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The Justice Department has ramped up work in recent months on drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The investigation into whether Apple has monopoly power that it abuses began in 2019, but enforcers have escalated their efforts in recent months, with more litigators now assigned to the case and new requests for documents and consultations with companies involved, the people said. The Justice Department's investigation deals in part with Apple's policies governing mobile third-party software on its devices, which has been the focus of much of the criticism targeting Apple's competitive practices. The department is also looking at whether Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, operates in an anticompetitive way by favoring its own products over those of outside developers, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden's Department of Justice has formally made its position known on a class action filed against John Deere over farmers' right to repair their tractors. From a report: John Deere owns 53 percent of the market share for tractors in the U.S. and has become notorious among farm workers for using monopolistic practices when it comes to repairs. Last month, Forest River Farms launched a class action lawsuit against John Deere accusing them of violating antitrust laws with its repair policies, including putting software locks on their tractors and restricting access to repair tools. In a "Statement of Interest" filed Monday, the DOJ sided with plaintiffs and forcefully disagreed with Deere's analysis of antitrust law. "I'm thrilled that the Department of Justice is weighing in on this issue," said Willie Cade, a board member at Repair.org whose grandfather served as a board member at John Deere for 30 years. "I'm sure he would be pleased that there is support being garnered for farmers and ranchers," Cade said of his grandfather. In its statement, the DOJ argued that because of Deere's practices, when tractors break, "repair markets function poorly, agriculture suffers. Crops waste. Land lies fallow." It expressed concern that "repair restrictions can drive independent repair shops out of business by raising their costs or denying them key inputs, which, in turn, leaves consumers with fewer choices." Further reading: 11 states consider right to repair for farming equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The idea of using dirt on the Moon to manufacture solar cells, which could power a permanent human settlement, may seem outlandish, but two companies say they've made big progress on that front: they each say they've already made solar cells using fake Moon dirt. From a report: Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin says it's been making solar cells this way since 2021 but just made that information public in a blog post on Friday. Separately, Lunar Resources, which aims to develop technologies for the "large-scale industrialization of Space," told The Verge in a call today that it's been doing the same for the last couple of years. Each company still has to make an enormous leap: from crafting solar cells out of fake dirt in Earth-bound labs to accomplishing the same thing on the harsh surface of the Moon. But this is a dream decades in the making. And if their technologies succeed, they could help make it possible to build outposts on the Moon. The idea of tapping the Moon's resources to support human settlements, called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) in technical speak, has only recently moved out of the realm of science fiction. Now, with its Artemis program, NASA is looking to establish "the first long-term presence on the Moon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glaxo says the heartburn drug doesn't cause tumors. But the company was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. From a report: The small British company was sometimes called Glaxo University, because it conducted important pharmaceutical research that rarely resulted in profitable drugs. Then the scientists at Glaxo Laboratories created a molecule they called ranitidine, and in 1978 the company was granted a US patent. The molecule was new, but not novel. The scientists had, as scientists sometimes do, looked for a way to mimic the success of an established drug -- in this case, one that healed ulcers and could be used to treat heartburn. They developed ranitidine quickly, and the US Food and Drug Administration reviewed it quickly. Glaxo gave it the brand name Zantac. Glaxo marketed it as better and safer than the drug that inspired it, Tagamet, and before long, Zantac overtook Tagamet to become the world's bestselling prescription medication. For years, Glaxo counted on Zantac for nearly half of its sales and almost as much of its profit. The company won an award from Queen Elizabeth; the chief executive officer was knighted. Zantac created reputations and fortunes. It financed the modern version of Glaxo, which, after mergers and takeovers and spinoffs, ended up as GSK, a company now worth some $73 billion. Among its most popular drugs are the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin and the shingles vaccine Shingrix. But not Zantac. In 2019 the drug was found to be tainted with high levels of a probable carcinogen. Not by chance or mistake in a few batches. The poison is created by ranitidine itself. Zantac's makers and health regulators around the world recalled the drug, and in the spring of 2020 the FDA forced it off the market altogether. No company could manufacture it; nobody should ingest it. The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats. The FDA says consuming minuscule amounts isn't harmful. But tests were revealing excessive amounts of NDMA in ranitidine -- and a capacity to create even more over time. No version seemed safe. From ranitidine's beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public. Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn't share a critical study. Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning. More than 70,000 people who took Zantac or generic versions of it are suing the company in US state courts for selling a potentially contaminated and dangerous drug.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A third of the companies most linked to the destruction of tropical rainforests have not set a single policy on deforestation, a report reveals. From a report: Research by Global Canopy has found that 31% of the companies with the greatest influence on tropical deforestation risk through their supply chains do not have a single deforestation commitment for any of the commodities to which they are exposed. Many of those who have set policies are not monitoring them correctly, meaning deforestation to produce their commodities could still be taking place. Of the 100 companies with a deforestation commitment for every commodity to which they are exposed, only 50% are monitoring their suppliers or sourcing regions in line with their deforestation commitments for every commodity. Global Canopy's Forest 500 report states: "We are three years past the 2020 deadline that many organisations set themselves to halt deforestation, and just two years away from the UN's deadline of 2025 for companies and financial institutions to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation, conversion and the associated human rights abuses. This target date is essential to meeting our global net zero targets and averting catastrophic climate change." At Cop26 in 2021, world leaders agreed to remove deforestation from supply chains. Land-clearing by humans accounts for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, largely deriving from the destruction of the world's forests for agricultural products such as palm oil, soy and beef.