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Valve has reportedly started banning Steam games featuring AI-created art assets, unless developers can prove they have rights to the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create them. From a report: In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build. In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights. "After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game." Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove all content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it. The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected. "We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights," Valve said. "At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. The New York Times: Cecilia Rabess figured her debut novel, "Everything's Fine," would spark criticism: The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views. But she didn't expect a backlash to strike six months before the book was published. In January, after a Goodreads user who had received an advanced copy posted a plot summary that went viral on Twitter, the review site was flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews, with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise. "It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on Goodreads, but these are broader campaigns of harassment," Rabess said. "People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well." In an era when reaching readers online has become a near-existential problem for publishers, Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building an audience. As a cross between a social media platform and a review site like Yelp, the site has been a boon for publishers hoping to generate excitement for books. But the same features that get users talking about books and authors can also backfire. Reviews can be weaponized, in some cases derailing a book's publication long before its release. "It can be incredibly hurtful, and it's frustrating that people are allowed to review books this way if they haven't read them," said Roxane Gay, an author and editor who also posts reviews on Goodreads. "Worse, they're allowed to review books that haven't even been written. I have books on there being reviewed that I'm not finished with yet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that 57 firms have been certified to utilize its "FedNow" instant payments system after it launches in late July. From a report: The Fed did not provide a specific date for the launch, but 41 banks and 15 service providers, including large firms like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo, have completed formal testing and will be ready to provide instant payments after the new service is live.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. From a report: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest -- and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference. "It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field." Consciousness is everything that a person experiences -- what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically." [...] The goal was to set up a series of 'adversarial' experiments to test various hypotheses of consciousness by getting rival researchers to collaborate on the studies' design. "If their predictions didn't come true, this would be a serious challenge for their theories," Chalmers says. The findings from one of the experiments -- which involved several researchers, including Koch and Chalmers -- were revealed on Friday at the ASSC meeting. It tested two of the leading hypotheses: integrated information theory (IIT) and global network workspace theory (GNWT). IIT proposes that consciousness is a 'structure' in the brain formed by a specific type of neuronal connectivity that is active for as long as a certain experience, such as looking at an image, is occurring. This structure is thought to be found in the posterior cortex, at the back of the brain. GNWT, by contrast, suggests that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission, according to the theory, happens at the beginning and end of an experience and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, Microsoft announced that it would continue its put-ChatGPT-in-everything adventure with a new Windows 11 feature called Copilot. The company added generative AI to Edge and to the Bing-powered taskbar Search field months ago, but Copilot promises to be the most visible and hard-to-ignore version of Microsoft's big AI push in its most visible and hard-to-ignore product. This week's Windows Insider Preview build for Dev channel users, build 23493, will be the first to enable Copilot for public testers. After installing the update, preview users can press Windows + C to open a Copilot column on the right side of the screen. It will use the same Microsoft account you use for the rest of the OS (it's unclear whether it will work without a Microsoft account, though, to date, the preview has required sign-up and sign-in). And like the other Bing Chat implementations, it has three different "conversation style" settings that either try to rein the chatbot in and keep its answers straightforward and factual or allow it to get "more creative" but more prone to confabulations. In addition to chatting, Copilot will also support creating AI images using OpenAI's DALL-E 2 model, the same technology used for the Bing Image Creator. Some features announced last month, including third-party plugin support, aren't included in this initial preview, and later versions will also be able to adjust a wider range of Windows settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI software and voice cloners simulate distracted saps willing to stay on the phone forever -- or until callers finally give up. From a report: Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are "far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC," with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said. Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second, constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators remove foreign accents and software allows overseas operators to trigger prerecorded English phrases, said Isaac Shloss. He is chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, a company that provides software and services tools to help call centers operate within the law. Roger Anderson, a 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., takes pleasure in foiling them. He began his war on telemarketers nearly a decade ago, he said, after one called the family's landline and said a bad word to his son. He started with an answering machine that said "Hello" a few times before hanging up. Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has posted conversations between man and bot, some lasting as long as 15 minutes before the telemarketer hangs up. The posts are part of Anderson's own marketing. He has several thousand customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called Jolly Roger. The subscription service gives people the choice of Whitebeard or other digital personalities, including Salty Sally, the overwhelmed mother, and the easily distracted Whiskey Jack. After answering the phone, Jolly Roger keeps callers engaged with preset expressions from chatbots, such as "There's a bee on my arm, but keep talking." Chatbots also grunt or say "uh-huh" to keep things going. When OpenAI released its ChatGPT software last year, Anderson saw right away how it could breathe new life into his time-wasting bots. At first, ChatGPT was reluctant to do the work. "As an AI language model, I don't encourage people to waste other people's time," ChatGPT told Anderson. Its successor, GPT-4, also pushed back, he said. Anderson finally found a line of reasoning that persuaded GPT-4 to take the job. "I told it that, 'You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed,'" he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a cybersecurity audit mistakenly reset everyone's password, a high school changed every student's password to "Ch@ngeme!" giving every student the chance to hack into any other student's account, according to emails