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From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today's machines look like toys. From a report: Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years. In the fall of 2019, Google unveiled an experimental quantum computer showing this was possible. Two years later, a lab in China did much the same. But quantum computing will not reach its potential without help from another technological breakthrough. Call it a "quantum internet" -- a computer network that can send quantum information between distant machines. At the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a team of physicists has taken a significant step toward this computer network of the future, using a technique called quantum teleportation to send data across three physical locations. Previously, this was possible with only two. The new experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites. "We are now building small quantum networks in the lab," said Ronald Hanson, the Delft physicist who oversees the team. "But the idea is to eventually build a quantum internet." Their research, unveiled this week with a paper published in the science journal Nature, demonstrates the power of a phenomenon that Albert Einstein once deemed impossible. Quantum teleportation -- what he called "spooky action at a distance" -- can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it. This technology could profoundly change the way data travels from place to place. It draws on more than a century of research involving quantum mechanics, a field of physics that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. Quantum teleportation not only moves data between quantum computers, but it also does so in such a way that no one can intercept it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swiss-based encrypted email provider ProtonMail today announced a restructuring of its privacy-first services, bringing them under a new unifying brand name: Proton. "Today, we are undertaking our biggest step forward in the movement for an internet that respects your privacy. The new, updated Proton offers one account, many services, and one privacy-by-default ecosystem. You can now enjoy unified protection with a modernized look and feel. Evolving into a unified Proton reflects our growth from an end-to-end encrypted email provider to an entire privacy ecosystem, allowing us to deliver even more benefits to the Proton community and make privacy accessible to everyone," the company said. MacRumors adds: Previously, users could only subscribe to each service the company offered individually. Going forward, the new Proton offers one account to access all the services offered in the company's privacy-by-default ecosystem, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive, all of which can be accessed from proton.me. All Proton services remain available as a free tier, with more advanced features and more storage available via paid plans. The free Proton tier includes up to 1GB of storage and one Proton email address, as well as access to Proton's encrypted Calendar and VPN services. Further reading: Proton Is Trying to Become Google -- Without Your Data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new website that published leaked emails from several leading proponents of Britain's exit from the European Union is tied to Russian hackers, according to a Google cybersecurity official and the former head of UK foreign intelligence. From a report: The website - titled "Very English Coop d'Etat" - says it has published private emails from former British spymaster Richard Dearlove, leading Brexit campaigner Gisela Stuart, pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs, and other supporters of Britain's divorce from the EU, which was finalized in January 2020. The site contends that they are part of a group of hardline pro-Brexit figures secretly calling the shots in the United Kingdom. "I am well aware of a Russian operation against a Proton account which contained emails to and from me," said Dearlove, referring to the privacy-focused email service ProtonMail.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now demonstrated a low-cost gel film that can pull many liters of water per day out of even very dry air. New Atlas reports: The gel is made up of two main ingredients that are cheap and common -- cellulose, which comes from the cell walls of plants, and konjac gum, a widely used food additive. Those two components work together to make a gel film that can absorb water from the air and then release it on demand, without requiring much energy. First, the porous structure of the gum attracts water to condense out of the air around it. The cellulose meanwhile is designed to respond to a gentle heat by turning hydrophobic, releasing the captured water. In tests, the gel film was able to wring an astonishing amount of water out of the air. At a relative humidity of 30 percent, it could produce 13 L (3.4 gal) of water per day per kilogram of gel, and even when the humidity dropped to just 15 percent -- which is low, even for desert air -- it could still produce more than 6 L (1.6 gal) a day per kilogram. [...] And the new gel film's efficiency could be improved even further, the team says, by creating thicker films, absorbent beds, or other array formations of the material. Perhaps most importantly, the material is extremely inexpensive to produce, costing as little as $2 per kilogram. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tomhath shares a report from The New York Times: The United States said on Monday that it would supply Romania with a training simulator in preparation for building a new type of nuclear power generating plant in the country. If an agreement on moving ahead with a power station is reached, Romania could become the first country in Europe, and perhaps in the world, to have such a plant, known as a small modular reactor. The one in Romania would be built by NuScale Power, a start-up company based in Portland, Ore. The government announced that the plant would be built in Doicesti, at the site of a shuttered coal-fired power plant about 55 miles northwest of Bucharest. [...] NuScale's approach to nuclear energy involves constructing relatively small reactors in factories and then assembling groups of them at the actual site for generating power. The aim is to reduce costs as well as the time required for construction. Conventional modern nuclear plants can cost $10 billion or more. The plan involves building a power station composed of six of the modular units. The plant would generate 462 megawatts of electricity, making it the size of a medium-size conventional power station. Such a plant might cost around $1.6 billion, according to figures published by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. The hope is to have it operating by the end of the decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week -- the world's first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It'll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles. The Huangpu Wenchong Shipyard began construction on the Zhu Hai Yun last July in Guangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, it's the first carrier of its kind, a self-contained autonomous platform that will roll out with everything necessary to perform a fully integrated operation including drone aircraft, boats and submersibles. [...] Zhu Hai Yun will run on remote control until it's out in the open water, and then its self-driving systems will take over to execute whatever mission it's running. It's kitted out with everything it needs to deploy its own boats, subs and aircraft, communicate with them, and run co-ordinated missions, including conducting "task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional views of specific targets," according to the shipbuilding company. The aerial drones can land back on its deck, and it stands ready to retrieve the boats and subs once they've made their rounds. While it's mainly pitched as an ocean research platform, the SCMP also reports that it has "military capability to intercept and expel invasive targets," a capability at the forefront of many autonomous marine projects. "Please note that Beijing went from laying down a new class of ship to christening in less than a year," adds the reader.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MattSparkes shares a report from New Scientist: The idea that autonomous cars, even in small numbers, can increase fuel efficiency, travel times and safety for all cars on the road will be put to the test on routes around Nashville, Tennessee, later this year. Benedetto Piccoli at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and his colleagues previously used a computer model of a simple circular road with just one lane in each direction, and found that autonomous cars could decrease overall fuel consumption of all traffic by 40 percent, even once adoption of these vehicles had only reached 5 per cent. The best-case scenarios from these new models "rarely happen" in the real world, he says, but his team still hopes to reduce fuel consumption of all vehicles on the road during the trial -- not just the driverless cars -- by as much as 10 percent. "If you take just the overall cost of the traffic system in any country, and you reduce that by even 5 percent we are talking about billions of dollars," he says. The researchers have shared their findings in a paper via arXiv.