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comparatively few people follow the Crown channel or participate in its chats -- suggesting they aren't engaging with the programming. From a report: When Amazon launched the Crown Channel on its livestreaming platform Twitch in 2019, the e-commerce giant was looking to flex its entertainment chops in the buzzy world of video games -- an arena the company had been trying to break into for years. Resembling a traditional television network, Crown offers a range of ad-supported original programming, including "Screen Invaders!," a show about mobile gaming. Amazon says Crown is among Twitch's top 10 entertainment channels, luring tens of thousands of viewers -- a feat typically equaled only by Twitch's top personalities -- and is attracting such big-name advertisers as chipmaker Intel and insurer Progressive. But a Bloomberg analysis of Crown audience metrics shows the channel isn't as popular as Amazon says it is. That has potential implications for brands, which according to internal documents, may have paid anywhere from $150,000 to $500,000-plus to promote themselves on the channel. A pitch deck for advertisers from January 2022 said the Crown channel then reached 43 million viewers and had a "highly engaged audience." But most of the viewers Crown cites are what the advertising industry calls "junk views," people who aren't actively watching the programming. Although Crown appears to draw in thousands of viewers each livestream, comparatively few people follow the channel or participate in its chats -- suggesting they aren't engaging with the content. Amazon sometimes pays Twitch tens of thousands of dollars to promote Crown programs on the site's home page, where they end up in a digital carousel that viewers scroll through, typically zipping past shows until they find something they want to watch. Audience inflation has been a long-standing issue for video and social-media sites.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 400 malicious packages were recently uploaded to PyPI (Python Package Index), the official code repository for the Python programming language, in the latest indication that the targeting of software developers using this form of attack isn't a passing fad. From a report: All 451 packages found recently by security firm Phylum contained almost identical malicious payloads and were uploaded in bursts that came in quick succession. Once installed, the packages create a malicious JavaScript extension that loads each time a browser is opened on the infected device, a trick that gives the malware persistence over reboots. The JavaScript monitors the infected developer's clipboard for any cryptocurrency addresses that may be copied to it. When an address is found, the malware replaces it with an address belonging to the attacker. The objective: intercept payments the developer intended to make to a different party.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe's proposed $20 billion takeover of design firm Figma risks a lengthy European Union probe after the bloc's antitrust watchdog warned of potential concerns over the deal. From a report: The European Commission said it had received requests from a number of national regulators to look into the deal, even though it falls below the normal revenue thresholds to warrant an EU-level review, according to a statement Wednesday. The agency said the deal could "significantly affect competition" in the market for interactive product design and whiteboarding software. It will now ask Adobe to notify the transaction as the companies can't go ahead with the deal without getting clearance from the EU.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deutsche Lufthansa has grounded all of its flights because of company computer issues. From a report: A Lufthansa spokesman said Wednesday the company is urgently investigating the matter. It wasn't immediately clear whether Lufthansa flights that were already airborne were instructed to land. Lufthansa's stable of airlines includes its namesake brand and the national flag-carriers Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Swiss. The company also operates low-cost carrier Eurowings as well as other smaller airlines. In total, the group operates around 700 aircraft, making it Europe's largest airline by fleet size.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A drug aimed at treating eyes immobilized sperm and prevented pregnancy in mice, encouraging researchers that it might work as a contraceptive for men. Injected into male mice, the drug was 100% effective in preventing pregnancy for 2 1/2 hours and about 91% effective for up to 3 1/2 hours, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The male mice were fertile after a day, the study found. The new approach is appealing for how quickly the contraceptive acts. The researchers said they would test the drug in other animals and aim for human trials in the coming years. The drug presented in Tuesday's study acts by deactivating an enzyme in mice and men that make sperm swim. "It's like your on-switch on your TV," said Jochen Buck, a pharmacologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, an author of the study. When the researchers added the drug to human and mice sperm in a dish, the cells stopped moving temporarily. Lower doses of the drug resulted in progressively more mobile sperm cells, Dr. Buck said. The drug took about 15 minutes to take effect. Male mice injected with the drug didn't alter their mating behavior. Allowed to mate in the 2.5 hours after injection, none of 52 pairs of mice produced offspring. A third of mice partners in a control group of 50 had pregnancies. Mice given the drug were later able to father healthy pups, the study said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has removed its "Surprise Me" button, a feature introduced in 2021 to alleviate the modern burden of choosing something to watch from thousands of titles. MarketWatch reports: The company discontinued the feature last month because of relatively low use, according to a spokeswoman. Netflix found that users tend to come to the service with a specific show, movie or genre in mind, undermining the appeal of a function such as "Surprise Me," the spokeswoman said. "We will continue to explore other ways to give members more options and ways to explore and discover content they want to watch," she said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Fiber is launching the 5Gbps internet plan it began testing in October. Engadget reports: The service will initially cover four cities, but Google says the $125-per-month service will expand to other areas later this year. The new plan is available today in Kansas City, West Des Moines and Fiber's Utah cities. It has symmetrical upload and download rates, an upgraded 10 Gig Fiber Jack (the small box housing the fiber cable's entrance into your home), professional installation, a WiFi 6 router and up to two mesh network extenders. The upgraded speeds are part of Google's rejuvenated focus on Fiber. The company also recently announced its first network expansion in years. But, perhaps more crucially, it reestablishes Fiber as an industry disrupter pushing competitors to upgrade speeds and lower prices (maybe) on existing plans. Comcast already offers 6Gbps service in some areas, but it costs a whopping $300 and doesn't include symmetrical uploads. Google also reiterated that Fiber's 8Gbps option, also announced late last year, is still "coming soon." That service will also include symmetrical uploads and downloads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from Nature: The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned. Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn't going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. "Their hands are really tied." [...] "There is no phase two," Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but "that plan has changed." "The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins," she said. Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus's initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated. "The ending of the investigation is not a surprise," adds Bruce66423. "But why 'quietly'?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an article that originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It was republished with permission via Ars Technica. Here's an excerpt: Research scientists on ships along Antarctica's west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage -- extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average. Despite "that extraordinary change, what we've seen this year is dramatic," said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program. "Even as somebody who's been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw," he said. "We don't know how long this is going to last. We don't fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave." If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica's critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems, and even ocean currents. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s. Data collected during Moffat's most recent research voyage includes the first readings from temperature and salinity sensors that were deployed a few years ago, which will give the scientists a starting point for comparisons. Moffat said it's "too early, and difficult" to attribute this year's conditions to long-term climate change until some peer-reviewed results are published. "But it seems to me that this might be a really unprecedented event," he said. "These episodes of relatively rapid ocean warming that can persist for months have been occurring all over the place. They haven't been common in this region." He said ocean temperature readings going back to April 2022 speak to the persistence of the warm conditions off the Antarctic Peninsula. The cruise covered an area more than 600 miles long and crisscrossed waters above the 125-mile wide continental shelf, documenting widespread ocean heating. "That's a very significant region," he said. "We don't have data going back 30 years for the entire region. But for the parts of the shelf for which we do have that data, it really seems extraordinary. It's very difficult to warm the ocean, and so when we see these conditions, that really speaks to a very intense forcing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report (PDF) from the Data Science 4 Everyone coalition reveals that data literacy skills among fourth and eighth-grade students have declined significantly over the last decade even as these skills have become increasingly essential in our modern, data-driven society. Phys.Org reports: Based on data from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results, the report uncovered several trends that raise concerns about whether the nation's educational system is sufficiently preparing young people for a world reshaped by the rise of big data and artificial intelligence. Key findings include: - The pandemic decline is part of a much longer-term trend. Between 2019 and 2022, scores in the data analysis, statistics, and probability section of the NAEP math exam fell by 10 points for eighth-graders and by four points for fourth-graders. Declining scores are part of a longer-term trend, with scores down 17 points for eighth-graders and down 10 points for fourth-graders over the last decade. That means today's eighth-graders have the data literacy of sixth-graders from a decade ago, and today's fourth-graders have the data literacy of third-graders from a decade ago. - There are large racial gaps in scores. These gaps exist across all grade levels but are at times most dramatic in the middle and high school levels. For instance, fourth-grade Black students scored 28 points lower -- the equivalent of nearly three grade levels -- than their white peers in data analysis, statistics, and probability. - Data-related instruction is in decline. Every state except Alabama reported a decline or stagnant trend in data-related instruction, with some states -- like Maryland and Iowa -- seeing double-digit drops. The national share of fourth-grade math teachers reporting "moderate" or "heavy" emphasis on data analysis dropped five percentage points between 2019 and 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support (LTS) release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5. This release brings a welcome wizard, which will guide you through setting up the desktop, and a new tiling system for KWin window manager, allowing you to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent tiled windows simultaneously. The settings for touch-enabled devices such as touchscreens and drawing tablets have been improved and expanded. For those lucky owners of Valve's Steam Deck gaming console, Discover can now perform system updates from within the desktop. Digital Clock desktop widget can now show the Hebrew calendar in its calendar view, and the Media Player widget is now touch-sensitive. The Bluetooth widget shows the battery status of connected devices when you hover the cursor over it. Those of you who use multiple monitors should benefit greatly from a major overhaul of how Plasma handles them. KDE Plasma now comes with Flatpak permissions settings integrated into the System Settings app. For details and other new features and improvements be sure to check out the full announcement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told the Financial Times that the company intends to "go big" on its brick-and-mortar grocery store business. Engadget reports: Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion, but the company is far from dominating the grocery market like it has so many other sectors. The company's physical store division accounts for 3.4 percent of overall business and has grown only around 10 percent since the Whole Foods acquisition. "We're just still in the early stages," Jassy told the Financial Times. "We're hopeful that in 2023, we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side. We have a history of doing a lot of experimentation and doing it quickly. And then, when we find something that we like, doubling down on it, which is what we intend to do." Many of the layoffs Amazon recently announced were in its grocery division. It has closed several of its Fresh supermarkets and put plans to open new ones on hold as it tries to find a format and formula that works. Jassy noted that many Fresh locations opened in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and as such Amazon hasn't "had a lot of normalcy." The physical retail business has struggled on other fronts. Almost a year ago, Amazon said it was closing all of its bookstores, 4-star shops and pop-up locations across the US and UK. The aim at the time was to focus more on the grocery side of things as well as physical clothing stores. However, Amazon took a $720 million hit last quarter due to slowing down its grocery expansion plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Hyundai and Kia are offering free software updates for millions of their cars in response to a rash of car thefts inspired by a viral social media challenge on TikTok. The so-called "Kia Challenge" on the social media platform has led to hundreds of car thefts nationwide, including at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Thieves known as "the Kia Boyz" would post instructional videos about how to bypass the vehicles' security system using tools as simple as a USB cable. The thefts are reportedly easy to pull off because many 2015-2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers that prevent thieves from simply breaking in and bypassing the ignition. The feature is standard equipment on nearly all vehicles from the same period made by other manufacturers. Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia are offering to update the "theft alarm software logic" to extend the length of the alarm sound from 30 seconds to one minute. The vehicles will also be updated to require a key in the ignition switch to turn the vehicle on. The software upgrade modifies certain vehicle control modules on Hyundai vehicles equipped with standard "turn-key-to-start" ignition systems. As a result, locking the doors with the key fob will set the factory alarm and activate an "ignition kill" feature so the vehicles cannot be started when subjected to the popularized theft mode. Customers must use the key fob to unlock their vehicles to deactivate the "ignition kill" feature. There hasn't been a nationwide accounting of how many Hyundai and Kia vehicles have been stolen, but stats from individual cities provide some sense of how viral the trend has become. In Milwaukee, for example, police report that 469 Kias and 426 Hyundais were stolen in 2020. Those numbers spiked the following year to 3,557 Kias and 3,406 Hyundais, according to NPR. Approximately 3.8 million Hyundais and 4.5 million Kias are eligible for the software update free of charge, for a total of 8.3 million cars. Vehicle owners are instructed to take their cars to a local dealership, where technicians will install the upgrades in less than an hour. The upgraded vehicles will also get a window decal indicating they've been equipped with anti-theft technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced by an Indian company is a stark illustration of the difficulties Apple faces in reducing its dependence on China. 9to5Mac reports: Apple's target for casings that fail to pass quality control is 0%, with Chinese suppliers reportedly getting extremely close to this. The attitude of Indian suppliers is also said to compare poorly with the can-do approach of Chinese companies, with one former Apple engineer saying that there is no sense of urgency in its Indian supply chain... The Financial Times reports that poor yields is a key challenge faced by Apple in attempting to replicate its Chinese supply chain in India: "At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple's suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple's assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter. This 50 per cent 'yield' fares badly compared with Apple's goal for zero defects. Two people that have worked in Apple's offshore operations said the factory is on a plan towards improving proficiency but the road ahead is long." Tech entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa said that it will likely take three years or so for Indian suppliers to be capable of the kind of volume production needed to make a noticeable dent in Chinese production. [...] He also suggested that Apple, too, will need to adapt -- especially when it comes to dealing with the bureaucratic government: "He suggested its engineers learn the art of jugaad -- a way of 'making do' or transcending obstacles. 