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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.

So long, "total addressable market." Farewell, "flywheel effect." Silicon Valley has a new buzzword. As the cost of signing up new customers rises, "lifetime value" is set to become must-use jargon for technology executives, investors and analysts in 2023. Reuters reports: Companies like Uber, DoorDash and Spotify want shareholders to know they can squeeze more revenue out of users than it costs to recruit them. As with previously popular jargon, though, the idea can quickly get garbled. The concept of lifetime value is not new, but a common definition remains elusive. The venture capitalist Bill Gurley defines it as "the net present value of the profit stream of a customer." Hollywood uses it to estimate the cumulative income from streaming movie titles, after deducting the cost of making the film. It's catching on in the tech world. Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi and his team invoked (PDF) the term seven times during the ride-hailing firm's investor day. At a similar event in June executives from music streaming service Spotify mentioned (PDF) it 14 times, with another 47 references to the abbreviation LTV. Earnings transcripts for 4,800 U.S.-listed companies analyzed by Bedrock AI show executives and analysts mentioned "lifetime value" over 500 times between October and mid-December, up from just 47 times in three months to March 2019. The problem is that everyone seems to have a different definition of lifetime value. Food delivery firm DoorDash looks at it as a metric to measure "customer retention, order frequency, and gross profit per order" over a fixed payback period. Uber and its Southeast Asian peer Grab treat it as the ability to bring in one customer and then cross-sell different services at a lower cost. The $49 billion e-commerce firm Shopify defines lifetime value as the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with the business over the course of an "average business relationship." But lifetime value isn't a silver bullet, as Gurley noted a decade ago. As capital becomes more scarce, generating free cash flow remains the most important target. As with previous buzzwords, investors may find that references to lifetime value do more to confound than clarify.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A new short-term rental registration law put forth by the administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams could remove thousands of Airbnb listings from the market next month. The new measure, which will go into effect in January, will require Airbnb hosts to register their short-term rentals with the city's database -- including proof that the hosts themselves reside there, and that their home abides by local zoning and safety requirements. If Airbnb hosts fail to comply, they could face $1,000 to $5,000 in penalty fees.https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-133488 Christian Klossner, executive director for the city's Office of Special Enforcement, told the New York Daily News that he expects to see 10,000 listings disappear after the new regulations go into effect. "Every illegal short-term rental in our city represents a unit of housing that is not available for real New Yorkers to live in," New York State Senator Liz Krueger said in July, following news of the lawsuit. "In the middle of an ongoing affordable housing crisis, every single unit matters." There are nearly 40,000 Airbnb listings in New York City alone, according to InsideAirbnb, which tracks these numbers. More than half of those listings, according to the database, are for an entire home, or apartment. A spokesperson for Airbnb said the new regulations will hurt average New Yorkers who are struggling to keep up with rising costs. "Airbnb agrees regular New Yorkers should be able to share their home and not be targeted by the City, and we urge the administration to work with our Host community to support a regulatory framework that helps responsible Hosts and targets illegal hotel operators," Nathan Rotman, public policy regional lead for Airbnb, said in a statement to NPR on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netgear has fixed a high-severity vulnerability affecting multiple WiFi router models and advised customers to update their devices to the latest available firmware as soon as possible. BleepingComputer reports: The flaw impacts multiple Wireless AC Nighthawk, Wireless AX Nighthawk (WiFi 6), and Wireless AC router models. Although Netgear did not disclose any information about the component affected by this bug or its impact, it did say that it is a pre-authentication buffer overflow vulnerability. The impact of a successful buffer overflow exploitation can range from crashes following denial of service to arbitrary code execution, if code execution is achieved during the attack. Attackers can exploit this flaw in low-complexity attacks without requiring permissions or user interaction. In a security advisory published on Wednesday, Netgear said it "strongly recommends that you download the latest firmware as soon as possible." A list of vulnerable routers and the patched firmware versions can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pro-Bitcoin politician Sitiveni Rabuka recently took office as the new Prime Minister of the Pacific Islands of Fiji. Now, it seems the new PM is actively considering the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender there. Bitcoin Magazine reports: While Rabuka himself hasn't been very public about his opinions on Bitcoin thus far, Lord Fusitu'a, a noble and former member of parliament of neighboring nation Tonga, has reportedly confirmed that the Fijian politician is a bitcoin bull. "The new PM is definitely pro-Bitcoin," Lord Fusitu'a assured Cointelegraph. Lord Fusitu'a also shared the news on Twitter. "A new pro-#Bitcoin friendly Prime Minister in the South Pacific. Fiji's newly elected Prime Minister @slrabuka," Lord Fusitu'a wrote, tagging Rabuka. In the second part of his tweet, Lord Fusitu'a hinted at the legal tender legislation. "Let's go 2 for 2 - BTC Legal Tender Bills for the Pacific in 2023," the tweet reads, hinting at Tonga's own Bitcoin legal tender legislation that could reportedly go live as early as Q2 2023. The Bitcoin dream first started brewing in Tonga right after El Salvador's Bitcoin Law came into effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity of children under 13 on YouTube. In an opinion (PDF) released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws. Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law. Several states across the US have laws similar to COPPA on the books. The revived lawsuit cites laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts to argue that Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and the Cartoon Network illegally lured children to their YouTube channels in order to target them with ads. A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the original lawsuit, ruling that COPPA bars individuals from suing companies for privacy violations. In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit judges hearing the appeal disagreed with the district court's reasoning. COPPA is not, in fact, the only route to enforcement, according to the ruling. "Since the bar on 'inconsistent' state laws implicitly preserves 'consistent' state substantive laws, it would be nonsensical to assume Congress intended to simultaneously preclude all state remedies for violations of those laws," wrote Judge Margaret McKeown. The case, which seeks damages for a seven-year time period between 2013 and 2020, now heads back to district court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HandBrake, the popular free and open source video transcoder, has been updated to version 1.6.0. This major point upgrade is notable for facilitating AV1 video encoding for the first time in a general release. Moreover, those with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) enabled processors, and those with Intel Arc GPUs will be able to encode AV1 video with hardware acceleration. From a report: HandBrake 1.6.0 can encode AV1 videos on any of its supported systems. In the current release its SVT-AV1 encoder offers the widest support, encoding on your processor through software. However, those with Intel QSV supporting CPUs or discrete Arc