Slashdot

From customer service to the entertainment industry, businesses in China are paying big bucks for virtual employees. From a report: Tech company Baidu said the number of virtual people projects it's worked on for clients has doubled since last year, with a wide price range of as little as $2,800 to a whopping $14,300 per year. Virtual people are a combination of animation, sound tech and machine learning that create digitized human beings who can sing and even interact on a livestream. While these digital beings have appeared on the fringes of the U.S. internet, they've been popping up more and more in China's cyberspace. Some buyers of virtual people include financial services companies, local tourism boards and state media, said Li Shiyan, who heads Baidu's virtual people and robotics business. As the tech improves, costs have dropped by about 80% since last year, he said. It costs about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) a year for a three-dimensional virtual person, and 20,000 yuan for a two-dimensional one. Li expects the virtual person industry overall will keep growing by 50% annually through 2025. China is pushing hard into the development of virtual people. Beijing city announced in August a plan to build up the municipal virtual people industry into one valued at more than 50 billion yuan by 2025. The municipal authorities also called for the development of one or two "leading virtual people businesses" with operating revenue of more than 5 billion yuan each. This fall, central government ministries released a detailed plan for incorporating more virtual reality -- especially in broadcasting, manufacturing and other areas. The country's latest five-year plan revealed last year included a call for more digitalization of the economy, including in virtual and augmented reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto entrepreneur Cameron Winklevoss is accusing fellow businessman Barry Silbert of "bad faith stall tactics" in resolving a dispute between their two companies that grew out of the collapse of FTX. From a report: Gemini, owned by Winklevoss and his twin brother, paused redemptions on a lending product called Earn. It had offered investors the potential to generate as much as 8% in interest on their digital coins -- by lending them out to Genesis Global Capital, one of the companies owned by Silbert's Digital Currency Group (DCG). Genesis owes Gemini's customers $900 million, Winklevoss said in an open letter to Silbert. The Earn halt came in November, after Genesis revealed it had $175 million locked in an account on Sam Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX crypto exchange. Genesis, which suspended both redemptions and new loan originations at the lending unit, has told clients that it could take "weeks" to find a path forward. Winklevoss, facing pressure of his own from angry customers locked out of their Gemini accounts and a lawsuit alleging fraud, said he had provided Silbert with multiple proposals to resolve the issue, including most recently on Dec. 25. "Despite this, you continue to refuse to get into a room with us to hash out a resolution," Winklevoss wrote. "In addition, you continue to refuse to agree to a timeline with key milestones. Every time we ask you for tangible engagement, you hide behind lawyers, investment bankers, and process. After six weeks, your behavior is not only completely unacceptable, it is unconscionable." Silbert's response: "DCG did not borrow $1.675 billion from Genesis. DCG has never missed an interest payment to Genesis and is current on all loans outstanding; next loan maturity is May 2023. DCG delivered to Genesis and your advisors a proposal on December 29th and has not received any response."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India set an "incredibly important precedent" by banning TikTok two and a half years ago, FCC Commissioner said, as he projected a similar fate for the Chinese giant Bytedance app in the U.S. From a report: Brendan Carr, Commissioner of the FCC, warned that TikTok "operates as a sophisticated surveillance tool," and told the Indian daily Economic Times that banning the social app is a "natural next step in our efforts to secure communication network." The senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission said he is worried that China could use sensitive and non-public data gleaned from TikTok to "blackmail, espionage, foreign influence campaigns and surveillance." He said: "We need to follow India's lead more broadly to weed out other nefarious apps as well," he said. Carr's remarks further illustrates a growing push among U.S. states and lawmakers that are increasingly growing cautious of TikTok, which has amassed over 100 million users in the nation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fierce Wireless reports:Verizon is telling customers that if they're still using a 3G CDMA or 4G (non-VoLTE) phone that does not support its newer network technologies, "your line will be suspended without billing and will lose the ability to call, text, or use data." Verizon is the last of the Big 3 wireless carriers in the U.S. to shut down a 3G network and repurpose the spectrum for newer technology. AT&T was first, shutting its 3G network down in February. T-Mobile's shuttered its 3G network over the summer.... Verizon has been working with customers — both consumers and businesses — since 2016 to ensure customers have "every opportunity" to get a device that uses either 4G or 5G, including direct outreach to customers and even sending some customers updated devices proactively, according to Karen Schulz of Verizon's Global Network & Technology Communications team. Indeed, the company initially said it was closing its 3G network in 2019. Then they extended it to the end of 2020 and finally, to the end of 2022. In March 2021, Verizon made it clear they were sticking with the 2022 end date and advised customers still accessing the 3G network that they may experience a degradation or complete loss of service. "Even after that, until the day before their February billing cycle, they'll still be able to use the phones for two things: calling 911 and Verizon customer service," reports the Verge:While 3G will still exist in other countries for quite a few more years, Verizon's deadline is pretty much the end of the line for it here in the US. The tech hasn't gone gentle into that good night; carriers delayed their shutdowns several times, there were tiffs between Dish and T-Mobile, and you can't just turn a network that had been around for years off without things starting to break. (Some notable examples: some connected cars and trucks have been pushed offline, as have parking meters and older Kindles. AT&T's shutdown was even blamed for delays in reporting voting results in Michigan this year.) Part of the reason carriers are decommissioning their networks is to help build their new ones. As we saw earlier this month, T-Mobile's latest and greatest 5G tech makes use of spectrum that was once part of its 3G network. The Verge's conclusion? "Spare a thought for the tech that helped build the mobile-first world we live in; even if this ends up being the last time you ever think about it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been "an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans" over the last 18 months, reports the New York Times. For example: - In September Intel pledged $20 billion for two chip factories in Ohio- Micron expects to spend at least that amount on a new manufacturing site in Syracuse, New York.- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plans to invest $40 billion in Phoenix. "The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips..."Across the U.S., more than 35 companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for manufacturing projects related to chips since the spring of 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group. The money is set to be spent in 16 states, including Texas, Arizona and New York on 23 new chip factories, the expansion of nine plants, and investments from companies supplying equipment and materials to the industry. The push is one facet of an industrial policy initiative by the Biden administration, which is dangling at least $76 billion in grants, tax credits and other subsidies to encourage domestic chip production.... The new U.S. production efforts may correct some of these imbalances, industry executives said — but only up to a point. The new chip factories would take years to build and might not be able to offer the industry's most advanced manufacturing technology when they begin operations. Companies could also delay or cancel the projects if they aren't awarded sufficient subsidies by the White House. And a severe shortage in skills may undercut the boom, as the complex factories need many more engineers than the number of students who are graduating from U.S. colleges and universities.... A $50 billion government investment is likely to prompt corporate spending that would take the U.S. share of global production to as much as 14 percent by 2030, according to a Boston Consulting Group study in 2020 that was commissioned by the Semiconductor Industry Association. "It really does put us in the game for the first time in decades," said John Neuffer, the association's president, who added that the estimate may be conservative because Congress approved $76 billion in subsidies in a piece of legislation known as the CHIPS Act. The article also cites predictions of 40,000 new jobs (made by the Semiconductor Industry Association) in exploring the possibility of a U.S. "talent shortage." "Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time geriatrician James Kirkland is a Mayo clinic researcher joining "a growing movement to halt chronic disease by protecting brains and bodies from the biological fallout of aging," reports Ars Technica. "While researchers like Kirkland don't expect to extend lifespan, they hope to lengthen 'health span,' the time that a person lives free of disease."One of their targets is decrepit cells that build up in tissues as people age. These "senescent" cells have reached a point — due to damage, stress or just time — when they stop dividing, but don't die. While senescent cells typically make up only a small fraction of the overall cell population, they accounted for up to 36 percent of cells in some organs in aging mice, one study showed. And they don't just sit there quietly. Senescent cells can release a slew of compounds that create a toxic, inflamed environment that primes tissues for chronic illness. Senescent cells have been linked to diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis and several other conditions of aging. These noxious cells, along with the idea that getting rid of them could mitigate chronic illnesses and the discomforts of aging, are getting serious attention. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is investing $125 million in a new research effort, called SenNet, that aims to identify and map senescent cells in the human body as well as in mice over the natural lifespan. And the National Institute on Aging has put up more than $3 million over four years for the Translational Geroscience Network multicenter team led by Kirkland that is running preliminary clinical trials of potential antiaging treatments. Drugs that kill senescent cells — called senolytics — are among the top candidates. Small-scale trials of these are already underway in people with conditions including Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis and kidney disease. "It's an emerging and incredibly exciting, and maybe even game-changing, area," says John Varga, chief of rheumatology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, who isn't part of the Translational Geroscience Network. But he and others sound a note of caution as well, and some scientists think the field's potential has been overblown. "There's a lot of hype," says Varga. "I do have, I would say, a very healthy skepticism." He warns his patients of the many unknowns and tells them that trying senolytic supplementation on their own could be dangerous.... So far, evidence that destroying senescent cells helps to improve health span mostly comes from laboratory mice. Only a couple of preliminary human trials have been completed, with hints of promise but far from blockbuster results. In conjunction with SpaceX and Axiom Space, Kirkland and a colleague also are investigating how space radiation affects senescence indicators in astronauts, the article points out . "They hypothesize that participants in future long-term missions to Mars might have to monitor their bodies for senescence or pack senolytics to stave off accelerated cellular aging caused by extended exposure to radiation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Australian city of Melbourne recently posted QR codes its citizens could use to report grafitti, reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC. Unfortunately, someone overlaid "a number" of those QR codes with "alternative" QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary:The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future.... The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see "how we can catch those culprits". [...] The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. "I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past. Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies. Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse. They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope. But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press:Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost. The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided." "For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...." Also entering the public domain today: - Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)- The song "My Blue Heaven"- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds:For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term".... [T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access.... The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Starting next year, Nintendo fans can step through a life-size warp pipe and enter the Mushroom Kingdom," reports Bloomberg, "for the first time on American soil." Bloomberg shares its reaction after "an early preview tour of the land as it finalizes construction," noting that it has "a chirping soundtrack of cheerful instrumentals and distant coin clinks."Super Nintendo World, an interactive replica of Nintendo's dynamic lands and characters, will bring its colorful chaos to Universal Studios Hollywood when it opens on Feb. 17, 2023. The expansion provides an opportunity to race alongside Mario and Luigi before meeting them face to face, and it will bring video game-inspired dining, retail and merchandise to the California theme park inside an immersive, bowllike structure lined with spinning coins and turtle shells.... Whether Koopa Troopas in motion or a fake desert set against the actual skies, there's always something to look at — and somewhere intriguing to head first. Its marquee attraction, Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge, puts riders in augmented reality-enabled helmets to experience the Mario Kart racing game firsthand while the challenge plays out virtually in front of them.... Super Nintendo World was released at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021, but its arrival stateside marks Universal Studio Hollywood's largest opening since its Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion in 2016, and it's the first of Nintendo's notable footprints on domestic soil. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, hits theaters in April, and a third iteration of Super Nintendo World will open with Epic Universe, the all-new theme park arriving at Universal Orlando Resort in 2025. In each iteration, the main draw is the Mario Kart experience. Here, riders in four-passenger vehicles will join Team Mario to compete across multiple courses for the Golden Cup — a familiar process to anyone who's played Nintendo's racing challenge back home. The article reminds readers that "all attendees can punch blocks (with more force than one may anticipate) and re-create other moments in the Mushroom Kingdom." But they ultimately describe the experience as a kind of "overwhelming immersion, transporting people to a location they've previously seen, but never before in real life."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2022 was the year that Microsoft retired its Internet Explorer web browser (to concentrate on its Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser). Yet Ghacks reports that Internet Explorer "is still haunting some from its grave."Some websites and apps use code to determine the user agent. The user agent informs the site about several parameters, including the used web browser (engine) and operating system. When done correctly, it may reveal the used browser and that may then lead to a custom user experience. When done incorrectly, it may lead to false identification; this is exactly what is happening on some sites currently regarding Internet Explorer user agent sniffing and the Firefox web browser. Some sites identify Firefox as Internet Explorer because of inaccurate user agent sniffing.. Internet Explorer 11's user agent ends by identifying its release version as rv:11.0, the article points out. So when a Firefox user visits a website using Firefox 110 (or any other version up to Firefox 119), "The site in question checks for rv:11 in the user agent [and] Firefox's rv:110 value is identified wrongly as Internet Explorer." Instead of risking problems with functionality, compatibility, or other display issues for Firefox versions 110 through 119, Mozilla has "decided to freeze part of Firefox's version."Instead of echoing rv:110, rv:111 and so on up to rv:119, Firefox returns rv:109 instead. The end of the user agent string displays the actual version of Firefox still. Mozilla plans to restore the original user agent of Firefox with the release of Firefox 120. The organization plans to release Firefox 120 on November 21, 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Boston Globe tech reporter checked last year's performance for the region's tech companies:A list of the worst local performers includes some truly bottom-of-the-barrel returns. Cannabis tech company Agrify in Billerica suffered a 99.6 percent stock drop in 2022. Wireless Internet service Starry and diet-device maker Gelesis were close behind with losses of 99.5 and 99.3 percent, respectively. (All stock prices are as of Dec. 28.) Agrify suffered a recent sales drop and growing losses while ending the year facing a customer lawsuit and possible hostile takeover. Starry was unable to raise the funds needed to continue building its network and put itself up for sale last month. And Gelesis fell far short of its sales forecast, bringing in about $30 million of revenue compared to a projection of $171 million presented when its merger with Capstar Special Purpose Acquisition Corp. was announced in 2021.... Companies like Starry and Gelesis that went public by merging with blank-check firms had a particularly tough year, as investors flipped from euphoria to panic on the so-called SPAC boom. The average 2022 return for 21 such stocks tracked by the Globe was a loss of 70 percent. Of tech companies that went public the traditional way, the average loss was 45 percent. Toast, which did a standard IPO at the same time Ginkgo Bioworks completed its SPAC deal, lost 51 percent for the year while Ginkgo plunged 80 percent. In the wider market of tech stocks, the article notes that the S&P 500 index dropped 20%, while the Nasdaq Composite plunged 34 percent, "and tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Meta shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market value." "Of 60 local tech stocks tracked by the Globe, only two posted positive returns: robotics maker Symbotic in Wilmington and payments company WEX in Portland, Maine.... Perhaps in 2023, the winners column will be a little longer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies like Apple have moved hardware production to places like India and Vietnam, reports the Washington Post. But Facebook "has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations."Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company's reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company's core focus was its social media and messaging apps. All that has changed now that Meta has rebranded itself as a hardware company, the people said. Beyond last year's name change from Facebook to Meta, the company has undertaken a broad internal reorganization, launched augmented-reality smart glasses, and is building a connected device that could be worn on a person's wrist. In October, the company introduced Meta Quest Pro, the first in a new line of headsets built for collaboration. Internal concerns about the hardware push intensified last year, when some executives worried that the anti-China strategy...would hurt its business ambitions and be viewed by the public and regulators as hypocritical, given the company's growing reliance on China for its plans.... Executives also looked, unsuccessfully, for ways to move manufacturing of Oculus to Taiwan. "Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can't just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere," said one of the executives.... While the original smartwatch plan was abandoned, the company continues to work on a wearable device for the wrist, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. "At present, Meta's consumer electronics hardware is manufactured in China but we are constantly reviewing and exploring supply chain opportunities around the world," spokeswoman Ha Thai said.... Executives are still hoping the hardware-focused rebranding will shift the conversation away from criticism of its social media business, said two of the people. But they are well aware that relying on China for a growing suite of virtual reality headsets, smartwatches and other hardware will invite a new set of political challenges. Companies dependent on China for manufacturing have faced criticism over shipping jobs overseas as well as environmental and labor rights issues, and have had their businesses impacted by trade wars and other political escalations. "You trade in one set of problems for another," said one of the people. The article also notes that Meta has quietly funded the nonprofit "American Edge" that "runs online advertising and other campaigns that are critical of China and of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app. "[S]ome Chinese analysts have argued that Meta was resorting to desperate measures because it feared TikTok owner ByteDance's growing dominance in short video."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Cryptocurrency went through a transformation in 2022," writes CNN, noting that its peak price last year occurred on January 1 of 2022, at over $47,000:Since then, the asset — along with other cryptocurrencies — has seen a steep fall in price, remaining well below $20,000 since early November.... [Current price: $16,585] In the wake of the FTX collapse, Emily Parker rhetorically asked, "So who will save crypto now?" Whether the currency can be saved at all is a question that divides our prognosticators. [Political commentator] Alice Stewart is the most bullish on the future of bitcoin, predicting that its peak price in 2023 will be $103,000. [Legal analyst] Elliot Williams isn't too far behind her, guessing the asset will top out at $70,000. [Opinion contributors] Jill Filipovic and Allison Hope, however, don't anticipate a rise in price at all — speculating that its peak value next year will be just $12,000 and $13,000 respectively. "I know nothing about Bitcoin," admits Hope, "but this seems like a conservative gloom and doom figure." In their larger collection of predictions, two CNN opinion contributors expressed mild hopes for bitcoin Raul Reyes wrote that Bitcoin "seems like the steadiest investment in the volatile crypto world," before predicting its 2023 peak price would be about $29,400. And Frida Ghitis predicted that "Speculators will swarm in, and Bitcoin will spike up above $36,000 — before falling back to Earth again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

January's Communications of the ACM includes an essay predicting "the end of programming," in an AI-powered future where "programming will be obsolete." But IT analyst and ZDNet contributor Joe McKendrick remains skeptical, judging by a new essay sardonically titled "It's the end of programming as we know it — again."Over the past few decades, various movements, paradigms, or technology surges — whatever you want to call them — have roiled the software world, promising either to hand a lot of programming grunt work to end users, or automate more of the process. CASE tools, 4GL, object-oriented programming, service oriented architecture, microservices, cloud services, Platform as a Service, serverless computing, low-code, and no-code all have theoretically taken the onerous burdens out of software development. And, potentially, threaten the job security of developers. Yet, here we are. Software developers are busier than ever, with demand for skills only increasing. "I remember when the cloud first started becoming popular and companies were migrating to Office 365, everyone was saying that IT Pros will soon have no job," says Vlad Catrinescu, author at Pluralsight. "Guess what — we're still here and busier than ever." The question is how developers' job will ultimately evolve. There is the possibility that artificial intelligence, applied to application development and maintenance, may finally make low-level coding a thing of the past.... Catrinescu believes that the emerging generation of automated or low-code development solutions actually "empowers IT professionals and developers to work on more challenging applications. IT departments can focus on enterprise applications and building complicated apps and automations that will add a lot of value to the enterprise." Even the man predicting "the end of programming" in an AI-powered future also envisions new technology that "potentially opens up computing to almost anyone" (in ACM's video interview). But in ZDNet's article Jared Ficklin, chief creative technologist and co-founder of argodesign, even predicts the possibility of real-time computing. "You could imagine asking Alexa to make you an app to help organize your kitchen. AI would recognize the features, pick the correct patterns and in real time, over the air deliver an application to your mobile phone or maybe into your wearable mobile computer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Imagine starting your work day with a fresh coconut juice perched by your laptop as you gaze over the ocean or a tropical rainforest...." writes the Conversation. "More than 40 nations or territories now offer "digital nomad" visas to attract those able to be employed in one country while living, and spending their income, in another."Fancy the beach? A bunch of exotic islands are on the list. Prefer tropical forests? Try Brazil or Costa Rica. Looking for history? There's Spain or Greece. Love Wim Hof-style ice-bathing? Iceland beckons. Think of a "digital nomad" visa as a cross between a tourist and temporary migrant visa — a working-on-holiday visa. Instead of the visa giving you the right to work in the country, it's allowing you to stay so long as you're gainfully employed and bringing money into the local economy. How long you can stay varies, from 90 days in Aruba in the Caribbean to up to two years in the Cayman Islands. Most are for 12 months, with an option to renew. Some places, such as Latvia, restrict visas to employers registered in an OECD country. But generally the key requirement is that you can show you have no need to find local work and can meet minimum income requirements. Generally, the visa conditions simplify taxation issues: you continue to pay your income tax in the country of your employer. But this varies. For example, in Greece (which offers a two-year renewable visa) you are exempt from paying local income tax only for the first six months. A key driver of the digital nomad trend is the ability to maintain a career while ticking off other personal goals, particularly travel and the ability to experience a different way of life. Moving somewhere with a cheaper cost of living could be another motivation. The article warns that "Living a long way away from family and friends and support networks is likely to be more challenging, no matter how idyllic your location. "If you like predictable structure and routine, the uncertainty and inevitable inconveniences that arise may mean it isn't for you."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA.... "Enough snow falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement from a NASA release. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface." So far, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can't peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles. [ -190 degrees Fahrenheit, or -123 degrees Celsius) ] However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that's invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from the Martian north pole.... "Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair." Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars' orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s. At the end of winter, the season's buildup of ice can thaw and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that have reminded NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, spiders and other unusual formations. That's just the beginning, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab:This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing. And they also note that the camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured some surprisingly colorful images of sand dunes covered by frostRead more of this story at Slashdot.