'Because everything in India is an obstacle,' he said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford said on Tuesday that it had stopped production and shipments of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup after discovering a potential battery issue during pre-delivery checks. Reuters reports: "We are not aware of any incidences of this issue in the field," Ford spokesperson Emma Bergg said in an email. She said the production stop was issued at the start of last week. Ford added it was investigating the matter, which was earlier reported by CNBC and first reported by Motor Authority. Shares of the automaker were down 1% in afternoon trade. Bergg says Ford has not established a timeline for when production and the shipments will resume. "The team is diligently working on the root cause analysis," she told CNBC, adding the company is "doing the right thing by our customers" to resolve any potential issues before resuming production and shipments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Many software projects emerge because -- somewhere out there -- a programmer had a personal problem to solve. That's more or less what happened to Graydon Hoare. In 2006, Hoare was a 29-year-old computer programmer working for Mozilla, the open-source browser company. Returning home to his apartment in Vancouver, he found that the elevator was out of order; its software had crashed. This wasn't the first time it had happened, either. Hoare lived on the 21st floor, and as he climbed the stairs, he got annoyed. "It's ridiculous," he thought, "that we computer people couldn't even make an elevator that works without crashing!" Many such crashes, Hoare knew, are due to problems with how a program uses memory. The software inside devices like elevators is often written in languages like C++ or C, which are famous for allowing programmers to write code that runs very quickly and is quite compact. The problem is those languages also make it easy to accidentally introduce memory bugs -- errors that will cause a crash. Microsoft estimates that 70% of the vulnerabilities in its code are due to memory errors from code written in these languages. Most of us, if we found ourselves trudging up 21 flights of stairs, would just get pissed off and leave it there. But Hoare decided to do something about it. He opened his laptop and began designing a new computer language, one that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs. He named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that are, he says, "over-engineered for survival." Seventeen years later, Rust has become one of the hottest new languages on the planet -- maybe the hottest. There are 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, and companies from Microsoft to Amazon regard it as key to their future. The chat platform Discord used Rust to speed up its system, Dropbox uses it to sync files to your computer, and Cloudflare uses it to process more than 20% of all internet traffic. When the coder discussion board Stack Overflow conducts its annual poll of developers around the world, Rust has been rated the most "loved" programming language for seven years running. Even the US government is avidly promoting software in Rust as a way to make its processes more secure. The language has become, like many successful open-source projects, a barn-raising: there are now hundreds of die-hard contributors, many of them volunteers. Hoare himself stepped aside from the project in 2013, happy to turn it over to those other engineers, including a core team at Mozilla. It isn't unusual for someone to make a new computer language. Plenty of coders create little ones as side projects all the time. But it's meteor-strike rare for one to take hold and become part of the pantheon of well-known languages alongside, say, JavaScript or Python or Java. How did Rust do it?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Meta gears up for its "year of efficiency," the company announced today it's exiting the livestream shopping business on Instagram, following a similar shutdown on Facebook. From a report: Starting on March 16, 2023, Instagram users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming -- a capability that has been broadly available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020. The changes highlight the difficulties the U.S. market has had in making livestream shopping successful. The activity is already hugely popular activity in Asian markets, including China where apps like WeChat, Taobao Live and Douyin (China's TikTok) have proven live shopping to be a popular and profitable endeavor. As the pandemic raged across the globe, many U.S. businesses looked to adopt live shopping as well, to help boost their own online retail revenues. Before too long, pundits were calling live shopping the "future of e-commerce," citing the early traction businesses like TalkShopLive, NTWRK, Brandlive, and others in the space had gained, alongside adoption from big tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warren is zeroing in on national security concerns as her focus for potential crypto legislation, even as she raises red flags about a host of issues in the space, from consumer protections to environmental impact. From a report: Sen. Elizabeth Warren is branding herself as the scourge of crypto. And she's not doing it alone. The progressive Massachusetts Democrat is starting to recruit conservative Senate Republicans to her anti-crypto cause and getting some early positive vibes from bank lobbyists, who also want to rein in digital asset startups. Warren has emerged as a lead lawmaker on crypto oversight and is trying to build support behind a bill that would have sweeping implications for the industry via tougher anti-money laundering restrictions, including requirements that more crypto service providers verify customer identities. "I want to emphasize how good her office has been to work with," said Sen. Roger Marshall, the Kansas Republican who co-sponsored Warren's legislation. Crypto advocates are resisting Warren's push, and some dismiss her as an outlier. But her budding partnership with GOP lawmakers reflects broader forces that are poised to unite progressives and conservatives, watchdog groups and bankers, who share common cause in wanting to derail the unfettered growth of crypto. That's in stark contrast to last year, before the crypto market meltdown, when digital currency lobbyists had gained serious traction with lawmakers who drafted friendlier, bipartisan legislation with the industry's input. "It's up to the crypto sector to prove at this point that they're safe, secure and superior, and I don't think they've made that case," said Paul Merski, who leads congressional relations at the Independent Community Bankers of America.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has begun letting Android developers kick the tyres of its claimed reboot of ad-targeting -- announcing the launch of the first Beta for its "Privacy Sandbox," an adtech stack proposal which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, behavioral targeting capability on web users' eyeballs. From a report: A "small percentage" of eligible Android 13 devices will be enrolled in the trial of the beta from today as the adtech giant starts a gradual (but it says global) rollout of the beta -- which will "expand over time." (It's published developer guidance on participating in the beta here.) Ad partners for the trial include TechCrunch's parent Yahoo, mobile games maker Rovio, mobility firm Wolt, cross-platform games engine Unity and mobile marketing platforms AppsFlyer, InMobi Exchange and Adjust. "If your device is selected for the Beta, you'll receive an Android notification letting you know," Google adds in a blog post -- implying Android users will be opted in to the experimental, interest-based ad targeting (and will have to actively opt out if they don't wish their eyeballs to be guinea pigs).