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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.

Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights Monday -- at least 70% of its schedule for the day -- and more than 2,500 flights Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET -- at least 60% of its schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware. NPR reports: The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights called off. Other airlines have also ordered large-scale cancellations in the past week. Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline's disruptions are a result of the winter storm's lingering effects, adding that it hopes to "stabilize and improve its operation" with more favorable weather conditions. Other issues that have exacerbated the airline's struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with "connecting flight crews to their schedules," Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments. Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, called it an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling, particularly after weather delays. But with many areas seeing clear skies on Monday, the airline would seem to have few obvious reasons to cancel so many flights. Potter calls it a "full-blown meltdown." "This is really as bad as it gets for an airline," Potter said. "We've seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there's pretty clear skies across the country." The U.S. Department of Transportation called the cancellations "unacceptable," and will be investigating the airline to see whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France's privacy watchdog fined Microsoft $64 million for not offering clear enough instruction for users to reject cookies used for online ads, as part of the move to enforce Europe's tightening data protection law. From a report: CNIL, France's digital privacy regulator, said Thursday that it carried out several investigations on the Microsoft search engine Bing in September 2020 and May 2021 and found that the site dropped advertising cookies in users' terminals without their explicit consent. The website also lacked a button for users to reject cookies as simply as accepting them, CNIL said, where two clicks were required to refuse all cookies while only one was needed to accept them. Cookies are small files that track and monitor the sites users have visited and are often used to help personalize online ads. According to CNIL, the $64 million fine against Microsoft is justified partly because of the scope of revenue the company made from advertising indirectly generated from the data collected via cookies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plastic wrappers and parcels that start off in Americans' recycling bins end up at illegal dumpsites and industrial furnaces -- and inside the lungs of people in Muzaffarnagar. From a report: Muzaffarnagar, a city about 80 miles north of New Delhi, is famous in India for two things: colonial-era freedom fighters who helped drive out the British and the production of jaggery, a cane sugar product boiled into goo at some 1,500 small sugar mills in the area. Less likely to feature in tourism guides is Muzaffarnagar's new status as the final destination for tons of supposedly recycled American plastic. On a November afternoon, mosquitoes swarmed above plastic trash piled 6 feet high off one of the city's main roads. A few children picked through the mounds, looking for discarded toys while unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold. Although much of it was sodden or shredded, labels hinted at how far these items had traveled: Kirkland-brand almonds from Costco, Nestle's Purina-brand dog food containers, the wrapping for Trader Joe's mangoes. Most ubiquitous of all were Amazon.com shipping envelopes thrown out by US and Canadian consumers some 7,000 miles away. An up-close look at the piles also turned up countless examples of the three arrows that form the recycling logo, while some plastic packages had messages such as "Recycle Me" written across them. Plastic that enters the recycling system in North America isn't supposed to end up in India, which has since 2019 banned almost all imports of plastic waste. So how did Muzaffarnagar become a dumping ground for foreign plastic? To answer that question, Bloomberg Green retraced a trail back from the industrial belt of northern India, through the brokers who ship refuse around the world, to the municipal waste companies in the US that look for takers of their lowest-value recycling. Finally, the search arrived at the point of origin: American consumers who thought -- wrongly, as it turns out -- that they were recycling their trash. It's a system that's supposed to cut pollution, spare landfills and give valuable materials a second life. But in Muzaffarnagar the failures are hard to miss. The region's other major industry is paper production, with more than 30 mills dotted among the furnaces for making jaggery. Paper factories in India often rely on imported waste paper, which is cheaper than wood pulp. The nation's paper makers need to import around 6 million tons annually to meet demand, and most of it comes from North America. This could be a recycling success story -- were it not for all the plastic that comes mixed into all the waste paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the hottest tickets at this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego was a session on psychedelic drugs. About 1,000 brain scientists squeezed into an auditorium at the San Diego Convention Center for the symposium, called Psychedelics and Neural Plasticity. They'd come to hear talks on how drugs like psilocybin and MDMA can alter individual brain cells, can help rewire the brain, and may offer a new way to treat disorders ranging from depression to chronic pain. [...] Brain plasticity may explain why a single dose of a psychedelic drug can have a long-lasting impact on disorders like anxiety, depression and PTSD. "It can be months or years," says Dr. Gitte Knudsen a neurologist from University of Copenhagen in Denmark who spoke at the psychedelics session. "It's a stunning effect." These long-term effects have been shown with drugs including psilocybin, LSD and DMT (ayahuasca), Knudsen says. In contrast, most existing psychiatric drugs need to be taken every day. But psychedelic drugs have some drawbacks. They can cause nausea or produce hallucinations that are frightening or unpleasant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Baidu, the Chinese internet giant that became known for its search engines, is making some big strides in autonomous driving. From a report: Starting this week, the public can ride its robotaxis in Wuhan between 7 am and 11 pm without safety drivers behind the wheel. Previously, its unmanned vehicles could only operate from 9 am to 5 pm in the city. The updated scheme is expected to cover one million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people. Like most autonomous vehicle startups, Baidu combines a mix of third-party cameras, radars, and lidars to help its cars see better in low-visibility conditions, in contrast to