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Snapchat is introducing a chatbot powered by the latest version of OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, it's a bet that AI chatbots will increasingly become a part of everyday life for more people. From a report: Named "My AI," Snapchat's bot will be pinned to the app's chat tab above conversations with friends. While initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers, the goal is to eventually make the bot available to all of Snapchat's 750 million monthly users, Spiegel tells The Verge. "The big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we're going to talk to AI every day," he says. "And this is something we're well positioned to do as a messaging service." At launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat. The main difference is that Snap's version is more restricted in what it can answer. Snap's employees have trained it to adhere to the company's trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that include swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn has been hit by a rise in sophisticated recruitment scams, as fraudsters seek to take advantage of the trend towards remote working and widespread lay-offs across the tech sector. From a report: Jobseekers on the world's largest professional network are being defrauded out of money after taking part in fake recruitment processes set up by scammers who pose as employers, before obtaining personal and financial information. "There's certainly an increase in the sophistication of the attacks and the cleverness," Oscar Rodriguez, vice-president of product management at LinkedIn told the Financial Times "We see websites being set up, we see phone numbers with a seemingly professional operator picking up the phone and answering on the company's behalf. We see a move to more sophisticated deception," he added. The warning comes as the Microsoft-owned social media company said it has sought to block tens of millions of fake accounts in recent months, while US regulators warn of an increase in jobs-related cons. Last month, cyber security company Zscaler revealed a scam that targeted jobseekers and a dozen US companies, where fraudsters approached people through LinkedIn's direct messaging feature InMail. Scammers identified businesses that were already hiring, including enterprise software company Zuora, software developer Intellectsoft and Zscaler itself. They then created "lookalike" websites with similar job ads and, via LinkedIn's InMail feature, invited jobseekers to enter personal information into the websites, before conducting remote interviews via Skype.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It's not good enough. Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn't, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves. Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them -- having searched for the exact title -- under a slew of other guff. Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks -- this esteemed publication included -- for lots of reasons. [...] However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple -- and indeed Google's Play store -- opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what's out there is up to standard. It's a wild west. Happily things may be about to change -- including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google's "effective duopoly" over what we see, do and play on our phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work. From a report: Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble over how to manage them -- only last week, Russia suspended participation in its nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Thankfully, nuclear warheads mostly just sit there, motionless and silent, cozy in their silos and underground storage caverns. If someone actually tried to use one, though, would it definitely go off as intended? "Nobody really knows," says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The 20th century witnessed more than 2,000 nuclear tests -- the vast majority carried out by the US and the Soviet Union. And while these did prove the countries' nuclear capabilities, they don't guarantee that a warhead strapped to a missile or some other delivery system would work today. Surprisingly, as far as we know, the US has only ever tested a live nuclear warhead using a live missile system once, way back in 1962. It was launched from a submarine. The Soviet Union had performed a similar test the previous year, and China followed in 1966. No nation has ever tested a nuclear warhead delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile could blow up on the launchpad, explains Wellerstein. No one wants to clean that mess up. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has, sadly, brought the specter of nuclear weaponry to the fore once again. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed new strategic nuclear weapons systems had been placed on combat duty, and he threatened to resume nuclear testing. Russia's former defense minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has been particularly vocal about his country's readiness to use nuclear weapons -- including against Ukraine. Russia has around 4,500 non-retired nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit that focuses on security. Roughly 2,000 are considered "tactical" -- smaller warheads that could be used on, for example, a foreign battlefield. To our knowledge, Russia has not begun "mating" those tactical warheads to delivery systems, such as missiles. Doing so involves certain safety risks, notes Lynn Rusten of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank: "It would be really worrisome if we saw any indication that they were moving those warheads out of storage." If they were brought into operation, multiple things could in theory go wrong with these weapons. For one thing, the delivery systems themselves might not be reliable. Mark Schneider, formerly of the US Department of Defense's senior executive service, has written about the many problems Russia has faced with its missiles so far during the war with Ukraine. Last spring, US officials said between 20 and 60 percent of Russian missiles were failing, either in terms of not launching or not hitting the intended target. That doesn't necessarily matter, though, notes Schneider. When firing a nuclear warhead with a big explosive yield, "accuracy is much less relevant," he says. Russia certainly has enough missiles to get a nuclear weapon more or less to where it wants -- even if it takes more than one attempt. But what about the warheads themselves? Modern thermonuclear devices are complex bits of machinery designed to initiate a specific explosive sequence, sometimes called a fission-fusion-fission reaction, which releases a massive amount of energy. Wellerstein points out that some warheads designed decades ago are still part of nuclear arsenals. Over time, their parts must be carefully checked for degradation and refurbished or replaced. But certain components can become unavailable due to changes in manufacturing capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Heat pumps, in contrast, (to gas or oil furnaces) don't generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300 percent efficiency in some cases. Because they are more efficient, using heat pumps to cool and heat homes can help homeowners save money on their utility bills, said Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocacy group. In Maine, where heat pump adoption is growing, but where a majority of homes still burn oil, homeowners can save thousands of dollars in annual energy costs by making the switch, according to an analysis from Efficiency Maine, an independent administrator that runs the state's energy-saving programs. Many heat pumps that are built for cold climates do have hefty upfront price tags. To soften the blow, a federal tax credit from last year's climate and tax law can cover 30 percent of the costs of purchase and installation, up to $2,000. As they've grown in popularity, heat pumps have increasingly been the subject of misconception and, at times, misinformation. Fossil-fuel industry groups have been the origin of many exaggerated and misleading claims, including the assertion that they don't work in regions with cold climates and are likely to fail in freezing weather. While heat pumps do become less efficient in subzero temperatures, many models still operate close to normally in temperatures down to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 24 Celsius. Some of the latest models are even more efficient, and many "cold" countries, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, are increasingly embracing heat pumps. "We're starting to see evidence that the myth has been kept alive by people with an entrenched interest in avoiding the adoption of heat pumps," Dr. Calisch said. There are additional steps homeowners can take to make the most of their heat pumps, like sealing air leaks and drafts and improving insulation, said Troy Moon, the sustainability director for the city of Portland, Maine. Homeowners can also keep their existing furnaces as backup for the coldest days of the year, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Chrome's giving its page zoom feature a boost, which should make it more helpful for people who have difficulty reading the smaller screen on a phone. From a report: With the improved feature, you can increase the size of text, images, videos, and interactive controls on mobile web pages by up to 300 percent while preserving their original formatting. While the feature hasn't yet become available for all Chrome users, you can access it now if you download the Chrome beta on your phone or tablet. To enable the feature, tap the three dots icon in the top right corner of the browser, hit Settings > Accessibility, and then adjust the zoom level to your liking. Google will save this preference for all the sites you browse so you won't have to keep tweaking it, and will even bypass the ones that try to block zoom features. Previously, Google only allowed users to adjust text scaling options up to 200 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the decade following US President John F Kennedy's 1961 announcement of America's mission to put a man on the moon, the number of physical science PhDs tripled, and that of engineering PhDs quadrupled. Now, the country is embarking on a moonshot to rebuild the semiconductor fabrication industry. Corporations that want a cut of the $39bn in manufacturing incentives within the Chips and Science Act programme can start