff. The rocket will use a brand new core stage, and side-mounted boosters that have flown into space one time, as side-mounted boosters on the USSF-44 Falcon Heavy mission that launched on November 1 2022. What's it carrying? Space.com writes:The main payload is a military communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM 2, which the Falcon Heavy will send to geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above Earth. Also flying Saturday is a rideshare spacecraft called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A, a payload adapter that can hold up to six small satellites, according to EverydayAstronaut.com. LDPE-3A will carry five Space Force payloads on USSF-67. Among them are "two operational prototypes for enhanced situational awareness and an operational prototype crypto/interface encryption payload providing secure space-to-ground communications capability," Space Force officials said in an emailed statement on Friday.... If all goes according to plan, the two side boosters will come back to Earth shortly after liftoff on Sunday, making vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The central booster will not return, instead ditching into the Atlantic Ocean.... USSF-67 is part of a busy week for SpaceX. The company also plans to launch 51 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 on Thursday, January 19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Thousands of CES 2023 attendees tested out the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop tunnel transit system," reports Fierce Electronics, "for quick 1.7-mile trips offering them a prelude of more of the efficient tunnels to come."The service was free during the early January event, offering 115,000 CES attendees a chance to reduce a 45-minute LVCC cross-campus walk time down to 2 minutes, not including short waits for Tesla vehicles with drivers. "I call shotgun!" one gleeful CES attendee said while waiting in line. Once inside the white Tesla vehicle, the man used his phone to video the entire trip, marking its sudden acceleration to maximum speed in the single lane white tunnel, an experience the design engineer likened to a slick amusement park ride over a tunnel race track.... Construction is expected to begin in 2023 on the 29-mile Vegas Loop tunnel network approved by the county in 2021 to ultimately connect 51 stations throughout the resort corridor. In 2022, the city of Las Vegas unanimously approved bringing the Vegas Loop to city limits, which increases the system to 34 miles and 55 stations in all. The dream is for Vegas Loop to eventually connect to Los Angeles, a distance of 270 miles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: In what is becoming a recurring theme, Gen Z keeps harkening back to nostalgia. Whether low-rise jeans or disposable cameras, they can't seem to get enough of vintage technology from the past. Their latest obsession? Flip phones. Why this fascination? Several reasons. Flip phones are far less expensive than any smart phone, easier to operate as they have few, if any, software included, there isn't the incessant need to see who messaged you or who said what and, perhaps just as important, privacy. For a generation which grew up on being tracked wherever they go via their phone, a flip phone's simplicity allows them the freedom to simply enjoy their life. HMD Global (the company which owns Nokia) said many people like the idea being less available. "We attribute this shift to many smartphone users beginning to recognize they are spending too much time glued to their devices and having a strong desire to disconnect and 'be fully present' to improve their quality of social connections," Kates said. CNN spoke to one influencer pushing flip phones — Sammy Palazzolo, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:Palazzolo's TikTok encouraging others to purchase flip phones has more than 14 million views and over 3 million likes, with hashtags that include #BRINGBACKFLIPPHONES and #y2kaesthetic. [The video says that instead of apps, the phones will only have the phone numbers of their other friends.] "It eliminates all the bad things about college and brings all of the good things about a phone," Palazzolo said. "Which is connecting with people and taking photos and videos...." Palozzolo wanted to use a flip phone during one high school summer because she thought it would be "cool." "My parents said absolutely not, we need to be able to track you," she said. "I love the photos on the flip phones because they are grainy and blurry," Palazzolo tells CNN. "And I think that captures the vibe of going out in college perfectly...." And one 18-year-old told CNN what they think is missing from the flip phone era. "People were more involved in each other than our phones and social media. It seemed like people just were talking to each other more and everything was more genuine and spontaneous."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From BuzzFeed News:Technology news outlet CNET has been found to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write articles about personal finance without any prior announcement or explanation. The articles, which numbered at 73, covered topics such as "What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?" and had a small disclaimer at the bottom of each reading, "This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff." The bylines on these articles read "CNET Money Staff" without any indication that they were generated by AI. The use of AI to write these articles was first brought to light by a Twitter user, and further investigation revealed that the articles have been generated using AI since November 2022.... Note: This article was written entirely by ChatGPT and reviewed by a human editor. (Actually, we had to rewrite the prompt a few times to get it to stop inserting factual errors.) CNET's editor in chief defends their AI-written stories:I use the term "AI assist" because while the AI engine compiled the story draft or gathered some of the information in the story, every article on CNET — and we publish thousands of new and updated stories each month — is reviewed, fact-checked and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish. That will remain true as our policy no matter what tools or tech we use to create those stories. Our reputation as a fact-based, unbiased source of news and advice is based on being transparent about how we work and the sources we rely on. So in the past 24 hours, we've changed the byline to CNET Money and moved our disclosure so you won't need to hover over the byline to see it: "This story was assisted by an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff...."Will we make more changes and try new things as we continue to test, learn and understand the benefits and challenges of AI? Yes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When Robert Wood came to Harvard University 17 years ago, he wanted to design an insect-sized robot that could fly," reports the Boston Globe. And finally Last month, technology from Wood's "RoboBee" project was commercialized for the first time, "spinning out as a surgical-robot startup backed by venture capital firm 1955 Capital. "RoboBee was funded by $10 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. Its evolution into a company says a lot about how schools like Harvard are doing more to encourage entrepreneurship."The RoboBee first took flight in 2012, connected to a tether that provided a power supply. In 2019, it became the lightest object to take off and fly on its own.... When it takes off, its little wings flap about 150 times per second, but a slowed-down video of the wings resembles a human treading water. Many wonder what tiny, flying robots that weigh less than one-tenth of a gram might be useful for. Pollinating crops? Surveillance? Wood said he never paid too much attention to that. "It's never really been about, 'Oh, I'm going to start a company based upon this,'" he said. But that changed recently, he said, mostly because of a growing push at Harvard to move research from its labs into the real world.... Wood was connected to venture capitalist and Harvard alum Andrew Chung by the school's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean, Frank Doyle, during the pandemic. The managing partner of 1955 Capital said he's been investing in surgical-robotics companies for the past decade. "The one key thing that we have been dreaming about is how we can make the robotic arms a lot smaller," Chung said. "Not necessarily what other VCs might be thinking, which is maybe 15 to 20 percent smaller. We're thinking 90 percent smaller." Chung noticed how the RoboBee was designed and manufactured — Wood got his inspiration from origami and children's-book layering and folding techniques — and thought it could help make better small-scale surgical robots. "Thinking about how to shrink these devices to insect size or smaller opens up a whole range of possibilities that even surgeons haven't quite imagined," Chung said. For now, the startup is called Project 1985, a reference to the year the first robotic-assisted surgery took place. The company will initially focus on neurosurgery, urology, and lung surgery. Wood will serve as an advisor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns. RNDIS is the proprietary protocol used atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. The support for RNDIS outside of Microsoft Windows has been mixed. RNDIS isn't widely used today in cross-platform environments and due to security concerns the upstream Linux kernel is looking to move the RNDIS kernel drivers behind the "BROKEN" Kconfig option so they effectively become disabled in future kernel builds. Ultimately once marked as "BROKEN" for a while, the drivers will likely be eventually removed from the upstream source tree. Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in a commit:"The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and vulnerable on any system that uses it with untrusted hosts or devices. Because the protocol is impossible to make secure, just disable all rndis drivers to prevent anyone from using them again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contrails — the wispy ice clouds trailing behind flying jets — "are surprisingly bad for the environment," reports CNN:A study that looked at aviation's contribution to climate change between 2000 and 2018 concluded that contrails create 57% of the sector's warming impact, significantly more than the CO2 emissions from burning fuel. They do so by trapping heat that would otherwise be released into space. And yet, the problem may have an apparently straightforward solution. Contrails — short for condensation trails, which form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines — require cold and humid atmospheric conditions, and don't always stay around for long. Researchers say that by targeting specific flights that have a high chance of producing contrails, and varying their flight path ever so slightly, much of the damage could be prevented. Adam Durant, a volcanologist and entrepreneur based in the UK, is aiming to do just that. "We could, in theory, solve this problem for aviation within one or two years," he says.... Of contrails' climate impact, "80 or 90% is coming from only maybe five to 10% of all flights," says Durant. "Simply redirecting a small proportion of flights can actually save the majority of the contrail climate impact...." In 2021, scientists calculated that addressing the contrail problem would cost under $1 billion a year, but provide benefits worth more than 1,000 times as much. And a study from Imperial College London showed that diverting just 1.7% of flights could reduce the climate damage of contrails by as much as 59%. Durant's company Satavia is now testing its technology with two airlines and "actively looking for more airlines in 2023 to work with, as we start scaling up the service that we offer." Truly addressing the issue may require some changes to air traffic rules, Durant says — but he's not the only one working on the issue. There's also the task force of a non-profit energy think tank that includes six airlines, plus researchers and academics. "We could seriously reduce, say, 50% of the industry's contrails impact by 2030," Durant tells CNN. "That's totally attainable, because we can do it with software and analytics."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

InfoWorld reports: JavaScript, Java, and Python skills are most in-demand by recruiters, according to a report published this week by tech hiring platforms CodinGame and CoderPad. But while the supply of those skills exceeds demand, the demand for TypeScript, Swift, Scala, Kotlin, and Go skills all exceed supply. The State of Tech Hiring in 2023, a CodinGame-CoderPad report published January 10, draws on a survey of 14,000 professionals and offers insights into what 2023 may hold for tech industry recruiters and job seekers. The demand for JavaScript, Java, and Python skills is consistent with previous years, the report notes. Among development frameworks, Node.js, React, and .NET Core proved to be the best-known and most in-demand. InfoWorld summarizes some other interesting findings:"59% of developers do not have a university degree in computer science. Nearly one-third consider themselves primarily self-taught.""Developers' main challenges at work include unplanned changes to their schedule, unclear direction, and a lack of technical knowledge by team members.""Most teams are now hybrid between remote and on-site work. Only 15% work onsite 100% of the time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Can editing code feel more tactile, like painting with Photoshop brushes?" Researchers at GitHub Next asked that question this week — and then supplied the answer. "We added a toolbox of brushes to our Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension that can modify your code.... Just select a few lines, choose your brush, and see your code update." The tool's web page includes interactive before-and-after examples demonstrating:Add Types brushFix Bugs brushAdd Debugging Statements brushMake More Readable brushAnd last month Microsoft's principle program manager for browser tools shared an animated GIF showing all the brushes in action. "In the future, we're interested in adding more useful brushes, as well as letting developers store their own custom brushes," adds this week's announcement. "As we explore enhancing developers' workflows with Machine Learning, we're focused on how to empower developers, instead of automating them. This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines." It's ultimately grafting an incredibly easy interface onto "ML-powered code modification", writes Visual Studio Magazine, noting that "The bug-fixing brush, for example can fix a simple typo, changing a variable name from the incorrect 'low' to the correct 'lo'.... "All of the above brushes and a few others have been added to the Copilot Labs brushes toolbox, which is available for anyone with a GitHub Copilot license, costing $10 per month or $100 per year.... At the time of this writing, the extension has been installed 131,369 times, earning a perfect 5.0 rating from six reviewers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year in America, "Renewable energy surpassed coal power nationwide for the first time in over six decades," reports the New York Times. Wind, solar and hydropower generated 22% of America's electricity, compared with 20% from coal. But unfortunately, America's greenhouse gas emissions still increased from the year before, "according to preliminary estimates published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research firm." The New Yorker supplies some context:This increase, according to the report, "was driven mainly by the demand for jet fuel," as air travel rebounded from COVID levels, and it might have been even larger but for the war in Ukraine, which drove up fuel prices.... As part of the Paris Agreement, the U.S. pledged to reduce its emissions by half by 2030, using 2005 as a baseline. Emissions are now down only around fifteen per cent compared with 2005, which leaves a thirty-five-per-cent cut to be implemented in just eight years. Last summer's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes some four hundred billion dollars' worth of spending on clean energy, was a "turning point," the Rhodium Group said, and could produce emissions cuts "as early as this year if the government can fast-track implementation." Still, the group admonished, the U.S. "needs to significantly increase its efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's plans for a presence on the moon "will allow the program to practice how to live in space sustainably," writes the Washington Post. "It will allow scientists to tap into the moon's considerable scientific value to learn more about how Earth was formed. And perhaps, it would also serve as a steppingstone to Mars and other deep-space destinations years in the future." First, unlike in the 1960s — we now know that the moon has water.Water is not only key to sustaining human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a gas station in space. That could be critical for long-duration missions, allowing spacecraft to refuel on the moon instead of lugging all the fuel from Earth. And since the moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, it is a relatively easy springboard to other points of the solar system. NASA is also considering building a nuclear reactor on the moon:It's one of several initiatives NASA has begun under its Artemis program, designed to help astronauts stay for extended periods when they'll need power, transportation and the ability to use the moon's resources.... The effort is still very much in its nascent stages, and the funding NASA would need for the long term has not materialized in full.... A sustainable presence, despite the rosy predictions coming from the top echelons of the agency, is still years away, and the technical challenges are immense. But NASA has begun developing the technologies that would be needed to sustain astronauts on the surface for extended periods. In June of last year, the agency and the Energy Department awarded contracts, worth $5 million each, to three companies to develop nuclear power systems that could be ready to launch by the end of the decade for a test on the moon. The systems would generate 40 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power six or seven American households, and last about 10 years.... NASA is also looking to build solar farms, using arrays that point vertically and catch the angle of the sun over the horizon. And it's exploring how best to exploit what are called "in situ resources" — meaning those that already exist, such as the regolith. The article even broaches the idea of "a lunar economy that would help sustain a permanent presence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Toronto Star notes "the near-elimination of cursive from the school curriculum and a move to paperless commerce" over the past two decades. So where does that leave handwritten signatures?Then the pandemic hit, and with it came an accelerated adoption of technology, including the electronic signature, which helped us through forcibly distant transactions. Overnight, companies like Docusign and Adobe became vital lifelines as people shifted to relying on e-signatures. Docusign, for example, went from 585,000 customers in 2020 to 1.1 million as of January 2022 and revenue over the same period grew from $974 million to $2.1 billion, according to the company's most recent annual report. "We believe that once businesses have shifted to digital agreement processes, they will not return to manual ones," noted Docusign. So even as life has returned to a semblance of normal, the now near ubiquitous option to just tap an electronic device doesn't bode well for the signature as we know it.... During the pandemic, jurisdictions round the world, including Ontario, amended legislation or relaxed rules around contract activity to mitigate the challenges social distancing posed.... Since 2006, the Ontario language curriculum lists cursive only as an option beginning in Grade 3. A plan by the Toronto Catholic District School Board in 2019 to reintroduce it as part of a pilot project was shuttered by the pandemic. And so you get stories of parents shocked to discover their child has to resort to block letters on a passport because they don't know how to "sign" their name. Digital signatures may be poised for even more growth. Market research firm P&S Intelligence estimates that just the U.S. digital signature market alone "stood at $921.3 million in 2021," and "will propel at a mammoth compound annual growth rate of 31.2% in the years to come, reaching $10.6 billion by 2030." Of course, there's always the question of whether or not handwritten signatures ever worked in the first place.