obtained by TechCrunch. From the report: Last week, Oak Park and River Forest (OPRF) High School in Illinois told parents that during a cybersecurity audit, "due to an unexpected vendor error, the system reset every student's password, preventing students from being able to log in to their Google account." "To fix this, we have reset your child's password to Ch@ngeme! so that they can once again access their Google account. This password change will take place beginning at 4 p.m. today," the school, which has around 3,000 students, wrote in an email dated June 22. "We strongly suggest that your child update this password to their own unique password as soon as possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supermassive black holes all over the universe are merging, a fate that will eventually come for the black hole at the center of our galaxy. From a report: These mysterious cosmic structures at the heart of nearly every galaxy consume light and matter and are impossible to glimpse with traditional telescopes. But now, for the first time, astrophysicists have gathered knowledge directly from these titans, in the form of gravitational waves that ripple through space and time. What they learned suggests that the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging numbers in the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions. The gravitational waves from these mergers are all contributing to an underlying background hum of the universe that researchers can detect from Earth. The findings, from a collaboration of more than 100 scientists, help confirm what will one day happen to the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, known as Sagittarius A*, as it crashes into the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. "The Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and in about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are set to merge," said Joseph Simon, a University of Colorado, Boulder, astrophysicist and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or Nanograv, which helped lead the new work with support from the National Science Foundation. That merger, he said, will eventually result in the black hole at the center of Andromeda and Sagittarius A* sinking into the center of the newly combined galaxy and forming what is known as a binary system. The results were announced in a series of papers published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Before now, we didn't even know if supermassive black holes merged, and now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging," said Chiara Mingarelli, a Yale University astrophysicist and a member of Nanograv. The new work could answer questions such as how these black holes grow, and how often their host galaxies merge, the researchers said. Further reading: The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle is spending "billions" of dollars on chips from Nvidia as it expands a cloud computing service targeting a new wave of artificial intelligence companies, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison said. From a report: Oracle's cloud division is working to gain ground against larger rivals such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. To get an edge, Oracle has focused on building fast networks that can shuffle around the huge amount of data needed to create AI systems similar to ChatGPT. Oracle is also buying huge numbers of GPUs designed to crunch that data for AI work. Oracle is also spending "billions" of dollars on Nvidia chips but even more on CPUs from Ampere Computing, a chip startup it has invested in, and AMD, Ellison said at an Ampere event.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is showtime for Virgin Galactic. The spaceflight company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson almost two decades ago launched its long-awaited first commercial spaceflight, called "Galactic 01," on Thursday. From a report: Taking off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, the company's spacecraft is being flown by a pair of pilots and carries four passengers: A Virgin Galactic trainer, to oversee the mission from inside the cabin, and its first trio of paying customers. The three paying passengers are members of the Italian Air Force, and the flight carries 13 research payloads onboard. Virgin Galactic's start to commercial service comes after years of delays and setbacks. If "Galactic 01" is successful, the company plans to fly its second mission as soon as August and then aims to begin flying its spacecraft, VSS Unity, once a month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is set for a showdown with European Union antitrust regulators, insisting it doesn't need to make any more changes to its App Store after it was hit by formal charges over its treatment of music streaming rivals such as Spotify. From a report: The iPhone maker will argue at a hearing in Brussels on Friday that the EU wrongly accused it of illegal curbs on the likes of Spotify that prevent developers from steering users away from the App Store. Apple will say it's already addressed any possible competition concerns over the past two years with changes that create a fair balance between the interests of Apple and app developers, according to a person familiar with the US firm's thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Apple was slapped with a revised charged sheet by the EU in February, which showed the commission had narrowed its probe, but continued to focus "on the contractual restrictions that Apple imposed on app developers which prevent them from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative music subscription options." Spotify says that Apple's anti-steering rules prohibit it and other developers "from telling consumers about any deals or promotions through their own apps."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators. From the report: Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said. The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence. It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators. However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Washington Post reports that all remaining editorial staffers have been laid off at National Geographic, as the iconic magazine continues to spiral downward," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The famous yellow-bordered print issues of our youth is also an endangered species, as National Geographic also announced that print issues will no longer be sold on newsstands." From the report: Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem. On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers. The cutback -- the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. -- involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine's small audio department. The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine's editorial operations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit is pressuring moderators who have set their subreddits to private to reopen their communities this week, according to messages seen by The Verge. From the report: The company has given moderators deadlines to lay out their plans for reopening but said that they can't stay closed. The timeframes given generally indicate a deadline of sometime Thursday afternoon. Reddit was vague about the exact repercussions but seemed to suggest this was the final warning stage. "This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue" beyond a the deadline, the admin (Reddit employee) account ModCodeofConduct wrote in a note to one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has roiled the cybersecurity industry by putting executives of SolarWind on notice that it may pursue legal action for violations of federal law in connection with their response to the 2020 attack on the company's infrastructure that affected thousands of customers in government agencies and companies globally. From a report: Current and former employees and officers of the company, including the chief financial officer (CFO) and chief information security officer (CISO), have received so-called Wells Notices notices from the SEC staff, in connection with the investigation