Two artists are illustrating bias in machine learning with data from one of the most opinionated sites on the internet: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit. Motherboard reports: Now boasting 3.9 million users, the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit has become known as one of the leading forums where users can seek and share advice with virtual strangers. Internet artists Morry Kolman and Alex Petros trained three AI models using comments from over 60,000 posts from the popular subreddit. They filtered the comments according to the original subreddit's formal voting guidelines where users vote on whether the poster is the asshole or if ESH (Everyone Sucks Here). What results is a positive bot, a negative bot, and a neutral bot that respond to every scenario submitted. The project, funded by Digital Void, aims to illustrate how training data can bias the decision-making abilities of artificial intelligence models. Now, their bots can help you answer the age-old question: Are you the asshole? Users can submit their own moral dilemmas -- real or not -- and get a positive, negative, and swing response that can go either way. The three AI models are trained on data derived from Reddit users passing judgment so what results is a funny microcosm of what it's like to debate on the internet now. Any topic can inspire strong, contradictory reactions from total strangers. "When reading the results of a judgment, note the way in which the AI constructs ideas from snippets of human reasoning," their website reads. "Sometimes the AI can produce stunning results, but it is fundamentally attempting to mimic the ways that humans put together arguments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is counteracting a ban on certain books by letting anyone in the US aged 13 to 21 apply for a digital library card. This gives teens and young adults, regardless of their location in the United States, access to the library's entire ebook collection. From a report: The initiative, called Books Unbanned, is fighting what the BPL describes as an "increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves." According to the American Library Association (ALA), a total of 729 books were challenged in 2021, meaning a person or group attempted to ban these titles from public libraries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Android Central was sent images of Google's upcoming Pixel Watch after it was reportedly left at a restaurant in the U.S. It's reminiscent of when an Apple iPhone 4 was lost and found at a bar in 2010. From the report: Android Central has reviewed the images of the watch that could be announced during Google I/O next month. It's possible that the watch itself could be released alongside the Pixel 7. The source, who we have left anonymous to protect their identity, said the watch, which could be "a testing model for the Internal Pixel team," was found at a restaurant. The source requested Android Central to not publish their name or the restaurant name, including location, in order to protect their job. After the reporting of this story, the source wrote a Reddit post about the alleged watch. The source indicated that the watch was left at the restaurant "for a few weeks expecting the people that left it to return, but that never happened." The watch in our images looks almost identical to leaks of rumored rendered images. It has a minimalist design and follows what leaks have suggested a screen with hardly any bezels. The image also confirms one of the rumored colors that the watch will come in: black. Previous rumors have suggested the watch will have a rotating crown and potentially two hidden buttons. It is a bit hard to tell from the image above, but if this is the rumored watch then there is definitely at least one button next to the crown. [I]t seems that the watch's band is a proprietary Google band and looks very similar to the jelly-like Apple Watch sport bands. This could mean that we might see many more colors to come. It also looks like it attaches directly to the watch case. This might make swapping out watch bands difficult, especially when most of the other top Android smartwatches give you more leeway with standard watch band types. No charger was left behind with the watch, but it is possible that the watch could be charged from the back of the watch case. This is also how Fitbit's Versa 3 and Sense smartwatches (Fitbit is owned by Google) and the Apple Watch are charged. The source indicated that the bottom "looks metallic but feels like it's coated with glass." [...] The source indicated that nothing happened past the boot logo when they tried to power it up [...]. This likely means that there is no OS yet installed on the watch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world. Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance. "The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms." [...] Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU's comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark. Lawmakers in the US keen to rein in Big Tech with their own regulations have already begun looking to the EU's rules for inspiration. The final text of the DSA has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain [...]. Although the broad terms of the DSA have now been agreed upon by the member states of the EU, the legal language still needs to be finalized and the act officially voted into law. This last step is seen as a formality at this point, though. The rules will apply to all companies 15 months after the act is voted into law, or from January 1st, 2024, whichever is later. "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users," notes The Verge. "Users should also be offered a recommender system 'not based on profiling.' In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)." The tech giants will also be prohibited from using "dark patterns" -- confusing or deceptive UIs designed to steer users into making certain choices. A detailed list of obligations contained in the DSA can be found in the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta's campus in Burlingame, California will be home to its first physical retail space where you can check out Quest 2 and its accessories as well as the Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses and the Portal video-calling device. UploadVR reports: The store opens May 9 with interactive demos for "Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you're seeing in-headset," according to a blog post from the company. "If we did our job right, people should leave and tell their friends, 'You've got to go check out the Meta Store,' Martin Gilliard, Head of Meta Store, is quoted as saying. "We're not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it." The store is said to be 1,550 square feet and also offers the ability to do a test call with the Portal video calling device and try out different styles of the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses. It sounds like the main attraction here, however, will be the Quest 2-powered mixed reality installation, which promises to give VR players "a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that's yours to share," with the video wall offering a live view into VR as it is being experienced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Earlier today, Twitter announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk for approximately $44 billion. The announcement led to speculation that former President Donald Trump may return to the social media platform after being permanently banned in January 2021 for his role in the January 6th insurrection. However, according to TechCrunch, "it looks like he's not interested and is instead planning to formally join his own Truth Social platform over the next seven days." From the report: "I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth," Trump told Fox News. "I hope Elon buys Twitter because he'll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth. The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter." [...] Trump's comments from today come as shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which announced a deal in October to acquire Trump Media & Technology Group, fell 9.5% as Twitter officially announced its deal with Musk. It's possible that Truth's shaky start could cause Trump to change his mind about rejoining Twitter down the road. Trump's media group released its Truth Social iOS app in February, but the app remained unavailable to users for quite some time. Truth is being marketed as an alternative to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. If Trump does end up posting on Truth regularly this week, it will mark the former president's return to social media following his ban from numerous platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. So far, he's only posted on Truth once. As for Twitter, Musk says that "free speech" is key to Twitter's future. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and "the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Biden administration is calling on Congress to expand authority for federal and local governments to take action to counter the nefarious use in the U.S. of drones, which are becoming a growing security concern and nuisance. The White House on Monday released an action plan that calls for expanding the number of agencies that can track and monitor drones flying in their airspace. It calls for establishing a list of U.S. government-authorized detection equipment that federal and local authorities can purchase, and creating a national training center on countering the malicious use of drones. The White House in a statement said it was critical that Congress "adopt legislation to close critical gaps in existing law and policy that currently impede government and law enforcement from protecting the American people and our vital security interests." The federal-government-wide focus comes as the Federal Aviation Administration projects that more than 2 million drones will be in circulation in the U.S. by 2024 and as availability of detection and mitigation technologies -- including jamming systems -- are limited under current law. The White House plan calls for expanding existing counter-drone authorities for the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, Energy, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency and NASA in limited situations. The proposal also seeks to expand drone detection authorities for state, local, territorial and tribal law enforcement agencies and critical infrastructure owners and operators. The proposal also calls for establishing a six-year pilot program for a small number of state, local, territorial and tribal law enforcement agencies to take part in a drone detection and mitigation operations under supervision of the Justice Department and Homeland Security. Currently, no state or local agencies have such authorization.