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The Verge reports that "Editing a tweet using Twitter's upcoming edit button could leave a digital trace of your tweet's history, according to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong."In a tweet, Manchun Wong explains that the edit function appears to have an "immutable" quality, which means Twitter may create an entirely new tweet when one is edited, all while preserving the previous versions of that tweet. "Looks like Twitter's approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit," Manchun Wong says. As Manchun Wong notes, it's unclear how a tweet's edit history will appear to users, or if it will at all. But if Twitter does decide to make tweet history public, it could be a way to address concerns over potential abuse of the feature, as some critics believe it could be used to alter the public record and mislead users. But in the end, it's two entirely separate questions. Will Twitter's edit functionality preserve a tweet's history online? And should it?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...."It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl.... "We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website. "Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said.... In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The nonprofit online news site Virginia Mercury investigated their state police departments' "real-time location warrants," which are "addressed to telephone companies, ordering them to regularly ping a customers' phone for its GPS location and share the results with police."Public records requests submitted to a sampling of 18 police departments around the state found officers used the technique to conduct more than 7,000 days worth of surveillance in 2020. Court records show the tracking efforts spanned cases ranging from high-profile murders to minor larcenies.... Seven departments responded that they did not have any relevant billing records, indicating they don't use the technique. Only one of the departments surveyed, Alexandria, indicated it had an internal policy governing how their officers use cellphone tracking, but a copy of the document provided by the city was entirely redacted.... Drug investigations accounted for more than 60 percent of the search warrants taken out in the two jurisdictions. Larcenies were the second most frequent category. Major crimes like murders, rapes and abductions made up a fraction of the tracking requests, accounting for just under 25 of the nearly 400 warrants filed in the jurisdictions that year. America's Supreme Court "ruled that warrantless cellphone tracking is unconstitutional back in 2012," the article points out — but in practice those warrants aren't hard to get. "Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is 'relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed'.... There's been limited public discussion or awareness of the kinds of tracking warrants the judiciary is approving.""I don't think people know that their cell phones can be converted to tracking devices by police with no notice," said Steve Benjamin, a criminal defense lawyer in Richmond who said he's recently noticed an uptick in cases in which officers employed the technique. "And the reality of modern life is everyone has their phone on them during the day and on their nightstand at night. ... It's as if the police tagged them with a chip under their skin, and people have no idea how easily this is accomplished." The case for these phone-tracking warrants? The executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police tells the site that physical surveillance ofen requires too many resources — and that cellphone tracking is safer. "It may be considered an intrusive way of gathering data on someone, but it's certainly less dangerous than physical tracking."A spokesperson for the Chesterfield County police department [responsible for 64% of the state's tracking] argued that "We exist to preserve human life and protect the vulnerable, and we will use all lawful tools at our disposal to do so." And they added that such "continued robust enforcement efforts" were a part of the reason that the county's still-rising number of fatal drug overdoses had not risen more.The site also obtained bills from four major US cellphone carriers, and reported how much they were charging police for providing their cellphone-tracking services:"T-Mobile charged $30 per day, which comes to $900 per month of tracking.""AT&T charged a monthly service fee of $100 and an additional $25 per day the service is utilized, which comes to $850 per 30 days of tracking...""Verizon calls the service 'periodic location updates,' charging $5 per day on top of a monthly service fee of $100, which comes to $200 per 30 days of tracking.""Sprint offered the cheapest prices to report locations back to law enforcement, charging a flat fee of $100 per month." Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Covid-19 pandemic "would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner," writes Bill Gates, in a guest essay Friday in the New York Times. This ultimately would've reduced fatalities — "and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did." But note that Gates said "treatment" — not vaccine. Gates believes most people in the public health community had expected an effective treatment would appear before vaccines became available.Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Safe, effective Covid vaccines were available within a year — a historic feat — but treatments that could keep large numbers of people out of the hospital were surprisingly slow out of the gate.... In late 2021, a few of their efforts paid off — not as soon as would have been ideal, but still in time to have a big impact. Merck and its partners developed an antiviral called molnupiravir, which was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. Soon after, another oral antiviral, Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, also proved to be very effective, reducing the risk of severe illness or death by nearly 90 percent among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. These drugs are useful tools for combating the pandemic, but they arrived much later than they should have and, for many, they are still difficult to access.... It's a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. We're lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn't, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population.... With good therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death could drop significantly, and countries could decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. What's more, imagine how people's lives would change if we're able to take the next step by linking testing and treatment. Anyone with early symptoms that might indicate Covid (or any other viral disease) could walk into a pharmacy or clinic anywhere in the world, get tested and, if positive for the virus, walk out with antivirals to take at home.... In short, although therapeutics didn't rescue us from Covid, they hold a lot of promise for saving lives and preventing future outbreaks from crippling health systems. But to make the most of that promise, the world needs to invest in the research and systems we'll need to find treatments much faster. That's why my foundation has supported a therapeutics accelerator at Duke University, but broader initiatives will be necessary to make lasting change. This will require substantial investment to bring together academia, industry and the latest software tools. But if we succeed, the next time the world faces an outbreak, we'll save millions more lives. Gates offers several specific recommendations — including "investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens." And...With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's now possible to use computers to identify weak spots on pathogens that we already know about, and we'll be able to do the same when new pathogens arise. These technologies are also speeding up the search for new compounds that will attack those weak spots.With adequate funding, various groups could take the most promising new compounds through Phase 1 studies even before there's an epidemic, or at least have several leads that can be turned into a product quickly once we know what the target looks like.