of the 2020 cyberattack, the company said in an SEC filing. "The Wells Notices provided to these individuals each state that the SEC staff has made a preliminary determination to recommend that the SEC file a civil enforcement action against the recipients alleging violations of certain provisions of the U.S. federal securities laws," SolarWinds said in its filing. A Wells Notice is neither a formal charge of wrongdoing nor a final determination that the recipient has violated any law, SolarWinds noted. However, if the SEC does pursue legal action and prevails in a lawsuit, there could be various consequences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: NASA said in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and "blowing up" in testing, Sean Clark, the project's principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said. The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. "As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn't seen on the ground," he said. "We've got a great design in progress to fix it, it's just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that." NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. "Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot's safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests," Bradley Flick, the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. "Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games. From a report: It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie -- but when you scan them in, it's easy to see some of the redactions. Oops. The court has scrambled to remove the document, but the damage is done; reporters and Sony's competition have already downloaded all the documents while they were in the public domain. Among other things, the document shows that Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees, and The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million with around 200 employees. It's not just how much games cost to make that's been revealed here, either. Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. My colleague Sean Hollister has analyzed the document, and it appears to show: "In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Koreans have become a year or two younger as a new law aligns the nation's two traditional age-counting methods with international standards. The BBC reports: The law scraps one traditional system that deemed South Koreans one year old at birth, counting time in the womb. Another counted everyone as aging by a year every first day of January instead of on their birthdays. The switch to age-counting based on birth date took effect on Wednesday. President Yoon Suk Yeol pushed strongly for the change when he ran for office last year. The traditional age-counting methods created "unnecessary social and economic costs," he said. For instance, disputes have arisen over insurance pay-outs and determining eligibility for government assistance programs. Previously, the most widely used calculation method in Korea was the centuries-old "Korean age" system, in which a person turns one at birth and gains a year on 1 January. This means a baby born on December 31 will be two years old the next day. A separate "counting age" system, that was also traditionally used in the country, considers a person zero at birth and adds a year on January 1. This means that, for example, as of June 28, 2023, a person born on June 29, 2003 is 19 under the international system, 20 under the "counting age" system and 21 under the "Korean age" system. Lawmakers voted to scrap the traditional counting methods last December. Despite the move, many existing statutes that count a person's age based on the "counting age" calendar year system will remain. For example, South Koreans can buy cigarettes and alcohol from the year -- not the day -- they turn 19. [...] The traditional age-counting methods were also used by other East Asian countries, but most have dropped it. Japan adopted the international standard in 1950 while North Korea followed suit in the 1980s.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A 20-strong fleet of Hitachi Masaccio trains is now running in Italy, where they are known as "Blues." It's the first phase of a 1.23 billion euros project which will add 135 battery-powered trains to national operator Trenitalia's network, running in Calabria, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Tuscany, and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. In Calabria, the trains are running on the Ionian Coast, while Sicilian routes include Messina to Palermo and Messina-Catania-Syracuse. Of course, not all the trains on these lines will be the Blues, so it's pot luck which travelers end up on. The three- and four-carriage, 300-seater trains are hybrid, working on battery, electric and diesel power. "It is the first time that batteries are used as the main energy source on a fleet of trains for commercial use in Europe," Trenitalia said in a statement. The fleet -- made with 93% recyclable materials -- will cut carbon emissions and fuel consumption by 50% versus diesel trains, Hitachi said in a statement. And by running on batteries through urban areas, they can also eliminate emissions and reduce noise pollution. A "driver advisory system" also suggests the optimal speed to reduce energy consumption. The trains have a short range of up to 15 kilometers (about 10 miles) on battery alone, but can recharge as they go, using the pantograph (the apparatus on top of the train which connects it to a power line) or by braking, meaning it can recharge multiple times during a journey. Maximum speed is 160 kph (100 mph). The next model of the Masaccio is due in two years time. It is predicted to run on batteries only, with a journey range of over 100 kilometers (62 miles). Hitachi also plans to retrofit the trains that have only just debuted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jeditobe writes: ReactOS is an open-source operating system that aims to replicate Microsoft Windows, and can already run many Windows applications without modification. ReactOS published a new (infrequent) newsletter to outline recent work. It reveals that progress has slowed down recently, but the project definitely isn't dead. The newsletter also acknowledges the team hasn't put out a new version since the end of 2021, although progress continues. Due to shifting focuses to quality releases, they are no longer on a quarterly release cadence. The date of the next release is not set yet, but according to a huge list of already-implemented changes they aim for it to be a substantial update. The last update to ReactOS was version 0.4.14, released on December 2021. While developers were previously committed to releasing updates every three months, that has since changed and updates will now be focused on quality rather than quantity. For the ReactOS team to be confident enough to release something, it needs to have less than 20 known unfixed regressions while adding new features and functions. Behind the scenes, it looks like things are spinning well. The team specifically highlighted its progress on the x64 port of ReactOS, which went from being a non-booting mess to an operating system that boots up and mostly works. It doesn't run any x86 programs since it doesn't have WoW64, but it's going well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Society of Automotive Engineers, a U.S.