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"Owners of some older iPhone models are expected to receive about $65 each," reports SiliconValley.com, "after a judge cleared the way for payments in a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of secretly throttling phone performance."The Cupertino cell phone giant agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it had perpetrated "one of the largest consumer frauds in history" by surreptitiously slowing the performance of certain iPhone models to address problems with batteries and processors... According to the lawsuit, filed in 2018, reports of unexplained iPhone shutdowns began to surface in 2015 and increased in the fall of 2016. Consumers complained their phones were shutting off even though the batteries showed a charge of more than 30%, the lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit claimed the shutdowns resulted from a mismatch between phones' hardware, including batteries and processing chips, and the ever-increasing demands of constantly updating operating systems. Apple tried to fix the problem with a software update, but the update merely throttled device performance to cut the number of shutdowns, the lawsuit claimed... In a 2019 court filing in the case, Apple argued that lithium-ion batteries become less effective with time, repeated charging, extreme temperatures and general use. Updating software, Apple asserted in the filing, entails trade-offs. "Providing more features also introduces complexity and can reduce speed, and increasing features or speed may adversely impact hardware lifespan," the company said. Consumer grief over the shutdowns and alleged throttling also led to a 2020 lawsuit against Apple by the State of California and Alameda and Los Angeles counties. Apple, admitting to no wrongdoing, settled the case for $113 million. About 3 million claims were received, the article notes, and two iPhone owners who'd objected to the settlement lost their appeal this week, "removing the final obstacle to the deal..." "The phones at issue in the case were iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE devices running operating systems iOS 10.2.1 or later before Dec. 21, 2017, and iPhone 7 and 7 Plus phones running iOS 11.2 or later before that date."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monday sees the release of "The Billion Dollar Heist," a documentary about the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, considered the biggest cyber-heist of all time. The film's executive producer wrote the book Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia (and is also a rector at the Institute for Human Sciences). But he's also written an article for the Financial Times outlining the complicated background of Russian-speaking hacker gangs responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002. The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website, carderplanet.com. Known as "the family", this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging... Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he's a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition? To obviate the problem, the CarderPlanet administrators created an escrow system for criminals. They would act as guarantor of any criminal sale of credit and debit card data - a disinterested party mediating between the vendor and the purchaser... The escrow system led to an explosion of credit card crime around the world in which many criminal fortunes were made.... Roman Stepanenko Vega, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian national who was one of the founders and administrators of CarderPlanet, explained to me how "two days before the conference's opening, we received a visit from an FSB [Federal Security Service] officer in Moscow. He explained that Moscow had no objections to us cloning credit cards or defrauding banks in Europe and the United States but anywhere within the CIS was off limits." In addition, the FSB officer let CarderPlanet know that if the Russian state ever required assistance from criminal gangs, it would be expected to co-operate... Members of criminal gangs were later recruited into notorious state-backed hacking teams such as Advanced Persistent Threat 28. A 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline brought warnings of a U.S. counterattack, the article notes, after which "Russian police started arresting and imprisoning cyber criminal groups." Ransomware attacks now seem particularly focused on Europe, and "According to cyber-security experts, the Russian government is giving these criminal groups information on potential targets."But once more the hackers have been careful not to cross what the Americans consider red lines, as advised, presumably, by Russia's security services. Russia is probably confident that disrupting European businesses will be unlikely to provoke a cyber attack. But the U.S. - whether its government, municipalities or police - remains strictly off-limits. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What to make of the news that early research appears unable to duplicate the much-ballyhooed claims for the LK99 superconductor? "The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..."[M]any tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s - but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies such as Google that previously said they'd invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such "moonshots..." Room-temperature superconductors would be especially relevant to the tech industry right now, which is busy burning billions of dollars on new computer chips and the energy costs to run them to train the AI models behind tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard. For years, computer chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, but that progress has run up against the limits of the physical world as transistors get so small some are now just one atom thick.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science magazine reports:Roughly one in five people are born with at least one copy of a gene variant called APOE4 that makes them more prone to heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in old age. That the variant is so common poses an evolutionary mystery: If it decreases our fitness, why hasn't APOE4 been purged from the human population over time? Now, a study of nearly 800 women in a traditional society in the Amazon finds that those with the disease-promoting variant had slightly more children. Such a fertility benefit may have allowed the gene to persist during human evolution despite its harmful effects for older people today... The Tsimane data also allowed the team to home in on how APOE4 may boost fertility: Women carrying it were slightly heavier that those without it, started bearing children about 1 year earlier, and had their next child a few months sooner. That fits with being more resistant to parasites, says siological anthropologist Benjamin Trumble . "Being in a better immune state means that you can then devote more calories towards growing faster, and then you're able to reproduce faster." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A retired Technical Fellow from Rockwell Collins "released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat," reports Universe Today (in an article republished at Science Alert):Dr. David W. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories - asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use)... He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal habitat type and then dives into calculations about the overall station mass, how to support the inner wall with massive columns, and how to allocate floor space. All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth? Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels... With admittedly "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program. And the result would be a space habitat that provides 1 billion square meters of land that didn't exist before. That's a total cost of $4.10 per square meter to build land - in space. Possibly even more impressive is the timeline - Dr. Jensen estimates that the entire construction project could be done in as little as 12 years. However, it will still take longer to fill the habitat with air and water and start regulating its temperature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this investigative report from The Markup:Over the past quarter-century, privacy policies - the lengthy, dense legal language you quickly scroll through before mindlessly hitting "agree" - have grown both longer and denser. A study released last year found that not only did the average length of a privacy policy quadruple between 1996 and 2021, they also became considerably more difficult to understand. "Analyzing the content of privacy policies, we identify several concerning trends, including the increasing use of location data, increasing use of implicitly collected data, lack of meaningful choice, lack of effective notification of privacy policy changes, increasing data sharing with unnamed third parties, and lack of specific information about security and privacy measures," wrote De Montfort University Associate Professor Isabel Wagner, who used machine learning to analyze some 50,000 website privacy policies for the study... To get a sense of what all of this means, I talked to Jesse Woo - a data engineer at The Markup who previously helped write institutional data use policies as a privacy lawyer. Woo explained that, while he can see why the language in Zoom's terms of service touched a nerve, the sentiment - that users allow the company to copy and use their content - is actually pretty standard in these sorts of user agreements. The problem is that Zoom's policy was written in a way where each of the rights being handed over to the company are specifically enumerated, which can feel like a lot. But that's also kind of just what happens when you use products or services in 2023 - sorry, welcome to the future! As a point of contrast, Woo pointed to the privacy policy of the competing video-conferencing service Webex, which reads: "We will not monitor Content, except: (i) as needed to provide, support or improve the provision of the Services, (ii) investigate potential or suspected fraud, (iii) where instructed or permitted by you, or (iv) as otherwise required by law or to exercise or protect Our legal rights." That language feels a lot less scary, even though, as Woo noted, training AI models could likely be covered under a company taking steps to "support or improve the provision of the Services." The article ends with a link to a helpful new guide showing "how to read any privacy policy and quickly identify the important/creepy/enraging parts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution:Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor? Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to target, which "could equate to even more software and hardware being made available to Linux." (And an "official" Linux might also be more appealing to business users.) Wallen suggests it be "maintained and controlled by a collective of people from users, developers, and corporations (such as Intel and AMD) with a vested interest in the success of this project... There would also be corporate backing for things like marketing (such as TV commercials)." He also suggests basing it on Debian, and supporting both Snap and Flatpak... In comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobbomo points instead to kernel.org, arguing "There already is an official version of Linux called mainline. Everything else is backports." And jd (Slashdot user #1,658) believes that the official Linux is the Linux Standard Base. "All distributions, more-or-less, conform to the LSB, which gives you a pseudo 'official' Linux. About the one variable is the package manager. And there are ways to work around that." Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia...The LSB standard stopped being updated in 2015 and current Linux distributions do not adhere to or offer it; however, the lsb_release command is sometimes still available.[citation needed] On February 7, 2023, a former maintainer of the LSB wrote, "The LSB project is essentially abandoned." That post (on the lsb-discuss mailing list) argues the LSB approach was "partially superseded" by Snaps and Flatpaks (for application portability and stability). And of course, long-time Slashdot user menkhaura shares the obligatory XKCD comic... It's not exactly the same thing, but days after ZDNet's article, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association, a new collaborative trade association to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux." So where does that leave us? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And should there be an "official" version of Linux?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography," writes Chrome's technical program manager for security, Devon O'Brien. "Continuing with our strategy for handling this major transition, we are updating technical standards, testing and deploying new quantum-resistant algorithms, and working with the broader ecosystem to help ensure this effort is a success."As a step down this path, Chrome will begin supporting X25519Kyber768 for establishing symmetric secrets in TLS, starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115. This hybrid mechanism combines the output of two cryptographic algorithms to create the session key used to encrypt the bulk of the TLS connection: X25519 - an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS today Kyber-768 - a quantum-resistant Key Encapsulation Method, and NIST's PQC winner for general encryption In order to identify ecosystem incompatibilities with this change, we are rolling this out to Chrome and to Google servers, over both TCP and QUIC and monitoring for possible compatibility issues. Chrome may also use this updated key agreement when connecting to third-party server operators, such as Cloudflare, as they add support. If you are a developer or administrator experiencing an issue that you believe is caused by this change, please file a bug. The Register delves into Chrome's reasons for implementing this now:"It's believed that quantum computers that can break modern classical cryptography won't arrive for 5, 10, possibly even 50 years from now, so why is it important to start protecting traffic today?" said O'Brien. "The answer is that certain uses of cryptography are vulnerable to a type of attack called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, in which data is collected and stored today and later decrypted once cryptanalysis improves." O'Brien says that while symmetric encryption algorithms used to defend data traveling on networks are considered safe from quantum cryptanalysis, the way the keys get negotiated is not. By adding support for a hybrid KEM, Chrome should provide a stronger defense against future quantum attacks... Rebecca Krauthamer, co-founder and chief product officer at QuSecure, told The Register in an email that while this technology sounds futuristic, it's useful and necessary today... [T]he arrival of capable quantum computers should not be thought of as a specific, looming date, but as something that will arrive without warning. "There was no press release when the team at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, either," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft "disclosed 15 high-severity vulnerabilities in a widely used collection of tools used to program operational devices inside industrial facilities" (like plants for power generation, factory automation, energy automation, and process automation). On Friday Microsoft "warned that while exploiting the code-execution and denial-of-service vulnerabilities was difficult, it enabled threat actors to 'inflict great damage on targets.'"The vulnerabilities affect the CODESYS V3 software development kit. Developers inside companies such as Schneider Electric and WAGO use the platform-independent tools to develop programmable logic controllers, the toaster-sized devices that open and close valves, turn rotors, and control various other physical devices in industrial facilities worldwide... "A denial-of-service attack against a device using a vulnerable version of CODESYS could enable threat actors to shut down a power plant, while remote code execution could create a backdoor for devices and let attackers tamper with operations, cause a PLC to run in an unusual way, or steal critical information," Microsoft researchers wrote. Friday's advisory went on to say: "[...] While exploiting the discovered vulnerabilities requires deep knowledge of the proprietary protocol of CODESYS V3 as well as user authentication (and additional permissions are required for an account to have control of the PLC), a successful attack has the potential to inflict great damage on targets. Threat actors could launch a denial-of-service attack against a device using a vulnerable version of CODESYS to shut down industrial operations or exploit the remote code execution vulnerabilities to deploy a backdoor to steal sensitive data, tamper with operations, or force a PLC to operate in a dangerous way." Microsoft privately notified Codesys of the vulnerabilities in September, and the company has since released patches that fix the vulnerabilities. It's likely that by now, many vendors using the SDK have installed updates. Any who haven't should make it a priority. "With the likelihood that the 15 vulnerabilities are patched in most previously vulnerable production environments, the dire consequences Microsoft is warning of appear unlikely," the article notes. A malware/senior vulnerability analyst at industrial control security firm Dragos also pointed out that CODESYS "isn't widely used in power generation so much as discrete manufacturing and other types of process control. So that in itself should allay some concern when it comes to the potential to 'shut down a power plant'." (And in addition, "industrial systems are extremely complex, and being able to access one part doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing will come crashing down.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard:As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are wondering just how far they can push the vehicles' limits - especially with no front-seat driver or chaperone to discourage them from questionable behavior... The Standard has spoken to four separate Cruise car riders who said they've had sex or hooked up in the driverless vehicles in San Francisco over recent months and have provided ride receipts. The Standard was unable to find a source who said they'd had sex in a Waymo... The rules and regulations surrounding robotaxis are murky, largely because the industry is so new... Unfortunately for the debaucherous among us, robotaxi companies currently use pretty extensive camera surveillance inside and outside of their cars. "We record video inside of the car for added safety and support," Cruise states on its website... When asked, both Cruise and Waymo sidestepped commenting directly on what is or isn't allowed in their cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a [pre-print] study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants. The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The U.S. academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model. "Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose," the team's paper concluded. "Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style." Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong... "During our study, we observed that only when the error in the ChatGPT answer is obvious, users can identify the error," their paper stated. "However, when the error is not readily verifiable or requires external IDE or documentation, users often fail to identify the incorrectness or underestimate the degree of error in the answer." Even when the answer has a glaring error, the paper stated, two out of the 12 participants still marked the response preferred. The paper attributes this to ChatGPT's pleasant, authoritative style. "From semi-structured interviews, it is apparent that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct," the paper explained.