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian officials "have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow's invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families," reports the Washington Post. Ukraine's IT Army (taking direction from Ukraine's government) "says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses."The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war. But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin's war machine. The West's solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers' parents, she said, is "classic psychological warfare" and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts. "If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, 'Oh, my God, that's barbaric,' " she said. "And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: 'Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?' " Clearview AI's chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge. Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several "'oh, wow' moments" as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan. Some of them are using Clearview's mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others have logged in for training while stationed at a checkpoint or out on patrol, the night sky visible behind their faces. "They're so enthusiastic," Ton-That said. "Their energy is really high. They say they're going to win, every call...." About 10% of Clearview's database came from Russia's biggest social network, the Post learns from Clearview's chief executive, ""making it a potentially useful tool for battlefield scans."Ukrainian agencies, Ton-That said, have used the app to confirm the identities of people at military checkpoints and to check whether a Ukrainian is a possible Russian infiltrator or saboteur. He argued that the system could deter Russian soldiers from committing war crimes, for fear of being identified, and said the Ukrainians are considering using the tool to verify the identities of Ukrainian refugees and their hosts as they flee for safety.... Beyond scanning corpses, Ukraine also is using facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers caught on camera looting Ukrainian homes and storefronts, an official with Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry told The Post. Mykhailo Fedorov, the head of that ministry, this month shared on Twitter and Instagram the name, hometown and personal photo of a man he said was recorded shipping hundreds of pounds of looted clothes from a Belarus post office to his home in eastern Russia. "Our technology will find all of them," he wrote. The article asks what happens if software makes a mistake in its identification — but Clearview's chief executive argues their tool is accurateTon-That said the company's sole ambition is to help defend a besieged country. But he also acknowledged the war has helped provide a "good example for other parts of the U.S. government to see how these use cases work." "This is a new war," he said. And the Ukrainians are "very creative with what they've been able to do." Thanks to Slashdot readers fbobraga and schwit1 for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Cryptocurrency has changed the game of cybercrime," argues Vice's Christian Devolu, in a new episode of their video series CRYPTOLAND. "Hackers and cybergangs have been locking down the data of large corporations, police departments, and even hospitals, and demanding ransom — and guess what they're asking for? Cryptocurrency!" In short, argues an article accompanying the episode, cryptocurrency "gave birth to the ransomware epidemic." Slashdot reader em1ly shares one highlight from the video: The team visits a school district in Missouri ["just one of around 1,000 U.S. schools hacked last year with ransomware"] that was the victim of a ransomware attack. ["Luckily, the school's backups were not impacted...."] Another interesting observation from the article:When ransom payments do happen, companies like Chainalysis can track the Bitcoin through the blockchain, identifying the hackers' wallets and collaborating with law enforcement in an attempt to recover the funds or identify the hackers themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under "false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the "true nature" of the school's financial interest in students' success. "I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn -- about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally," Bruner said in a press release. "I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me." Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit. After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school's job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students' success -- specifically by "falsely representing" that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Headline says it all," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81. "Lots of people have been looking forward to this Kickstarter for the Unihertz Titan Slim, but it is easily the thickest phone of 2022." Neowin's Dean Howell reacts to an unboxing video of Unihertz's Titan Slim, the successor to last year's Titan Pocket physical keyboard-equipped BlackBerry clone, writing: While Blackberry refugees have been clamoring for new PKB devices, they've been asking for them to be thin and sleek like the Blackberry of yesterday. We thought that's what we were getting with the announcement of the Titan Slim, but after yesterday's unboxing video by Adam over at TechOdyssey we know that's not the case at all. [...] Normally he would show how it compares to other devices, and I think this go 'round he was reticent to compare it directly to the Titan Pocket because if he did it would confirm what I think is true; the Titan Slim is not slim at all and it's every bit as think as the Titan Pocket. The drama doesn't end there I'm afraid. There is a review embargo on this device, so there are a lot of details Adam didn't talk about, like performance characteristics. [...] New year, new phone, new CPU right? Wrong. I wondered what CPU the Titan Slim would ship with and it took less than a minute to figure out. I went over to Geekbench and found it had already been tested. Unfortunately, the Titan Slim will ship with the same CPU as last year's Titan Pocket. What's worse is the Helio P70 in the Titan Slim is comparable at best to the then-mid-range Snapdragon 660 of the 2018 Key2.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes making a brand-new type of box requires outside-the-box thinking, which is exactly what Spartan chemists used to create an eight-atom, magnetic cube. Phys.Org reports: Part of what made the researchers' idea so wild was their choice to work with starting ingredients that are notoriously finicky in the chemistry community. One ingredient is a group of elements referred to as lanthanides, which occupy a special row toward the bottom of the periodic table of elements. The other is the metallic element bismuth, which doesn't typically get too much attention (although some may recognize it from its role in bright pink antacids such as Pepto Bismol). By finding a way to combine the bismuth with a lanthanide element -- notably terbium or dysprosium -- they created a molecule with permanent magnetic features. It's the same magnetism found in bar magnets and hard disk drives, but at a much smaller scale. The small scale of molecular magnets offers technological opportunities, such as improving the storage capacity of magnetic hard drives. There are also emerging applications where conventional magnets may simply be too large to contribute, such as in processors for quantum computers. The first single-molecule magnet was discovered about 30 years ago and, since then, researchers have been seeking new varieties with different physical and chemical attributes. They've also been working to develop more creative chemical approaches to make the magnets. The molecule itself, though, looks simple, belying the complexity of the process required to make it. The top and bottom of the molecule are capped with rings of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Each ring is linked to a lanthanide that forms a cube with the bismuth atoms. The researchers published their findings in the journal Chem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California, which aims to have a carbon-free power grid within 25 years, got a short glimpse of that possibility earlier this month. The state's main grid ran on more than 97% renewable energy at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday April 3, breaking a previous record of 96.4% that was set just a week earlier, the California Independent System Operator said Thursday in a statement. While these all-time highs are for a brief time, they solidly demonstrate the advances being made to reliably achieve California's clean energy goals," said California ISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in the statement. Power production from the sun and wind typically peak in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the angle of the sun allowing for an extended period of strong solar production, the grid operator said. While hitting the new renewable record is remarkable, the state has found itself scrambling for power supplies during the past two summers as it has added more intermittent sources and retired natural-gas plants for environmental reasons. California has set a target to have a zero-carbon power system by 2045.