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report from the Washington Post:Staff at Activision Blizzard-owned video game studio Proletariat — whose name is a term for the working class — announced their intention to form a union in December of last year. "Well, what'd you expect?" the Proletariat Workers Alliance wrote on Twitter at the time. Earlier this week, however, Proletariat leadership shared an update: Instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, it will conduct an anonymous vote through the National Labor Relations Board. Proletariat owner Activision Blizzard has been accused of employing union-busting tactics in its negotiations with two other subsidiaries that have voted to unionize, Raven Software and Blizzard Albany.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet," writes ScienceAlert. It's all based on the idea that melting absorbs heats."The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem," says mechanical engineer Drew Lilley, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn't hurt the environment. We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately...." A current running through the system would move the ions in it, shifting the material's melting point to change temperature. The team also ran experiments using a salt made with iodine and sodium, to melt ethylene carbonate. This common organic solvent is also used in lithium-ion batteries, and is produced using carbon dioxide as an input. That could make the system not just GWP [global warming potential] zero, but GWP negative. A temperature shift of 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) was measured through the application of less than a single volt of charge in the experiment, a result that exceeds what other caloric technologies have managed to achieve so far.... "Now, it's time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges," says mechanical engineer Ravi Prasher, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It often feels like you're tossing your resume into the abyss and praying to the recruitment gods for a response," writes Vox. But then the real ordeal begins:Companies are seemingly coming up with new, higher, and harder hoops to jump through at every turn. That translates to endless rounds of interviews, various arbitrary tests, and complex exercises and presentations that entail hours of work and prep. There can be good reasons for firms to do this — they really want to make sure they get the right person, and they're trying to reduce biases — but it's hard not to feel like it can just be too much. "There's no reason why 10 years ago we were able to hire people on two interviews and now it's taking 20 rounds of interviews," said Maddie Machado, a career strategist who has previously worked as a recruiter at companies such as LinkedIn, Meta, and Microsoft. "It's kind of like dating. When you go on a first date, you need a second date. You don't need 20 dates to know if you like somebody...." Another man was told to start looking for apartments across the country after being flown out for a final interview, only to follow up a couple of weeks later and learn that the recruiter simply forget to tell him he hadn't gotten the job. "My interviewing experiences have been worse than dating, with the ghosting and non-responses," he said.... There's no denying that over the years, in many instances, the hiring process has gotten harder and more convoluted. A 2022 survey from hiring software company Greenhouse found that 60 percent of job seekers were "unimpressed by time-consuming recruitment processes...." The pandemic and current economic conditions may be exacerbating employers' anxiety even more. Sondra Levitt [a leadership and career coach with Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm] said she thinks many firms feel like they "jumped too fast" to make hires amid the great resignation or great reshuffle, as for much of 2021 and 2022 workers hopped jobs in droves. The pendulum is swinging the other way now, with managers being extra careful to do their due diligence, especially as the economy looks rocky. "Perhaps the simplest answer to why companies make it so hard is that they can," the article concludes. Job-hunters have faced IQ tests, credit checks, and even reviews of their grades from high school. (I still remember one employer who asked everyone to take the Meyers-Briggs personality test.) And it's painfully annoying to do multiple rounds of interviews — and then be rejected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue," reports CNN:On the flip side, young mice have prematurely aged, with devastating results to nearly every tissue in their bodies. The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven "forwards and backwards at will," said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. Our bodies hold a backup copy of our youth that can be triggered to regenerate, said Sinclair, the senior author of a new paper showcasing the work of his lab and international scientists. The combined experiments, published for the first time Thursday in the journal Cell, challenge the scientific belief aging is the result of genetic mutations that undermine our DNA, creating a junkyard of damaged cellular tissue that can lead to deterioration, disease and death. "It's not junk, it's not damage that causes us to get old," said Sinclair, who described the work last year at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. "We believe it's a loss of information — a loss in the cell's ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function — in much the same way an old computer may develop corrupted software. I call it the information theory of aging." Jae-Hyun Yang, a genetics research fellow in the Sinclair Lab who coauthored the paper, said he expects the findings "will transform the way we view the process of aging and the way we approach the treatment of diseases associated with aging." While Sinclair is now testing "genetic resets" in primates, the article warns that "decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval." But Sinclair suggests damage could probably also be repaired through healthy behaviors like exercise and sufficient sleep, social support and lower stress levels, eating less often and focusing on plants. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top." "On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...."Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say. "This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...." "Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this." Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020. Other stats from the article about 2022:Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high."Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you've been itching to try an Arch Linux distribution and want something outside of the usual GNOME/KDE/Xfce desktop environments, Mabox Linux is an outstanding option...." writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "It reminded me of my early days using Linux, only with a bit of a modern, user-centric twist...."Linux was hard in its infancy. So, when I see a Linux distribution that reminds me of those days but manages to make it easy on users without years of experience under their belts, it reminds me how far the open-source operating system has come. Such is the case with Mabox Linux.... It's not that Mabox doesn't make Arch Linux easy...it does. But when you first log into the desktop, you are greeted with something most hard-core Linux users love to see but can be a real put-off to new users. I'm talking about information...and lots of it. You see, Mabox Linux places four information-centric widgets front and center on the desktop, so you can get an at-a-glance look at how the OS is using your system resources and even two widgets that give you keyboard shortcuts for things like opening various apps, menus, and even window management controls. Also on the OpenBox Window Manager desktop, you'll find a single top panel that gives you quick access to all your installed apps, the Mabox Colorizer... and a system tray with plenty of controls.... Once you have the distribution installed, the big surprise comes by way of performance. Mabox Linux is amazingly fast...like faster than most distributions I've used. A big part of that is due to the OpenBox Window Manager, which is very lightweight. Compared to my regular GNOME-based Linux desktop, Mabox is like driving a Lamborgini instead of a Prius. The difference is that obvious. The installation process lets you choose between open-source or proprietary video drivers, the article points out. And "you can easily customize the color of your Mabox desktop, including the theme, side panels, Conky (which creates the desktop widgets), wallpaper, Tint2 Panel, and even the terminal theme."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC. But instead "at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper stage experienced an anomaly which 'prematurely ended' the first burn. The company said this event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor.,,," At this point the unmanned rocket became "a slow moving fireball in the sky," astrodynamics lecturer Marco Langbroek told Gizmodo in an email. The rocket's hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space. Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. He released the footage on YouTube, as well as on Twitter. Earlier this week Space.com noted that four previous Virgin Orbit missions have all been successful, deploying a total of 33 satellites into orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the mid-1970s, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to film Dune (working with artists including H.R. Giger). A documentary about that attempt was filmed by Frank Pavich, who now writes in the New York Times that "The cast would have included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Alejandro's 12-year-old son, Brontis, in the lead role. The soundtrack would have been composed and recorded by Pink Floyd.... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations." Just because you cannot watch Alejandro's "Dune" doesn't mean it didn't change the world. This unfilmed film's influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the "Dune" art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as "Blade Runner," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Prometheus," "The Terminator" and even the original "Star Wars." His "Dune" does not exist, yet it's all around us. Nearly half a century later... I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1976 version of "Tron." The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian. However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make "Tron." I'm not even sure he knows what "Tron" is. And Disney's original "Tron" was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from...? The truth is that these weren't stills from a long-lost movie. They weren't photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. The article notes that the real Jodorowsky is now almost 94 — and is planning to direct a new film. But it also points out that in the early 1970s Jodorowsky's team put in "two years of pure analog struggle to create his Dune," — while Canadian film director Johnny Darrell generated the Tron images in less than a minute using an A.I. program called Midjourney. Pavich says this raises several questions. "Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?" In his great documentary F for Fake Orson Welles intones wrly that "A forgery — is still a painting." So Pavich's piece concludes with perhaps the ultimate question. "What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students... can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven't yet even been imagined? "I have a feeling we're all about to find out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin's (BTC) 2023 surge continues, with the crypto now above $20,000 for the first time since the FTX collapse in early November. CoinDesk reports: The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization started the week near the $17,000 mark after hovering in the mid-$16,000 area since mid-December. Now at $20,250, bitcoin has gained more than 20% in the opening two weeks of this year. Still, the crypto -- which topped $65,000 in Nov. 2021 -- remains near the low end of a brutal bear market. Indeed, $20,000 "once [was] deemed a disturbing low but now potentially represents a sign of a revival," according to Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at foreign exchange market maker Oanda. Also moving nicely higher is ether (ETH), ahead more than 20% year-to-date and threatening $1,500 for the first time since early November. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) rose 14% for the week. Crypto-related stocks also benefited from the rally this week: Exchange Coinbase (COIN) was up 39% while bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) surged 76%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Game Rant: A Discord user has just released various development assets from Valve's repository. It is not an isolated case as Valve is a constant target of hackers and the like. There have been multiple instances wherein concept images or artwork randomly surface on the internet. Valve is a globally recognized company whose games such as Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress have grown its large fan base. Its games go through a lengthy development process, which is the reason hundreds to thousands of documents, photos, and such are accumulated during this period. Only a limited number of staff with a Source developer license would have had access to the repository. As such, the files might have been more secure if access was limited. Twitter user sylvia_braixen stated that one of the biggest Valve data breaches had just occurred. Not long after, they shared screenshots showing the various drops made onto a Discord server. They believe that the files were from the same wave of uploads that users got a taste of as early as 2016. According to the screenshots, the uploads were done by a user named Leakerwanderer, who had access to the Valve repository. Titles such as Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 are no strangers to leaks, and they were among those that had its assets shown this time as well. Currently, the documents are accessible via a Discord server named Valve Cut Content. However, upon checking, the server is not accepting new members because of the recent flood of users who have tried to check out the files. With the gravity of the leak, people are left wondering if this data breach is a targeted attack, especially since a recent Valve prototype of Left 4 Dead surfaced online just a few days before. It seems that may have served as a precursor to this bigger repository leak.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UpNext, Airbus's future technology-focused subsidiary, reported on Thursday that it has entered the final three months of testing tech it hopes will automate the process of getting a plane from the air to the gate. The Register reports: The system, called DragonFly, tackles automated operations like diversions, landings, and taxi procedures through a combination of sensors, computer vision algorithms and robust guidance calculations. Airbus pitches the system as an extra layer of safety for emergency operations. "In the unlikely situation where a crew is unable to control the aircraft, DragonFly can redirect the flight to the nearest appropriate airport and facilitate a safe landing," enthused the aerospace corporation. The eventual hope is for the technologies to pave the way for automated landing -- or at least compensate for a less than perfect pilot during an emergency situation. If the captain had the fish, for example. A marketing video of the Airbus UpNext DragonFly details that a safe landing feature is included in the Automated Emergency Ops application. It works by detecting the most suitable airport for landing and calculates a trajectory to get there, with consideration for weather, military zones and other factors. Airbus assures viewers that Air Traffic Control (ATC) and Operations Control Center (OCC) communication links are in place. The video does not, however, explain how the aircraft communicates with air traffic control for clearance into controlled airspace if the pilot is incapacitated, as that task is completed through human verbal interaction. An automated landing is assisted by sensors that enhance the view of the runway, computer vision algorithms, and guidance computation. Furthermore, the demonstrator is kitted out with a pilot taxi assistance application to manage its maneuvers on the ground in a heavily trafficked airport. Air traffic control clearance is interpreted and translated into taxi guidance cues. Crew receive audio alerts in reaction to obstacles, assisted speed control and an interactive airport map. The taxi assistance element was tested at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport. The subsidiary reckons one day DragonFly will allow for automatic landing at any airport, regardless of whether the ground equipment is equipped for such landings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. "I am very worried," says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. "If we're now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what's true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics," she adds. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a 'large language model', a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on November 30, and it is free to use. Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them. The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts. The ChatGPT-generated abstracts sailed through the plagiarism checker: the median originality score was 100%, which indicates that no plagiarism was detected. The AI-output detector spotted 66% the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn't do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated. Wachter says that, if scientists can't determine whether research is true, there could be "dire consequences". As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are "implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society". For example, it could mean that research-informed policy decisions are incorrect, she adds. On the contrary, Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says: "It is unlikely that any serious scientist will use ChatGPT to generate abstracts." He adds that whether generated abstracts can be detected is "irrelevant." "The question is whether the tool can generate an abstract that is accurate and compelling. It can't, and so the upside of using ChatGPT is minuscule, and the downside is significant," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock in a process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor. It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer. CNBC reports: The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zurich, the main technical university in Switzerland's largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air. have all bought future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has been certified by DNV, an independent auditor. The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide the companies want to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also pay to Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions. Climeworks' largest carbon dioxide removal facility is located in Iceland, where it partners with CarbFix, which stores the gas underground. CarbFix dissolves carbon dioxide in water then intermingles that mixture with basalt rock formations. Natural processes convert the material to solid carbonate minerals in about two years. In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Canadian systems security consultant discovered that an Android TV box purchased from Amazon was pre-loaded with persistent, sophisticated malware baked into its firmware. BleepingComputer reports: The malware was discovered by Daniel Milisic, who created a script and instructions to help users nullify the payload and stop its communication with the C2 (command and control) server. The device in question is the T95 Android TV box with an AllWinner T616 processor, widely available through Amazon, AliExpress, and other big e-commerce platforms. It is unclear if this single device was affected or if all devices from this model or brand include the malicious component. Milisic believes the malware installed on the device is a strain that resembles 'CopyCat,' a sophisticated Android malware first discovered by Check Point in 2017. This malware was previously seen in an adware campaign where it infected 14 million Android devices to make its operators over $1,500,000 in profits. The analyst tested the stage-1 malware sample on VirusTotal, where it returns only 13 detections out of 61 AV engine scans, classified with the generic term of an Android trojan downloader. [...] Unfortunately, these inexpensive Android-based TV box devices follow an obscure route from manufacturing in China to global market availability. In many cases, these devices are sold under multiple brands and device names, with no clear indication of where they originate. [...] To avoid such risks, you can pick streaming devices from reputable vendors like Google Chromecast, Apple TV, NVIDIA Shield, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku Stick.