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The cryptocurrency industry is ramping up efforts to recruit more legal talent as it faces increased regulatory pressure while looking to be accepted by and become part of mainstream finance. From a report: Crypto exchanges and companies are poaching attorneys left and right, from both law firms and other crypto companies, bringing them in-house to help navigate an evolving regulatory landscape while helping to curb outside legal expenses, industry participants said. Law firms, which are sometimes losing their partners to in-house positions, are also building up their crypto practices to maintain that valuable expertise. The increased demand for lawyers also marks a turning point for crypto, whose early supporters often expressed skepticism of regulation. The industry has been expanding rapidly with hopes of attracting more mainstream investment opportunities and many are embracing the stance that they want regulatory clarity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thousands of potentially harmful chemicals could soon be prohibited in Europe under new restrictions, which campaigners have hailed as the strongest yet. From a report: Earlier this year, scientists said chemical pollution had crossed a "planetary boundary" beyond which lies the breakdown of global ecosystems. The synthetic blight is thought to be pushing whale species to the brink of extinction and has been blamed for declining human fertility rates, and 2 million deaths a year. The EU's "restrictions roadmap" published on Monday was conceived as a first step to transforming this picture by using existing laws to outlaw toxic substances linked to cancers, hormonal disruption, reprotoxic disorders, obesity, diabetes and other illnesses. Industry groups say that up to 12,000 substances could ultimately fall within the scope of the new proposal, which would constitute the world's "largest ever ban of toxic chemicals," according to the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). Tatiana Santos, the bureau's chemicals policy manager, said: "EU chemical controls are usually achingly slow but the EU is planning the boldest detox we have ever seen. Petrochemical industry lobbyists are shocked at what is now on the table. It promises to improve the safety of almost all manufactured products and rapidly lower the chemical intensity of our schools, homes and workplaces."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Press release: Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential -- I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." Earlier on Monday, Musk tweeted: "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Press release: Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential -- I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." Earlier on Monday, Musk tweeted: "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The global effort to protect Earth from dangerous asteroids is set to become stronger, as China has announced its intentions to test an asteroid redirect system as early as 2025. Reader InfiniteZero writes: Speaking to China Central Television on Sunday, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), described China's preliminary plans to embark on the planetary defense project, according to Chinese state-owned news agency Global Times. Wu's comments coincided with Space Day, an annual event that commemorates the 1970 launch of China's first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, in 1970. For the proposed test, Wu said a probe would closely survey a near-Earth object prior to smashing into it. Known as kinetic impaction, the idea is to alter the orbital trajectory of a threatening asteroid by directing a large, high-speed spacecraft into the object. NASA is currently running a similar test, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which seeks to deliberately crash a space probe into Dimorphos -- a tiny asteroid -- later this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Millions of people stopped playing Call of Duty in the first quarter of 2022, as one of gaming's top franchises continued to cool off, according to Activision Blizzard's latest financial results. From a report: Call of Duty is the biggest annual franchise in gaming, so any struggles can have knock-on effects for the rest of the industry. Activision Blizzard said its Activision-branded games -- which nearly entirely consist of Call of Duty -- had 100 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2022. That's down from 107 million in the quarter before. And it's down from 150 million in the first three months of 2021. The drop comes as Microsoft presses forward on a bid to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. In a press release, the company blamed the decline on "lower premium sales" for November's Call of Duty: Vanguard compared to November 2020's Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. It also cited "lower engagement" for free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone and flat performance for its Call of Duty: Mobile title.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SpaceX is starting to make deals with airlines to provide its Starlink satellite internet to sky travelers everywhere. From a report: It announced a deal on Monday with Hawaiian Airlines, and last week made a similar deal with charter carrier JSX. None of the involved parties shared the financial details of their deals, but both airlines did say they're planning to offer the in-flight Wi-Fi for free, which is both a semi-miraculous fact and a sign of hope that free Wi-Fi is becoming the industry standard. Delta meanwhile, confirmed last week that it's running "exploratory" Starlink tests. In-flight Wi-Fi has been on the minds of Team Starlink for a while. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX's VP of Starlink and commercial sales, said last year that the company was building an aviation product, and was "in talks with several of the airlines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive and founder of Bahama-based crypto-exchange FTX and one of the most influential people in crypto, offered his insights into yield farming, projects that deliver tokens to buyers for staking. An excerpt from the podcast: Bloomberg's Levine: Can you give me an intuitive understanding of farming? I mean, like to me, farming is like you sell some structured puts and collect premium, but perhaps there's a more sophisticated understanding than that. Sam Bankman-Fried: Let me give you sort of like a really toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a box. So what this protocol is, it's called 'Protocol X,' it's a box, and you take a token. You can take ethereum, you can put it in the box and you take it out of the box. Alright so, you put it into the box and you get like, you know, an IOU for having put it in the box and then you can redeem that IOU back out for the token. So far what we've described is the world's dumbest ETF or ADR or something like that. It doesn't do anything but let you put things in it if you so choose. And then this protocol issues a token, we'll call it whatever, 'X token.' And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so that's sort of where you start. And then you say, alright, well, you've got this box and you've got X token and the box protocol declares, or maybe votes by on-chain governance, or, you know, something like that, that what they're gonna do is they are going to take half of all the X tokens that were re-minted. Maybe two thirds will, two thirds will offer X tokens, and they're going to give them away for free to whoever uses the box. So anyone who goes, takes some money, puts in the box, each day they're gonna airdrop, you know, 1% of the X token pro rata amongst everyone who's put money in the box. That's for now, what X token does, it gets given away to the box people. And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's probably not zero. Let say it's, you know, a $20 million market. Levine: Wait, wait, wait, from like first principles, it should be zero, but okay. SBF: Uh, sure. Okay. Completely reasonable comments. [...] Describe it this way, you might think, for instance, that in like five minutes with an internet connection, you could create such a box and such a token, and that it should reflect like, you know, it should be worth like $180 or something market cap for like that, you know, that effort that you put into it. In the world that we're in, if you do this, everyone's gonna be like, 'Ooh, box token. Maybe it's cool. If you buy in box token,' you know, that's gonna appear on Twitter and it'll have a $20 million market cap. And of course, one thing that you could do is you could like make the float very low and whatever, you know, maybe there haven't been $20 million dollars that have flowed into it yet. Maybe that's sort of like, is it, you know, mark to market fully diluted valuation or something, but I acknowledge that it's not totally clear that this thing should have market cap, but empirically I claim it would have market cap.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bored Ape Yacht Club's Instagram account and Discord server were both hacked on Monday, with an unofficial "mint" link being sent out to followers. From a report: "There is no mint going on today. It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything," the NFT project wrote on Twitter. At the time of writing, it is estimated that around 24 Bored Apes and 30 Mutant Apes have been stolen according to recent OpenSea transfers, although some of these may be holders transferring their NFTs for security purposes. The value of the 54 NFTs calculated by floor price is $13.7 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As Netflix shares plunge to their lowest point in five years, the company risks losing its most valuable resource: its star employees. From a report: Working at Netflix has been one of the most desirable jobs in Hollywood, if not all of corporate America. The company ranks as one of the most beloved brands, pays well and offers a chance to work with the people that changed the way we watch TV. But a record decline in Netflix's share price, precipitated by its poor financial results, has shaken employees' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory. It has also erased the value of many employees' options. People who were sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with nothing. More people are looking to leave Netflix right now than at any point in recent memory, current and former employees said this past week. Netflix employees also asked leadership to issue new stock grants to make them whole for the losses this past week, per The Information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