Tesla's vision-based solution. In August, Baidu started offering fully driverless robotaxi rides, charging passengers at taxi rates. In Q3, Apollo Go, the firm's robotaxi hailing app, completed more than 474,000 rides, up 311% year over year. Accumulatively, Apollo Go had exceeded 1.4 million orders as of Q3. That sounds like a potentially substantial revenue stream for Baidu, but one should take such figures with a grain of salt and ask: how many of these trips are subsidized by discounts? How many of them are repeatable, daily routes rather than one-off novelty rides taken by early adopters? To juice up performance numbers, it's not uncommon to see Chinese robotaxi operators enticing the public to ride in their vehicles with perks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries to gain AI prowess as well as semiconductor sovereignty, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. From a report: In addition, the number of GPU makers grew worldwide in recent years as demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and graphics processing increased at a rather unprecedented rate. When it comes to discrete graphics for PCs, AMD and Nvidia maintain lead, whereas Intel is trying to catch up. Tens of companies developed graphics cards and discrete graphics processors in the 1980s and the 1990s, but cut-throat competition for the highest performance in 3D games drove the vast majority of them out of business. By 2010, only AMD and Nvidia could offer competitive standalone GPUs for gaming and compute, whereas others focused either on integrated GPUs or GPU IP. The mid-2010s found the number of China-based PC GPU developers increasing rapidly, fueled by the country's push for tech self-sufficiency as well as the advent of AI and HPC as high-tech megatrends. In total, there are 18 companies developing and producing GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are two companies that develop SoC-bound GPUs primarily with smartphones and notebooks in mind, there are six GPU IP providers, and there are 11 GPU developers focused on GPUs for PCs and datacenters, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, which design graphics cards that end up in our list of the best graphics cards. In fact, if we added other China-based companies like Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin to the list, there would be even more GPU designers. However, Biren and Tianshu Zhixin are solely focused on AI and HPC for now, so JPR does not consider them GPU developers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers stole data belonging to multiple electric utilities in an October ransomware attack on a US government contractor that handles critical infrastructure projects across the country, according to a memo describing the hack obtained by CNN. From the report: Federal officials have closely monitored the incident for any potential broader impact on the US power sector while private investigators have combed the dark web for the stolen data, according to the memo sent this month to power company executives by the North American grid regulator's cyberthreat sharing center. The previously unreported incident is a window into how ransomware attacks on critical US companies are handled behind the scenes as lawyers and federal investigators quietly spring into action to determine the extent of the damage. The ransomware attack hit Chicago-based Sargent & Lundy, an engineering firm that has designed more than 900 power stations and thousands of miles of power systems and that holds sensitive data on those projects. The firm also handles nuclear security issues, working with the departments of Defense, Energy and other agencies "to strengthen nuclear deterrence" and keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorists' hands, according to its website. Two people familiar with the investigation of the Sargent & Lundy hack told CNN that the incident was contained and remediated, and didn't appear to have a broader impact on other power-sector firms. There is no sign that data stolen from Sargent & Lundy, which includes "model files" and "transmission data" the firm uses for utility projects, is on the dark web, according to the memo from the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world is now awash in chips. The oversupply marks a sharp turnaround from a global shortage during two years of supercharged demand. From a report: Consumer appetite for electronics has weakened against a backdrop of rising interest rates, a falling stock market and recession fears. Chip inventories are swelling, mirroring what is happening in the wider economy where retailers are stuck with goods on their shelves and producers of a range of products in high demand early in the pandemic now face a glut. What is happening in chips amounts to good news for consumers who can get their hands on products from washing machines to laptops faster, and sometimes more cheaply, than a year ago. For chip makers, the shift has triggered a wave of job cuts and reduction in capital spending as companies try to restore profitability levels that have eroded in recent months. Chip inventory levels are "well above our target level," said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of memory maker Micron as the company on Thursday missed Wall Street earnings projections, gave a subdued outlook and said it would cut about 10% of its workforce. Lead times between chip orders and deliveries that swelled early in the pandemic have fallen in recent months, according to an analysis by Susquehanna International Group. Inventory levels, typically measured in days, are at their highest levels in more than a decade, or about 40 days above the median for the chip industry and its supply chain, according to a UBS analysis. Much of what is playing out for chip makers is illustrated by the reversal in fortunes that gadget makers have experienced over recent months. HP and Dell, two of the largest PC makers, say their products that flew off the shelves early in the pandemic now are sitting there for longer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Deep brain stimulation is already used to treat severe cases of epilepsy and a few movement disorders such as Parkinson's. But depression is more complicated -- partly because we still don't fully understand what's going on in the brain when it occurs. "Depression is a complex illness," says Patricio Riva Posse, a neurologist at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the trial. "It's not like trying to correct one tremor -- there's a whole universe of symptoms." These include low mood, suicidality, inability to experience pleasure, and changes in motivation, sleep, and appetite. Doctors have been using electricity to treat brain disorders -- including depression -- for decades, and some studies have found that electrodes placed deep inside the brain can jolt some people out of their symptoms. But results vary. Neuroscientists hope that by getting a better idea of what's happening inside the brains of people with symptoms like John's, they can make the treatment more effective. John is one of five people who have volunteered to have their brains probed as part of a clinical