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Bankman-Fried instructed his FTX cofounder Gary Wang to create a "secret" backdoor to enable his trading firm Alameda to borrow $65 billion of clients' money from the exchange without their permission, the Delaware bankruptcy court was told Wednesday. Insider reports: Wang was told to create a "backdoor, a secret way for Alameda to borrow from customers on the exchange without permission," said FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich. "Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," he added. "And we know the size of that line of credit. It was $65 billion." The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) made similar allegations when it brought charges against Wang in December. But the value of that line of credit hasn't been discussed before now. The CFTC then described it as "virtually unlimited." [...] Dietderich told the court that with the $65 billion back door, Alameda "bought planes, houses, threw parties, made political donations." Dietderich said the rest of the money went towards personal loans, sponsorships, and investments. "We know that all this has left a shortfall, in value to repay customers and creditors," he added. That amount "will depend on the size of the claims pool and our recovery efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Gen Digital, formerly Symantec Corporation and NortonLifeLock, is sending data breach notifications to customers, informing them that hackers have successfully breached Norton Password Manager accounts in credential-stuffing attacks. According to a letter sample shared with the Office of the Vermont Attorney General, the attacks did not result from a breach on the company but from account compromise on other platforms. "Our own systems were not compromised. However, we strongly believe that an unauthorized third party knows and has utilized your username and password for your account," NortonLifeLock said. "This username and password combination may potentially also be known to others." More specifically, the notice explains that around December 1, 2022, an attacker used username and password pairs they bought from the dark web to attempt to log in to Norton customer accounts. The firm detected "an unusually large volume" of failed login attempts on December 12, 2022, indicating credential stuffing attacks where threat actors try out credentials in bulk. By December 22, 2022, the company had completed its internal investigation, which revealed that the credential stuffing attacks had successfully compromised an undisclosed number of customer accounts: "In accessing your account with your username and password, the unauthorized third party may have viewed your first name, last name, phone number, and mailing address." For customers utilizing the Norton Password Manager feature, the notice warns that the attackers might have obtained details stored in the private vaults. Depending on what users store in their accounts, this could lead to the compromise of other online accounts, loss of digital assets, exposure of secrets, and more. Norton has reset passwords on impacted accounts and implemented additional measures to counter the malicious attempts. They're recommending customers enable two-factor authentication and take up the offer for a credit monitoring service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is launching its final Stadia game today and is promising to release a tool next week to enable Bluetooth connections on its Stadia Controller. The Verge reports: The last Stadia game to launch on the service is Worm Game, a test game that was technically available on Stadia before Stadia launched publicly in November 2019. Developers at Google have decided to release the game just before the streaming service disappears next week. [...] Alongside the new game, Google is also committing to enabling Bluetooth on Stadia controllers. Google Stadia owners will be pleased to hear there's a self-serve tool coming next week that will enable Bluetooth on the Stadia Controller. "We'll share details next week on how to enable this feature," says a Google Stadia community manager in a forum post. Google originally launched the Stadia Controller as a device that connects directly to Stadia services and had the Bluetooth chip disabled. After news broke of the Stadia shutdown, fans have been finding ways to save the controller from an e-waste fate by using workarounds to connect it wirelessly to other devices. Workarounds like connecting to an Android device will no longer be required thanks to this new tool. It means that most Stadia players that purchased a Founders or Premiere edition will have been effectively gifted a free Bluetooth controller thanks to Google's refunds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has a pair of new Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Ars Technica reports: We'll start with the most consumer-friendly of the two, the NW-A300. This basic design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, but that shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less-ancient version of Android, a new SoC, and a scalloped back design. In Sony's home of Japan, the 32GB version is 46,000 yen (about $360), while in Europe, it's 399 euro (about $430). The NW-A300 is a tiny little device that measures 56.6x98.5x12 mm, so pretty close to a deck of playing cards. [...] The front is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280x720 touchscreen LCD. There's 32GB of storage, and the device supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That's about all Sony wants to talk about for official specs. It touts "longer battery life" but won't say how big the battery is, promising only "36 hours* of 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours* of 96 KHz FLAC High-Resolution Audio playback." Presumably, that's all with the screen off. [...] This is a music player, so of course, there's a headphone jack on the bottom of the unit. You'll also find a spot for a lanyard, a speedy USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for quick music transfers, and a MicroSD slot for storing all your music. Buttons along the side of the device also give you every music control you could want, like a hold switch, previous, play/pause, next, volume controls, and power. There's another new Sony Walkman, the NW-ZX700. It's 104,500 yen ($818) in Japan, and while that sounds like a lot for a portable music player, it's actually a relative bargain compared to the "Signature Series" NW-WM1ZM2, which goes for an eye-popping $3,700 thanks to audiophile hocus-pocus like a "gold plated, oxygen-free, copper body." Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6x132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment. I'm sure Sony has a wonderful headphone collection to match. [...] Both this and the A300 use the S-Master HX digital amplifier chip, which supports Sony's high-resolution "NativeDSD" audio format, which is also used on Super Audio CDs. If you're some kind of heathen that is just streaming 128kb Spotify, Sony's "DSEE Ultimate" feature dubiously claims to be able to "upscale" your music with AI. There's also a "Vinyl Processor" that will add record player noises to your audio for an "authentic listening experience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally addressed its community's concerns about changes to the open gaming license. The open gaming license (OGL) has existed since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party creators to publish virtual tabletop software, expansion books and more. Many of these creators can make a living thanks to the OGL. But over the last week, a new version of the OGL leaked after WoTC sent it to some top creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of an expected announcement, and waves of users deleted their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, WoTC's online platform. Now, WoTC admitted that "it's clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1." Or, in non-Dungeons and Dragons speak, they screwed up. "We wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community -- not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose," the company wrote in a statement. But fans have critiqued this language, since WoTC -- a subsidiary of Hasbro -- is a "major corporation" in itself. Hasbro earned $1.68 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. TechCrunch spoke to content creators who had received the unpublished OGL update from WoTC. The terms of this updated OGL would force any creator making more than $50,000 to report earnings to WoTC. Creators earning over $750,000 in gross revenue would have to pay a 25% royalty. The latter creators are the closest thing that third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to "major corporations" -- but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so to refer to these companies in that way is a misnomer. [...] The fan community also worried about whether WoTC would be allowed to publish and profit off of third-party work without credit to the original creator. Noah Downs, a partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons livestreamer, told TechCrunch that there was a clause in the document that granted WoTC a perpetual, royalty-free sublicense to all third-party content created under the OGL. Now, WoTC appears to be walking back both the royalty clause and the perpetual license. "What [the next OGL] will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds," WoTC wrote in a statement. "Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't." WoTC claims that it included this language in the leaked version of the OGL to prevent creators from being able to "incorrectly allege" that WoTC stole their work. Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft -- however, creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign off on it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) publishers took action. Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered under WoTC's original OGL. Paizo's owner and presidents were leaders at Wizards of the Coast at the time that the OGL was originally published in 2000, and wrote in a statement yesterday that the company was prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the OGL license from existing projects. Along with other publishers like Kobold Press, Chaosium and Legendary Games, Paizo announced it would release its own Open RPG Creative License (ORC). "Ultimately, the collective action of the signatures on the open letter and unsubscribing from D&D Beyond made a difference. We have seen that all they care about is profit, and we are hitting their bottom line," said Eric Silver, game master of Dungeons & Dragons podcast Join the Party. He told TechCrunch that WoTC's response on Friday is "just a PR statement." "Until we see what they release in clear language, we can't let our foot off the gas pedal," Silver said. "The corporate playbook is wait it out until the people get bored; we can't and we won't."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange Crypto.com is cutting its global workforce by 20%, it said on Friday, as it navigates ongoing economic headwinds and "unforeseeable" industry events. From a report: This is the second major layoff at the Singapore-headquartered Crypto.com, which cut 250 jobs in mid-last year -- though a report suggested that more than 2,000 people were either let go or left at their own will. The company did not say what roles were being eliminated in the new round of layoff but blamed the collapse of FTX, whose misappropriation of customers' funds and bankruptcy "significantly damaged trust in the industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's streaming software now has an option to make it appear like you're making eye contact with the camera, even if you're looking somewhere else in real life. From a report: Using AI, the "Eye Contact" feature added to Nvidia Broadcast 1.4 will replace your eyes with "simulated" ones that are aligned with your camera -- an effect that worked really well when we tested it ourselves, except for all the times it didn't. In an announcement post, the company writes the feature is meant for "content creators seeking to record themselves while reading their notes or a script" without having to look directly at a camera. Pitching it as something you'd use during a public performance, instead of something you'd use socially, does kind of sidestep the dilemmas that come with this sort of tech. Is it rude to use AI to trick my mom into thinking I'm engaged in our video call when I'm actually looking at my phone? Or, to make my boss think I'm not writing an article on my other monitor during a meeting? Nvidia suggests that Eye Contact will try to make your simulated eyes match the color of your real ones, and there's "even a disconnect feature in case you look too far away."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has filed a legal complaint against a company for allegedly creating tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data and provide surveillance services for clients. From a report: The firm, Voyager Labs, bills itself as "a world leader in advanced AI-based investigation solutions." What this means in practice is analyzing social media posts en masse in order to make claims about individuals. In 2021, for example, The Guardian reported how Voyager Labs sold its services to the Los Angeles Police Department, with the company claiming to predict which individuals were likely to commit crimes in the future. Meta announced the legal action in a blog post on January 12th, claiming that Voyager Labs violated its terms of service. According to a legal filing issued on November 11th, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs created over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and used its surveillance software to gather data from Facebook and Instagram without authorization. Voyager Labs also collected data from sites including Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google and Nvidia have expressed concerns to the Federal Trade Commission about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, adding fuel to the government's case against the $69 billion deal, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The companies joined Sony in raising issues with the transaction, which the FTC sued to block in December. The commission has argued that the deal would hinder competition in the video-game industry and has scheduled an in-house trial for August. Either company could be called to testify as part of the FTC trial. Google and Nvidia provided information that backs a key FTC contention -- that Microsoft could gain an unfair advantage in the market for cloud, subscription and mobile gaming -- according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is confidential. In its remarks to the FTC, Nvidia stressed the need for equal and open access to game titles but didn't directly oppose the acquisition, according to one of the people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All.health, a medical care startup that rose from the ashes of once-hot wearable company Jawbone, is being sued in San Francisco by one of its investors for alleged fraud, misrepresentation and breach of contract. From a report: All.health's co-founders, the former Jawbone Chief Executive Officer Hosain Rahman and Michael Luna, are also named in the complaint. While All.health, Rahman and Luna deny the claims, the dispute is an illustration of the rancor that can envelop fledgling tech companies at a suddenly volatile time for startup funding. Jawbone was a Silicon Valley darling -- most famous for its wireless earpieces -- until the startup dramatically folded in 2017 and sold off its assets. As Jawbone was disintegrating, Rahman salvaged the company's medical device business. The resulting startup, now called All.health, developed wearable monitoring hardware and technology for people with chronic illnesses like diabetes. In a complaint filed this summer, Polymath Holdings, a Dubai-based investment company and All.health backer, claimed that the startup overpromised, took millions of dollars and under-delivered on a commitment to manufacture thousands of health-monitoring devices. The suit, which was recently largely unredacted by a San Francisco court, alleges that the startup was a "classic 'fake-it-until-you-make it' tale of fraud."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of Google, the company says in a court filing that a case before the Supreme Court challenging the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could "upend the internet," resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content. From a report: In a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content -- including controversial political speech -- while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content. [...] The case was brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The plaintiffs claim that YouTube, a unit of Google, aided ISIS by recommending the terrorist group's videos to users. The Gonzalez family contends that the liability shield -- enacted by Congress as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 -- has been stretched to cover actions and circumstances never envisioned by lawmakers. The plaintiffs say certain actions by platforms, such as recommending harmful content, shouldn't be protected. Section 230 generally protects internet platforms such as YouTube, Meta's Facebook and Yelp from being sued for harmful content posted by third parties on their sites. It also gives them broad ability to police their sites without incurring liability. The Supreme Court agreed last year to hear the lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs have contended Section 230 shouldn't protect platforms when they recommend harmful content, such as terrorist videos, even if the shield law protects the platforms in publishing the harmful content. Google contends that Section 230 protects it from any liability for content posted by users on its site. It also argues that there is no way to draw a meaningful distinction between recommendation algorithms and the related algorithms that allow search engines and numerous other crucial ranking systems to work online, and says Section 230 should protect them all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google warned on Friday that if the Indian antitrust watchdog's ruling is allowed to progress it would result in devices getting expensive in the South Asian market and lead to proliferation of unchecked apps that will pose threats for individual and national security, escalating its concerns over the future of Android in the key overseas region. From a report: "Predatory apps that expose users to financial fraud, data theft and a number of other dangers abound on the internet, both from India and other countries. While Google holds itself accountable for the apps on Play Store and scans for malware as well compliance with local laws, the same checks may not be in place for apps sideloaded from other sources," the company wrote in a blog post, titled "Heart of the Matter." The Competition Commission of India has slapped two fines against Google, alleging the Android-maker abused the Play Store's dominant position in the country and required Android device makers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. intelligence community says that the number of UFO reports involving U.S. military personnel is increasing, "enabling a greater awareness of the airspace and increased opportunity to resolve" what is actually being reported. From a report: Roughly half of the new incidents reported in the report had terrestrial explanations, the report said. The increase in reporting is being partially attributed to the continuing effort to destigmatize the reporting of such