-based standards organization known as SAE International, announced plans to support Tesla's EV "North American Charging Standard" or NACS port. "SAE's adoption will make it easier for electric vehicle charging station manufacturers and operators to implement the port while also making charging for EV owners more consistent and reliable," reports The Verge. From the report: Tesla's formerly proprietary charging port was opened up last year in a bid to become the de facto EV standard in the US. The US Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has worked with Tesla and the SAE in an effort to expedite the Tesla plug as a standard to improve the country's charging infrastructure. SAE is also working with the ChargeX consortium, which was put together by the Biden administration so the Department of Energy's National Labs can help EV manufacturers create consistent tech across vehicles and chargers for items like universal error codes. SAE is lending its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology to make charging more secure against cyber attacks. Also today, ChargePoint announced that customers setting up charging stations with its equipment could add Tesla's port standard to new orders of several commercial AC stations and DC fast chargers, as well as home AC charging systems later this year (via Electrek). ChargePoint joins a handful of similar electric vehicle charging station companies that have announced support for Tesla's charging port. The standard has been gaining momentum since major legacy automakers Ford, GM, and Rivian all announced commitments to add Tesla's plug to their future vehicles. [...] Now, with SAE supporting NACS, larger EV charging company holdouts like the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America may have an easier time making the jump.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The servers used by the GMP project, an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs, slowed to a crawl earlier this month due to a large amount of network traffic originating from Microsoft servers. The Register reports: Torbjorn Granlund, principal author of GMP, raised the alarm in a note to the project's mailing list. "The GMP servers are under attack by several hundred IP addresses owned by Microsoft Corporation," he wrote. "We do not know if this is made with malice by Microsoft, if it is some sort of mistake, or if [it is one] of their cloud customers ... running the attack. The attack targets the GMP repo, with thousands of identical requests. The requests are cleverly chosen as to cause heavy system load. "We're firewalling off all of Microsoft's IP addresses as an emergency response." The following day, Mike Blacker, director of threat hunting, operations, and response at Microsoft's GitHub, had identified the culprit: a GitHub Actions Workflow that clones a Mercurial repo and has been forked more than 700 of times. "Microsoft and GitHub have investigated the issue and determined that a GitHub user updated a script within the FFmpeg-Builds project that pulled content from https://gmplib.org," explained Blacker. "This build was configured to run parallel simultaneous tests on 100 different types of computers/architectures. This activity does not appear to be nefarious. [GMP] appears to have limited infrastructure that could not sustain the limited, yet simultaneous requests." [...] As of last week, the excessive traffic was still an issue. "Our servers are fully available again, but that's the result of us adding all participating Microsoft network ranges to our firewall," the GMP project explains on its webpage. "We understand that we are far from the first project to take such measures against Github." The Register asked Granlund whether he was satisfied with Microsoft-GitHub's response, and he told us he had only heard once from Blacker. "I blocked about 40 IP ranges from accessing our web server," he explained. "A week after this started, there was still intensive traffic from the same IP addresses, perhaps 100 different Microsoft addresses all in all, belonging to about 40 ranges. The difference was that that traffic just caused minuscule load, and a log line in the firewall." "Problem solved. I cannot care less if they no longer can access gmplib.org. I find it interesting how little responsibility Github/Microsoft assume here. They seem to think that they are entitled to bash away at smaller sites."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia should phase out advertising for online gambling in three years, a parliamentary committee of inquiry recommended on Wednesday as it looked to limit the "havoc" it caused in one of the world's biggest betting market. The committee made 31 recommendations on how online gambling, which it said was changing the culture of sport, should be regulated and how Australians struggling with addiction should be supported. Australians outspend the citizens of every other country on online gambling, Peta Murphy, chair of the committee said in the report titled "You win some, you lose more." "This is wreaking havoc in our communities," Murphy said. Murphy said online gambling companies advertise deliberately and strategically alongside sport, which has normalized it as fun and harmless and sociable activity. A generation of young Australians views gambling and sport as inextricably linked, Murphy said, adding that it was changing the culture of sport. "Australia would be diminished if sport was to be so captured by gambling revenue that providing an opportunity for betting came to be seen as its primary purpose," Murphy said. A phased, comprehensive ban on all gambling advertising on all media, broadcast and online, that left no room for circumvention, was needed, the panel said. It recommended the ban be phased in over three years so sporting bodies and broadcasters had enough time to find alternative sources of advertising revenue. [...] Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government would consider the recommendations. "We need to deal with online issues, we need to deal with social media issues, we need to deal with it comprehensively across the board," Albanese said on ABC Gold Coast radio.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can now use a new feature on the ChatGPT app called Browsing to have ChatGPT search Bing for answers to questions. TechCrunch reports: Browsing can be enabled by heading to the New Features section of the app settings, selecting "GPT-4" in the model switcher and choosing "Browse with Bing" from the drop-down list. Browsing is available on both the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps. OpenAI says that Browsing is particularly useful for queries relating to current events and other information that "extend[s] beyond [ChatGPT's] original training data." When Browsing is disabled, ChatGPT's knowledge cuts off in 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp has announced it is retiring its Electron-based desktop app, forcing users to switch to the native app for their OS to continue using WhatsApp. Android Police reports: Back when WhatsApp was in the early stages of development, the developers created an app for desktop, based on the Electron JavaScript framework. This allowed them to share a code base between WhatsApp Web and the new, platform-agnostic desktop app that worked on both Windows and macOS. Around four weeks ago, a countdown timer showed up on the main screen of this desktop app, announcing its shutdown. Doomsday is now here and WABetaInfo reports anyone visiting the Electron-based app just sees a screen saying "App expired." The deprecated app helpfully links to the native WhatsApp Desktop app available on the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store. The new native app has been stable for around a year now, but is still relatively new. Some users may lament the transition period was too short, or the native app still doesn't have all the functionality for business users, like catalog management and quick replies, and they would be right.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A collection of over 2,200 new old stock computers from the 1980s, manufactured by a company called NABU and featuring a groundbreaking pre-internet network, are being liberated from a barn in Massachusetts. "In a way, this is two stories: The first, of a breakthrough network from Canada, a consumer-friendly 1983 version of the internet decades ahead of its time," writes Ernie Smith via Motherboard. "The other story, of the man who got a hold of these machines, held onto them for 33 years, and mysteriously allowed them to flood the used market one day. One day, thanks to a confluence of the right people noticing the right eBay listings, these two stories merged and created a third story -- the tale of a computer network, brought back to life." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: For more than two decades, the biggest retro computing story in recent memory sat like a sleeper cell in a Massachusetts barn. The barn was in danger of collapse. It could no longer protect the fleet of identical devices hiding inside. A story like this doesn't need the flash of a keynote or a high-profile marketing campaign. It really just needs someone to notice. And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor. These computers, with a weight equivalent to roughly 11 full-size vehicles, were basically new, other than the fact that they had sat unopened and unused for nearly four decades, roughly half that time inside this barn. Every box was "new old stock," essentially a manufactured time capsule, waiting to be found by somebody. These machines, featuring the label of a forgotten brand built around an idea that was tragically too early to succeed, could have disappeared, anonymously, into the junkyard of history, as so many others like them have. Instead, they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord servers, and Patreon channels where retro tech collectors hid. But then, a well-known tech YouTuber, Adrian Black, did a video about them, and these eBay machines, slapped with the logo of a company called NABU, were anonymous no more. [...] Black was impressed. These devices, which utilized the landmark Z80 processor -- a chip common in embedded systems, arcade machines like Pac-Man, and home consoles like the Colecovision -- had an architecture very similar to the widely used MSX platform, making them a great choice for device hackers. (Well, minus the fact that they didn't have floppy drives.) Plus, they were essentially new. "It's new old stock, but it is tested," he says at the beginning of the clip. "I think the seller actually peeled the original tape off, tested it, and then taped it back up again." Essentially, this was the retro-computing version of a unicorn: An extremely obscure platform, being sold at a scale wide enough that basically anyone who wanted one could have it. And on top of all that, NABU -- an acronym standing for Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities -- was essentially the 1983 version of AOL, except built around proprietary hardware. The flood of interest was so significant that it knocked the seller's eBay account offline for months while the company verified that the units were actually his. (They were.) For people who love tinkering with devices, there was a lot to work with here, especially in 2023. There was a real chance that this relic of the past could live again, with its network available to anyone who took a chance on buying one of these devices. "The kind of hardware and software hacking that people are doing with those wouldn't have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago," says Sean Malseed, host of the popular YouTube channel Action Retro and one of the many people who bought a NABU from the mysterious eBay listing. "These machines were once considered basically e-waste, but instead they're seeing a very unlikely renaissance." So where did this computer come from? Why did this seller have so many? And why didn't you know about the NABU until now? [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you want official updates from the Minecraft dev team, you better not look on Reddit. A post from a Reddit user bearing the name sliced_lime and a flair indicating they are the Minecraft Java Tech Lead (almost certainly Mojang's Mikael Hedberg) announced yesterday that Mojang would no longer be posting official content to Reddit, in the wake of that platform's response to protests over changes to its API. "As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits," read the post, before announcing that those changes have led Mojang to "no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer [its] players to". The events are only obliquely referred to in the post, but it seems the move has been sparked by Reddit's crackdown on protests against recent changes to its API that would, in essence, kill off third-party apps that let users access the site. Subreddit mods have spent the last few weeks mounting various campaigns against Reddit's corporate leadership, either "going dark" by turning the subreddits they oversee into private, invite-only communities or else marking them as NSFW, meaning Reddit can't sell ads on those pages. Reddit responded by pressuring disgruntled mods, and in some cases ousting and trying to replace them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activision Blizzard will likely abandon a $69 billion takeover bid by Microsoft if the US Federal Trade Commission wins a ruling pausing the deal, the game maker's chief executive officer told a judge. From a report: Microsoft called Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to testify in San Francisco federal court Wednesday to reinforce its claim that the acquisition won't hurt competition in the markets for console and subscription-based games. US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley must decide whether to halt the deal -- which has a July 18 closure deadline -- while the FTC's legal challenge to the transaction plays out. "My board's view is if the preliminary injunction is granted, we don't see how this will continue," Kotick said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The exoplanet 8 Ursae Minoris b should not exist. It orbits its host star at just half the Earth-Sun distance, and by all indications, the star should have gone through a phase in which it bloated up enough to engulf that entire orbit and then some. Yet 8 Ursae Minoris b definitely appears to exist. From a report: There is a handful of potential explanations, none of them especially likely. The people who discovered the planet are suggesting that it survived because its host star got distracted by swallowing a white dwarf instead. 8 Ursae Minoris b was discovered using the radial velocity method, which watches for changes in a star's light that occur as planets tug the star back and forth as they orbit. This tugging creates a blue shift in the light when the planet is pulling the star in the direction of Earth and a red shift when the star is pulled away from Earth. But the planet is unlikely to be tugging the star directly toward Earth, so we tend to only measure the component of the star's motion that's in our direction. We'd see the same apparent motion of the star if a light planet's orbit was oriented directly toward Earth or a very heavy planet that has a relatively skewed orbit. At best, radial velocity measurements give us an estimate of the minimum mass of the planet; it could potentially be larger. So we know that, at minimum, 8 Ursae Minoris b is a big planet, at over 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter. It also resides close to its host star, completing a full orbit in just 93 days. That places it at half an Astronomical Unit (AU, the typical distance between Earth and the Sun) from its star. Observations also hint at a second body orbiting the star at least five AU. The evidence for that is weak given the current data, but it may have a significant role in shaping the system. On its own, there's nothing especially unusual about the 8 Ursae Minoris exosolar system. Where things get weird is when you consider the star at the center of the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks has confirmed it inadvertently exposed about 61,000 filers' private addresses in a years-long data spill. From a report:The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said in a notice sent to affected trademark applicants that their private domicile address -- often their home address -- inadvertently appeared in public records between February 2020 and March 2023. U.S. law requires applicants to include their private address when submitting a trademark application in efforts to crack down on fraudulent trademark filings. USPTO said the issue was discovered in one of its APIs, which allows apps used by both agency staff and filers to access a system for checking the status of pending and registered trademarks. (An API allows two things on the internet, such as an app and a server, to communicate with each other.) USPTO said that the address data also appeared in bulk datasets that the agency publishes online to aid academic and