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Spanish government on Tuesday announced plans to invest $13.2 billion to build microchips in the country and "help reduce the dependence of Span and the European Union on other suppliers," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Speaking in Madrid, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said the five-year plan is aimed at enabling Spain to cover every area in the design and production of microchips, which are now considered key to all areas of modern industry. She said the plan was among the most ambitious of the Spanish government's projects to reboot the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and that it would have an effect on other sectors. The project was directed at boosting the EU's weak position in microchip production, which Calvino said represented some 10% of the world total. She said this led to a great dependence on a small number of major producers such as Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, Japan and China. Calvino added that "the war in Ukraine makes it a priority to reinforce strategic autonomy in energy, technology, food production as well as cyber security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung is rumored to be assembling a special task force dubbed "Dream Platform One team" tasked with designing a custom in-house Samsung mobile Application Processor (AP) that can take on Apple Silicon. Neowin reports: It's probably fair to say that Samsung hasn't had the best time with its Exynos offerings when compared against rivals like Qualcomm or Apple. To shake its fortunes up, the company also paired up with AMD for its Exynos 2200 GPU, and results were a mixed bag. Both the AMD RDNA 2 Xclipse 920 graphics and the Exynos 2200 CPU were found to be pretty disappointing in terms of power efficiency as they were not much better than the previous Exynos 2100 offering. In a nutshell, the new CPU was around 5% faster while the AMD graphics was around 17% better, both of which were clearly not enough (via TechAltar on Twitter). However, the company is looking to get real serious and down to business come 2025. The new report coincides with a separate report suggesting that Samsung was working on a custom chipset for its Galaxy S series. The downside is that it's not slated for 2025 and will obviously have to compete against whatever Apple offers at that time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Dutch police have received dozens of leads after using deepfake technology to virtually bring to life a teenager almost two decades after his murder. Sedar Soares was shot dead in 2003 while throwing snowballs with friends in the parking lot of a Rotterdam metro station. The 13-year-old's murder baffled police for years. Now, with the permission of Sedar's family, they have made a video in which the teen asks the public to help solve the cold-case crime. In what Dutch police believe could be a world first, an eerily lifelike image of Sedar appears in the video as he greets the camera and picks up a football. Accompanied by stirring music, he walks through a guard of honor on the field, comprising his relatives, former teachers and friends. "Somebody must know who murdered my darling brother. That's why he has been brought back to life for this film," a voice says, before Sedar stops and drops his ball. "Do you know more? Then speak," Sedar and his relatives and friends say, before his image disappears from the field and the video gives the police contact details. Dutch police have posted the deepfake video on YouTube. You can also watch the making of the video in the documentary "Speak! Now!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DuckDuckGo isn't as private as you thought. "Due to a confidential search agreement, the DuckDuckGo browser does not block all Microsoft trackers," reports Review Geek. "What's worse, DuckDuckGo only acknowledged this 'privacy hole' after it was discovered by a security researcher." From the report: Security researcher @thezedwards found that the mobile DuckDuckGo browser does not block Microsoft trackers on third-party websites, such as the Facebook-owned Workplace.com. Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of DuckDuckGo, is now running damage control on Twitter. He explains that Microsoft cannot see what you search in DuckDuckGo, and the DuckDuckGo browser blocks all Microsoft cookies. But if you visit a website that contains Microsoft's trackers, then your data is exposed to services like Bing and LinkedIn. This is the result of DuckDuckGo's "search syndication agreement" with Microsoft. In order to pull search information from Bing, the privacy experts at DuckDuckGo have to poke holes in their browser's security system. While DuckDuckGo has a solid privacy policy when it comes to Microsoft's ads, it hasn't explained how Microsoft uses data from third-party trackers. And that's quite alarming. Maybe this situation is overblown, or maybe Microsoft can build targeted ad profiles based on your web activity in DuckDuckGo -- we don't know because DuckDuckGo signed a confidentiality agreement. Gabriel Weinberg says that DuckDuckGo is "working tirelessly behind the scenes" to improve its deal with Microsoft. Additionally, he expects DuckDuckGo to "include more third-party Microsoft protection" in a future update.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's ad transparency tools will soon reveal another treasure trove of data: advertiser targeting choices for political, election-related, and social issue spots. The Register reports: Meta said it plans to add the targeting data into its Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment for academic researchers at the end of May. The move comes a day after Meta's reputation as a bad data custodian resurfaced with news of a lawsuit filed in Washington DC against CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Yesterday's filing alleges Zuckerberg built a company culture of mishandling data, leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The suit seeks to hold Zuckerberg responsible for the incident, which saw millions of users' data harvested and used to influence the 2020 US presidential election. Jeff King, Meta's VP of business integrity, said that FORT would allow researchers to look at detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral and political ads. "This data will be provided for each individual ad and will include information like the interest categories chosen by advertisers," King said. Prior to this announcement, data for social, electoral, and political ads in the run-up to the 2020 election was available as part of a pilot program. This new release will expand the pilot and add data from all ads in those categories run globally since 2020, King said. The non-academic public has to wait until July to get their hands on that data in Facebook's Ad Library, and when released it will be in a summarized form. Included in the update will be data on total number of social, electoral, and political ads ran on a page using particular targeting data, percentage spent on the different issues, and whether the page uses a custom or lookalike audience. King said that Meta hopes the release will "help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies," and emphasized yet again that Meta is "committed to providing meaningful transparency, while also protecting people's privacy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Actor and producer Seth Green was robbed of several NFTs this month after succumbing to a phishing scam that inadvertently threw a monkey wrench into the plan for his new animated series. The forthcoming show was developed from characters in Green's expansive NFT collection, but in light of the recent hack, the project's blatant crypto optimism has become a tragically ironic reminder of the industry's shadier side. On Saturday, Green teased a trailer for White Horse Tavern at the NFT conference VeeCon. A twee comedy, the show seems to be based on the question, "What if your friendly neighborhood bartender was Bored Ape Yacht Club #8398?" In an interview with entrepreneur and crypto hype man Gary Vaynerchuk, Green said he wanted to imagine a universe where "it doesn't matter what you look like, what only matters is your attitude." Unfortunately for Green, what also matters is copyright law. And when the actor's NFT collection was pilfered by a scammer in early May, he lost the commercial rights to his show's cartoon protagonist, a scruffy Bored Ape named Fred Simian, whose likeness and usage rights now belong to someone else. "I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show," Green told Vaynerchuk. "Then days before -- his name is Fred by the way -- days before he's set to make his world debut, he's literally kidnapped." Green did not respond to a tweet from BuzzFeed News regarding the show. On May 8, an anonymous scammer swiped four of Green's NFTs in a phishing scheme. Green mourned his "stolen" assets on Twitter, where he announced the losses of a Bored Ape, two Mutant Apes, and a Doodle, which were transferred out of Green's wallet after he unknowingly interacted with a phishing site. One of the Mutant Apes was flipped for $42,000, Motherboard reported. Transaction ledgers show the Bored Ape was also sold by the scammer to a pseudonymous collector known as "DarkWing84," who purchased it for more than $200,000. The NFT was then swiftly transferred to a collection called "GBE_Vault," which is where it currently sits. If the current owner "wanted to cause trouble for Seth Green they probably could, because that person becomes the holder" of the commercial usage rights, said Daniel Dubin, an intellectual property attorney at Alston & Bird LLP. [...] Seemingly aware of the problems his ape's new owner could cause, Green has spent the last several days tweeting at DarkWing84 in an attempt to reclaim the Bored Ape [...]