trial. At the start of 2020, he had a total of 14 electrodes implanted across his brain. For nine days, he stayed in a hospital with protruding cables wrapped around his head, while neuroscientists monitored how his brain activity correlated with his mood. The researchers behind the trial say they have developed a "mood decoder" -- a way of being able to work out how someone is feeling just by looking at brain activity. Using the decoder, the scientists hope to be able to measure how severe a person's depression is, and target more precisely where the electrodes are placed to optimize the effect on the patient's mood. So far, they have analyzed the results of three volunteers. What they have found is extremely promising, says Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who is leading the trial. Not only have he and his colleagues been able to link volunteers' specific brain activity with their mood, but they have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood. "This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions," says Sheth. His colleague Jiayang Xiao presented the findings at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego in November.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing. The device's memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people. From a report: Most people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted individuals, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the U.S. government or simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. The device -- a relic of the vast biometric collection system the Pentagon built in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- is a physical reminder that although the United States has moved on from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the tools built to fight them and the information they held live on in ways unintended by their creators. Exactly how the device ended up going from the battlefields in Asia to an online auction site is unclear. But the data, which offers detailed descriptions of individuals in addition to their photograph and biometric data, could be enough to target people who were previously unknown to have worked with U.S. military forces should the information fall into the wrong hands. For those reasons, Mr. Marx would not place the information online or share it in an electronic format, but he did allow a Times reporter in Germany to see the data in person alongside him. "Because we have not reviewed the information contained on the devices, the department is not able to confirm the authenticity of the alleged data or otherwise comment on it," Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Defense Department's press secretary, said in a statement. "The department requests that any devices thought to contain personally identifiable information be returned for further analysis." He provided an address for the military's biometrics program manager at Fort Belvoir in Virginia where the devices could be sent. The biometric data on the SEEK II was collected at detainment facilities, on patrols, during screenings of local hires and after the explosion of an improvised bomb. Around the time when the device was last used in Afghanistan, the American war effort there was winding down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief executive of one of Europe's biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become "uninsurable" as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. From a report: Insurance executives have been increasingly vocal in recent years about systemic risks, such as pandemics and climate change, that test the sector's ability to provide coverage. For the second year in a row, natural catastrophe-related claims are expected to top $100 billion. But Mario Greco, chief executive at insurer Zurich, told the Financial Times that cyber was the risk to watch. "What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber," he said. "What if someone takes control of vital parts of our infrastructure, the consequences of that?" Recent attacks that have disrupted hospitals, shut down pipelines and targeted government departments have all fed concern about this expanding risk among industry executives. Focusing on the privacy risk to individuals was missing the bigger picture, Greco added: "First off, there must be a perception that this is not just data ... this is about civilisation. These people can severely disrupt our lives." Spiralling cyber losses in recent years have prompted emergency measures by the sector's underwriters to limit their exposure. As well as pushing up prices, some insurers have responded by tweaking policies so clients retain more losses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Copyright Office has completed its public consultations on the use of technical measures to identify and protect copyrighted content online. From a report: For many years, U.S. lawmakers have considered options to update the DMCA so it can more effectively deal with today's online copyright issues. Many proposals have come and gone, without resulting in any significant updates. Calls to change current legislation persist, however. Following repeated nudges from Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy, the Copyright Office launched a consultation on automated tools that online services can use to ensure that pirated content is less easily shared. The Copyright Office also asked stakeholders whether it's desirable to make certain standard technical measures mandatory for online platforms. Such measures could include upload filters to block pirated content from being reuploaded. This month the Copyright Office presents its conclusions, which are also shared with Senators Tillis and Leahy in two letters. After reviewing thousands of responses and input from stakeholders in plenary sessions, the overall conclusion is one of clear disagreement. Most parties agree that it's impossible to design an error-free takedown process but disagree on what error rate is acceptable when takedowns are automated. Opponents of filtering technology warn that fair use and First Amendment rights are at stake. Rightsholders did not dispute that but noted that these issues don't play a role when full copies of copyrighted content are shared. When it comes to the implementation of voluntary measures, the Copyright Office doesn't have any concrete suggestions. Instead, it will continue to back existing initiatives, while facilitating dialogue between various stakeholders. "The public comments and the consultations confirmed that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to voluntary technical measures, and that there remains a lack of consensus in this area," the Office writes. "Nevertheless, the consultations served as valuable opportunities for dialogue among stakeholders, which may lead to further voluntary action. The Copyright Office proposed options to continue its role as convener of these conversations in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced to switch down their facilities due to deadly blizzards. From a report: Bitcoin hashrate, the level of computing power used for mining and processing transactions, came