filing their applications for subsidies on Tuesday. In order to get them, they'll have to show that they are contributing to something that may be even more difficult than putting a man in space: building a 21st-century workforce. America has plenty of four-year graduates with crushing debt (the national average for federal loan debts is more than $37,000 a student) and underwhelming job prospects. It also has plenty of college dropouts and young people with high-school degrees who are trying to make ends meet through minimum-wage jobs supplemented by gig work. What it lacks are the machinists, carpenters, contractors and technicians who will build the new fabrication facilities. It also needs to triple the number of college graduates in semiconductor-related fields, such as engineering, over the next decade, according to commerce secretary Gina Raimondo. Raimondo, who is well on her way to becoming the industrial strategy tsar of the administration, gave a speech to this effect earlier this month. In it, she underscored not only the need to rebuild chip manufacturing in a world in which the US and China will lead separate tech ecosystems, but also to ensure that there are enough domestic workers to do so. "If you talk to the CEOs of companies like TSMC and Samsung [both of which are launching fabs in the US], they are worried about finding these people here," Raimondo told me. She cites workforce development -- alongside scale and transparency -- as major hurdles that must be overcome to meet the administration's goals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An industry group representing the world's biggest mobile phone operators announced a new united interface that will give developers universal access to all of their networks, speeding up the delivery of new services and products. From a report: The GSMA will introduce the portal, called Open Gateway, at its annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, its Director General Mats Granryd said in an interview. AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Group are among the 21 GSMA members that will use the interface. "We have the phenomenal reach down to the base station and out into your pocket," Granryd said. "And that's what we're trying to make available for the developer community to ultimately benefit you as a consumer or you as a business."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The packaged-goods giant aims to cut its environmental impact and retailers' electric bills. From a report: Unilever wants to warm up its ice cream freezers in convenience stores without turning its products into puddles, part of a broader effort to pursue green goals and potentially boost sales in the process.The consumer packaged goods giant, which sells ice cream brands including Ben & Jerry's and Magnum, is testing the performance of its products in freezers that are set to temperatures of roughly 10 degrees Fahrenheit, up from the industry standard of zero. Unilever owns most of the 3 million chest-like freezers that house its ice-cream tubs and treats in bodegas and corner stores, and the energy used to power them accounts for around 10% of Unilever's greenhouse gas footprint, according to the London-based firm. Keeping ice cream at 10 degrees as opposed to zero will reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 20% to 30% per freezer, it said. It might also help sales with sustainability-minded consumers and even keep stores' ice-cream selling season going longer. Unilever's out-of-home ice cream sales declined slightly during the fourth quarter of 2022 because, the company said, some stores unplugged their freezers sooner in the year than usual. "What was happening was that shopkeepers in some markets responded to fears about rising energy costs by switching off their cabinets earlier than they otherwise would have done," departing Chief Executive Alan Jope said in discussing the results earlier this month. Unilever in January said Hein Schumacher would take over as CEO in July. [...] But the strategy has required Unilever to reformulate some of its ice creams so they can withstand higher temperatures without melting, losing structural integrity or forfeiting what the company calls their distinctive mouthfeel. Higher temperatures can lead to softer ice creams that stick to wrappers and slide off ice cream sticks, for example, said Andrew Sztehlo, chief research and development officer for Unilever's ice cream division. Other ingredients such as wafer cones can turn soggy in warmer temperatures, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xiaomi unveiled wireless augmented reality glasses in the latest attempt to build momentum in an arena that has yet to become mainstream. From a report: The concept device from the Chinese phone maker is designed to let users gesture via its embedded camera to select and open apps, swipe through pages and exit apps to return to the start page, without using a smartphone. Dubbed Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass, the headset weighs 126 grams (4.4 ounces) and shows information to the user via two MicroOLED screens, Xiaomi said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures in America "has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses," reports the New York Times:So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away. More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.... PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation's largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, has been so inundated by connection requests that last year it announced a freeze on new applications until 2026, so that it can work through a backlog of thousands of proposals, mostly for renewable energy. It now takes roughly four years, on average, for developers to get approval, double the time it took a decade ago. And when companies finally get their projects reviewed, they often face another hurdle: the local grid is at capacity, and they are required to spend much more than they planned for new transmission lines and other upgrades. Many give up. Fewer than one-fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the so-called interconnection queue, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "From our perspective, the interconnection process has become the No. 1 project killer," said Piper Miller, vice president of market development at Pine Gate Renewables, a major solar power and battery developer.... A potentially bigger problem for solar and wind is that, in many places around the country, the local grid is clogged, unable to absorb more power. That means if a developer wants to build a new wind farm, it might have to pay not just for a simple connecting line, but also for deeper grid upgrades elsewhere.... These costs can be unpredictable. In 2018, EDP North America, a renewable energy developer, proposed a 100-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota, estimating it would have to spend $10 million connecting to the grid. But after the grid operator completed its analysis, EDP learned the upgrades would cost $80 million. It canceled the project. That creates a new problem: When a proposed energy project drops out of the queue, the grid operator often has to redo studies for other pending projects and shift costs to other developers, which can trigger more cancellations and delays. It also creates perverse incentives, experts said. Some developers will submit multiple proposals for wind and solar farms at different locations without intending to build them all. Instead, they hope that one of their proposals will come after another developer who has to pay for major network upgrades. The rise of this sort of speculative bidding has further jammed up the queue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX is livestreaming coverage of its latest launch tonight. SpaceX and NASA were "preparing to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station," reports CNN, "continuing the public-private effort to keep the orbiting laboratory fully staffed and return astronaut launches to U.S. soil For this mission a reusable Falcon 9 rocket will eventually propel a Crew Dragon capsule into space — carrying six astronauts "from all over the world — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates... to take over operations from the SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts who arrived at the space station in October 2022."They're expected to spend up to six months on board the orbiting laboratory, carrying out science experiments and maintaining the two-decade-old station.... During their stint in space, the Crew-6 astronauts will oversee more than 200 science-oriented projects, including researching how some substances burn in the microgravity environment and investigating microbial samples that will be collected from the exterior of the ISS. They will play host to two other key missions that will stop by the ISS during their stay. The first is the Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will mark the first astronaut mission under a Boeing-NASA partnership. Slated for April, the flight will carry NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the space station, marking the last phase of a testing and demonstration program Boeing needs to carry out to certify its Starliner spacecraft for routine astronaut missions. Then, in May, a group of four astronauts will arrive on a mission called AX-2 — a privately funded tourism mission to the space station. That mission, which will be carried out by a separate SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, will include former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now a private astronaut with the Texas-based space tourism company Axiom, which brokered and organized the mission. It will also include three paying customers, similar to the AX-1 mission that visited the ISS last year. "It's another paradigm shift," mission commander Stephen Bowen said in January. "Those two events — huge events — in spaceflight happening during our increment, on top of all the other work we get to do, I don't think we're going to fully be able to absorb it until after the fact." Roughly 25 hours after the launch the crew capsule willdock with the space station. This will be SpaceX's seventh astronaut-carrying flight for NASA since 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines." Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up."We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet. While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge. Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages. But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since the earliest versions of the iPhone, "The ability to dynamically execute code was nearly completely removed," write security researchers at Trellix, "creating a powerful barrier for exploits which would need to find a way around these mitigations to run a malicious program. As macOS has continually adopted more features of iOS it has also come to enforce code signing more strictly. "The Trellix Advanced Research Center vulnerability team has discovered a large new class of bugs that allow bypassing code signing to execute arbitrary code in the context of several platform applications, leading to escalation of privileges and sandbox escape on both macOS and iOS.... The vulnerabilities range from medium to high severity with CVSS scores between 5.1 and 7.1. These issues could be used by malicious applications and exploits to gain access to sensitive information such as a user's messages, location data, call history, and photos." Computer Weekly explains that the vulnerability bypasses strengthened code-signing mitigations put in place by Apple on its developer tool NSPredicate after the infamous ForcedEntry exploit used by Israeli spyware manufacturer NSO Group:So far, the team has found multiple vulnerabilities within the new class of bugs, the first and most significant of which exists in a process designed to catalogue data about behaviour on Apple devices. If an attacker has achieved code execution capability in a process with the right entitlements, they could then use NSPredicate to execute code with the process's full privilege, gaining access to the victim's data. Emmitt and his team also found other issues that could enable attackers with appropriate privileges to install arbitrary applications on a victim's device, access and read sensitive information, and even wipe a victim's device. Ultimately, all of the new bugs carry a similar level of impact to ForcedEntry. Senior vulnerability researcher Austin Emmitt said the vulnerabilities constituted a "significant breach" of the macOS and iOS security models, which rely on individual applications having fine-grain access to the subset of resources needed, and querying services with more privileges to get anything else. "The key thing here is the vulnerabilities break Apple's security model at a fundamental level," Trellix's director of vulnerability research told Wired — though there's some additional context:Apple has fixed the bugs the company found, and there is no evidence they were exploited.... Crucially, any attacker trying to exploit these bugs would require an initial foothold into someone's device. They would need to have found a way in before being able to abuse the NSPredicate system. (The existence of a vulnerability doesn't mean that it has been exploited.) Apple patched the NSPredicate vulnerabilities Trellix found in its macOS 13.2 and iOS 16.3 software updates, which were released in January. Apple has also issued CVEs for the vulnerabilities that were discovered: CVE-2023-23530 and CVE-2023-23531. Since Apple addressed these vulnerabilities, it has also released newer versions of macOS and iOS. These included security fixes for a bug that was being exploited on people's devices. TechCrunch explores its severity:While Trellix has seen no evidence to suggest that these vulnerabilities have been actively exploited, the cybersecurity company tells TechCrunch that its research shows that iOS and macOS are "not inherently more secure" than other operating systems.... Will Strafach, a security researcher and founder of the Guardian firewall app, described the vulnerabilities as "pretty clever," but warned that there is little the average user can do about these threats, "besides staying vigilant about installing security updates." And iOS and macOS security researcher Wojciech ReguÅa told TechCrunch that while the vulnerabilities could be significant, in the absence of exploits, more details are needed to determine how big this attack surface is. Jamf's Michael Covington said that Apple's code-signing measures were "never intended to be a silver bullet or a lone solution" for protecting device data. "The vulnerabilities, though noteworthy, show how layered defenses are so critical to maintaining good security posture," Covington said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pennsylvania State University has an announcement. "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe.""These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe." Using the first dataset released from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.... In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. "The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science," said Leja. "We've been informally calling these objects 'universe breakers' — and they have been living up to their name so far." Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. "We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find," Leja said. "It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question." "My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives," Leja says in the statement. "But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying." "While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change." Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper's co-authors:It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science's best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times," Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies "really go off a cliff," he said.... The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form "much more efficiently," said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added. This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery "all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking," Elbaz said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes an article from Fortune:Earlier this month, job advice platform Resumebuilder.com surveyed 1,000 business leaders who either use or plan to use ChatGPT. It found that nearly half of their companies have implemented the chatbot. And roughly half of this cohort say ChatGPT has already replaced workers at their companies.... Business leaders already using ChatGPT told ResumeBuilders.com their companies already use ChatGPT for a variety of reasons, including 66% for writing code, 58% for copywriting and content creation, 57% for customer support, and 52% for meeting summaries and other documents. In the hiring process, 77% of companies using ChatGPT say they use it to help write job descriptions, 66% to draft interview requisitions, and 65% to respond to applications. Overall, most business leaders are impressed by ChatGPT's work," ResumeBuilder.com wrote in a news release. "Fifty-five percent say the quality of work produced by ChatGPT is 'excellent,' while 34% say it's 'very good....'" Nearly all of the companies using ChatGPT said they've saved money using the tool, with 48% saying they've saved more than $50,000 and 11% saying they've saved more than $100,000.... Of the companies ResumeBuilder.com identified as businesses using the chatbot, 93% say they plan to expand their use of ChatGPT, and 90% of executives say ChatGPT experience is beneficial for job seekers — if it hasn't already replaced their jobs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post:Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky — or "direct air capture," as it is known by experts and scientists — is a bit like a time machine for climate change. It removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground, almost exactly the reverse of what humanity has been doing for centuries by burning fossil fuels. Its promise? That it can help run back the clock, undoing some of what we have done to the atmosphere and helping to return the planet to a cooler state. The problem with direct air capture, however, has been that it takes energy — a lot of energy.... But if the energy powering that comes from fossil fuels, direct air capture starts to look less like a time machine than an accelerator: a way to emit even more CO2. Now, however, a company is working to combine direct air capture with a relatively untapped source of energy: Heat from Earth's crust. Fervo Energy, a geothermal company headquartered in Houston, announced on Thursday that it will design and engineer the first purpose-built geothermal and direct air capture plant. With the help of a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the company hopes to have a pilot facility online in 3 to 5 years. If it works, it will be a way to produce carbon-free electricity, while reducing CO2 in the atmosphere at the same time. In short, a win-win for the climate. "You have to have your energy from a carbon-free source" for direct air capture to make sense, said Timothy Latimer, the CEO of Fervo Energy. "Geothermal is a great match...." Geothermal wells don't, of course, get anywhere close to Earth's core, but a geothermal well drilled just 1 to 2 miles into hot rocks below the surface can reach temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees. Water is pumped into the well, heated and returned to the surface, where it can be converted into steam and electricity. Even after generating electricity, most geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat — often clocking in around 212 degrees. And conveniently, that happens to be the exact temperature needed to pull carbon dioxide out of an air filter and bury it underground. The article notes a study which found that if air capture were combined with all the geothermal plants currently in America, the country "could suck up around 12.8 million tons of carbon dioxide every year." And "Unlike wind and solar, a geothermal plant can be on all of the time, producing electricity even when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127. DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there's two more agencies (including America's CIA) that are "undecided." But there is one agency that decided — with "low confidence" — that the virus had somehow leaked from a lab. (And the FBI also decided with "moderate confidence" on that same theory.) "The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin," writes the Wall Street Journal — adding that unfortunately U.S. officials "declined" to give any details on what led to the Energy Department's position. The Wall Street Journal also notes:Despite the agencies' differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.... Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to "the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins," the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn't have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said. Also responding to the Department of Energy's outlying position was a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at Canada's University of Saskatchewan, who posted a series of observations on Twitter:The available evidence shows overwhelmingly that the pandemic started at Huanan market via zoonosis. I have no idea what this evidence that Department of Energy has is. All I know that it is "weak" and resulted in a conclusion of "low confidence". It reportedly comes from the DOE's own network of national labs rather than through spying. But I do know that to be consistent with the available scientific evidence, the DOE has to explain how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in humans at the same market the size of a tennis court, over 8 km & across a river from the only lab in Wuhan working on SARSr-CoVs.... Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure speculation & unsupported by evidence.... Despite 3 years of a global search for this evidence, it has not materialized, while evidence supporting zoonosis associated with Huanan has continued to stack up. At some point, an absence of evidence might just be evidence of absence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From an opinion piece in the Register:Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft.... Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656.... Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code.... Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat. The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle. "We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: They say "always be learning" — but do podcasts actually help? I've been trying to find podcasts that discuss programming, and I've enjoyed Lex Fridman's interviews with language creators like Guido van Rossum, Chris Lattner, and Brendan Eich (plus his long interviews with Donald Knuth). Then I discovered that GitHub, Red Hat, Stack Overflow, and the Linux Foundation all have their own podcast. There's a developer podcast called "Corecursive" that I like with the tagline "the stories behind the code," plus a whole slew of (sometimes language-specific) podcasts at Changelog (including an interview with Brian Kernighan). And it seems like there's an entirely different universe of content on YouTube — like the retired Microsoft engineer doing "Dave's Garage," Software Engineering Daily, and the various documentaries by Honeypot.io. Computerphile has also scored various interviews with Brian Kernighan, and if you search YouTube enough you'll find stray interviews with Steve Wozniak. But I wanted to ask Slashdot's readers: Do you listen to podcasts about computer science? And if so, which ones? (Because I'm always stumbling across new programming podcasts, which makes me worry about what else I've been missing out on.) Maybe I should also ask if you ever watch coding livestreams on Twitch — although that gets into the more general question of just how much content we consume that's related to our profession. Fascinating discussions, or continuing work-related education? (And do podcasts really help keep your skills fresh? Are coding livestreams on Twitch just a waste of time?) Most importantly, does anyone have a favorite geek podcast that they're listening to? Share your own experience and opinions in the comments... What's the best podcast about computer science?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In what might be mistaken for an early April Fools' joke, one month after Amazon confirmed it would layoff 18,000+ employees, Amazon News last week put out a whimsical story about 10,000+ of its employees' dogs who are registered to "work" at corporate offices as part of Amazon's Dogs at Work program. "This unique program," Amazon explains," pulls out all the stops to make sure dogs have everything they need for a successful work day, including decked out dog parks, unlimited treats from the reception desk, and regular events where dogs and their owners can get to know their colleagues." Amazon employees also received a back-to-the office edict last week from CEO Andy Jassy, who cited the need for "serendipitous interactions" between team members, which Amazon has at times suggested would be facilitated if its employees' dogs return to the workplace, too. "The dog-friendly policy also contributes to the company's culture of collaboration," Amazon reported last year. "Dogs in the workplace are an unexpected mechanism for connection, an Amazon manager added. "I see employees meeting each other in our lobbies or elevators every day because of their dogs." Amazon News offers profiles of "11 Amazing Pups" who didn't need obedience school to be convinced to return to the office, including Murray and Ripley. "Working from home certainly has its perks," Amazon reports, "but Murray LOVES coming into the office. He gets to see his favorite colleagues-both human and canine-and brighten everyone's day." And "Ripley starts each workday with a greeting from her best friend Lisa at the Culver Studios gate. From there, she promptly reports for duty, doling out kisses to anyone who needs a little pick-me-up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An interesting profile of EV entrepreneur Horace Luke from Rest of World:During his time working for companies like Microsoft and HTC on projects like the Xbox gaming system and Android phones, Luke mulled over the idea of mobility. In 2011, he pitched the idea that would form the core of his company Gogoro: an electric vehicle that didn't have to take up space and time charging its batteries, but instead relied on a network of batteries that could be swapped at roadside stations, like filling up a gas tank. Multiple investors and vehicle makers told him the idea was impossible. Today, Gogoro battery-swapping stations are as common as gas stations in Taiwan, and the network supports nearly 400,000 battery swaps a day, by over 526,000 riders. Last year, according to the Taiwanese government, 12% of all scooters sold in Taiwan were electric, and over 90% of those relied on Gogoro batteries. But in order to make the battery network a reality, Gogoro didn't have to develop just the batteries but also the vehicles that use them, along with an internal management software that encompasses everything from the supply of vehicle parts to the number of charged batteries at stations to how far riders can go before their next swap. And the company now has pilot projects in Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld:.NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers. A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7. The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer. "We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement. And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We extended the capabilities of ChatGPT to robotics," brags a blog post from Microsoft's Autonomous Systems and Robotics research group, "and controlled multiple platforms such as robot arms, drones, and home assistant robots intuitively with language." They're exploring how to use ChatGPT to "make natural human-robot interactions possible... to see if ChatGPT can think beyond text, and reason about the physical world to help with robotics tasks."We want to help people interact with robots more easily, without needing to learn complex programming languages or details about robotic systems. The key challenge here is teaching ChatGPT how to solve problems considering the laws of physics, the context of the operating environment, and how the robot's physical actions can change the state of the world. It turns out that ChatGPT can do a lot by itself, but it still needs some help. Our technical paper describes a series of design principles that can be used to guide language models towards solving robotics tasks. These include, and are not limited to, special prompting structures, high-level APIs, and human feedback via text.... In our work we show multiple examples of ChatGPT solving robotics puzzles, along with complex robot deployments in the manipulation, aerial, and navigation domains.... We gave ChatGPT access to functions that control a real drone, and it proved to be an extremely intuitive language-based interface between the non-technical user and the robot. ChatGPT asked clarification questions when the user's instructions were ambiguous, and wrote complex code structures for the drone such as a zig-zag pattern to visually inspect shelves. It even figured out how to take a selfie! We also used ChatGPT in a simulated industrial inspection scenario with the Microsoft AirSim simulator. The model was able to effectively parse the user's high-level intent and geometrical cues to control the drone accurately.... We are excited to release these technologies with the aim of bringing robotics to the reach of a wider audience. We believe that language-based robotics control will be fundamental to bring robotics out of science labs, and into the hands of everyday users. That said, we do emphasize that the outputs from ChatGPT are not meant to be deployed directly on robots without careful analysis. We encourage users to harness the power of simulations in order to evaluate these algorithms before potential real life deployments, and to always take the necessary safety precautions. Our work represents only a small fraction of what is possible within the intersection of large language models operating in the robotics space, and we hope to inspire much of the work to come.tics to the reach of a wider audience. We believe that language-based robotics control will be fundamental to bring robotics out of science labs, and into the hands of everyday users. ZDNet points out that Google Research and Alphabet's Everyday Robots "have also worked on similar robotics challenges using a large language models called PaLM, or Pathways Language Model, which helped a robot to process open-ended prompts and respond in reasonable ways."