. The NFT marketplace OpenSea said it has frozen the tokens and marked all four NFTs taken from Green with "suspicious activity" warnings. "We do not have the power to freeze or delist NFTs that exist on decentralized blockchains; however, we do disable the ability to use OpenSea to buy or sell stolen items," said OpenSea spokesperson Allie Mack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than one in 10 cases of coronary heart disease could be prevented if people reduced their TV viewing to less than an hour a day, research suggests. From a report: Coronary heart disease occurs when fatty material builds up inside the coronary arteries causing them to narrow, reducing the heart's blood supply. Researchers say cutting down on time spent in front of the TV could lower the risk of developing the disease. "Reducing time spent watching TV should be recognised as a key behavioural target for prevention of coronary heart disease, irrespective of genetic susceptibility and traditional risk markers," said Dr Youngwon Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an author of the research. While the team did not look at what was behind the association, Kim said previous studies had found excessive TV viewing time is associated with adverse levels of cholesterol and glucose in the body. "Unfavourable levels of these cardiometabolic risk markers may then lead to increased risk of developing coronary heart disease," he said. Writing in the journal BMC Medicine, Kim and colleagues report how they used data from 373,026 white British people aged 40-69 who were part of an endeavour known as the UK Biobank study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As states race to keep plants open, California becomes a test case of how much the tide has shifted. From a report: Charles Komanoff was for decades an expert witness for groups working against nuclear plants, delivering blistering critiques so effective that he earned a spot at the podium when tens of thousands of protesters descended on Washington in 1979 over the Three Mile Island meltdown. Komanoff would go on to become an unrelenting adversary of Diablo Canyon, the hulking 37-year-old nuclear facility perched on a pristine stretch of California's Central Coast that had been the focal point of anti-nuclear activism in America. But his last letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in February, was one Komanoff never expected to write. He implored Newsom to scrap state plans to close the coastal plant. "We're going to have to give up some of our long-held beliefs if we are going to deal with climate," Komanoff said in an interview. "I am still a solar and wind optimist. But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing." Komanoff's conversion is emblematic of the rapidly shifting politics of nuclear energy. The long controversial power source is gaining backers amid worries that shutting U.S. plants, which emit almost no emissions, makes little sense as governments race to end their dependence on fossil fuels and the war in Ukraine heightens worries about energy security and costs. The momentum is driven in large part by longtime nuclear skeptics who remain unsettled by the technology but are now pushing to keep existing reactors running as they face increasingly alarming news about the climate. The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in April, warned that the world is so dangerously behind on climate action that within a decade it could blow past the targets crucial to containing warming to a manageable level. Emissions analysts are increasingly critical of retirements of existing nuclear reactors as they take large amounts of low-emissions power off the grid, undermining the gains made as sources such as wind and solar come online. The movement to keep plants open comes despite persistent worries about toxic waste and just a decade after the nuclear disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant. It has been boosted by growing public acceptance of nuclear power and has nurtured an unlikely coalition of industry players, erstwhile anti-nukers, and legions of young grass-roots environmental activists more worried about climate change than nuclear accidents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today is the 15th birthday of Google Maps Street View, Google's project to take ground-level, 360-degree photographs of the entire world. To celebrate, the company is rolling out a few new features. From a report: First up, Google is bringing historical Street View data to iOS and Android phones. The feature has long existed on desktop browsers, where you can click into Street View mode and then time travel through Google's image archives. When you tap on a place to see Street View imagery, a "see more dates" button will appear next to the current age of the photo, letting you browse all the photos for that area going back to 2007. Google says the feature will release "starting today on Android and iOS globally," though, like all Google product launches, it will take some time to fully roll out. If you'd like to help Google with its plan to photograph the entire world, the company is launching "Street View Studio." Google calls this "a new platform with all the tools you need to publish 360 image sequences quickly and in bulk." The Street View app is still around for people who want to build a 360 photosphere from a regular smartphone camera, but Google imagines Street View Studio as a tool for people with consumer 360 cameras. Google has a store-style page that lists compatible 360 cameras; the options range from sub-$200 fisheye cameras to the $3,600, ball-shaped Insta360 Pro, which looks like something out of Star Wars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Riding the wave of enthusiasm for no-code/low-code solutions, Microsoft today announced Power Pages, a standalone product within the company's Power Platform portfolio for creating business websites. Power Pages previously existed as a component within Power Apps called Power Apps portals, but it's been broken out and redesigned with a new user experience. From a report: "As a new, standalone product, Power Pages empowers anyone, regardless of their technical background, with an effective platform to create data-powered, modern, and secure websites," Sangya Singh, vice president of power portals at Microsoft, said in a blog post. "In addition to being low-code, Power Pages extends far beyond portals former capabilities to enable organizations of any size to securely build websites with exciting new aesthetic features and advanced capabilities for customization with pro-dev extensibility." There's no shortage of web design startups on the market. But Microsoft is touting Power Pages' integrations with its existing services as the key differentiator. For example, Power Pages ties in with Visual Studio Code, GitHub, the Power Platform command line interface and Azure DevOps to let more advanced users automate development workflows (e.g. by downloading and uploading projects) and leverage CI/CD practices. Power Pages also allows users to implement role-based access controls and web app firewalls via Azure, and to collect and share business info with site visitors via Microsoft's Dataverse platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Build 2022, Microsoft unveiled Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform that's designed to let developers explore "AI scenarios" via Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (SNPE) for Windows toolkit. From a report: The hardware arrives alongside support in Windows for neural processing units (NPUs), or dedicated chips tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific workloads. Dedicated AI chips, which speed up AI processing while reducing the impact on battery, have become common in mobile devices like smartphones. But as apps like AI-powered image upscalers come into wider use, manufacturers have been adding such chips to their laptop lineups. M1 Macs feature Apple's Neural Engine, for instance, and Microsoft's Surface Pro X has the SQ1 (which was co-developed with Qualcomm). Intel at one point signaled it would offer an AI chip solution for Windows PCs, but -- as the ecosystem of AI-powered Arm apps is well-established, thanks to iOS and Android -- Project Volterra appears to be an attempt to tap it rather than reinvent the wheel. It's not the first time Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm to launch AI developer hardware. In 2018, the companies jointly announced the Vision Intelligence Platform, which featured "fully integrated" support for computer vision algorithms running via Microsoft's Azure ML and Azure IoT Edge services. Project Volterra offers evidence that, four years later, Microsoft and Qualcomm remain bedfellows in this arena, even after the reported expiration of Qualcomm's exclusivity deal for Windows on Arm licenses. Arriving later this year, Microsoft says (somewhat hyperbolically) that Project Volterra will come with a neural processor that has "best-in-class" AI computing capacity and efficiency. The primary chip will be Arm-based, supplied by Qualcomm, and will enable developers to build and test Arm-native apps alongside tools including Visual Studio, VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams. Project Volterra is the harbinger of an "end-to-end" developer toolchain for Arm-native apps from Microsoft, as it turns out, which will span the full Visual Studio 2022, VSCode, Visual C++, NET 6, Windows Terminal, Java, Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android (for running Android apps).