graphics can use the QSV-AV1 encoder for hardware accelerated processing. QSV isn't supported if your CPU is an 'F' suffixed model (i.e. it doesn't have an iGPU), or it is older than the Skylake generation. If you are lucky enough to have multiple QSV accelerators in your system, support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode should accelerate processing further. While AMD and Nvidia have AV1 encoders available for their latest GPUs, they currently aren't integrated with HandBrake. AV1 video is set to become the dominant codec across app-based streaming services and the wider internet, offering attractions such as; an open and royalty-free architecture, improved compression enabling efficient 8K video streaming, and support for the newest HDR standards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Renewable power sources generated 40% of Britain's electricity in 2022, up from 35% in 2021, while the share of fossil fuel in the energy mix also rose, a report by academics from Imperial College London for Drax Electric Insights showed on Thursday. From a report: Overall generation from renewables has more than quadrupled over the last decade. Wind, solar, biomass and hydro are the main sources of renewable power. Fossil fuel still has a larger share, providing 42% of Britain's power in 2022, which was its biggest contribution to the country's fuel mix since 2016. Iain Staffell of Imperial College London, and lead author of the report, said 2022 had been "a year like no other for the energy industry." Although renewables provide "more cheap, green energy than ever before," he said, the public is feeling the pain of gas prices, which surged in response to supply disruption linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the fourth time since 2007, an internal audit shows the Department of Homeland Security isn't deactivating access cards in the hands of ex-employees, leaving its secure facilities vulnerable to intruders. From a report: A new report by Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General shows that the department is systemically failing to revoke tens of thousands of "personal identity verification" cards that allow staff to enter sensitive, secure facilities and access internal data networks, despite being warned about the problem for 15 years. The issue is made worse, the report continues, by the fact that Homeland Security's internal record-keeping is so shoddy that it was impossible to determine how many ex-staffers have working access cards they aren't supposed to. Like many modern office workers, Homeland Security hands out office-unlocking keycards to its employees to make sure strangers can't wander in off the street. And, like most workplaces, the department is supposed to follow a standard policy: When an employee is no longer an employee, for whatever reason, their card is to be promptly deactivated. Unlike most employers, though, Homeland Security is a component of the U.S. Intelligence Community, meaning these credit card-sized badges have a "grave potential for misuse if lost, stolen, or compromised," according to the inspector general report. Unfortunately for the department -- and potentially the homeland -- the OIG's latest audit found that's exactly what's happening, and on a vast scale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With an energy crisis hitting Europe, governments are exploring ways to recycle electricity used on social-media scrolling, conference calls and video streaming to help heat homes and offices. From a report: Electricity-hungry data centers are seeing huge growth in usage, leading to pressure from European officials to funnel the excess heat generated by their computer chips into municipal heating networks. After years of discussions about putting residual heat to work rather than simply venting it outdoors, more such projects are becoming a reality. In the last year, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have started connecting, or announced plans to connect, major data centers to district heating systems in Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Alphabet's Google says it is assessing opportunities to recover heat from its data centers across Europe. Meta Platforms has been recovering excess heat from its data center in Odense, Denmark, since 2020. The Facebook parent is currently expanding that base, with plans to provide enough excess heat to warm about 11,000 homes as of next year. Other data-center operators are providing heat to networks, particularly in Northern Europe, including Equinix, which is expanding its district heating project in Helsinki, and working on new ones in Germany and other countries. In the Netherlands, there are 10 data centers already supplying heat, and another 15 projects being built or researched, according to the Dutch Data Center Association, a trade group. Higher energy prices, stemming from Russia's decision to effectively cut off natural-gas deliveries following its invasion of Ukraine, have boosted the financial incentive for tech companies to invest in systems necessary to sell off their excess heat, energy and tech sector officials say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel and SoftBank-backed VLSI Technology have agreed to end a $4 billion patent dispute, according to documents filed in Delaware District Court this week. From a report: The decision marks a victory for Intel, which has already lost $3 billion in failed patent disputes to VLSI over the past few years. The case in question dates back to 2018 and alleged that Intel had infringed on five VLSI-owned patents governing things like secure communications, power optimization and delivery, and flip-chip interconnects. If VLSI sounds familiar, that's because the company has been lurking around the semiconductor industry in one shape or form since the late '70s. The company originally made ASICs before it was acquired by Philips Electronics and later spun off under NXP. But despite any early successes in chipmaking, VLSI is now owned by SoftBank's Fortress Investment Group, and appears to exist solely to sue chipmakers it believes have violated its intellectual property -- in other words, it's a patent troll. The decision to call it quits comes after nearly five years of litigation. Tuesday, Intel and VLSI released a joint filing in which Intel and VLSI mutually agreed to dismiss the case and resolve all disputes over Intel's use of the aforementioned patents. Critically, VLSI has done so with prejudice. As we understand it, this means the company can't refile the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the Digital Fair Repair Act on December 28th, 2022, and the law will go into effect on July 1st, 2023 -- a full year after it was originally passed by the NY State legislature. The bill establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics and parts from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in order to repair their own devices. However, the bill was meaningfully compromised at the last minute by amendments that give OEMs some convenient exceptions and loopholes to get out of obligations that many right to repair advocates had been hoping for. One of the most controversial adjustments in the signed law is that it allows OEMs to sell assemblies of parts instead of individual components if they choose to. The bill also won't require OEMs to provide "passwords, security codes or materials" to bypass security features, which is sometimes necessary to do to save a locked, but otherwise functionally fine device. This makes the bill "functionally useless," according to Louis Rossmann, a repair technician who has been a fierce advocate of toothy right to repair legislation. Rossmann responded today to the amended bill with a video full of detailed analysis and criticism. Hochul claims in her signed memorandum that the bill was amended to lessen the risk of physical harm or security issues while making repairs, an amendment that Rossman calls "bullshit" and expects manufacturers to exploit in circumvention of the spirit of the bill.