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An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The surge of interest in AI is creating a massive demand for computing power. Around the world, companies are trying to keep up with the vast amount of GPUs needed to power more and more advanced AI models. While GPUs are not the only option for running an AI model, they have become the hardware of choice due to their ability to efficiently handle multiple operations simultaneously -- a critical feature when developing deep learning models. But not every AI startup has the capital to invest in the huge numbers of GPUs now required to run a cutting-edge model. For some, it's a better deal to outsource it. This has led to the rise of a new business: GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS). In recent years, companies like Hyperbolic, Kinesis, Runpod, and Vast.ai have sprouted up to remotely offer their clients the needed processing power. [...] Studies have shown that more than half of the existing GPUs are not in use at any given time. Whether we're talking personal computers or colossal server farms, a lot of processing capacity is under-utilized. What Kinesis does is identify idle compute -- both for GPUs and CPUs -- in servers worldwide and compile them into a single computing source for companies to use. Kinesis partners with universities, data centers, companies, and individuals who are willing to sell their unused computing power. Through a special software installed on their servers, Kinesis detects idle processing units, preps them, and offers them to their clients for temporary use. [...] The biggest advantage of GPUaaS is economical. By removing the need to purchase and maintain the physical infrastructure, it allows companies to avoid investing in servers and IT management, and to instead put their resources toward improving their own deep learning, large language, and large vision models. It also lets customers pay for the exact amount of GPUs they use, saving the costs of the inevitable idle compute that would come with their own servers. The report notes that GPUaaS is growing in profitability. "In 2023, the industry's market size was valued at US $3.23 billion; in 2024, it grew to $4.31 billion," reports IEEE. "It's expected to rise to $49.84 billion by 2032."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many of the world's largest tech companies, including Meta, Google, TikTok, and X, have pledged to European lawmakers that they will do more to prevent and remove illegal hate speech on their platforms. The revised set of voluntary commitments unveiled on Monday aim to help platforms "demonstrate their compliance" with the Digital Services Act (DSA) obligations regarding illegal content moderation. The Verge reports: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Dailymotion, Jeuxvideo.com, Rakuten Viber, and Microsoft-hosted consumer services have all signed the "Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online Plus" -- which is not a terribly named streaming service but an update to a 2016 Code. The revised code commits signatories to transparency around hate speech detection and reduction, to allowing third-party monitors to assess how hate speech notices are reviewed by the platforms, and to review "at least two-thirds of hate speech notices" within 24 hours. These EU Codes of Conduct are voluntary commitments and companies face no penalties if they decide to back out of the agreement [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The notorious hacker IntelBroker claims to have stolen data from HPE systems, including source code, private repositories, digital certificates, and access to certain services. SecurityWeek reports: The compromised data allegedly includes source code for products such as Zerto and iLO, private GitHub repositories, digital certificates, Docker builds, and even some personal information that the hacker described as "old user PII for deliveries." IntelBroker is also offering access to some services used by HPE, including APIs, WePay, GitHub and GitLab. Contacted by SecurityWeek, HPE said it's aware of the breach claims and is conducting an investigation. "HPE became aware on January 16 of claims being made by a group called IntelBroker that it was in possession of information belonging to HPE. HPE immediately activated our cyber response protocols, disabled related credentials, and launched an investigation to evaluate the validity of the claims," said HPE spokesperson Adam R. Bauer. "There is no operational impact to our business at this time, nor evidence that customer information is involved," Bauer added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CIA has developed a chatbot to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers. "Understanding leaders around the world is one of the CIA's most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors," reports the New York Times. "A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work." From the report: The chatbot is part of the spy agency's drive to improve the tools available to CIA analysts and its officers in the field, and to better understand adversaries' technical advances. Core to the effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the most secretive agency. William Burns, CIA director for the past four years, prioritized improving the agency's technology and understanding of how it is used. Incoming Trump administration officials say they plan to build on those initiatives, not tear them down. [...] The CIA has long used digital tools, spy gadgets and even AI. But with the development of new forms of AI, including the large language models that power chatbots, the agency has stepped up its investments. Making better use of AI, Burns said, is crucial to US competition with China. And better AI models have helped the agency's analysts "digest the avalanche of open-source information out there," he said. The new tools have also helped analysts process clandestinely acquired information, Burns said. New technologies developed by the agency are helping spies navigate cities in authoritarian countries where governments use AI-powered cameras to conduct constant surveillance on their population and foreign spies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Meta is among a long list of companies being sued for allegedly using pirated material to train its AI models. Meta has never denied using copyrighted works but stressed that it would rely on a fair use defense. However, with rightsholders in one case asking for torrent client data and 'seeding lists' for millions of books allegedly shared in public, the case now takes a geeky turn. [...] A few weeks ago, the plaintiffs asked for permission to submit a third amended complaint (PDF). After uncovering Meta's use of BitTorrent to source copyright-infringing training data from pirate shadow library, LibGen, the request was justified, they argued. Specifically, the authors say that Meta willingly used BitTorrent to download pirated books from LibGen, knowing that was legally problematic. As a result, Meta allegedly shared copies of these books with other people, as is common with the use of BitTorrent. "By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books," the amended complaint notes. "Put another way, by opting to use a bit torrent system to download LibGen's voluminous collection of pirated books, Meta 'seeded' pirated books to other users worldwide." Meta believed that the allegations weren't sufficiently new to warrant an update to the complaint. The company argued that it was already a well-known fact that it used books from these third-party sources, including LibGen. However, the authors maintained that the 'torrent' angle is novel and important enough to warrant an update. Last week, United States District Judge Vince Chhabria agreed, allowing the introduction of these new allegations. In addition to greenlighting the amended complaint, the Judge also allowed the authors to conduct further testimony on the "seeding" angle. "[E]vidence about seeding is relevant to the existing claim because it is potentially relevant to the plaintiffs' assertion of willful infringement or to Meta's fair use defense," Judge Chhabria wrote last week. With the court recognizing the relevance of Meta's torrenting activity, the plaintiffs requested reconsideration of an earlier order, where discovery on BitTorrent-related matters was denied. Through a filing submitted last Wednesday, the plaintiffs hope to compel Meta to produce its BitTorrent logs and settings, including peer lists and seeding data. "The Order denied Plaintiffs' motion to compel production of torrenting data, including Meta's BitTorrent client, application logs, and peer lists. This data will evidence how much content Meta torrented from shadow libraries and how much it seeded to third parties as a host of this stolen IP," they write. While archiving lists of seeders is not a typical feature for a torrent client, the authors are requesting Meta to disclose any relevant data. In addition, they also want the court to reconsider its ruling regarding the crime-fraud exception. That's important, they suggest, as Meta's legal counsel was allegedly involved in matters related to torrenting. "Meta, with the involvement of in-house counsel, decided to obtain copyrighted works without permission from online databases of copyrighted works that 'we know to be pirated, such as LibGen," they write. The authors allege that this involved "seeding" files and that Meta attempted to "conceal its actions" by limiting the amount of data shared with the public. One Meta employee also asked for guidance, as "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta announced a new video editing app called Edits to fill the gap left by ByteDance's CapCut editor, which was temporarily removed from the App Store and Google Play Store as part of the TikTok ban. While the ban was lifted, the new app serves to capitalize on the uncertainty of TikTok's future. TechCrunch reports: Instagram head Adam Mosseri (pictured above) said on Threads that the app will launch next month on iOS, with an Android version following later. He added that the company is working with select creators to gather feedback about the app. "Today we're announcing a new app called 'Edits,' for those of you who are passionate about making videos on your phone. There's a lot going on right now, but no matter what happens, it's our job to provide the best possible tools for creators," he wrote. Mosseri said the app will have a suite of creative tools, including a dedicated tab for inspiration, a tab for keeping track of ideas, and a high-quality camera. Plus, it will have the ability to share draft versions of creations with friends or collaborators. He added that creators would be able to see insights on how videos made through Edits are performing on Instagram after publishing. In a separate post, he emphasized that the app is "more for creators than casual video makers," which is hard to quantify in measurable terms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald and Melania Trump have launched a pair of meme coins just before President Trump was sworn into office. The coins are already worth billions of dollars, raising "serious ethical questions and conflicts of interest," said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. CNN reports: Melania Trump launched her cryptocurrency $MELANIA in a social media post Sunday, sending her husband's cryptocurrency $TRUMP, announced two days earlier, plummeting. "The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now. https://melaniameme.com," the future first lady wrote on X Sunday. Meme coins are a type of highly volatile cryptocurrency inspired by popular internet or cultural trends. They carry no intrinsic value but can soar, or plummet, in price. "My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE!" Trump wrote on X Friday. "It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com -- Have Fun!" Both coins are trading on the Solana blockchain. [...] $TRUMP is the first cryptocurrency endorsed by the incoming president, who once trashed bitcoin as "based on thin air." [...] While executive branch employees must follow conflict of interest criminal statutes that prevent them from participating in matters that impact their own financial interests, the law does not apply to the president or the vice president. [...] The Trump coin's market capitalization, which is based on the 200 million coins circulating, is capped at $13 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The meme coin's website said there will be 1 billion Trump coins over the next three years. Both $MELANIA and $TRUMP's websites contain disclaimers saying the coins are "intended to function as a support for, and engagement with" the values of their respective brands and "are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type." The website says the meme coin is not politically affiliated. But 80% of the coin's supply is held by Trump Organization-affiliate CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC, which are both subject to a three-year unlocking schedule -- so they cannot sell all of their holdings at once. Trump coin's fully diluted value (which reflects the eventual total supply of Trump coins) stood at around $54 billion as of Monday morning, according to CoinMarketCap. At that value, the 80% linked to Trump is worth a staggering $43 billion, at least on paper. The $TRUMP coin's website says it is "the only official Trump meme. Now, you can get your piece of history. This Trump Meme celebrates a leader who doesn't back down, no matter the odds," the website reads. "Trump owning 80% and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it," Nick Tomaino, a former Coinbase executive, said in a post on X. "Trump should be airdropping to the people rather than enriching himself or his team on this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself -- such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings -- in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies. Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company's founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment. Based on 404 Media's own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it. "We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but it's ," Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July. GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize "distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships." That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also "maintains global capabilities for location identification." [...] GeoSpy has not received much media attention, but it has become something of a sensation on YouTube. Multiple content creators have tested out the tool, and some try to feed it harder and harder challenges. Now that it's been shut off to the public, users have to request access, which is "available exclusively to qualified law enforcement agencies, enterprise users and government entities," according to the company's website. The law enforcement-version of GeoSpy is more powerful than what was publicly available, according to Heinen's Discord posts. "Geospy.ai is a demo," he wrote in September. "The real work is the law enforcement models."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An organization developing math benchmarks for AI didn't disclose that it had received funding from OpenAI until relatively recently, drawing allegations of impropriety from some in the AI community. Epoch AI, a nonprofit primarily funded by Open Philanthropy, a research and grantmaking foundation, revealed on December 20 that OpenAI had supported the creation of FrontierMath. FrontierMath, a test with expert-level problems designed to measure an AI's mathematical skills, was one of the benchmarks OpenAI used to demo its upcoming flagship AI, o3. In a post on the forum LessWrong, a contractor for Epoch AI going by the username "Meemi" says that many contributors to the FrontierMath benchmark weren't informed of OpenAI's involvement until it was made public. "The communication about this has been non-transparent," Meemi wrote. "In my view Epoch AI should have disclosed OpenAI funding, and contractors should have transparent information about the potential of their work being used for capabilities, when choosing whether to work on a benchmark."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France's low-carbon electricity output surged to more than 95% of annual power production for the first time in 2024, as rising nuclear and hydro generation squeezed the use of fossil fuels. From a report: Rebounding atomic production together with record output from renewables boosted France's electricity production to a five-year high of 536.5 terawatt hours, transmission network operator Reseau de Transport d'Electricite said in a statement on Monday. Net exports almost doubled to record of 89 terawatt hours as domestic demand remain subdued due to sluggish economic growth. Electricite de France SA's nuclear fleet -- the backbone of western Europe's power system -- has largely recovered from maintenance issues that worsened the continent's energy crisis in 2022. That's helping keep a lid on electricity prices, even as the cost of natural gas has risen since Russia's attack on Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers could steal sensitive personal data from former startup employees by exploiting abandoned company domains and Google login systems, security researcher Dylan Ayrey revealed at ShmooCon conference. The vulnerability particularly affects startups that relied on "Sign in with Google" features for their business software. Ayrey, CEO of Truffle Security, demonstrated the flaw by purchasing one failed startup's domain and accessing ChatGPT, Slack, Notion, Zoom and an HR system containing Social Security numbers. His research found 116,000 website domains from failed tech startups currently available for sale. While Google offers preventive measures through its OAuth "sub-identifier" system, some providers avoid it due to reliability concerns - which Google disputes. The company initially dismissed Ayrey's finding as a fraud issue before reversing course and awarding him a $1,337 bounty. Google has since updated its documentation but hasn't implemented a technical fix, TechCrunch reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has launched a new iOS livestreaming app that allows users to switch between three camera views -- but initially excludes support for Canon cameras. The "Live Switcher Mobile" app, compatible only with Apple devices, offers automated camera switching and streaming to platforms including YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook through RTMP protocol. The free version supports 720p resolution with ads and watermarks, while an $18 monthly subscription unlocks 1080p quality and additional features. Canon plans to add support for its cameras in future updates, it says. Further reading: Canon Draws Fire for Charging Subscription Fee To Use Cameras as Webcams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing will host the world's first human-robot half-marathon in April, with dozens of humanoid robots competing alongside 12,000 human runners in the capital's Daxing district. The robots, from more than 20 companies, must be between 0.5 and 2 meters tall, bipedal, and capable of walking or running without wheels, according to local authorities. Both remote-controlled and autonomous robots can participate, with battery changes permitted during the 21km (13 miles) race.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday in a ceremony inside the U.S. Capitol's Rotunda, returning to the White House after defeating Kamala Harris. Trump, 78, took the oath of office before a packed crowd of lawmakers, dignitaries, and supporters, with Chief Justice John Roberts administering the ceremony. Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama attended, continuing a tradition of peaceful transitions of power. In a notable show of corporate support, top technology executives including Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Tesla's Elon Musk sat in prominent positions near the stage. Prior to the ceremony, Biden and Trump shared a limousine ride to the Capitol, maintaining another inaugural tradition despite their fierce rivalry. Biden, 82, issued several last-minute pardons before departing office, including one for Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center shows more and more teens are turning to ChatGPT for help with their homework. Three things to know: 1. According to the survey, 26% of students ages 13-17 are using the artificial intelligence bot to help them with their assignments.2. That's double the number from 2023, when 13% reported the same habit when completing assignments.3. Comfort levels with using ChatGPT for different types of assignments vary among students: 54% found that using it to research new topics, for example, was an acceptable use of the tool. But only 18% said the same for using it to write an essay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology giants must do more to co-operate with law enforcement on encryption or they risk threatening European democracy, according to the head of Europol, as the agency gears up to renew pressure on companies at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. From a report:Catherine De Bolle told the Financial Times she will meet Big Tech groups in the Swiss mountain resort to discuss the matter, claiming that companies had a "social responsibility" to give the police access to encrypted messages that are used by criminals to remain anonymous. "Anonymity is not a fundamental right," said the EU law enforcement agency's executive director. "When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter." In a digital environment, the police needed to be able to decode these messages to fight crime, she added. "You will not be able to enforce democracy [without it]."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nokiaaccurately predicted the iPhone would revolutionize the smartphone industry in a confidential analysis prepared the day after Apple unveiled the device in 2007, according to internal documents recently released by Nokia's Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. The presentation praised the iPhone's touchscreen interface and recognized Apple's unprecedented control over carrier relationships, though it misjudged the importance of web browsing and Java support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission intends to propose a ban on the use of PFAS, or "forever chemicals", in consumer products, with exemptions for essential industrial uses, the EU's environment chief told Reuters. From a report: PFAS, or Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, do not break down in the environment, raising concerns about the consequences of them building up in ecosystems, drinking water and the human body. They are used in thousands of items, from cosmetics and non-stick pans to aircraft and wind turbines, due to their resistance to extreme temperatures and corrosion. "What we know we are looking for is a ban in consumer products," EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told Reuters in an interview. "This is something that is important for us human beings, of course, but also for the environment, but I think also for the industry so they know how they can phase out PFAS."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people. Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a "significant advantage" in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats, the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, told TechCrunch in a phone interview. "We obviously are increasing the ways in which we can speed up the execution of kill chain so that our commanders can respond in the right time to protect our forces," said Plumb. The "kill chain" refers to the military's process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to Plumb. The relationship between the Pentagon and AI developers is a relatively new one. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta walked back their usage policies in 2024 to let U.S. intelligence and defense agencies use their AI systems. However, they still don't allow their AI to harm humans. "We've been really clear on what we will and won't use their technologies for," Plumb said, when asked how the Pentagon works with AI model providers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2022 California's Air Resources Board issued regulations to ban new diesel truck sales by 2036, remembers the Los Angeles Times, and force the owners of diesel trucks to take them off the road by 2042. "The idea was to replace those trucks with electric and hydrogen-powered versions, which dramatically reduce emissions but are currently two to three times more expensive." But it would've required a federal waiver to enforce those rules - which isn't going to happen:The Biden administration hadn't granted the waivers as of this week, and rather than face almost certain denial by the incoming Trump administration, the state withdrew its waiver request... Trucking representatives had filed a lawsuit to block the rules, arguing they would cause irreparable harm to the industry and the wider economy. The nonprofit news site CalMatters notes the withdrawal "comes after the Biden administration recently approved the California Air Resources Board's mandate phasing out new gas-powered cars by 2035, but had not yet approved other waivers for four diesel vehicle standards that the state has adopted... California may have to suspend any future rule-making for vehicles over the next four years of the Trump administration and rely instead on voluntary agreements with engine manufacturers, trucking companies, railroads and other industries." The Los Angeles Times adds that California "could, however, pursue waivers at some point in the future." Under America's federal Clean Air Act, "California is allowed to set its own air standards, and other states are allowed to follow California's lead. But federal government waivers are required..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week," Linux Torvalds posted tonight on the Linux kernel mailing list, "so I've tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release." Phoronix says the release has "plenty of fine features":Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors. The new AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency.... Linux 6.13 also brings more Rust programming language infrastructure and more. Phoronix notes that Linux 6.13 also brings "the start of Intel Xe3 graphics bring-up, support for many older (pre-M1) Apple devices like numerous iPads and iPhones, NVMe 2.1 specification support, and AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support when compiling the Linux kernel with the LLVM Clang compiler." And some lucky Linux kernel developers will also be getting a guitar pedal soldered by Linus Torvalds himself, thanks to a generous offer he announced a week ago:For _me_ a traditional holiday activity tends to be a LEGO build or two, since that's often part of the presents... But in addition to the LEGO builds, this year I also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds ("LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron"). Not because I play guitar, but because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing"... [S]ince I don't actually have any _use_ for the resulting pedals (I've already foisted off a few only unsuspecting victims^Hfriends), I decided that I'm going to see if some hapless kernel developer would want one.... as an admittedly pretty weak excuse to keep buying and building kits... "It may be worth noting that while I've had good success so far, I'm a software person with a soldering iron. You have been warned... [Y]ou should set your expectations along the lines of 'quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has angered its workers "after forcing them to return to the office five days a week," reports the New York Post. The problem? "Not enough desks for everyone." (As well as "packed parking lots" that are turning some workers away.) The Post cites interviews conducted with seven Amazon employees by Business Insider (which notes that in mid-December Amazon had already "delayed full return-to-office at dozens of locations, sometimes until as late as May, because of office-capacity issues). Here in mid-January, the Post writes, many returning-to-office workers still aren't happy:Some meeting rooms have not had enough chairs - and there also have not been enough meeting rooms for everyone, one worker told the publication... [S]imply reaching the office is a challenge in itself, according to the report. Some complained they were turned away from company parking lots that were full, while others griped about having to join meetings from the road due to excess traffic on their way to the office, according to the Slack messages. Once staffers conquer the challenges of reaching the office and finding a desk, some lamented the lack of in-person discussions since many of the meetings remain virtual, according to BI. Amazon acknowledged they had offices that were "not quite ready" to "welcome everyone back a full five days a week," according to Post, though Amazon believed the number of not-quite-ready offices were "relatively small". But the parking lot situation may continue. Business Insider says one employee from Amazon's Nashville office "said the wait time for a company parking pass was backed up for months." (Although another Nashville staffer said Amazon was handing out passes for them to take mass-transit for free, which they'd described as "incredibly generous.") There's also Amazon shuttle busses, according to the article. Although other staffers "said they were denied a spot on Amazon shuttle buses because the vehicles were full..."Others said they just drove back home, while some staffers found street parking nearby, according to multiple Slack messages seen by Business Insider... This month, some employees were still questioning the logic behind the policy. They said being in the office has had little effect on their work routine and has not generated much of a productivity gain. A considerable portion of their in-office work is still being done through video calls with customers who are elsewhere, these employees told BI. Many Amazon colleagues are at other office locations, so face-to-face meetings still don't happen very often, they added. The Post adds another drawback of returning to the office. "Employees at Amazon's Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Engineers have showcased a prototype electric vehicle that can drive for up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per day using just solar power," reports LiveScience. The production-ready "Aptera Launch Edition" made its first appearance this month at CES 2025, and "also offers up to 400 miles (640 km) of range from a single charge via an electrical output, company representatives said in a statement." LiveScience describes the vehicle as "lighter and more energy-efficient than conventional EVs, while offering a 50% reduction in aerodynamic resistance," with an energy efficiency rating of 100 Watt-hours per mile (Wh/mile).By contrast, a Tesla Model S (released in 2022) consumes 194 Wh/mile in the city in mild weather and 288 Wh/mile on the highway in mild weather, according to the EV Database. At a maximum range of 440 miles - including 40 miles using solar power and 400 miles using electricity - the Aptera EV may also overtake the current longest-range vehicles in production. The Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ has a maximum range of 425 miles (684 km), according to the EV Database, followed by the Lucid Air Grand Touring at 410 miles (660 km). Aptera says it's raised $135 million "through equity crowdfunding" to fund its pre-production progress. "Since its launch, the Company has accepted $1.7 billion in pre-orders with nearly 50,000 vehicles reserved by future Aptera owners in the U.S. and internationally." MotorTrend writes that "nearly two decades in the making, the otherworldly three-wheel Aptera is headed to production this year as a $40,000, 400-mile EV that can capture up to 40 miles worth of free solar energy every day. Maybe."The California startup made similar promises in 2008, 2009, 2012, and 2022 and yet it has never delivered a single vehicle. Is anything different this time...? At CES, co-CEO (and one of Aptera's original founders) Chris Anthony told MotorTrend it will take another $60 million to finish the development work, buy the tooling, and build out the Carlsbad, California, assembly plant. "We're still in fundraising mode and we hope that we inspire some people in this beautiful building (Las Vegas Convention Center) to invest in Aptera," Anthony said. "We're trying to raise $20 million in the first quarter of this year. That will basically kick off all the long-lead items to get into production, but it's a $60 million plan to get into volume production." Anthony said the company has already made one of its largest purchases, the molds for the carbon-fiber sheet-molding composite body structure and the fiberglass sheet-molding composite body panels that will be made in Italy. The next $20 million will cover the tooling for the diecast metal suspension arms and the injection-molded interior components... It would be relatively easy for Aptera to hand build cars in a garage and announce the start of production, but the plan calls for building up to 80 cars per day per the guidance of engineering consultant and YouTuber Sandy Munro, who is an Aptera investor and adviser. "He really helped shepherd the design from what was an early prototype prove-out design into how to make the most manufacturable vehicle ever," Anthony said. The structure is built from just six parts and the entire car has been designed to be put together in a factory with just 12 stations. But that radical simplicity complicates the job at hand right now. In addition to developing the car, the small engineering team also has to create the machine that makes it. Anthony's plan has the factory ramping up to build 20,000 vehicles a year within nine months of starting production at the end of 2025. Before that can happen, Aptera needs to clear the same hurdle that tripped it up in 2011 and sent the company stumbling into liquidation - the money. "We would love one investor to be so inspired by what we're doing that they just hand us a $60 million check," Anthony told MotorTrend. "But it could be something that's kind of piecemeal over the next nine months to get that $60 million into the company." Are you convinced?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Los Angeles Times calls it "a guns-blazingly funny documentary about two out-of-work British actors who spent a chunk of their COVID-19 lockdown staging Shakespeare's masterpiece on the mean streets of Grand Theft Auto V." Grand Theft Hamlet won SXSW's Jury Award for best documentary, and has now opened in U.S. theatres this weekend (and begun streaming on Mubi), after opening in the U.K. and Ireland. But nearly the entire film is set in Grand Theft Auto's crime-infested version of Los Angeles, the Times reports, "where even the good guys have weapons and a nihilistic streak - the vengeful Prince of Denmark fits right in."Yet when Sam Crane, a.k.a. @Hamlet_thedane, launches into one of the Bard's monologues, he's often murdered by a fellow player within minutes. Everyone's a critic. Crane co-directed the movie with his wife, Pinny Grylls, a first-time gamer who functions as the film's camera of sorts. What her character sees, where she chooses to stand and look, makes up much of the film, although the editing team does phenomenal work splicing in other characters' points of view. (We're never outside of the game until the last 30 seconds; only then do we see anyone's real face....) The Bard's story is only half the point. Really, this is a classic let's-put-on-a-pixilated-show tale about the need to create beauty in the world - even this violent world - especially when stage productions in England have shuttered, forcing Crane, a husband and father, and Mark Oosterveen, single and lonely, to kill time speeding around the digital desert... To our surprise (and theirs), the play's tussles with depression and anguish and inertia become increasingly resonant as the production and the pandemic limps toward their conclusions. When Crane and Oosterveen's "Grand Theft Auto" avatars hop into a van with an anonymous gamer and ask this online stranger for his thoughts on Hamlet's suicidal soliloquy, the man, a real-life delivery driver stuck at home with a broken leg, admits, "I don't think I'm in the right place to be replying to this right now...." In 2014 Hamlet was also staged in Guild Wars 2, the article points out. "This is, however, the first attempt I'm aware of that attempts to do the whole thing live in one go, no matter if one of the virtual actors falls to their doom from a blimp. "As Grylls says, 'You can't stop production just because somebody dies.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's outgoing national security adviser has "wide access to the world's secrets," writes Axios, adding that the security adviser delivered a "chilling" warning that "The next few years will determine whether AI leads to catastrophe - and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race." But in addition, Sullivan "said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states... 