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science magazine reports:Researchers have shown how to conduct thousands of rapid molecular screenings simultaneously, using light to identify target molecules snared on top of an array of tiny silicon blocks. In theory, the tool could be used to spot 160,000 different molecules in a single square centimeter of space. Developed to spot gene fragments from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and other infectious organisms, the technology should also be able to identify protein markers of cancer and small molecules flagging toxic threats in the environment... "[P]revious sensors have not been able to detect a wide range of target molecules," from very low to very high abundance, says Jennifer Dionne, an applied physicist at Stanford University. In hopes of getting around these problems, Dionne and her colleagues turned to an optical detection approach that relies on metasurfaces, arrays of tiny silicon boxes - each roughly 500 nanometers high, 600 nanometers long, and 160 nanometers wide - that focus near-infrared light on their top surface. This focusing makes it easy for a simple optical microscope to detect the shift in the wavelength of light coming from each silicon block, which varies depending on what molecules sit on top... [T]he technique could allow doctors to detect viral infections without first having to amplify the genetic material from a patient, Dionne says. Perhaps as important, she notes, an array can be designed to reveal how much target DNA has bound, making it possible to detect in minutes not just whether a particular virus is present, but how intense the infection is. Such information could help doctors tailor their treatments. Current tests can also do this, but they normally take several hours to amplify the genetic material and quantify the results. Dionne and her colleagues have formed a company called Pumpkinseed Bio to commercialize their new detectors, specifically aimed at detecting minute levels of proteins and other molecules that can't readily be amplified to make them easier to detect. And because only a small number of silicon blocks would be needed to spot individual target molecules, researchers should be able to craft arrays to track a multitude of disease biomarkers simultaneously. "We hope to look at many disease states at the same time," says Jack Hu, a former graduate student in Dionne's lab and head of the new startup. "That's the vision." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnCivil Liberty writes:Following in the footsteps of three MIT students who were previously gagged from presenting their findings at Defcon 2008 are two Massachusetts teens (who presented at this year's Defcon without interference). The four teens extended other research done by the 2008 hacker team to fully reverse engineer the "CharlieCard," the RFID touchless smart card used by Boston's public transit system. The hackers can now add any amount of money to one of these cards or invisibly designate it a discounted student card, a senior card, or even an MBTA employee card that gives them unlimited free rides. "You name it, we can make it," says Campbell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CBC reports that "Some parts of the Halifax harbour turned a bright shade of pink on Thursday - for science." After researchers dumped in 500 litres of safe, water-soluble dye, "boats, drones and underwater robots were then deployed to map the movement of the dye, so researchers can understand where materials spread and how quickly they do so." The CTV calls it "part of long-term research project that could help reverse some of the world's greenhouse gas emissions" by Dalhousie University and the climate-solutions research organization Planetary Technologies:The move is the first step, says Katja Fennel, an oceanographer at Dalhousie, before researchers release alkaline material into the water this fall. That material will effectively act as an antacid for the ocean, helping to neutralize the additional acidic carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans. "The purpose is to actually induce the ocean to take up atmospheric CO2 - CO2 from the air - and help us reduce legacy carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere," Fennel told CTV News. To track the uptake of carbon dioxide, researchers need to account for the movement of water. So "The ultimate goal here is to test an idea for a technology that would help us reduce atmospheric CO2," one oceanographer leading the research told the CBC, "and could be one tool in the toolbox for fighting climate change..." They point out that the ocean holds 50 times as much CO2 as is in the atmosphere, and call the experiment "cutting edge...world-leading research... Ocean alkalinity enhancement has the greatest potential, actually, in terms of storing carbon permanently and safely at a scale that is relevant for global climate." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:U.S. spy agencies will share more intelligence with U.S. companies, nongovernmental organizations and academia under a new strategy released this week that acknowledges concerns over new threats, such as another pandemic and increasing cyberattacks. The National Intelligence Strategy, which sets broad goals for the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, says that spy agencies must reach beyond the traditional walls of secrecy and partner with outside groups to detect and deter supply-chain disruptions, infectious diseases and other growing transnational threats. The intelligence community "must rethink its approach to exchanging information and insights," the strategy says. The U.S. government in recent years has begun sharing vast amounts of cyber-threat intelligence with U.S. companies, utilities and others who are often the main targets of foreign hackers, as well as information on foreign-influence operations with social-media companies... The emphasis on greater intelligence sharing is part of a broader trend toward declassification that the Biden administration has pursued. "The new strategy is meant to guide 18 U.S. intelligence agencies with an annual budget of about $90 billion... "Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge writes that "LK-99 hasn't turned out to be the miraculous superconductor some people initially claimed it was..."[T]he results so far indicate that LK-99 is not a superconductor, at room temperature or otherwise. A slew of research groups have released studies that counter claims originally made about LK-99. "With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth," the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) posted on August 7th... [The last words of their tweet? "Data have spoken."] Labs hurriedly published their own results on ArXiv, the same server for preprints (papers that haven't undergone peer review) where the original papers on LK-99 first appeared. Now, a body of evidence has piled up that disproves claims about LK-99. "There is no sign of superconductivity in LK-99 at room temperature," says one preprint from the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in India. (That was one of the papers cited by the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center this week when it posted that "the game is over....") [H]opes that levitation meant that LK-99 is a superconductor were dashed this week after another preprint posed another explanation for why the material might float. The International Center for Quantum Materials in China found evidence that the material is ferromagnetic. That means it can be magnetized and then attracted or repelled by other magnetic materials (iron, for example, is ferromagnetic)... [T]here are already well over a dozen papers on ArXiv casting doubt on LK-99. "There may be room temperature superconductors to find, but this does not seem to be one," Chris Grovenor, professor of materials at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, tells The Verge in an email. The Washington Post reports that one of physicists who co-authored the discovery paper "countered in an email that other research groups' failure to replicate their results are probably because they lack 'know how' in developing the sample the same way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:The mastermind behind a ransomware hosting service that allegedly helped criminals collect more than 5,000 bitcoin in ransom from hundreds of victims was indicted in federal court this week, prosecutors announced Thursday. Artur Grabowski's LolekHosted service operated for about a decade and advertised itself as a haven for "everything but child porn," according to Florida prosecutors. Clients allegedly used the hosting service to deploy ransomware viruses that infected around 400 networks around the world... [That's 400 just for the Netwalker ransomware, which the announcement calls "one of the ransomware variants facilitated by LolekHosted."] Grabowski was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. Grabowski himself is also the subject of a $21.5 million seizure order... Grabowski, a Polish national, faces a maximum sentence of 45 years, if he is ever detained and convicted. Grabowski also "remains a fugitive," according to an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice. It notes that the 36-year-old's site - registered in 2014 - also "facilitated" brute-force attacks, and phishing. "Grabowski allegedly facilitated the criminal activities of LolekHosted clients by allowing clients to register accounts using false information, not maintaining Internet Protocol (IP) address logs of client servers, frequently changing the IP addresses of client servers, ignoring abuse complaints made by third parties against clients, and notifying clients of legal inquiries received from law enforcement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has sent emails "to those it believes are not complying with its return-to-office policies," reports CNN:The message highlights Amazon's determination to enforce its rules amid an employee backlash to the policy, which requires workers to report to an office at least three days a week, and in the face of a broader push by companies to scale back on remote work. Screenshots of the email circulating on social media show that Amazon told some employees they were "not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week, even though your assigned building is ready... We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now," the email continued. It added that since the policy went into effect in May, many Amazon employees have complied, "and you can feel the surge in energy and collaboration happening among Amazonians and across teams." Amazon told employees that the email "was sent to employees who have badged in fewer than 3 days a week for 5 or more of the past 8 weeks, have not badged in 3 days a week for 3 or more of the past 4 weeks, and their building has been ready for 8 weeks or more." CNN adds that a followup email "acknowledged that some may have received the notice in error and urged those individuals to contact their managers to correct the mistake."