VentureBeat's lead gaming writer made 10 predictions for 2023. Prediction #8? "Gaming will become more open in 2023."There are many forces at play that will make gaming more open. The web browser is poised for a comeback. Companies are working on ways to get around the restrictions of the app stores by turning to the open web. In the past, this meant bad graphics and limited interactivity. But new standards like glTF and proprietary technologies could enable speedier delivery. The open web could be succeeded one day by the open metaverse. That won't happen real soon, but enough people are talking about this that the conversation is top of mind at some of the biggest and most important companies in the industry.... Gatekeepers who create platforms still take a 30% cut of royalties. Matthew Ball, author of the bestselling book The Metaverse, has argued that this stands in the way of progress as it weakens the developers who are in the best position to push forward ideas like the metaverse. While the industry isn't going to change overnight, the added awareness to the costs of closed platforms is a catalyst for change. Epic isn't fighting for this all by itself. The Open Metaverse Standards group has formed to push for better open standards, and USD is making progress as an interoperable 3D file format. Forte and Lamina1 have raised a lot of money and they believe that blockchain technology infrastructure can also improve the openness of sectors such as gaming, enabling players to finally own their stuff. Overall, more business models and technologies — like Web3 or cloud gaming or subscriptions — will yield more choice for both developers and consumers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares an article listing "the five best Linux distros of 2022" — as chosen by the editor of the blog omg! ubuntu! "Spoiler: they're not all Ubuntu-based!" the article begins, also noting that it's not a ranking of superiority of importance, but rather "giving a shoutout to some of the year's best Linux releases." Its top-listed non-Ubuntu distro? Fedora Workstation 37 Fedora Workstation is a flagship desktop Linux distro for good reason: it's robust, it's reliable, it's impeccably produced — it distills what a lot of folks seek most: a "pure" GNOME experience, delivered as devs intend, atop a strong and stable base. Autumn's offer of Fedora 37 Workstation features GNOME 43 — an update that majorly improves the GNOME Shell user experience with Quick Settings. There's also a more-featured Files rebuilt in GTK4/libadwaita; a revamped Calendar app; a Device Security panel; Raspberry Pi 4 support; GRUB instead of syslinux on BIOS; and more. Folk often overlook Fedora Workstation because, as Linux distros go, it's rather understated, unassuming, and drama-free. Yet, it is a finessed and functional distro that forgoes fancy flourishes to focus entirely on its performance, its integration, and its cohesion. If you've never tried Fedora you're missing out, so sort it! There were two other non-Ubuntu distros on the list: Manjaro 22.0 'Sikaris'. "As Arch-based Linux distros go Manjaro is one of the best.... Everything from the shell to the package manager to bespoke touches and apps are cohesive, considered, and choreographed. Manjaro 22.0 isn't just a distro, it's an experience." Linux Mint 21. "As well as being easy to use, Linux Mint ships with an interesting selection of pre-installed software that aims to cover most users' needs, including some homegrown apps that are rather special."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To hear the first results from the James Webb Telescope, 200 astronomers descended on the Space Telescope Science Institute for three days in December, reports the New York Times, with an update on what may be 2022's biggest science story. The $10 billion telescope "is working even better than astronomers had dared to hope" -- and astronomers are ecstatic:At a reception after the first day of the meeting, John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Webb's senior project scientist from the start, raised a glass to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who had tested it in space and the new generation of scientists who would use it. "Some of you weren't even born when we started planning for it," he said. "Have at it!" Launched on Christmas one year ago, the Webb telescope "is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope," the Times reports -- sharing what was revealed in that auditorium in December:One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules like water or carbon dioxide.) "We're in business," declared Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, as he presented data of one of the exoplanets. Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a "deep dive" through the Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy hotbed of star formation in the Carina constellation, which was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is tracing how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and triggering the formation of new stars. "This could be a template for what our own sun went through when it was formed," Dr. Reiter said in an interview. Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope's development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble. The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And appropriately for New Year's Eve, the article concludes with a look to the future:Thus far the telescope, bristling with cameras, spectroscopes and other instruments, is exceeding expectations. (Its resolving power is twice as good as advertised.) The telescope's flawless launch, Dr. Rigby reported, has left it with enough maneuvering fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more. "These are happy numbers...." The closing talk fell to Dr. Mather. He limned the telescope's history, and gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski, the former senator of Maryland, who supported the project in 2011 when it was in danger of being canceled. He also previewed NASA's next big act: a 12-meter space telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory that would seek out planets and study them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking back at 2022's technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta's $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone's "mostly unnoticeable improvements." But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights:- It's very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you.... That doesn't mean that we'll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people's work flows.- In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word "metaverse," is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. "You'll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?" Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples. He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple's headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won't be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. "From a consumer perspective, it's still very uncertain what you're spending your thousand bucks on when you're buying a headset," she said. "Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it's not a necessity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer programmer Zeynep Tufekci now writes about the impact of technology on society. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tufekci writes on "the shameful open secret" that earlier this week led Southwest airlines to suddenly cancel 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. "The recent meltdown was avoidable, but it would have cost them." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece "takes a crack at explaining 'technical debt' to the masses." Tufekci writes:Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn't return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week's major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed. It's been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week. And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries. "The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn't ignore the problem," the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots' union "pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.") "In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay." Speaking about this week's outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that "We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions." But Tufekci concludes that "Ultimately, the problem is that we haven't built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management.... For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. "I believe the conventional idea of 'writing a program' is headed for extinction," he opines in January's Communications of the ACM, "and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed." His essay is titled "The End of programming," and predicts a future will "Programming will be obsolete."In situations where one needs a "simple" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.... with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.... I am not just talking about things like Github's CoPilot replacing programmers. I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule. The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and then some), ready to be given any task required of the machine. The bulk of the intellectual work of getting the machine to do what one wants will be about coming up with the right examples, the right training data, and the right ways to evaluate the training process. Suitably powerful models capable of generalizing via few-shot learning will require only a few good examples of the task to be performed. Massive, human-curated datasets will no longer be necessary in most cases, and most people "training" an AI model will not be running gradient descent loops in PyTorch, or anything like it. They will be teaching by example, and