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"The Register reports Microsoft fixed a Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes," writes Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "So much for the express lane at check-out." From the report: A fresh Windows 11 patch slipped out overnight as an optional update, but contains an impressively long list of fixes for Microsoft's flagship operating system. One bug addressed in KB5012643 could leave Point of Sale terminals hanging for up to 40 minutes during startup. Microsoft stated, "We fixed an issue that delays OS startup by approximately 40 minutes." "Microsoft described the fixes as 'improvements' [and chose to highlight the fact that temperature would now be displayed on top of the weather icon on the taskbar]," added Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "[Y]eah, Windows 11 is great as a PoS."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications. Science News reports: These "nucleobases" -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of all life on Earth. Whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or instead formed in a warm soup of earthly chemistry is still not known. But the discovery adds to evidence that suggests life's precursors originally came from space, the researchers say. Scientists have detected bits of adenine, guanine and other organic compounds in meteorites since the 1960s. Researchers have also seen hints of uracil, but cytosine and thymine remained elusive, until now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Is polio making a comeback? The world has spent billions of dollars over the last 15 years in an effort to wipe out the virus through vaccination efforts -- with encouraging results. Rates plunged from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just several dozen by 2016. But in recent years, polio incidence has started to inch back up. The reason has to do with the type of vaccine used in many parts of the world, primarily in low- and middle-income countries. While the United States and other Western countries inject an inactivated virus that poses no risk of spread and are now polio-free, other countries rely on an oral vaccine. It's cheap, it's easy to administer and two or more doses confer lifelong immunity. But it's made with living, weakened virus. And that poses a problem. Those who've been immunized with live virus can shed it in their stool, which can then spread through sewage in places with poor sanitation. If the virus stays weak, it can even expose the unvaccinated to polio and give them immunity. But if it mutates and regains virulence, someone who isn't vaccinated can become sick with vaccine-derived polio after contact with the contaminated wastewater. And now countries that had previously eradicated polio in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia are seeing new outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio. One reason for this rise in cases, say polio experts, is that gaps in immunization in recent years have created more opportunities for the unvaccinated to become infected. "Vaccination campaigns have been certainly affected by the pandemic," says Raul Andino, a virologist at University of California, San Francisco. [...] The composition of the oral vaccine has also been a factor. In 2016, eyeing an uptick in vaccine-derived polio, global health officials altered the composition of the oral vaccine. Previously, the vaccine protected against all three types of wild polio -- the virus that circulates naturally in the environment. Then they withdrew one of those types -- the one that was leading to most of the vaccine-derived cases but whose wild form had been successfully eradicated. Only there was a development that hadn't been anticipated. Vaccine-derived poliovirus of that type was still in circulation from earlier iterations of the oral vaccine -- and now with the reformulated vaccine, increasing numbers of people who were no longer vaccinated against it. So there was further spread. Thankfully, a new kind of vaccine being rolled out is showing promise. "The novel vaccine still contains a weakened version of the virus, but it's been hobbled even further," reports NPR. "The researchers tweaked the virus so that it has to accumulate more mutations to become virulent and has a harder time amassing those mutations. For example, they've altered the polymerase, one of the key enzymes responsible for introducing mutations, reducing its ability to mix and match genes from different viruses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. MIT News reports: This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to. To achieve these properties, the researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only three basic steps and can be scaled up to produce ultrathin loudspeakers large enough to cover the inside of an automobile or to wallpaper a room. A typical loudspeaker found in headphones or an audio system uses electric current inputs that pass through a coil of wire that generates a magnetic field, which moves a speaker membrane, that moves the air above it, that makes the sound we hear. By contrast, the new loudspeaker simplifies the speaker design by using a thin film of a shaped piezoelectric material that moves when voltage is applied over it, which moves the air above it and generates sound. [...] They tested their thin-film loudspeaker by mounting it to a wall 30 centimeters from a microphone to measure the sound pressure level, recorded in decibels. When 25 volts of electricity were passed through the device at 1 kilohertz (a rate of 1,000 cycles per second), the speaker produced high-quality sound at conversational levels of 66 decibels. At 10 kilohertz, the sound pressure level increased to 86 decibels, about the same volume level as city traffic. The energy-efficient device only requires about 100 milliwatts of power per square meter of speaker area. By contrast, an average home speaker might consume more than 1 watt of power to generate similar sound pressure at a comparable distance. The researchers showed the speaker in action, playing "We Are the Champions" by Queen. You can listen to it here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Central African Republic (CAR) has approved Bitcoin as legal tender -- just the second country to do so. The BBC reports: CAR is one of the world's poorest countries, but is rich in diamonds, gold and uranium. It has been wracked by conflict for decades and is a close Russian ally, with mercenaries from the Wagner Group helping fight rebel forces. Lawmakers voted unanimously to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, said a statement from the CAR presidency. The move puts CAR "on the map of the world's boldest and most visionary countries", it said. El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency in September 2021 - a move criticized by many economists, including the International Monetary Fund, which said it increased the risk of financial instability. Others have raised fears that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could make it easier for criminals to launder money, and that they are environmentally damaging because they use so much electricity to generate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, the world's largest plant for making silicon carbide chips was opened in central New York. Nikkei Asia reports: The $1 billion, 63,000 sq. meter fabrication plant, or "fab," will be the first of its kind to make 200mm silicon carbide wafers, according to [North Carolina-based Wolfspeed]. Silicon carbide, or SiC, is an alternative to traditional silicon that is gaining popularity due to its energy efficiency when transferring power, something especially useful in electric vehicle manufacturing. Ahead of the fab opening, Wolfspeed announced a partnership with luxury EV maker Lucid Motors. It also has agreements with General Motors and China's Yutong Group to supply silicon carbide chips for their electric vehicles. The U.S. share of modern semiconductor manufacturing capacity has declined to 12% from 37% in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a group that has lobbied for the CHIPS Act. This trend, the group says, is largely due to a lack of government investment compared to other nations. [...] In New York, there are hopes that other plants will cluster around the Wolfspeed fab. Wolfspeed received $500 million in construction subsidies from New York as the state seeks to expand its semiconductor manufacturing industry, which has generated nearly $6 billion a year in economic impact and over 34,000 jobs, according to [New York Gov. Kathy Hochul]. The grand opening of a modern manufacturing facility has a special resonance in central New York. The fab stands in the Mohawk Valley, an area along the Erie Canal that was once filled with traditional industry but long ago slid into an economic decline that has defined the region in recent times. So far the Wolfspeed facility has created 265 jobs, with a goal of over 600 new jobs by 2029, according to the company. The site sits directly across from a campus of SUNY Polytechnic Institute, New York's public polytechnic college, and Wolfspeed has given the school $250,000 to help train potential future employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Social media platform Mastodon, often seen as an alternative to Twitter, gained nearly 30,000 new users on the day that Elon Musk bought Twitter. On Tuesday a Mastodon domain became unresponsive. Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's CEO, later told Motherboard in an email that there were performance issues. "I'm sorry I couldn't have responded sooner," he wrote. "I was working all day on fixing performance issues on the Mastodon servers I operate due to the influx of new and returning users following Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk." Rochko added that Mastodon has seen an increase of 41,287 active users, including both returning users and new users. When breaking that figure down by just new users, 28,391 new people have joined Mastodon in the past day, Rochko said. Mastodon is a piece of open-source software that people can use as a base to create their own social networks. Although its appearance is similar to Twitter, it also differs from Twitter in the sense that Twitter is a single social network people sign up for. When it comes to the social network side of things, Mastodon holds more similarities with Discord, in that users have to find specific Mastodon instances to join. Those looking to create their own Mastodon instance also have to host it themselves, a step that may alienate many non-technical users. Donald Trump's social media site, Truth Social, is based on Mastodon and was recently called out by the company for failing to provide the source code for the site built on top of it. Two weeks later, the social media site quietly acknowledged Mastodon in a dedicated section labeled "open source." In regard to the matter, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said: "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free." Twitter did confirm some fluctuations in follower counts after Musk's deal was made official, although they said they were organic in nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. The Register reports: In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion. The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all. "Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended," the Pentagon oversight body wrote in an audit [PDF] report this month. In other words, the Army hasn't yet fully determined if or how service members will find these HoloLens headsets valuable in the field. Although the heavily redacted report did not reveal soldiers' responses to the prototype testing, it said feedback from surveys showed "both positive and negative user acceptance." The Army plans to purchase 121,500 IVAS units from Microsoft while admitting that "if soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it," the report disclosed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal is shuttering its San Francisco office as it evaluates its global office footprint. TechCrunch reports: Multiple sources say the payments giant is closing its San Francisco office on 425 Market St. which housed its Xoom business unit. PayPal acquired Xoom, which is focused on online money transfer technology and services, in 2015. A person familiar with internal happenings at the company said the employees that worked out of that office will work virtually with the ability to work from the company's headquarters office in San Jose. It is unclear how many employees are affected by the decision. An individual who commented on a post on the topic on the anonymous professional network, Blind, speculated that the reason behind the move could be San Francisco's Prop C, which levied a tax upon any San Francisco business that earns more than $50 million in gross receipts. Proceeds are to be directed toward housing and services in an attempt to address the city's challenges with homelessness.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Vulnerabilities recently discovered by Microsoft make it easy for people with a toehold on many Linux desktop systems to quickly gain root system rights -- the latest elevation of privileges flaw to come to light in the open source OS. [...] Nimbuspwn, as Microsoft has named the EoP threat, is two vulnerabilities that reside in the networkd-dispatcher, a component in many Linux distributions that dispatch network status changes and can run various scripts to respond to a new status. When a machine boots, networkd-dispatcher runs as root. [...] A hacker with minimal access to a vulnerable desktop can chain together exploits for these vulnerabilities that give full root access. [The step-by-step exploit flow can be found in the article. The researcher also was able to gain persistent root access using the exploit flow to create a backdoor.] The proof-of-concept exploit works only when it can use the "org.freedesktop.network1" bus name. The researcher found several environments where this happens, including Linux Mint, in which the systemd-networkd by default doesn't own the org.freedodesktop.network1 bus name at boot. The researcher also found several processes that run as the systemd-network user, which is permitted to use the bus name required to run arbitrary code from world-writable locations. The vulnerable processes include several gpgv plugins, which are launched when apt-get installs or upgrades, and the Erlang Port Mapper Daemon, which allows running arbitrary code under some scenarios. The vulnerability has been patched, although it's unclear which version of Linux the patch is in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major technology companies have been duped into providing sensitive personal information about their customers in response to fraudulent legal requests, and the data has been used to harass and even sexually extort minors, according to four federal law enforcement officials and two industry investigators. Bloomberg: The companies that have complied with the bogus requests include Meta, Apple, Alphabet's Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord, according to three of the people. All of the people requested anonymity to speak frankly about the devious new brand of online crime that involves underage victims. The fraudulently obtained data has been used to target specific women and minors, and in some cases to pressure them into creating and sharing sexually explicit material and to retaliate against them if they refuse, according to the six people. The tactic is considered by law enforcement and other investigators to be the newest criminal tool to obtain personally identifiable information that can be used not only for financial gain but to extort and harass innocent victims. It is particularly unsettling since the attackers are successfully impersonating law enforcement officers. The tactic is impossible for victims to protect against, as the best way to avoid it would be to not have an account on the targeted service, according to the people. It's not clear how often the fraudulent data requests have been used to sexually extort minors. Law enforcement and the technology companies are still trying to assess the scope of the problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency companies said they remain unsure of U.S. regulations governing products that allow customers to earn interest on holdings instead of trading them, months after such an interest-bearing product drew a $100 million fine from a federal regulator and state governments. From a report: In February, New Jersey crypto company BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million in a landmark settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and state authorities who said its interest-bearing product qualifies as a security and should have been registered. Still, many digital asset companies providing such products said this month the rules remain unclear to them and they are uncertain when they should register such offerings, which are growing more popular and which many firms launched within the last year. Most firms have tried to structure the interest-bearing products to avoid the need to register them with the SEC, a process that takes time and entails ongoing disclosure and reporting obligations. That effort might set them up for a clash with the agency as it increases scrutiny of the crypto industry. BlockFi plans to offer an alternative yield product, which it said it would register first. The company and the SEC said the deal should provide a roadmap for other companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fibre-optic cable is being laid across the globe at great expense to speed up people's internet connections, but researchers claim that the copper telephone wire already in use across the country can achieve data rates three times higher than currently seen at a fraction of the price, at least over short distances. New Scientist: Their technique to boost speeds may help to ease the transition to nationwide fibre optic, and may also be of use in countries that use similar twisted-pair copper wire. Ergin Dinc at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say that twisted pairs of copper wire, of the type used for decades as telephone lines and now repurposed for broadband internet, can support a frequency fives times higher than is currently used, which would dramatically improve data transmission rates. Above that limit, the researchers found that the wire essentially acts as an aerial and transforms any signal sent along it into radio waves that dissipate before reaching their destination. "These cables are actually very old, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, and