theodp writes: The University of Washington's Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Access (DEIA) relies on "a set of objective measurements that will enable us to assess our progress." So, what might those look like? Well, for Goal O.3 "have effective pipelines for students to enter the Allen School as Ph.D. students with a focus on increasing diversity," the UW's 5-Year Strategic Plan for DEIA (PDF) specifies these 'Objective Measurements': 1. Measure the percentage of women at the Ph.D. level and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 40%. 2. Measure the percentage of domestic Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Ph.D students and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 12% (the UW-Seattle average for Ph.D. students). 3. Measure the percentage of Ph.D. students with disabilities (measured based on DRS use) and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 8% (the UW-Seattle average). But with an Allen School Incoming Ph.D. Class of only 54 students -- of which 63% are International -- that suggests race/ethnicity success for an incoming PhD class could be just one Black student and one Hispanic student, if my UW DEIA math is correct. Even if it falls short, at least UW attempted to publicly quantify what their overall DEI race/ethnicity goals are, which is more than what Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have done. That the UW felt compelled to break out U.S. and International students separately in an effort to facilitate more meaningful comparisons also suggests another way that the tech giants' self-reported race/ethnicity percentages and EEO-1 raw numbers for their U.S.-based tech workforce (which presumably includes International students and other visa workers) may be misleading, as well as a possible explanation for tech's puzzling diversity trends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter is in the final stretch of negotiations about a sale to Elon Musk, a person with knowledge of knowledge of the matter said, Bloomberg News reports. From the report: The social media company is working to hammer out terms of a transaction and could reach an agreement as soon as Monday if negotiations go smoothly, according to the person.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"As housing prices across the country continue to skyrocket, an Iowa-based company, Alquist 3D, is looking to combat the crisis by 3D-printing homes," reports NexStar Media: Alquist, one of a few U.S. companies that 3D-prints houses, is looking to build 200 of these homes in Virginia starting this summer. The process is somewhat simple. First, a person designs what they want the frame of the house to look like by using a computer program. Then, a file is transmitted to a machine, which tells it what to do and how to move. On-site workers pour in cement material, then the concrete is pumped through the tubes and dispersed in layers... Zachary Mannheimer, founder and CEO of Alquist 3D, believes 3D-printing is a game changer because it cuts costs up to 15% by scaling back labor, materials, and time. He does understand that there are concerns about displacing traditional construction jobs, and some environmental impacts of this method, but he says he is working to attack those issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Solar and wind power are "intermittent," points out Slashdot reader silverjacket . "A feature in this week's issue of The New Yorker highlights current efforts to use gravity, heat, momentum, air pressure, and other methods to store large amounts of energy for the electricity grid." In other words, alternatives to massive lithium-ion batteries:Quidnet [has] patented a new kind of pumped hydro. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company's system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet's technology is like a green riff on fracking.... Initially, Quidnet encountered skepticism about its ability to form lenses of the right size and shape. By the time I visited, however, it had successfully completed multiple pumping cycles in Texas, Ohio, and Alberta. The company has received thirty-eight million dollars in private and government funding, including contributions from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established by Bill Gates. The New Yorker science/technology writer also interviewed Bill Gross, a longtime investor in solar power and a co-founder of his own energy-storage company called Energy Vault. He points an inconvenient truth: "it actually costs more to store electricity than to make it." In many cases, solar and wind have become less expensive than coal and gas. But add the cost of storage, and renewables can lose to fossil fuels. But he's working on his own solution...Energy Vault's first attempt at a system was EV1, a looming, Transformer-like tower crane with six arms. The idea was that such a crane would stack blocks in a wall around itself, then unstack them.... [T]he company moved on to a new, enclosed design, called EVx. In renderings, it resembles a boxy automated warehouse forty stories tall. Elevators will use clean power to lift blocks weighing as much as thirty tons and put them on trolleys, which will move them toward the middle of the structure. When energy is needed, the blocks will be moved back to the elevators. As they descend, the elevators will power generators, producing new electricity... The EVx demo is being developed in a bucolic Swiss mountain valley in the shadow of EV1... [T]he company isn't alone in pursuing what's known as "gravity storage." Gravitricity, based in Scotland, recently concluded a demonstration that involved hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two stories at a time; it now plans to raise and lower single, thousand-ton blocks inside disused mine shafts. Two other companies, Gravity Power, in California, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight at the bottom of a shaft and then pump water underneath to lift it. To withdraw energy, they'll let the weight push the water down into a pipe and through a turbine. RheEnergise, based in Montreal, has come up with yet another take on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid that the company invented called R-19, which is two and a half times as dense as water; its system will move the fluid between tanks at the top and bottom of an incline. The work is still at the crowdfunding stage. Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrolysis is used to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then cached underground, or in aboveground tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammonia. When it's recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it forms water again and releases electricity. The article's last line? "Nature can help us generate power. Maybe it can help us hold on to it, too."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CNBC explores the dream of "a future where nobody has to constantly update and change online passwords to stay ahead of hackers and keep data secure."Here's the good news: Some of the biggest names in tech are already saying that the dream of a password-less internet is close to becoming a reality. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among those trying to pave the way... In theory, removing passwords from your cybersecurity equation nixes what former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has called "by far the weakest link in cybersecurity." More than 80% of data breaches are a result of weak or compromised passwords, according to Verizon.... Doing away with passwords altogether is not without risks. First, verification codes sent via email or text message can be intercepted by hackers. Even scarier: Hackers have shown the ability to trick fingerprint and facial recognition systems, sometimes by stealing your biometric data. As annoying as changing your password might be, it's much harder to change your face or fingerprints. Second, some of today's password-less options still ask you to create a PIN or security questions to back up your account. That's not much different from having a password.... Plus, tech companies still need to make online accounts accessible across multiple platforms, not just on smartphones — and also to the people who don't own smartphones at all, roughly 15% of the U.S. Some data points from the article:"Microsoft says 'nearly 100%' of the company's employees use password-less options to log into their corporate accounts." "In September, Microsoft announced that its users could go fully password-less to access services like Windows, Xbox, and Microsoft 365." "Similarly, Google sells physical security keys, and its Smart Lock app allows you to tap a button on your Android or iOS device to log into your Google account on the web." Apple's devices have used Touch ID and Face ID features for several years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"We have worked on Overgrowth for 14 years," begins their new announcement. Development first began in 2008, and the game runs on Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. Overgrowth's page on Wikipedia describes the realistic 3D third-person action game as "set in a pre-industrial world of anthropomorphic fighter rabbits, wolves, dogs, cats and rats." And now, "Just like they did with some earlier games, Wolfire Games have now open sourced the game code for Overgrowth," reports GamingOnLinux. "[J]ump, kick, throw, and slash your way to victory.... The source code is available on GitHub. You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam." The Overwatch site adds as a bonus that "we're also permanently reducing the game's price by a third worldwide" (so U.S. prices drop from $29.99 to $19.99). "Only the code is getting open sourced," the announcement notes, "not the art assets or levels, the reason is that we don't want someone to build and sell Overgrowth as their own." Wolfire CEO Max Danielsson explains in a video that "you'll still have to own the game to play and mod it.""What it does mean, however, is that everyone will have full and free access to all our source code, including the