in at 155.28 exahashes per second on Saturday, down from 253.88 exahashes on Wednesday, according to data from IntoTheBlock. A winter storm has claimed at least 32 lives across the U.S., as of Monday morning in Hong Kong, according to media reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raymond Chen, writing for Microsoft DevBlogs: In the mid-1980's, Microsoft produced an expansion card for the IBM PC and PC XT, known as the Mach 10. In addition to occupying an expansion slot, it also replaced your CPU: You unplugged your old and busted 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and plugged into the now-empty socket a special adapter that led via a ribbon cable back to the Mach 10 card. On the Mach 10 card was the new hotness: A 9.54 MHz 8086 CPU. This gave you a 2x performance upgrade for a lot less money than an IBM PC AT. The Mach 10 also came with a mouse port, so you could add a mouse without having to burn an additional expansion slot. Sidebar: The product name was stylized as MACH [PDF] in some product literature. The Mach 10 was a flop. Undaunted, Microsoft partnered with a company called Portable Computer Support Group to produce the Mach 20, released in 1987. You probably remember the Portable Computer Support Group for their disk cache software called Lightning. The Mach 20 took the same basic idea as the Mach 10, but to the next level: As before, you unplugged your old 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and replaced it with an adapter that led via ribbon cable to the Mach 20 card, which you plugged into an expansion slot. This time, the Mach 20 had an 8 MHz 80286 CPU, so you were really cooking with gas now. And, like the Mach 10, it had a mouse port built in. According to a review in Info World, it retailed for $495. The Mach 20 itself had room for expansion: it had an empty socket for an 80287 floating point coprocessor. One daughterboard was the Mach 20 Memory Plus Expanded Memory Option, which gave you an astonishing 3.5 megabytes of RAM, and it was high-speed RAM since it wasn't bottlenecked by the ISA bus on the main motherboard. The other daughterboard was the Mach 20 Disk Plus, which lets you connect 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 floppy drives. A key detail is that all these expansions connected directly to the main Mach 20 board, so that they didn't consume a precious expansion slot. The IBM PC came with five expansion slots, and they were in high demand. You needed one for the hard drive controller, one for the floppy drive controller, one for the video card, one for the printer parallel port, one for the mouse. Oh no, you ran out of slots, and you haven't even gotten to installing a network card or expansion RAM yet! You could try to do some consolidation by buying so-called multifunction cards, but still, the expansion card crunch was real. But why go to all this trouble to upgrade your IBM PC to something roughly equivalent to an IBM PC AT? Why not just buy an IBM PC AT in the first place? Who would be interested in this niche upgrade product?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US citizens lost over $10 billion due to phishing calls by illegal Indian call centres in 2022, as per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data. From a report: Most of the victims of these fraud calls from Indian phishing gangs were elderly US citizens above the age of 60 years who lost over $3 billion, Times Of India reported citing FBI data. After several incidents were reported in 2022, the FBI has now deputed a permanent representative at the US embassy in New Delhi. The representative will work closely with the CBI, Interpol and the Delhi Police to bust these gangs that have put India under the threat to be termed as the hub of such illegal call centres. Several Americans lost a total of $10.2 billion in 2022 so far, which is a 47 per cent increase from 2021's $6.9 billion, to such fraud calls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: This column about a writer's struggle to find the perfect note-taking app resonated a lot with me. "A singular productivity tool that works for everyone is a unicorn -- beautiful, perfect, and completely fictional. Still, there has to be some sort of middle ground between an unachievable fantasy and the current landscape. I would happily settle for two, maybe three apps. Honestly, less than 10 is all I'm asking for. Until then, my phone and laptop will be a cluttered mess of productivity apps that only do half their jobs," writes Victoria Song. Over the years, I have tried Notion, Apple Notes, the good old Windows' Notepad, Roam Research, Obsidian, Google Keep, Google Docs, and OneNote among possibly many more that I am unable to recall anymore. Some support Apple Pencil, which is one of the usecases I find useful. Roam Research did not even have a native app for mobile devices for the longest time. Some applications are good, but they don't support online syncing, or support syncing with only a particular storage service. And have you noticed just how expensive some of these apps could get? As much as $15-$30 a month! Out of curiosity, and forget my usecases -- as I admit I have not mentioned many -- how do you maintain your notes for work and personal life. (I have been using physical notepads a lot more in recent months but would like an app for digital notes.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many of the nation's largest nonprofit hospital systems, which give aid to poorer communities to earn tax breaks, have been leaving those areas and moving into wealthier ones as they have added and shed hospitals in the last two decades. From a report: As nonprofits, these regional and national giants reap $8.8 billion from tax breaks annually, by one Johns Hopkins University researcher's estimate. Among their obligations, they are expected to provide free medical care to those least able to afford it. Many top nonprofits, however, avoid communities where more people are likely to need that aid, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly 470 transactions. As these systems grew, many were more likely to divest or close hospitals in low-income communities than to add them. Since 2001, half the hospitals divested by CommonSpirit Health, a large Catholic system based in Chicago, were in communities where the poverty rate was above the medians for state hospital markets, compared with 30% of those it added. At Bon Secours Mercy Health, formed by the 2018 merger of two growing regional nonprofits, about 42% of hospitals it divested were in areas with higher poverty, compared with 27% of hospitals it added. Of hospitals divested or closed by St. Louis-based Ascension, about half were located in higher-poverty areas, compared with 40% of the Catholic system's acquisitions. At the same time, many top nonprofits were moving more aggressively to add hospitals in more affluent areas. At Mercy, a St. Louis-based hospital nonprofit, 56% of new hospitals were in places with lower poverty rates, compared with 25% of those it shed. About two-thirds of the hospitals it added were in markets where the share of households with incomes of at least $200,000 was above the state median. That compared with 25% of those the system shed. Of hospitals acquired by Florida-based AdventHealth, nearly two-thirds were in low-poverty areas, compared with 40% of those they divested. And 59% had a larger share of higher-income households, compared with 40% of those they exited.