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "has issued a health advisory to warn the public of an increase of a drug-resistant bacteria called Shigella," reports CNN:There are limited antimicrobial treatments available for these particular drug-resistant strains of Shigella and it's also easily transmissible, warned the CDC in the Friday advisory. It's also able to spread antimicrobial resistance genes to other bacteria that infect the intestines.... The CDC says patients will recover from shigellosis without any antimicrobial treatment and it can be managed with oral hydration, but for those who are infected with the drug-resistant strains there are no recommendations for treatment if symptoms become more severe. The percentage of infections from drug-resistant strains of the bacteria increased from zero in 2015 to 5% in 2022, according to the CDC. Nationwide, there are nearly 3 million antimicrobial-resistant infections each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result, according to the CDC. A recent report by the United Nations said roughly 5 million deaths worldwide were associated with antimicrobial resistance in 2019 and the annual toll is expected to increase to 10 million by 2050 if steps are not taken to stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Nokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes in partnership with iFixit. Launched before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Saturday, the Nokia G22 has a removable back and internal design that allows components to be easily unscrewed and swapped out including the battery, screen and charging port. Nokia phones manufacturer HMD Global will make "quick fix" repair guides and genuine parts available for five years via specialists iFixit, in addition to affordable professional repair options. "People value long-lasting, quality devices and they shouldn't have to compromise on price to get them. The new Nokia G22 is purposefully built with a repairable design so you can keep it even longer," said Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing for HMD Global. The G22 is partially made of recycled plastic and has a 6.53in screen, large-capacity battery, 50-megapixel camera and a fingerprint scanner. It runs Android 12 and will be supported for three years of monthly security updates and two major Android version upgrades.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After an iPhone was stolen, $10,000 vanished from the owner's bank account — and they were locked out of their Apple account's photos, contacts and notes. The thieves "stole thousands of dollars through Apple Pay" and "opened an Apple Card to make fraudulent charges," writes 9 to 5 Mac, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal.These thieves often work in groups with one distracting a victim while another records over a shoulder as they enter their passcode. Others have been known to even befriend victims, asking them to open social media or other apps on their iPhones so they can watch and memorize the passcode before stealing it. A 12-person crime ring in Minnesota was recently taken down after targeting iPhones like this in bars. Almost $300,000 was stolen from 40 victims by this group before they were caught. The Journal adds that "similar stories are piling up in police stations around the country," while one of their article's authors has tweeted Apple's official response. "We sympathize with users who have had this experience and we take all attacks on our users very seriously, no matter how rare.... We will continue to advance the protections to help keep user accounts secure." The reporter suggests alphanumeric passwords are harder to steal, while MacRumors offers some other simple fixes. "Use Face ID or Touch ID as much as possible when in public to prevent thieves from spying... In situations where entering the passcode is necessary, users can hold their hands over their screen to hide passcode entry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:While Ubuntu Linux hasn't provided Flatpak support out-of-the-box due to their preference of using their own Snap app packaging/distribution format, Ubuntu flavors/spins have to this point been able to pre-install Flatpak support if they desired. However, for the 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" cycle and moving forward, Ubuntu flavors will no longer be permitted to install Flatpak packages by default. Flatpak support for Ubuntu and its flavors will remain available in the Ubuntu archive so those wanting to install Flatpak support can easily do so post-install. This change going into effect with the 23.04 cycle is making it so no Ubuntu flavors will have Flatpak support installed by default / out-of-the-box: they are supposed to center around Debian packages and Snaps for their out-of-the-box packaging support to align with Ubuntu. From the blog OMG Ubuntu:Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu's official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release. Ubuntu says the decision will 'improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience' for new users by making it clearer about what an "Ubuntu experience" is.... As far as Ubuntu is concerned, only deb and snap software is intrinsic to the 'Ubuntu experience', and that experience now needs to be offered everywhere. Flavor leads (apparently) agree, and have all agreed to mirror regular Ubuntu by not offering Flatpak features in their default install for future releases.... Flatpak will not be uninstalled or removed when user makes the upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04 from a version where Flatpak is already present.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shared this report about the boxy little Wuling:Priced at around $5,500 and famously outselling Tesla in China, it's a tiny, comically square car, produced in joint partnership with General Motors and SAIC. The micro EV has been fodder for articles and YouTubers — even while it's remained unavailable outside China. Until last summer, that is, when Wuling attempted to go international. First stop: Indonesia. With its Air model selling at a mere $16,000 — less than half the price of alternatives — the minimalist EV was depicted in advertising as a gateway to the future, a slick solution for busy Indonesian city-dwellers. Six months later, the Wuling Air now dominates EV sales in the country, according to the Association of Indonesia Automotive Industries (Gaikindo). Since entering Indonesia last August, it's sold some 8,000 vehicles. The number may be small compared to the manufacturers' sales figures in their home turfs of the U.S. and China, but it's equivalent to 78% of the EV market in the Southeast Asian country.... It's not perfect; customers complain of battery failure and the anxiety of finding charge points. But the price tag counts for a lot.... A $48,000 Nissan Leaf or Hyundai Ioniq is way out of most Indonesians' price brackets. But a Wuling — $16,000 for standard range, which lasts 250 kilometers on a full charge, and $20,000 for long-range, at 450 kilometers — is achievable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than a quarter of Google's full-time workforce is in its cloud unit, reports CNBC. And now Google is asking cloud employees and partners "to share their desks and alternate days with their desk mates starting next quarter, citing 'real estate efficiency.'"The new desk-sharing model will apply to Google Cloud's five largest U.S. locations — Kirkland, Washington; New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; and Sunnyvale, California — and is happening so the company "can continue to invest in Cloud's growth," according to an internal FAQ recently shared with cloud employees and viewed by CNBC. Some buildings will be vacated as a result, the document noted. "Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler," the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the same day. "Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment." The FAQ says employees may come in on other days, but if they're in on an unassigned day, they will use "overflow drop-in space." Internally, leadership has given the new seating arrangement a title: "Cloud Office Evolution" or "CLOE," which it describes as "combining the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility" of hybrid work. The new workspace plan is not a temporary pilot, the document noted. "This will ultimately lead to more efficient use of our space," it said. A Google spokesperson said they'd conducted pilot programs and surveys "to explore different hybrid work models," CNBC reports, with the results showing employees "value guaranteed in-person collaboration when they are in the office, as well as the option to work from home a few days each week." So they've devised their new system to combine "the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility and focus we've all come to appreciate from remote work, while also allowing us to use our spaces more efficiently." The article points out that Google Cloud is currently not profitable, and "is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter — $480 million in the fourth quarter, although that was nearly half of the loss a year prior." An internal FAQ warns that affected employees are now expected to have "conversations about how they will or will not decorate the space, store personal items, and tidiness expectations." Thanks to Slashdot reader RUs1729 for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this story from The New York Times. (Alternate URL for a shorter version here.)Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's biggest maker of advanced computer chips, is upgrading and expanding a new factory in Arizona that promises to help move the United States toward a more self-reliant technological future. But to some at the company, the $40 billion project is something else: a bad business decision. Internal doubts are mounting at the Taiwanese chip maker over its U.S. factory, according to interviews with 11 TSMC employees, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Many of the workers said the project could distract from the research and development focus that had long helped TSMC outmaneuver rivals. Some added that they were hesitant to move to the United States because of potential culture clashes.... Its factory expansion in the northern outskirts of Phoenix is meant to bring advanced microchip production closer to the United States and away from any potential standoff with China. Yet the effort has stoked internal apprehension, with high costs and managerial challenges showing how difficult it is to transplant one of the most complicated manufacturing processes known to man halfway across the world. The pressure for the Arizona factory to succeed is immense. Failure would mean a setback for U.S. efforts to cultivate the advanced chip manufacturing that mostly moved to Asia decades ago. And TSMC would have spent billions on a plant that did not produce enough viable chips to make it worth the effort.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software. But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework.In his talk, Crawford presentedNASA's Open-SourceScience Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help themintegrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just afew weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directoratepublished its newpolicy on scientific information. Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restrictedas necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publicationsshould be made openly available with no embargo period, including researchdata and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zerolicense, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such asApache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributingto open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will beupdated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-sourceprojects in their official capacity.... As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started itsfive-year Transformto Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speedup adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House andall major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA'sstrategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveriesthrough open-science principles, Crawford said. Interesting tidbit from the article: "In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA OpenSource Agreement. This licensehas been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't considerit a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects." Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Since Thursday morning, Dish Network has been experiencing a major outage that's taken down the company's main websites, apps, and customer support systems, and employees tell The Verge it's not clear what's going on inside the company. The company's Dish.com website is completely blank save for a notice apologizing for "any disruptions you may be having" while promising that "teams are working hard to restore systems as soon as possible." The Boost Mobile and Boost Infinite sites display a similar message. When we called each brand's customer support lines, there were no humans on the other end -- each call automatically hung up after delivering a recorded message about the outage. In an ironic twist, the outage started around the time that Dish was set to release its earnings for Q4 and fiscal year 2022. CEO Erik Carlson addressed it during the company's earnings call, saying the company was experiencing an "internal outage that's continuing to affect our internal servers and IT telephony." While Carlson claimed that Dish, Sling, and the company's wireless networks were operating normally, he admitted that "internal communications, customer care functions, Internet sites" were knocked out. Internally, frontline employees have been kept in the dark about what's going on. Two sources tell The Verge that they are being told to stand by for information from their leadership teams, which haven't yet been forthcoming. They say it hasn't even been made clear whether they'll be paid. Employees have also been told that they won't be able to connect to their VPN, keeping remote workers from logging in to work. Despite Carlson's comments that Dish's services should be working normally, Downdetector shows an increase in reports of issues using Dish Network's services, which include satellite TV and Boost Mobile's wireless network. Customers are reporting on social media that they're unable to activate new equipment or SIM cards received from the company, and alleged technicians say they can't complete installs and upgrades for customers. Customers have also said that the outage is preventing them from paying their bills. Some of the company's sites, like dishwireless.com and launch.5gmobilegenesis.com, are currently completely down and don't even display an error message. The good news is that the outage doesn't appear to be the result of a cyberattack, according to The Desk, though Dish likely hasn't concluded its investigation yet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Linkoping, Lund and Gothenburg universities in Sweden have successfully grown electrodes in living tissue using the body's molecules as triggers. The result, published in the journal Science, paves the way for the formation of fully integrated electronic circuits in living organisms. Phys.Org reports: Linking electronics to biological tissue is important to understanding complex biological functions, combating diseases in the brain, and developing future interfaces between man and machine. However, conventional bioelectronics, developed in parallel with the semiconductor industry, have a fixed and static design that is difficult, if not impossible, to combine with living biological signal systems. To bridge this gap between biology and technology, researchers have developed a method for creating soft, substrate-free, electronically conductive materials in living tissue. By injecting a gel containing enzymes as the "assembly molecules," the researchers were able to grow electrodes in the tissue of zebrafish and medicinal leeches. "Contact with the body's substances changes the structure of the gel and makes it electrically conductive, which it isn't before injection. Depending on the tissue, we can also adjust the composition of the gel to get the electrical process going," says Xenofon Strakosas, researcher at LOE and Lund University and one of the study's main authors. The body's endogenous molecules are enough to trigger the formation of electrodes. There is no need for genetic modification or external signals, such as light or electrical energy, which has been necessary in previous experiments. The Swedish researchers are the first in the world to succeed in this. In their study, the researchers further show that the method can target the electronically conducting material to specific biological substructures and thereby create suitable interfaces for nerve stimulation. In the long term, the fabrication of fully integrated electronic circuits in living organisms may be possible. In experiments conducted at Lund University, the team successfully achieved electrode formation in the brain, heart, and tail fins of zebrafish and around the nervous tissue of medicinal leeches. The animals were not harmed by the injected gel and were otherwise not affected by the electrode formation. One of the many challenges in these trials was to take the animals' immune system into account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warner Bros. Pictures is revamping the "Lord of the Rings" film franchise. Variety reports: On a Thursday earnings call, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced that newly-installed studio leaders Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have brokered a deal to make "multiple" films based on the beloved J. R. R. Tolkien books. The projects will be developed through WB label New Line Cinema. The first "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, helmed by Peter Jackson, grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide; Jackson's follow-up trilogy based on Tolkien's "The Hobbit" matched those grosses. No filmmakers have been attached to the projects as yet, but in a statement to Variety, Jackson and his main "Lord of the Rings" collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens said Warner Bros. and Embracer "have kept us in the loop every step of the way." "We look forward to speaking with them further to hear their vision for the franchise moving forward," Jackson, Walsh and Boyens said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cheap, light, flexible, yet robust circuit boards are critical for wearable electronics, among other applications. In the future, those electronics might be printed on flexible circuits made out of bacterial cultures used to make the popular fermented black tea drink called kombucha, according to a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. "Nowadays kombucha is emerging as a promising candidate to produce sustainable textiles to be used as eco-friendly bio wearables," co-author Andrew Adamatzky, of the University of the West of England in Bristol, old New Scientist. "We will see that dried -- and hopefully living -- kombucha mats will be incorporated in smart wearables that extend the functionality of clothes and gadgets. We propose to develop smart eco-wearables which are a convergence of dead and alive biological matter." Adamatzky previously co-authored a 2021 paper demonstrating that living kombucha mats showed dynamic electrical activity and stimulating responses, as well as a paper last year describing the development of a bacterial reactive glove to serve as a living electronic sensing device. Inspired by the potential of kombucha mats for wearable electronics, he and his latest co-authors have now demonstrated that it's possible to print electronic circuits onto dried SCOBY mats. The team used commercially sourced kombucha bacteria to grow their mats, then air-dried the cultures on plastic or paper at room temperature. The mats don't tear easily and are not easily destroyed, even when immersed in water for several days. One of the test mats even survived oven temperatures up to 200 C (392 F), although the mats will burn when exposed to an open flame. Adamatzky et al. were able to print conductive polymer circuits onto the dried kombucha mats with an aerosol jet printer and also successfully tested an alternative method of 3D printing a circuit out of a conductive polyester/copper mix. They could even attach small LEDs to the circuits with an epoxy adhesive spiked with silver, which were still functioning after repeatedly being bent and stretched. According to Adamatzky et al., unlike the living kombucha mats he worked with previously, the dried SCOBY mats are non-conductive, confining the electrical current to the printed circuit. The mats are also lighter, cheaper, and more flexible than the ceramic or plastic alternatives. Potential applications include wearable heart rate monitors, for instance, and other kombucha-based devices. "Future research will be concerned with printing advanced functional circuits, capable for detecting -- and maybe recognizing -- mechanical, optical, and chemical stimuli," the authors concluded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unlocking exclusive access has been a long-held promise of a lot of NFT-based communities. And now, Spotify is helping some of them realize that claim with token-gated playlists. TechCrunch reports: According to a series of tweets by Kingship, a metaverse band signed to Universal Music Group (UMG), the streaming company is piloting playlists that could be unlocked through NFTs in certain geographies. Under the pilot, Kingship has released a special playlist that could be accessed only by Kingship key card NFT holders. The group posted a series of steps that involves linking a crypto wallet like Metamask, Trust Wallet, Rainbow, Ledger Live, or Zerion to authenticate the NFT that unlocks the playlist. Kingship said that currently, this experience is only available to Android users in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand. "At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as important learnings. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time," a Spotify spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Verge, Microsoft has been secretly testing its Sydney chatbot for several years after making a big bet on bots in 2016. From the report: Sydney is a codename for a chatbot that has been responding to some Bing users since late 2020. The user experience was very similar to what launched publicly earlier this month, with a blue Cortana-like orb appearing in a chatbot interface on Bing. "Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020," says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview. We continue to tune our techniques and are working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible." "This is an experimental AI-powered Chat on Bing.com," read a disclaimer inside the 2021 interface that was added before an early version of Sydney would start replying to users. Some Bing users in India and China spotted the Sydney bot in the first half of 2021 before others noticed it would identify itself as Sydney in late 2021. All of this was years after Microsoft started testing basic chatbots in Bing in 2017. The initial Bing bots used AI techniques that Microsoft had been using in Office and Bing for years and machine reading comprehension that isn't as powerful as what exists in OpenAI's GPT models today. These bots were created in 2017 in a broad Microsoft effort to move its Bing search engine to a more conversational model. Microsoft made several improvements to its Bing bots between 2017 and 2021, including moving away from individual bots for websites and toward the idea of a single AI-powered bot, Sydney, that would answer general queries on Bing. Sources familiar with Microsoft's early Bing chatbot work tell The Verge that the initial iterations of Sydney had far less personality until late last year. OpenAI shared its next-generation GPT model with Microsoft last summer, described by Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's head of search and AI, as "game-changing." While Microsoft had been working toward its dream of conversational search for more than six years, sources say this new large language model was the breakthrough the company needed to bring all of its its Sydney learnings to the masses. [...] Microsoft hasn't yet detailed the full history of Sydney, but Ribas did acknowledge its new Bing AI is "the culmination of many years of work by the Bing team" that involves "other innovations" that the Bing team will detail in future blog posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

L.Kynes shares a report from CSO Online: At a time when almost all software contains open source code, at least one known open source vulnerability was detected in 84% of all commercial and proprietary code bases examined by researchers at application security company Synopsys. In addition, 48% of all code bases analyzed by Synopsys researchers contained high-risk vulnerabilities, which are those that have been actively exploited, already have documented proof-of-concept exploits, or are classified as remote code execution vulnerabilities. The vulnerability data -- along with information on open source license compliance -- was included in Synopsys' 2023 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report (PDF), put together by the company's Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC). "Of the 1,703 codebases that Synopsys audited in 2022, 96% of them contained open source," adds L.Kynes, citing the report. "Aerospace, aviation, automotive, transportation, logistics; EdTech; and Internet of Things are three of the 17 industry sectors included in the report that had open source in 100% of their audited codebases. In the remaining verticals, over 92% of the codebases contained open source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A revolution in artificial intelligence could slash the amount of time people spend on household chores and caring, with robots able to perform about 39% of domestic tasks within a decade, according to experts. Tasks such as shopping for groceries were likely to have the most automation, while caring for the young or old was the least likely to be affected by AI, according to a large survey of 65 artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the UK and Japan, who were asked to predict the impact of robots on household chores. But greater automation could result in a "wholesale onslaught on privacy," warned one of the report's authors. The experts involved in the research, published in the journal Plos One, estimated that only 28% of care work, such as teaching or accompanying a child, or caring for an older relative, would be automated. But they predicted that 60% of the time spent on shopping for groceries would be cut. However, predictions about robots taking over domestic work "in the next 10 years" have been made for several decades, but the reality of a robot able to put out the bins and pick lego up from the floor has remained elusive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's second-largest telecom, TELUS is investigating a potential data breach after a threat actor shared samples online of what appears to be employee data. BleepingComputer reports: The threat actor subsequently posted screenshots that apparently show private source code repositories and payroll records held by the company. TELUS has so far not found evidence of corporate or retail customer data being stolen and continues to monitor the potential incident. On February 17, a threat actor put up what they claim to be TELUS' employee list (comprising names and email addresses) for sale on a data breach forum. "TELUS employes [sic] from a very recent breach. We have over 76K unique emails and on top of this, we have internal information associated with each employee scraped from Telus' API," states the forum post. While BleepingComputer has been unable to confirm the veracity of threat actor's claims just yet, the small sample set posted by the seller does have valid names and email addresses corresponding to present-day TELUS employees, particularly software developers and technical staff. By Tuesday, February 21, the same threat actor had created another forum post -- this time offering to sell TELUS' private GitHub repositories, source code, as well as the company's payroll records. The seller further boasts that the stolen source code contains the company's "sim-swap-api" that will purportedly enable adversaries to carry out SIM swap attacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn't know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to "McCarthyism." Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Joseph Cox: On Wednesday, I phoned my bank's automated service line. To start, the bank asked me to say in my own words why I was calling. Rather than speak out loud, I clicked a file on my nearby laptop to play a sound clip: "check my balance," my voice said. But this wasn't actually my voice. It was a synthetic clone I had made using readily available artificial intelligence technology. "Okay," the bank replied. It then asked me to enter or say my date of birth as the first piece of authentication. After typing that in, the bank said "please say, 'my voice is my password.'" Again, I played a sound file from my computer. "My voice is my password," the voice said. The bank's security system spent a few seconds authenticating the voice. "Thank you," the bank said. I was in. I couldn't believe it -- it had worked. I had used an AI-powered replica of a voice to break into a bank account. After that, I had access to the account information, including balances and a list of recent transactions and transfers. Banks across the U.S. and Europe use this sort of voice verification to let customers log into their account over the phone. Some banks tout voice identification as equivalent to a fingerprint, a secure and convenient way for users to interact with their bank. But this experiment shatters the idea that voice-based biometric security provides foolproof protection in a world where anyone can now generate synthetic voices for cheap or sometimes at no cost. I used a free voice creation service from ElevenLabs, an AI-voice company. Now, abuse of AI-voices can extend to fraud and hacking. Some experts I spoke to after doing this experiment are now calling for banks to ditch voice authentication altogether, although real-world abuse at this time could be rare. A Lloyds Bank spokesperson said in a statement that "Voice ID is an optional security measure, however we are confident that it provides higher levels of security than traditional knowledge-based authentication methods, and that our layered approach to security and fraud prevention continues to provide the right level of protection for customers' accounts, while still making them easy to access when needed." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the U.S. agencies that regulates the financial industry, said: "The CFPB is concerned with data security, and companies are on notice that they'll be held accountable for shoddy practices. We expect that any firm follow the law, regardless of technology used."