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Internet Archive and a group of leading book publishers told a Manhattan federal court on Friday that they have resolved aspects of their legal battle over the Archive's digital lending of their scanned books. If accepted, the consent judgment would settle questions over potential money damages in the case and the scope of a ban on the Archive's lending and would clear the way for the Archive to appeal U.S. District Judge John Koeltl's decision that it infringed the publishers' copyrights. The proposed order would require the Archive to pay Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, News Corp's HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Bertelsmann SE & Co's Penguin Random House an undisclosed amount of money if it loses its appeal. The order would also permanently block the Archive from lending out copies of the publishers' books without permission, pending the result of the appeal. They asked Koeltl to resolve a dispute over whether the order will apply only to the publishers' books that are already available for electronic licensing or books commercially available in any format. The Internet Archive said in a blog post that the fight was "far from over," and founder Brewster Kahle said in a statement that "we must have strong libraries, which is why we are appealing this decision." Maria Pallante, the CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement that the plaintiffs were "extremely pleased" with the proposed injunction, which will "extend not only to the Plaintiffs' 127 works in suit but also to thousands of other literary works in their catalogs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can help detect (or even treat) cancer in hard-to-reach places, such as the colon. The team has published a paper in Science for the technique dubbed CATCH, or cellular assay for targeted, CRISPR-discriminated horizontal gene transfer. Engadget reports: For their lab experiments, the scientists used a species of bacterium called Acinetobacter baylyi. This bacterium has the ability to naturally take up free-floating DNA from its surroundings and then integrate it into its own genome, allowing it to produce new protein for growth. What the scientists did was engineer A. baylyi bacteria so that they'd contain long sequences of DNA mirroring the DNA found in human cancer cells. These sequences serve as some sort of one-half of a zipper that locks on to captured cancer DNA. For their tests, the scientists focus on the mutated KRAS gene that's commonly found in colorectal tumors. If an A. baylyi bacterium finds a mutated DNA and integrates it into its genome, a linked antibiotic resistance gene also gets activated. That's what the team used to confirm the presence of cancer cells: After all, only bacteria with active antibiotic resistance could grow on culture plates filled with antibiotics. While the scientists were successfully able to detect tumor DNA in mice injected with colorectal cancer cells in the lab, the technology is still not ready to be used for actual diagnosis. The team said it's still working on the next steps, including improving the technique's efficiency and evaluating how it performs compared to other diagnostic tests. In the future, the technology could also be used for targeted biological therapy that can deploy treatment to specific parts of the body based on the presence of certain DNA sequences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A UCLA-led study of NASA's DART mission found that the collision launched a cloud of boulders from its surface. "The boulder swarm is like a cloud of shrapnel expanding from a hand grenade," said Jewitt, lead author of the study and a UCLA professor of earth and planetary sciences. "Because those big boulders basically share the speed of the targeted asteroid, they're capable of doing their own damage." From a news release: In September 2022, NASA deliberately slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos to knock it slightly off course. NASA's objective was to evaluate whether the strategy could be used to protect Earth in the event that an asteroid was headed toward our planet. Jewitt said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a 15-foot boulder hitting Earth would deliver as much energy as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Fortunately, neither Dimorphos nor the boulder swarm have ever posed any danger to Earth. NASA chose Dimorphos because it was about 6 million miles from Earth and measured just 581 feet across -- close enough to be of interest and small enough, engineers reasoned, that the half-ton Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, planetary defense spacecraft would be able to change the asteroid's trajectory. When it hurtled into Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour, DART slowed Dimorphos' orbit around its twin asteroid, Didymos, by a few millimeters per second. But, according to images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the collision also shook off 37 boulders, each measuring from 3 to 22 feet across. None of the boulders is on a course to hit Earth, but if rubble from a future asteroid deflection were to reach our planet, Jewitt said, they'd hit at the same speed the asteroid was traveling -- fast enough to cause tremendous damage. The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that the rocks were likely knocked off the surface by the shock of the impact. A close-up photograph taken by DART just two seconds before the collision shows a similar number of boulders sitting on the asteroid's surface -- and of similar sizes and shapes -- to the ones that were imaged by the Hubble telescope. The boulders that the scientists studied, among the faintest objects ever seen within the solar system, are observable in detail thanks to the powerful Hubble telescope.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The founder and former CEO of Russia's largest internet company, Arkady Volozh, has slammed Vladimir Putin's "barbaric" war in Ukraine, becoming one of the most prominent Russian businessmen to express criticism of what Russia still calls euphemistically its "special military operation." "I've been asked a lot of questions over the past year, and especially a lot of them came up this week. I would like to clarify my position," he said in a statement released to the media. "I am totally against Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where I, like many, have friends and relatives. I am horrified by the fact that every day bombs fly into the homes of Ukrainians," said Volozh, describing himself "as a "Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor, and philanthropist." "Despite the fact that I have not lived in Russia since 2014, I understand that I also have a share of responsibility for the actions of the country," he added. "There were many reasons why I had to remain silent. You can argue about the timeliness of my statement, but not about its substance. I am against war." In June 2022, Volozh quit as CEO of Yandex (YNDX), which also operates Russia's most popular search engine, after he was sanctioned by the European Union over Russia's actions in Ukraine. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine," the EU said. "Yandex is also responsible for promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and de-ranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine." In his statement, Volozh said after moving to Israel in 2014, he has been working on developing Yandex's international projects. "But in February 2022, the world changed, and I realized that my story with Yandex was over." "After the outbreak of the war, I focused on supporting talented Russian engineers who decided to leave the country and start a new life. It turned out to be a difficult task that required a lot of effort, attention and caution," he said. "Now these people are outside of Russia and can start doing something new in the most advanced areas of technology. They will be of great benefit to the countries where they remain," he added. Volozh went on to say that when Yandex was created, "We believed that we were building a new Russia -- an open, progressive, integrated into the global economy, known in the world not only for its raw materials." However, "over time, it became clear that Russia was in no hurry to become part of the global world. At the same time, the pressure on the company grew," he said. "But we did not give up, we did our best despite the external conditions. Has it always been possible to find the right balance? Now, looking back, it is clear that something could have been done differently."