'There's going to have to be a new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor,' Sullivan says..." Somehow, government will have to join forces with these companies to nurture and protect America's early AI edge, and shape the global rules for using potentially God-like powers, he says. U.S. failure to get this right, Sullivan warns, could be "dramatic, and dramatically negative - to include the democratization of extremely powerful and lethal weapons; massive disruption and dislocation of jobs; an avalanche of misinformation..." To distill Sullivan: America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something with capabilities we didn't anticipate or prepare for. We need to both beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don't use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration - and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China... There's no person we know in a position of power in AI or governance who doesn't share Sullivan's broad belief in the stakes ahead... That said, AI is like the climate: America could do everything right - but if China refuses to do the same, the problem persists and metastasizes fast. Sullivan said Trump, like Biden, should try to work with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a global AI framework, much like the world did with nuclear weapons. "I personally am not an AI doomer," Sullivan says in the interview. "I am a person who believes that we can seize the opportunities of AI. But to do so, we've got to manage the downside risks, and we have to be clear-eyed and real about those risks." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:Ruptures of undersea cables that have rattled European security officials in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage, according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials. The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed... [S]o far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow. Instead, U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date - including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence - points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels. U.S. officials cited "clear explanations" that have come to light in each case indicating a likelihood that the damage was accidental, and a lack of evidence suggesting Russian culpability. Officials with two European intelligence services said that they concurred with U.S. assessments. Despite initial suspicions that Russia was involved, one European official said there is "counter evidence" suggesting otherwise. The U.S. and European officials declined to elaborate and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of ongoing investigations... A Nordic official briefed on the investigation said conditions on the tanker were abysmal. "We've always gone out with the assumption that shadow fleet vessels are in bad shape," the official said. "But this was even worse than we thought...." European security officials said that Finland's main intelligence service is in agreement with Western counterparts that the Dec. 25 incident appears to have been an accident, though they cautioned that it may be impossible to rule out a Russian role. The article points out another reason Russia might not want to draw attention to the waterways around NATO countries. Doing so "could endanger oil smuggling operations Russia has relied on to finance the war in Ukraine, and possibly provoke more aggressive efforts by Western governments to choke off Russia's route to the North Atlantic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As large-scale solar farms crop up across the U.S.," reports ABC News, "the booming solar industry has found an unlikely mascot..." Sheep.In Milam County, outside Austin [Texas], SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares). How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine. The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend - solar grazing - that has exploded alongside the solar industry. Agrivoltaics, a method using land for both solar energy production and agriculture, is on the rise with more than 60 solar grazing projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The American Solar Grazing Association says 27 states engage in the practice. "The industry tends to rely on gas-powered mowers, which kind of contradicts the purpose of renewables," SB Energy asset manager James Hawkins said... Because solar fields use sunny, flat land that is often ideal for livestock grazing, the power plants have been used in coordination with farmers rather than against them.... Some agriculture experts say [solar sheepherders'] success reflects how solar farms have become a boon for some ranchers. Reid Redden, a sheep farmer and solar vegetation manager in San Angelo, Texas, said a successful sheep business requires agricultural land that has become increasingly scarce. "Solar grazing is probably the biggest opportunity that the sheep industry had in the United States in several generations," Redden said. The response to solar grazing has been overwhelmingly positive in rural communities near South Texas solar farms where Redden raises sheep for sites to use, he said. "I think it softens the blow of the big shock and awe of a big solar farm coming in," Redden said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC News reported that the official newspaper of China's communist party is claiming TikTok refugees on RedNote found a "new home," and "openness, communication, and mutual learning are... the heartfelt desires of people from all countries." But in fact, Wired reports, "China's Cyberspace Administration, the country's top internet watchdog, has reportedly already grown concerned about content being shared by foreigners on Xiaohongshu," and "warned the platform earlier this week to 'ensure China-based users can't see posts from U.S. users,' according to The Information." And that's just the beginning. Wired reports that RedNote is now also "scrambling to hire English-speaking moderators."Social media platforms in China are legally required to remove a wide range of content, including nudity and graphic violence, but especially information that the government deems politically sensitive... "RedNote - like all platforms owned by Chinese companies - is subject to the Chinese Communist Party's repressive laws," wrote Allie Funk, research director for technology and democracy at the nonprofit human rights organization Freedom House, in an email to WIRED. "Independent researchers have documented how keywords deemed sensitive to those in power, such as discussion of labor strikes or criticism of Xi Jinping, can be scrubbed from the platform." But the influx of American TikTok users - as many as 700,000 in merely two days, according to Reuters - could be stretching Xiaohongshu's content moderation abilities thin, says Eric Liu, an editor at China Digital Times, a California-based publication documenting censorship in China, who also used to work as a content moderator himself for the Chinese social media platform Weibo... Liu reposted a screenshot on Bluesky showing that some people who recently joined Xiaohongshu have received notifications that their posts can only be shown to other users after 48 hours, seemingly giving the company time to determine whether they may be violating any of the platform's rules. This is a sign that Xiaohongshu's moderation teams are unable to react swiftly, Liu says... While the majority of the new TikTok refugees still appear to be enjoying their time on Xiaohongshu, some have already had their posts censored. Christine Lu, a Taiwanese-American tech entrepreneur who created a Xiaohongshu account on Wednesday, says she was suspended after uploading three provocative posts about Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan. "I support more [Chinese and American] people engaging directly. But also, knowing China, I knew it wouldn't last for long," Lu tells WIRED. Despite the 700,000 signups in two days, "It's also worth nothing that the migration to RedNote is still very small, and only a fraction of the 170 million people in the US who use TikTok," notes The Conversation. (And they add that "The US government also has the authority to pressure Apple to remove RedNote from the US App Store if it thinks the migration poses a national security threat.") One nurse told the Los Angeles Times Americans signed up for the app because they "just don't want to give in" to "bullying" by the U.S. government. (The Times notes she later recorded a video acknowledging that on the Chinese-language app, "I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what I'm reading, I'm just pressing buttons.")On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese officials had discussed the possibility of selling TikTok to a trusted non-Chinese party such as Elon Musk, who already owns social media platform X. However, analysts said that Bytedance is unlikely to agree to a sale of the underlying algorithm that powers the app, meaning the platform under a new owner could still look drastically different.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports: TikTok appears to be coming back online just hours after President-elect Donald Trump pledged Sunday that he would sign an executive order Monday that aims to restore the banned app. Around 12 hours after first shutting itself down, U.S. users began to have access to TikTok on a web browser and in the app, although the page still showed a warning about the shutdown. The brief outage was "the first time in history the U.S. government has outlawed a widely popular social media network," reports NPR. Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores. (And Apple also removed Lemon8). The incoming president announced his pending executive order "in a post on his Truth Social account," reports the Associated Press, "as millions of TikTok users in the U.S. awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform." But two Republican Senators said Sunday that the incoming president doesn't have the power to pause the TikTok ban. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Peter Ricketts of Nebraska posted on X.com that "Now that the law has taken effect, there's no legal basis for any kind of 'extension' of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale... severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posted to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok." The Associated Press reports that the incoming president offered this rationale for the reprieve in his Truth Social post. "Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations."The law gives the sitting president authority to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale is underway. Although investors made a few offers, ByteDance previously said it would not sell. In his post on Sunday, Trump said he "would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture," but it was not immediately clear if he was referring to the government or an American company... "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.," a pop-up message informed users who opened the TikTok app and tried to scroll through videos on Saturday night. "Unfortunately that means you can't use TikTok for now." The service interruption TikTok instituted hours earlier caught most users by surprise. Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users had been expected to continue to have access to videos until the app stopped working due to a lack of updates... "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned," read the pop-up message... Apple said the apps would remain on the devices of people who already had them installed, but in-app purchases and new subscriptions no longer were possible and that operating updates to iPhones and iPads might affect the apps' performance. In the nine months since Congress passed the sale-or-ban law, no clear buyers emerged, and ByteDance publicly insisted it would not sell TikTok. But Trump said he hoped his administration could facilitate a deal to "save" the app. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump's inauguration with a prime seating location. Chew posted a video late Saturday thanking Trump for his commitment to work with the company to keep the app available in the U.S. and taking a "strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship...." On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The article adds that TikTok "does not operate in China, where ByteDance instead offers Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing's strict censorship rules." Sunday morning Republican House speaker Mike Johnson offered his understanding of Trump's planned executive order, according to Politico. Speaking on Meet the Press, Johnson said "the way we read that is that he's going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership. "It's not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about. It's the Chinese Communist Party and their manipulation of the algorithms." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The JavaScript runtime Node.js can execute TypeScript (Microsoft's JavaScript-derived language with static typing). But now it can do it even better, explains Marco Ippolito of the Node.js steering committee:In August 2024 Node.js introduced a new experimental feature, Type Stripping, aimed at addressing a longstanding challenge in the Node.js ecosystem: running TypeScript with no configuration. Enabled by default in Node.js v23.6.0, this feature is on its way to becoming stable. TypeScript has reached incredible levels of popularity and has been the most requested feature in all the latest Node.js surveys. Unlike other alternatives such as CoffeeScript or Flow, which never gained similar traction, TypeScript has become a cornerstone of modern development. While it has been supported in Node.js for some time through loaders, they relied heavily on configuration and user libraries. This reliance led to inconsistencies between different loaders, making them difficult to use interchangeably. The developer experience suffered due to these inconsistencies and the extra setup required... The goal is to make development faster and simpler, eliminating the overhead of configuration while maintaining the flexibility that developers expect... TypeScript is not just a language, it also relies on a toolchain to implement its features. The primary tool for this purpose is tsc, the TypeScript compiler CLI... Type checking is tightly coupled to the implementation of tsc, as there is no formal specification for how the language's type system should behave. This lack of a specification means that the behavior of tsc is effectively the definition of TypeScript's type system. tsc does not follow semantic versioning, so even minor updates can introduce changes to type checking that may break existing code. Transpilation, on the other hand, is a more stable process. It involves converting TypeScript code into JavaScript by removing types, transforming certain syntax constructs, and optionally "downleveling" the JavaScript to allow modern syntax to execute on older JavaScript engines. Unlike type checking, transpilation is less likely to change in breaking ways across versions of tsc. The likelihood of breaking changes is further reduced when we only consider the minimum transpilation needed to make the TypeScript code executable - and exclude downleveling of new JavaScript features not yet available in the JavaScript engine but available in TypeScript... Node.js, before enabling it by default, introduced --experimental-strip-types. This mode allows running TypeScript files by simply stripping inline types without performing type checking or any other code transformation. This minimal technique is known as Type Stripping. By excluding type checking and traditional transpilation, the more unstable aspects of TypeScript, Node.js reduces the risk of instability and mostly sidesteps the need to track minor TypeScript updates. Moreover, this solution does not require any configuration in order to execute code... Node.js eliminates the need for source maps by replacing the removed syntax with blank spaces, ensuring that the original locations of the code and structure remain intact. It is transparent - the code that runs is the code the author wrote, minus the types... "As this experimental feature evolves, the Node.js team will continue collaborating with the TypeScript team and the community to refine its behavior and reduce friction. You can check the roadmap for practical next steps..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2022 Google released a tool to easily scan for vulnerabilities in dependencies named OSV-Scanner. "Together with the open source community, we've continued to build this tool, adding remediation features," according to Google's security blog, "as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats... Users looking for an out-of-the-box vulnerability scanning CLI tool should check out OSV-Scanner, which already provides comprehensive language package scanning capabilities..." Thursday they also announced an extensible library for "software composition analysis" scanning (as well as file-system scanning) named OSV-SCALIBR (Open Source Vulnerability - Software Composition Analysis LIBRary). The new library "combines Google's internal vulnerability management expertise into one scanning library with significant new capabilities such as: Software composition analysis for installed packages, standalone binaries, as well as source code OSes package scanning on Linux (COS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and much more), Windows, and Mac Artifact and lockfile scanning in major language ecosystems (Go, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and much more) Vulnerability scanning tools such as weak credential detectors for Linux, Windows, and Mac Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation in SPDX and CycloneDX, the two most popular document formats Optimization for on-host scanning of resource constrained environments where performance and low resource consumption is critical"OSV-SCALIBR is now the primary software composition analysis engine used within Google for live hosts, code repos, and containers. It's been used and tested extensively across many different products and internal tools to help generate SBOMs, find vulnerabilities, and help protect our users' data at Google scale. We offer OSV-SCALIBR primarily as an open source Go library today, and we're working on adding its new capabilities into OSV-Scanner as the primary CLI interface."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fortune reports 18% of workers have engaged in "career catfishing" - getting a job offer, but then refusing to show up on the first day of work. And when someone posted Fortune's article to Reddit's antiwork subreddit, it drew 2,100 upvotes -- and another 84 comments. ("I love doing this...! This feels really great to do after a company has jerked you around, and basically said that several other people were in line ahead of you... after five interviews.") But Fortune reports there's other sources of frustration:At the moment, Gen Z is contending with an onerous battle to land an entry-level, full-time role. The class of 2025 is set to apply to more jobs than the graduating class prior, already submitting 24% more applications on average this past summer than seniors did last year. Furthermore, the class of 2024 applied to 64% more jobs than the cohort before them, according to job platform Handshake. To make matters all the more bleak, the number of job listings has dwindled from 2023 levels, generating deeper frenzy and more intense competition for the roles listed. That adds up to a hiring managers' market and senior executives are playing hardball; only 12% of mid-level executives think entry-level workers are prepared to join the workforce, per a report from technology education provider General Assembly. About one in four say they wouldn't hire today's entry-level employees. Yet, that's not really the point of entry-level roles, points out Jourdan Hathaway, General Assembly's chief business officer. By definition, it's a position that requires investment in a young adult, she explained. "The entry-level employee pipeline is broken," Hathaway wrote in a statement. "Companies must rethink how they source, train, and onboard employees." The especially competitive hiring landscape could be forcing Gen Zers to accept the first gig they can get because the job market is so dire - only to later regret it and not show up the first day. The article also acknowledges that "employers themselves have a role in the two-way communication - or lack thereof - between hire and hirer."Almost 80% of hiring managers admitted they've stopped responding to candidates during the application process, according to a survey of 625 hiring managers from Resume Genius. Gen Zers say that their ghosting is in reaction to the company's behavior. More than a third of applicants who have purposefully dropped the ball say it was because a recruiter was rude to them or misled them about a position, according to Monster... In part, it's likely AI that's fueling said ghosting. AI has become more integrated into the hiring process, becoming a screener that rejects resumes without ever reaching a human person's eyes. That phenomenon possibly fuels both sides' tendency to be non-responsive...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN has the latest on "a startling discovery made public in July that metallic rocks were apparently producing oxygen on the Pacific Ocean's seabed, where no light can penetrate. "Initial research suggested potato-size nodules rich in metals, predominantly found 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) below the surface in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, released an electrical charge, splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen through electrolysis." The unprecedented natural phenomenon challenges the idea that oxygen can only be made from sunlight via photosynthesis. Andrew Sweetman, a professor at the UK's Scottish Association for Marine Science who was behind the find, is embarking on a three-year project to investigate the production of "dark" oxygen further... Uncovering dark oxygen revealed just how little is known about the deep ocean, and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, in particular. The region is being explored for the deep-sea mining of rare metals contained in the rock nodules. The latter are formed over millions of years, and the metals play a key role in new and green technologies... Understanding the phenomenon better could also help space scientists find life beyond Earth, [Sweetman] added... Officials at NASA are interested in the research on dark oxygen production because it could inform scientific understanding of how life might be sustained on other planets without direct sunlight, Sweetman said. The space agency wants to run experiments to understand the amount of energy required to potentially produce oxygen at higher pressures that occur on Enceladus and Europa, the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, he added. Those moons are among the targets for investigating the possibility of life. Deep-sea mining companies are aiming to mine the cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium and manganese contained in the nodules for use in solar panels, electric car batteries and other green technology. Some companies have taken issue with Sweetman's research. Critics say deep-sea mining could irrevocably damage the pristine underwater environment and that it could disrupt the way carbon is stored in the ocean, contributing to the climate crisis. CNN's article also notes Massachusetts microbiologist Emil Ruff, who found unexpected oxygen far below the Canadian prairie in water isolated from the atmosphere for more than 40,000 years. "Nature keeps surprising us," he said. "There are so many things that people have said, 'Oh, this is impossible,' and then later it turns out it's not."