the machine will do the rest. In this new computer science — if we even call it computer science at all — the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an an educational one; that is, how to best educate the machine, not unlike the science of how to best educate children in school. Unlike (human) children, though, these AI systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids, and possibly even governing entire countries. I would argue that the vast majority of Classical CS becomes irrelevant when our focus turns to teaching intelligent machines rather than directly programming them. Programming, in the conventional sense, will in fact be dead.... We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents.... This shift in the underlying definition of computing presents a huge opportunity, and plenty of huge risks. Yet I think it is time to accept that this is a very likely future, and evolve our thinking accordingly, rather than just sit here waiting for the meteor to hit. "I think the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI models are going to revolutionize the field," Welsh says in a video interview. "It's more a question of degree rather than whether it's going to happen.... "I think we're going to change from a world in which people are primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we're teaching AI models how to do things that we want them to do... It starts to feel more like a field that focus on AI education and maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can't just assume that people are going to be writing the code by hand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for. "Or are they?""Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage." This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott.... Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should. "The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader guest reader shares some interesting research from the University of Missouri:Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They developed close bonds with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest-control in society's first civilizations. A new study at the University of Missouri found this lifestyle transition for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world's first domestication of cats, and as humans began to travel the world, they brought their new feline friends along with them. Leslie A. Lyons, a feline geneticist and Gilbreath-McLorn endowed professor of comparative medicine in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.... Lyons added that while horses and cattle have seen various domestication events caused by humans in different parts of the world at various times, her analysis of feline genetics in the study strongly supports the theory that cats were likely first domesticated only in the Fertile Crescent before migrating with humans all over the world.... Lyons, who has researched feline genetics for more than 30 years, said studies like this also support her broader research goal of using cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact both cats and people, such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.... "[A]nything we can do to study the causes of genetic diseases in cats or how to treat their ailments can be useful for one day treating humans with the same diseases," Lyons said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The first open source equivalent of OpenAI's ChatGPT has arrived," writes TechCrunch, "but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all."This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta's Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT [listed as a work in progress]. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code. But PaLM + RLHF isn't pre-trained. That is to say, the system hasn't been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won't magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload.... PaLM + RLHF isn't going to replace ChatGPT today — unless a well-funded venture (or person) goes to the trouble of training and making it available publicly. In better news, several other efforts to replicate ChatGPT are progressing at a fast clip, including one led by a research group called CarperAI. In partnership with the open AI research organization EleutherAI and startups Scale AI and Hugging Face, CarperAI plans to release the first ready-to-run, ChatGPT-like AI model trained with human feedback. LAION, the nonprofit that supplied the initial dataset used to train Stable Diffusion, is also spearheading a project to replicate ChatGPT using the newest machine learning techniques.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when MIT researchers did fMRI brain scans measuring the blood flow through brains to determine which parts were engaged when programmers evaluated code? MIT now says that a new paper (by many of the same authors) delves even deeper:Whereas the previous study looked at 20 to 30 people to determine which brain systems, on average, are relied upon to comprehend code, the new research looks at the brain activity of individual programmers as they process specific elements of a computer program. Suppose, for instance, that there's a one-line piece of code that involves word manipulation and a separate piece of code that entails a mathematical operation. "Can I go from the activity we see in the brains, the actual brain signals, to try to reverse-engineer and figure out what, specifically, the programmer was looking at?" asks Shashank Srikant, a PhD student in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "This would reveal what information pertaining to programs is uniquely encoded in our brains." To neuroscientists, he notes, a physical property is considered "encoded" if they can infer that property by looking at someone's brain signals. Take, for instance, a loop — an instruction within a program to repeat a specific operation until the desired result is achieved — or a branch, a different type of programming instruction than can cause the computer to switch from one operation to another. Based on the patterns of brain activity that were observed, the group could tell whether someone was evaluating a piece of code involving a loop or a branch. The researchers could also tell whether the code related to words or mathematical symbols, and whether someone was reading actual code or merely a written description of that code..... The team carried out a second set of experiments, which incorporated machine learning models called neural networks that were specifically trained on computer programs. These models have been successful, in recent years, in helping programmers complete pieces of code. What the group wanted to find out was whether the brain signals seen in their study when participants were examining pieces of code resembled the patterns of activation observed when neural networks analyzed the same piece of code. And the answer they arrived at was a qualified yes. "If you put a piece of code into the neural network, it produces a list of numbers that tells you, in some way, what the program is all about," Srikant says. Brain scans of people studying computer programs similarly produce a list of numbers. When a program is dominated by branching, for example, "you see a distinct pattern of brain activity," he adds, "and you see a similar pattern when the machine learning model tries to understand that same snippet." But where will it all lead?They don't yet know what these recently-gleaned insights can tell us about how people carry out more elaborate plans in the real world.... Creating models of code composition, says O'Reilly, a principal research scientist at CSAIL, "is beyond our grasp at the moment." Lipkin, a BCS PhD student, considers this the next logical step — figuring out how to "combine simple operations to build complex programs and use those strategies to effectively address general reasoning tasks." He further believes that some of the progress toward that goal achieved by the team so far owes to its interdisciplinary makeup. "We were able to draw from individual experiences with program analysis and neural signal processing, as well as combined work on machine learning and natural language processing," Lipkin says. "These types of collaborations are becoming increasingly common as neuro- and computer scientists join forces on the quest towards understanding and building general intelligence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're buying more things online, the Washington Post notes. But how we buy may be changing too:For the first time in years, Google and Meta have grabbed less than half of the digital marketing money spent in the United States in 2022. Amazon, which took more than 11 percent of all digital ads purchased, was the biggest reason Google and Meta lost ground as advertising powerhouses, according to the research firm Insider Intelligence. In part because of Amazon's success with paid product promotions, Walmart, Target, the grocery delivery company Instacart, drugstore chain Walgreens and other retailers are also putting a higher priority on tailoring commercials to influence what you buy, advertising specialists said. Another reason these ads are spreading is that retailers' knowledge of what you buy is valuable, especially now that there are more limitations on how internet powers such as Facebook can follow everything you do to target you with ads. Like Google and Facebook, stores are trying to use as much information as they can find about you to steer your choices. One difference from Google and Facebook is that retailers like Amazon and Walmart make money from influencing what you buy and from selling you the product. The thing is ... these ads seem to work on you. And that's why paid product persuasion is likely here to stay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Rapid chess" grants 15 minutes to each player for all moves (plus 10 seconds per move). "Blitz chess" grants each player three minutes (plus 