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new startup lifting elements of competing businesses is far from unusual in today's venture world, but sometimes competing founders don't find the imitation all that flattering. From a report: Andy Bromberg, CEO of the a16z-backed startup Eco, is claiming that Pebble, another fintech startup that came out of stealth this morning, "plagiarized" Eco's materials and business model. Bromberg posted a Twitter thread this afternoon saying Pebble engaged in "copy-and-pasting, immaturity, lying, and espionage." In the thread, Bromberg detailed the background behind his claims, and he also spoke to TechCrunch about the allegations. Bromberg claims the Pebble co-founders, CEO Aaron Bai and CTO Sahil Phadnis, impersonated Y Combinator investors to get access to Eco's waitlist. He also alleges that Phadnis asked detailed questions about Eco's backend under the guise of looking for employment and that multiple aspects of Pebble's product and marketing language are essentially copy-pasted from Eco. TechCrunch covered the news earlier this week that Pebble, which participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 cohort, raised $6.2 million in seed funding from YC itself alongside LightShed Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Montage Ventures, Soma Capital and angel investors. On its website, Pebble, founded last year, calls itself "the first app that pays you to save, spend, and send your money -- all in one balance." It launched with two core products -- a 5% APY interest offering for customer cash deposits, and a 5% cash back offering when customers spend at its partner merchants, which include Uber, Amazon and Chipotle, Pebble CEO Aaron Bai said. The former product is based on the model of taking in customer funds, converting them to stablecoins, and lending them out to institutions, Bai explained at the time. Bromberg subsequently told TechCrunch that both core products were based on two of Eco's core offerings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is planning to support third-party widgets inside Windows 11 later this year. At its annual Build developer conference today, the software giant says it will open up access to Windows 11 widgets to developers as companions to their win32 or PWA apps. From a report: Currently, the Windows 11 widgets system is restricted to native widgets created by Microsoft, and the selection is rather limited. Microsoft has built widgets for its Outlook and To Do apps, but the rest are largely web-powered ones that present the weather, entertainment feeds, or news in the dedicated widgets panel for Windows 11. "We're energized by the customer feedback on Widgets to date, people are enjoying the quick access to content most important to them in a way that is seamless without breaking their flow," says Panos Panay, head of devices and Windows. "Beginning later this year you'll be able to start building Widgets as companion experiences for your Win32 and PWA apps on Windows 11, powered by the Adaptive Cards platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Drone delivery has been a long time coming, but its actual implementation has largely arrived in fits and starts. Some companies (Alphabet's Wing) have made decent headway, while others (Amazon) have struggled. There are still plenty of issues to contend with ahead of any sort of mainstream adoption, from regulation to congestion to safety concerns. But a number of parties have found small successes in limited markets. Today, Walmart is expanding its own investment, announcing plans to extend its partnership with DroneUp to include 34 sites across six states. The planned rollout is set to be completed by the end of the year, at which point it will -- theoretically -- cover up to 4 million U.S. households. The retailer announced an investment in the 6-year-old startup late last year, following trial deliveries of COVID-19 testing kits. Early trials were conducted in Bentonville, Arkansas. This year, Arizona, Florida, Texas and DroneUp's native Virginia are being added to the list. Once online, customers will be able to choose from tens of thousands of products, from Tylenol to hot dog buns, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grocery app Gorillas, which promises to deliver goods in as quickly as 10 minutes, is laying off half of its office staff. From a report: In a press release, the company said it was letting go of roughly 300 employees from a "global office workforce" of 600. (This workforce also includes roughly 14,400 staff working in warehouse and as delivery drivers.) The company is also planning to tighten its focus on five markets that account for 90 percent of its revenue: the UK, US, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The company also operates in four other European markets -- Spain, Denmark, Italy, and Belgium -- where it says it is "looking at all possible strategic options for the Gorillas brand." That might mean pulling out of these markets, but Gorillas tells The Verge nothing has been decided yet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The AI world is still figuring out how to deal with the amazing show of prowess that is DALL-E 2's ability to draw/paint/imagine just about anything but OpenAI isn't the only one working on something like that. Google Research has rushed to publicize a similar model it's been working on -- which it claims is even better. [...] Imagen starts by generating a small (64x64 pixels) image and then does two "super resolution" passes on it to bring it up to 1024x1024. This isn't like normal upscaling, though, as AI super-resolution creates new details in harmony with the smaller image, using the original as a basis. The advances Google's researchers claim with Imagen are several. They say that existing text models can be used for the text encoding portion, and that their quality is more important than simply increasing visual fidelity. That makes sense intuitively, since a detailed picture of nonsense is definitely worse than a slightly less detailed picture of exactly what you asked for. For instance, in the paper describing Imagen (PDF), they compare results for it and DALL-E 2 doing "a panda making latte art." In all of the latter's images, it's latte art of a panda; in most of Imagen's it's a panda making the art. (Neither was able to render a horse riding an astronaut, showing the opposite in all attempts. It's a work in progress.) In Google's tests, Imagen came out ahead in tests of human evaluation, both on accuracy and fidelity. This is quite subjective obviously, but to even match the perceived quality of DALL-E 2, which until today was considered a huge leap ahead of everything else, is pretty impressive. I'll only add that while it's pretty good, none of these images (from any generator) will withstand more than a cursory scrutiny before people notice they're generated or have serious suspicions. OpenAI is a step or two ahead of Google in a couple ways, though. DALL-E 2 is more than a research paper, it's a private beta with people using it, just as they used its predecessor and GPT-2 and 3. Ironically, the company with "open" in its name has focused on productizing its text-to-image research, while the fabulously profitable internet giant has yet to attempt it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City removed its last public payphone on Monday. The boxy enclosures were once an iconic symbol across the city. But the rise of cellphones made the booths obsolete. CNBC reports: The effort to replace public pay telephones across the city kicked off in 2014 when the de Blasio administration solicited proposals to reimagine the offering, the city's Office of Technology and Innovation said in a news release. Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks. There are nearly 2,000 kiosks across the city, according to a map from LinkNYC. The last public pay telephone will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York as part of an exhibit looking back at life in the city before computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from the University of Gottingen have published new calculations of the physics of the sun's atmosphere that resolve the apparent contradiction between the modern standard model of solar evolution and the "tried-and-true" method called spectral analysis. "The new calculations of the physics of the sun's atmosphere yield updated results for abundances of different chemical elements, which resolve the conflict," reports Phys.Org. "Notably, the sun contains more oxygen, silicon and neon than previously thought. The methods employed also promise considerably more accurate estimates of the chemical compositions of stars in general." From the report: Highly accurate helioseismic measurements gave results about the sun's interior structure that were at odds with the solar standard models. According to helioseismology, the so-called convective region within our sun where matter rises and sinks down again, like water in a boiling pot, was considerably larger than the standard model predicted. The speed of sound waves near the bottom of that region also deviated from the standard model's predictions, as did the overall amount of helium in the sun. To top it off, certain measurements of solar neutrinos -- fleeting elementary particles, hard to detect, reaching us directly from the sun's core regions -- were slightly off compared to experimental data, as well. Astronomers had what they soon came to call a "solar abundances crisis," and in search of a way out, some proposals ranged from the unusual to the downright exotic. Did the sun maybe accrete some metal-poor gas during its planet-forming phase? Is energy being transported by the notoriously non-interacting dark matter particles? The newly published study by Ekaterina Magg, Maria Bergemann and colleagues has managed to resolve that crisis, by revisiting the models on which the spectral estimates of the sun's chemical composition are based. [...] In this study they tracked all chemical elements that are relevant to the current models of how stars evolved over time, and applied multiple independent methods to describe the interactions between the sun's atoms and its radiation field in order to make sure their results were consistent. For describing the convective regions of our sun, they used existing simulations that take into account both the motion of the plasma and the physics of radiation ("STAGGER" and "CO5BOLD"). For the comparison with spectral measurements, they chose the data set with the highest available quality: the solar spectrum published by the Institute for Astro- and Geophysics, University of GÃttingen. "We also extensively focused on the analysis of statistical and systematic effects that could limit the accuracy of out results," notes Magg. The new calculations showed that the relationship between the abundances of these crucial chemical elements and the strength of the corresponding spectral lines was significantly different from what previous authors had claimed. Consequently, the chemical abundances that follow from the observed solar spectrum are somewhat different than stated in previous analysis. "We found, that according to our analysis the sun contains 26% more elements heavier than helium than previous studies had deduced," explains Magg. In astronomy, such elements heavier than helium are called "metals." Only on the order of a thousandth of a percent of all atomic nuclei in the sun are metals; it is this very small number that has now changed by 26% of its previous value. Magg adds: "The value for the oxygen abundance was almost 15% higher than in previous studies." The new values are, however, in good agreement with the chemical composition of primitive meteorites ("CI chondrites") that are thought to represent the chemical make-up of the very early solar system. When those new values are used as the input for current models of solar structure and evolution, the puzzling discrepancy between the results of those models and helioseismic measurements disappears.