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four power substations in Washington State were attacked on Christmas Day, disrupting service to thousands of residents, just weeks after gunfire at electricity facilities in North Carolina prompted an investigation by the FBI. From a report: Law enforcement agencies are now investigating at least eight attacks on power stations in four states in the past month that have underscored the vulnerability of the nation's power grid. It remains unknown if they were connected. In the most recent incidents outside of Tacoma, Washington, thousands were left without power after vandals forced their way into four substations and damaged equipment, in one case leading to a fire, according to the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. In all, 14,000 people were left without power from that attacks on substations owned by Tacoma Public Utilities and Puget Sound Energy, according to the sheriff's office, which said most power has since been restored.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes those things were documented, or at least hinted at, in blog posts that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. From a report: A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95. Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Every major phone manufacturer is guilty of a serious crime, and I won't be quiet about it any longer: they stole the power button from us. Apple, Google, Samsung: guilty, guilty, guilty. Long-pressing the power button used to bring up an option to turn your phone off, but then these companies decided to get cute and make this a shortcut to summon their digital assistant. This is bad and wrong, and I'm politely demanding that these companies return what they took from us. Look, I get the logic. When phone screens got bigger, physical buttons like Apple's home button were axed, and existing buttons had to pick up the slack. In the iPhone X, Apple re-homed the Siri function to the power button. Since then, turning your iPhone off has required pressing a combination of buttons. If you make the fatal mistake of long-pressing the power button in hopes of turning your phone off, Siri will start listening to you as you curse about how the power button doesn't work how it should anymore. And woe to you if you don't hold down the right button combination long enough -- you'll take a screenshot that you didn't want and will have to delete later. It's just as bad on Samsung and Google phones. Long-pressing the power button on the Pixel 7 Pro just now brought up the Google Assistant and a prompt to ask it how to say sorry in Spanish. No, Google. It is you who should be apologizing. And the Galaxy S22 phones I used this year all bid me to set up Bixby whenever I made the mistake of long-pressing the power button. Both Google and Samsung let you change it back to the power menu -- and Samsung has the decency to put a shortcut to side key options on its shutdown screen -- but enough is enough. Long-pressing the power button should, by default, just turn the phone off. The thing that really adds salt to the wound is that the button combination to turn your phone off isn't even the same on every phone. On an iPhone, you can press and hold the power button and either volume key to get to shutdown options. On a Pixel phone, it's a short press of the volume up key and power button. If you screw up and press the volume down key, you'll take a screenshot, which will make you feel stupid when you find it in your photo gallery later. Samsung makes you press and hold the volume down key and power button.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A brand-new law (awaiting only the president's signature) will let the Federal Communications Commission directly regulate rates in the notoriously predatory prison calling industry. From a report: Under the threat of having to provide a solid product for a reasonable price, companies may opt to call it a day and open up the market to a more compassionate and forward-thinking generation of providers. Prison calling systems depend on the state and the prison system, and generally have run the gamut from good enough to shockingly bad. With a literally captive customer base, companies had no real reason to innovate, and financial models involving kickbacks to the prisons and states incentivized income at all costs. Inmates are routinely charged extortionate rates for simple services like phone calls and video calls (an upsell), and have even had visitation rights rescinded, leaving paid calls the only option. Needless to say, this particular financial burden falls disproportionately on people of color and those with low incomes, and it's a billion-dollar industry. It's been this way for a long time, and former FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn spent years trying to change it. When I talked with her in 2017, before she left the agency, she called inmate calling "the clearest, most glaring type of market failure I've ever seen as a regulator." It was an issue she spent years working on, but she gave a lot of credit to Martha Wright-Reed, a grandmother who had organized and represented the fight to bring reform to the system right up until she died.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo. From a report: In a paper titled, "Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?", Stanford boffins Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh answer that question in the affirmative. Worse still, they found that AI help tends to delude developers about the quality of their output. "We found that participants with access to an AI assistant often produced more security vulnerabilities than those without access, with particularly significant results for string encryption and SQL injection," the authors state in their paper. "Surprisingly, we also found that participants provided access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe that they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant." Previously, NYU researchers have shown that AI-based programming suggestions are often insecure in experiments under different conditions. The Stanford authors point to an August 2021 research paper titled "Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot's Code Contributions," which found that given 89 scenarios, about 40 per cent of the computer programs made with the help of Copilot had potentially exploitable vulnerabilities. That study, the Stanford authors say, is limited in scope because it only considers a constrained set of prompts corresponding to 25 vulnerabilities and just three programming languages: Python, C, and Verilog. The Stanford scholars also cite a followup study from some of the same NYU eggheads, "Security Implications of Large Language Model Code Assistants: A User Study," as the only comparable user study they're aware of. They observe, however, that their work