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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo has issued a number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests against SteamGridDB (SGDB), a site that hosts custom fan-made icons and images used to represent games on Steam's front-end interface. Since 2015, SGDB's collection has grown to include hundreds of thousands of images representing tens of thousands of titles. That includes custom imagery for many standard Steam games and emulated game ROMs, which can be added to Steam as "external games." To be clear, SteamGridDB doesn't host the kind of ROM files that have gotten other sites in legal trouble with Nintendo, or even the emulators used to run those games. "We don't support piracy in any way," an SGDB admin (who asked to remain anonymous) told Ars. "The website is just a free repository where people can share options to customize their game launchers." But in a series of DMCA requests viewed by Ars Technica, dated October 27, Nintendo says some of the imagery on SGDB "displays Nintendo's trademarks and other intellectual property (including characters) which is likely to lead to consumer confusion." Thus, dozens of SGDB images have been replaced with a blank image featuring the text "this asset has been removed in response to a DMCA takedown request" (you can see some of the specific images that were removed in this Internet Archive snapshot from April and compare it to how the listing currently looks). Thus far, Nintendo's DMCA requests focus on imagery for just five Switch games that are listed on SGDB: Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, Splatoon 3, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Other Switch games listed on the site (some featuring the same exact characters) are unaffected, as are images for many older Nintendo titles. [...] Even for the Switch games in question, the DMCA requests focused on images that "straight up used sprites and assets from [Nintendo's] IP," according to the SGDB admin. Nintendo's requests so far seem to have ignored "completely original creations" and "pure fan art" even when that art involves drawings of Nintendo's original characters. It's unclear if those kinds of images would fall under a different legal standard in this case. "If an IP holder asks to take down original creations then I'll figure out the best way to handle that when it happens," the admin said. "The site is basically all just fan art, we're open to publishers reaching out and discussing any issues they may have. [The] best way to find a good course of action is to discuss options."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of Intel's revitalized contract chip manufacturing business plans to step down, The Register has learned, creating a setback for the x86 behemoth's big bet to take on Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung as part of its comeback plan. From the report: Randhir Thakur, senior vice president and president of Intel Foundry Services, "has decided to pursue other opportunities" but will continue to lead the business unit through the first quarter of 2023 to "ensure a smooth transition to a new leader," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in an email to employees Monday that was seen by el Reg. Intel spokesperson William Moss confirmed the news with us. "We're grateful to Randhir for the tremendous progress IFS has made and for laying the foundation for Intel to become a world-class systems foundry," Moss said in a statement. "We wish him all the best in his new endeavors." In his email, Gelsinger said he will share more information soon "about the new leader" for Intel Foundry Services, suggesting the company may have a successor in place -- or is at least close to having one. "Randhir has been a key member of the Executive Leadership Team for the past two and a half years and has served in several senior leadership roles since he joined us in 2017," Gelsinger wrote. "... His contributions to our [Integrated Device Manufacturing] 2.0 transformation are many, but most notable is his leadership in standing up our IFS business." Intel revitalized its contract chip manufacturing business in early 2021 and renamed it Intel Foundry Services with the goal of competing with TSMC and Samsung, the world's two largest contract chip manufacturers that make chips for the likes of Intel rivals, including AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. In his email to employees, Gelsinger credited Thakur for establishing a "seasoned leadership team with veterans from leading foundries" like TSMC and Samsung. He added that the Intel Foundry Services leader also "secured major customer wins in the mobile and auto segments" and helped the company win the US government's RAMP-C award along with four customers for chip designs on its 18A node. "Since Q2, IFS has expanded engagements to seven of the 10 largest foundry customers coupled with consistent pipeline growth to include 35 customer test chips," Gelsinger said. "This is tremendous progress in only 20 months!" Intel has a pending $5.4 billion acquisition of Israeli chip manufacturer Tower Semiconductor, notes The Register. "Analysts responding to the news of Thakur's resignation said the move is likely happening because Intel plans to put Tower Semiconductor's management in charge of Intel Foundry Services." The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"With new COVID variants and subvariants evolving faster and faster, each chipping away at the effectiveness of the leading vaccines, the hunt is on for a new kind of vaccine," reports the Daily Beast, "one that works equally well on current and future forms of the novel coronavirus. "Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they've found a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a long-lasting jab. As a bonus, it also might work on other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19."The NIH team reported its findings in a peer-reviewed study that appeared in the journal Cell Host & Microbe earlier this month. The key to the NIH's potential vaccine design is a part of the virus called the "spine helix." It's a coil-shaped structure inside the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. Lots of current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target the spine helix. And yet, there are good reasons to focus on that part of the pathogen. Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn't. That gives scientists "hope that an antibody targeting this region will be more durable and broadly effective," Joshua Tan, the lead scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast.... A vaccine that binds the spine helix in SARS-CoV-2 should hold up for a long time. And it should also work on all the other coronaviruses that also include the spine helix — and there are dozens of them, including several such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS that have already made the leap from animal populations and caused outbreaks in people.... Maybe a spine-helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it's encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress toward a more universal coronavirus vaccine. One that could work for many years on a wide array of related viruses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hardaker writes: I wrote up the results from studying graphs of CO2 measurement data during a trip I took from Sacramento, California to London to attend the IETF-115 conference. Since CO2 is considered to be a potential proxy for measuring exposure to airborne viruses, it provided me with a rough guess about how safe (or not) I was at various points of my travel. TL;DR: big conference rooms: good, busses: bad, everything else: in between. "Numbers alone do not effectively measure risk absolutely," the page concludes. "You must combine numbers with logic and common sense. Airlines with good filtering systems are likely ok. But do aim the fans at you with maximum air flow..." "Hallways and crowded coffee tables are where we need to worry the most. Unfortunately, the masking policy at IETF-115 was sort of backward: in the rooms the circulation was quite good, but in all my graphs you can see a spike as I wandered from one room to another, and this is where masking policies were more lax allowing participants to remove their masks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He's been a contributing editor at the Linux foundation's Linux.com, a contributor to Linux Journal, and a blogger for Linux Pro magazine. Now Bruce Byfield has teamed with the lead editor for the Open Office authors volunteer group (who was also co-lead on Open Office's documentation project) to co-author a second edition of Byfield's book Designing with LibreOffice. From the official announcement:The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com. ["Under this license, you can share or copy the book, or even add to it," explains the book's site, "so long as you mention the writer's name and release your changes under the same license."] The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as "an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document...." The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction. In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader nanday for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1999, Slashdot editor Hemos said Greg Bear was "rightly recognized as a master of hard science fiction" (introducing a review of Bear's then-new book, Nebula-winning book Darwin's Radio). In 2011 Bear began writing the Forerunner Saga , a trilogy of books set 100,000 years before the events in the game Halo. Today theGamer.com writes that Bear has passed away at age 71:Bear's family and fans are paying tribute to the legendary author, who had more than 50 sci-fi novels to his name. Many share fond memories of reading Bear's work and meeting him at conventions, describing him as generous, welcoming, and brilliant. Fans are also sharing their favourite books from Bear in tribute, encouraging others to explore his works to celebrate his legacy. Bear's wife, Astrid Bear, confirmed the news of his passing in the early hours of Sunday. This was after she revealed that her husband has been placed on life support, with no chance of making a full recovery after the stroke. More from File770.com:Bear's novels won Nebulas for Moving Mars (1995) and Darwin's Radio. Three other works of short fiction won Nebulas, and two of those — "Blood Music" (1984) and "Tangents" (1987) — also won the Hugo.... Bear sold his first short story, "Destroyers", to Famous Science Fiction at age 15, and along with high-school friends helped found San Diego Comic-Con. He also published work as an artist at the beginning of his career, including illustrations for an early version of theÂStar Trek Concordance,Âand covers forÂGalaxyÂandÂF&SF. He was a founding member of the Association of Science Fiction Artists. He even created the cover for his novel, Psychlone...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Last week's collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is sending aftershocks through the scientific community," writes Science magazine:An undergraduate physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who founded FTX and quickly became a billionaire, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried began to back philanthropic organizations that supported a wide variety of science-related causes, most designed to improve human well-being. Now, with FTX in bankruptcy and under investigation for misuse of investors' money, his formerly flush foundations are suddenly strapped for cash and much of that work is at risk. One foundation, the Future Fund, was just launched in February. But by the end of June, its officials reported awarding 262 grants and "investments" totaling $132 million. It's unclear how much of that money has been distributed. But on 10 November, five senior Future Fund officials resigned and announced in a statement, "We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor...." Just what will happen to awards the Future Fund and the similar FTX Foundation have already made remains unclear. FTX owes billions of dollars to creditors and is now being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, according to The Wall Street Journal. Writing in an online forum hosted by the Center for Effective Altruism, to which the Future Fund pledged nearly $14 million, Molly Kovite, legal operations manager for the Open Philanthropy foundation, noted that FTX's creditors could try to "claw back" their investments during bankruptcy proceedings. If grantees received awards after 11 August, which is 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing, "the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back" she predicts. That has grantees wondering how they will pay the bills. "Everyone is obviously really worried," Morrison says. Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Drought conditions are worsening in the U.S.," reports CNBC, "and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet."Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool the centers. In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west. "There is, without a doubt, risk if you're dependent on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. "These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right...?" Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center. But Meta's overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to have "water stress," according to its website. It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west. Microsoft has also set a goal to be "water positive" by 2030. Â"The good news is we've been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. "In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Drought conditions are worsening in the U.S.," reports CNBC, "and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet."Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool the centers. In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west. "There is, without a doubt, risk if you're dependent on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. "These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right...?" Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center. But Meta's overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to have "water stress," according to its website. It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west. Microsoft has also set a goal to be "water positive" by 2030. Â"The good news is we've been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. "In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Get ready: Neurotechnology is coming to the workplace," claims IEEE Spectrum:Neural sensors are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial pilot projects that extract productivity-enhancing data from workers' brains. These projects aren't confined to specialized workplaces; they're also happening in offices, factories, farms, and airports. The companies and people behind these neurotech devices are certain that they will improve our lives. But there are serious questions about whether work should be organized around certain functions of the brain, rather than the person as a whole. To be clear, the kind of neurotech that's currently available is nowhere close to reading minds. Sensors detect electrical activity across different areas of the brain, and the patterns in that activity can be broadly correlated with different feelings or physiological responses, such as stress, focus, or a reaction to external stimuli. These data can be exploited to make workers more efficient — and, proponents of the technology say, to make them happier. Two of the most interesting innovators in this field are the Israel-based startup InnerEye, which aims to give workers superhuman abilities, and Emotiv, a Silicon Valley neurotech company that's bringing a brain-tracking wearable to office workers, including those working remotely.... EEG has recently broken out of clinics and labs and has entered the consumer marketplace. This move has been driven by a new class of "dry" electrodes that can operate without conductive gel, a substantial reduction in the number of electrodes necessary to collect useful data, and advances in artificial intelligence that make it far easier to interpret the data. Some EEG headsets are even available directly to consumers for a few hundred dollars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:Facebook's fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN. While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says, and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others. Despite Trump's ban, "Team Trump," a page run by Trump's political group, is still active and has 2.3 million followers.... The carve-out is not exclusive to Trump and applies to all politicians, but given the rate fact-checkers find themselves dealing with claims made by the former president, a manager on Meta's "news integrity partnership" team emailed fact-checkers on Tuesday ahead of Trump's announcement. ... The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians. "It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak," Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption. The Meta memo sent to fact-checkers made clear that if Trump announced a 2024 presidential bid Tuesday night, he could no longer be fact-checked on the platform. The memo noted that "political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign." It concluded that "if former President Trump makes a clear, public announcement that he is running for office, he would be considered a politician under our program policies." Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said the memo was "a reiteration of our long-standing policy" and "should not be news to anyone...." Meta plans on considering allowing Trump back on the platform as soon as January — two years since his initial ban.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot has been covering plans for the UK's largest chip plant to be acquired by Chinese-owned firm Nexperia. But this week the U.K. government "has blocked the takeover of the country's largest microchip factory by a Chinese-owned firm," CNBC reported this week, "over concerns it may undermine national security."Grant Shapps, minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, on Wednesday ordered Dutch chipmaker Nexperia to sell its majority stake in Newport Wafer Fab, the Welsh semiconductor firm it acquired for £63 million ($75 million). Nexperia is based in the Netherlands but owned by Wingtech, a partially Chinese state-backed company listed in Shanghai. Nexperia completed its acquisition of Newport Wafer Fab in 2021, and the firm subsequently changed its name to Nexperia Newport Limited, or NN. "The order has the effect of requiring Nexperia BV to sell at least 86% of NNL within a specified period and by following a specified process," the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement. Nexperia had initially owned 14% of Newport Wafer Fab, but in July 2021 it upped its stake to 100%. "We welcome foreign trade & investment that supports growth and jobs," Shapps tweeted Wednesday. "But where we identify a risk to national security we will act decisively." Nexperia plans to appeal the decision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having trouble falling asleep, a writer for Vulture pondered a study from February in the Journal of Sleep Research that "runs refreshingly counter to common sleep-and-screens wisdom."For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress.... Specifically interested in the use of "entertainment media" (streaming services, video games, podcasts) before bed, [the new February study's] researchers asked a group of 58 adults to keep a sleep diary and found that, if participants consumed entertainment media in the hour before bed, the habit was associated with an earlier bedtime as well as more sleep overall (though the benefits diminished if participants binged for longer than an hour or multitasked on their phones). Essentially, these researchers explored screen use