since then no one has looked into the theoretical limits," says Dinc. He and his colleagues say that their findings may allow houses near fibre-optic cables to achieve higher speeds than they currently enjoy without the expense of running fibre all the way to their home. Fibre-optic cables carry groups of photons to represent data, and huge numbers of these groups can be sent along the line one after another without waiting for the first to arrive. Fibre connections in use today typically operate at 1 gigabit per second, but theoretical speeds could be many thousands of times higher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least six different Kremlin-linked hacking groups have conducted nearly 240 cyber operations against Ukrainian targets, Microsoft said Wednesday, in data reveal a broader scope of alleged Russian cyberattacks during the war on Ukraine than previously documented. From a report: "Russia's use of cyberattacks appears to be strongly correlated and sometimes directly timed with its kinetic military operations," said Tom Burt, a Microsoft vice president. The Microsoft report is the most comprehensive public record yet of Russian hacking efforts related to the war in Ukraine. It fills in some gaps in public understanding of where Russia's vaunted cyber capabilities have been deployed during the war. Burt cited a cyberattack on a Ukrainian broadcast company on March 1, the same day as a Russian missile strike against a TV tower in Kyiv, and malicious emails sent to Ukrainians falsely claiming the Ukrainian government was "abandoning" them amid the Russian siege of the city of Mariupol. Suspected Russian hackers "are working to compromise organizations in regions across Ukraine," and may have been collecting intelligence on Ukrainian military partnerships many months before the full-scale invasion in February, the Microsoft report says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google launched in general availability Media CDN, a platform for delivering content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube. From a report: With a presence in over 1,300 cities across 200 countries, Google says that Media CDN is designed to -- in the company's words -- "automate all facets" of "serving content [close to users]." The pandemic led to an explosion in demand for streaming content as business closures and shelter-in-place orders forced folks to stay home. Media CDN, which joins Google's CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration, is by no stretch of the imagination the first of its kind. There's plenty of CDNs optimized to serve media. But Google touts ostensibly unique benefits like delivery protocols tailored to individual users and network conditions and "industry-leading" offload rates. "With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin -- even for infrequently accessed content," Google VP Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post yesterday. "This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs." Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video content with ads. Moreover, the service is "built with AI/ML" to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the old saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, partner up with another overly powerful cable giant to give yourself a better shot. From a report: This morning, Comcast and Charter announced a new joint venture that will see the two companies teaming up to develop "a next-generation streaming platform on a variety of branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs." This new platform and the devices that run it will square off against Amazon, Roku, Google, Apple, and other established streaming hardware players. The new venture is evenly divided between the two companies and is exclusively focused on streaming; it "does not involve the broadband or cable video businesses of either Comcast or Charter, which will remain independent." Comcast says its Flex streaming platform will serve as the foundation for what's coming next. It's also contributing "the retail business for XClass TVs and will contribute Xumo, a streaming service it acquired in 2020." Comcast introduced its XClass TVs last year as an alternative to the many popular budget TVs that come preloaded with Roku, Amazon, or Google software. For its part, Charter -- known better to many for its Spectrum brand -- is kicking in $900 million over the course of several years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm has moved to regain control of its renegade China unit and replace its chief executive Allen Wu, as the UK chip designer seeks to clear its path to a successful public listing. From a report: The UK chip designer will put forward two individuals to act as co-chief executives of its China joint venture and has received official sign-off to submit the paperwork, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The proposed candidates to take over as co-CEOs are Dr Liu Renchen, a government adviser and vice-dean of the Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen and Vision Fund managing partner Eric Chen, who has been leading SoftBank's negotiations with Chinese officials. Arm has been trying to oust Wu for almost two years, afterâhe disregarded a 7 to 1 board vote for his removal and unilaterally took control of the company. "Discussions have been going on for a while and this is the proposed solution," said one person close to Arm China's board. "But submission is not the problem, getting authorities to sign off on it is," the person said. The person noted that previous deals to resolve the stand-off had fallen through at the last minute and cautioned: "We still have to see if Allen will be able to derail it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned live-streaming website, is weighing potential changes to how it pays top talent, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the planning, an effort that would boost its profits but would also risk alienating some of its biggest stars. From a report: The updates under consideration would offer incentives for streamers to run more ads. The proposal would also reduce the proportion of subscription fees doled out to the site's biggest performers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Some changes to Twitch's monetization structure could be implemented as soon as this summer, the people said. Twitch staff is considering paring back the revenue cut of channel subscriptions granted to the top echelon of streamers in its so-called partnerships program to 50%, from 70%. Another option is to create multiple tiers and set criteria for how to qualify for each one, two of the people said. In exchange, Twitch may offer to release partners from exclusivity restrictions, allowing them to stream on Google's YouTube or Facebook.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Retail brokerage firm Robinhood is cutting back staffing levels, citing "duplicate roles and job functions" after rapid expansion last year. From a report: CEO Vlad Tenev made the announcement in a blog post on Tuesday afternoon. Shares fell more than 5% in extended trading. The move will affect about 9% of full-time employees. Robinhood reported 3,800 full-time employees as of Dec. 31. The company declined to give more detail on the exact number of employees being let go. "We determined that making these reductions to Robinhood's staff is the right decision to improve efficiency, increase our velocity, and ensure that we are responsive to the changing needs of our customers," Tenev wrote. "While the decision to undertake this action wasn't easy, it is a deliberate step to ensure we are able to continue delivering on our strategic goals and furthering our mission to democratize finance," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Sony's expanded PlayStation Plus service starts rolling out next month, it will fold in PlayStation Now, which offers access to hundreds of games from older console generations. Now, it seems the company is getting even more serious about game preservation. From a report: According to Twitter and LinkedIn posts spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Sony has hired at least one engineer (Garrett Fredley, a former build engineer for mobile developer Kabam) to work on a new preservation team. "Today is my first day as a Senior Build Engineer at @PlayStation, working as one of their initial hires for the newly created Preservation team! Game Preservation was my first career passion, so I'm ecstatic that I get to go back to those roots," Fredley wrote. "Let's go and ensure our industry's history isn't forgotten!" [...] Sony historically hasn't done an incredible job with preserving games. Aside from the original PS3 models being able to run many PS1 and PS2 games, backward compatibility seemed like an afterthought until the PS5, which supports all but a few PS4 titles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube is testing advertisements on Shorts, its short-form video feature that competes with TikTok and Instagram, Google's chief business officer told investors on Tuesday. From a report: The video-sharing site introduced Shorts in 2020 and has been slow to add commercials, which it runs on the rest of its content. But the company has begun experimenting with app-install ads and other promotions, according to Philipp Schindler. "While it's still early days, we're encouraged