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao suggested crypto entrepreneurs might need to move to a country more favorable to cryptocurrencies and digital assets amid what appears to be a growing crackdown by U.S. regulators on the industry. From a report: "If you're serious about your project, moving to a new country may not be a bad thing," he said in a Twitter Spaces talk, citing Dubai, Bahrain and France among those places with more welcoming regulation. The comments come on the heels of the New York Department of Financial Services' move to stop Binance partner Paxos from issuing the BUSD stablecoin. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered the Kraken exchange to stop offering staking services. "Most regulators at least claim they welcome people to talk to them, but I'm not sure how much access they really do give to people, especially entrepreneur, new projects without reputation," he said, adding that big firms like Binance do have access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new bill advancing through the Arkansas legislature aims to make it harder for people to access porn sites. From a report: Senate Bill 66, the Protection of Minors from Distribution of Harmful Material Act, would require anyone in Arkansas to provide a "digitized identification card" before viewing a site that contains more than 33.33 percent of "harmful material." That arbitrarily-defined number, and the language of the bill itself, is a copycat of a recently-enacted law in Louisiana that blocks people from seeing porn if they don't hand over official identification. SB66 was filed in the Arkansas Senate in January, and passed to the House on February 1.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden's long-stalled nominee to the Federal Communications Commission fired back at her critics today, saying that the telecom industry shouldn't be allowed to choose its own regulators. From a report: "I believe deeply that regulated entities should not choose their regulator," Sohn said in prepared testimony for a Senate Commerce Committee nomination hearing today. "Unfortunately, that is the exact intent of the past 15 months of false and misleading attacks on my record and my character. My industry opponents have hidden behind dark money groups and surrogates because they fear a pragmatic, pro-competition, pro-consumer policymaker who will support policies that will bring more, faster, and lower-priced broadband and new voices to your constituents." Biden first nominated Sohn, a longtime consumer advocate and former FCC official, on October 26, 2021. The full Senate never voted on whether to confirm Sohn as an FCC commissioner, and Biden renominated her last month. With the FCC deadlocked at two Democrats and two Republicans, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel hasn't been able to pursue any major regulation of an industry that was deregulated during the Trump era. "The FCC has been without a majority for the entirety of the Biden administration -- over two years -- at a time when closing the digital divide is front and center," Sohn's testimony said. "There are too many important issues in front of the commission to lack a full complement of members, including improving the broadband maps, fixing the Universal Service Fund, closing the homework gap, ensuring fair access to broadband, and protecting consumers' privacy. Americans deserve a full FCC where I could play a critical role in addressing every one of these, but time is of the essence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has confirmed that it's finally killing off Yammer, the enterprise social network it procured more than a decade ago for $1.2 billion. From a report: Yammer was initially created out of San Francisco back in 2008, with cofounder David Sacks formally launching the startup at a TechCrunch startup event. The company went on to raise north of $140 million in funding before Microsoft swooped in with its billion-dollar bid four years after its launch. In many ways, it's surprising that the Yammer brand has lasted this long. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to bring Yammer to the masses by integrating it into its core Office suite of products, Microsoft has set about developing tangential communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, which the company integrated with Yammer in 2019. And then two years ago, Microsoft launched Viva, pitched as an "employee experience platform" that was something akin to the corporate intranet of yore. In the intervening months, Microsoft has been turbo-charging Viva, and last year it launched Viva Engage, which it said at the time was an "evolution of the Yammer Communities app."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Department of Defense's research agency, DARPA, has announced that its AI algorithms can now control an actual F-16 in flight. The fighter aircraft that was first introduced in 1978 has now seemingly evolved into an autonomous plane. From a report: "In early December 2022, ACE algorithm developers uploaded their AI software into a specially modified F-16 test aircraft known as the X-62A or VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft), at the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and flew multiple flights over several days," a press release by DARPA said. "The flights demonstrated that AI agents can control a full-scale fighter jet and provided invaluable live-flight data." DARPA's Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program began in 2019 when the agency began to work on human-machine collaboration in dogfighting. It began testing out AI-powered flights in 2020 when the organization had what was called the AlphaDogfight Trials, a competition between different companies to see who could create the most advanced algorithm for an AI-powered aircraft. ACE is one of more than six hundred Department of Defense projects that are incorporating artificial intelligence into the nation's defense programs. In 2018, the government committed to spending up to $2 billion on AI investments in the next five years, and spent $2.58 billion on AI research and development in 2022 alone. Other AI defense projects include making robots and wearable technology, and intelligence gathering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet Explorer 11 was never Windows 10's primary browser -- that would be the old, pre-Chromium version of Microsoft Edge. But IE did continue to ship with Windows 10 for compatibility reasons, and IE11 remained installed and accessible in most versions of Windows 10 even after security updates for the browser ended in June of 2022. That ends today, as Microsoft's support documentation says that a Microsoft Edge browser update will fully disable Internet Explorer in most versions of Windows 10, redirecting users to Edge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Parliament on Tuesday formally approved a law to effectively ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the European Union from 2035, aiming to speed up the switch to electric vehicles and combat climate change. From a report: The landmark rules will require that by 2035 carmakers must achieve a 100% cut in CO2 emissions from new cars sold, which would make it impossible to sell new fossil fuel-powered vehicles in the 27-country bloc. The law will also set a 55% cut in CO2 emissions for new cars sold from 2030 versus 2021 levels, much higher than the existing target of a 37.5%. "The operating costs of an electric vehicle are already lower than the operating costs of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine," Jan Huitema, the parliament's lead negotiator on the rules, said, adding that it was crucial to bring more affordable electric vehicles to consumers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's AI chatbot isn't the only one to make factual errors during its first demo. Independent AI researcher Dmitri Brereton has discovered that Microsoft's first Bing AI demos were full of financial data mistakes. From a report: Microsoft confidently demonstrated its Bing AI capabilities a week ago, with the search engine taking on tasks like providing pros and cons for top selling pet vacuums, planning a 5-day trip to Mexico City, and comparing data in financial reports. But, Bing failed to differentiate between a corded / cordless vacuum, missed relevant details for the bars it references in Mexico City, and mangled financial data -- by far the biggest mistake. Bing then goes on to state Gap had a reported operating margin of 5.9 percent, which doesn't appear in the financial results. The operating margin was 4.6 percent, or 3.9 percent adjusted and including the impairment charge. During Microsoft's demo, Bing AI then goes on to compare