engine, project files, scripts, and shaders. "We'll be releasing it under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows you to do whatever you want with the code, including relicensing and selling it, with very few obligations. We tried to keep this easy... "This isn't the next big engine. We don't intend to compete with any other great open source game engines like Godot, which is a great option if you're looking for a general-purpose game engine. But if you're interested in looking at what shipped game code can look like, want to look at specific code, like the procedural animation system, or if you're an Overgrowth modder who wants to make an involved total conversion mod, then this is for you. "We have wanted to open source Overgrowth for a long time," says the announcement on Wolfire's site, "and we are incredibly grateful to our team and community for making this happen. "We are excited to see what people do with this code and we look forward to the spirit of Overgrowth living on for another 14 years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Streaming right now on Hulu: a three-hour live special in which two members of something called the "Red Bull Air Force" try to make aviation history, reports People:On Sunday, April 24, Aikins and Farrington will try to switch planes mid-air in a stunt at Sawtooth Airport in Eloy, Arizona, that can be seen exclusively on Hulu, according to a press release from Red Bull. The planes will be "completely empty" and facing the ground when Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington attempt the daring switch, which will air during a three-hour livestream event. To complete the feat, Aikins and Farrington will fly a pair of Cessna 182 single-seat aircraft up to 14,000 feet before putting them into a vertical nosedive and jumping out, with the goal of skydiving into each other's planes. The cousins will stop the planes' engines and aim them toward the ground as they complete the stunt. A custom airbrake with the ability to hold the planes in a controlled-descent terminal velocity speed of 140 mph will also be utilized to complete the trick. After catching up to the opposing stuntman's plane, Aikins and Farrington will enter the cockpits and turn the planes back on as normal, piloting them to land. Aikins is an experienced skydiver, having completed more than 21,000 jumps throughout his career. Farrington, meanwhile, has completed 27,000 jumps. "I call it more calculated than crazy," Aikins says in an interview with the web site Complex. "We work really hard to make sure that everything's going to be okay. We don't flip a coin and fingers crossed and hope it all works out. We mitigate the risk down to something that's acceptable and what's acceptable to me."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A former NSA computer scientist is disgusted with the current state of security practices, writes ITWire. Slashdot reader samuel_the_fool shares their report:Patching of vulnerabilities is the security industry's equivalent of thoughts and prayers, a prominent American security expert has said during a debate on the topic "Patching is useless" at a recent online conference named Hack At The Harbor. Dave Aitel, 46, a former NSA computer scientist who ran his own security shop, Immunity, for many years, said the remedies proposed by security vendors and big technology companies had served to lull people into a false sense of security all these years and ensure that all the old problems still remained.... Aitel pointed out that if there were vulnerable devices on a network, then they should be removed and substituted with others, rather than being continuously patched.... Aitel was no less severe on Linux, noting that the biggest contributor to the kernel was the Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei Technologies, which he claimed had been indicted by the US, and asking how one could rest content if so many patches were coming from a company of this kind. On the positive side, he had praise for ChromeOS, an operating system that is produced by Google, and recommended the use of Chromebooks rather Windows machines. Aitel called for vulnerability management, advocating the government as the best entity to handle this. His argument was that no other entity had sufficient power to push back against the lobby of the big software vendors and the security industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader drinkypoo writes: Researchers at UNSW Sydney have discovered that aphantasia, or lack of visual imagination, can be detected by lack of pupillary response. Pupillary response to both real and imagined objects was measured and compared, and the response to imagined objects was larger in those reporting greater vividness of imagery. "One of the problems with many existing methods to measure imagery is that they are subjective, that is to say they rely on people being able to accurately assess their own imagery," says Professor Joel Pearson, senior author of the paper."Our results show an exciting new objective method to measure visual imagery, and the first physiological evidence of aphantasia. With over 1.3 million Australians thought to have aphantasia, and 400 million more internationally, we are now close to an objective physiological test, like a blood test, to see if someone truly has it... We are very close to having objective, reliable tests for extreme imagery, aphantasia and hyperphantasia (extremely strong visual imagery) that could be scaled up to run online for millions of people everywhere," Another author on the study sees a larger significance. âoeThese findings further highlight the wide variability of the human mind that can often remain hidden until we ask someone about their internal experiences or invent new ways to measure the mind. It reminds us that just because I remember or visualise something one way, doesnâ(TM)t mean everyone does.âRead more of this story at Slashdot.
The governor of Michigan has announced America's first "public wireless in-road charging system," which would allow electric vehicles (EV) to charge — both while in motion and when stationary. The GreenBiz site takes a look at this "inductive vehicle charging pilot program."There's perhaps no place more fitting for this pilot than Detroit. The city that led the nation's first wave of automobile technology is helping lead its second, as the Michigan Department of Transportation has awarded a $1.9 million contract to Electreon to install one mile of in-road EV charging in Motor City. "Wireless is the future for this technology," said Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development for Electreon in the U.S. The wireless charging company is already building out the tech across Europe, where it has pilots in Germany, Italy and Sweden. The Michigan project is expected to be operational in 2023. "We've always, for the past century, stopped to fuel the car, and we're thinking the same with EVs," Tongur said. But that creates many challenges when it comes to large-scale batteries and fleets especially, Tongur noted... So Electreon and others envision a network of strategic corridors with wireless, in-road charging that could gradually power vehicles along a route, rather than all at once at the destination. Fleet operators could either pay a subscription to use the chargers or integrate the costs into highway tolling, depending on the situation, Tongur said. He described Electreon's business model as "charging as a service." Alex Gruzen, CEO of wireless charging company WiTricity, tells the site this technology ultimately could accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. "The company's own research indicates that wireless charging can increase a consumer's intent to purchase an EV by 68%, according to Gruzen, which could help move EVs beyond the early adopter stage." Or, as Gruzen puts it, "What we want to do is show that the EV ownership experience can be better than any experience you've ever had with a car before." Thanks to Slashdot reader doyouwantahotpocket for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill Gates shares a statistic about the COVID-19 pandemic. "If we'd been able to stop it within 100 days, we would've saved over 98% of the lives.""Viruses spread exponentially, and so if you get in there when the infection rate is fairly small, you can actually stop the spread." In a new TED talk, Gates argues that we did learn a lot from this pandemic — enough to build a prevention system for next time. "Covid 19 can be the last pandemic if we take the right steps." But the answer isn't vaccines. "We also need vaccines, but we want to stop the outbreak before we have to do a global vaccination campaign." And then Gates points out that currently it could take months to get resources to a low-income country experiencing an outbreak. Read on for Slashdot's report on Gates' proposed solution — and how he feels about his own prominence in anti-vaccine misinformation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Someone contacted Android Central saying they'd apparently found Google's yet-to-be-released Pixel Watch — left behind at a restaurant.The images of what could be the watch seem to match many rumors that have leaked, including the minimalist design, the crown, and a potential hidden button. It looks like the watch has proprietary Google bands.... The image also confirms one of the rumored colors that the watch will come in: black.... The source indicated that the bottom "looks metallic but feels like it's coated with glass." Engadget summarizes its features:"The watch features a single button next to its crown and what looks like a microphone or altimeter port.""On the back of the device, you can see an optical heartrate sensor.""If you look closely, you can see the wearable's band attaches directly to its case, with a latch mechanism that looks proprietary to Google and reminiscent of the design employed by Fitbit on its Versa and Sense smartwatches (Google acquired the company in 2021)... "According to a report leaker Jon Prosser published in January, Google will announce the Pixel Watch on May 26th. The company recently filed to trademark the Pixel Watch name."