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the unfortunate event that Amazon cancels Good Omens, a British fantasy comedy series created by Neil Gaiman, the New York Times bestselling author says a novel would be written to continue where the show left off. For those unaware, Good Omens recently launched season two on Amazon Prime and follows various characters all trying to either encourage or prevent an imminent Armageddon, seen through the eyes of the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley. According to Gizmodo's Linda Codega, it "ends on an absolutely devastating cliffhanger. Emotionally speaking." From the report: Neil Gaiman, the co-author of Good Omens (the book) alongside Terry Pratchett and the lead writer on Good Omens (the show), has always been active on Tumblr. Naturally, people have been asking him about that ending -- mostly because Good Omens, for all the hype, hasn't yet been renewed for a third season, and I will reiterate, the ending of season two is heart-wrenching. Gaiman had a lovely answer for one fan [poohbear0915] who asked: "In the unfortunate event that Good Omens is not renewed for a season three, would you consider releasing a script book of what would have happened for the fans to read?" Neil Gaiman responded: "No, I'd write a novel."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, Queens resident David Leacraft filed a lawsuit against Canon claiming that his Canon Pixma All-in-One printer won't scan documents unless it has ink. According to The Verge's Sean Hollister, it has quietly ended in a private settlement rather than becoming a big class-action. From the report: I just checked, and a judge already dismissed David Leacraft's lawsuit in November, without (PDF) Canon ever being forced to show what happens when you try to scan without a full ink cartridge. (Numerous Canon customer support reps wrote that it simply doesn't work.) Here's the good news: HP, an even larger and more shameless manufacturer of printers, is still possibly facing down a class-action suit for the same practice. As Reuters reports, a judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by Gary Freund and Wayne McMath that alleges many HP printers won't scan or fax documents when their ink cartridges report that they've run low. Among other things, HP tried to suggest that Freund couldn't rely on the word of one of HP's own customer support reps as evidence that HP knew about the limitation. But a judge decided it was at least enough to be worth exploring in court. "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that HP had a duty to disclose and had knowledge of the alleged defect," wrote Judge Beth Labson Freeman, in the order denying almost all of HP's current attempts to dismiss the suit. Interestingly, neither Canon nor HP spent any time trying to argue their printers do scan when they're low on ink in the lawsuit responses I've read. Perhaps they can't deny it? Epson, meanwhile, has an entire FAQ dedicated to reassuring customers that it hasn't pulled that trick since 2008. (Don't worry, Epson has other forms of printer enshittification.) HP does seem to be covering its rear in one way. The company's original description on Amazon for the Envy 6455e claimed that you could scan things "whenever". But when I went back now to check the same product page, it now reads differently: HP no longer claims this printer can scan "whenever" you want it to. Now, we wait to see whether the case can clear the bars needed to potentially become a big class-action trial, or whether it similarly settles like Canon, or any number of other outcomes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pornhub, along with several other members and activists in the adult industry are suing Texas to block the state's impending law that would require age verification to view adult content. Motherboard reports: The complaint was filed on August 4 in US District Court for the Western District of Texas, and the law will take effect on September 1 unless the court agrees to block it. Governor Greg Abbott passed HB 1181 into law in June. The plaintiffs, including Pornhub, adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition, and several other site operators and industry members, claim that the law violates both the Constitution of the United States and the federal Communications Decency Act. In the complaint, the plaintiffs write that the act employs "the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas' stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors," and that minors can easily use VPNs or Tor; on-device content filtering would be a better method of restricting access to porn for children, they write. "But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don't really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors." Under the law, porn sites would be required to display a "Texas Health and Human Services Warning" on their websites in 14-point font or larger font, in addition to age verification. "Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like without foisting its viewpoint upon others through mandated statements that are a mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations," the complaint says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.") The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which takes effect on January 1, 2024, passed after a unanimous vote. It allows victims to recover damages and to request "a temporary restraining order, emergency order of protection, or preliminary or permanent injunction to restrain and prevent the disclosure or continued disclosure of a person's personally identifiable information or sensitive personal information." It's the first law of its kind in the Midwest, the Daily Herald reported, and is part of a push by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pass similar laws at the state and federal levels. ADL's Midwest regional director, David Goldenberg, told the Daily Herald that ADL has seen doxxing become "over the past few years" an effective way of "weaponizing" the Internet. ADL has helped similar laws pass in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. [...] The law does not involve criminal charges but imposes civil liability on individuals who dox any Illinois residents. Actions can also be brought against individuals when "any element" of a doxxing offense occurs in the state. [...] Goldenberg told Ars that the Illinois law was written to emphasize not how information was found and gathered by people seeking to dox others, but on what they did with the information and how much harm they caused. The law might need less updating as the Internet evolves if it doesn't focus on the methods used to mine personally identifiable information. "The reality is that those who are using the Internet to spread hate, to spread misinformation, to do bad are pretty nimble and technology changes on a near daily basis," Goldenberg told Ars. "The law was crafted in a way that ensures that if technology changes, and people use new technologies to share someone's personally identifiable information with the intent to do harm and that harm actually happens, this law remains relevant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out a new update for Windows 11 that disables the digital assistant Cortana. The Verge reports: If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you'll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change. Microsoft is now planning to end support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams Display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms "in the fall of 2023." Surprisingly, Cortana inside Outlook mobile "will continue to be available," according to Microsoft. Microsoft is now working on Windows Copilot, a new sidebar for Windows 11 that is powered by Bing Chat and can control Windows settings, answer questions, and lots more. Windows Copilot is expected to be available this fall as part of a Windows 11 update that will also include native RAR and 7-Zip support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba Group hasn't been able to completely fulfill demand for AI training from clients because of global supply constraints, its top executive said, suggesting a shortage of critical components such as artificial intelligence chips is weighing on Chinese efforts to ramp up in the cutting-edge technology. From a report: "In the past quarter, we have received strong demand for model training and related services on cloud infrastructure, which were only partially fulfilled due to the near-term supply chain constraints globally," Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang, who steps down in September, told analysts on a conference call. He will focus on Alibaba's cloud business full-time after ceding his dual roles to Alibaba co-founders Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu. A shortage of high-powered semiconductors is undermining Chinese efforts to keep pace with the US in AI. Washington has banned Chinese firms from buying the most advanced chips made by Nvidia, impeding attempts to build rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Zoom changed its terms of service to say that it won't use any customer content -- at all -- in training generative artificial intelligence models. The update, which the videoconference company announced Friday, comes after observers raised the alarm about a recent change in Zoom's TOS that appeared to grant the company royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models. In its initial response on Aug. 7, Zoom said it doesn't use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI "without consent." Now it says it will not use such content in any way related to generative AI development. In a statement Friday appended its its earlier blog post, Zoom said, "Following feedback received regarding Zoom's recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models." Zoom said it also updated in-product notices to reflect the change. According to Zoom's revised terms of service, the company still owns all rights to what