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newly released documents show an influential group that helps shape US food policy and steers consumers toward nutritional products has financial ties to the world's largest processed food companies and has been controlled by former industry employees who have worked for companies like Monsanto. From a report: The documents reveal the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has a record of quid pro quos with a range of food giants, owns stock in ultra-processed food companies and has received millions in contributions from producers of pop, candy, and processed foods linked to diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other health problems. The findings are a part of a recently published peer-reviewed study that examined a trove of financial documents and internal communications obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request. "It's incredibly influential so if the Academy is corrupt then nutritional policy in the US is going to be corrupt," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of US Right to Know, and a co-author of the study. The investigative non-profit developed the study with researchers from non-profits and universities in the US and UK. "If we're ever going to solve the problems of obesity and diabetes in the US and elsewhere, then we're going to have to tackle the corruption in our health institutions," Ruskin added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Of the billions of dollars in customer deposits that disappeared from FTX in a flash, $200 million was used to fund investments in two companies, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged founder Sam Bankman-Fried with "orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors." From a report: Through its FTX Ventures unit, the crypto firm in March invested $100 million in Dave, a fintech company that had gone public two months earlier through a special purpose acquisition company. At the time, the companies said they would "work together to expand the digital assets ecosystem." The other deal the SEC appears to have referenced was a $100 million investment round in September for Mysten Labs, a Web3 company. In total, it was a $300 million funding round that valued Mysten at $2 billion and included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs and Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solana, the blockchain network once championed by Sam Bankman-Fried, is drawing intense scrutiny as industry watchers wonder whether its former close ties to the disgraced crypto mogul and his now-defunct FTX empire will jeopardize its future. From a report: Its founders are doing everything they can to break that connection. The price of Solana's crypto token, SOL, has plummeted 96% from its all-time high of $260 in November 2021 to about $10, hurt first by a year-long crypto rout that engulfed the whole market and then again by FTX's fall. SOL dropped as much as 12% on Wednesday alone on concern large holders are offloading the token, which is used as the base cryptocurrency for financial transactions on the blockchain. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, the startup that developed the blockchain, said in an interview earlier this month that he doesn't usually comment on price, and that the focus instead should be on "the technology and having people build something awesome that's decentralized." But the collapse of FTX is having an impact -- both personal and professional -- on Solana and its founders. And the token's drop can be seen as an expression of waning confidence in the whole platform, which at its peak sported a market value of almost $80 billion and is now a tiny fraction of that. Yakovenko said roughly 4% of teams building projects on Solana now were acutely affected by FTX's collapse. Some platforms had funds custodied on the crypto exchange. About 80% of teams on Solana's blockchain had no exposure at all to FTX, Yakovenko said, referring to survey data, adding that he was connecting severely impacted founders with investors who could potentially provide emergency capital. "There's definitely more to Solana than FTX," Yakovenko said. Still, the network's longstanding ties to FTX and Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm co-founded by Bankman-Fried, may make it hard for some to move past the association. The two firms helped support Solana by purchasing SOL tokens in bulk from the Solana Foundation, the nonprofit that helps support the blockchain. Alameda also bought large quantities of SOL from Solana Labs. [...] Alameda and FTX's venture arm also invested in multiple projects that operated on Solana, while FTX built its own projects on the network, including the decentralized finance platform Serum. These types of efforts, from an industry leader with substantial influence in the market, helped introduce Solana to many crypto users, Gokal said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company began mass production of its most advanced chips in southern Taiwan on Thursday and the company's chairman said it would continue to expand capacity on the island. From a report: The long-awaited mass production of chips with 3-nanometre technology comes as attention focuses on the world's largest contract chipmaker's investment plans at home and abroad. TSMC has a dominant position as a maker of advanced chips used in technology from cellphones to fighter jets. "TSMC is maintaining its technology leadership while investing significantly in Taiwan, continuing to invest and prosper with the environment," TSMC Chairman Mark Liu told a ceremony marking the production and capacity expansion in the southern city of Tainan. Liu said demand for the firm's 3-nanometre chip was "very strong", driven by new technologies including 5G and high-performance computing products. He did not elaborate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: As smartphone manufacturers are improving the ear speakers in their devices, it can become easier for malicious actors to leverage a particular side-channel for eavesdropping on a targeted user's conversations, according to a team of researchers from several universities in the United States. The attack method, named EarSpy, is described in a paper published just before Christmas by researchers from Texas A&M University, Temple University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Dayton. EarSpy relies on the phone's ear speaker -- the speaker at the top of the device that is used when the phone is held to the ear -- and the device's built-in accelerometer for capturing the tiny vibrations generated by the speaker. The researchers discovered that attacks such as EarSpy are becoming increasingly feasible due to the improvements made by smartphone manufacturers to ear speakers. They conducted tests on the OnePlus 7T and the OnePlus 9 smartphones -- both running Android -- and found that significantly more data can be captured by the accelerometer from the ear speaker due to the stereo speakers present in these newer models compared to the older model OnePlus phones, which did not have stereo speakers. The experiments conducted by the academic researchers analyzed the reverberation effect of ear speakers on the accelerometer by extracting time-frequency domain features and spectrograms. The analysis focused on gender recognition, speaker recognition, and speech recognition. In the gender recognition test, whose goal is to determine whether the target is male or female, the EarSpy attack had a 98% accuracy. The accuracy was nearly as high, at 92%, for detecting the speaker's identity. When it comes to actual speech, the accuracy was up to 56% for capturing digits spoken in a phone call. "[This] accuracy still exhibits five times greater accuracy than a random guess, which implies that vibration due to the ear speaker induced a reasonable amount of distinguishable impact on accelerometer data," the researchers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sales of VR headsets in the U.S. this year declined 2% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion as of early December, according to data shared with CNBC by research firm NPD Group. CNBC reports: [D]ata from analyst firm CCS Insight reveals that worldwide shipments of VR headsets as well as augmented reality devices dropped more than 12% year over year to 9.6 million in 2022. Taken together, the estimates of VR headset sales and shipments create a problematic picture for Meta, whose stock price has lost about two-thirds of its value this year. Zuckerberg has said he's playing the long game with the metaverse, expecting it take up to a decade to go mainstream and projecting it will eventually host hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce. Sales