Gap financial data to Lululemon's same results during the Q3 2022 quarter. Bing makes more mistakes with the Lululemon data, and the result is a comparison riddled with inaccuracies. Brereton also highlights an apparent mistake with a query related to the pros and cons of top selling pet vacuums. Bing cites the "Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Handheld Vacuum," and lists the con of it having a short cord length of 16 feet. "It doesn't have a cord," says Brereton. "It's a portable handheld vacuum." In one of the demos, Microsoft's Bing AI attempts to summarize a Q3 2022 financial report for Gap clothing and gets a lot wrong. The Gap report mentions that gross margin was 37.4 percent, with adjusted gross margin at 38.7 percent excluding an impairment charge. Bing inaccurately reports the gross margin as 37.4 percent including the adjustment and impairment charges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US prosecutors said their discovery that Sam Bankman-Fried used a virtual private network to access the internet on two recent occasions raises concerns that the FTX co-founder could be hiding his online activities. From a report: The Manhattan judge handling Bankman-Fried's criminal fraud case last week expressed his own concerns that even if the defendant is barred from using encrypted messaging apps like Signal, he could still use old-fashioned secret code to contact witnesses in the case, similar to letters penned by Mary, Queen of Scots, more than 400 years ago. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan refused on Feb. 9 to approve an agreement negotiated between prosecutors and Bankman-Fried that would have required him to stop using Signal and certain other apps and to only contact a specific set of former and current FTX employees, while preserving his right to use WhatsApp with monitoring technology, iMessage and also make Zoom and FaceTime calls. In a letter to the judge late Monday, a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan US attorney said the government is discussing with lawyers for Bankman-Fried how to fashion internet ground rules acceptable to both sides and the court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As spotted in Kevin Tofel's About Chromebooks blog, an updated version of the shortcut viewer in the Settings app -- first seen in October 2022 -- has the early makings of a shortcut changing and adding mechanism. Clicking on a shortcut brings up a dialogue that allows you to, at the moment, add alternative shortcuts to common shortcuts for manipulating tabs, windows and desktops, system settings, accessibility, and other utilities. A small "lock" icon next to each suggests that you might also be able to unlock these shortcuts to remove or alter their defaults. A "Reset all shortcuts" button offers another hint. Sadly, none of the shortcuts you add seem to work for the moment, though the promise is there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority's provisional report on the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition includes an admission from Microsoft that putting games into its Game Pass subscription service cannibalizes sales of those titles. GamesIndustry.biz reports: "Microsoft also submitted that its internal analysis shows a [redacted]% decline in base game sales twelve months following their addition on Game Pass," the CMA noted in its report. That confirmation runs counter to claims Xbox head Phil Spencer made in 2018 that Game Pass boosts sales rather than undermines them. "When you put a game like Forza Horizon 4 on Game Pass, you instantly have more players of the game, which is actually leading to more sales of the game," Spencer said, adding, "You say, 'Well isn't everyone just going to subscribe for $10 and go play this thing?' But no, gamers find things to play based on what everybody else is playing." Elsewhere in the CMA's report, it cites Microsoft as saying that Activision took a dim view on putting its titles into multi-game subscription services on any platform, believing that "severely cannibalize B2P [buy-to-play] sales, particularly in the case of newer releases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's space agency will hold off returning three astronauts from the International Space Station as it works with NASA to investigate a coolant leak issue that impacted an uncrewed freighter spacecraft last weekend. The Register reports: The Progress MS-21 -- also known as the Progress 82 spacecraft -- arrived at the floating space lab in October 2022 carrying water and other supplies. After months of being docked to the station's Poisk module, the vehicle suddenly began spewing liquid coolant. On February 11, engineers at the Russian Mission Control Center detected a drop in pressure inside its coolant loop, but the station and the crew onboard are safe. The Progress 82 spacecraft is currently being filled with trash and is scheduled to undock on February 17 and be disposed of over the Pacific Ocean. It began leaking coolant just as the Russian uncrewed Progress 83 cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the station's Zvezda service module. NASA and Roscosmos are now investigating the coolant glitch on Progress 82 as it's the second Soyuz incident of late after the Soyuz MS-22 began leaking in December. It's not clear what might have caused that malfunction, although one possibility that has been floated is that a micrometeoroid pierced an exterior radiator. Yury Borisov, Roscosmos's director general, said cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will have to remain onboard until March at the earliest while officials examine the coolant loop's depressurization, according to Reuters. Their space ferry had been due to launch on February 20 but that has been pushed back to March 10 at the earliest. "Officials are monitoring all International Space Station systems and are not tracking any other issues," NASA concluded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, in a blog post not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or a news release, Blue Origin quietly said its "Blue Alchemist" program has been working on [using the dusty lunar surface to manufacture solar panels] for the last two years. The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, has made both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil -- a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith. The engineering work is based on a process known as "molten regolith electrolysis," and Blue Origin has advanced the state of the art for solar cell manufacturing. In this process, a direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature, above 1,600-degrees Celsius. Through this electrolysis process, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from the lunar regolith. Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis. The key advance made by Blue Alchemist is that its engineers and scientists have taken the byproducts of this reaction -- and these materials alone -- to fabricate solar cells as well as the protective glass cover that would allow them to survive a decade or longer on the lunar surface. Blue Origin will attempt to market the technology to NASA for use by its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon in a "sustainable" way. NASA and its international partners seek to differentiate Artemis from the Apollo program by more extended stays on the Moon and building infrastructure such as power systems. "Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is real now," the company said in its blog post. "Blue Origin's goal of producing solar power using only lunar resources is aligned with NASA's highest priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development objective." This is a notable research breakthrough, as the same electrolysis process could also be used to produce metals for building habitats and other structures, as well as oxygen. These are all important for "living off the land" if humans are to avoid the expense of needing to bring everything from Earth to live and work in space. While it is a long way from lab experiments to manufacturing on the Moon, these experiments are a critical first step.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Kotaku reported late last week, Valve is preparing a major update for Team Fortress 2. The studio published a rare blog post asking the game's community to submit new content to the Steam Workshop ahead of May 1st. "The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year [Valve's emphasis], we're planning on shipping a full-on update-sized update -- with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?!" Valve said. Engadget reports: By our count, the "as as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed)" update Valve has planned will go down as TF2's first major content release since the company came out with the Jungle Inferno update in 2017 for the game's 10-year anniversary. Valve has released smaller updates since then mostly to address the botting problem that made it impossible to play the game, but new content additions have been few and far between.