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The buzz in tech these last few weeks has been focused squarely on the language models developed and deployed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. But Meta, Facebook's parent company, continues to do significant work in this field and is releasing a new AI language generator named LLaMA today. From a report: LLaMA isn't like ChatGPT or Bing; it's not a system that anyone can talk to. Rather, it's a research tool that Meta says it's sharing in the hope of "democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field." In other words: to help experts tease out the problems of AI language models, from bias and toxicity to their tendency to simply make up information. To this end, Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models) under "a noncommercial license focused on research use cases," with access granted to groups like universities, NGOs, and industry labs. "We believe that the entire AI community -- academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry -- must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular," the company wrote in its post. "We look forward to seeing what the community can learn -- and eventually build -- using LLaMA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cyber-insurance market, battered by a rash of pandemic-era ransomware attacks, is making a comeback. Price hikes are moderating, new carriers and fresh sources of capital are emerging, and companies can better afford coverage. From a report: Cyber-insurance pricing increased 10% from a year earlier in January, a fraction of the 110% annual increase reported in the first quarter of 2022, preliminary data from insurance broker Marsh McLennan show. If those trends continue, prices could be set to decline, said Tom Reagan, Marsh's cyber practice leader. The reversal would follow a wave of digital intrusions that dominated the work-from-home era and forced insurers to recalibrate both how they write policies and their risk appetites. Those attacks also pushed their clients to adopt stronger cybersecurity measures. The brutal conditions in the market have let up since then, with claim frequency declining in the fourth quarter of 2022 even as severity remained elevated, according to Marsh. "What we're left with is a very, very, very different market than what we went into two or three years ago," said Paul Bantick, the global head of cyber risks at London-based insurer Beazley. "We have a mature market that has stood up against a huge test." The risks posed by cyber criminals are still enormous. Ransomware attacks against industrial organizations increased by 87% in 2022 from the year before, while the US Treasury Department said financial institutions flagged nearly $1.2 billion in likely ransomware-related payments in 2021. Recent high-profile breaches at financial services firm ION Trading UK and a major Asian data center emphasized the grim risk posed by hackers. Even so, the total amount extorted from ransomware victims in 2022 dropped to $456.8 million from $765.6 million the year before, according to data from Chainalysis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cars aren't the only conveyances being transformed by electricity. Along with electric motorcycles and snowmobiles, personal watercraft are floating better ways to coexist with nature and neighbors. This new breed of machines brings requisite thrills to the Great Outdoors, but without fouling the atmosphere or disturbing the peace with an internal-combustion racket. From a report: The latest comes from Florida-based Pelagion, whose founder and chief executive, engineer Jamie Schlinkmann, was inspired by childhood adventures on a watersports icon: A 1973 Kawasaki Jet Ski. Schlinkmann's machine, just the 213th ever built, is still one of his prized possessions. His company's Pelagion HydroBlade is an ingenious mash-up of classic stand-up Jet Skis and modern surfboard-style "eFoils." Those electric-powered boards had a real breakthrough in 2020 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was spotted sailing over Hawaiian waters on one model. The metaverse may spring to mind the first time you see an eFoil, with its rider seeming to fly above the waves on a magic carpet. Naturally, there's no magic, only hydrodynamics. Hydrofoils work like an airplane wing, only underwater: An aerodynamic wing creates high and low pressure areas as it slices through water, generating lift with precious little drag. Add an electric motor and propeller to create thrust and you've got a hydrofoil that doesn't require surf waves, a kite, or tow boat to generate power. There's only one problem: Powered or not, a hydrofoil takes some practice and patience to learn to ride in a standing position, especially for people with no surfing or wakeboarding experience, or so-so balance skills. To solve that, Schlinkmann's invention adds a boom-mounted canard and rudder ahead of the rider to keep the craft airborne and steady without a rider having to constantly expend energy and adjust body position. Add a trusty set of handlebars, says Schlinkmann, and the HydroBlade handles more like a vehicle with which most of us are familiar: a bicycle. Making the experience somewhat like riding a bike, he says, helps ease the intimidation factor and boost appeal for people of all ages and abilities. [...] The design began to take shape around 2020. Schlinkmann pulled the engine and other ICE guts from his old Jet Ski and studied how he could make it electric. He realized a conventional electric Jet Ski might only have a 15- or 20-minute runtime on a single charge, which wasn't good enough. But after riding a few eFoils, the idea came together. For the HydroBlade, a pair of permanent-magnet radial-flux motors drive dual propellers at a peak 16 kilowatts (21 horsepower). They're fed by two battery packs, with a combined 600 cylindrical 2170 NCM cells and a total 11 kilowatt-hours of energy -- about eight to 10 times the capacity onboard a typical eFoil. A separate 1.6-kW charger can refill batteries in about 4 hours.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The inner core of the Earth appears to hold an innermost secret. From a report: Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely viscous liquid, driving the movement of continents and the lifting of mountains; a liquid outer core of iron and nickel that generates the planet's magnetic field; and a solid inner core. Analyzing the crisscrossing of seismic waves from large earthquakes, two Australian scientists say there is a distinctly different layer at the very center of the Earth. "We have now confirmed the existence of the innermost inner core," said one of the scientists, Hrvoje Tkalcic, a professor of geophysics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Dr. Tkalcic and Thanh-Son Pham, a postdoctoral researcher, estimate that the innermost inner core is about 800 miles wide; the entire inner core is about 1,500 miles wide. Their findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. While the cutaway diagram appears to depict clear-cut divisions, knowledge about the deep interior of Earth is unavoidably fuzzy. It is nearly 4,000 miles to the center of Earth, and it is impossible to drill more than a few miles into the crust. Most of what is known about what lies beneath comes from seismic waves -- the vibrations of earthquakes traveling through and around the planet. Think of them as a giant sonogram of Earth. Two Harvard seismologists, Miaki Ishii and Adam Dziewonski, first proposed the idea of the innermost inner core in 2002 based on peculiarities in the speed of seismic waves passing through the inner core. Scientists already knew that the speed of seismic waves traveling through this part of the Earth varied depending on the direction. The waves traveled fastest when going from pole to pole along the Earth's axis and slowest when traveling perpendicular to the axis. The difference in speeds -- a few percent faster along polar paths -- arises from the alignment of iron crystals in the inner core, geophysicists believe. But in a small region at the center, the slowest waves were those traveling at a 45-degree angle to the axis instead of 90 degrees, the Harvard seismologists said. The data available then were too sparse to convince everyone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in the days before practically every mobile game was a free-to-play, ad- and microtransaction-laden sinkhole, Rovio found years of viral success selling paid downloads of Angry Birds to tens of millions of smartphone users. Today, though, the company is delisting the last "pay upfront" version of the game from mobile app stores because of what it says is a "negative impact" on the more lucrative free-to-play titles in the franchise. From a report: Years after its 2009 launch, the original Angry Birds was first pulled from mobile app stores in 2019, a move Rovio later blamed on "outdated game engines and design." The remastered "Rovio Classics" version of the original game launched last year, asking 99 cents for over 390 ad-free levels, complete with updated graphics and a new, future-proofed engine "built from the ground up in Unity." In a tweeted statement earlier this week, though, Rovio announced that it is delisting Rovio Classics: Angry Birds from the Google Play Store and renaming the game Red's First Flight on the iOS App Store (presumably to make it less findable in an "Angry Birds" search). That's because of the game's "impact on our wider games portfolio," Rovio said, including "live" titles such as Angry Birds 2, Angry Birds Friends, and Angry Birds Journey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google "systematically destroyed" instant message chats every 24 hours, violating federal rules to preserve potentially relevant communications for litigation, the Department of Justice alleged in a filing that became public on Thursday. From a report: As a result of Google's default to preserve chats for only 24 hours unless an employee opts to turn on history for the conversation, "for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours," the department wrote in the filing. According to the DOJ, Google should have adjusted its defaults in mid-2019 "when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation." Instead, it relied on individual employees to decide when chats were potentially relevant to future litigation, the department said. "Few, if any," did, according to DOJ. Meanwhile, investigators alleged, Google "falsely" told the government it had "'put a legal hold in place' that 'suspends auto-deletion.'" The government added that "at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications." The data deletion continued up until as recently as this month when the government indicated it would file a motion for sanctions and an evidentiary hearing, investigators allege. At that point, the DOJ said, Google committed to "permanently set to history on."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telecom equipment maker Ericsson will lay off 8,500 employees globally as part of its plan to cut costs, a memo sent to employees and seen by Reuters said. From the report: While technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet have laid off thousands of employees citing economic conditions, Ericsson's move would be the largest layoff to hit the telecoms industry. "The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice," Chief Executive Borje Ekholm wrote in the memo. "In several countries the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week," he said. On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.Read more of this story at Slashdot.