incidents and focusing on the potential safety risks they could pose to U.S. personnel. The report released Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that since its first June 2021 unclassified report on what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), it is now aware of 510 such reports. That is significantly more than the 144 incidents reviewed in the initial report, only one of which could be explained. The new report said the Pentagon's new office looking at UAP reports has looked at 366 new reported incidents and initially determined that about half of them have "unremarkable characteristics." Twenty-six are being attributed to drones, 163 characterized as balloon or balloon-like entities, and six are attributed to clutter. The report says these initial assessments do "not mean positively resolved or unidentified" but will aid investigators in trying to determine how to explain "the remaining 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports" some of which "appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: Members of YouTube's gaming community are calling out the video hosting site for adding new regulations regarding profanity usage and violent content, disproportionately affecting gaming creators who produce unscripted videos such as let's plays of M-rated games. Worse, the policy is retroactively deeming their videos in violation of new rules and affecting their ability to make money on the platform. The rule changes in question was originally made in November of 2022, and the blog post announcing it says that YouTube now treats all profanity equally (meaning "ass" is just as bad as "fuck"), and any usage of such in titles, thumbails, or in the first seven seconds of a video may result in complete demonetization. While you can swear after the first eight seconds, if you use profanity "consistently throughout the video" it may also be demonetized according to this new policy. The same restrictions apply to violent content, as well. Previously, YouTube's violent content policy applied to images of real-world violence, though game violence is now specifically noted as of the November update. As for profanity, prior to this change, YouTube allowed creators to use what it describes as "moderate profanity" (it says "shit" and "bitch" fall under this category) in the first 30 seconds without fear of demonetization.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NSA Director and head of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Paul Nakasone said in remarks on Thursday that intelligence authorities up for renewal later this year have played a key role in protecting the United States against cyberattacks. From a report: Nakasone's remarks at a virtual meeting of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board offered a preview of what is expected to be an intense political fight later this year to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- a law that provides U.S. intelligence agencies wide-ranging authorities to conduct surveillance of foreign persons located abroad and which civil liberties advocates argue is in desperate need of greater transparency. Section 702 will expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts, and on Thursday Nakasone made the case that "the authority plays an outsized role in protecting our nation." He said, "we have saved lives because of 702," adding that the law has been used to counter ransomware threats, including those against critical infrastructure and a foreign operation trying to steal sensitive U.S. military information. The political fight over reauthorization has yet to heat up, but as the newly elected Republican majority seeks to investigate federal government probes of former President Donald Trump and his associates, the renewal of Section 702 could emerge as a central flashpoint between the GOP and national-security agencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Malicious hackers have begun exploiting a critical vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting. ArsTechnica reports: "This is an unauthenticated RCE," members of the Shadowserver group wrote on Twitter, using the abbreviation for remote code exploit. "Exploitation is trivial and a PoC published." PoC refers to a proof-of-concept code that exploits the vulnerability. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-44877. It was discovered by Numan Turle of Gais Cyber Security and patched in October in version 0.9.8.1147. Advisories didn't go public until earlier this month, however, making it likely some users still aren't aware of the threat. Figures provided by Security firm GreyNoise show that attacks began on January 7 and have slowly ticked up since then, with the most recent round continuing through Wednesday. The company said the exploits are coming from four separate IP addresses located in the US, Netherlands, and Thailand. Shadowserver shows that there are roughly 38,000 IP addresses running Control Web Panel, with the highest concentration in Europe, followed by North America, and Asia. The severity rating for CVE-2022-44877 is 9.8 out of a possible 10. "Bash commands can be run because double quotes are used to log incorrect entries to the system," the advisory for the vulnerability stated. As a result, unauthenticated hackers can execute malicious commands during the login process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big global banks are eying some of the world's most fragile countries for a new experiment in financial engineering: debt relief in exchange for environmental protections. From a report: Called "debt-for-nature swaps," they present a tempting solution for the rising number of nations in distress, particularly those with ecosystems to protect. A country gets to avoid default and lower its debt burden, as long as it's willing to earmark some of the savings to salvage a coral reef, preserve a forest or build a wind farm, for example. Global investors get better returns and enhanced green credentials. Wall Street takes a cut. As much as $2 trillion of developing country debt may be eligible for this kind of restructuring, according to a rough estimate by the Nature Conservancy, a US nonprofit that's taking a lead role in these deals. Belize inked a $364 million nature swap in 2021; Gabon signaled plans for a $700 million restructuring in October; Ecuador is said to be working on a $800 million transaction, and Sri Lanka is considering a $1 billion deal. Buoyed by the finance industry's newfound enthusiasm for biodiversity, backers of this latest flavor of swap are finding eager partners in investment banks and institutional investors. These are "turbocharged swaps," said Daniel Munevar, economic affairs officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and former adviser to finance ministries in Greece and Colombia. "The limit in these operations isn't the money to fund the swaps, it's how much debt can be swapped." Behind the feel-good headlines, it's unclear whether these kinds of swaps will deliver the promised benefits. The terms can be murky. Transaction costs are high. Experts question whether the complex and costly deals will achieve long-term financial stability. In December, as negotiators gathered at the United Nations' COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal, Greenpeace and dozens of other non-profits called for debt-nature swaps to be rejected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says it's investigating an issue in Windows that is causing application shortcuts in the Start menu or taskbar to disappear. From a report: Multiple IT admins have detailed the problem on Twitter and Reddit this morning, and it appears to be related to a recent update to the Microsoft Defender threat detections. The problem is affecting businesses and organizations using Microsoft 365 and Defender for protection against malware, viruses, and other threats. In a note to customers, Microsoft says it has received reports that a certain attack surface reduction (ASR) rule is causing the problems. IT admins are currently trying to work around the issue by setting the "Block Win32 API calls from Office macro" rule to audit only. Microsoft says it has now "reverted the rule to prevent further impact whilst we investigate further." The software maker hasn't issued a workaround or any guidance on how IT admins might recover the shortcuts on affected machines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Downing Street has said it is considering a Tory-backed amendment to the online safety bill that would allow for the imposing of jail sentences on social media bosses who are found not to have protected children's safety. The Guardian reports: No 10 said on Thursday it was open to the proposal, which is backed by at least 36 Conservative MPs including the former home secretary Priti Patel and the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The amendment would give Ofcom, the communications watchdog, the power to prosecute executives at social media companies that are found to have breached the law. If ministers include it in the bill, it will mark the third time the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has bowed to the demands of his backbenchers, after U-turns on planning and onshore windfarms. The bill is aimed at cracking down on a range of online content that ministers believe is causing serious harm to users and was informed in part by the testimony of Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who accused the company of repeatedly putting profits ahead of user safety. The bill will force companies to remove any content promoting self-harm, depicting sexual violence or facilitating suicide. It will also require companies to impose and enforce strict age limits and to publish assessments of the risks their platforms pose to young people. As it is currently written, the bill gives Ofcom the power to levy fines on companies of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaches in the law. Ofcom will be able to prosecute executives only if they fail to cooperate with an investigation. This has upset many Conservative MPs, however, who believe the regulator should be given tougher powers. The amendment, which has been signed by 37 MPs overall, would allow Ofcom to prosecute individual executives if they were proved to have connived with or consented to breaking the elements of the bill designed to protect children's safety. Judges would be allowed to impose prison sentences of up to two years. [...] Other changes to the bill, which has its report and third reading stage in the House of Commons next week, include altering earlier plans to tackle content seen by adults that is harmful but falls below the threshold of criminality, such as cyberbullying and sexist and racist material. Tech companies will be required to state clearly in their terms and conditions how they will moderate such content. Users will also be given the option of asking to have such content screened out when they are on social media platforms. A Downing Street spokesperson said on Thursday: "Our aim is to hold to account social media platforms for harmful content, while also ensuring the UK remains a great place to invest and grow a tech business. We are confident we can achieve both of these things. We will carefully consider all the proposed amendments to the online safety bill and set out the position when report stage continues."