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have created genetically edited tomatoes, each containing as much provitamin D3 -- the precursor to vitamin D -- as two eggs or a tablespoon of tuna. Outdoor field trials of the tomatoes are expected to begin in the UK next month, and if successful, could provide an important new dietary source of vitamin D. The tomato plants were created by making tiny changes to an existing tomato gene using an editing technique called Crispr-Cas9. "It's like a pair of molecular tweezers, which you can use to precisely snip out a very small fragment of the gene to enhance a desirable trait in plants a lot quicker than traditional breeding process, and without introducing any foreign DNA from other species," said Jie Li at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, who led the research. In this case, their focus was an enzyme found in tomato plants that normally converts provitamin D3 into cholesterol. By altering this enzyme, the researchers managed to block this pathway, meaning provitamin D3 accumulated in the tomatoes' fruits and leaves. They calculated that the amount of provitamin D3 in one tomato fruit -- if converted to vitamin D3 -- would be equivalent to levels present in two medium-sized eggs or 28 grams of tuna. To convert this into active vitamin D3, the fruit would still need to be exposed to UVB light, or they could potentially be grown outdoors, something the researchers plan to test in upcoming field trials. The research was published in Nature Plants. "Unlike GMOs, the tomato plants do not contain genes from other organisms and could theoretically have been created through selective breeding -- albeit much more slowly," notes the Guardian. Therefore, they could be allowed under a proposed genetic technology (precision breeding) bill aimed to allow gene-edited plants to be treated differently to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EPA is formally accepting applications for its Clean School Bus Program, a $5 billion program to replace dirty diesel school buses with more environmentally friendly options. Ars Technica reports: Specifically, the EPA is aiming to replace older (model year 2010 or older) diesel-powered school buses, which must be scrapped in order for a clean bus to be bought to replace them. Oh, and the old bus has to be fully functionalâ"this isn't intended as a way to make the government pay for broken junk to be replaced with shiny new buses. But the agency says it will also accept applications from schools looking for zero-emission buses that are prepared to scrap older non-diesel school buses, as well as newer internal combustion buses (which should either be sold, scrapped, or donated). The EPA isn't requiring the replacement buses to all be electric, however. While the program will pay for battery-electric buses -- such as the Thomas C2 Jouley that was delivered to a school in Alexandria County in Virginia on Friday to mark the start of the program -- it will also pay for buses powered by propane or compressed natural gas as long as they're also model year 2021 or newer and will serve the school district for at least five years, among other requirements. The EPA will consider applications to replace up to 25 buses at once and has set aside $250 million for zero-emission buses in 2022 and $250 million for clean school buses, with another $4.5 billion remaining for 2023-2028. Rebates range from $375,000 for a zero-emissions Class 7 or Class 8 bus down to $25,000 for smaller propane buses (classes 3-6). The application process is open until August 19, and successful applicants should be notified in October that it's time to order some new buses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to CNBC, Airbnb is closing its domestic business in China. From the report: All mainland Chinese listings -- homes and experiences -- will be taken down by this summer. Airbnb formally launched its mainland China business in 2016 and has faced mounting competition from domestic players. Sources say that the segment was already costly and complex to operate. The pandemic worsened these issues and heightened their impact. Despite in-country branding and putting Airbnb cofounder, Nathan Blecharczyk, at the head of efforts, stays in China on the platform have accounted for approximately 1% of revenue for the last few years. Sources say Chinese outbound travel has been a bigger opportunity for Airbnb and the company will refocus on providing listings for Chinese travelers going abroad. One source says the overlap between Airbnb's outbound and domestic businesses was not strong. Airbnb will maintain an office in Beijing with hundreds of employees, according to one source.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is actively seeking a potential buyer or merger. Apple has reportedly been in talks with the company about buying EA out according to Puck. Disney and Amazon have also been in talks about purchasing the video game company. 9to5Mac reports: The Redwood City-based firm has published hits like Apex Legends, Madden, and The Sims franchise. According to Puck, EA ideally would like a merger so Andrew Wilson can remain CEO of the combined company. [...] EA's roots actually go back to Apple. Back in 1982, Apple's then Director of Strategy and Marketing, Trip Hawkins, left the company to start EA. A buyout wouldn't be Apple's first venture into gaming, however. The Cupertino company unveiled its gaming service Apple Arcade back in 2019. Through Apple Arcade, users can play ad-free games on their iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Investment-banking firm Goldman Sachs made an eye-catching move last week: it granted unlimited paid holiday to its senior staff. According to a memo seen by a number of media organizations, partners and managing directors will be able to "take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement." Junior staff were given two more annual days off, and the company said all workers had to take a minimum of 15 days holiday each year. At first glance, this looks like a positive initiative from a company known for grueling work hours and demanding culture. Unlimited paid time off (UPTO), after all, could allow overworked staff more time to rest and improve their mental health and overall work-life balance. Plus, a generous holiday policy at the top could trickle down into the wider workforce, potentially making for happier and more productive staff on the whole. Yet what sounds like an amazing benefit comes with major caveats. Workers will likely only take a decent amount of holiday if firms create an environment that encourages them to do so. In some firms with UPTO, workers end up taking less holiday -- not more -- because of peer pressure and perceived expectations around 'acceptable' amounts of holiday. The latest data, meanwhile, shows UPTO isn't the benefit that workers covet the most; rather than an unlimited amount of holiday, most people prize flexibility, including the option to work from home. Is this recently introduced perk the shiny new toy workers have wanted all along -- or is it the gift no one asked for? "With UPTO, workers are not technically owed any vacation days, since there's no fixed number, and everything must be cleared by the boss on a case-by-case basis," notes the BBC. "For workers, establishing what the 'right' amount of paid time off to ask for often depends on observing the behavior of colleagues and bosses. If colleagues are only taking 10 days per year, asking for more could feel inappropriate." Companies that adopt UPTO, says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, have "moved from a model where you accrue it -- so you're actually owed the vacation -- to one where you kind of [have to] ask. And there's nothing stopping your boss from yelling at you if you want to take additional time off -- or punishing you if you do." The BBC adds, citing Cappelli: "UPTO also removes the safeguards that protect workers' interests if they can't take time off -- there are no leftover days workers are legally required to take by year's end, or carry over to the next year. There's also nothing for workers to cash out if they quit and have days left over, which [...] saves companies money."