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models," writes Phys.org, "and faster than can be explained by our current understanding of physics." There's now been new confirmation of this (published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters) by a team led by Dan Scolnic, an associate professor of physics at Duke University. And this means the so-called Hubble tension "now turns into a crisis," said Dan Scolnic, who led the research team... This is saying, to some respect, that our model of cosmology might be broken."Measuring the universe requires a cosmic ladder, which is a succession of methods used to measure the distances to celestial objects, with each method, or "rung," relying on the previous for calibration. The ladder used by Scolnic was created by a separate team using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is observing more than 100,000 galaxies every night from its vantage point at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Scolnic recognized that this ladder could be anchored closer to Earth with a more precise distance to the Coma Cluster, one of the galaxy clusters nearest to us. "The DESI collaboration did the really hard part, their ladder was missing the first rung," said Scolnic. "I knew how to get it, and I knew that that would give us one of the most precise measurements of the Hubble constant we could get, so when their paper came out, I dropped absolutely everything and worked on this non-stop." To get a precise distance to the Coma cluster, Scolnic and his collaborators used the light curves from 12 Type Ia supernovae within the cluster. Just like candles lighting a dark path, Type Ia supernovae have a predictable luminosity that correlates to their distance, making them reliable objects for distance calculations. The team arrived at a distance of about 320 million light-years, nearly in the center of the range of distances reported across 40 years of previous studies - a reassuring sign of its accuracy. "This measurement isn't biased by how we think the Hubble tension story will end," said Scolnic. "This cluster is in our backyard, it has been measured long before anyone knew how important it was going to be." The results? "It matches the universe's expansion rate as other teams have recently measured it," writes Phys.org, "but not as our current understanding of physics predicts it. The longstanding question is: is the flaw in the measurements or in the models? Scolnic's team's new results add tremendous support to the emerging picture that the root of the Hubble tension lies in the models..." And the article closes with this quote from Scolnic:"Ultimately, even though we're swapping out so many of the pieces, we all still get a very similar number. So, for me, this is as good of a confirmation as it's ever gotten. We're at a point where we're pressing really hard against the models we've been using for two and a half decades, and we're seeing that things aren't matching up," said Scolnic. "This may be reshaping how we think about the universe, and it's exciting! There are still surprises left in cosmology, and who knows what discoveries will come next?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jersey is an island in the English channel, "a self-governing British Crown Dependency near the coast of northwest France," according to Wikipedia - population: 103,267. But now some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood," reports the Guardian, "after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems."Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island's airport, which were manufactured by the U.S. multinational 3M. .. Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean... In response to the blood results, the government established an independent PFAS scientific advisory panel to advise public policy. The panel's first report recommended that the government should look at offering bloodletting to affected residents. "Studies show that bloodletting is an effective way to lower levels of PFAS in blood," said Ian Cousins, one of the panel members, though he added that there were no guarantees the process would prevent or cure diseases associated with the chemicals. The therapy costs about 100,000 upfront and then as much as 200,000 a year to treat 50 people. The panel is also considering the benefit of the drug cholestyramine, which a study has shown reduces PFAS in blood more quickly and cheaply, albeit with possible side effects. The government says it plans to launch a clinical service by early 2025. Contamination persisted on the island for decades. "We know they started to use 3M's firefighting foam in the 1960s and then ramped up in the 1990s in weekly fire training exercises, after which foam started to appear in nearby streams," said Jeremy Snowdon, a former Jersey airport engineer who drank contaminated water for years. He has measured elevated levels of PFAS in his own blood and has high cholesterol. The article includes this quote from one of the 88 residents of the polluted area found to have high levels of PFAS after blood testing. "I just want this out of my body. I don't want to end up with bladder cancer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese social-networking site RedNote became the #1 most-downloaded app in America, reports the Associated Press, with some new users considering it a way to protest America's possible TikTok ban. So what happened next?They were met with surprise, curiosity and in-jokes on Xiaohongshu - literally, "Little Red Book" - whose users saw English-language posts take over feeds almost overnight. Americans introduced themselves with hashtag TikTok refugees, ask me anything attitude and posting photos of their pets to pay their hosts' "cat tax." Parents swapped stories about raising kids and Swifties from both countries, of course, quickly found each other. It's a rare moment of direct contact between two online worlds that are usually kept apart by language, corporate boundaries, and China's strict system of online censorship that blocks access to nearly all international media and social media services... Xiaohongshu's 300 million monthly active users are overwhelmingly Chinese - so much so that parts of its interface have no English-language version... [Press reports suggest about a million of TikTok's 170 million users tried switching to RedNote this week...] On the platform, two versions of the TikTok refugee hashtag have over 24 million posts, with related posts appearing at the top of many users' feeds. A large number of American users say they've received a warm welcome from the community, with #TikTokrefugee. "Welcome the global villagers" remains the top one trending topic on Xiaohongshu, with 8.9 million views on Thursday. Users from both countries are comparing notes on grocery prices, rent, health insurance, medical bills and the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Parents talk about what the kids learn in school in two countries. Some have already joined book clubs and are building up a community. American users asked how Chinese see the LGBTQ community and got warned that it was among sensitive topics, Chinese users taught Americans what are sensitive topics and key words to avoid censorship on the app. Chinese students pulled out their English homework, looking for help. Chinese state media, which have long dismissed U.S. allegations against TikTok, have welcomed the protest against the ban. People's Daily [the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party], said in an op-ed about TikTok refugees on Thursday that says the TikTok refugees found a "new home," and "openness, communication, and mutual learning are the unchanging themes of mankind and the heartfelt desires of people from all countries." Making the most of the moment is Jianlu Bi, who is apparently a senior content producer for Beijing's state-run China Global Television Network, which Wikipedia describes as "under the control of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party". Friday Jianlu Bi crafted an article claiming "surprising" and "stark contrasts" were revealed:While the United States is often portrayed as a land of limitless opportunity, many American netizens have shared their struggles with high living costs, particularly in urban areas. One common theme is the exorbitant cost of healthcare. "I just got a simple bill for a routine checkup and it was over $500," shared one American user. "I can't imagine what a serious illness would cost! I feel like I'm constantly on the brink of financial ruin due to medical expenses." In contrast, Chinese netizens often express surprise at the affordability of many goods and services in their home country. For instance, the cost of housing, particularly in smaller cities, is often significantly lower in China compared to the United States.... This disparity is often attributed to factors such as government policies, economic development, and cultural differences... Traditional media narratives often present simplified and often biased portrayals of China and the United States. For example, the U.S. is often portrayed as a land of opportunity with limitless possibilities, while China is sometimes depicted as a country with limited freedoms. Xiaohongshu, on the other hand, provides a platform for ordinary people to share their authentic experiences and perspectives... A Chinese student studying in the U.S. shared, "I was surprised to learn that many of my classmates are working part-time jobs to cover their tuition and living expenses. This is very different from the image of affluent American students I had in my mind. It really opened my eyes to the realities of life for many young people in the U.S." "As social media continues to evolve, these platforms will undoubtedly play an increasingly important role in shaping global perceptions..." the article concludes. Article suggested by long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ratio of vacant U.S. jobs to jobless workers "has fallen from a record of 2 in 2022 to 1.1 in November," reports the Wall Street Journal - which adds that "the balance of power between employers and employees has shifted as the labor market has gone from white-hot to merely solid." JP Morgan's five-days-a-week return-to-office mandate was only the beginning, with big companies like Amazon and Dell "tightening remote-work policies, shrinking travel budgets and cutting back on benefits... Companies are slashing perks such as college-tuition assistance and time off for a sick pet... "76% of [U.S.] job growth in the past year has been in healthcare and education, leisure and hospitality, and government. In fields such as finance, information, and professional and business services, job growth has been far weaker. While a shift in leverage to employers might have shown up in layoffs or wage cuts in the past, now it is more subtle, often in changes to working conditions. For example, knowing that some workers will quit rather than return to the office, some companies are ending remote work as a way of trimming payroll. "Quiet quitting" - workers who slacked off rather than quit - has been replaced by "quiet cutting" - employers who cut jobs without actually announcing job cuts... Michael Gibbs, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, said the new mandates might simply be a message to workers that times have changed. "Firms are trying to reset expectations," he said... [After refusing her employers return-to-office four-days-a-week mandate, Mayrian] Sanz, who now works as an independent business and leadership coach, said she applied for 25 to 30 jobs listed as remote but initially got no responses. When some hiring managers finally replied, they had a surprise: Jobs listed as remote would now be in-office. "They just say everything is shifting to going back to the office," she said. Among tech workers, the share receiving perks such as paid volunteer hours, college-tuition reimbursement, free financial advice and mental-health programs all declined by about 4 percentage points in 2024 from 2023, according to Dice, a technology job board. Average bonuses fell by more than $800, from $15,011 to $14,194. Meanwhile, Netflix has quietly backed off from its unlimited parental leave in a child's first year, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. A company spokesman said at that time that employees have the freedom and flexibility to determine what is best for them. The article notes that "The actual impact of return-to-office directives remains to be seen," with economists "skeptical" the directives make companies more productive and faster-growing:Many workers now being called in were already spending some time in their cubicles. Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, said most of the benefits of collaboration can be achieved with just a few days in the office, while some tasks that require concentration are better done at home. Elsewhere the Wall Street Journal that looking for a job "is set to get less miserable this year," since roughly two-thirds of U.S. employers plan to add permanent roles within the next six months, "according to a new survey by staffing and consulting firm Robert Half." And Computerworld notes that the IT unemployment rate is now just 2% in the U.S. (according to official figures from the US Bureau of Labor statistics).