2 seconds per move). Now CNN reports that five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen "won both the World Rapid and World Blitz chess titles in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in the latest landmark of his glittering career."The 32-year-old Norwegian is now the holder of all three world chess championship titles — in Classical, Rapid and Blitz — for the third time in his career, while no other player has ever won both the Rapid and Blitz titles in the same year. "Gonna need more hands soon," Carlsen joked on Twitter, posting a video of himself counting his now 15 world titles on his fingers. It caps a triumphant end to Carlsen's remarkable decade-long reign as the classical world champion, as he has already announced that he will not defend his title next year. Chess24 reports that for his first three-minute match, Magnus Carlsen showed up two and a half minutes late — and starting with just 30 seconds left on his clock, still beat his opponent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix checks systemd's Git activity in 2022 (and compares it to previous years):If measuring a open-source project's progress by the commity activity per year, while not the most practical indicator, systemd had a very good year. In 2022 there were 6,271 commits which is under 2021's all-time-high of 6,787 commits. But this year's activity count effectively ties 2018 for second place with the most commits in a given calendar year. This year saw 201k lines of new code added to systemd and 110k lines removed, or just under one hundred thousand lines added in total to systemd in 2022.... Systemd continues to grow and is closing out 2022 at around 1,715,111 lines within its Git repository. Also interesting: "[W]hen it comes to the most commits overall to systemd over its history, Lennart Poettering easily wins the race and there is no competition. As a reminder, this year Lennart joined Microsoft as one of the surprises for 2022."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused the company earlier this year of "deceiving users and invading their privacy." From a report: Google has also agreed to change some of its practices, primarily concerning how it informs users about collecting, storing and using their location data. "Google leads consumers to believe that consumers are in control of whether Google collects and retains information about their location and how that information is used," the complaint, which Racine filed in January, read. "In reality, consumers who use Google products cannot prevent Google from collecting, storing and profiting from their location." Racine's office also accused Google of employing "dark patterns," which are design choices intended to deceive users into carrying out actions that don't benefit them. Specifically, the AG's office claimed that Google repeatedly prompted users to switch in location tracking in certain apps and informed them that certain features wouldn't work properly if location tracking wasn't on. Racine and his team found that location data wasn't even needed for the app in question. They asserted that Google made it "impossible for users to opt out of having their location tracked."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The time has come: Dark Sky, the (mostly) beloved weather app for iOS is going to stop working on January 1st, according to in-app warnings. From a report: The sunsetting has been in the forecast for a while -- Apple announced it was planning on shutting down the service last year after acquiring it in 2020, and it removed Dark Sky from the App Store a few months ago, according to 9to5Mac. But if you've been putting off finding a new weather app, now's the time to finally get around to it. As for what alternatives iPhone users have available (the Android app was axed in 2020), perhaps the most obvious is Apple's own built-in Weather app. The company even has a support document titled "How Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app," which talks about how features from the former have been added to the later. Further reading: The World's Best Terrible Weather App.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple CEO Tim Cook urged Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to consider user protections when regulating smartphone app distribution during a mid-December meeting, Nikkei is reporting, as the tech giant faces growing pressure to open up to third-party app stores. From a report: Apple has come under fire in Europe and elsewhere for requiring all app downloads on the iPhone go through its official App Store. Cook's first trip to Japan in three years was likely intended to prevent similar arguments from gaining momentum in Japan. Cook met with Kishida in Tokyo on Dec. 15 as part of a whirlwind tour of Japan. He outlined how Apple invested more than $100 billion in Japanese supply chains in the last five years, and stressed the company's continued focus on the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows Central reports: The Surface Earbuds are a weird product in Microsoft's line of Surface devices. Now over two years old, and still available to buy at a close to launch price of $160, the Surface Earbuds might be the worst "Surface" branded device you can buy brand new right now. They launched at a time when the wireless earbuds space was heating up and offered less than the competition while charging more. Are they the best in audio quality? Definitely not. Are they the best designed? Most would argue that they aren't. Are they the most comfortable? That depends, but I know a lot of people claim they don't properly fit in their ears. Do they support wireless charging? Nope. Is the case premium? Mine scratches easily and the lid feels flimsy. Nothing about the product screams $160 premium earbuds. [...] My sources have said that Microsoft was working on a successor to the Surface Earbuds, codenamed Ella, that was supposed to launch before the end of this year. We're now at the end of the year and that never happened. I hope they've simply been delayed and not canceled, though I wouldn't be surprised if they have. Microsoft's abandonment of the first Surface Earbuds should be a huge red flag for any potential buyers of a second-generation pair. Why should anyone buy them if Microsoft is going to abandon them the second they hit the market? This product segment is competitive, and there are many other brands that will commit to supporting their own wireless earbuds for longer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: CES 2023 is now just days away, and there's already a standout category that we're particularly excited about: 240Hz OLED gaming monitors. Generally speaking, OLED panels can achieve better picture quality and a faster response time than their LED or IPS equivalents but have historically lacked the ability to match them in providing high-refresh rates. There have been some exceptions -- such as the Alienware AW3423DW, a QD-OLED running at 175Hz -- but now, OLED gaming displays have finally achieved the optimal 240Hz refresh rate prized by gamers who specialize in eSports and FPS titles. There are several 240Hz OLED displays (that we're aware of) being showcased at the CES 2023 conference. One of the more innovative offerings is the Corsair Xeneon Flex, a 45-inch OLED with a customizable curvature and a $1,999 price tag. By squeezing the screen together, you can switch between flat and 800R curved display modes, making it ideal for both work and play.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British businesses have complained about the tactics used by Sage, the UK's largest listed tech company, to push them into accepting more expensive subscription services or have access to their existing accounting software packages switched off. From a report: Small companies across the UK rely on the FTSE 100 company's Sage50 software for book-keeping, sending invoices, processing orders and helping with tax payments. But in recent months, Sage has pushed customers who had been sold single-payment, long-term licences to the software on to monthly subscriptions that work out to be more expensive over the long run, by saying they would turn off their licences on security grounds, despite having no specific grounds to do so in their terms and conditions. "It's a pitload of crap," said Kate Barton, owner of model train company Reeves 2000, who last upgraded her so-called perpetual package in January 2019 for a licence she expected to last 15 years. Barton now faces monthly payments of $187 on a subscription model. "This is a bigger picture of the way things are going, where we're forced on to a subscription for everything," she said. "It's quite frightening." Under the direction of chief executive Steve Hare, Sage's focus on subscription software forms part of a plan to achieve more regular recurring revenues, which would make it less vulnerable to the income shocks that can occur from an overreliance on new customers making one-off purchases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Demand for graphics cards significantly increased during the pandemic as some people spent more time at home playing games, whereas others tried to mine Ethereum to get some cash. But it looks like now that the world has re-opened and Ethereum mining on GPUs is dead, demand for desktop discrete GPUs has dropped dramatically. From a report: In fact, shipments of discrete graphics cards hit a ~20-year low in Q3 2022, according to data from Jon Peddie Research. The industry shipped around 6.9 million standalone graphics boards for desktop PCs -- including the best graphics cards for gaming -- and a similar number of discrete GPUs for notebooks in the third quarter. In total, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia shipped around 14 million standalone graphics processors for desktops and laptops, down 42% year-over-year based on data from JPR. Meanwhile, shipments of integrated GPUs totaled around 61.5 million units in Q3 2022. In fact, 6.9 million desktop discrete add-in-boards (AIBs) is the lowest number of graphics cards shipped since at least Q3 2005 and, keeping in mind sales of standalone AIBs were strong in the early 2000s as integrated GPUs were not good enough back then, it is safe to say that in Q3 2022 shipments of desktop graphics boards hit at least a 20-year low.