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"AMD's Computex 2022 keynote marks the first appearance of company's new Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 desktop chip in the flesh," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid. "And in its first quick benchmark tease, it's looking pretty buff." Here's an excerpt from a report via HotHardware: AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors that will be the first to ship with Zen 4 cores will include one or two 5nm Zen 4 CCDs -- topping out at 16 cores, just like Zen 3 -- as well as a new cIOD fabricated on 6nm chip process technology. The new cIOD will include PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, as well as an RDNA 2-based GPU for basic display support. [...] Initial performance claims regarding solid state storage weren't the only ones made during AMD's Computex keynote, however. As the keynote was wrapping up, Dr. Su showed two demos powered by a Ryzen 7000 series processor. AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors that will be the first to ship with Zen 4 cores will include one or two 5nm Zen 4 CCDs -- topping out at 16 cores, just like Zen 3 -- as well as a new cIOD fabricated on 6nm chip process technology. The new cIOD will include PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, as well as an RDNA 2-based GPU for basic display support. In the second demo, a custom Ryzen 7000 3D image was being rendered in Blender, with an Intel Core i9-12900K 16-core / 24-thread processor running alongside an AMD Ryzen 7000 series 16-core / 32-thread processor. In the time-lapsed demo, the Ryzen 7000-based system finished the render 31% faster than the Intel system. While AMD wasn't willing to commit to any specific date, the company did confirm that Zen 4 will be here this year, and well before the holiday shopping season. Dr. Su set a timeframe of "Fall" for availability of the new Ryzen 7000 CPUs, as well as the motherboards that will help enable the entire platform. Slashdot reader UnknowingFool also shared the news (via AnandTech). You can watch the entire AMD Computex 2022 Keynote presentation here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has updated the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) to Android 12.1 and shipped improvements to Android integration with Windows, networking, the camera in apps, the Settings app, and more. ZDNet reports: Current limitations aside, Microsoft is continuing to invest in bringing Android to Windows 11, as seen in its update to the WSA on Windows 11 (version 2204.40000.15) to Android 12.1, which is available to Insiders on the Dev Channel, according to a Microsoft blogpost. WSA launched with Android 11. Microsoft has improved networking on the Windows Subsystem for Android, so that Android apps can connect to devices on the same network as a Windows PC. Advanced networking allows users to set up smart home devices such as speakers and security cameras with a compatible Android app. This feature is available in Windows 11 preview builds 22621 and higher, with advanced networking on by default for new x64 Windows builds. Android-Windows integration has also been improved. Windows taskbar icons now show which Android apps are currently using hardware features like the mic and location in the system tray. The taskbar now also correctly appears or disappears when apps are running or stopped. Android notifications also show as Windows notifications and the Windows title of an Android app now reflects the Android activity title. Android apps won't restart afresh after exiting connected standby mode, but instead will recommence where the app was paused. Of the "many camera updates" in this release, Microsoft highlights that camera orientation is fixed to natural orientation, and that it's fixed incorrect camera previews, letterboxing (where the app window is wider than it is high, or horizontally longer), and a "squishing of the camera feed." Mouse and keyboard inputs in Windows Subsystem for Android have been improved. Microsoft also improved scroll-wheel support, fixed the onscreen keyboard focus, and ensured the Android soft keyboard displays correctly. The updated Windows Subsystem for Android Settings app gained redesigned UX and diagnostics data viewer. As of this update, telemetry collection is off by default. However, Microsoft is encouraging users to enable the setting, so it can collect data about Android app usage. "Other important updates include reduced flicker when apps are restored from a minimized state, the addition of VP8 and VP9 video hardware decoding, and the addition of Chromium WebView 100 to the Windows Subsystem for Android," adds ZDNet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine has sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly failing to protect consumer data following the Cambridge Analytica data leak. "The evidence shows Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in Facebook's failure to protect the privacy and data of its users leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident," Racine said in a statement about the lawsuit released Monday. "This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans' personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg's policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook's wrongful conduct." He added, "This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions." The lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg was "responsible for" and "had the clear ability" to control Facebook operations and enabled Cambridge Analytica to use consumer data. The lawsuit alleges that third-party firms like Cambridge Analytica got data from 87 million Americans and half of District of Columbia residents. Racine filed a lawsuit against Facebook in December 2018 for the data leak and is bringing this suit following evidence found during that litigation, according to the attorney general. In March, a judge ruled against an effort by Racine to add Zuckerberg as a defendant in the ongoing 2018 case. [...] The lawsuit filed by Racine takes issue with what it appears to consider a central business objective of Facebook. The suit accuses the company of aiming "to convince people to reveal the most granular details of who they are to Facebook -- their religions, their work histories, their likes -- so that it can be monetized, and Zuckerberg and his company can continue to grow even wealthier." On multiple occasions, the lawsuit notes that the company pursued its policies "at Zuckerberg's direction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While not every user is actively monitoring hardware resource usage when gaming, enthusiasts and reviewers often turn the stats on to see how certain games and other applications are being handled by the hardware. During such a test run, CapFrameX, which developed a useful frametime analysis tool, noticed a weird anomaly when gauging the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Lara Croft Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR). The processor usage reported on Windows 11 is seemingly unusually low in one of the scenes in the game which is typically known to be quite intense on the CPU. Only one out the 16 threads seem to be reporting the correct usage whereas all the other threads are under 10% utilization. CapFrameX notes the issue though it isn't sure what could be causing it: " The core usage reporting on Window 11 is completely broken. Should be >80% for SotTR + this particular scene and settings. What happened? Did the recent update change the timer behavior?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance promoted terraUSD as a "safe" investment just weeks before the stablecoin and its counterpart luna collapsed in a $40bn wipeout that shook the crypto industry. From a report: The world's biggest crypto exchange advertised on April 6 an investment scheme in which clients lend out their terra to earn a yield of almost 20 per cent as a "safe and happy" opportunity, according to a message Binance sent on its official channel on the Telegram messaging app. Terra and luna, a set of linked digital tokens, were popular with crypto traders seeking to earn high returns through lending programmes known as "staking," but lost nearly all of their value earlier this month in one of the crypto industry's biggest-ever crashes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase is testing a practice where it asks employees to frequently rate each other. Some employees at the company have been using a real-time evaluation app invented by Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, which helped enforce a culture of "radical transparency" that encourages blunt honesty, The Information reported Monday, citing two people with direct knowledge. From the report: The app, Dot Collector, is sold by Principles, a company Dalio founded. Coinbase's version lets employees evaluate co-workers, including their managers, on how well they exemplify the crypto firm's 10 cultural tenets -- which include clear communication, efficient execution and positive energy -- during meetings and other interactions, these people said. After an interaction, an employee can give their colleague a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or neutral rating.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Florida law intended to punish social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, dealing a major victory to companies who had been accused by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis of discriminating against conservative thought. Associated Press: A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded that it was overreach for DeSantis and the Republican-led Florida Legislature to tell the social media companies how to conduct their work under the Constitution's free speech guarantee. "Put simply, with minor exceptions, the government can't tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it," said Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, in the opinion. "We hold that it is substantially likely that social media companies -- even the biggest ones -- are private actors whose rights the First Amendment protects." The ruling upholds a similar decision by a Florida federal district judge on the law, which was signed by DeSantis in 2021. It was part of an overall conservative effort to portray social media companies as generally liberal in outlook and hostile to ideas outside of that viewpoint, especially from the political right.