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security camera company Arlo is reversing course on its controversial decision to apply a retroactive end-of-life policy to many of its popular home security cameras. The Verge reports: On Friday, Arlo CEO Matthew McRae posted a thread on Twitter, announcing that the company will not remove free storage of videos for existing customers and that it is extending the EOL dates for older cameras a further year to 2025. He also committed to sending security updates to these cameras until 2026. The end-of-life policy was due to go into effect January 1st, 2023, and removed a big selling point -- seven-day free cloud storage -- for many Arlo cams. McRae now says all users with the seven-day storage service will "continue to receive that service uninterrupted." But he did note that "any future migrations will be handled in a seamless manner," indicating there are changes coming still. The thread did not provide details on specific models other than using the Arlo Pro 2 as an example of a camera that will now EOL in 2025 instead of 2024, as previously announced, with security updates continuing until 2026. There was also no update on the plans to remove other features, such as email notifications and E911 emergency calling, or whether "legacy video storage" will remain. The EOL policy applied to the following devices: Arlo Gen 3, Arlo Pro, Arlo Baby, Arlo Pro 2, Arlo Q, Arlo Q Plus, Arlo Lights, and Arlo Audio Doorbell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle venture Zoox said on Monday that it is now testing its self-driving robotaxis on public roads in California with passengers on board. CNBC reports: The vehicles have no steering wheel or pedals, and they have bidirectional driving capabilities and four-wheel steering, enabling them to change directions without the need to reverse. Zoox executives said the company began the tests after it received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles last week. The permit is not for all public roads in the state. The tests are currently limited to shuttling Zoox employees on a one-mile public route between two office buildings at the company's headquarters in Foster City, California, at speeds up to 35 miles an hour. The company hasn't said how big its test fleet is, but executives have said they have built "dozens" of vehicles, although fewer than 100. Zoox said one of its vehicles completed a test run with employees on board over the weekend.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Domain registrar Namecheap had their email account breached Sunday night, causing a flood of MetaMask and DHL phishing emails that attempted to steal recipients' personal information and cryptocurrency wallets. The phishing campaigns started around 4:30 PM ET and originated from SendGrid, an email platform used historically by Namecheap to send renewal notices and marketing emails. After recipients began complaining on Twitter, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall confirmed that the account was compromised and that they disabled email through SendGrid while they investigated the issue. Namecheap published a statement Sunday night stating that their systems were not breached but rather it was an issue at an upstream system that they use for email. "We have evidence that the upstream system we use for sending emails (third-party) is involved in the mailing of unsolicited emails to our clients. As a result, some unauthorized emails might have been received by you," reads a statement issued by Namecheap. "We would like to assure you that Namecheap's own systems were not breached, and your products, accounts, and personal information remain secure." After the phishing incident, Namecheap says they stopped all emails, including two-factor authentication code delivery, trusted devices' verification, and password reset emails, and began investigating the attack with their upstream provider. Services were restored later that night at 7:08 PM EST. While Namecheap did not state the name of this upstream system, the CEO of Namecheap previously tweeted that they were using SendGrid, which is also confirmed in the phishing emails' mail headers. However, Twilio SendGrid told BleepingComputer that Namecheap's incident was not the result of a hack or compromise of the email service provider's systems, adding more confusion as to what happened: "Twilio SendGrid takes fraud and abuse very seriously and invests heavily in technology and people focused on combating fraudulent and illegal communications. We are aware of the situation regarding the use of our platform to launch phishing email and our fraud, compliance and cyber security teams are engaged in the matter. This situation is not the result of a hack or compromise of Twilio's network. We encourage all end users and entities to take a multi-pronged approach to combat phishing attacks, deploying security precautions such as two factor authentication, IP access management, and using domain-based messaging. We are still investigating the situation and have no additional information to provide at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working to bring native support for RGB PC gaming accessories to Windows 11. The Verge reports: The Windows lighting experience will include the ability for PC gamers to configure accessories with RGB lighting without having to install third-party software. Twitter user Albacore has spotted early work for integrating this new lighting experience into Windows 11 in the latest public test builds of the operating system. Options for controlling brightness, lighting effects, speed, and colors can all be found in the settings interface of Windows 11. There's even a feature that will match your accessories to the Windows accent color.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laura Dobberstein writes via The Register: Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign. Furthermore, without immediate new investment, the company will be forced to cease development by the end of the month, said the company's former CEO and operator of the Kickstarter campaign, Joshua Montgomery. "We will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website, because these sales directly cover the costs of producing and shipping the products," confirmed Montgomery. He said the company was now at bare-bones employee count: layoffs had reduced the staff down to two developers, one customer service agent and one attorney. Montgomery said he had "poured a lot of [his] own savings, and additional funding from [his] foundation into Mycroft" but the company was running out of cash. Mycroft AI experienced many challenges one would expect to encounter at a startup, such as difficulty finding hardware partners, which forced it to resort to off-the-shelf parts. [...] But what truly killed the company and product, he claimed, were expenses related to ongoing litigation. In 2020, Mycroft AI was sued for patent infringement from what it labeled a "patent troll." The company suing Mycroft AI, Voice Tech Corporation, dropped its litigation, but not before costing the startup deeply. "If we had that million dollars we would be in a very different state right now," said Montgomery. Billed as an "open answer" to Amazon Echo and Google Home but with data privacy, the Mark II went from costing $99 in components each to $300. That total doesn't include the costs of spending $100,000 on injection molds. The product currently sells on the company's website for $499. The Kickstarter campaign brought in 2,245 backers for the smart speaker and raised over $394,000. The goal had been set at a mere $50,000. It's uncertain how many backers received a Mark II. Backers have left disappointed and upset responses on its Kickstarter page -- some mourning the death of hardware crowdsourcing, some pleading for their product, some alleging scam, and others urging the company to push through. "Send us the components to assemble the pieces ourselves if that's the outstanding problem at this point," offered one Kickstarter supporter. "Why can't we make it into a group project to assemble MyCroft II in our homes?" "I don't mind that I don't get my Mark II: the bigger goal of open source artificial intelligence was more important to me," said another.