differs because it focuses on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model rather than OpenAI's less powerful codex-cushman-001 model, both of which play a role in GitHub Copilot, itself a fine-tuned descendant of a GPT-3 language model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week America passed a $1.7 trillion federal spending bill — and it includes a big win for retailrs reporters the Associated Press. It forces online marketplaces like Amazon and Facebook "to verify high-volume sellers on their platforms amid heightened concerns about retail crime...."The bill, called the INFORM ACT, also seeks to combat sales of counterfeit goods and dangerous products by compelling online marketplaces to verify different types of information — including bank account, tax ID and contact details — for sellers who make at least 200 unique sales and earn a minimum of $5,000 in a given year. It's difficult to parse out how much money retailers are losing due to organized retail crime — or if the problem has substantially increased. But the issue has received more notice in the past few years as high-profile smash-and-grab retail thefts and mass shoplifting events grabbed national attention. Some retailers have also said in recent weeks they're seeing more items being taken from stores. Target executives said in November the number of thefts has gone up more than 50%, resulting in more than $400 million in losses. Its expected to be more than $600 million for the full fiscal year.... Walgreens, Best Buy and Home Depot have also pointed out similar problems. The National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, said its latest security survey of roughly 60 retailers found that inventory loss — called shrink — clocked in at an average rate of 1.4% last year, representing $94.5 billion in losses [included damaged products and theft by employees] ... It also noted retailers, on average, saw a 26.5% uptick in organized theft incidents last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Last week at the 2022 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, planetary scientists and astronomers discussed how new machine-learning techniques are changing the way we learn about our solar system," reports Space.com, "from planning for future mission landings on Jupiter's icy moon Europa to identifying volcanoes on tiny Mercury...."For many tasks in astronomy, it can take humans months, years or even decades of effort to sift through all the necessary data... "You can find up to 10,000, hundreds of thousands of boulders, and it's very time consuming," Nils Prieur, a planetary scientist at Stanford University in California said during his talk at AGU. Prieur's new machine-learning algorithm can detect boulders across the whole moon in only 30 minutes. It's important to know where these large chunks of rock are to make sure new missions can land safely at their destinations. Boulders are also useful for geology, providing clues to how impacts break up the rocks around them to create craters. Computers can identify a number of other planetary phenomena, too: explosive volcanoes on Mercury, vortexes in Jupiter's thick atmosphere and craters on the moon, to name a few. During the conference, planetary scientist Ethan Duncan, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, demonstrated how machine learning can identify not chunks of rock, but chunks of ice on Jupiter's icy moon Europa. The so-called chaos terrain is a messy-looking swath of Europa's surface, with bright ice chunks strewn about a darker background. With its underground ocean, Europa is a prime target for astronomers interested in alien life, and mapping these ice chunks will be key to planning future missions. Upcoming missions could also incorporate artificial intelligence as part of the team, using this tech to empower probes to make real-time responses to hazards and even land autonomously. Landing is a notorious challenge for spacecraft, and always one of the most dangerous times of a mission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge presents what it's calling "an interview with an AI early adopter," who is currently using ChatGPT not just to generate titles, but also the plots for their mysteries. For example, "I need four murder suspects with information about why they're suspected and how they are cleared. And then tell me who the guilty killer is." The author says "It will do just that. It will spit that out." Q: You and a few other independent authors were early adopters of these tools. With ChatGPT, it feels like a lot of other people are suddenly grappling with the same questions you were confronting. What's that been like...? Every group, every private, behind-the-scenes author group I'm in, there's some kind of discussion going on. Right now, everybody's talking about using it on the peripherals. But there seems to be this moral chasm between: "It does blurbs really well, and I hate doing blurbs, and I have to pay somebody to do blurbs, and blurbs isn't writing, so I'm going to use it for blurbs." Or "Well, I'm going to have it help me tighten up my plot because I hate plotting, but it plots really well, so I'm going to use it for that." Or "Did you know that if you tell it to proofread, it'll make sure that it's grammatically correct?' Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they're talking about this: "But I do not ever use its words to write my books." And I do.... The actual words, just to get them down faster and get it out, I do. So I've found myself in the past couple of weeks wondering, do I engage in this debate? Do I say anything? For the most part, I've said nothing. Q: What do you think the line is that people are drawing? It's a concern of plagiarism. Everybody knows that they crawled stuff with permission and without permission. And there's an ethical question.... I have three authors that I've read extensively, indie authors that I'm friends with, and I know they never gave permission for their stuff to be looked at, and I was able to reasonably recreate their style.... That I won't do. That, for me, is an ethical line.... But you could, if you were ethically okay with that, with this technology and what it allows you to do.