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor — an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture. "Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post. "I used to say, 'No way,' " Ed said. "Now it's more like, 'Please God, don't let us be here to see it.' "The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor. It's buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It's 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as "total nuclear annihilation." "I bet it would fly right over our living room," Ed said. "I wonder if we'd even see it." "We'd hear it. We'd feel it," Pam said. "The whole house would be shaking." "And if we're shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us," Ed said... "I guess we'd head for the storage room," Ed said. "Make a few goodbye calls," Pam said. "Hold hands. Pray." Ed got up to clear his plate. "Good thing it's all hypothetical. It's really only there for deterrence. It'll never actually explode." "You're right," Pam said. "It won't happen. Almost definitely not."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"The U.S. is spending millions to explore a surprising source of untapped power," reports Recode, describing a new pilot program from America's Department of Energy"Geothermal energy works on a simple premise: The Earth's core is hot, and by drilling even just a few miles underground, we can tap into that practically unlimited heat source to generate energy for our homes and businesses without creating nearly as many of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. However, drilling doesn't come cheap — it accounts for half the cost of most geothermal energy projects — and requires specialized labor to map the subsurface, drill into the ground, and install the infrastructure needed to bring energy to the surface. But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom, just so happens to have millions of oil and gas wells sitting abandoned across the country. And oil and gas wells, it turns out, happen to share many of the same characteristics as geothermal wells — namely that they are deep holes in the ground, with pipes that can bring fluids up to the surface. So, the DOE asks, why not repurpose them? That's exactly what the agency's pilot program, called Wells of Opportunity: ReAmplify, aims to do, awarding a total of $8.4 million to four projects across the country that will each try to tap into some of those old wells to extract geothermal energy rather than gas or oil. If they work, they could be the key to not only reducing the country's use of planet-damaging fossil fuels, but also helping answer the question of how to transition many of the more than 125,000 people who work in oil and gas extraction across the country into clean-energy jobs.... [T]he next year or so will be spent on planning and assessing the feasibility of turning oil wells into geothermal resources, after which energy generation will slowly ramp up. The biggest question is just how scalable these ideas are: One megawatt is, after all, a pittance compared to the country's energy needs. "Some European countries already rely on direct use of geothermal energy on a large scale," the article points out. Volcanically-active Iceland, for example, "uses its vast reserves of geothermal energy to heat 90 percent of its homes." Thanks to Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the storyRead more of this story at Slashdot.
Once every 10 years there's a report released by America's National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Released this year, the report recommends prioritizing a mission to the planet Uranus to map its gravitational and magnetic fields and study how the planet's internal heat moves to the surface. BGR reports:Despite being the seventh planet in our solar system, there's very little we know about Uranus as a whole. In fact, one of the best images we have of the planet was captured in 1986 by the Voyager 2... Additionally, scientists want to learn more about the various moons that surround the planet. We also know very little about the ring system that surrounds the blue planet. A team led by Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab wrote a white paper on their goals.... We currently already have the tech we need to get a spacecraft there that can orbit the planet. Additionally, scientists have found that launching a mission in 2031 would allow us to capitalize on gravity assistance from Jupiter. The report also recommends studying Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn which has shown signs it could sustain microbial life. Thanks to Slashdot reader alaskana98 for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CNN profiles Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative group specializing in "open-source intelligence". And investigator Christo Grozev tells CNN that authoritarian governments make their work easier, because "they love to gather data, comprehensive data, on ... what they consider to be their subjects, and therefore there's a lot of centralized data." "And second, there's a lot of petty corruption ... within the law enforcement system, and this data market thrives on that."Billions have been spent on creating sophisticated encrypted communications for the military in Russia. But most of that money has been stolen in corrupt kickbacks, and the result is they didn't have that functioning system... It is shocking how incompetent they are. But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government. Interestingly there's apparently less corruption in China — though more whistleblowers. But Bellingcat's first investigation involved the 2014 downing of a Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine that killed 283 passengers. (The Dutch Safety Board later concluded it was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.) "At that time, a lot of public data was available on Russian soldiers, Russian spies, and so on and so forth — because they still hadn't caught up with the times, so they kept a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of weapons that shoot down airliners. That's where we kind of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs..." "By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the internet because a new law had been passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and by soldiers. So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray market of data in Russia, which is comprised of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases. Most of these are available for free, completely freely downloadable from torrent sites or from forums and the internet."And for some of them, they're more current. You actually can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases when we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government has committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical boundaries from using such data — as long as it is verifiable, as long as it is not coming from one source only but corroborated by at least two or three other sources of data. That's how we develop it. And the first big use case for this approach was the ... poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 (in the United Kingdom), when we used this combination of open source and data bought from the gray market in Russia to piece together who exactly the two poisoners were. And that worked tremendously.... It has been what I best describe as a multilevel computer game.... [W]hen we first learned that we can get private data, passport files and residence files on Russian spies who go around killing people, they closed the files on those people. So every spy suddenly had a missing passport file in the central password database. But that opened up a completely new way for us to identify spies, because we were just able to compare older versions of the database to newer versions. So that allowed us to find a bad group of spies that we didn't even know existed before. The Russian government did realize that that's maybe a bad idea to hide them from us, so they reopened those files but just started poisoning data. They started changing the photographs of some of these people to similar looking, like lookalikes of the people, so that they confused us or embarrass us if we publish a finding but it's for the wrong guy. And then we'll learn how to beat that. When asked about having dropped some ethical boundaries about data use, Grozev replies "everything changes. Therefore, the rules of journalism should change with the changing times.""And it's not common that journalism was investigating governments conducting government-sanctioned crimes, but now it's happening." With a country's ruler proclaiming perpetual supreme power, "This is not a model that traditional journalism can investigate properly. It's not even a model that traditional law enforcement can investigate properly."I'll give an example. When the British police asked, by international agreement, for cooperation from the Russian government to provide evidence on who exactly these guys were who were hanging around the Skripals' house in 2018, they got completely fraudulent, fake data from the Russian government.... So the only way to counter that as a journalist is to get the data that the Russian government is refusing to hand over. And if this is the only way to get it, and if you can be sure that you can prove that this is valid data and authentic data — I think it is incumbent on journalists to find the truth. And especially when law enforcement refuses to find the truth because of honoring the sovereign system of respecting other governments. It was Bellingcat that identified the spies who's poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. CNN suggests that for more details on their investigation, and "to understand Vladimir Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film Navalny which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN." The movie's tagline? "Poison always leaves a trail."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Apple may be cracking down on apps that no longer receive updates," reports the Verge:In a screenshotted email sent to affected developers, titled "App Improvement Notice," Apple warns it will remove apps from the App Store that haven't been "updated in a significant amount of time" and gives developers just 30 days to update them.... In 2016, Apple said it would start removing abandoned apps from the App Store. At the time, it also warned developers that they would have 30 days to update their app before it got taken down. That said, it's unclear whether Apple has continuously been enforcing this rule over the years, or if it recently started conducting a wider sweep. Apple also doesn't clearly outline what it considers to be "outdated" — whether it's based on the time that has elapsed since an app was last updated, or if it concerns compatibility with the most recent version of iOS. Critics of this policy argue that mobile apps should remain available no matter their age, much like old video games remain playable on consoles. Others say the policy is unnecessarily tough on developers, and claim Apple doesn't fully respect the work that goes into indie games. Earlier this month, the Google Play Store similarly announced it would begin limiting the visibility of apps that "don't target an API level within two years of the latest major Android release version." Android developers have until November 1st, 2022 to update their apps, but also have the option of applying for a six-month extension if they can't make the deadline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Associated Press files this report from Chernobyl, where invading tanks in February "churned up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world's worst nuclear disaster..." "Here in the dirt of one of the world's most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves."For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged.... Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone, believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers' warnings to their commanders. "Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old," he said.... The full extent of Russia's activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out. Ukrainian authorities can't monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn't receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers' personal radiation monitors.... When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they're now in Russia. In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed. The article includes more stories from Chernobyl's staff:Even now, weeks after the Russians left, "I need to calm down," the plant's main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change. "I was afraid they would install something and damage the system," he said in an interview.... Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe. Long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes also notes reports that researchers at Chernobyl "had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste — but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility." New Scientist reports (in a pay-walled article) that scientist Olena Pareniuk "was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl's destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips." Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system."With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware. OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support. The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER."The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm. It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on.... We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thoughtworks is a technology consultancy/distributed agile software design company. The principle technologist in its CTO's office warns that managers of IT assets "need to keep up" with the changing economics of open source:Early 2022 has brought with it an unusually high level of commotion in the open-source community, largely focused on the economics of who — and how we — should pay for "free" software. But this isn't just some geeky flame war. What's at stake is critical for vast swaths of the business world.... We know of many open-source enthusiasts who maintain their software personally while leading busy professional lives — the last thing they want is the responsibility of a service-level agreement because someone paid them for their creation. So, is this the end of the road for the open-source dream? Certainly, many of the open-source naysayers will view the recent upheavals as proof of a failed approach. They couldn't be more wrong. What we're seeing today is a direct result of the success of open-source software. That success means there isn't a one-size-fits-all description to define open-source software, nor one economic model for how it can succeed. For internet giants like Facebook or Netflix, the popularity, or otherwise, of their respective JavaScript library and software tool — React and Chaos Monkey — is beside the point. For such companies, open-source releases are almost a matter of employer branding — a way to show off their engineering chops to potential employees. The likelihood of them altering licensing models to create new revenue streams is small enough that most enterprises need not lose sleep over it. Nonetheless, if these open-source tools form a critical part of your software stack or development process, you might want some form of contingency plan — you're likely to have very little sway over future developments, so understanding your risks helps. For companies that have built platforms containing open-source software, the risks are more uncertain. This is in line with Thoughtworks' view that all businesses can benefit from a greater awareness of what software is running in their various systems. In such cases, we advise companies to consider the extent to which they're reliant on that piece of software: are there viable alternatives? In extreme circumstances, could you fork the code and maintain it internally? Once you start looking at crucial parts of your software stack where you're reliant on hobbyists, your choices begin to dwindle. But if Log4J's case has taught us anything, it's this: auditing what goes into the software that runs your business puts you in a better place than being completely caught by surprise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On April 15th Americans filed their taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (or IRS). But on the same day ProPublica was reporting a difference between "the rich and the rest of us" — that their wealth just isn't easily defined: For one, wages make up only a small part of their earnings. And they have broad latitude in how they account for their businesses and investments. Their incomes aren't defined by a tax form. Instead, they represent the triumph of careful planning by skilled professionals who strive to deliver the most-advantageous-yet-still-plausible answers to their clients. For them, a tax return is an opening bid to the IRS. It's a kind of theory.... We counted at least 16 other billionaires (along with hundreds of other ultrawealthy people, including hedge fund managers and former CEOs) among the stimulus check recipients. This is just how our system works. It's why, in 2011, Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, qualified for $4,000 in refundable child tax credits. (Bezos didn't respond to our questions.) A recent study by the Brookings Institution set out with a simple aim: to compare what owners of privately held businesses say they earn with the income that appears on the owners' tax returns. The findings were stark: "More than half of economic income generated by closely held businesses does not appear on tax returns and that ratio has declined significantly over the past 25 years." That doesn't mean business owners are illegally hiding income from the IRS, though it's certainly a possible contributor. There are plenty of ways to make income vanish legally. Tax perks like depreciation allow owners to create tax losses even as they expand their businesses... "Losses" from one business can also be used to wipe out income from another. Sometimes spilling red ink can be lots of fun: For billionaires, owning sports teams and thoroughbred racehorses are exciting loss-makers. Congress larded the tax code with these sorts of provisions on the logic that what's good for businesses is good for the economy. Often, the evidence for this broader effect is thin or nonexistent, but you can be sure all this is great for business owners. The Brookings study found that households worth $10 million or more benefited the most from being able to make income disappear.... In the tax system we have, billionaires who'd really rather not pay income taxes can usually find a way not to. They can bank their accumulating gains tax-free and deploy tax losses to wipe out whatever taxable income they might have. They can even look forward to a few thousand dollars here and there from the government to help them raise their kids or get through a national emergency. This system also means it's much harder to catch underreported income on the tax returns of the wealthy, the article points out. And with so many legal deducations, it's also hard to prove the low incomes really exceed what the law allows. Even then, the wealthy can still hire an army of the best tax lawyers to make their case in court. And now thousands of auditors have left the agency — and have not been replaced. The end result? "Audits of the wealthy have plummeted. "Business owners have still more reason to be bold...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The New York Times reports:Images such as Ukrainian tractors towing away a disabled Russian tank and helicopter, although unverified, have not only helped fight Russian disinformation, but also helped support Ukrainian charities and even the Ukrainian military. The merchandise sales they have generated in the United States and elsewhere are surprising given that many people buying the T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs and chocolate bars would never have thought about the Eastern European country before the conflict. One example? Toronto-based Christian Borys, who decided to launch a site selling stickers of the Virgin Mary hoisting an antitank missile (adapted from a painting by the American artist Chris Shaw.) In eight weeks Borys' "Saint Javelin" site "has raised so far almost $1.5 million to assist the Ukrainian charity Help Us Help, which has branched into multiple services, and to provide protective equipment for journalists covering the war, he said."Mr. Borys, who had worked for the e-commerce platform Shopify before turning to journalism, said he created a website in half an hour, hoping to raise money to send to a charity for Ukrainian orphans. That night, he made 88 Canadian dollars in sales. By the time he added T-shirts at the end of February, the threat of war had turned into a full-scale invasion, and he said sales grew to 170,000 Canadian dollars a day — most coming from the United States. "The internet speaks in memes and it just became this crazy, viral sensation," he said. "I think it's because people were looking for a symbol of support, a way to support Ukraine, because they saw the whole injustice of everything...." Three weeks ago, Mr. Borys, a Canadian of Ukrainian Polish origin, turned Saint Javelin from an all-volunteer effort to a full-time staff of four to keep up with demand. His website has branched out from the Virgin Mary to other saints: Saint