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The U.S. Government's crackdown against Z-Library late last year aimed to wipe out the pirate library for good. The criminal prosecution caused disruption but didn't bring the site completely to its knees. Z-Library continued to operate on the dark web and this weekend, reappeared on the clearnet, offering a 'unique' domain name to all users. [...] Sites can often be seen hardening their operations to mitigate disruption caused by domain name seizures. Many have a list of backup domains that can be deployed when needed; The Pirate Bay infamously launched its hydra setup consisting of five different domain names. Z-Library is taking this hydra-inspired scheme to the next level. A new announcement reveals that the platform is publicly available once again and offering a unique and private domain name to every user. "We have great news for you -- Z-Library is back on the Clearnet again! To access it, follow this link singlelogin.me and use your regular login credentials," the Z-Library team writes. "After logging into your account, you will be redirected to your personal domain. Please keep your personal domain private! Don't disclose your personal domain and don't share the link to your domain, as it is protected with your own password and cannot be accessed by other users." While we can't confirm that all users will get unique domain names, people are indeed redirected to different clearnet domains after logging in. After doing so, a popup message reminds them to keep their personal domain secret. The domain names in question are subdomains of newly registered TLDs that rely on different domain name registries. Every user has two of these 'personal' domains listed on their personal profile page. If users can't access the universal login page, Z-Library says they can log in through TOR or I2P and get their personal clearnet domains there. How many new domain names Z-Library has is unclear but that's exactly the point. The site's operators want to prevent future domain name seizures and with the U.S. Government on its back, new domains are far from safe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digital asset platform Bakkt is to discontinue its two-year-old consumer-facing app as its focus shifts toward business-to-business (B2B) tech services. From a report: Consumers will be able to continue to managing assets over the web after the app officially closes on March 16, Bakkt said Monday. The app went live in March 2021 with the aim of integrating crypto holdings with other digital assets such as airline miles, gift cards and loyalty points. Partnerships with firms including Starbucks, Best Buy and Choice Hotels accompanied the app's launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's Cabinet formally adopted a policy that will allow for the operation of nuclear reactors beyond their current 60-year limit alongside the building of new units to replace aging ones as part of efforts to cut carbon emissions while ensuring adequate national energy supply. From a report: The government's "green transformation" policy features extensive use of nuclear power along with renewable energy and marks a major policy shift for the country, which suffered a devastating nuclear disaster in 2011. The Cabinet decision follows a meeting in late December, in which the policy was agreed upon. Bills necessary to implement the new policy were submitted to parliament Friday. The government also plans to raise about 20 trillion yen ($152 billion) through the issuance of green transformation bonds to boost investment in decarbonization projects, as it estimates public and private investment of over 150 trillion yen will be necessary over the next 10 years. The new policy will effectively extend the amount of time reactors can remain operational beyond 60 years by excluding time spent on inspections and other offline periods from consideration when calculating their entire service life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. From a report: According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March. In November, the company laid off 11,000 employees or about 13 percent of its global workforce. Those cuts were the largest in Meta's nearly 20-year history, affecting every organization within the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's capital Beijing will support leading enterprises in building large artificial intelligence (AI) models that can challenge ChatGPT, the city's economy and information technology bureau said on Monday. From a report: The city will support key firms to invest in building an open source framework and accelerate the supply of basic data, it said in a statement. The bureau also said that 1,048 core AI companies, or 29% of the country's total, were located in Beijing as of October last year, and that it would look into ways to cultivate talent and conduct research in areas such as ethical governance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sensitive mental health data is for sale by little-known data brokers, at times for a few hundred dollars and with little effort to hide personal information such as names and addresses, according to research released Monday. From a report: The research, conducted over the span of two months at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, which studies the ecosystem of companies buying and selling personal data, consisted of asking 37 data brokers for bulk data on people's mental health. Eleven of them agreed to sell information that identified people by issues, including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, and often sorted them by demographic information such as age, race, credit score and location. The researchers did not buy the data, but in many cases received free samples to prove that the broker was legitimate, a common industry practice. The study doesn't name the data brokers. Some of the brokers were particularly cavalier with sensitive data. One made no demands on how information it sold was used and advertised that it could offer names and addresses of people with "depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety issues, panic disorder, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality disorder, as well as individuals who have had strokes and data on theirs races and ethnicities," the report found. "[T]he industry appears to lack a set of best practices for handling individuals' mental health data, particularly in the areas of privacy and buyer vetting." the report found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An existential fight over the US government's ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime. From a report: New details about the FBI's failures to comply with restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence for domestic crimes have emerged at a perilous time for the US intelligence community. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the so-called crown jewel of US intelligence, grants the government the ability to intercept the electronic communications of overseas targets who are unprotected by the Fourth Amendment. That authority is set to expire at the end of the year. But errors in the FBI's secondary use of the data -- the investigation of crimes on US soil -- are likely to inflame an already fierce debate over whether law enforcement agents can be trusted with such an invasive tool. Central to this tension has been a routine audit by the Department of Justice's (DOJ) national security division and the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) -- America's "top spy" -- which unearthed new examples of the FBI failing to comply with rules limiting access to intelligence ostensibly gathered to protect US national security. Such "errors," they said, have occurred on a "large number" of occasions. A report on the audit, only recently declassified, found that in the first half of 2020, FBI personnel unlawfully searched raw FISA data on numerous occasions. In one incident, agents reportedly sought evidence of foreign influence linked to a US lawmaker. In another, an inappropriate search pertained to a local political party. In both cases, these "errors" were attributed to a "misunderstanding" of the law, the report says. At some point between December 2019 and May 2020, FBI personnel conducted searches of FISA data using "only the name of a US congressman," the report says, a query that investigators later found was "noncompliant" with legal procedures. Further reading: NSA Director Urges Congress To Renew Controversial Intelligence Authority.Read more of this story at Slashdot.