by initial advertiser feedback and results," he said on the earnings call for Alphabet, Google's parent company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple on Wednesday followed through on its plans to begin publicly releasing repair manuals for some of its products, in addition to selling parts and tools online. The goal, the company said, is to allow iPhone owners an alternative way to repair their devices. From a report: The tech giant's new program, called Self Service Repair, is starting out for US customers with Apple's iPhone 13 line of smartphones, the iPhone 12 and new iPhone SE. Apple said it designed the program to offer adventurous and capable people access to the same parts, tools and instructions it gives to its own certified technicians and partner repair shops, hopefully making it easier for people to repair devices instead of resorting to buying a new one. "We believe we have a responsibility to customers and the environment to offer convenient access to safe, reliable, and secure repairs to help customers get the most out of their devices," the company wrote in a document published Wednesday that outlines its plans. "As the doors open on this new venue, we're underwhelmed, and settling back into our usual skepticism," iFixit posted on Wednesday. The firm adds: The biggest problem? Apple is doubling down on their parts pairing strategy, enabling only very limited, serial number-authorized repairs. You cannot purchase key parts without a serial number or IMEI. If you use an aftermarket part, there's an "unable to verify" warning waiting for you. This strategy hamstrings third-party repair with feature loss and scare tactics and could dramatically limit options for recyclers and refurbishers, short-circuiting the circular economy. As of today, you can buy an official Apple iPhone 12 screen and install it yourself, on your own device, with no fuss. Until now, DIY repairs relied on keeping the Face ID speaker and sensor assembly intact, then very carefully moving it to your new screen, and finally ignoring some gentle warnings. If your assembly was damaged or defective, you were out of luck. The new program will solve that problem -- assuming you've bought an official Apple part.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter locked down its source code to prevent unauthorized changes, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The reports say that this change was made to prevent employees from "going rogue" and sabotaging the platform after Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of the company. Currently, a vice president must approve any changes. After the company announced it would accept Musk's offer to buy the publicly traded platform, it wasn't immediately clear to Twitter's 7,000 employees how their day-to-day would change. Even after a company all-hands, where CEO Parag Agrawal reassured the team that no layoffs were planned "at this time," employees were still left with questions about how they would fare in Musk's takeover. [...] For now, Musk's takeover bid for Twitter remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. But if it goes through as expected, we may witness major personnel shifts, resignations and more. A similar shake-up took place when Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. By the time the company went public, there were already 90 startups being built by former Twitter employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Facebook is facing what it describes internally as a "tsunami" of privacy regulations all over the world, which will force the company to dramatically change how it deals with users' personal data. And the "fundamental" problem, the company admits, is that Facebook has no idea where all of its user data goes, or what it's doing with it, according to a leaked internal document obtained by Motherboard. "We've built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) ... and it flows ... everywhere," the document read. "How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?" (3PD means third-party data; 1PD means first-party data; SCD means sensitive categories data.) The document was written last year by Facebook privacy engineers on the Ad and Business Product team, whose mission is "to make meaningful connections between people and businesses," and which "sits at the center of our monetization strategy and is the engine that powers Facebook's growth," according to a recent job listing that describes the team. This is the team that is tasked with building and maintaining Facebook's sprawling ads system, the core of the company's business. And in this document, the team is both sounding an alarm, and making a call to change how Facebook deals with users' data to prevent the company from running into trouble with regulators in Europe, the US, India, and other countries that are pushing for more stringent privacy constraints on social media companies. "We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose.' And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation," the document read. In other words, even Facebook's own engineers admit that they are struggling to make sense and keep track of where user data goes once it's inside Facebook's systems, according to the document. This problem inside Facebook is known as "data lineage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

vm shares a report from Space.com: SpaceX is among companies that might replace services of NASA's aging space telecoms constellation that has kept the International Space Station connected to Earth for decades. For years, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation has served as the main link between the International Space Station and Earth, providing astronauts with constant connection to ground control as well as the ability to engage with the public and stay in touch with their loved ones. The American space agency, however, plans to retire the six aging satellites in the next decade and hand over their task to commercial companies. This month, the agency announced partnerships with six commercial satellite operators including SpaceX, U.K. company Inmarsat, American Viasat and Switzerland-based SES, to demonstrate how they could take care of NASA's space communication needs in the future. "We don't plan to launch any new TDRS satellites in the future," Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project, who oversees the partnership with the commercial companies, told Space.com. "The plan is to allow the constellation to basically [reach the end of its life]. At some point later in this decade, we are going to have some diminished capability and the plan is for the [commercial companies] to come up with a different way of providing communication services to our missions." "Back in the 1980s, when we developed TDRS, there really wasn't an ability on the commercial side to be able to provide this service," Naffah said. "But since then, the industry has far outpaced NASA's investment in this area. There's a lot of infrastructure, both on the ground and in orbit that is capable of providing these types of services to a spacecraft. [...] Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration." According to Naffah, NASA will invest $278 million into the project over the next five years, with the agency's industry partners contributing a total of about $1.5 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Following in the footsteps of iOS 14, Google is rolling out an app privacy section to the Play Store on Tuesday. When you look up an app on the Play Store, alongside sections like "About this app" and "ratings and reviews," there will be a new section called "Data privacy & security," where developers can explain what data they collect. Note that while the section will be appearing for users starting today, it might not be filled out by developers. Google's deadline for developers to provide privacy information is July 20. Even then, all of this privacy information is provided by the developer and is essentially working on the honor system. Here's how Google describes the process to developers: "You alone are responsible for making complete and accurate declarations in your app's store listing on Google Play. Google Play reviews apps across all policy requirements; however, we cannot make determinations on behalf of the developers of how they handle user data. Only you possess all the information required to complete the Data safety form. When Google becomes aware of a discrepancy between your app behavior and your declaration, we may take appropriate action, including enforcement action." Once the section is up and running, developers will be expected to list what data they're collecting, why they're collecting it, and who they're sharing it with. The support page features a big list of data types for elements like "location," "personal info," "financial info," "web history," "contacts," and various file types. Developers are expected to list their data security practices, including explaining if data is encrypted in transit and if users can ask for data to be deleted. There's also a spot for "Google Play's Families Policy" compliance, which is mostly just a bunch of US COPPA and EU GDPR requirements. Google says developers can also indicate if their app has "been independently validated against a global security standard."