Carl Gustaf wears a gas mask, while "Saint Olha, the Warrior Queen of Kyiv" wears a crown and hoists a bazooka over her camouflaged shoulders. "People on Instagram demand we make things basically," Mr. Borys said. "We get messages from people in Spain who say, 'Hey, we just shipped the C-90,' a shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launcher," he said. "And they'll say, 'Hey we want a saint for Spain' or a saint specific to that type of system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"As more and more workers have fallen under the gaze of algorithms, a growing chorus of experts have noted how platform companies have paralleled the practices of colonial empires," writes MIT Technology review, "in using management tools to surveil and exploit a broad base of cheap labor." But resistance rose in Jakarta from an informal "base camp" for gig-worker drivers with Indonesia's largest ride-hailing company Gojek. And their experience "could reveal a new playbook for resistance: a way for workers to build collective power, achieve a measure of security, and take care of one another when seemingly no one else will." "If one person shares a tip or a concern, it quickly travels through a loose network of WhatsApp and Telegram groups and across social media," the article points out — also noting that drivers eventually learned that by repeatedly rejecting certain gigs, they can train the app's algorithm to offer them different kinds of work. But that's just the beginning...Other drivers who are skilled in deciphering the mysteries of the algorithm offer paid "therapy services" to those who are struggling. A therapist will take over a client's phone for a week and slowly coax the account back to health before returning it to its owner. Then there are more sophisticated hacks. The more tech-savvy in the driver communities have developed an entire ecosystem of unauthorized apps that help drivers tweak and tune their accounts, Qadri says. Some are relatively trivial, built simply to eliminate a reliance on Gojek's engineering team: they enlarge the text on the app's user interface to improve its readability, or help drivers accept jobs automatically, a feature Gojek has by now incorporated. But the most popular, with more than half a million downloads, spoof a phone's GPS. They can give the illusion that a driver who is resting is still working. This can avoid penalties for sick time or help quickly graduate an account to higher levels with more earning potential. Such apps can also give drivers access to places with high customer demand without requiring them to muscle into crowded spaces.... As driver networks have grown and accumulated political capital, they've also sought to agitate for broader reforms. They use social media to protest undesirable app updates or push for feature requests. Gojek now sends representatives to base camps to seek feedback and buy-in from drivers about forthcoming changes. "This sense of community is now at the heart of what distinguishes Jakarta's drivers from other gig workers around the world," the article argues. "While such workers everywhere have felt increasingly squeezed and exploited by unforgiving algorithms, most have struggled to organize and effect concrete changes in the platforms that control their work or the government policies that enable their mistreatment." Or, as one California law professor tells the site, "You don't get the kind of regulations you want without worker power, and you don't have worker power without worker community." "This story is part three of MIT Technology Review's series on AI colonialism, the idea that artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order. It was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full series here."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you ranked all U.S. companies by annual revenue, Occidental Petroleum comes in at #183. But Wednesday this massive "hydrocarbon exploration" company "outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business," reports Reuters, "including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air."The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024. The U.S. oil and gas producer is aiming to build a profitable business from providing services and technologies that pull CO2 out of the air and burying it underground to advance government and business climate mitigation goals. This year's investments in the low carbon business will total $275 million, and the company plans to develop over time three carbon sequestration hubs that will be online by 2025 and another 69 smaller DAC facilities by 2035, it told investors.... Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year — 100 times bigger than all 19 DAC plants currently operating worldwide combined, according to the International Energy Agency. "There's just not going to be enough other alternatives for CO2 offsets," said Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub. "So this is a sure opportunity." Executives did not say when they expect the business to turn a profit. DAC is currently not commercial on a large scale. "We expect that to play out over the next five to 10 years as we develop plants," Richard Jackson, Occidental's head of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management operations, told Reuters by phone. "The commerciality of those plants will be determined by mainly the market". Last month Occidental announced that Airbus had already pre-purchased "400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from [Occidental's] planned first Direct Air Capture facility," specifically, "the capture and permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for four years — with an option to secure more volume in the future." Occidental called the deal "indicative of the availability of a feasible, affordable, and scalable decarbonization solution for aviation and other hard-to-abate industries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After startup Axiom Space brokered the first visit to the Space Station by an all-private crew, the AX-1 mission turned into a "longer-than-expected" stay, reports CNN. It launched on April 8 and "was originally billed as a 10-day mission," CNN notes, "but delays have extended the mission by about a week."The four crew members — Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut-turned-Axiom employee who is commanding the mission; Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe; Canadian investor Mark Pathy; and Ohio-based real estate magnate Larry Connor — are slated to leave the space station aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sunday at 8:55 pm ET. That's another 24-hour delay from what NASA and Axiom were targeting on Saturday. They now plan to spend a day free flying through orbit before plummeting back into the atmosphere and parachuting to a splashdown landing off the coast of Florida at about 1 pm ET Monday, according to a tweet from Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA's human spaceflight program... During their first 12 days on the space station, the group stuck to a regimented schedule, which included about 14 hours per day of activities, including scientific research that was designed by various research hospitals, universities, tech companies and more. They also spent time doing outreach events by video conferencing with children and students. The weather delays then afforded to them "a bit more time to absorb the remarkable views of the blue planet and review the vast amount of work that was successfully completed during the mission," according to Axiom.... It's not the first time paying customers or otherwise non-astronauts have visited the ISS, as Russia has sold seats on its Soyuz spacecraft to various wealthy thrill seekers in years past. But AX-1 is the first mission with a crew entirely comprised of private citizens with no active members of a government astronaut corps accompanying them in the capsule during the trip to and from the ISS. It's also the first time private citizens have traveled to the ISS on a US-made spacecraft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dirk Hohndel gets frequently mentioned on Slashdot. He was a very early contributor to Linux (and for the last five years the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware). But he's also the guy who interviews Linus Torvalds in the keynote sessions of Open Source Summits. Hohndel "has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 1990's," reports Phoronix, and was even a member of the Linux Foundation Board of Directors. But they add that now Hohndel has "somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort." Dirk Hohndel was CTO at SUSE going back to the mid-90's before joining Intel for a fifteen year run that ended in 2016 where he was Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist... When Dirk left VMware unexpectedly at the beginning of the year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he felt he completed his job at the company in driving open-source transformation. He was leaving to go "look for the next opportunity, the next step in my career" and now it apparently is with blockchain. The surprising news today is that he's joined the Cardano Foundation. The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss-based foundation built around the Cardano public blockchain platform. Cardano is open-source and is the most notable proof-of-stake blockchain that was started by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano has its own cryptocurrency, ADA.... Dirk will be serving as the Cardano Foundation's Chief Open-Source Officer. Interestingly, Linus Torvalds appears to be less enthralled with blockchain technologies. Last year ZDNet reported on the reaction when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world. "An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Writing for the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow reports on Pegasus, "a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance — exposing, say, confidential meetings."Pegasus is useful for law enforcement seeking criminals, or for authoritarians looking to quash dissent.... In Catalonia, more than sixty phones — owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers, and activists in Spain and across Europe — have been targeted using Pegasus. This is the largest forensically documented cluster of such attacks and infections on record. Among the victims are three members of the European Parliament... Catalan politicians believe that the likely perpetrators of the hacking campaign are Spanish officials, and the Citizen Lab's analysis suggests that the Spanish government has used Pegasus.... In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda's opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi's associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, "Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.") Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states. But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company's efforts to fight spyware, told me, "The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff — not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments...." "Almost all governments in Europe are using our tools," Shalev Hulio, NSO Group's C.E.O., told me. A former senior Israeli intelligence official added, "NSO has a monopoly in Europe." German, Polish, and Hungarian authorities have admitted to using Pegasus. Belgian law enforcement uses it, too, though it won't admit it. Calling the spyware industry "largely unregulated and increasingly controversial," the article notes how it's now impacting major western democracies."The Citizen Lab's researchers concluded that, on July 26 and 27, 2020, Pegasus was used to infect a device connected to the network at 10 Downing Street, the office of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.... The United States has been both a consumer and a victim of this techÂnology. Although the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. have their own surveillance technology, other government offices, including in the military and in the Department of Justice, have bought spyware from private companies, according to people involved in those transactions." But are the company's fortunes faltering?The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO.... In November, the [U.S.] Commerce Department added NSO Group, along with several other spyware makers, to a list of entities blocked from purchasing technology from American companies without a license. I was with Hulio in New York the next day. NSO could no longer legally buy Windows operating systems, iPhones, Amazon cloud servers — the kinds of products it uses to run its business and build its spyware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. government "is launching a $6 billion effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing," reports the Associated Press, "citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change."A certification and bidding process opened Tuesday for a civil nuclear credit program that is intended to bail out financially distressed owners or operators of nuclear power reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy told The Associated Press exclusively, shortly before the official announcement. It's the largest federal investment in saving financially distressed nuclear reactors... "U.S. nuclear power plants contribute more than half of our carbon-free electricity, and President Biden is committed to keeping these plants active to reach our clean energy goals," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. "We're using every tool available to get this country powered by clean energy by 2035, and that includes prioritizing our existing nuclear fleet to allow for continued emissions-free electricity generation and economic stability for the communities leading this important work...." A dozen U.S. commercial nuclear power reactors have closed in the past decade before their licenses expired, largely due to competition from cheaper natural gas, massive operating losses due to low electricity prices and escalating costs, or the cost of major repairs. This has led to a rise in emissions in those regions, poorer air quality and the loss of thousands of high-paying jobs, dealing an economic blow to local communities, according to the Department of Energy. A quarter or more of the fleet is at risk, the Department of Energy added. The owners of seven currently operating reactors have already announced plans to retire them through 2025.... Twenty more reactors faced closure in the last decade before states stepped in to save them, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute , the industry's trade association.... Low electricity prices are the main cause of this trend, though federal and state policies to boost wind and solar have contributed as well, the NEI added. There are 55 commercial nuclear power plants with 93 nuclear reactors in 28 U.S. states. Nuclear power already provides about 20% of electricity in the U.S., or about half the nation's carbon-free energy. If reactors do close before their licenses expire, fossil fuel plants will likely fill the void and emissions will increase, which would be a substantial setback, said Andrew Griffith, acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy at DOE. While natural gas may be cheaper, nuclear power hasn't been given credit for its carbon-free contribution to the grid and that has caused nuclear plants to struggle financially, Griffith added.... David Schlissel, at the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said he wishes the federal government, before it allocated the $6 billion, had analyzed whether that money might have been better spent on ramping up renewables, battery storage and energy efficiency projects, which can be done quickly and cheaply to displace fossil fuels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Energy Department has teamed with GM and MathWorks to launch an EcoCAR Electric Vehicle Challenge that asks student groups at 15 North American universities to develop more efficient EV technology. From a report: The will have students tinker with a Cadillac Lyriq over four years as they develop automation, connectivity and propulsion tech, and they can will win annual prizes based on their progress. The teams are also expected to use a mix of connected car and sensor tech to enable sharing EV battery power with homes, "recreational uses" (think camping) and the electrical grid. GM is supplying the cars as part of a broader $6 million investment in the challenge. EcoCAR kicks off this fall.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
European Union lawmakers have secured a provisional deal on a landmark update to rules for digital services operating in the region -- grabbing political agreement after a final late night/early morning of compromise talks on the detail of what is a major retooling of the bloc's existing ecommerce rulebook. From a report: The political agreement on the Digital Services Act (DSA) paves the way for formal adoption in the coming weeks and the legislation entering into force -- likely later this year. Although the rules won't start to apply until 15 months after that -- so thereâ(TM)s a fairly long lead in time to allow companies to adapt. The regulation is wide ranging -- setting out to harmonize content moderation and other governance rules to speed up the removal of illegal content and products. It addresses a grab-bag of consumer protection and privacy concerns, as well as introducing algorithmic accountability requirements for large platforms to dial up societal accountability around their services. While 'KYC' requirements are intended to do the same for online marketplaces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought on a surge of "zoom-bombing" as hackers and pranksters crashed into virtual meetings with abusive messages and imagery. Now, Zoom has agreed to a "historic" payout of $85m as part of a class-action settlement brought by its users, including church groups who said they were left traumatized by the disruptions. From a report: As part of the settlement agreement, Zoom Video Communications, the company behind the teleconference application that grew popular during the pandemic, will pay the $85m to users in cash compensation and also implement reforms to its business practices. On Thursday, federal judge Laurel Beeler of California granted final approval to the agreement which was first filed in July. The agreement was granted preliminary approval in October. The settlement stems from 14 class-action complaints filed against the San Jose-based company by users between March and May of 2020, in which they argued that the company violated their privacy and security.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Analysis of thousands of tumours has unveiled a treasure trove of clues about the causes of cancer, representing a significant step towards the personalisation of treatment. The Guardian: Researchers say that for the first time it is possible to detect patterns -- called mutational signatures -- in the DNA of cancers. These provide clues including about whether a patient has had past exposure to environmental causes of cancer such as smoking or UV light, for example. This is important as these signatures allow doctors to look at each patient's tumour and match it to specific treatments and medications. However, these patterns can be detected only through analysis of the vast amounts of data unearthed by whole genome sequencing -- identifying the genetic makeup of a cell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Librarians say Holocaust deniers, antivaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists are being featured in the catalogs of a popular ebook lending service. From a report: In February, a group of librarians in Massachusetts identified a number of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic books on Hoopla, including titles like "Debating The Holocaust" and "A New Nobility of Blood and Soil" -- the latter referring to the infamous Nazi slogan for nationalist racial purity. After public outcry from library and information professionals, Hoopla removed a handful of titles from its digital collection. In an email obtained by the Library Freedom Project last month, Hoopla CEO Jeff Jankowski explained that the titles came from the company's network of more than 18,000 publishers: "[The titles] were added within the most recent twelve months and, unfortunately, they made it through our protocols that include both human and system-driven reviews and screening." However, quick Hoopla keyword searches for ebooks about "homosexuality" and "abortion" turn up dozens of top results that contain largely self-published religious texts categorized as "nonfiction," including several titles like "Can Homosexuality Be Healed" which promote conversion therapy and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. This prompted a group of librarians to start asking how these titles are appearing in public library catalogs and why they are ranked so high.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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