it calls "service-generated data." That comprises telemetry data, product-usage data, diagnostic data and similar data "that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users' use of the Services or Software," the terms of service say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Private equity and venture capital funds targeted in Biden administration's crackdown. From a report: After President Joe Biden announced a ban on US investment in some of China's critical tech industries, the founder of a Shanghai-based semiconductor start-up felt forced to react. "After the news came out, I was determined to move the team out of China, at least part of the team," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Otherwise, the financing will be very limited." The US ban, announced in an executive order on Wednesday and due to come into force next year, aims to block investment in quantum computing, advanced chips and artificial intelligence in an effort to stop China's military from accessing American funding and knowhow. For their part, US investors are trying to work out the potential impact of Biden's order on their holdings in China and weighing up strategies to comply or exit. Private equity groups General Atlantic, Warburg Pincus and Carlyle Group have poured billions into China in recent years as they sought the huge returns from betting on the nation's emergence as a technological superpower. Seeing the writing on the wall, though, many have already pulled back. Buyout groups struck deals in China worth $47bn in 2021, but that fell rapidly to just $2.4bn in 2022 and $2.8bn so far this year, figures from Dealogic show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You're either a subtitles person or you're not. But increasingly, people are. From a report: Preply followed up on its subtitle-use survey of Americans from 2022 and found a 5% rise, to 58%, in how many people use captioning more than they used to. Now, just over half (51%) of those surveyed say they use subtitles most of the time. If you're thinking this habit could be the purview of older folks who are having a hard time hearing -- well, 96% of Gen Z survey respondents said they impose words over what they're watching. Netflix watchers are using captioning the most; 52% of survey respondents say they turn the feature on while they're watching. Subtitles help 81% of people better comprehend what they're watching. A significant part of the time (70%), people use subtitles to understand foreign accents, particularly if a speaker is Scottish, which poses a problem for Outlander fans. Preply found that Americans have a hard time understanding their own language when someone has a Scottish accent (47%), an Irish accent (20%), a British accent (13%), a South African accent (12%), an Australian accent (5%), and even a Southern US accent (3%). So those who watching Derry Girls, Downton Abbey, and Ozark are adjusting their settings to follow along.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a defense request to delay SBF's detention pending appeal of the bail revocation. Reuters reports: The decision could complicate Bankman-Fried's efforts to prepare for trial, where the 31-year-old former billionaire faces charges of having stolen billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. He was led out of the courtroom by members of the U.S. Marshals Service in handcuffs after removing his shoelaces, jacket and tie and emptying his pockets. His parents, both law professors at Stanford University, were present in the courtroom's audience. His mother, Barbara Fried, nodded to him in tears as he left. His father, Joseph Bankman, placed his hand over his heart as he watched his son be led away. Bankman-Fried has been largely confined to his parents' Palo Alto, California, home on $250 million bond since his December 2022 arrest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is reducing packaging on millions of deliveries. From a report: Millions of Amazon orders are arriving on doorsteps across the U.S. without any extra packaging. A new television may sit in the manufacturer's box at the door. A blender appears as if it were picked off a store shelf. The same for a box of baby wipes or trash bags. The change represents the next frontier in the tech giant's overhaul of its delivery processes, one Chief Executive Andy Jassy hopes will appeal to customers who are put off by the volume of Amazon-branded boxes they receive and discard every week. The company in the past year revamped its logistics network, enabling faster and more efficient deliveries. Eliminating or reducing packaging has become increasingly important for the company to maintain its dominance, reduce costs and reach its goals related to its climate impact. "The recognition by a number of senior leaders was just that this is becoming more and more important," said Pat Lindner, who Amazon hired last year as its first vice president of packaging and innovation. "There's a significant need for our company to take the next step in innovation around packaging." About 11% of items that the company delivers now arrive without extra packaging, or what the company calls "ships in own container," Amazon said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration will spend $1.2 billion to help build the nation's first two commercial-scale plants to vacuum carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere, a nascent technology that some scientists say could be a breakthrough in the fight against global warming, but that others fear is an extravagant boondoggle. From a report: Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, announced Friday that her agency would fund two pilot projects that would deploy the disputed technology, known as direct air capture. Occidental Petroleum will build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, and Battelle, a nonprofit research organization, will build the other in Calcasieu Parish on the Louisiana coast. The federal government and the companies will equally split the cost of building the facilities. "These projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next-generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal, and one of those technologies includes direct air capture, which is essentially giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky," Ms. Granholm said on a telephone call with reporters on Thursday. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law included $3.5 billion to fund the construction of four commercial-scale direct air capture plants. Friday's announcement covered the first two. Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott DeVaney, writing at Mozilla blog: In the coming months Mozilla will launch support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We'll announce a definite launch date in early September, but it's safe to expect a roll-out before the year's end. Here's everything developers need to know to get their Firefox desktop extensions ready for Android usage and discoverability on AMO. For the past few years Firefox for Android officially supported a small subset of extensions while we focused our efforts on strengthening core Firefox for Android functionality and understanding the unique needs of mobile browser users. Today, Mozilla has built the infrastructure necessary to support an open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. We anticipate considerable user demand for more extensions on Firefox for Android, so why not start optimizing your desktop extension for mobile-use right away?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Detroit police chief said he's setting new policies on the use of facial-recognition technology after a woman who was eight months pregnant said she was wrongly charged with robbery and carjacking in a case that was ultimately dismissed by prosecutors. From a report: The technology, which was used on images taken from gas station video, produced leads in the case but was followed by "very poor" police work, Chief James White said. "We want to ensure that nothing like this happens again," White said Wednesday. His comments came two days after the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan announced a lawsuit on behalf of Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old Black woman, who was arrested in February while trying to get children ready for school. There have been two similar lawsuits against Detroit. Woodruff was identified as a suspect in a January robbery and carjacking through facial-recognition technology. She denied any role. The Wayne County prosecutor's office said charges later were dropped because the victim did not appear in court. White said his officers will not be allowed "to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup. Period." He said two captains must review arrest warrants when facial technology is used in a case, among other changes. The new policies will be presented to the Detroit Police Board of Commissioners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A battle has been brewing in San Francisco over driverless cars. Hundreds of the autonomous vehicles have been roaming city streets over the past couple of years. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, voted 3-1 to let self-driving car companies expand their programs and start charging passengers like taxis. The build-up before the Commission's vote Thursday was tense. Public comment lasted more than six hours. Much of that testimony was about how autonomous vehicles have impeded emergency operations in the city. San Francisco's police and fire departments have urged the CPUC to oppose the expansion a" they say they've tallied 55 incidents where self-driving cars have got in the way of rescue operations in just the last six months. The incidents include running through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways and refusing to move for first responders. "Our folks cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we've got ladders to throw," San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said in a public meeting on Monday providing commissioners testimony before Thursday's vote. "I am not anti-technology, I am pro-safety."