of Meta's flagship Quest device dropped in 2022, a decline that can be attributed to the device's big year in 2021, said Ben Arnold, NPD's consumer electronics analyst. [...] A confluence of factors contributed to lower sales and shipments in 2022. The Quest 2 has been around for a few years and, like any consumer electronics device, has lost some appeal as it's aged. And while Meta released a new VR headset in fall, the Quest Pro, that device is geared toward businesses and costs $1,100 more than the Quest 2, pushing it even further out of reach for many VR enthusiasts. Next year is expected to be another "slow year" for the VR market, CCS Insight said in its latest report, citing a weak economy and inflation. [Leo Gebbie, an analyst at CCS Insight] said "consumer budgets will be tightening," and "non-essential purchases like VR headsets are likely to be the casualty of this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA is exploring whether SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab. Reuters reports: NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia's Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut to Earth early next year. But the Dec. 14 leak, which emptied the Soyuz of a vital fluid used to regulate crew cabin temperatures, has derailed Russia's space station routines, with engineers in Moscow examining whether to launch another Soyuz to retrieve the three-man team that flew to ISS aboard the crippled MS-22 craft. If Russia cannot launch another Soyuz ship, or decides for some reason that doing so would be too risky, NASA is weighing another option. "We have asked SpaceX a few questions on their capability to return additional crew members on Dragon if necessary, but that is not our prime focus at this time," NASA spokeswoman Sandra Jones said in a statement to Reuters. It was unclear what NASA specifically asked of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capabilities, such as whether the company can find a way to increase the crew capacity of the Dragon currently docked to the station, or launch an empty capsule for the crew's rescue. But the company's potential involvement in a mission led by Russia underscores the degree of precaution NASA is taking to ensure its astronauts can safely return to Earth, should one of the other contingency plans arranged by Russia fall through.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Take a grand tour of the solar system tonight (Dec. 28) as each of the planets in the solar system will be visible at the same time. As 2022 comes to an end, skywatchers can take in the rare sight of all of the planets in our solar system (aside from Earth) together in the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all currently visible simultaneously with the naked eye. The two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, can meanwhile be observed with binoculars or a telescope. The five planets visible with the naked eye -- Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, in that order -- will line up in the sky starting from the southwestern horizon. Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, will be difficult to see with the eye, but it's possible if dark sky conditions are right. Uranus, visible only through binoculars or a telescope, can be found between Mars and Jupiter, while Neptune will be visible through optics between Saturn and Jupiter. The Virtual Telescope Project is hosting a free "grand tour of the solar system" livestream starting at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT) on Wednesday (Dec. 28). The live webcast is also available on their YouTube channel. The report notes that this "grand tour" happens roughly every one to two years, on average. "In June 2022, skywatchers were treated to five planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- arranged in a rare alignment the likes of which hadn't occurred since 1864," the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, LastPass announced that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. "While the company insists that your login information is still secure, some cybersecurity experts are heavily criticizing its post, saying that it could make people feel more secure than they actually are and pointing out that this is just the latest in a series of incidents that make it hard to trust the password manager," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from the report: LastPass' December 22nd statement was "full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies," reads a blog post from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher known for helping originally develop AdBlock Pro, among other things. Some of his criticisms deal with how the company has framed the incident and how transparent it's being; he accuses the company of trying to portray the August incident where LastPass says "some source code and technical information were stolen" as a separate breach when he says that in reality the company "failed to contain" the breach. He also highlights LastPass' admission that the leaked data included "the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," saying that could let the threat actor "create a complete movement profile" of customers if LastPass was logging every IP address you used with its service. Another security researcher, Jeremi Gosney, wrote a long post on Mastodon explaining his recommendation to move to another password manager. "LastPass's claim of 'zero knowledge' is a bald-faced lie," he says, alleging that the company has "about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with." LastPass claims its "zero knowledge" architecture keeps users safe because the company never has access to your master password, which is the thing that hackers would need to unlock the stolen vaults. While Gosney doesn't dispute that particular point, he does say that the phrase is misleading. "I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted." Palant also notes that the encryption only does you any good if the hackers can't crack your master password, which is LastPass' main defense in its post: if you use its defaults for password length and strengthening and haven't reused it on another site, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology" wrote Karim Toubba, the company's CEO. "This prepares the ground for blaming the customers," writes Palant, saying that "LastPass should be aware that passwords will be decrypted for at least some of their customers. And they have a convenient explanation already: these customers clearly didn't follow their best practices." However, he also points out that LastPass hasn't necessarily enforced those standards. Despite the fact that it made 12-character passwords the default in 2018, Palant says, "I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Information, Amazon is working on a standalone app for watching sports content. Reuters reports: Sports remains one of the biggest attractions for live viewing as U.S. audiences increasingly switch from pay TV subscriptions to streaming apps. The move will likely complement Amazon's effort to double down on sports programming through its Prime Video service, a key channel to attract consumers to its shopping platform. Amazon already owns the rights to stream games including National Football League's Thursday Night Football franchise and Premier League soccer matches in the UK, setting it up to better compete with sports streaming leader Walt Disney Co. It was not clear when Amazon would roll out the sports app and whether it would go through with the plan, according to the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks in part to Canada's immigration policies, the tech sector in the Toronto Waterloo Corridor will soon have more workers than the San Francisco Bay area. The Record reports: During 2021, the San Francisco Bay area added 14,000 jobs, increasing total tech employment there to 378,870. During 2021, the Toronto Waterloo Corridor added 88,000 jobs, increasing total tech employment to 313,700. "We are on a tear," said Chris Albinson, the chief executive officer at Communitech. "Canada admitted 400,000 newcomers during the last 12 months, half of them with STEM degrees." "We are growing 350 per cent faster than Silicon Valley, and sometime in early 2023 there will be more tech workers in the Waterloo Toronto corridor," said Albinson. Communitech will announce a new strategy in mid-January, backed by the federal government, that will help push the size of the tech workforce in the corridor ahead of the Silicon Valley, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter rivalMastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform's non-profit status. Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire's running of the social media platform. Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in backing the product, following its fast growth. But he said the platform's non-profit status was "untouchable," adding that Mastodon's independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction. "Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter," said Rochko. "The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It's the difference in paradigms [between the platforms]." Rochko is Mastodon's sole shareholder and, according to its 2021 annual report, he paid himself 2,400 euros per month last year, a figure he said has since risen by 500 euros. Mastodon will continue to rely on donations to fund the platform. The site has more than 8,500 donors on the membership platform Patreon, through which it is raising over 25,000 pounds a month. This compares with total earnings of just over 55,000 euros in the six months from June to December 2021. Rochko said his long-term ambition for Mastodon was to replace Twitter and other commercial social networks. "It's a long road ahead but at the same time, it's bigger than it ever has been."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The crypto wallets associated with now-bankrupt trading firm Alameda Research, the sister company of FTX, were seen transferring out funds just days after the former CEO Sam Bankman Fried was released on a $250 million bond. CoinTelegraph reports: The transfer of funds from Alameda wallets raised community curiosity, but more than that, the way in which these funds were transferred grabbed the community's attention. The Alameda wallet was found to be swapping bits of ERC-20s for Ether/Tether, and then the ETH and USDT were funneled through instant exchangers and mixers. For example, a wallet address that starts with 0x64e9 received over 600 ETH from wallets that belong to Alameda, part of it was swapped to USDT while the other part of the transaction was sent to ChangeNow. On-chain analyst ZachXBT noted that the Alameda wallet was eventually swapping the funds for Bitcoin using decentralized exchanges such as FixedFloat and ChangeNow. These platforms are often used by hackers and exploiters to hide their transaction routes. Many speculated that the pattern in which these funds are being swapped looks like an exploiter, but given Bankman-Fried's known criminal past now, many speculated it could be an insider job to take out whatever is left in those wallets. Others questioned the bail conditions and asked why was he given access to the internet. One user wrote that the former CEO was "desperately trying to funnel money out," adding, "why did his bail condition include no computer/internet access?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A recent study finds that software engineers who use code-generating AI systems are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. The paper, co-authored by a team of researchers affiliated with Stanford, highlights the potential pitfalls of code-generating systems as vendors like GitHub start marketing them in earnest. The Stanford study looked specifically at Codex, the AI code-generating system developed by San Francisco-based research lab OpenAI. (Codex powers Copilot.) The researchers recruited 47 developers -- ranging from undergraduate students to industry professionals with decades of programming experience -- to use Codex to complete security-related problems across programming languages including Python, JavaScript and C. Codex was trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. The system surfaces a programming approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g. "Say hello world"), drawing on both its knowledge base and the current context. According to the researchers, the study participants who had access to Codex were more likely to write incorrect and "insecure" (in the cybersecurity sense) solutions to programming problems compared to a control group. Even more concerningly, they were more likely to say that their insecure answers were secure compared to the people in the control. Megha Srivastava, a postgraduate student at Stanford and the second co-author on the study, stressed that the findings aren't a complete condemnation of Codex and other code-generating systems. The study participants didn't have security expertise that might've enabled them to better spot code vulnerabilities, for one. That aside, Srivastava believes that code-generating systems are reliably helpful for tasks that aren't high risk, like exploratory research code, and could with fine-tuning improve in their coding suggestions. "Companies that develop their own [systems], perhaps further trained on their in-house source code, may be better off as the model may be encouraged to generate outputs more in-line with their coding and security practices," Srivastava said. The co-authors suggest vendors use a mechanism to "refine" users' prompts to be more secure -- "akin to a supervisor looking over and revising rough drafts of code," reports TechCrunch. "They also suggest that developers of cryptography libraries ensure their default settings are secure, as code-generating systems tend to stick to default values that aren't always free of exploits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the last 20 years, there has been twice as much sea level rise on Italy's Amalfi coast as on Spain's Costa del Sol, a study shows. From a report: Researchers combined data from tide gauges and satellites with ice melt measurements to model sea level change across the Mediterranean basin since 1960. To their surprise, they found that sea level fell by about 9mm between 1960 and 1989, owing to increased atmospheric pressure over the basin. But since 1989, ocean warming and land ice melting have driven rapid sea level rise, reaching an average rate of 3.6mm a year in the Mediterranean basin over the last two decades. The rise has not been spread evenly, however. Their findings, which are published in JGR Oceans, show that the Adriatic, Aegean and Levantine seas have risen by 8cm over two decades, while the Cretan passage in the eastern Mediterranean has risen by half this amount.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will require anyone arriving by air from China to provide a negative Covid test, following a surge of Covid-19 cases across China as Beijing has eased its strict zero-Covid rules. Politico reports: Under the new rules, which will take effect on Jan. 5, anyone two years and older will need to show a negative result from a test taken within two days of their departure from airports in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, administration officials told reporters in a briefing. The move reflects the Biden administration's alarm about the potential spillover of new Covid variants linked to soaring Covid infections in China. The Chinese government ended its draconian Covid-zero policy -- hinged to mass testing, tracing and lockdowns -- on Dec. 7 following mass protests in November fueled by anger about the strategy. According to health authorities in Milan, almost half of the passengers on flights from China were found to have COVID-19. They, too, will begin testing all arrivals from China and will be sequencing the tests to see if there are new variants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an advertisement on Facebook and Instagram, a middle-aged man holding a dumbbell says testosterone "literally changed my life," restoring his energy and happiness. What the October ad from telehealth startup Hone Health doesn't say is that the unidentified man is an actor who has never used the prescription drug. From a report: It doesn't mention that testosterone is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for men with specific disorders and that among its risks are heart attacks and stroke. Similar telehealth companies are flooding TikTok, Instagram and other platforms with ads that don't conform to longtime standards governing the marketing of prescription drugs and healthcare treatments. They feature actors posing as customers, tout benefits of drugs with no mention of side effects and promote medications for uses not approved by the FDA. Since the pandemic, online advertising has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to telehealth companies such as Cerebral and Done for treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and other medical conditions. Some employees and patients have said their marketing practices contributed to the abuse of controlled substances. In a four-week period spanning October and November, about 20 companies ran more than 2,100 ads on Facebook and Instagram that described benefits of prescription drugs without citing risks, promoted drugs for unapproved uses or featured testimonials without disclosing whether they came from actors or company employees, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of ads collected by the nonprofit Algorithmic Transparency Institute from Meta Platforms' ad library.