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's controversial App Tracking Transparency feature available in iOS 14.5 is expected to have a significant impact on Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and YouTube in 2022. According to a report by Lotame, big tech platforms' revenue could drop by almost $16 billion. 9to5Mac reports: For those who don't remember, ATT requires that applications ask permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. For example, when you open the Facebook app, you'll see a prompt that says the app would like to track you across other apps and services. There will be two options from which to choose: "Ask App not to Track" or "Allow." Talking about Facebook, Lotame's report shows that Zuckerberg's company will take the biggest hit as the privacy changes will cost it $12.8 billion in revenue: "The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute,' said Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer at Lotame. 'To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boffins at two US universities have found that muting popular native video-conferencing apps fails to disable device microphones -- and that these apps have the ability to access audio data when muted, or actually do so. The research is described in a paper titled, "Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing App." The Register reports: Among the apps studied -- Zoom (Enterprise), Slack, Microsoft Teams/Skype, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, BlueJeans, WhereBy, GoToMeeting, Jitsi Meet, and Discord -- most presented only limited or theoretical privacy concerns. The researchers found that all of these apps had the ability to capture audio when the mic is muted but most did not take advantage of this capability. One, however, was found to be taking measurements from audio signals even when the mic was supposedly off. "We discovered that all of the apps in our study could actively query (i.e., retrieve raw audio) the microphone when the user is muted," the paper says. "Interestingly, in both Windows and macOS, we found that Cisco Webex queries the microphone regardless of the status of the mute button." They found that Webex, every minute or so, sends network packets "containing audio-derived telemetry data to its servers, even when the microphone was muted." This telemetry data is not recorded sound but an audio-derived value that corresponds with the volume level of background activities. Nonetheless, the data proved sufficient for the researchers to construct an 82 per cent accurate background activity classifier to analyze the transmission and infer the likely activity among six possibilities -- e.g. cooking, cleaning, typing, etc. -- in the room where the app is active. Worse still from a security standpoint, while other apps encrypted their outgoing data stream before sending it to the operating system's socket interface, Webex did not. "Only in Webex were we able to intercept plaintext immediately before it is passed to the Windows network socket API," the paper says, noting that the app's monitoring behavior is inconsistent with the Webex privacy policy. The app's privacy policy states Cisco Webex Meetings does not "monitor or interfere with you your [sic] meeting traffic or content." After the researchers reached out about their findings, Cisco altered Webex so it no longer transmits microphone telemetry data. "Cisco is aware of this report, and thanks the researchers for notifying us about their research," said a Cisco spokesperson. "Webex uses microphone telemetry data to tell a user they are muted, referred to as the 'mute notification' feature. Cisco takes the security of its products very seriously, and this is not a vulnerability in Webex."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Buyout firm Thoma Bravo has contacted Twitter to express interest in putting together an acquisition offer that would rival Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $43 billion bid. Reuters reports: Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm that had more than $103 billion in assets under management as of the end of December, has informed Twitter that it is exploring the possibility of putting together a bid, the sources said. It is not clear how much Thoma Bravo would be prepared to offer and there is no certainty that such a rival bid will materialize, the sources cautioned, asking not to be identified because the matter is confidential.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new class-action lawsuit filed in California targets Otonomo, a data broker that harvests location data from tens of millions of vehicles around the world and then sells access to that information. Otonomo says it has systems in place that protect peoples' privacy. But in June last year, Motherboard published an investigation based on a set of Otonomo data and used the information to find where people likely lived, worked, and where else they drove. At the time, experts said that Otonomo could face legal consequences because of how it handles consent and its data. The new lawsuit focuses specifically on those issues. "Defendant Otonomo Inc. is a data broker that secretly collects and sells real-time GPS location information from more than 50 million cars throughout the world, including from tens of thousands in California. This data allows Otonomo -- and its paying clients -- to easily pinpoint consumers' precise locations at all times of day and gain specific insight about where they live, work, and worship, and who they associate with," the lawsuit, filed by lawyers from Edelson PC, reads. Courthouse News first reported on the lawsuit. The plaintiff in the case is Saman Mollaei, a citizen of California. The lawsuit does not explain how it came to the conclusion that Otonomo is tracking tens of thousands of people in California. Otonomo originally started in Israel and has an office in California. Mollaei drives a 2020 BMW X3, and when the vehicle was delivered to him, it contained an electronic device that allowed Otonomo to track its real-time location, according to the lawsuit. Importantly, the lawsuit alleges that Mollaei did not provide consent for this tracking, adding that "At no time did Otonomo receive -- or even seek -- Plaintiff's consent to track his vehicle's locations or movements using an electronic tracking device." More broadly, the lawsuit claims that Otonomo "never requests (or receives) consent from drivers before tracking them and selling their highly private and valuable GPS location information to its clients." The lawsuit says that because Otonomo is "secretly" tracking vehicle locations, it has violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), which bans the use of an "electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of a person" without consent. In a previous report, Motherboard discovered that Otonomo established agreements with 16 OEM car manufacturers to source location data from their vehicles, which total over 40 million. They also source data from navigation apps and satnavs. The data, which is "relatively easy to deanonymize," is then sold to thousands of different organizations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft wants to let advertisers place ads inside free-to-play Xbox games. According to Insider, the company "is currently identifying adtech companies who can create the in-game inventory and work with ad agencies to place the ads." From the report: This new program will boost Xbox's limited ad inventory by adding more games that brands can advertise in and by allowing more developers to sell ad space. Those sources said those ads would show up as, for instance, digitally rendered billboards in a car racing game. Insider was unable to learn if Xbox will also offer other types of in-game ad units, like avatar skins or video ads that play in gaming lobbies. Insider was also unable to determine if Microsoft has pitched the Xbox offering to advertisers yet. Insider's sources expect this capability to be live by the third quarter. The two sources said the tech giant