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country's wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine. NBC News reports: With some states in India's breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with highs of 120 Fahrenheit this week, observers fear a range of lasting impacts, both local and international, from the hot spell. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month that India could step in to ease the shortfall created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The two countries account for nearly a third of all global wheat exports, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the conflict could leave an additional 8 million to 13 million people undernourished by next year. India's wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels -- some 122 million tons -- in 2022. But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time. The heat wave is hitting India's main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh's Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Dell's new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) leaked out last week, several tech sites led many to believe that the company was taking a path to "lock out users upgrades." However, according to PCWorld citing both the person who designed and patented the CAMM standard, as well as the product manager of the first Dell Precision laptop to feature it, "the intent of the new memory module standard is to head-off looming bandwidth ceilings in the current SO-DIMM designs." They claim that CAMM could increase performance, improve reliability, aid user upgrades, and eventually lower costs too. From the report: Most of the internet hot takes last week, however, reacted to CAMM being proprietary, which is typically viewed as a method to lock people into buying upgrades only from one company. Dell officials, however, insist that's not the case at all. "One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards," said Dell's Tom Schnell, the Senior Distinguished Engineer who designed much of it. "We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We're not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard." Schnell said that Dell isn't making the modules and has worked with memory companies as well as Intel on this. In the future, a person with a CAMM-equipped laptop will be able to buy RAM from any third party and install it in the laptop. Yes, initially, Dell will likely be the only place to get CAMM upgrades, but that should change as the standard scales up and is adopted by other PC makers. The new memory modules are also built using commodity DRAMs just like conventional SO-DIMMs. In fact, Dell points out, it's not even "proprietary" on its own laptops. The first Precision workstations that come with CAMM will also eventually be offered with conventional SO-DIMMs using an interposer. Mano Gialusis, product manager for Precision workstations, said the interposer option goes into the same CAMM mount, too. With CAMM now a reality, Dell's next step is to get it in front of JEDEC, the memory standards organization, to make it available to others, he said. Why not create a standard from scratch? Schnell said its far easier to get a standard minted once it's proven to work rather than trying to simply create something anew every time. The report goes on to say that Dell does hold patents on the CAMM design "and there will be royalties," but "no standard can go forward through JEDEC unless the licensing is not anti-competitive, is reasonably priced, and cannot discriminate against a company."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Europe's Digital Markets Act -- near-finalized legislation to tame the internet's gatekeepers -- contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple's iOS browser restrictions. The Register reports: The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of "web browser engines" as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations. Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari. That requirement has been a sore spot for years among rivals like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. They could not compete on iOS through product differentiation because their mobile browsers had to rely on WebKit rather than their own competing engines. And Apple's browser engine requirement has vexed web developers, who have been limited to using only the web APIs implemented in WebKit for their web apps. Many believe this barrier serves to steer developers toward native iOS app development, which Apple controls. The extent to which Apple profits from the status quo has prompted regulatory scrutiny in Europe, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. [...] Now those efforts have been translated into the text of the DMA, which, alongside the Digital Services Act (DSA), defines how large technology gatekeepers will be governed in Europe. [...] In short, when the DMA takes effect in 2024, it appears that Apple will be required to allow browser competition on iOS devices. "The potential for a capable web has been all but extinguished on mobile because Apple has successfully prevented it until now," said Alex Russell, partner program manager on Microsoft Edge who worked previously as Google Chrome's first web standards tech lead. "Businesses and services will be able to avoid building 'apps' entirely when enough users have capable browsers." "There's a long road between here and there," he added. "Apple has spent enormous amounts to lobby on this, and they aren't stupid. Everyone should expect them to continue to play games along the lines of what they tried in Denmark and South Korea."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An independent monitor of Britain's use of surveillance cameras has asked for the government to clarify its positions on buying equipment from a Chinese technology company accused of involvement in human rights abuses. From a report: Fraser Sampson, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, said he raised concerns with senior Cabinet officials after Hikvision failed to answer questions about the extent of its role in China's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in western Xinjiang province. "There are serious unanswered questions about Hikvision's involvement in appalling human rights abuses in China," Sampson said in a statement Tuesday. "The company seems unwilling or unable to provide assurances about the ethics of some of its operations and about security concerns associated with its equipment." Sampson said the company's cameras and facial recognition technology have been implicated in "systematic human rights abuses" against Uyghurs. He said widespread persecution of the minority group in Xinjiang "is known to rely heavily on surveillance technology, including facial recognition software designed to detect racial characteristics." The Telegraph newspaper reported earlier this month that the U.K. health department banned Hikvision, which is part-owned by the Chinese government, from competing for new business after a procurement report found "ethical concerns" about the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maine is closer to launching its space program after Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill to create the Maine Space Port, a law aimed at growing the state's aerospace industry. From a report: Mills signed the bill into law on April 19, creating a public-private partnership that would build launch sites, data networks and operations to send satellites into space, The Portland Press Herald reported Sunday. Most of the work accomplished at the program will be through the creation of the Maine Space Complex which will be built at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station within the next decade. The complex will oversee three entities including a computer center and satellite launch and operations sites. Terry Shehata, director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium, said the spaceport would be one of the first in the U.S. to launch satellites, conduct data analysis and provide education to students. The consortium is the NASA-funded nonprofit spearheading the spaceport complex.