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI is investigating the 3Commas data breach, CoinDesk is reporting. From the report: The investigation comes after weeks of criticism from users of the Estonia-based crypto trading service, who say its CEO repeatedly brushed off warning signs that the platform had leaked user data. This week, 100,000 Binance and KuCoin API keys linked to 3Commas were leaked by an anonymous person. On Thursday, two 3Commas users told CoinDesk that they were contacted by agents from the FBI's Cincinnati Field Office in connection to the leak. Over the last several months, dozens of 3Commas users found that the service had, without their consent, traded away funds on crypto exchanges they'd linked to it. Initially, 3Commas said that these users were most likely phished and insisted that the platform was safe. The API database leaker insinuated that the 3Commas keys had been sold by someone from within the company, but 3Commas CEO Yuriy Sorokin said in a statement on Thursday that "3Commas stresses that it has found no evidence during the internal investigation that any employee of 3Commas was somehow involved in attacks against the API data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The proposal has angered many of Japan's neighbors, particularly those with the most direct experience of unexpected exposure to dangerous levels of radiation. From a report: Every day at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, officials flush over a hundred tons of water through its corroded reactors to keep them cool after the calamitous meltdown of 2011. Then the highly radioactive water is pumped into hundreds of white and blue storage tanks that form a mazelike array around the plant. For the last decade, that's where the water has stayed. But with more than 1.3 million tons in the tanks, Japan is running out of room. So next year in spring, it plans to begin releasing the water into the Pacific after treatment for most radioactive particles, as has been done elsewhere. The Japanese government, saying there is no feasible alternative, has pledged to carry out the release with close attention to safety standards. The plan has been endorsed by the United Nations' nuclear watchdog. But the approach is increasingly alarming Japan's neighbors. Those in the South Pacific, who have suffered for decades from the fallout of a U.S. nuclear test in the Marshall Islands, are particularly skeptical of the promises of safety. Last month, a group representing more than a dozen countries in the Pacific, including Australia and the Marshall Islands, urged Tokyo to defer the wastewater releases. Now, Japan is poised to forge ahead even as it risks alienating a region it has tried in recent years to cultivate. Nuclear testing in the Pacific "was shrouded in this veil of lies," said Bedi Racule, an antinuclear activist from the Marshall Islands. "The trust is really not there."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese police can set up "alarms" for various protest activities using a software platform provided by Hikvision, a major Chinese camera and surveillance manufacturer, the Guardian has learned. From the report: Descriptions of protest activity listed among the "alarms" include "gathering crowds to disrupt order in public places," "unlawful assembly, procession, demonstration" and threats to "petition." These activities are listed alongside offenses such as "gambling" or disruptive events such as "fire hazard" in technical documents available on Hikvision's website and flagged to the Guardian by surveillance research firm IPVM, or Internet Protocol Video Market. The company's website also included alarms for "religion" and "Falun Gong" -- a spiritual movement banned in China and categorized as a cult by the government -- until IPVM contacted the company. The findings come a month after mass protests against the country's zero-Covid policies erupted across China. Though the demonstrations resulted in the government easing restrictions, many protesters later received calls from police. The US government has long had its sights set on Hikvision. The company was placed on a commerce department blacklist that restricts the use of federal funds to purchase equipment manufactured by the firm as well as US exports to the surveillance firm for its complicity in human rights violations associated with China's mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. In November, the Federal Communications Commission also introduced new rules that prohibited imports and sales of future Hikvision communications equipment in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced that it's adding a red "suspected spam caller" warning to Google Voice calls if it doesn't think they're legitimate. From a report: In a post on Thursday, the company says it's identifying spam "using the same advanced artificial intelligence" system as it does with its traditional phone app for Android. If the spam label appears, you'll also have the option of confirming that a call was spam -- in which case any future calls will be sent straight to your voicemail -- or clarifying that it wasn't, which will get rid of the label for future calls. Google Voice has had the ability to automatically filter calls identified as spam to voicemail for years, and has also allowed you to screen calls before actually picking them up, but those options may not have been great if you're the type of person who gets a lot of important calls from unknown numbers. Google does say that you'll have to turn off the Filter Spam feature by going to Settings > Security > Filter spam if you want the automatic spam labeling.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ohio Supreme Court has unanimously overruled a judgment of the Ohio Second District Court of Appeals and moved that there must be "direct" physical loss or physical damage in the company's computer software for insurance policy coverage. From a report: In the three-year court proceedings between the greater Dayton medical billing software maker EMOI and its insurance service provider Lansing, Michigan-based Owners Insurance Company, the latter asserted that the insurance contract unambiguously stated only "direct physical loss" or "direct physical damage" to media would be covered under the insurance policy. The court in its final ruling gave the rationale that a computer might have physical electronic components that are "tangible" in nature but the information stored there has no "physical presence"; thus a ransomware attack on the company software has no coverage under the company's insurance policy. The judgment against EMOI concludes that a software developer can't use its property insurance to cover losses. A district judge had dismissed EMOI's case against Owners, which the developer brought forth just months after the attack. But the appellate court in November 2021 had ruled in favor of EMOI stating that the claimant could sue the insurance company for allegedly treating its claim in bad faith by failing to properly examine "the various types of damage that can occur to media such as software."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

King Dollar is facing a revolt. Tired of a too-strong and newly weaponized greenback, some of the world's biggest economies are exploring ways to circumvent the US currency. From a report: Smaller nations, including at least a dozen in Asia, are also experimenting with de-dollarization. And corporates around the world are selling an unprecedented portion of their debt in local currencies, wary of further dollar strength. No one is saying the greenback will be dethroned anytime soon from its reign as the principal medium of exchange. Calls for "peak dollar" have many times proven premature. But not too long ago it was almost unthinkable for countries to explore payment mechanisms that bypassed the US currency or the SWIFT network that underpins the global financial system. Now, the sheer strength of the dollar, its use under President Joe Biden to enforce sanctions on Russia this year and new technological innovations are together encouraging nations to start chipping away at its hegemony. "This will simply intensify the efforts in Russia and China to try to manage their part of the world economy without the dollar," said Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England in a Bloomberg podcast. Writing in a newsletter last week, John Mauldin, an investment strategist and president of Millennium Wave Advisors with more than three decades of markets experience said the Biden administration made an error in weaponizing the US dollar and the global payment system. "That will force non-US investors and nations to diversify their holdings outside of the traditional safe haven of the US," said Mauldin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Closing out a record-setting year, SpaceX launched a $186 million Israeli Earth-imaging satellite early Friday, the California rocket builder's 61st and final Falcon 9 launch of 2022 and its seventh this month, both modern-day records. From a report: Since the rocket's debut in 2010, SpaceX has chalked up 194 Falcon 9 launches overall -- 198 including four triple-core Falcon Heavies -- putting together a string of 179 straight successful flights since the company's only in-flight failure in 2015. This year's flight total falls one short of doubling last year's. Even more flights are expected in 2023, including two NASA astronaut ferry flights to the International Space Station, at least two commercial crew flights, two station cargo flights, and the maiden orbital launch of SpaceX's huge Super Heavy/Starship rocket.