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC brings news from the Baltic Sea. After critical undersea cables were damaged or severed last year, "NATO has launched a new mission to increase the surveillance of ships..."Undersea infrastructure is essential not only for electricity supply but also because more than 95% of internet traffic is secured via undersea cables, [said NATO head Mark Rutte], adding that "1.3 million kilometres (800,000 miles) of cables guarantee an estimated 10 trillion-dollar worth of financial transactions every day". In a post on X, he said Nato would do "what it takes to ensure the safety and security of our critical infrastructure and all that we hold dear".... Estonia's Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said in December that damage to submarine infrastructure had become "so frequent" that it cast doubt on the idea the damage could be considered "accidental" or "merely poor seamanship". The article also has new details about a late-December cable-cutting by the Eagle S (which was then boarded by Finland's coast guard and steered into Finnish waters). "On Monday, Risto Lohi of Finland's National Bureau of Investigation told Reuters that the Eagle S was threatening to cut a second power cable and a gas pipe between Finland and Estonia at the time it was seized." And there's reports that the ship was loaded with spying equipment. NATO's new surveillance of the Baltic Sea will include "uncrewed surface vessels," according to defense-news web site TWZ.com:The uncrewed surface vessels [or USVs], also known as drone boats, will help establish an enhanced common operating picture to give participating nations a better sense of potential threats and speed up any response. It is the first time NATO will use USVs in this manner, said a top alliance commander... There will be at least 20 USVs assigned [a NATO spokesman told The War Zone Friday]... In the first phase of the experiment, the USVs will "have the capabilities under human control" while "later phases will include greater autonomy." The USVs will augment the dozen or so vessels as well as an unspecified number of crewed maritime patrol aircraft committed One highly-placed NATO official tells the site that within weeks "we will begin to use these ships to give a persistent, 24-7 surveillance of critical areas." Last week the U.K. government also announced "an advanced UK-led reaction system to track potential threats to undersea infrastructure and monitor the Russian shadow fleet." The system "harnesses AI to assess data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System (AIS) ships use to broadcast their position, to calculate the risk posed by each vessel entering areas of interest."Harnessing the power of AI, this UK-led system is a major innovation which allows us the unprecedented ability to monitor large areas of the sea with a comparatively small number of resources, helping us stay secure at home and strong abroad.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new law is being considered by New York's state legislature, reports a local news outlet. "if passed, will require anyone buying a 3D printer to pass a background check. If you can't legally own a firearm, you won't be able to buy one of these printers..."It is illegal to print most gun parts in New York. Attorney Greg Rinckey believes the proposal is an overreach. "I think this is also gonna face some constitutional problems. I mean, it really comes down to a legal parsing of what are you printing and at what point is it technically a firearm?" [Ascent Fabrication owner Joe] Fairley thinks lawmakers should shift their focus on those partial gun kits that produce the metal firing components. Another possibility is to require printer manufacturers to install software that prevents gun parts from being printed. "They would need to agree on some algorithm to look at the part and say nope, that is a gun component, you're not allowed to print that part somehow," said Fairley. "But I feel like it would be extremely difficult to get to that point."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A county transit police detective fed a poor-quality image to an AI-powered facial recognition program, remembers the Washington Post, leading to the arrest of "Christopher Gatlin, a 29-year-old father of four who had no apparent ties to the crime scene nor a history of violent offenses." He was unable to post the $75,000 cash bond required, and "jailed for a crime he says he didn't commit, it would take Gatlin more than two years to clear his name."A Washington Post investigation into police use of facial recognition software found that law enforcement agencies across the nation are using the artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence... The Post reviewed documents from 23 police departments where detailed records about facial recognition use are available and found that 15 departments spanning 12 states arrested suspects identified through AI matches without any independent evidence connecting them to the crime - in most cases contradicting their own internal policies requiring officers to corroborate all leads found through AI. Some law enforcement officers using the technology appeared to abandon traditional policing standards and treat software suggestions as facts, The Post found. One police report referred to an uncorroborated AI result as a "100% match." Another said police used the software to "immediately and unquestionably" identify a suspected thief. Gatlin is one of at least eight people wrongfully arrested in the United States after being identified through facial recognition... All of the cases were eventually dismissed. Police probably could have eliminated most of the people as suspects before their arrest through basic police work, such as checking alibis, comparing tattoos, or, in one case, following DNA and fingerprint evidence left at the scene. Some statistics from the article about the eight wrongfully-arrested people:In six cases police failed to check alibisIn two cases police ignored evidence that contradicted their theory In five cases police failed to collect key pieces of evidenceIn three cases police ignored suspects' physical characteristics In six cases police relied on problematic witness statementsThe article provides two examples of police departments forced to pay $300,000 settlements after wrongful arrests caused by AI mismatches. But "In interviews with The Post, all eight people known to have been wrongly arrested said the experience had left permanent scars: lost jobs, damaged relationships, missed payments on car and home loans. Some said they had to send their children to counseling to work through the trauma of watching their mother or father get arrested on the front lawn. "Most said they also developed a fear of police."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News. The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday."The top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) - CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx - generated roughly $7.3 billion through price hikes over about five years starting in 2017, the FTC said. The "excess" price hikes affected generic drugs used to treat heart disease, HIV and cancer, among other conditions, with some increases more than 1,000% of the national average costs of acquiring the medications, the commission said. The FTC also said these so-called Big Three health care companies - which it estimates administer 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S. - are inflating drug prices "at an alarming rate, which means there is an urgent need for policymakers to address it...." Some of the steepest drug markups were "hundreds and thousands of percent," according to Tuesday's report, which highlights just how profitable specialty drugs have become for the three leading PBMs. Cancer drugs alone made up nearly half of the $7.3 billion, the commission wrote, with multiple sclerosis medications accounting for another 25%. Dispensing highly marked-up specialty drugs was a massive income stream for the companies in 2021, the FTC found. Out of tens of thousands of drugs dispensed, the top 10 specialty generics alone made up nearly 11% of the companies' pharmacy-related operating income that year, the agency estimated. Across the 51 drugs the agency analyzed, the Big Three's price-markup revenue surged from $522 million in 2017 to $2.1 billion in 2021, the report said. "The FTC found that 22 percent of specialty drugs dispensed by PBM-affiliated pharmacies were marked up by more than 1,000 percent," reports The Hill, "while 41 percent were marked up between 100 and 1,000 percent. Among those drugs marked up by more than 1,000 percent, half of them were marked up by more than 2,000 percent." And the nonprofit site progressive news site Common Dreams shares some examples from the FTC's 60-page report:"For the pulmonary hypertension drug tadalafil (generic Adcirca), for example, pharmacies purchased the drug at an average of $27 in 2022, yet the Big Three PBMs marked up the drug by $2,079 and paid their affiliated pharmacies $2,106, on average, for a 30-day supply of the medication on commercial claims," the publication notes. That's a staggering average markup of 7,736%... The new analysis follows a July 2024 report that revealed Big Three PBM-affiliated pharmacies received 68% of the dispensing revenue generated by specialty drugs in 2023, a 14% increase from 2016... Responding to the FTC report, Emma Freer, senior policy analyst for healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project - a corporate accountability and antitrust advocacy group - said in a statement Tuesday that "the FTC's second interim report lays bare the blatant profiteering by PBM giants, which are marking up lifesaving drugs like cancer, HIV, and multiple sclerosis treatments by thousands of percent and forcing patients to pay the price."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth," writes the Washington Post. "But first it has to be put together, piece by piece, in a cavernous chamber at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland." One long-time NASA worker calls it "the largest clean room in the free world," and the Post notes everyone wears white gowns and surgical masks "to keep hardware from being contaminated by humans. No dust allowed. No stray hairs. One wall is entirely covered by HEPA filters."The place is known as the Clean Room, or sometimes the High Bay. It is 125 feet long, 100 feet wide, 90 feet high, with almost as much volume as the Capitol Rotunda. NASA boasts that in the Clean Room you could put nearly 30 tractor-trailers side by side on the floor and stack them 10 high... About two dozen workers clustered around towering pieces of hardware, some twice or three times the height of a typical person. When stacked and integrated, these components will form the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The assembly of the telescope ramped up this fall, with 600 workers aiming to get everything integrated and tested by late 2026. NASA has committed to launching the telescope no later than May 2027. The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a "stubby Hubble," some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can't. It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers. A primary goal of the Roman is to understand "dark energy," the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets - worlds orbiting distant stars... The main element, informally referred to as "the telescope" but officially called the "optical telescope assembly," showed up this fall. It was originally built as a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. That's right: It was built to look down at Earth, rather than at the rest of the universe. The NRO decided more than a decade ago that it didn't need it, and gave it, along with another, identical spy satellite, to NASA. Roman's wide-angle view of deep space, its maneuverability and ability to download massive amounts of data makes it optimized as a dark energy telescope. And it will also study the effects of dark matter, which comprises about 25 percent of the universe but remains a ghostly presence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists have just resurrected 'ELIZA,' the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code," reports LiveScience, "and it still works extremely well." (Click in the vintage black-and-green rectangle for a blinking-cursor prompt...)Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play "Pygmalion," who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman. As a language model that the user could interact with, ELIZA had a significant impact on today's artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers wrote in a paper posted to the preprint database arXiv Sunday (Jan. 12). The "DOCTOR" script written for ELIZA was programmed to respond to questions as a psychotherapist would. For example, ELIZA would say, "Please tell me your problem." If the user input "Men are all alike," the program would respond, "In what way." Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in a now-defunct programming language he invented, called Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP), but it was almost immediately copied into the language Lisp. With the advent of the early internet, the Lisp version of ELIZA went viral, and the original version became obsolete. Experts thought the original 420-line ELIZA code was lost until 2021, when study co-author Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found it among Weizenbaum's papers. "I have a particular interest in how early AI pioneers thought," Shrager told Live Science in an email. "Having computer scientists' code is as close to having a record of their thoughts, and as ELIZA was - and remains, for better or for worse - a touchstone of early AI, I want to know what was in his mind...." Even though it was intended to be a research platform for human-computer communication, "ELIZA was such a novelty at the time that its 'chatbotness' overwhelmed its research purposes," Shrager said. I just remember that time 23 years ago when someone connected a Perl version of ELIZA to "an AOL Instant Messenger account that has a high rate of 'random' people trying to start conversations" to "put ELIZA in touch with the real world..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the New York Post:Generation Z's recent foray into the corporate world has been an eye-popping escapade plagued by their "annoying" workplace habits and helicopter parents accompanying them on interviews. Now, newcomers to the 9-to-5 grind are inflicting a fresh new level of hell onto the workforce with a trending act of defiance known as "career catfishing." That means "a successful candidate accepted a job and then never showed up," writes Fortune, citing a survey of 1,000 U.K. employees conducted by CV Genius. The New York Post notes researchers "found that a staggering 34% of 20-somethings skip Day 1 of work, sans communicating with their new employer, as a demonstration of autonomy."After drudging through the ever-exasperating job hunting process - which often includes submitting dozens of lengthy applications, suffering through endless rounds of interviews and anxiously awaiting updates from sluggish hiring managers - the Z's are apparently "catfishing" jobs to prove that they, rather than their prospective employers, have all the power. But the rebellious babes aren't the only ones pulling fast ones on new bosses. A surprising 24% of millennials, staffers ranging in age from 28 to 43, have taken a shine to career catfishing, too, per the findings. However, only 11% of Gen Xers, hirelings ages 44 to 59, and 7% of baby boomers, personnel over age 60, have joined in on the office treachery. Unlike their older colleagues, Gen Zs are apparently more concerned about prioritizing their personal needs and goals than kowtowing to the demands of corporate culture. Fortune agrees that "Gen Z applicants aren't alone in going no- and low-contact during the recruiting process. Some 74% of employers now admit that ghosting is a facet of the hiring landscape, according to a 2023 Indeed survey of thousands of job seekers and employers..."That being said, simply not showing up to work could prove unsustainable in the long run. Like many young workers before them, Gen Zers have garnered a poor reputation with employers. Hiring managers have labeled them as the most difficult generation to work with, according to a Resume Genius report. The report found employees also admitted to practicing "quiet vacationing" (taking time off without telling your boss) and "coffee badging" (grabbing coffee in the office before returning home)...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as CEO at the beginning of 2024, is returning to the post in mid-March. Former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, who succeeded Herd, has resigned for "personal reasons" and will remain in the role until Wolfe Herd takes over. "As I step into the role of CEO, I'm energized and fully committed to Bumble's success, our mission of creating meaningful, equitable relationships, and our opportunity ahead," Wolfe Herd says in a statement. "We have exciting innovation ahead for Bumble in this bold new chapter." Bumble's share price has dropped by half since the app introduced a redesign and feature in April that let men send the first message in response to prewritten questions. "Bumble gained popularity in part because it was set up for women to message their matches first," notes The Verge. "In Bumble's most recent earnings report, it said that the number of paying users had increased from 3.8 million to 4.3 million over the last year, however, average revenue per paying user dropped from $23.42 to $21.17, and its total revenue dropped slightly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country Returns HD earlier this week, with fans noticing that the original team members at Retro are not individually credited in the updated version. "Instead, the credits state that it was 'based on the work' of Retro Studios, while the team at Forever Entertainment gets its credits for working on the remaster," reports GameSpot. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, a Nintendo spokesperson said: "We believe in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or contributing to a game's creation, and value the contributions that all staff make during the development process." From the report: That statement doesn't really address why the original team's names were excluded from the credits, and this has happened before. In 2023, the Retro Studios developers behind Metroid Prime were left out of the credits for Metroid Prime Remastered. Similarly, external translators voiced their frustrations last year because Nintendo didn't credit them for their work either. This story has been largely overshadowed by the reveal of Switch 2 earlier this week. It seems likely that the Donkey Kong Country franchise will be revisited on that system as well. However, it's not among the games rumored for Switch 2. In the meantime, the bizarre Donkey Kong Country animated TV series is still available to watch on Prime Video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday. "It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang," the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press' Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn't home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that's when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video's frames.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has developed a language model designed for engineering proteins, capable of converting regular cells into stem cells. It marks the company's first venture into biological data and demonstrates AI's potential for unexpected scientific discoveries. An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was "confident" his company knows how to build an AGI, adding that "superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own." The protein engineering project started a year ago when Retro Biosciences, a longevity research company based in San Francisco, approached OpenAI about working together. That link-up did not happen by chance. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, personally funded Retro with $180 million, as MIT Technology Review first reported in 2023. Retro has the goal of extending the normal human lifespan by 10 years. For that, it studies what are called Yamanaka factors. Those are a set of proteins that, when added to a human skin cell, will cause it to morph into a young-seeming stem cell, a type that can produce any other tissue in the body. [...] OpenAI's new model, called GPT-4b micro, was trained to suggest ways to re-engineer the protein factors to increase their function. According to OpenAI, researchers used the model's suggestions to change two of the Yamanaka factors to be more than 50 times as effective -- at least according to some preliminary measures. [...] The model does not work the same way as Google's AlphaFold, which predicts what shape proteins will take. Since the Yamanaka factors are unusually floppy and unstructured proteins, OpenAI said, they called for a different approach, which its large language models were suited to. The model was trained on examples of protein sequences from many species, as well as information on which proteins tend to interact with one another. While that's a lot of data, it's just a fraction of what OpenAI's flagship chatbots were trained on, making GPT-4b an example of a "small language model" that works with a focused data set. Once Retro scientists were given the model, they tried to steer it to suggest possible redesigns of the Yamanaka proteins. The prompting tactic used is similar to the "few-shot" method, in which a user queries a chatbot by providing a series of examples with answers, followed by an example for the bot to respond to. Although genetic engineers have ways to direct evolution of molecules in the lab, they can usually test only so many possibilities. And even a protein of typical length can be changed in nearly infinite ways (since they're built from hundreds of amino acids, and each acid comes in 20 possible varieties). OpenAI's model, however, often spits out suggestions in which a third of the amino acids in the proteins were changed. "We threw this model into the lab immediately and we got real-world results," says Retro's CEO, Joe Betts-Lacroix. He says the model's ideas were unusually good, leading to improvements over the original Yamanaka factors in a substantial fraction of cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids reached 20% of new car sales in the U.S. last year, with Tesla maintaining dominance in the EV market despite a slight decline in market share. CNBC reports: Auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports more than 3.2 million "electrified" vehicles were sold last year, or 1.9 million hybrid vehicles, including plug-in models, and 1.3 million all-electric models. Traditional vehicles with gas or diesel internal combustion engines still made up the majority of sales, but declined to 79.8%, falling under 80% for the first time in modern automotive history, according to the data. Regarding sales of pure EVs, Tesla continued to dominate, but Cox Automotive estimated its annual sales fell and its market share dropped to about 49%, down from 55% in 2023. The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 were estimated to be the bestselling EVs in 2024. Following Tesla in EV sales was Hyundai Motor, including Kia, at 9.3% of EV market share; General Motors at 8.7%; and then Ford Motor at 7.5%, according to Motor Intelligence. BMW rounded out the top five at 4.1%. The EV market in the U.S. is highly competitive: Of the 68 mainstream EV models tracked by Cox's Kelley Blue Book, 24 models posted year-over-year sales increases; 17 models were all new to the market; and 27 decreased in volume.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The FDIC sued 17 former executives and directors of Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty," reports Reuters. The move comes almost two years after Silicon Valley Bank's March 2023 collapse, which shocked financial markets and ended up benefiting big players like JPMorgan Chase. From the report: In a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the FDIC, in its capacity the bank's receiver, said the defendants ignored fundamental standards of prudent banking and the bank's own risk policies in letting the bank take on excessive risks to boost short-term profit and its stock price. The FDIC faulted the bank's overreliance on unhedged, interest rate-sensitive long-term government bonds such as US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, as rates looked set to -- and eventually did -- rise. It also objected to the payment of a "grossly imprudent" $294 million dividend to its parent that drained needed capital "at a time of financial distress and management weakness" in December 2022, less than three months before its demise. "SVB represents a case of egregious mismanagement of interest-rate and liquidity risks by the bank's former officers and directors," the complaint said. The defendants include former Chief Executive Gregory Becker, former Chief Financial Officer Daniel Beck, four other former executives and 11 former directors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.