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. prosecutors have filed criminal charges of commodities fraud and manipulation against a man accused of trying to steal about $110 million in October by rigging the Mango Markets cryptocurrency exchange. From a report: According to a complaint made public on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, Avraham Eisenberg's trades in futures related to Mango's crypto token MNGO enabled him to withdraw $110 million in cryptocurrencies from other investors' deposits, with no apparent intention to repay the funds. Eisenberg was arrested on Monday night in Puerto Rico, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in Manhattan said in a court filing. It was unclear whether Eisenberg has a lawyer. Mango is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange run by Mango DAO that lets investors lend, borrow, swap, and use leverage to trade cryptocurrency assets. The Dec. 23 complaint signed by FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz said Eisenberg on Oct. 11 used two accounts to concurrently buy and sell futures based on the relative values of MNGO and the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Rumours of a Nintendo Switch Pro console have been swirling in the video game industry and the gaming community for years. However, it seems that Nintendo is ready to move on from the portable console. According to Digital Foundry's John Linneman, many developers acknowledged that a "mid-generation Switch update" was initially planned, but Nintendo opted to focus instead on building a new console. Nintendo has yet to officially announce its next video game system, and Linneman said he does not expect it will be released until 2023. "So I think at one point internally from what I can understand from talking to different developers, is that there was some sort of mid-generation Switch update planned at one point and that seems to be no longer happening," said Linneman in the Digital Foundry podcast.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. "I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like," he once said. Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers' speech patterns -- their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as "hi" or "please" or "somebody" can reveal a murderer on the phone. So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster's claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn't be used to lock people up. Prosecutors know it's junk science too. But that hasn't stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions. [...] Junk science in the justice system is nothing new. But unvarnished correspondence about how prosecutors wield it is hard to come by. It can be next to impossible to see how law enforcement -- in league with paid, self-styled "experts" -- spreads new, often unproven methods. The system is at its most opaque when prosecutors know evidence is unfit for court but choose to game the rules, hoping judges and juries will believe it and vote to convict. People like Faria, defense lawyers and sometimes even the judges are blindsided. "I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else," Faria told me. Askey, who now goes by Leah Chaney and is no longer a prosecutor, did not answer questions about the case other than to say she didn't know about Harpster's work until after Faria's first trial. She has denied allegations of misconduct in other media interviews.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX launched the first batch of a new generation of Starlink satellites into orbit early Wednesday (Dec. 28) and nailed a rocket landing at sea to mark a record 60th flight of the year. From a report: A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites -- the first generation 2 (Gen2) versions of the SpaceX fleet -- lit up the predawn sky with a smooth launch at 4:34 a.m. EST (0934 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. "Under our new license, we are now able to deploy satellites to new orbits that will add even more capacity to the network," Jesse Anderson, a SpaceX production and engineering manager, said during live launch commentary. "Ultimately, this enables us to add more customers and provide faster service, particularly in areas that are currently oversubscribed." About eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth with a landing on the SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean, where rough recovery weather threatened to delay the launch. The touchdown marked a successful end to SpaceX's 60th launch of SpaceX in 2022, nearly doubling the 31 launches set as a SpaceX record in 2021. The Falcon 9 first stage on this mission made its 11th flight with Wednesday's launch. The booster previously flew five Starlink missions, launched two U.S. GPS satellites, the Nilesat 301 commercial satellite and carried two different private astronaut crews on the Inspiration4 and Ax-1 missions, SpaceX has said. The company will also attempt to recover the two payload fairing halves that made up the Falcon 9's nose cone, which had both flown before, for later reuse, Anderson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok will no longer be allowed on any device managed by the US House of Representatives. Ars Technica reports: On Tuesday, the House's Chief Administrative Office announced the ban of the popular video-sharing app, a move that comes just a week after legislation that would bar TikTok from all federal devices was introduced. Congresspersons and their staffers will not be able to download the app on managed devices, the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity said in an email seen by Reuters. The mobile app is a "high risk to users due to a number of security risks," the email said. "If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it," the email continued. Potential federal bans aside, TikTok is already at least partially banned from government-owned devices in 19 states. And the federal omnibus spending bill passed last week will put the kibosh on TikTok when it comes to all federally managed smartphones and devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have developed a blood test to diagnose Alzheimer's disease without the need for expensive brain imaging or a painful lumbar puncture, where a sample of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is drawn from the lower back. If validated, the test could enable faster diagnosis of the disease, meaning therapies could be initiated earlier. The Guardian reports: Current guidelines recommend detection of three distinct markers: abnormal accumulations of amyloid and tau proteins, as well as neurodegeneration -- the slow and progressive loss of neuronal cells in specified regions of the brain. This can be done through a combination of brain imaging and CSF analysis. However, a lumbar puncture can be painful and people may experience headaches or back pain after the procedure, while brain imaging is expensive and takes a long time to schedule. Although current blood tests can accurately detect abnormalities in amyloid and tau proteins, detecting markers of nerve cell damage that are specific to the brain has been harder. [Prof Thomas Karikari at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania] and his colleagues around the world focused on developing an antibody-based blood test that would detect a particular form of tau protein called brain-derived tau, which is specific to Alzheimer's disease. They tested it in 600 patients at various stages of Alzheimer's and found that levels of the protein correlated well with levels of tau in the CSF, and could reliably distinguish Alzheimer's from other neurodegenerative diseases. Protein levels also closely corresponded with the severity of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in brain tissue from people who had died with Alzheimer's. The research was published in the journal Brain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering. [...] Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without any public engagement or scientific scrutiny. It's already attempting to sell "cooling credits" for future balloon flights that could carry larger payloads. Several researchers MIT Technology Review spoke with condemned the effort to commercialize geoengineering at this early stage. Some potential investors and customers who have reviewed the company's proposals say that it's not a serious scientific effort or a credible business but more of an attention grab designed to stir up controversy in the field. Luke Iseman, the cofounder and CEO of Make Sunsets, acknowledges that the effort is part entrepreneurial and part provocation, an act of geoengineering activism. He hopes that by moving ahead in the controversial space, the startup will help drive the public debate and push forward a scientific field that has faced great difficulty carrying out small-scale field experiments amid criticism. "We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult," he says. Iseman, previously a director of hardware at Y Combinator, says he expects to be pilloried by both geoengineering critics and researchers in the field for taking such a step, and he recognizes that "making me look like the Bond villain is going to be helpful to certain groups." But he says climate change is such a grave threat, and the world has moved so slowly to address the underlying problem, that more radical interventions are now required. "It's morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this," he says. What's important is "to do this as quickly and safely as we can." [...] By Iseman's own description, the first two balloon launches were very rudimentary. He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October. Iseman says he pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and added what he estimated would be the right amount of helium to carry them into the stratosphere. He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it's not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches. "This was firmly in science project territory," he says, adding: "Basically, it was to confirm that I could do it." The company is already attempting to earn revenue from the cooling effects of future flights. It is offering to sell $10 "cooling credits" for releasing one gram of particles in the stratosphere -- enough, it asserts, to offset the warming effect of one ton of carbon for one year. "What I want to do is create as much cooling as quickly as I responsibly can, over the rest of my life, frankly," Iseman says, adding later that they will deploy as much sulfur in 2023 as "we can get customers to pay us" for. The company says it has raised $750,000 in funding from Boost VC and Pioneer Fund, among others, and that its early investors have also been purchasing cooling credits. Shuchi Talati, a scholar in residence at American University who is forming a nonprofit focused on governance and justice in solar geoengineering, was highly critical of the company's scientific claims, stressing that no one can credibly sell credits that purport to represent such a specific per gram outcome, given vast uncertainty at this stage of research. "What they're claiming to actually accomplish with such a credit is the entirety of what's uncertain right now about geoengineering," she says. Talati adds that it's hypocritical for Make Sunsets to assert they're acting on humanitarian grounds, while moving ahead without meaningfully engaging with the public, including with those who could be affected by their actions. "They're violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future," she says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Game developer Archer Maclean recently passed away at the age of 60. Maclean was a longtime programmer and designer best known for Dropzone on the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. Game Developer reports: Born January 28, 1962, Maclean's first game was the aforementioned Dropzone. Following the success of that title, he would go on to do design and graphics for 1986's International Karate (and its 1987 sequel, International Karate+), and several snooker simulation games, including Archer Maclean Presents Pool Paradise. Several of these titles were developed at Awesome Studios, a subsidiary of the now defunct Ignition Entertainment. Maclean co-founded Awesome in 2002, and later left the developer in 2005. He went on to found Awesome Play, creators of the 2009 Nintendo Wii title Speedzone (or Wheelspin in Europe). Though Speedzone marked the end of his time as a game developer, Maclean also wrote columns for Retro Gamer Magazine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from Alameda Research to purchase his stake in trading app Robinhood Markets (HOOD), according to court documents (PDF). CoinDesk reports: In an affidavit provided to a Caribbean court before his arrest, Bankman-Fried said he and FTX co-founder Gary Wang together borrowed over $546 million from Alameda via promissory notes in April and May. They used that money to capitalize Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., the shell corporation that in May bought a 7.6% stake of Robinhood. The affidavit provides a new curveball in the three-way race to lay claim to the 56 million Robinhood shares. Crypto lender BlockFi, FTX Group and Bankman-Fried himself have all attempted to lay claim to the shares, which could be worth over $440 million. Crypto lender BlockFi, which like FTX has filed for bankruptcy, alleged in a court document (PDF) that it was owed the rights to the Robinhood shares due to a deal Bankman-Fried made in early November. The shares were pledged as collateral against a loan taken out by Alameda Research -- the same firm whose funds were used to purchase the shares to begin with, according to Tuesday's filing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A developer managed to use an exploit found in iOS 16 to change the default font of the system without jailbreak. 9to5Mac reports: Zhuowei Zhang shared his project on Twitter, which he calls a "proof-of-concept app." According to Zhang, the app he developed uses the CVE-2022-46689 exploit to overwrite the default iOS font, so that users can customize the system's appearance with a different font other than the default (which is San Francisco). The CVE-2022-46689 exploit affects devices running iOS 16.1.2 or earlier versions of the operating system, and it basically lets apps execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The exploit was fixed with iOS 16.2, which also fixed a bunch of other security breaches found in the previous version of iOS. Since iOS has its own font format, the developer performed the experiment using only a few fonts, including DejaVu Sans Condensed, Serif, Mono, and Choco Cooky. And in case you're wondering, Choco Cooky is the weird font that used to come pre-installed by default on Samsung smartphones. Now you can finally have it on your iPhone. Zhang explains that the process should be safe for everyone, since all changes are reversed after rebooting the device. Still, the developer recommends users trying out the app to back up their devices before replacing the default system font. He also details that the change only affects some of the text on iOS, as other parts of the system use different fonts. More details about the project, including its source code, are available on GitHub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Headlines: In a recent voice assistant test conducted by popular YouTuber MKBHD, Google Assistant emerged as the best voice assistant, outperforming Apple's Siri, Samsung's Bixby, and Amazon's Alexa. There are several reasons why Google Assistant stands out as the top voice assistant. Firstly, it is backed by Google's powerful artificial intelligence, which helps it to understand and interpret user requests accurately. Secondly, Google