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the weeks leading up to her graduation from Pomona College, Sophia Augustine thought she had it all figured out. She had gotten a job offer at Accenture Plc and had plans to live with two friends in New York starting in August. Then she got a much-dreaded phone call. She, like hundreds of other new graduates this year, had a delayed start date. She would now report to work in April 2024, and for her troubles she'd receive a $25,000 stipend. The sudden change made her nervous, but she quickly pivoted. She found someone to sublet her apartment and made travel plans, starting with a trip to Southeast Asia. "I never got to study abroad in college because of Covid," Augustine said. "So I'm viewing this as, just like, my golden opportunity." The delay wasn't a complete surprise. Layoffs in consulting, finance and technology have piled up in recent months, putting the job market on shaky ground. Top consulting firms, reeling from a cut back in business spending, had been delaying start dates for some MBA graduates. And while undergrads with offers from Accenture, Bain & Co and Deloitte initially thought they were spared, they too have been caught up in the slump. Consulting firms are known to adjust their hiring plans when there's an economic downturn or change in market conditions. It's a way to ensure new hires have work to do, and keep costs down until business picks up again. For some new graduates, a stipend can provide an unexpected chance to travel, work at a nonprofit or pursue a professional certification.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shoddy guidebooks, promoted with deceptive reviews, have flooded Amazon in recent months. Their authors claim to be renowned travel writers. But do they even exist? The New York Times: The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms -- like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing -- with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon's policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. The use of these tools in tandem has allowed the books to rise near the top of Amazon search results and sometimes garner Amazon endorsements such as "#1 Travel Guide on Alaska." A recent Amazon search for the phrase "Paris Travel Guide 2023," for example, yielded dozens of guides with that exact title. One, whose author is listed as Stuart Hartley, boasts, ungrammatically, that it is "Everything you Need to Know Before Plan a Trip to Paris." The book itself has no further information about the author or publisher. It also has no photographs or maps, though many of its competitors have art and photography easily traceable to stock-photo sites. More than 10 other guidebooks attributed to Stuart Hartley have appeared on Amazon in recent months that rely on the same cookie-cutter design and use similar promotional language. The Times also found similar books on a much broader range of topics, including cooking, programming, gardening, business, crafts, medicine, religion and mathematics, as well as self-help books and novels, among many other categories. Amazon declined to answer a series of detailed questions about the books.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The aviation sector's plans to pass along the cost of decarbonization could add hundreds of dollars to the price of some fights. From a report: Fresh from surviving the Covid-19 pandemic, the aviation industry is about to hand passengers the multi-trillion dollar bill to fight its next existential threat: decarbonization. Cleaning up flying is a mission of improbable scale: Neutralize the carbon emissions of about 25,000 planes in the world's commercial fleet that typically ferry some 4 billion people a year and burn close to 100 billion gallons of jet kerosene. That's more dirty liquid to launder than all the beer drunk in the world in a year. Some $5 trillion of capital investment may be needed to deliver on aviation's goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, almost all of it plowed into sustainable fuel production and renewable power generation, according to McKinsey. It's a mountain of money so large it could wipe out global airline revenue for the best part of a decade. With the clock ticking, industry leaders are starting to voice an uncomfortable truth. It's clear, they say, that the costs of weaning air travel off fossil fuels will land on passengers. Through seven decades of nearly unfettered expansion, the aviation industry had to pay little attention to emissions. Passengers grew accustomed to ever-improving connectivity, increasing competition and cheap tickets. Suddenly, carriers find themselves in an environmental squeeze, with governments setting deadlines and activists gluing themselves to runways to call attention to global warming. While Greta Thunberg introduced flight-shaming to the public before the pandemic, record temperatures this summer have only underscored climate campaigners' point. Aviation's expensive transition to cleaner fuels has the power to put the democratization of flying into reverse, leading to higher fares, and fewer routes and airlines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others). This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases." And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. From a report: The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. Hitching a ride aboard a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket, Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday. Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a "one in a million chance" that one of Luna 25's rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters. The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976. Luna 25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it's a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs of seasonal floods on Mars at a site called Gale Crater. Ars Technica reports: About 3,000 Martian days into its exploration, the rover was at a site that dates to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, during Mars' relatively wet Hesperian period. And it came across what would be familiar to gamers as a hex grid: hundreds of hexagonal shaped rock deposits in the area of a few centimeters across and at least 10 centimeters deep. These features are small enough that they'd be easy to overlook as simply another collection of wind-swept debris on the red planet. But up close, they're striking: large collections of hexagons that share sides, creating a regular grid. While there's some irregularity, the lines separating them largely form three-way intersections with equal angles between each line. And, in places where erosion has had different effects on nearby instances, it's clear that individual hexagons are at least 10 centimeters in height. Similar shapes have been seen on Pluto, formed by convection of an icy surface. But these are far, far larger, able to be detected from a considerable distance from Pluto. The tiny size of the hexes on Mars is completely incompatible with convection. Instead, it has to be the product of mud drying out, creating cracks as the material contracts. The water itself could either come externally, in the form of a flood, or via groundwater that soaks up to the surface. But again, the tiny size of these features is decisive, indicating that only the top few centimeters got wet, which is incompatible with a groundwater source. To form the regular, hexagonal shapes also means repeated cycles -- experiments show that at least a dozen cycles are needed before you start to get the equal angles at the junction. So, simply based on their shape, it appears that these hexagons are the product of repeated flooding. The chemistry backs this up. The rocks in the lines that separate individual hexagons are largely a mixture of calcium and magnesium sulfates, which will readily precipitate out of water as conditions get drier. These deposits will form harder rocks than the dried mud that comprises the bulk of the hexagons. The researchers behind the work note that the apparently regular, mild wet/dry cycling is incompatible with a lot of ideas about the source of water in Mars' past, such as volcanic melting of ice deposits. Instead, it's consistent with mild seasonal flooding, although there's no way to tell if the cadence was tied to Mars' orbit given what we currently know. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amtrak and a company called Texas Central announced a partnership on Wednesday to connect Houston and Dallas by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph. Popular Science reports: According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to "several federal grant programs" to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region's I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year. The trains traveling Amtrak's Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan's updated N700S Series Shinkansen "bullet train," a design that first debuted in 2020. "This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US," Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement. American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation "in the right circumstances." If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature. They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics. Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons. More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics. All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. These four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other. The findings have been made at a US particle accelerator facility called Fermilab. They build on results announced in 2021 in which the Fermilab team first suggested the possibility of a fifth force of nature. Since then, the research team has gathered more data and reduced the uncertainty of their measurements by a factor of two, according to Dr Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab. "We're really probing new territory. We're determining the (measurements) at a better precision than it has ever been seen before." In an experiment with the catchy name 'g minus two (g-2)' the researchers accelerate the sub-atomic particles called muons around a 50-foot-diameter ring, where they are circulated about 1,000 times at nearly the speed of light. The researchers found that they might be behaving in a way that can't be explained by the current theory, which is called the Standard Model, because of the influence of a new force of nature. Although the evidence is strong, the Fermilab team hasn't yet got conclusive proof. They had hoped to have it by now, but uncertainties in what the standard model says the amount of wobbling in muons should be, has increased, because of developments in theoretical physics. In essence, the goal posts have been moved for the experimental physicists. The researchers believe that they will have the data they need, and that the theoretical uncertainty will have narrowed in two years' time sufficiently for them to get their goal. That said, a rival team at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hoping to get there first. The results have been announced to the public and submitted to the Journal Physical Review Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, has released an updated version of its faster, cheaper, text-generating model available through an API, Claude Instant. TechCrunch reports: The updated Claude Instant, Claude Instant 1.2, incorporates the strengths of Anthropic's recently announced flagship model, Claude 2, showing "significant" gains in areas such as math, coding, reasoning and safety, according to Anthropic. In internal testing, Claude Instant 1.2 scored 58.7% on a coding benchmark compared to Claude Instant 1.1, which scored 52.8%, and 86.7% on a set of math questions versus 80.9% for Claude Instant 1.1. "Claude Instant generates longer, more structured responses and follows formatting instructions better," Anthropic writes in a blog post. "Instant 1.2 also shows improvements in quote extraction, multilingual capabilities and question answering." Claude Instant 1.2 is also less likely to hallucinate and more resistant to jailbreaking attempts, Anthropic claims. In the context of large language models like Claude, "hallucination" is where a model generates text that's incorrect or nonsensical, while jailbreaking is a technique that uses cleverly-written prompts to bypass the safety features placed on large language models by their creators. And Claude Instant 1.2 features a context window that's the same size of Claude 2's -- 100,000 tokens. Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g. the word "fantastic" would be split into the tokens "fan," "tas" and "tic"). Claude Instant 1.2 and Claude 2 can analyze roughly 75,000 words, about the length of "The Great Gatsby." Generally speaking, models with large context windows are less likely to "forget" the content of recent conversations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Financial Times, China's internet giants have ordered more than $5 billion worth of high-performance Nvidia chips for building generative AI systems. Reuters reports: Baidu, TikTok-owner ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have made orders worth $1 billion to acquire about 100,000 A800 processors from the U.S. chipmaker to be delivered this year, the FT reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. The Chinese groups had also purchased a further $4 billion worth of graphics processing units to be delivered in 2024, according to the report. The Biden administration last October issued a sweeping set of rules designed to freeze China's semiconductor industry in place while the U.S. pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its chip industry. Nvidia offers the A800 processor in China to meet export control rules after U.S. officials asked the company to stop exporting its two top computing chips to the country for AI-related work. Nvidia's finance chief said in June that restrictions on exports of AI chips to China "would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry", though the company expected no immediate material impact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod shares a report from The Guardian: A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes -- recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, "poison bread sandwiches" and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes. The app, created by supermarket chain Pak 'n' Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an "oreo vegetable stir-fry." When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed "aromatic water mix" would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as "the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses." "Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance," it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death. New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir posted the "recipe" to Twitter, prompting other New Zealanders to experiment and share their results to social media. Recommendations included a bleach "fresh breath" mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, "bleach-infused rice surprise" and "methanol bliss" -- a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast. In a statement, a spokesperson for the supermarket said they would "keep fine tuning our controls" of the bot to ensure it was safe and useful. They noted that the bot should only be used by people over the age of 18 and that the recipes "are not reviewed by a human being."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A group of teenage hackers managed to breach some of the world's biggest tech firms last year by exploiting systemic security weaknesses in US telecom carriers and the business supply chain, a US government review of the incidents has found, in what is a cautionary tale for America's critical infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security-led review of the hacks, which was shared exclusively with CNN, determined US regulators should penalize telecom firms with lax security practices and Congress should consider funding programs to steer American youth away from cybercrime. The investigation of the hacks -- which hit companies like Microsoft and Samsung -- found that, in general, it was far too easy for the cybercriminals to intercept text messages that corporate employees use to log into systems. [...] "It is highly concerning that a loose band of hackers, including a number of teenagers, was able to consistently break into the best-defended companies in the world," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN in an interview, adding: "We are seeing a rise in juvenile cybercrime." After a series of high-profile cyberattacks marked his first four months in office, President Joe Biden established the DHS-led Cyber Safety Review Board in 2021 to study the root causes of major hacking incidents and inform policy on how to prevent the next big cyberattack. Staffed by senior US cybersecurity officials and executives at major technology firms like Google, the board does not have regulatory authority, but its recommendations could shape legislation in Congress and future directives from federal agencies. [...] The board's first review, released in July 2022, concluded that it could take a decade to eradicate a vulnerability in software used by thousands of corporations and government agencies worldwide. The second review, to be released Thursday, focused on a band of young criminal hackers based in the United Kingdom and Brazil that last year launched a series of attacks on Microsoft, Uber, Samsung and identity management firm Okta, among others. The audacious hacks were often followed by extortion demands and taunts by hackers who seemed to be out for publicity as much as they were for money. The hacking group, known as Lapsus$, alarmed US officials because they were able to embarrass major tech firms with robust security programs. "If richly resourced cybersecurity programs were so easily breached by a loosely organized threat actor group, which included several juveniles, how can organizations expect their programs to perform against well-resourced cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors?" the Cyber Safety Review Board's new report states. Lapsus$, as well as other hacking groups, conduct "SIM-swapping" attacks that can take over a victim's phone number by having it transferred to another device, thereby gaining access to 2FA security codes and personal messages. These can then be used to reveal login credentials and access financial information. "The board wants telecom carriers to report SIM-swapping attacks to US regulatory agencies, and for those agencies to penalize carriers when they don't adequately protect customers from such attacks," reports CNN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Financial Times, Universal Music Group and Google are considering developing a tool that people can use to create AI-generated music using popular artists' voices and melodies. Gizmodo reports: Under the licensing deal, the relevant copyright owners would be paid for the use of their likeness and would have the option to opt in to give UMG and Google permission to license AI-generated music using their voice, per the FT. Google and UMG are in the early stages of negotiations over creating the deepfake tool, and there aren't currently any plans to immediately launch it. Robert Kyncl, the CEO of Warner Music Group, voiced his opposition to deepfake technology in a conference earnings call on Tuesday, saying artists should always have a choice if they'll allow their likeness to be used. "There's nothing more precious to an artist than their voice," Kyncl said in the call, "and protecting their voice is protecting their livelihood and protecting their persona."Read more of this story at Slashdot.