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Don't be fooled by the name. While 3D printers do print tangible objects (and quite well), how they do the job doesn't actually happen in 3D, but rather in regular old 2D. Working to change that is a group of former and current researchers from the Rowland Institute at Harvard. [...] The researchers present a method to help the printers live up to their names and deliver a "true" 3D form of printing. In a new paper in Nature, they describe a technique of volumetric 3D printing that goes beyond the bottom-up, layered approach. The process eliminates the need for support structures because the resin it creates is self-supporting. The key component in their novel design is turning red light into blue light by adding what's known as an upconversion process to the resin, the light reactive liquid used in 3D printers that hardens into plastic. In 3D printing, resin hardens in a flat and straight line along the path of the light. Here, the researchers use nano capsules to add chemicals so that it only reacts to a certain kind of light -- a blue light at the focal point of the laser that's created by the upconversion process. This beam is scanned in three dimensions, so it prints that way without needing to be layered onto something. The resulting resin has a greater viscosity than in the traditional method, so it can stand support-free once it's printed. "We designed the resin, we designed the system so that the red light does nothing," Congreve said. "But that little dot of blue light triggers a chemical reaction that makes the resin harden and turn into plastic. Basically, what that means is you have this laser passing all the way through the system and only at that little blue do you get the polymerization, [only there] do you get the printing happening. We just scan that blue dot around in three dimensions and anywhere that blue dot hits it polymerizes and you get your 3D printing." The researchers used their printer to produce a 3D Harvard logo, Stanford logo, and a small boat, a standard yet difficult test for 3D printers because of the boat's small size and fine details like overhanging portholes and open cabin spaces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The common perception that nearly everyone in America seemed to have acquired the Omicron variant last winter may not have been far from the truth. By February 2022, nearly 60 percent of the population had been infected with the coronavirus, almost double the proportion seen in December 2021, according to data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The New York Times reports: "By February 2022, evidence of previous Covid-19 infections substantially increased among every age group," Dr. Kristie Clarke, the agency researcher who led the study, said at a news briefing. Infections rose most sharply during the Omicron surge among children and adolescents, perhaps because many people in those age groups were still unvaccinated. The increase was smallest among adults 65 or older, who have the highest rate of vaccination and may be the most likely to take precautions. The new research suggests that three out of four children and adolescents in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus by February 2022, compared with one-third of older adults. While some studies suggest that prior infection offers a weaker shield against the virus than vaccines do, the resulting antibodies should provide a reasonable degree of protection against severe illness, at least in the short term. "We still do not know how long infection-induced immunity will last," Dr. Clarke said. The gains in population-wide immunity may explain why the new surge that is roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States so far. The findings may offer some comfort to parents who have been waiting anxiously for a vaccine to be approved for the youngest children. Many of those children now seem to have acquired at least some immunity. Even so, Dr. Clarke urged parents to immunize children who qualify as soon as regulators approve a vaccine for them, regardless of any prior infection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seattle startup Read just released its first study on the effectiveness of video conference calls after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September. Overall, one in five calls had a below average meeting score, and 31% of meetings start late. GeekWire reports: Seattle startup Read just released its first study after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September, when it announced its $10 million seed round. The company's software measures engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings. For meetings with seven or more people, some of the findings include: - 50% of participants arrive late- 40% have below average or poor engagement- 22% of participants don't say a single word- 11% don't have video or audio on "The scale and impact of bad meetings is a massive drain on resources and morale," said David Shim, CEO of Read. Shim said with workers going remote amid the pandemic, people erred on the side of inviting more participants, and the default response of those invited was to accept. This is what introduced "Zoom Fatigue," he said. That's part of what Read is trying to address with its products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of TikTok- and Instagram-famous physicians say they have a solution for the "red tape" of the current medical system: NFTs of cartoon doctors. From a report: These NFTs, called MetaDocs, are supposed to give buyers access to real doctors, almost like a Web3 telehealth subscription. When MetaDocs launched in December, it claimed that its legion of celebrity doctors, who have a collective social media following of 70 million and have included "Dr. Pimple Popper" Sandra Lee and plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Brown of TikTok fame, would all be available via DM, group "ask me anything" sessions, or one-on-one video chats to those who buy in. MetaDocs founder Dr. Sina Joorabchi hopes it will evolve into a full-fledged virtual clinic in the so-called metaverse, where patients can put on a haptic suit and be examined remotely by a physician in virtual reality. But now, MetaDocs is facing backlash from the medical community, in part because it is not actually licensed as a telemedicine service and thus its doctors cannot legally make diagnoses, write prescriptions, or give personalized medical advice to anyone who buys a MetaDocs NFT. A further wrinkle: Doctors are almost always required to be licensed in a state in order to practice there, including through telehealth services. "At this point, we're hesitant to refer to anybody as a patient," Dr. Dustin Portela, a MetaDocs physician and practicing dermatologist, told BuzzFeed News. According to a recent white paper, the presale cost of a MetaDocs NFT will be 0.2 ETH, or about $570, though the company hasn't determined an exact price yet. But why would someone pay hundreds of dollars for a cartoon so they could "ask a doctor anything" if they are not seeking some form of medical advice?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Peoples Dispatch: Mexico has officially nationalized its lithium industry. On April 21, the bill, proposed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), that modified the mining law to give the state the exclusive right to explore, exploit and use the valuable metal entered into force. According to the law, published in the Official Gazette of the Federation, the executive or the president now has 90 days to create a decentralized state company that will deal with all lithium-related matters. [...] The new mining law recognizes lithium as a heritage of the nation, and reserves it for the benefit of the people of Mexico. It elevates lithium to the category of "strategic mineral," and prohibits granting concessions, licenses, contracts, permits, assignments or authorizations for its exploitation to private corporations. The president emphasized that lithium is a strategic element for the development of the nation, and its effective exploitation can contribute to economic growth. He said that his administration would work to develop necessary technology to take the best advantage of their lithium, ensuring that it does not harm the health of the population, the environment, or the rights of Indigenous people. He also took the opportunity to reiterate that his administration would review all lithium contracts. He requested that the shareholders and managers of the companies and corporations begin to establish a dialogue with their legal representatives. There is only one lithium mine in Mexico, operated by Chinese firm Ganfeng Lithium, which is slated to produce 35,000 tons of the metal per year starting in 2023. In the coming days, it will be discussed if that will be taken over by the government. Meanwhile, the right-wing opposition criticized nationalization of lithium. Some legislators from the opposition National Action Party (PAN) and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who voted against the reform, said that it would severely affect the development in the mining of the metal, arguing that the Mexican government has no experience in mining lithium. Others criticized that it violated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and would bring trade tensions. Nevertheless, the people of Mexico have expressed their approval of the president and his policies. A number of social organizations and trade unions have praised the president and the ruling center-left MORENA party, recalling that the nationalization of lithium in Bolivia during former president Evo Morales' rule helped the country achieve high levels of economic and social growth. "Lithium is considered an important resource due to its importance for the development of batteries used for electric cars," notes the report. "According to data from the US Geological Survey, Mexico has 1.7 million tons of lithium mining reserves."