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UnknowingFool writes: This weekend, Miguel Ojeda, added support for a set of additional Rust patches in the kernel and separately a new version of Uutils which is the Rust version of GNU CoreUtils. These changes will go towards more inclusion of Rust into Linux. The v7 patches adds in abstractions used by Rust and the Uutils update contained fixes and addresses compatibility issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology entrepreneur Michael Dell once again finds himself at the center of one of his industry's biggest deals. From a report: Dell holds a roughly $16.2 billion stake in VMware, meaning he's likely to have a important say in a potential takeover of the cloud-computing provider by chip maker Broadcom. The two companies are in talks about a transaction, Bloomberg News reported Sunday. While it's not known what price Broadcom is willing to pay for VMware, which has a market value of $40 billion, it may have to offer a sizable premium to get the company's shareholders on board. VMware's market capitalization touched $70 billion as recently as October, when Dell's interest would have been worth some $28 billion. Shares in VMware rose 15% in premarket trading on Monday, which would value the company at about $46 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Spring has brought remarkably extreme heat to India and Pakistan this year. Unusually extensive heatwaves have followed one after another since March and are continuing well into May. The situation presents a conundrum for rapid studies of the role of climate change in this event, as we can't yet put an end date on it. Nevertheless, a pair of studies have looked into the influence of the climate on March and April's heat. Daily and monthly temperature records have been broken in many areas. Thermometers have hit temperatures as high as 120F (49C), and the heat has been accompanied by abnormally dry weather. Record-breaking heatwaves often coincide with drought, as the dry ground heats up even more without the cooling effect of evaporation. However, the lower humidity has reduced the heat's threat to human health, though at least 90 deaths have been reported so far, and that number is expected to rise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: It's a few weeks old, but ...A local computer scientist and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has been named an A.M. Turing Award winner by the Association for Computing Machinery. The Turing Award is often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of computer science." It carries a million dollar prize. "Oh, it was a complete shock. I'm still recovering from it," Jack Dongarra told Knox News with a warm laugh. "It's nice to see the work being recognized in this way but it couldn't have happened without the support and contribution of many people over time." Chances are Dongarra's work has touched your life, even if you don't know it. If you've ever used a speech recognition program or looked at a weather forecast, you're using technology that relies on Dongarra's software libraries. Dongarra has held a joint appointment at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 1989. While he doesn't have a household name, his foundational work in computer science has undergirded the development of high-performance computers over the course of his 40-year career... Dongarra developed software to allow computers to use multiple processors simultaneously, and this is basically how all computer systems work today. Your laptop has multiple processing cores and might have an additional graphics processing core. Many phones have multiple processing cores. "He's continually rethought how to exploit today's computer architectures and done so very effectively," said Nicholas Higham a Royal Society research professor of applied mathematics at the University of Manchester. "He's come up with ideas so that we can get the very best out of these machines." Dongarra also developed software that allowed computers with different hardware and operating systems to run in parallel, networking distant machines as a single computation device. This lets people make more powerful computers out of many smaller devices which helped develop cloud computing, running high-end applications over the internet. Most of Dongarra's work was published open-source through a project called Netlib.Congratulations!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: NASA programmer/scientist, Ron Garret shares his experience debugging LISP code from 150-million miles away on the robotic Mars rover Sojourner. Garret describes his experience in a recent episode of Adam Gordon Bell's Corecursive podcast. Garret later explains, "And it didn't work..." for the next project NASA's New Millennium project using LISP. Like a professor said in LISP programming class, LISP -- getting it done is half DEFUN. Garret had written an essay in 2006 , titled, "How knowing LISP destroyed my programming career." Available on the web archive. So much for LISPcraft, or the Little LISPer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameStop said on Monday it has launched a digital asset wallet that will allow gamers to store, send and receive cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens. From a report: The digital wallet will be able to be used across decentralized apps, which run on a blockchain and aren't controlled by a central authority, without players having to leave their web browsers, the company said in a statement. The GameStop wallet is a self-custodial Ethereum wallet, meaning the user controls the keys to their assets, not a third party. The wallet extension can be downloaded from Google's Chrome web store and will allow transactions on GameStop's NFT marketplace, which is expected to launch in the second quarter of the company's fiscal year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zola, a wedding planning startup that allows couples to create websites, budgets and gift registries, has confirmed that hackers gained access to user accounts but has denied a breach of its systems. From a report: The incident first came to light over the weekend after Zola customers took to social media to report that their accounts had been hijacked. Some reported that hackers had depleted funds held in their Zola accounts, while others said they had thousands of dollars charged to their credit cards and gift cards. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Zola spokesperson Emily Forrest confirmed that accounts had been breached as a result of a credential stuffing attack, where existing sets of exposed or breached usernames and passwords are used to access accounts on different websites that share the same set of credentials. [...] Zola declined to say how many users were affected by the breach and declined to answer our questions regarding the lack of two-factor authentication (2FA) currently offered to users, which helps to protect accounts against credential stuffing attacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon, stuck with too much warehouse capacity now that the surge in pandemic-era shopping has faded, is looking to sublet at least 10 million square feet of space and could vacate even more by ending leases with landlords, according to people familiar with the situation. From a report: The excess capacity includes warehouses in New York, New Jersey, Southern California and Atlanta, said the people, who requested anonymity because they're not authorized to speak about the deals. The surfeit of space could far exceed 10 million square feet, two of the people said, with one saying it could be triple that. Another person close to the deliberations said a final estimate on the square footage to be vacated hasn't been reached and that the figure remains in flux. Amazon could try to negotiate lease terminations with existing landlords, including Prologis, an industrial real estate developer that counts the e-commerce giant as its biggest tenant, two of the people said. In a sign that Amazon is being careful not to cut too deeply should demand quickly rebound, the 10 million square feet the company is looking to sublet is roughly equivalent to about 12 of its largest fulfillment centers or about 5% of the square footage added during the pandemic. In another signal that Amazon is hedging its bets, some of the sublet terms would last just one or two years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charlotte Web writes: A recent survey of 20,000 developers found a third (34%) were learning about cryptocurrencies, ZDNet reports — and 16% even said they were actively working on crypto-related projects. (And 11% said they were actively working on NFT technology, while 32% said they were learning more about NFTs.) 30% also said they were learning about blockchain technologies other than cryptocurrencies (with just 12% currently working on blockchain projects — just 1% higher than in a 2021 survey). Citing the survey, ZDNet adds that "The next most popular technologies were the metaverse and AI-assisted software development: 28% of developers are learning about these technologies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Created at Google in late 2007, the Go programming language was open sourced in late 2009, remember its creators, and "since then, it has operated as a public project, with contributions from thousands of individuals and dozens of companies." In a joint essay in Communications of the ACM, five of the language's five original creators explore what brought growing popularity to this "garbage-collected, statically compiled language for building systems" (with its self-contained binaries and easy cross-compilation). "The most important decisions made in the language's design...were the ones that made Go better for large-scale software engineering and helped us attract like-minded developers...."Although the design of most languages concentrates on innovations in syntax, semantics, or typing, Go is focused on the software development process itself. Go is efficient, easy to learn, and freely available, but we believe that what made it successful was the approach it took toward writing programs, particularly with multiple programmers working on a shared codebase. The principal unusual property of the language itself — concurrency — addressed problems that arose with the proliferation of multicore CPUs in the 2010s. But more significant was the early work that established fundamentals for packaging, dependencies, build, test, deployment, and other workaday tasks of the software development world, aspects that are not usually foremost in language design. These ideas attracted