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The first mostly non-human-run McDonald's is open for business just outside Fort Worth, Texas," reports the Guardian. CNN calls it "an almost fully-automated restaurant," noting there's just one self-service kiosk (with a credit card reader) for ordering food. McDonalds tells CNN there's "some interaction between customers and the restaurant team" when picking up orders or drinks. But at the special "order ahead" drive-through lane, your app-ordered bag of food is instead delivered to a platform by your car's window using a vertical conveyor belt. CNN reports that it's targetted to customers on the go. For example, there's dedicated parking spaces outside for curbside pickup orders, while inside there's a room with bags to be picked up by food-delivery couriers (who also get their own designated parking spaces outside). But for regular customers, CBS emphasizes that "ordering is done through kiosks or an app — no humans involved there, either."But not all customers are loving it. "Well there goes millions of jobs," one commenter on a TikTok video said about the new restaurant said. "Oh no first we have to talk with Siri and Google [and] now we have to talk to another computer," another one opined. "I'm not giving my money to robots," another commenter wrote. "Raise the minimum wage!" Other customers had more personal concerns, expressing worries about how they could get their order fixed if it was incorrectly prepared or how to ask for extra condiments. "And if they forget an item. Who you supposed to tell, the robot? It defeats the purpose of using the drive thru if you have to go inside for it," one consumer noted.... To be sure, not everyone had negative views about the concept. Some customers expressed optimism that the automated restaurant could improve service and their experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek:Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this." The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers. The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels. Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned.""They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...." "It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.] [...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Zero Day Initiative, a zero-day security research firm, announced a new Linux kernel security bug that allows authenticated remote users to disclose sensitive information and run code on vulnerable Linux kernel versions. ZDNet reports:Originally, the Zero Day Initiative ZDI rated it a perfect 10 on the 0 to 10 common Vulnerability Scoring System scale. Now, the hole's "only" a 9.6.... The problem lies in the Linux 5.15 in-kernel Server Message Block (SMB) server, ksmbd. The specific flaw exists within the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands. The issue results from the lack of validating the existence of an object prior to performing operations on the object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the kernel context. This new program, which was introduced to the kernel in 2021, was developed by Samsung. Its point was to deliver speedy SMB3 file-serving performance.... Any distro using the Linux kernel 5.15 or above is potentially vulnerable. This includes Ubuntu 22.04, and its descendants; Deepin Linux 20.3; and Slackware 15.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Microsoft employee appears to have accidentally announced that Windows 11's Notepad app is getting a tabs feature," reports the Verge:The employee, a senior product manager at Microsoft, posted a photo of a version of Notepad with tabs, enthusiastically announcing "Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!" with a loudspeaker emoji. The tweet was deleted minutes later, but not before Windows Central and several Windows enthusiast Twitter accounts had spotted the mistake. The Notepad screenshot includes a Microsoft internal warning: "Confidential Don't discuss features or take screenshots...." The addition of tabs in Notepad could signal a shift towards tabs appearing in more built-in Windows apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reports on a dangerously "wormable" Windows vulnerability that allowed attackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required — a vulnerability that was present "in a much broader range of network protocols, giving attackers more flexibility than they had when exploiting the older vulnerability."Microsoft fixed CVE-2022-37958 in September during its monthly Patch Tuesday rollout of security fixes. At the time, however, Microsoft researchers believed the vulnerability allowed only the disclosure of potentially sensitive information. As such, Microsoft gave the vulnerability a designation of "important." In the routine course of analyzing vulnerabilities after they're patched, IBM security researcher Valentina Palmiotti discovered it allowed for remote code execution in much the way EternalBlue did [the flaw used to detonate WannaCry]. Last week, Microsoft revised the designation to critical and gave it a severity rating of 8.1, the same given to EternalBlue.... One potentially mitigating factor is that a patch for CVE-2022-37958 has been available for three months. EternalBlue, by contrast, was initially exploited by the NSA as a zero-day. The NSA's highly weaponized exploit was then released into the wild by a mysterious group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The leak, one of the worst in the history of the NSA, gave hackers around the world access to a potent nation-state-grade exploit. Palmiotti said there's reason for optimism but also for risk: "While EternalBlue was an 0-Day, luckily this is an N-Day with a 3 month patching lead time," said Palmiotti. There's still some risk, Palmiotti tells Ars Technica. "As we've seen with other major vulnerabilities over the years, such as MS17-010 which was exploited with EternalBlue, some organizations have been slow deploying patches for several months or lack an accurate inventory of systems exposed to the internet and miss patching systems altogether." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meanwhile, over in the Microsoft ecosystem, CNET reports:You can ditch the subscription (with recurring charges) and snag a lifetime license of access to Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher and Access for just $30... That's back at the lowest price we've ever seen, and a whopping 91% off the usual price of $349. However, this deal expires in just a few days, so be sure to get your order in soon.The offer, from StackSocial, applies to both the Windows and Mac version of the software. Now, you can always opt to use the free online version of Microsoft Office (which has far fewer features). But compared to the online Microsoft 365 subscription suite that costs $10 per month or $100 per year, this downloadable version is a phenomenal bargain. The Mac deal ends today, but the Windows deal extends through December 28th, according to CNET's article. "The two big caveats: You get a single key — which only works on a single computer — and there's no Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Storage included."