economic research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada has launched a bid to attract techies working in the USA on the notorious H-1B visa, by offering them the chance to move north. From a report: The offer, announced on Wednesday as part of the nation's first ever tech talent strategy, means H-1B visa holders can move to Canada without having a job waiting for them. The H-1B visa is contentious in the USA. Its purpose is to attract skilled people whose talents are in short supply stateside, thus adding flexibility to the economy, but the visa is believed to be widely abused -- by employers who use it to find employees willing to work for less than their American peers. But the visa is very popular in India -- one of the main sources of H-1B applicants. Indeed it's so popular that the Biden Administration last week announced moderate reforms to the program during the state visit by Indian prime minster Narendra Modi. The H-1B also made news early in 2023 amid mass layoffs in the tech sector, because visa holders who don't have jobs have just 90 days to leave the Land of the Free. Canada has clearly spotted an opportunity to nab some talent that needs a bolt-hole -- and can get that talent safe in the knowledge that its southern neighbor has vetted H-1B holders, and they already have some experience of working in North America.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's surprisingly easy for someone to mess with the makeup of Earth's atmosphere, regardless of the consequences that could have for our planet. Now, as part of its plans to address security risks posed by climate change, the European Union is calling for talks on a potential international framework on how to treat deliberately atmosphere-altering technologies, AKA geoengineering. The issue is that scientists aren't quite sure how much good that would do or whether geoengineering might inadvertently trigger new problems. That's why the European Commission says the world needs to start thinking about rules on geoengineering. Without them, climate vigilantes could decide to go ahead with their experiments without any oversight or accountability. In fact, that's already started to happen, albeit on a small scale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than one-third of the famed startup accelerator Y Combinator's latest batch of companies are focused specifically on artificial intelligence. From a report: Y Combinator received a record 24,000 applications for its latest cohort, and accepted just under 1% of those, Garry Tan, president and chief executive officer of the accelerator, said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. About 35% of the companies selected for the program are AI-focused, he said, and as many as half involve AI as a component of their business. "There's something very special happening here," Tan said about AI in San Francisco. "The smartest people in the world are sitting in those cafes having discussions. Not just about starting their companies, but also what is the cutting edge of what these AI models can do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant's online-ad business. From a report: Google's YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page's main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren't skipped. Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page's main content, on sites that don't meet Google's standards for monetization, among other violations. Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal. In a statement, Google said the report "makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn't reflect how we keep advertisers safe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements. In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with "very high clearances and high positions within our government" "have come forward to share" "first-hand" UFO-related claims "beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with." Rubio's comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of "non-earth" or "exotic" origin. This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower's recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of "non-human" origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight. Additionally, the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe. Moreover, nearly 20 pages of the legislation appear to directly address recent events by enhancing a raft of legal protections for whistleblowers while also permitting such individuals to contact Congress directly. Researcher and congressional expert Douglas Johnson first reported on and analyzed the remarkable bill language, which, if it passes the House, could become law this calendar year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has uploaded the entire first episode of its sci-fi series "Silo" to Twitter, allowing anyone there to watch the opening installment for free. Engadget reports: Silo is based on the science fiction novel Wool by American author Hugh Howey. It takes place on a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, where what remains of humanity is confined to the Silo, a 144-story underground bunker that serves as a self-sufficient underground community. The citizens are told that the world outside the Silo is perilous, but questions arise about what truly lies beyond. It's a clever premise that allows showrunner Graham Yost to explore the book's themes about truth vs. fiction and information as power. Apple has reportedly renewed the series for a second season. You can watch the full episode on Twitter here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing. Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Five cases of malaria have been confirmed in Florida and Texas, the first time the potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease has been locally acquired in the United States in 20 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. The four Florida cases, along with one in Texas, have been diagnosed over a period of two months, the agency said. The state of Florida said that its first case was diagnosed on May 26 in Sarasota County, while officials in Texas said on June 23 that a Texas resident who worked outdoors in Cameron County had been diagnosed with the disease. The CDC said in an alert released Monday that malaria is considered a medical emergency, and that anyone with symptoms should be "urgently evaluated." However, the CDC said that risk of malaria remains low in the United States, and that most cases are acquired when people travel outside of the country. Fully 95% of malaria infections are acquired in Africa, the health agency said. Malaria is caused by five species of a parasite carried by certain female mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle pain and fatigue. Nausea, diarrhea and vomiting may also appear. Malaria can cause life-threatening damage, including kidney failure, seizures and coma.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's speech recognition subsidiary, Nuance Communications, is integrating its AI-powered clinical notes application into Epic Systems. The collaboration aims to reduce physicians' administrative workload by automatically generating draft clinical notes within seconds using real-time conversation recording and advanced AI models, ultimately saving time for doctors and improving patient engagement. CNBC reports: Epic is a health-care software company that helps hospitals and other health systems store, share and access electronic health records. More than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients across the globe use Epic's offerings, and the company has long-standing partnerships with both Microsoft and Nuance. The companies are collaborating to build a system that can carry out many of clinicians' back-end administrative responsibilities. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that integrating its latest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, into Epic is a "major step" toward that goal. DAX Express automatically generates a draft clinical note within seconds after a patient visit. It can record a conversation between a doctor and a patient in real time and create a note using a combination of existing AI and OpenAI's newest model, GPT-4. "I think the magical thing here is that note is produced not in an hour, but in a matter of seconds," Garrett Adams, product lead for Epic's ambulatory division, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. "So whereas it would have taken them so much longer than that to type it out manually, they now get it better, faster and with a level of convenience that wasn't even really possible to imagine a decade ago." Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so patient data is fully encrypted and runs in HIPAA-compliant environments. DAX Express for Epic will be available in a private preview capacity for select users this summer, and [...] the company hopes to expand to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asset management giant Fidelity is preparing to submit its own filing for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The news helped push bitcoin above the $31,000 mark earlier today. The Block reports: The launch of a spot bitcoin ETF has been described as a gamechanger among market pundits since it can provide a way for investors to get exposure to the market without having to deal with the underlying asset. BlackRock's filing specifically has been pointed out as significant given the firm's size and significance in global markets. "BlackRock's decision to file for a Bitcoin ETF signals that large institutional players are positive on the long-term outlook for the digital asset," Ark analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote. Fidelity is also a powerhouse, with tens of millions of retail brokerage clients and over $11 trillion in assets under its administration. The firm is also no stranger to crypto as it has operated an institutional custody and trading services business in the market since 2018. [...] This will be Fidelity's second attempt at such a product. In 2021, it filed for a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund called the Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust but was denied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in early 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Volve has joined Ford, General Motors, and Rivian in adopting Tesla's proprietary charging port. Car and Driver reports: Volvo says that starting in 2025 all of its electric vehicles will be equipped with a North American Charging Standard (NACS) port. This will allow them to charge at Tesla's far-reaching Supercharger network in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The charging network is currently said to consist of 12,000-plus fast-chargers and is expected to continue to keep growing. "One major inhibitor to more people making the shift to electric driving, a key step in making transportation more sustainable, is access to easy and convenient charging infrastructure," Volvo CEO Jim Rowan said in a press release. What does this mean for the owners of Volvo models built before the NACS adoption? The company says its current lineup of EVs, which includes the XC40 Recharge, the C40 Recharge, the recently revealed EX30, and the new three-row EX90 SUV that are are currently equipped with CCS-type charge ports, will be able to use an adapter to connect to Tesla's chargers. Volvo says the CCS-to-NACS adapter will be made available in the first half of next year, but what remains to be seen is how much it will cost, if anything. Also worth noting is that the automaker plans to offer a NACS-to-CCS adapter for future 2025 models for owners who wish to replenish their battery using that style charger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A hacker has stolen the messages, call logs and locations intercepted by a widely used phone monitoring app called LetMeSpy, according to the company that makes the spyware. The phone monitoring app, which is used to spy on thousands of people using Android phones around the world, said in a notice on its login page that on June 21, "a security incident occurred involving obtaining unauthorized access to the data of website users." "As a result of the attack, the criminals gained access to e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and the content of messages collected on accounts," the notice read. LetMeSpy is a type of phone monitoring app that is marketed for parental control or employee monitoring. The app is also specifically designed to stay hidden on a phone's home screen, making it difficult to detect and remove. Also known as stalkerware or spouseware, these kinds of phone monitoring apps are often planted by someone -- such as spouses or domestic partners -- with physical access to a person's phone, without their consent or knowledge. Once planted, LetMeSpy silently uploads the phone's text messages, call logs, and precise location data to its servers, allowing the person who planted the app to track the person in real-time. Polish security research blog Niebezpiecznik first reported the breach. When Niebezpiecznik contacted the spyware maker for comment, the hacker reportedly responded instead, claiming to have seized wide access to the spyware maker's domain. It's not clear who is behind the LetMeSpy hack or their motives. The hacker intimated that they deleted LetMeSpy's databases stored on the server. A copy of the hacked database also appeared online later the same day. TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims' call logs and text messages dating back to 2013. The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared little to no data with LetMeSpy. (LetMeSpy claims to delete data after two months of account inactivity.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SiriusXM will shut down its podcast app Stitcher at the end of August. The Hollywood Reporter reports: In a memo sent to employees, executives from the satellite radio and audio company said SiriusXM will not be backing away from podcasting, but rather will be trying to move more listeners over to its SXM app in order to grow subscriber numbers ahead of new "streaming experience" launching this fall. The SiriusXM Podcast Network, which includes content production hubs Stitcher Studios and Earwolf, remains unchanged as part of this decision and there will not be layoffs as part of this. "The scale and reach of our widely distributed podcasts has been and remains a crucial accelerant for our advertising sales business, while incorporating podcasts more holistically into our flagship SiriusXM subscription service will help to drive further growth. As a result, we have made the decision to sunset our stand-alone podcast listening app as we increase our focus on these priorities," reads an internal memo Tuesday from chief product and tech officer Joe Inzerillo, chief ad revenue officer John Trimble and chief content officer Scott Greenstein.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Figma is expanding its partnership with Google for Education in a bid to introduce more school-age students to its product design and collaboration platforms. Announced during the Config event on Wednesday, June 21st, all K-12 students across the US can now access Figma for free on education Chromebooks. Figma is also expanding its educational partnership with Chromebooks outside of the US, starting with Google schools in Japan. The Verge reports: Today's announcement effectively opens up the beta program that Figma released last year, which was initially limited to select US high schools. As with the beta, students will have access to both Figma (the company's flagship product design platform) and FigJam, Figma's collaborative whiteboarding app. Figma's Google program is only available on Chromebooks, though the company said that schools using non-Google systems can apply for access on an individual class basis. While Figma already provides free account tiers, these restrict users to a limited number of files and features. This offering for educational markets gives students and educators access to the company's Enterprise tier -- which typically starts at $75 a month per editor -- without paying a dime. The Enterprise tier for Figma and FigJam is the company's most powerful offering, allowing large groups of students to collaborate at scale. It also grants educators full control over their Figma environments to ensure student safety and support class management. The Chromebook-specific perks of this partnership allow school admins running Google Workspace for Education to deploy and manage Figma to numerous Chromebooks with a few clicks, directly within the Google Admin console. And given how popular Chromebooks are in educational settings (largely because they're cheap, cloud-based, and easy to use), it's not unreasonable to expect schools to have some lying around.