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British group gained $7.8bn valuation in pandemic, but lay-offs and slump in secondary market trades have followed. From a report: In November 2020, with the pandemic in full force, British virtual events start-up Hopin declared that a new era of digital gatherings had begun. Virtual events were "here to stay," said founder Johnny Boufarhat, as he bragged that there were "more than 15,000 monthly events" available on Hopin's "Explore" platform. Today, there are fewer than 500 listed. Boufarhat's vision made Hopin a pandemic sensation and Europe's fastest growing start-up ever. Launched in 2019, his company rocketed to fame after Covid hit with a conferencing product that seemed tailor-made for lockdowns. The 27-year-old raised more than a billion dollars for Hopin in little over a year, reaching a $7.8bn private market valuation that made him Britain's youngest self-made billionaire on paper. As top-tier venture capital firms like IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global clamoured to invest, Boufarhat sold $195mn worth of his own shares, according to a Financial Times analysis. With Covid beginning to recede and publicly traded technology stocks being dumped by investors, Boufarhat now faces a moment of truth as he tries to build a sustainable business that lives up to the lofty expectations it set during the pandemic. "The landscape will look very different going forward. People can now meet," noted one events industry executive. They dismissed the pandemic-driven online events boom as "a bit of an artificial bubble."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chess.com, writes in a blog post: Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the "Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media." Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia's war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International. According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: "On The Invasion of Ukraine" which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and "Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War" which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com's apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UnknowingFool writes: In 2020, Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their previously proprietary NTFS driver into Linux. After a year of review, the NTFS3 driver was added to the Linux 5.15 kernel. While Paragon pledged to maintain their driver, there have been no major updates to the driver despite a growing list of patches that have submitted. Developer Kari Argillander has raised his concerns on the mailing list that the driver is orphaned, and that the Paragon maintainer has not responded to any messages about fixes. An offer to co-maintain the driver has also been met with "radio silence".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computers using light rather than electric currents for processing, only years ago seen as research projects, are gaining traction and startups that have solved the engineering challenge of using photons in chips are getting big funding. From a report: In the latest example, Ayar Labs, a startup developing this technology called silicon photonics, said on Tuesday it had raised $130 million from investors including chip giant Nvidia. While the transistor-based silicon chip has increased computing power exponentially over past decades as transistors have reached the width of several atoms, shrinking them further is challenging. Not only is it hard to make something so miniscule, but as they get smaller, signals can bleed between them. So, Moore's law, which said every two years the density of the transistors on a chip would double and bring down costs, is slowing, pushing the industry to seek new solutions to handle increasingly heavy artificial intelligence computing needs. According to data firm PitchBook, last year silicon photonics startups raised over $750 million, doubling from 2020. In 2016 that was about $18 million. The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing, and there is a bottleneck on the speed of data transmission between chips or servers using current electrical methods.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a first-of-its-kind move -- and the latest sign that crypto-investing has gone mainstream -- Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday that 401(k) plan participants will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin via their retirement plan. Reader BeerFartMoron writes: The investing option should be available by mid-year, Fidelity, the nation's largest 401(k) plan provider, said in a press release. Employers will need to opt into the change, which may limit which employees actually have access to Bitcoin in their workplace retirement accounts. That could enable millions of people to invest in the digital asset without the need to set up a separate account on a cryptocurrency exchange. There are few details currently available about how exactly the account will work, but Fidelity says employees will be able to invest in Bitcoin via what the company is calling the Digital Assets Account, which will be part of the investor's 401(k). That account will also hold short-term money market investments to provide the liquidity for transactions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bolt, the payments startup known for its founder's inflammatory Twitter threads claiming Silicon Valley is run by "mob bosses," is being sued by its most prominent customer. From a report: The complaint by Authentic Brands Group alleges that Bolt not only failed to deliver promised technology but that during Bolt's integration with Forever 21, the clothier lost out on more than $150 million in online sales. The complaint also states that Bolt raised funding at increasingly high valuations by "consistently overstating" the nature of its integration with ABG's brands to suggest it had more customers than it did and to convince investors to bankroll additional growth for the startup. Because Bolt's business relies on having a large network of consumers, the allegations create major new uncertainty for the controversial payments startup, which investors most recently valued at $11 billion. In a filing, Bolt responded to the complaint saying that ABG's claims are without merit, and are "a transparent attempt" to renegotiate the terms of the companies' agreements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India has once again called upon Elon Musk to manufacture Tesla cars locally instead of selling China-made electric vehicles in the world's fourth-largest autos market as demand for clean transport surges. From a report: "If Elon Musk is ready to manufacture Tesla in India, then there is no problem," Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said at an event Tuesday. But manufacturing cars in China and selling them in India is not a "good proposition." Discussions between Tesla and the Indian government have come to a standstill over import taxes and a local factory. The U.S. automaker is seeking lower levies in India so it can test the market by selling cheaper imported EVs before committing to a manufacturing base of its own. India will consider Tesla's demand for a reduction in taxes only if it promises to buy $500 million of auto parts from local suppliers and ramp up domestic sourcing by around 10% to 15% each year, people familiar with the matter said in February.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new breed of startups wants to formalise cattle trading. The Economist: Livestock fairs, where most animals are still bought and sold, can be expensive and chaotic. Farmers shell out entry fees to register their beasts. They must pay for labourers to load and unload the animals, as well as for transport to and from the fair. They worry about cattle thieves. Making a sales pitch to every prospective customer takes a toll in the heat. And if your cows find no buyers, you must go through the whole rigmarole again, complains Anil Renusay, another cattle farmer in Vajeghar. Then there is fraud, says Satish Birnale, who rears buffaloes in Sangli, a small western city. Some traders inject their animals with steroids. Horns are often polished "as if the cows have just been to a beauty parlour," he says. "It's like searching for a bride in an arranged marriage. We have to be careful and not go just by the looks." Firms like Pashushala and Animall claim to have solved such problems with a system of checks, including a nod from a local veterinarian. Animall requires sellers to upload videos and pictures of their cattle, and provide details not just of breed or age, but also past pregnancies, how much milk they provide and so on. A team calls every user to verify the information. Ads with blurry photos or listings with pictures taken from the internet are swiftly removed. A close-up of the cow's udders is important. So are comments by the farmer about the animal's temperament. In one video a seller croons, "Beautiful! Oh, look at those singhs (horns)". It is not a new pitch. But it is now easier and cheaper to make.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