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday America's Federal Trade Commission issued an announcement on what it called "illegal business tactics that Mastercard has been using to force merchants to route debit card payments through its payment network," saying the FTC is now requiring Mastercard "to stop blocking the use of competing debit payment networks."The popularity of debit cards has been growing especially quickly for purchases consumers make using their personal devices equipped with ewallet applications such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet. Payment card networks play a critical role in those debit card transactions.... Payment card networks compete for the business of banks that issue cards and for the business of merchants that accept card payments. Mastercard, along with Visa, is one of the two leading payment card networks in the United States. The processing fees charged by networks total billions of dollars every year, affecting every purchase made with a debit card, according to the FTC. Most of these fees are paid by the merchants to the card-issuing banks and the payment card networks.... Mastercard was flouting the law by setting policies to block merchants from routing ecommerce transactions using Mastercard-branded debit cards saved in ewallets to alternative payment card networks, including networks that may charge lower fees than Mastercard, the FTC alleged. Specifically, Mastercard used its control over a process called "tokenization" to block the use of competing payment card networks, the agency alleged. Transactions commonly are "tokenized" by replacing the cardholder's primary account number with a different number to protect the account number during some stages of a debit transaction. Tokens are stored in ewallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet and serve as a substitute credential to provide additional protection for a cardholder's account number.... According to the FTC, Mastercard refuses to provide conversion services to competing networks for remote ewallet debit transactions...thereby making it impossible for merchants to route their ewallet transactions on a network other than Mastercard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justin Garrison works at Amazon Web Services on the Kubernetes team (and was senior systems engineer on several animated films). This week he spotted a new milestone for Linux in the 2022 StackOverflow developer survey:[Among the developers surveyed] Linux as a primary operating system had been steadily climbing for the past 5 years. 2018 through 2021 saw steady growth with 23.2%, 25.6%, 26.6%, 25.3%, and finally in 2022 the usage was 40.23%. Linux usage was more than macOS in 2021, but only by a small margin. 2022 it is now 9% more than macOS. Their final stats for "professional use" operating system:Windows: 48.82%Linux-based: 39.89%MacOs: 32.97%But Garrison's blog post notes that that doesn't include the million-plus people all the Linux-based cloud development environments (like GitHub Workspaces) — not to mention the 15% of WSL users on Windows and all the users of Docker (which uses a Linux VM). "It's safe to say more people use Linux as part of their development workflow than any other operating system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like a visit from an old friend, it's Donald Knuth's annual Christmas tree lecture for 2022. "Because of the pandemic, it's been three years since Knuth has been able to honor this tradition," notes The New Stack:2022 marks the 60th anniversary of that fateful day in 1962 when a 24-year-old Donald Knuth started writing " The Art of Computer Programming." Now approaching his 85th birthday, Knuth has become almost a legend in the world of computer programming — and he's still writing additional volumes for his massive analysis of algorithms. But every year, right around Christmas time, there's another tradition. Knuth gives a special lecture "pitched at non-specialists" for a small audience at Stanford University (where Knuth is a professor emeritus) and a larger audience online... Hunched over a notepad (which was projected onto a screen behind him), Knuth began the 26th annual Christmas lecture by pointing out that the evening's topic had been hiding in plain sight for two decades. For the first 20 years, they'd called them the "Christmas tree" lectures, since "trees are one of the most important things to a computer scientist. And every year I learned at least two new cool things about trees..." About five years ago they'd changed the name to just "Christmas lectures" — but the problem wasn't that trees stopped being interesting. "I still learn cool things about trees every year. But they're getting harder and harder to explain to a general audience!" So this year's triumphant "homecoming" lecture would indeed include trees — specifically a phenomenon Knuth describes as "twintrees," along with Baxter permutations, and Floorplans. Knuth noted they're all topics touched on in the latest volume of The Art of Computer Programming, before jokingly reminding the audience that his book makes an excellent Christmas present. By the end of the lecture, Knuth had written algorithms for all three mathematical concepts — then connected all three algorithms with Linux pipes to show what happens when you convert one kind of sequence into the other and then into the other. "I get back, of course, the one I started with!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN shares the historic close-up snowflake photos of Wilson Bentley, the first person to capture the details of the individual "snow crystal" ice that makes up snowflakes. It was 1885, just 69 years after the invention of the camera, and after years of trial and error, "He went on to photograph more than 5,000 of these "ice flowers" during his lifetime — never finding any duplicates — and the images still mesmerize to this day."Every snow crystal shares a common six-sided or six-pointed structure — it's how frozen water molecules arrange themselves — but they will always vary from one another because each falls from the sky in its own unique way and experiences slightly different atmospheric conditions on its travel down to earth. Some of their arms may look long and skinny. Others may appear short and flat or somewhere in between. The possibilities are endless and fascinating.... "He had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and you can see that in his writings," said Sue Richardson, Bentley's great-grandniece who is vice president of the board for the Jericho Historical Society. "He wrote many, many articles over the years for scientific publications and for other magazines like Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic. "He also kept very detailed weather records and very detailed journals of every photograph that he took of a snow crystal — the temperature, the humidity, what part of the storm it came from. He kept very detailed information, and then these weather records that he kept and the theories that he developed about how snow crystals formed in the atmosphere, those were proven true...." It wasn't easy, however, to get those snow crystals on camera. It took almost three years, Richardson said, for Bentley to figure out how to successfully photograph one — which he did just a month shy of his 20th birthday. The first obstacle was figuring out how to attach the microscope to the camera. And then there was the challenge of getting each crystal photographed before it could melt away. "He worked in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house. He had to," Richardson said. "And the microscope slides, everything, had to be an ambient temperature or they'd melt" the crystal.... A children's book about him won the Caldecott Medal in 1999. Bentley never had formal education, according to his grandniece (who grew up hearing stories about this famous ancestor). One says that when Wilson Bentley was given an old microscope at age 15, "The first time he looked at a snow crystal under it, he was hooked. Just the beauty, the intricate detail. He was totally hooked."Read more of this story at Slashdot.