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A cleaner at a college in New York state accidentally destroyed decades of research by turning off a freezer in order to mute "annoying alarm" sounds. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, is suing the cleaner's employer, alleging improper training. According to a lawsuit filed in the New York supreme court in Rensselaer county earlier this month, the university is seeking more than $1m in damages, the Times Union newspaper reported. "People's behavior and negligence caused all this," Michael Ginsberg, an attorney for RPI, told the Times Union. "Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research." The cleaner, who is not named in the lawsuit, was employed by Daigle Cleaning Systems and worked at RPI for several months in 2020, when the incident occurred. The lab freezer contained several cultures that were part of a research project on photosynthesis headed by the biology and chemistry professor KV Lakshmi, the BBC reported. The cultures were usually stored at -112F (-80C). On September 14, 2020, days before the freezer was unplugged, an alarm indicated that the freezer temperature was fluctuating, the lawsuit says, adding that the specimens in the freezer were still viable at that point. Covid restrictions at the time meant repairs could not be made for a week. Lab officials took precautions to preserve the cultures and explain the alarm, posting a sign explaining where the noise was coming from and how to mute it. Lakshmi also installed a lock box on the freezer's outlet and socket to stop anyone unplugging it. But on September 17, the Daigle Cleaning Systems employee turned off the circuit breaker, causing the temperature of the freezer to rise. The next day, lab officials discovered the samples were unsalvageable. "[A] majority of specimens were compromised, destroyed and rendered unsalvageable demolishing more than 20 years of research," the lawsuit says. In an interview with university officials, the cleaner said he thought he was turning the circuit breaker on after hearing the alarms. "At the end of the interview, he still did not appear to believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help," the lawsuit says, saying the cleaner made an "error" when reading the panel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gatzke writes: Upsetting many in the open-source community was Red Hat's announcement last week that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and publicly would be limited to the CentOS Stream sources. In turn this causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux moving forward. Red Hat this week issued another blog post trying to address some of the criticism. Red Hat's blog this week featured a post by Mike McGrath, the VP of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat. In the post he talks up "Red Hat's commitment to open source." Some of the key takeaways include:"Despite what's currently being said about Red Hat, we make our hard work readily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers....We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL. When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it....I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous....Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple's strict payment rules. From a report: Apple had threatened to remove Damus earlier this month over the app's tips feature, claiming that it could be used by content creators to sell digital content on the platform. The tech giant has a long history of prohibiting developers from selling additional in-app content unless the transactions go through Apple, which takes a 30% cut. To avoid a ban, the team behind Damus had to tweak the app's tipping feature, which is made possible by way of Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The company previously explained in a tweet that it had to remove the tips button from posts and was only allowed to permit tips on profiles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that in order to find someone guilty of making a "true threat" courts must first determine that the person recklessly disregarded the fact that their words might be perceived as threats. From a report: Experts fear the decision will create new hurdles for victims of cyberstalking by requiring them to first prove that their stalkers understand the consequences of their actions. "The Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the First Amendment if the stalker genuinely believes his actions are non-threatening," tweeted Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington Law School and president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. "That is, the more deluded the stalker, the more protected the stalking." The case, Counterman v. Colorado, concerns a man named Billy Raymond Counterman, who was convicted under a Colorado anti-stalking law, after he sent a barrage of threatening Facebook messages to a woman he'd never met. The Colorado law didn't require the court to consider Counterman's mental state when he sent the messages. It only had to consider his behavior and how it was objectively received, that is, whether he repeatedly contacted, followed, or surveilled his target in a way that would cause a "reasonable person" distress. Counterman was found guilty under that statute, but he appealed his conviction, arguing that his statements were protected by the First Amendment and did not constitute "true threats," a category of speech that falls outside the bounds of the First Amendment, because it wasn't his intention to threaten his target. In its decision, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly sided with Counterman.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has criticised powers in the UK's Online Safety Bill that could be used to force encrypted messaging tools like iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal to scan messages for child abuse material. From a report: Its intervention comes as 80 organisations and tech experts have written to Technology Minister Chloe Smith urging a rethink on the powers. Apple told the BBC the bill should be amended to protect encryption. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) stops anyone but the sender and recipient reading the message. Police, the government and some high-profile child protection charities maintain the tech -- used in apps such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage -- prevents law enforcement and the firms themselves from identifying the sharing of child sexual abuse material. But in a statement Apple said: "End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. "It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk. "Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs, French, Dutch and European Union prosecutors said Tuesday. From a report: The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality -- mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering -- that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones. "It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement. The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille. As a result, 6,558 suspects have been arrested worldwide, including 197 "high-value targets." Seized drugs included 30.5 million pills, 103.5 metric tons (114 tons) of cocaine, 163.4 metric tons (180 tons) of cannabis and 3.3 metric tons (3.6 tons) of heroin. The investigations also led to nearly 740 million euros ($809 million) in cash being recovered and assets or bank accounts worth another 154 million euros ($168 million) frozen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.