did not seem intent on taking a cut of ad revenue, and that it seemed more interested in building out the Xbox ad network. Ad revenue will be shared by the game developer and the adtech company that places the ad, those sources believe. One of the sources speculated Microsoft isn't currently interested in collecting a cut of ad revenue because it wants to provide more money-making opportunities to developers who make free-to-play games. Microsoft started talks to build an Xbox in-game ad network around 2018 or 2019, but that process accelerated thanks to the 2020 release of the latest Xbox, and the boom in free-to-play titles, the two sources said. Microsoft is worried inserting ads into Xbox games could irritate people who don't expect to see ads when playing on consoles, so it's moving cautiously and intends to create a "private marketplace," where only select brands can insert ads into games in a way that doesn't disrupt the gameplay experience, the two sources said. They also said Microsoft is concerned about securing its customers' data, so other companies can't use it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Phoronix reports: Solaris 11.4 CBE is the "Common Build Environment" and intended for open-source developers and strictly non-production personal use... That is if you want Solaris for new installs in 2022. The new Solaris 11.4 "CBE" spin is effectively a rolling release and from Oracle's perspective hopes to ease the integration of the open-source software relied upon by Solaris rather than being bound to the dated 11.4.0 GA release. Downloading the new Solaris 11.4 CBE does require an Oracle account. The CBE builds are also described as "similar to a beta, they are pre-release builds of a particular SRU." The non-production use license is put out under the Oracle Technology Network Early Adopter License Agreement for Oracle Solaris. Oracle will allow upgrading from these free CBE releases to paid SRU releases under Oracle support contracts. More details for those interested in Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE via the Oracle Solaris blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies. Several YouTube ripping services have disappeared, too and even the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable. [...] The lack of results is not tied to a specific country and manually fiddling with the region settings didn't change anything either. Apparently, DuckDuckgo has simply removed all thepiratebay.org URLs from its index. This whole-site removal isn't limited to The Pirate Bay either. When we do similar searches for 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io, and 123moviesfree.net, no results appear. For RarBG.to and Fitgirl-repacks we only get one result, instead of the hundreds of thousands we see on other search engines. The absence of results doesn't only apply to pirate sites themselves. For example, there are no results for the streaming portals Flixtor and Primewire. In addition, the associated status pages, which merely include links to the official domains, are not indexed either. Even several popular stream-rippers have been completely wiped from the search results. That includes 2conv.com, Flvto.bid, and several others. The most surprising omission, by far, is that the official site for the open-source software youtube-dl is not indexed by DuckDuckGo. This site certainly doesn't host or link to any copyright-infringing material. We don't know why the official youtube-dl.org website is not in DuckDuckGo's search results, but at least the official GitHub repository is still findable. DuckDuckGo has yet to explain why these domain names aren't showing up in its search results. "It wouldn't be a surprise if the move is copyright-related," says TorrentFreak.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DC Attorney General Karl Racine has filed a motion asking the court to reconsider its decision to dismiss the antitrust lawsuit he filed against Amazon in 2021. From a report: In the original lawsuit, Racine accused the e-commerce giant of "illegally abusing and maintaining its monopoly power by controlling prices across the online retail market." Third-party sellers that use Amazon's Marketplace have to abide by the company's agreement, which includes a fair pricing policy. If they sell their goods for lower prices elsewhere, Amazon could remove their items' buy box, suspend their shipment option and even terminate their selling privileges for "serious or repeated cases." The company stopped telling sellers back in 2019 in the midst of antitrust scrutiny that they couldn't sell their products for cheaper prices elsewhere. However, the company later added back a clause under its fair pricing policy that's nearly identical. Racine argued that since sellers price their goods with Amazon's cut in mind, the policy artificially raises prices even on sellers' own websites and on competing e-commerce platforms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

92% of executives at medium to large firms think workers who turn cameras off during meetings don't have long-term futures at the company, according to a new survey from Vyopta, a software company. From a report: The data adds grist to the worry that hybrid and remote employees have expressed about the post-pandemic world -- that those who choose to work from home some, most or all of the time will be out-of-sight, out-of-mind for bosses. In a separate finding from Vyopta, 93% of execs said that people who frequently turn off their cameras probably aren't paying attention. Those employees are perceived as less engaged with their work overall. The majority of companies around the world are moving to a hybrid working model, which means more video meetings in the future. But the casual, camera-off and microphone-muted way of taking a meeting might be harming employees' career prospects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Developer burnout is helping to drive an exodus of software developer talent from organizations, as part of a larger trend known as the Great Resignation, according to a report released on April 13 by MuleSoft, which is a division of Salesforce. From a report: The MuleSoft report was based on research conducted by Vanson Bourne in February 2022 across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Eighty-six percent of respondents indicated that in the last two years it has become increasingly difficult to recruit software developers. One of the reasons why is the larger macroeconomic trend of the Great Resignation, where employees are leaving their employers en masse during the COVID-19 pandemic as they seek a better work-life balance. Burnout is also a large challenge for developers, according to the report. The top causes of developer burnout are increasing workloads and the challenges of learning new skills to adapt to emerging technologies. "The pandemic was a massive accelerator for the need of digital tools," Matt McLarty, global field CTO and vice president of the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) at MuleSoft, told ITPro Today. "Non-technology companies were ultimately forced to become technology companies overnight, and we saw nearly every organization require developers to help them achieve these new goals on high-pressure deadlines, all at once."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new social engineering scam is making the rounds, and this one is particularly insidious: It tricks users into sending money to what they think is their own account to reverse a fraudulent charge. From a report: The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued the warning, which it said involves cybercriminals who have definitely done their homework. "In addition to knowing the victim's financial institution, the actors often had further information such as the victim's past addresses, social security number, and the last four digits of their bank accounts," the IC3 said. The con starts off as many that target individuals do nowadays: With a text message. In this case it's not a phishing attempt, it's an attempt to ascertain whether the person receiving the message is susceptible to further manipulation. Posing as the target's bank, the message asks whether a large charge ($5,000 in the example the FBI gives) was legitimate and asks for a reply of YES or NO. Replying no leads to a follow-up text: "Our fraud specialist will be contacting you shortly. This is where social engineering comes in, and the FBI is painting a picture of a sophisticated operation. The "fraud specialists" contacting users reportedly "speak English without a discernible accent," and once they establish credibility