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Wu, a central architect of President Biden's push to clip the wings of the nation's largest companies, is leaving the White House. From a report: Mr. Wu's last day at the National Economic Council will be Wednesday, ending his 22-month tenure as special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy, the White House said. Mr. Wu told The New York Times that he would return to his previous job, as a professor at Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu is one-third of a troika -- along with Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Justice Department -- leading Washington's attempts to more aggressively check corporate giants, including the largest tech companies. He was an author of a July 2021 executive order demanding that federal agencies take steps to increase competition across the economy. Ms. Khan and Mr. Kanter have tried to block corporate consolidation using uncommon arguments in court. Mr. Wu, 50, said personal reasons were driving his departure. He has been commuting to Washington from New York, he said, requiring him to spend stretches away from his young children. "There's a time where the burden on family is too much," Mr. Wu said. "I've been feeling the balance has shifted." Mr. Wu said he had entered the job believing it to be a "once-in-a-generation chance" to reverse decades of more conservative thinking in antitrust law. The administration has notched some wins on that front -- such as enacting parts of the 2021 executive order, which led to efforts by the government to open up charging networks for electric vehicles and make hearing aids available for purchase over the counter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Name a type of organic matter and chances are some type of organism has evolved to eat it. Plants, meat, algae, insects and bacteria are all consumed by different creatures, but now scientists have discovered something new on the menu -- viruses. Since viruses are found absolutely everywhere, it's inevitable that organisms will consume them incidentally. But researcher John DeLong at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to find out if any microbes actively ate viruses, and whether such a diet could support the physiological growth of individuals and the population growth of a community. "They're made up of really good stuff: nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous," said DeLong. "Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get ahold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials." To test the hypothesis, DeLong and his team collected samples of pond water, isolated different microbes, and then added large amounts of chlorovirus, a freshwater inhabitant that infects green algae. Over the next few days the team tracked the population size of the viruses and the other microbes to see if the latter was eating the former. And sure enough, one particular microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses -- a ciliate known as Halteria. In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn't grow at all. These experiments show that the newly coined term "virovory" can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore. But of course, it's unlikely to be the only one out there, and the researchers plan to continue investigating the phenomenon, including its effects on food webs and larger systems like the carbon cycle. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from KITCO: Midas Investments, the hybrid centralized/decentralized (CeDeFi) cryptocurrency platform, announced Tuesday that they will shut down operations as of Dec. 27 and will deduct 55% from most customer accounts to "balance assets and liabilities." This morning, Midas' CEO shut down his own AMA with customers after less than half an hour. "I am writing to you today with a heavy heart to announce that the Midas platform is closing down," wrote Iakov Levin, CEO of Midas Investments, who also goes by 'Trevor,' in a Dec. 27 blog post. Levin said that in the spring of 2022, the advent of the crypto winter saw Midas' DeFi portfolio lose $50 million of its $250 million market value, or 20%. Then, following the bankruptcy of Celsius on Jul. 13 and FTX on Nov. 11, "the platform experienced over 60% of AUM being withdrawn, creating a large asset deficit" of $63.3 million, based on assets of $51.7 million against liabilities of $115 million in BTC, ETH and stablecoins. "Based on this situation and current CeFi market conditions, we have reached the difficult decision to close the platform," Levin wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India said on Thursday that under its ongoing G20 presidency, it will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will explore the "possibility of [their] prohibition" in a potentially large setback for the nascent industry. From a report: India began its year-long presidency of the Group 20 early this month. The group, which comprises 19 nations across continents and the EU, represents 85% of the world's GDP. It also invites non-member countries including Singapore and Spain and international organizations such as World Bank and the IMF. The Reserve Bank of India, the Indian central bank, said in a report today that crypto assets are highly volatile and exhibit high correlations with equities in ways that dispute the industry's narrative and claims around the virtual digital assets being an alternative source of value due to their supposed inflation-hedging benefits. The Indian central bank warned that policymakers across the globe are concerned that the crypto sector may become more interconnected with mainstream finance and "divert financing away from traditional finance with broader effect on the real economy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KOMO: Ermenildo Castro, 28, of Tacoma, allegedly told detectives that he was inspired by the 90's movie "Office Space" when he devised a plan to divert customer fees from his employer, Zulily.com, into his own bank accounts. According to court documents, Castro wrote software code that manipulated the online retailer's checkout page to send the shipping fees into his own account. The charges allege Castro netted $260,000 in stolen shipping fees. Seattle police detectives said Castro also used his position as a software engineer to manipulate prices on Zulily to purchase approximately $41,000 in merchandise for 'pennies on the dollar'. According to police, the company's cybersecurity staff found a document on Castro's laptop titled 'OfficeSpace project', which outlined Castro's scheme to 'cleanup evidence' by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging. The theft began in February and by March the company had identified discrepancies in the shipping fees being charged to customers, an SPD report states. Castro was part of the team assigned to investigate the discrepancies in shipping fees, according to the report. Zulily investigators eventually caught on to Castro's scheme and went to his house in Tacoma where they found boxes of merchandise piled up outside the front door and driveway, the report states. In total, Zulily's team said Castro had sent over 1,000 items sent to his house. Seattle police detectives wrote a narrative explaining how Castro's alleged scheme related to the movie "Office Space," including the plot outline on IMDB.com. "In the Initech office, the insecure Peter Gibbons hates his job. His best friends are two software engineers Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, that also hate Initech. When he discovers that Michael and Samir will be downsized, they decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter's account. However[,] Michael commits a mistake in the software on the decimal place and they siphon off over $300,000. The desperate trio tries to fix the problem, return the money and avoid going to prison."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new beta version of the Google-owned app, as reported by Israeli tech news site Geektime, can alert users about roads that have statistically high crash occurrences based on Waze community data. The Verge reports: While using this new beta version of Waze, nearby roads deemed to be high-risk are colored red on the map. Although, Geektime points out that it may not do this for roads that the user often travels on. The feature also only pushes just one pop-up notification about the dangerous roads around the driver, perhaps in an effort to keep precaution from turning into anxiety. If you're in the country and have access to the beta release, you'll get a pop-up that states: "using reports from drivers and your route, you may see alerts for 'History of crashes' on some roads." While the feature is only in beta, it's likely to release to the general public soon. But if you would rather not have Waze paint the roads red when it comes out, the feature can be turned off with a toggle located under the app's settings section designated for alerts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla Model Y became the best-selling car in all of Europe in November. It's for the second time, and not just for electric vehicles, but all cars. Electrek reports: According to data from Automotive News Europe, Tesla delivered nearly 20,000 Model Y vehicles in Europe last month: "Tesla sold 19,144 units of the premium midsize SUV, a gain of more than 260 percent on the same month last year. It was a big rebound for the electric model after it fell out of the top 50 in October, just one month after finishing as Europe's overall top-seller." December is expected to be an even bigger month based on early data coming in. For example, Tesla has already delivered 5,000 Model Y vehicles in Norway alone in December. The Model Y's rise in popularity in Europe coincides with Tesla ramping-up Model Y production at Gigafactory Berlin. The automaker recently confirmed that the factory is now producing 3,000 Model Y vehicles per week. All those vehicles are for the European market, and Tesla also ships cars from Gigafactory Shanghai to Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.