like-minded developers who valued the result: easy concurrency, clear dependencies, scalable development and production, secure programs, simple deployment, automatic code formatting, tool-aided development, and more. Those early developers helped popularize Go and seeded the initial Go package ecosystem. They also drove the early growth of the language by, for example, porting the compiler and libraries to Windows and other operating systems (the original release supported only Linux and MacOS X). Not everyone was a fan — for instance, some people objected to the way the language omitted common features such as inheritance and generic types. But Go's development-focused philosophy was intriguing and effective enough that the community thrived while maintaining the core principles that drove Go's existence in the first place. Thanks in large part to that community and the technology it has built, Go is now a significant component of the modern cloud computing environment. Since Go version 1 was released, the language has been all but frozen. The tooling, however, has expanded dramatically, with better compilers, more powerful build and testing tools, and improved dependency management, not to mention a huge collection of open source tools that support Go. Still, change is coming: Go 1.18, released in March 2022, includes the first version of a true change to the language, one that has been widely requested — the first cut at parametric polymorphism.... We considered a handful of designs during Go's first decade but only recently found one that we feel fits Go well. Making such a large language change while staying true to the principles of consistency, completeness, and community will be a severe test of the approach.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC reports on "the next generation of genetic modification technology" — which goes beyond simply introducing a "lab-tweaked gene" into an organism. Instead it introduces a "gene drive" — a lab-tweaked gene "that targets and removes a specific natural gene."if an animal (parent A) that contains a gene drive mates with one that doesn't (parent B), then in the forming embryo that starts to combine their genetic material, parent A's gene drive immediately gets to work. It recognises the natural gene version of itself in the opposite chromosome from parent B, and destroys it, by cutting it out of the DNA chain. Parent B's chromosome then repairs itself — but does so, by copying parent A's gene drive. So, the embryo, and the resulting offspring, are all but guaranteed to have the gene drive, rather than a 50% chance with standard GM — because an embryo takes half its genes from each parent. Gene drives are created by adding something called Crispr, a programmable DNA sequence, to a gene. This tells it to target the natural version of itself in the DNA of the other parent in the new embryo. The gene drive also contains an enzyme that does the actual cutting. It is hoped that gene drives can be used to greatly reduce the numbers of malarial mosquitos, and other pests or invasive species.... One organisation at the forefront of this is Target Malaria, which has developed gene drives that stop mosquitos from producing female offspring. This is important for two reasons — only the females bite, and without females, mosquito numbers will plummet. The core aim is to greatly reduce the number of people who die from malaria — of which there were sadly 627,000 in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. It could also slash the economic impact of the disease. With 241 million cases in 2020, mostly in Africa, malaria is estimated to cost the continent $12bn (£9.7bn) in reduced economic output every year.... One of the world's pioneering developers of gene drives is US biologist Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He first came up with the technology back in 2013.... Prof Esvelt adds that this technology is being provided by something called "daisy chain". This is where a gene drive is designed to become inert after a few generations. Or halving its spread every generation until it eventually stops. Using this technology he says it is possible to control and isolate the spread of gene drives. "A town could release GM organisms with its boundaries to alter the local population [of a particular organism] while minimally affecting the town next door," he says. The technology has not been authorized for use "in the wild," the article points out. But there are currently no bans on laboratories researching it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicholas Weaver is a senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. But he's also a raging cryptocurrency skeptic, arguing that cryptocurrency is useless and destructive, and should "die in a fire." In a recent interview in Current Affairs he promulgates what he calls Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain. "When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don't understand X, and you can ignore them." So for those pushing cryptocurrency for "Banking the unbanked," Weaver points to M-Pesa, a payment system Vodafone started in Kenya in 2007 "about the same time as Bitcoin..."It has eaten the Third World. It's huge. Because it just basically attaches a balance to your phone account. And you can text to somebody else to transfer money that way.... So even with the most basic dumb phone you have easy-to-use electronic money. And this has taken over multiple countries and become a huge primary payment system. [Whereas] the cryptocurrency doesn't work." Weaver also contends that when companies say they accept payments in Bitcoin, "They're lying." (They're using a service which pays them in "actual money" after performing conversions on any Bitcoin proferred-up by a customer.) He believes cryptocurrency is only seriously used for payments for ransomware and drug deals — the things that non-decentralized currencies are legally obligated to block.The reason I've gotten so sour on the cryptocurrency space is the ransomware. It's doing tens to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to the global economy. And it only exists because people can pay in Bitcoin. Weaver also believes cryptocurrency lets venture capitalists "carry out securities fraud as a business model" when they sell one of their startup's tokens to retail investors.This is blatantly an unlicensed security. This is blatant securities fraud, but they didn't commit the securities fraud. It was just the companies they invested in that did the securities fraud, and the SEC has not been proactively enforcing this. They only retroactively enforce against the initial coin offerings after they fail.... and when things fail, the only people to prosecute are the companies, not Andreessen Horowitz itself. So they've been able to make securities fraud a business in such a way that they are legally remote, so you will not be able to throw them in jail.... The SEC has the authority to stop those proactively rather than reactively. They choose not to.... Basically, there's a fear among regulators — that I think started in the '80s — of being accused of "stifling innovation." There's no innovation to stifle. So regulate away. He's also skeptical of cryptocurrency's other supposed advantages. Weaver argues cryptocurrency incentivizes green power "the same way that a whole bunch of random shootings would incentivize bulletproof vests." And even as an investment vehicle, Weaver sees it as "a self-created pyramid scheme."[Y]ou have to keep getting new suckers in. As soon as the number of suckers dries up, it collapses. And because it's not zero-sum, but deeply negative-sum, there are actually a lot of mechanisms that can cause it to collapse suddenly to zero. We saw this just the other day with the Terra stablecoin and the Luna side token. So when asked for the future of cryptocurrency, Weaver predicts "It will implode spectacularly." (By which he means it will "collapse greatly.")The only question is when. I thought it would have actually imploded a year ago. But basically, what we saw with Terra and Luna, where it collapsed suddenly due to these downward positive feedback loops — situations where basically the system is designed to collapse utterly and quickly — those will happen to the larger cryptocurrency space.... [T]he Washington Nationals just the other day started doing a lot of tweets for their business relationship with Terra. That was $5 million for five years prepaid in advance in cash. So for the next five years, the Washington Nationals are obliged to hype a cryptocurrency that failed spectacularly already. Thanks to Slashdot reader sdinfoserv for sharing the article...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you'd like to deter "digital voyeurs," Popular Science points out that you can ask the map apps from Google, Apple, and Microsoft "to draw a veil of privacy across your property. "You'd be in good company too: Apple CEO Tim Cook had his home blurred from mapping apps after issues with a stalker."There is something to bear in mind before you do this, though: you may not be able to reverse the process. The blur could be there for good. This is the case for Google Maps, and while Apple and Microsoft don't specify whether blurs on their services are permanent, they may follow the same protocol or decide to do so in the future. The case for blurring? "Having strangers from all over the world stare at your home isn't necessarily something you want to happen — but it can be done in seconds on the mapping apps we all carry around on our phones." ("Stop people from peering at your place," suggests the article's subtitle.) But is there also a case against demanding platforms blur what's essentially just the exterior of a building? Where's the boundary where we're honoring the wishes of the privacy-conscious — and does the public ever have a right to see? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And would you blur your house on every map app? (Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article...)Read more of this story at Slashdot.