with the victim they move on to "helping" them "reverse" the fake transaction. It gets even more insidious here: The charges that are being refuted aren't bank charges directly: they are payments being made through an instant payment app like Venmo or CashApp. The fraudster never asks for a password or any information that might clue someone in that they're being strung along. Instead, the caller asks the victim to use their bank website or app to remove their email address from the digital payment app (thereby unlinking the app and bank account), which the fraudster then asks for. Next, the victim is asked to send the same amount as the fake payment to themselves using their own email address, which has already been added to an account the criminal controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is issuing fixes for two vulnerabilities in its Chrome web browser, including one flaw that is already being exploited in the wild. From a report: The emergency updates the company issued this week impact the almost 3 billion users of its Chrome browser as well as those using other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Brave and Vivaldi. It is the third such emergency update Google has had to issue for Chrome this year. One of the flaws is a type confusion vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-1364, a high-severity, zero-day bug that is actively being used by attackers. With a type confusion flaw, a program will allocate a resource like a pointer or object using one type but later will access the resource using another, incompatible type. In some languages, like C and C++, the vulnerability can result in out-of-bounds memory access. This incompatibility can cause a browser to crash or trigger logical errors. However, if exploited, it could enable a hacker to execute arbitrary code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has started widespread internal testing of several new Mac models with next-generation M2 chips, according to developer logs, part of its push to make more powerful computers using homegrown processors. Bloomberg: The company is testing at least nine new Macs with four different M2-based chips -- the successors to the current M1 line -- with third-party apps in its App Store, according to the logs, which were corroborated by people familiar with the matter. The move is a key step in the development process, suggesting that the new machines may be nearing release in the coming months. The M2 chip is Apple's latest attempt to push the boundaries of computer processing after a split with Intel in recent years. Apple has gradually replaced Intel chips with its own silicon, and now looks to make further gains with a more advanced line. After years of slow growth, the Mac computer division enjoyed a resurgence the past two years, helped in part by home office workers buying new equipment. The business generated $35.2 billion in sales the past fiscal year, about 10% of Apple's total.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Internal Revenue Service is investigating American Express over a questionable tax break that it pitched to clients, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The civil investigation has been under way for a few months, these people said. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that AmEx salespeople touted a tax break based on a shaky interpretation of tax law. The pitch was part of a strategy to persuade business owners to sign up for costly payment services. AmEx previously acknowledged, in response to the November story, that some members of its U.S. sales organization "failed to uphold our values and had positioned certain products inappropriately, specifically with respect to tax benefits." An AmEx spokesman said this week that "we have already taken a number of actions to change products, policies and personnel and are continuing to cooperate with our regulators and government agencies. "As we said in November, we engaged an external law firm to conduct an investigation of our small business sales practices in the U.S.," he added. AmEx "will take further steps as appropriate." AmEx previously said that it discontinued wire services associated with the pitch. These had been available to a wide range of companies, according to people familiar with the matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter's board on Friday enacted a defensive measure meant to deter Elon Musk's $43 billion hostile takeover bid. From a report: The "poison pill," as it's called in corporate terms, gives Twitter's existing shareholders time to purchase additional shares at a discount, thus diluting Musk's ownership stake. Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter earlier this month. He then announced he was joining the company's board of directors and began proposing several changes to the platform, including turning the company's headquarters into a homeless shelter. [...] He later backed out of joining the board and offered to purchase the company for $54.20 a share, though he did specify how he planned to pay for it. Twitter said in a statement that "its Board of Directors has unanimously adopted a limited duration shareholder rights plan. ... The Board adopted the Rights Plan following an unsolicited, non-binding proposal to acquire Twitter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A federal class-action lawsuit involving Maple Heights and 2,000 other U.S. communities against Netflix and Hulu took a detour Wednesday through the Ohio Supreme Court, with Maple Heights officials asking state justices to define the streaming giants as "video service providers." If the Supreme Court agrees, the streaming services would be subject to the same video service provider fees paid by cable companies. Those fees in Ohio are 5% of the companies' gross revenues they earn in the city and go directly into city coffers. The streaming companies argued they are instead "specified digital products" under state law. Therefore, they pay state sales taxes, and Ohio would lose money if the court determines they owe the local franchise fees since they would be exempt from state sales tax under Ohio law. The Ohio Supreme Court will determine whether Netflix and Hulu are video service providers, among other legal questions, in the coming months. After the Ohio Supreme Court issues an opinion, the case in federal court in Cleveland can resume. That case involves around 2,000 cities, but U.S. District Judge James Gwin directed the Ohio Supreme Court to answer legal questions first.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Privacy is one of the selling points of Apple products. But for employees who develop these products, it can be a pain. The Information: Apple doesn't collect a lot of customer data from its services, including Apple Maps, the Siri voice assistant and its paid video-streaming service, according to more than a dozen former employees. And the customer data it does collect from products like the App Store and Apple Music aren't widely accessible to employees who work on those and other products, these people said. That makes it difficult for Apple to mimic popular features developed by its competitors, which collect more data and have fewer restrictions on employee access to such information, they said. Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok is under investigation by US government agencies over its handling of child sexual abuse material, as the burgeoning short-form video app struggles to moderate a flood of new content. From a report: Dealing with sexual predators has been an enduring challenge for social media platforms, but TikTok's young user base has made it vulnerable to being a target. The US Department of Homeland Security is investigating how TikTok handles child sexual abuse material, according to two sources familiar with the case. The Department of Justice is also reviewing how a specific privacy feature on TikTok is being exploited by predators, said one person with knowledge of the case. The DOJ has a longstanding policy of not confirming or denying the existence of ongoing investigations. "It is a perfect place for predators to meet, groom and engage children," said Erin Burke, unit chief of the child exploitation investigations unit at Homeland Security's cyber crime division, calling it the "platform of choice" for the behaviour.