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweden is preparing legislation to allow the construction of more nuclear power stations to boost electricity production in the Nordic country and bolster energy security, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Kristersson has made expanding nuclear power generation a key goal for his right-wing government, seeking to reverse a process of gradual closures of several reactors in the past couple of decades that has left the country relying more heavily on renewable but sometimes less predictable energy. Sweden's energy mix consists mainly of nuclear, hydro and renewables and while it so far has been less affected by the turmoil surrounding gas supplies due to Russia's standoff with the West, electricity prices have been high and volatile since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine. The proposed new legislation, which still needs to be passed by parliament, would allow new reactors to be constructed at additional locations across Sweden and was seen being in place in March next year. The new legislation would scrap existing rules that caps the total number of reactors at ten and prohibits reactor construction in other locations than where they currently exist, opening the door to building smaller reactors that many see as the most cost-effective nuclear option. [...] Sweden currently has six operational reactors, half of what it once had, and temporary closures for maintenance of some of them have contributed to push up electricity prices in the Nordic country in recent months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Becky Ferreira writes via Motherboard: You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant "superbubble" that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles in our galaxy that are produced by the fallout of supernovas. Cosmic superbubbles have remained fairly mysterious for decades, but recent astronomical advances have finally exposed key details about their evolution and structure. Just within the past few years, researchers have mapped the geometry of the Local Bubble in three dimensions and demonstrated that its surface is an active site of star birth, because it captures gas and dust as it expands into space. Now, a team of scientists has added another layer to our evolving picture of the Local Bubble by charting the magnetic field of the structure, which is thought to play a major role in star formation. Astronomers led by Theo O'Neill, who conducted the new research during a summer research program at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), presented "the first-ever 3D map of a magnetic field over a superbubble" on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's 241st annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The team also unveiled detailed visualizations of their new map, bringing the Local Bubble into sharper focus. "We think that the entire interstellar medium is really full of all these bubbles that are driven by various forms of feedback from, especially, really massive stars, where they're outputting energy in some form or another into the space between the stars," said O'Neill, who just received an undergraduate degree in astronomy-physics and statistics from the University of Virginia, in a joint call with their mentor Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at CfA who co-authored the new research. [...] "Now that we have this map, there's a lot of cool science that can be done both by us, but hopefully by other people as well," O'Neill said. "Since stars are clustered, it's not as if the Sun is super special, and is in the Local Bubble because we're just lucky. We know that the interstellar medium is full of bubbles like this, and there's actually a lot of them nearby our own Local Bubble." "One cool next step will be looking at places where the Local Bubble is nearby other feedback bubbles," they concluded. "What happens when these bubbles interact, and how does that drive start formation in general, and the overall long-term evolution of galactic structures?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A Canadian woman has been ordered by a civil tribunal to compensate her former employer for "time theft" after she was caught misrepresenting hours worked by controversial tracking software. Karlee Besse, who worked remotely as an accountant in British Columbia, initially claimed she was fired from her job without cause last year and sought $3,729 in compensation -- both in unpaid wages and severance. But the company, Reach CPA, told the tribunal Beese had logged more than 50 hours that "did not appear to have spent on work-related tasks." Reach said it installed employee-tracking software called TimeCampon Besse's work laptop after it found her assigned files were over budget and behind schedule, a strategy companies are increasingly taking in the era of remote work. The software tracks how long a document is open, how the employee uses the document and logs the time as work. Weeks later, the company said an analysis "identified irregularities between her timesheets and the software usage logs." While Besse told the tribunal she found the program "difficult" and worried it didn't differentiate between work and personal use, the company demonstrated how TimeCamp automatically makes those distinctions, separating time logs for work from activities such as using the laptop to stream movies and television shows. Besse said she had printed documents to work on, but did not tell Reach she was using hard copy because she "knew they wouldn't want to hear that" and she was afraid of repercussions. The company said that the software also tracks printing -- and that few documents had been logged as printed. It also said any work from the printed documents would have needed to be input into the company's software, which never happened. [...] The judge tossed out Besse's claim of wrongful termination and ordered her to pay $1,840.27, both in returned wages and as a part of previous advance she had received from the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society. CNN reports: The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%. The 33% decline in cancer mortality is "truly formidable," said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection. In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases. Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, "which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use," said Dr. William Dahut, the society's chief scientific officer. "There are other cancers that are HPV-related -- whether that's head and neck cancers or anal cancers -- so there's optimism this will have importance beyond this," he said. The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report. The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991. Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated. The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18. The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report. Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%. The report does have some bad news: new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been "of concern" and rising in the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the HDMI Licensing Administrator (LA), the HDMI Alt Mode feature is dead. Notebookcheck reports: According to HDMI LA, there are simply no more uses for Alt Mode. One of the reasons is that companies like Apple have begun putting HDMI ports on their products again. HDMI Alt Mode also no longer offers any advantages. As a result, the specification will not receive any further updates. This means an HDMI output has to come from somewhere else on a laptop. Besides the standard and mini sockets, DisplayPort is typically used in Alt Mode via a USB-C port. Eventually, the signal is converted to HDMI output. As HDMI LA mentioned at CES, there are people currently working on a logo program for labelling certified HDMI adapters to help consumers be sure that a USB-C to HDMI adapter will work properly. Right now, such a program only exists for cables. Whilst USB to HDMI adapters with DisplayPort undergo base certification, this is not something that is apparent in retail shops. HDMI Alt Mode has never managed to win over manufacturers. HDMI LA said that it doesn't know of a single adapter that has ever been produced. Similarly, at the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), people who are familiar with the certification process have yet to see a true USB-C to HDMI adapter. This is good news for consumers because there is no longer any risk that an HDMI adapter on the market won't work with conventional USB-C ports that support DisplayPort. The HDMI Licensing Administrator may have given up on Alt Mode, but it's still working on improving power delivery. "At just 0.3A@5V, HDMI Cable Power is at most able to drive a cable over longer distances," reports Notebookcheck. "The specification was announced back at CES 2021 but only officially introduced in mid 2022." "There are now plans to further increase the amount of power provided. This means it may be possible in future to power streaming devices (e.g. Fire TV Sticks) directly over an HDMI port." That said, HDMI LA cautioned that the upcoming standard is still in the discussion phase and there's no date for when the update will arrive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.