World military spending continued to grow in 2021, reaching an all-time high of $2.1 trillion. This was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased. From a report: "Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels," said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Senior Researcher with SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. "There was a slowdown in the rate of real-terms growth due to inflation. In nominal terms, however, military spending grew by 6.1 per cent." As a result of a sharp economic recovery in 2021, the global military burden -- world military expenditure as a share of world gross domestic product (GDP) -- fell by 0.1 percentage points, from 2.3 per cent in 2020 to 2.2 per cent in 2021. US military spending amounted to $801 billion in 2021, a drop of 1.4 per cent from 2020. The US military burden decreased slightly from 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 3.5 per cent in 2021. US funding for military research and development rose by 24 per cent between 2012 and 2021, while arms procurement funding fell by 6.4 per cent over the same period. In 2021 spending on both decreased. However, the drop in R&D spending (-1.2 per cent) was smaller than that in arms procurement spending (-5.4 per cent).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: European wind-energy companies have reportedly been targeted by hackers -- or been affected by cyberattacks on their suppliers -- since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nordex SE and Deutsche Windtechnik AG have both reported cyber incidents over the last few months. A third German company, Enercon GmbH, told the Journal it was "collateral damage" when Viasat was hacked at the start of the invasion. The severity of the hacks varies. Nordex SE had to shut down its IT systems; Deutsche Windtechnik AG couldn't remotely control about 2,000 turbines for at least a day; and Enercon GmbH lost remote access to some 5,800 turbines because of the Viasat hack. The notorious Conti ransomware gang has reportedly claimed responsibility for the March hack of Nordex SE; the Journal says that security experts are currently investigating the possibility that it was involved with the April hack of Deutsche Windtechnik AG as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is already working on an M3 iMac, along with refreshed MacBooks and a Mac Mini running an M1 Pro chip. He also said the iMac Pro isn't dead, though it's not expected to arrive "anytime soon." From the report: Add an M3-based iMac to your list of future models. Last week, I detailed Apple's road map for the M2 chip and Mac. The plans include: An M2 chip for a new MacBook Air, entry-level MacBook Pro and Mac mini; M2 Pro and M2 Max chips for a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro; and A dual M2 Ultra chip for the Mac Pro. Since then, I've heard that the M2 chips aren't the only ones in testing within Apple. And if you're waiting for a new iMac, I'm hearing an M3 version of that desktop is already in the works -- though I imagine it won't launch until the end of next year at the earliest. Also, for those asking, I still think an iMac Pro is coming. It just won't be anytime soon. Gurman also wrote about what we can expect to see with the iPhone 14. "First off, the overall design from the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 will stick around another year. [...] There will also be larger camera bumps to fit in new sensors." "That notch will include a pill-shaped cutout for Face ID and a circular cutout for the camera," adds Gurman. "That will be Apple's solution until it's able to fully embed Face ID and the front-facing camera into the display itself. That's still at least three or four years away." There's also going to be a slight shake-up with the iPhone's screen sizes, with the non-Pro iPhone line getting a 6.7-inch screen option. Interestingly, the company is "still working on bringing satellite connectivity to the iPhone" to gain the ability to make calls over satellite networks. "The company first aimed at adding the feature in last year's model, but now the capability could be ready this time around," wrote Gurman.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The seismometer placed on Mars by NASA's InSight lander has recorded its two largest seismic events to date: a magnitude 4.2 and a magnitude 4.1 marsquake. Phys.Org reports: The pair are the first recorded events to occur on the planet's far side from the lander and are five times stronger than the previous largest event recorded. Seismic wave data from the events could help researchers learn more about the interior layers of Mars, particularly its core-mantle boundary, researchers from InSight's Marsquake Service (MQS) report in The Seismic Record. Anna Horleston of the University of Bristol and colleagues were able to identify reflected PP and SS waves from the magnitude 4.2 event, called S0976a, and locate its origin in the Valles Marineris, a massive canyon network that is one of Mars' most distinguishing geological features and one of the largest graben systems in the Solar System. Earlier orbital images of cross-cutting faults and landslides suggested the area would be seismically active, but the new event is the first confirmed seismic activity there. S1000a, the magnitude 4.1 event recorded 24 days later, was characterized by reflected PP and SS waves as well as Pdiff waves, small amplitude waves that have traversed the core-mantle boundary. This is the first time Pdiff waves have been spotted by the InSight mission. The researchers could not definitively pinpoint S1000a's location, but like S0976a it originated on Mars' far side. The seismic energy from S1000a also holds the distinction of being the longest recorded on Mars, lasting 94 minutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientific experiments on crabs and lobsters could be curbed when the animal sentience bill becomes law, the Guardian has learned. There are few restrictions on how crustaceans and decapods can be treated in scientific studies, in contrast with mice and other mammals, for which there are strict welfare laws. Because scientists do not have to register how many crustaceans and decapods they experiment on, there are no numbers for how many are used. But because they breed quickly and are sensitive to pollutants, they are frequently used in experiments, especially those that look into how different types of pollution affect the body. But this could be about to change, Home Office sources said after crabs and lobsters were recognized as sentient beings which could feel pain. The new legislation, which is awaiting royal consent after being approved by parliament this month, means ministers must consider the sentience of animals when implementing policy. This could result in restrictions on how crabs and lobsters can be treated when experimented on. They are not included in the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, unlike mice, octopuses and various other animals. This means that no licenses or training are required before they can be used in procedures that can cause pain, suffering or distress. Robert Ellwood, professor emeritus at the school of biological science at Queen's University Belfast, authored the research that found crabs and lobsters feel pain. He welcomed the potential legislative development, but said it must be applied to the commercial fishing industry as well as scientists. "This is a step forward and if people are happy to accept that decapods are sentient and experience pain, then they should be given some protection. But I would see this ... as a problem if they still leave millions of animals in commercial practices that are treated the same as before," said Ellwood, who has worked with crustaceans for 30 years. He added: "To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair. "It is asking for more rules, regulations and red tape, it will take longer to conduct an experiment, but that is a good thing, if it is applied across the board."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all its vehicles produced last quarter are already using cobalt-free iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Electrek reports: Over the last few years, CEO Elon Musk has said multiple times that Tesla plans to shift more electric cars to LFP batteries in order to overcome nickel and cobalt supply concerns. Iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which don't use nickel or cobalt, are traditionally cheaper and safer, but they offer less energy density, which means less efficient and shorter range for electric vehicles. However, they have improved enough recently that it now makes sense to use cobalt-free batteries in lower-end and shorter-range vehicles. It also frees up the production of battery cells with other, more energy-dense chemistries to produce more longer-range vehicles. Tesla already moved its Standard Range Model 3 and Model Y produced in China to LFP cells. Last year, Tesla also announced it is "shifting to Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry globally" for "standard range vehicles." It confirmed that the automaker planned to switch the Model 3 Standard Range, also known as Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, being produced in the Fremont factory to LFP cells, too. Now with the release of Tesla's Q1 2022 financial results, Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all vehicles produced are now using LFP batteries: "Diversification of battery chemistries is critical for long-term capacity growth, to better optimize our products for their various use cases and expand our supplier base. This is why nearly half of Tesla vehicles produced in Q1 were equipped with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, containing no nickel or cobalt. Currently, LFP batteries are used in most of our standard range vehicle products, as well as commercial energy storage applications. As a result of our energy efficient motors, a Model 3 with an LFP battery pack can still achieve a 267-mile EPA range." This would mean that roughly half of Tesla's volume comes from Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, the cheapest Tesla vehicle, and the Model Y Standard Range, which is only offered in China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.