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigerian banks have been hit by an exodus of tech talent, chief executives of the nation's lenders say. From a report: "So many of our very experienced talents especially in the area of software engineering are either leaving the industry or leaving the country," Abubakar Suleiman, chief executive officer of Sterling Bank, told reporters at the end of a meeting of bank CEOs on Thursday, according to a voice recording shared by the central bank. He referred to it as a "great resignation." The meeting came as traditional lenders in Africa's largest economy face stiff competition for talent from technology startups attracting increased funding from international investors and offering better working conditions, in and outside the country. Africa-focused startups raised a record $5 billion last year, with those specializing in digital and mobile payments and lending soaking up most of the funding. Two economic contractions in the last five years have also forced some Nigerians with globally marketable skills to leave the country, with the U.S., Canada and U.K. being preferred destinations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham combed through Steam Hardware & Software Survey data "to see how Windows 11 is fairing with enthusiasts." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers -- nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers -- about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements -- many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good. Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users -- and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users -- were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller. In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021 -- even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. NPR reports: The nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, NASA says. The comet's nucleus is about 50 times larger than that of most comets, and its mass is estimated to be a gigantic 500 trillion tons. Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein using archival images from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The comet has been observed since 2010, when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun, and has been studied since then. NASA says there was a challenge in measuring the comet's nucleus because it was too far away for the Hubble telescope to determine its size. Instead, scientists had to make a computer model that was adjusted to fit the images of the comet's bright light that they got from the telescope's data. Despite traveling at 22,000 mph, the massive comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system. But NASA assures us that it will never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun -- and even then, that won't be until 2031. The previous record-holder for largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. Comet C/2002 VQ94 was approximately 60 miles across.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has signed up to test SpinLaunch's extraordinary whirl 'n' hurl space launch technology, which accelerates a launch vehicle to hypersonic speeds using an electric centrifuge instead of a rocket, hurling it skyward like a space discus. New Atlas reports: The idea behind SpinLaunch is as staggering as the company's name is appropriate. The idea of winding up and throwing satellites most of the way into orbit just boggles the mind. But in initial testing, this company's kinetic launch system, which looks externally a lot like a turbocharger, has shown promise as an environmentally-friendly, and potentially cost-effective replacement for first-stage rocket launches. [T]he company says it'll be appropriate for smaller launch vehicles weighing up to about 440 lb (200 kg), carrying ultra-ruggedized satellites capable of dealing with the forces involved. The SpinLaunch system will do the first part, flinging them high into the air, where a second-stage rocket can take over and give them the final push into orbit. And the advantages are pretty compelling. SpinLaunch says that eliminating the first-stage rocket from the launch vehicle will cut out some 70 percent of the fuel and structures needed by a traditional launch vehicle, and that it can get appropriate loads into orbit using a quarter of the fuel, and at a tenth of the price. NASA is one of many parties interested in this possibility, and it's now signed a Space Act agreement with SpinLaunch to develop and integrate a NASA payload for this kinetic launch system, which will be flung skyward from Spaceport America, New Mexico, in a test flight later this year. This, like all SpinLaunch "regular" test flights to date, will be a slower sub-orbital launch with a speed closer to 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h, Mach 1.3) than 5,000 mph. The payload will be designed to take a range of measurements, which will be analyzed by both groups. All non-proprietary information learned from this test will be published, and SpinLaunch says it's working towards its first orbital launch in 2025. A render posted late last year by SpinLaunch shows how their system works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward. Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!" The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new immunotherapy that targets cells infected with Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) has halted the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a small trial. Perhaps even more incredibly, in some patients, it is possible that symptoms of MS were actually reversed, though this was not fully identified in the most recent presentation of results (PDF). IFLScience reports: [S]ignificant evidence has linked infection of EBV and the eventual development of MS. [...] Attempting to "transform treatment of Multiple Sclerosis," Atara Biotherapeutics has developed an allogeneic T-cell therapy called ATA188. The concept is simple -- when cells are infected with EBV, they express small proteins called antigens on the cell surface, and the immunotherapy contains immune cells that target and destroy them. In a trial of 24 patients who received the therapy, 20 saw improvements or stability in their symptoms and no fatal or serious adverse effects were reported. Early brain scans suggest that some damaged nerve cells may have been "repaired" by the therapy in a process called remyelination, which could mean a reversal of damage caused by MS in the nervous system, but this has not yet been confirmed. While the results are extremely promising, it is an early Phase 1 trial with a small sample size and no placebo or control group, so it is unclear whether the results are significant at this stage. However, it is unlikely that this repair would occur naturally, suggesting the therapy is having a beneficial effect on some level.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, Reddit is updating its search feature to index comments. The Verge reports: For the first time, users will have an option to pull results from replies to posts, making it less of a hassle to find something specific outside of general Reddit posts, communities, and people. The rollout is Reddit's latest change to help users encounter content from outside their usual subreddits following the addition of a discovery tab on its mobile app in January. Reddit says that in a user survey last year, the ability to search comments was one of the top results. During "limited initial testing," Reddit claimed 26,000 users went on to use the feature against five billion comments. Right now, the new ability is available globally for users searching on Reddit's desktop website, but not via its apps. The company "is also updating its search experience to help users find more relevant search results written by real people," adds The Verge. "For example, when searching for something, instead of showing search results with that exact wording, related results will pop up instead to make the search less restrictive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive pirate streaming site with roughly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in the remote countryside of Peru, the anti-piracy group says the site is no more. TorrentFreak reports: In a statement published Wednesday, ACE officially announced that it was behind the closure of Pelisplushd.net. The anti-piracy group labeled the platform the second-largest Spanish-language 'rogue website' in the entire Latin American region with 383.5 million visits in the past six months and nearly 75 million visits in February 2022. In Mexico alone, the site had more visitors than hbomax.com, disneyplus.com and primevideo.com, a clear problem for those platforms which are all ACE members. "This is a huge win for the ACE team based in Latin America as we work to protect the legitimate digital ecosystem throughout the region," said Jan van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection for the Motion Picture Association. "The successful action against the operator of Pelisplushd.net was only made possible because of evidence that we gathered from previous operations conducted in other countries in Latin America. "This speaks volumes about ACE's ability to crack current cases utilizing years of past gathered intelligence and highlights the global, strategic approach that determines our actions around the world." The operator of Pelisplushd is yet to be named but ACE reveals that after a positive identification, the anti-piracy group tracked him down to the "remote countryside of Peru." That took place in March and soon after, ACE says the operator agreed to turn over his domains. As far as we can tell the main domain at Pelisplushd.net is not yet completely in ACE/MPA hands but a full transfer will probably take place later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency -- a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team's design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid. With the new TPV cell, the team has now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in separate, small-scale experiments. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel-driven power plants and enable a fully decarbonized power grid, supplied entirely by renewable energy. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virgil Griffith, a US cryptocurrency expert, was sentenced on Tuesday to 63 months in prison after pleading guilty to assisting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) with technical info on how to evade sanctions. BleepingComputer reports: The sanctions imposed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and Executive Order 13466 forbid the export of any goods, services, or technology to the DPRK without a Department of the Treasury license issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Griffith, who worked as a special projects developer and research scientist for the Ethereum Foundation, was arrested in November 2019 by the FBI following a presentation in North Korea on how the country could use cryptocurrency and blockchain tech (i.e., smart contracts) to launder money and evade sanctions. Despite being denied permission by the US Department of State, Griffith went to the North Korean conference knowing that doing so without a license from the OFAC would violate US sanctions against the DPRK. According to court documents, the cryptocurrency expert asked to receive his travel visa on a separate paper and not on his US passport, likely to avoid creating physical evidence of his travel to North Korea. At the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, "Griffith and his co-conspirators also answered specific questions about blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for the DPRK audience, including individuals whom Griffith understood worked for the North Korean government." DOJ said today. He also tried recruiting "other US citizens to travel to North Korea and provide similar services to DPRK persons and attempted to broker introductions for the DPRK to other cryptocurrency and blockchain service providers." During the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, he also talked about how North Korea could use cryptocurrency to gain financial independence from the global banking system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a Twitter thread earlier today, Meta CTO Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth teased a web version of Horizon Worlds, the company's virtual reality platform that's an integral part of their plan for creating a "metaverse." Boz was responding to criticism from MacRumors' Sami Fathi, who pointed out the hypocrisy of Meta taking an almost 50% commission on "metaverse" purchases after complaining about the 15-30% cut Apple takes from developers in the App Store. "We're taking a different approach with our margin (heh) on Quest devices to make them available to more people," said Boz. "We're committed to help build a different ecosystem. Developers are already seeing success on the Quest Store alone -- over 120 titles are generating over $1M." He added: "We're making good on our goal to ensure that developers have a path to real financial success on our platform. It's early days, there is still a lot of work to be done and we continue to partner closely with our creators and developers to enable them to earn meaningful revenue." Boz went on to say that the Horizon World's platform fee "will only be 25%" when the web version launches -- "a much lower rate compared to other similar world-building platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says. In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country. The EIA notes that in the spring and fall months, nuclear and coal generators reduce their output because demand tends to be lower, which could contribute to why wind turbines produced more electricity that day. But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived. The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Summer on Neptune seems to be cooling down. Observations dating back to 2003 show that the temperature in the planet's southern hemisphere has been dropping, despite the fact that these measurements were taken in the early part of its long summer. New Scientist reports: Michael Roman at the University of Leicester, UK, and his colleagues examined data from several of the world's biggest telescopes to figure out how the temperature of Neptune has changed since the first relatively detailed measurements were made in 2003. "Because we are observing Neptune in this southern summer, we basically expect temperatures to be getting slowly warmer in time," says Roman. "But what we saw was that they dropped by about 8C" over the course of 15 years, he says. The observations also revealed a surprise near the planet's south pole. Between 2018 and 2020, an area there warmed by about 11C, an unexpectedly rapid change given that it takes Neptune more than 165 Earth years to complete a circuit around the sun. "A season on Neptune is over 40 years long, so we'd expect these changes to be a lot more gradual," says Roman.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists believe they have found evidence of microbes that were thriving near hydrothermal vents on Earth's surface just 300m years after the planet formed -- the strongest evidence yet that life began far earlier than is widely assumed. From a report: If confirmed, it would suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life are relatively basic. "If life is relatively quick to emerge, given the right conditions, this increases the chance that life exists on other planets," said Dominic Papineau, of University College London, who led the research. Five years ago, Papineau and colleagues announced they had found microfossils in iron-rich sedimentary rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq supracrustal belt in Quebec, Canada. The team suggested that these tiny filaments, knobs and tubes of an iron oxide called haematite could have been made by bacteria living around hydrothermal vents that used iron-based chemical reactions to obtain their energy. Scientific dating of the rocks has suggested they are at least 3.75bn years old, and possibly as old as 4.28bn years, the age of the volcanic rocks they are embedded in. Before this, the oldest reported microfossils dated to 3.46bn and 3.7bn years ago, potentially making the Canadian specimens the oldest direct evidence of life on Earth. Now, further analysis of the rock has revealed a much larger and more complex structure -- a stem with parallel branches on one side that is nearly a centimetre long -- as well as hundreds of distorted spheres, or ellipsoids, alongside the tubes and filaments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, it announced it's taking some big steps to address some of the emissions associated with making and using those products by investing in a solar farm going up in Texas and cleaning up its supply chain. From a report: Apple is tackling part of its Scope 3 emissions. The biggest challenge for nearly any company is addressing carbon pollution from the manufacturing and use of its products. And Apple has a lot of products in circulation. The company has a mind-bending 1.8 billion devices currently in service around the world. If they were evenly distributed (spoiler: they're not), roughly a quarter of the world's population would own an Apple device. For those Apple devices to be useful, they need to be charged. I mean, duh. By the company's own carbon accounting, all that charging is