Assistant has access to a vast amount of data from its users, which allows it to provide a more personalized experience. The company also collects data from various services such as search, maps, and email to improve the functionality and performance of Google Assistant. However, one of the biggest reasons behind Google Assistant's win is its strong conversation skills. Google's AI uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the meaning and context of words and phrases, which helps to keep the conversation going. Apple's Siri took second place in the competition. It performed well when asked to complete tasks like setting a timer and searching the internet, but struggled when asked to answer more complex or conversational questions. Additionally, Siri was unable to perform tasks that required interacting with apps. In contrast, Samsung's Bixby excelled in device control thanks to its integration with Samsung devices. This integration enables Bixby to control system settings and integrate more deeply with apps than any other voice assistant. Bixby can send text messages, check sports scores, turn down screen brightness, check your calendar, launch apps, and more. Of all the digital assistants, Amazon's Alexa performed the worst in the voice assistant test. This is due to several factors. Firstly, Alexa is not integrated into smartphones, which means it lacks the personalized touch of other voice assistants. This can make it feel less intuitive and less convenient to use. Secondly, Alexa's inaccuracy in finding facts, inability to interact with other apps and poor conversational models all combine to create a subpar experience when used on a phone. These issues make it difficult for Alexa to provide useful and reliable information, which is a key expectation of voice assistants. In addition, the inclusion of Amazon advertisements between tasks can be annoying and disrupt the user experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced it's making Excel's autocomplete even smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365). The Verge reports: Formula suggestions are pretty much what they say on the tin: if you type the equal sign into a cell, Excel for web will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should be using, given the data that's around it. For example, if you have a full of quarterly sales numbers and a column at the end labeled "total," Excel might suggest summing the range of cells. According to a blog post from Microsoft, the feature currently only works in English, and will suggest sum, average, count, counta, min, and max formulas. It's not a groundbreaking feature, to be sure -- Google Sheets has had something similar for a while, and Excel's AutoSum has long been a quick way to apply formulas to data -- but for some use cases, it could be a nice timesaver. Then there's Formula by Example, which is similar to the Flash Fill feature that can automatically detect patterns in data and fill out the rest of a column. The feature is a bit hard to explain succinctly, but this video from Microsoft gives you an idea of what it's about; detecting a pattern where you're combing information from cells and then automatically generating a formula that will save you some typing. Microsoft's blog post also includes several other feature announcements [...]. There's a function for adding images with alt-text into your tables coming to Windows, Mac, and web, and the company's also adding nested Power Query data types and the ability to get data from dynamic arrays to the Insider version of the Windows app for testing. One other potentially useful (and thankfully easy to understand) feature coming to the web is "suggested links," which will automatically help you fix broken links to other workbooks stored in the cloud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: Stabilizing an inverted pendulum is a classic problem in control theory, and if you've ever taken a control systems class you might remember seeing pages full of differential equations and bode diagrams just to describe its basic operation. Although this might make such a system seem terribly complicated, actually implementing all of that theory doesn't have to be difficult at all, as [Limenitis Reducta] demonstrates in his latest project. All you need is a 3D printer, some basic electronic skills and knowledge of Python. The components needed are a body, two wheels, motors to drive those wheels and some electronics. [Limenitis] demonstrates the design process in the video [here] (in Turkish, with English subtitles available) in which he draws the entire system in Fusion 360 and then proceeds to manufacture it. The body and wheels are 3D-printed, with rubber bands providing some traction to the wheels which would otherwise have difficulty on slippery surfaces. Two stepper motors drive the wheels, controlled by a DRV8825 motor driver, while an MPU-9250 accelerometer and gyroscope unit measures the angle and acceleration of the system. The loop is closed by a Raspberry Pi Pico that implements a PID controller: another control theory classic, in which the proportional, integral and derivative parameters are tuned to adapt the control loop to the physical system in question. External inputs can be provided through a Bluetooth connection, which makes it possible to control the robot from a PC or smartphone and guide it around your living room. All design files and software are available on Limenitis' GitHub page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is now trialing drone deliveries in new California and Texas locations. From a report: David Carbon, VP of Prime Air Amazon, announced the "careful first steps" in a Christmas Eve LinkedIn post. "First deliveries from our new sites in TX and CA," he wrote. Carbon posted a photo of an airborne drone carrying an Amazon box at the end of a nearly invisible tether. No further details were revealed. Nearly a decade in the making, Amazon's air drone delivery service is finally set to reach US customers. Once onboarded, local shoppers can place orders for Prime Air-eligible items as normal, then wait for the unmanned aerial vehicle to drop them off -- literally. The self-flying drones are capable of evading objects like chimneys and other aircraft while flying up to 50mph and carrying packages that weigh as much as 5 pounds. Amazon's drones ferry each shipment to the customer's backyard, where they hover at a safe distance before releasing the package on the ground.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The investment bank B Riley is so determined to persuade the troubled bitcoin miner Core Scientific to avoid filing for bankruptcy that it has offered as much as $72mn in fresh financing to keep the company from seeking a court-supervised Chapter 11 restructuring. "Bankruptcy is not the answer and would be a disservice to the Company's investors," B Riley wrote in a letter from early December. "It will destroy value for the Company's shareholders, reduce potential recoveries for the Company's lenders, deplete its limited resources and create massive uncertainty for all its stakeholders." Core Scientific filed for bankruptcy anyway last week. Still, B Riley's aversion should be understandable. A series of players have succumbed to the ongoing crypto winter including FTX, BlockFi, Voyager Digital and Celsius with customer accounts largely frozen. The novel legal issues about digital asset ownership, the continuing problems in the sector and the deliberative nature of US bankruptcy proceedings have kept any of the major companies from exiting court protection yet. The costs are piling up and account holders are noticing. Lawyers, bankers and other advisers in the Celsius case that began in July recently submitted detailed fee requests to the New York federal bankruptcy court totalling $53mn. Per US law, these official advisers will have these so-called "administrative expenses," subject to court approval, paid by the "estate" or the company which will naturally eat into the recoveries of account holders. Law firms involved including Kirkland & Ellis and White & Case which are usual powerhouses in corporate and private equity bankruptcies are involved in Celsius and have top lawyers billing more than $1,800 per hour. (This may remain a bargain as top lawyers in the FTX bankruptcy at Sullivan & Cromwell are charging in excess of $2,000 per hour).Read more of this story at Slashdot.