responsible for nearly 22% of Apple's carbon footprint. Manufacturing all those devices is an even bigger chunk of emissions, accounting for more than 70% of its 22.6 million ton carbon footprint, according to its most recent environmental progress report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Independent contractors are pushed to handle customer service without compensation. From an investigation: When Samsung announced its new Galaxy S22, the biggest Android smartphone launch of the year, Jennifer Larson was ready to finally make some money. On February 9th, she logged into the Ibbu app, where she sells phones to waiting customers at Samsung.com via online chats. Typically, the yearly Galaxy Unpacked showcase is a huge sales event for Samsung and a potentially big payday for her. "They built it up like it was Christmas, I got all pumped up," Larson says. But on this product release day, Samsung's website was experiencing widespread glitches; customers couldn't complete orders, and some were getting blank screens. If they could connect to the chats at all, customers were frustrated. Larson gave up after about two hours and called it a day. And really, why would she stay? She thought Unpacked would be a break from the increasingly grim reality of her job, which has been to field a growing number of completely unpaid customer service calls. Instead, it was more of the same -- hours of customer complaints she wasn't going to get paid for handling. Samsung's experts are commission-only, with no hourly rate. So if they don't sell anything, they don't get paid. Originally, the money was good, but a once-promising work-from-home job has deteriorated into a confusing mess of misdirected customers and inconsistent directions from superiors, Larson and her co-workers say. Meanwhile, Samsung customers looking for support may not be aware that they've been routed to someone whose only financial incentive is to sell them a new product. Larson and her colleagues are portrayed as subject matter experts there to help customers -- think Apple's Genius Bar -- but the expert's goal is really to close sales. Even if they want to help, they aren't trained in customer support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter's board of directors views Elon Musk's buy offer as unwelcome, The Information reported Thursday, citing a person familiar with the situation, suggesting it will fight the bid. The report adds: One person close to the situation said that the board wanted to support CEO Parag Agrawal, who only assumed the role in November. Meanwhile, Musk hasn't provided details of his plans for Twitter or his financing for the deal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking for the first time since news broke of his attempts to buy all of Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his offer had been made for the public good. From a report: Musk emphasized that he was motivated by the public interest value of the platform. "Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. So it's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law," Musk said. Musk was speaking at TED 2022 conference in Vancouver. Asked why he wanted to buy Twitter, Musk opened with a joke. "I don't know," Musk told a live audience. "A little bird tweeted in my ear or something." To protect that venue, Musk went on to say he believes Twitter should "open source the algorithm" in order to build trust and ensure availability. "The code should be on Github so people can look through it," Musk said. Musk insisted that buying Twitter wasn't an economic move for him. "This is not a way to sort of make money. My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important," he says. "So the future of civilization, but you don't care about the economics at all." Musk said he has a Plan B if Twitter rejects his offer, without offering more details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Somnium Space is developing a way for people to talk to their loved ones even after they die. All it requires is massive amounts of personal data. From a report: Almost five years ago, Artur Sychov's father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, which would ultimately kill him within a few years. The news of his father's illness devastated Sychov. "It kind of hit me that the time I had with him was limited," he told me last week. At the time, Sychov's children were just a few years old, and it pained him to think that they might grow up without a memory of their grandfather. In those moments, he started to wonder if there was some way in which his children might be able to have a conversation with their grandfather, even after he was gone. Sychov is the CEO and founder of Somnium Space, one of the many versions of the metaverse that have sprouted up in recent years. Unlike many of its competitors, Somnium Space is already compatible with virtual reality headsets, allowing for an immersive 3D experience. The death of Sychov's father served as the inspiration for an idea that he would come to call "Live Forever" mode, a forthcoming feature in Somnium Space that allows people to have their movements and conversations stored as data, then duplicated as an avatar that moves, talks, and sounds just like you -- and can continue to do so long after you have died. In Sychov's dream, people will be able to talk to their dead loved one whenever they wish. [...] To Sychov, these are the sort of potential innovations that make the metaverse a new arena of human experience worth investing in. "They think that it's about selling NFTs and brands selling their stuff, but it's not about that," he told me. "It's much deeper."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tencent said it will shut down a service that allowed Chinese gamers to access overseas platforms to play unapproved foreign games, in a sign of tightening compliance as Chinese regulators more closely scrutinize the industry. From a report: The country's largest social and gaming firm said late on Wednesday it will on May 31 update its games speed booster mobile and desktop apps to new versions that would only support games operating in China. The new versions will no longer allow users to access foreign games. Tencent first launched the apps in 2018. Such apps, which other companies like NetEase also offer, act as network acceleration tools that help users boost their internet speeds. Unlike most countries, gamers in China are only allowed to play titles approved by the government and are not allowed to play with foreigners on foreign servers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E-cigarette giant Juul Labs will pay Washington state $22.5 million and has agreed to a variety of reforms to prevent underage use and sales under a settlement announced Wednesday by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. From a report: Ferguson filed a consumer protection lawsuit in September 2020, saying the country's largest e-cigarette company targeted underage consumers and deceived consumers about the addictiveness of its product. "Juul's conduct harmed Washingtonians," Ferguson said at a news conference in Seattle. "They harmed the youth of our state." Ferguson said that upon the product's launch in 2015, the company flooded social media with colorful ads, fueling a spike in use and nicotine addiction among teenagers. The percentage of vaping high school sophomores in Washington rose from 13% in 2016 to nearly 21% by 2018, according to Ferguson's office.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. From a report: On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its WhatsApp messaging app that will allow users to now not only connect privately with friends and family, as before, but also participate in larger discussion groups, called Communities. These groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people's larger group chats with added support for tools like file-sharing of up to 2GB, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things. The feature has been under development for some time as the next big iteration for the WhatsApp platform, meant to capitalize on the app's existing end-to-end encryption as well as users' growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook. In particular, Communities could present a challenge to other messaging apps like Telegram -- which has recently become a prominent player in communications related to the Russia-Ukraine war -- in addition to other private messaging platforms, like iMessage or Signal, as well as apps like GroupMe, Band, Remind and others used to communicate with groups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.