before bed as a form of relaxation rather than a form of self-harm, which is exactly how I and probably 5 billion other people use it — as a way of distracting our minds from the onslaught of material reality just before we drift off to temporary oblivion. Vulture's writer interviews Dr. Morgan Ellithorpe, one of the authors of the Journal of Sleep Research study and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware who specializes in media psychology.Dr. Ellithorpe is a proponent of intentional media use as a way to relieve stress, but she tells me that, in her research, she's found that the worst types of media to absorb before bed are those that have no "stopping point" — Instagram, TikTok, shows designed to be binge-watched. If you intend to binge a show, that might be fine: "Making a plan and sticking to it seems to matter," she says. We agree that humans are famously bad at that, and that's where the problems begin. The solution, Dr. Ellithorpe says, is figuring out why we're on our screens and if that reason is "meaningful." Are we turning to a screen in order to recover from an eventful day? Because we want something to talk about with our friends? Because we're seeking, as she puts it, a moment of "hedonic enjoyment"? The key is that you must be able to recognize when that need is fulfilled. Then "you're likely to have a good experience, and you won't need to force yourself to stop. But it takes practice." Dr. Ellithorpe cites several studies for me to review — on gratification, mood-management theory, selective exposure, and self-determination theory — all of which, to various extents, grapple with the notion that human beings can make decisions to use media for purposeful things. "There's this push now to realize that people aren't a monolith, and media uses that seem bad for some people can actually be really good for other people." Although many researchers like Dr. Ellithorpe and her cohort are onboard with this push, she admits that "the movement has not filtered out to the public yet. So the public is still on this kick of 'Oh, media's bad.'" And that's a huge part of the issue. "We sabotage ourselves when it comes to benefiting from media because we've been taught in our society to feel guilty for spending leisure time with media," Dr. Ellithorpe says. "The research in this area suggests that people who want to use media to recover from stress, if they then feel bad about doing so, they don't actually get the benefit from the media use." But even Dr. Ellithorpe is prone to unintentional sleep moralizing, saying she is often "bad" and "on her phone two seconds before I turn off the light." She recommends watching a "low-challenge show" before bed and, like Dr. Kennedy, cites Stranger Things specifically as a dangerous pre-bed content choice because "you have to keep track of all the characters, remember what happened three seasons ago, and it's emotionally charged. It might be difficult afterward to come down from that and go to bed." In the end, she suggests watching whatever you want as long as it doesn't delay your bedtime.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ticketmaster provoked ire with a botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift's first concert in five years. NPR reports:On Thursday afternoon, the day before tickets were due to open to the general public, Ticketmaster announced that the sale had been cancelled altogether due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Taylor Swift broke her silence on Friday in statement on Instagram in which she said it is "excruciating for me to watch mistakes happen with no recourse." She said there are many reasons people had a hard time getting tickets, and she's trying to figure out how to improve the situation moving forward. "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," she wrote, without naming Ticketmaster. America's Justice Department "has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster," reports the New York Times. But the investigation "predates the botched sale" and "is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry."The new investigation is the latest scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment, which is the product of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster that the Justice Department approved in 2010. That created a giant in the live entertainment business that still has no equals in its reach or power.... The debacle involving Ms. Swiftâ(TM)s concert tickets this week has exacerbated complaints in the music business and in Washington that Live Nationâ(TM)s power has constrained competition and harmed consumers. Or, as NPR puts it, "The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers."Would-be concertgoers have complained vocally about recent incidents with near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have feuded with it over the decades. One common complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a clear alternative or competitor to Ticketmaster, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice). Now Tennessee's attorney general, a Republican, is opening a consumer protection investigation into the incident. North Carolina's attorney general announced on Thursday that his office is investigating Ticketmaster for allegedly violating consumers' rights and antitrust laws. And multiple Democratic lawmakers are asking questions about the company's dominance â" not for the first time.... "Taylor Swift's tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly," tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who has long called for investigation and accountability into the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation. The article also cites a Thursday statement from Ticketmaster:The company says that using Verified Fan invite codes has historically helped manage the volume of users visiting the website to buy tickets, though that wasn't the case on Tuesday. "The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn't have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests â" 4x our previous peak," it said, adding that it slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize its systems, resulting in longer wait times for some users. It estimates that about 15% of interactions across the website experienced issues, which it said is "15% too many." The Tuesday sale also broke Ticketmaster's record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day," reports People, "selling two million tickets." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The creator of the Linux/macOS package manager Homebrew has a new package manager named Tea. But according to Stack Overflow's podcast, the software also "aims to solve the problem of providing funding for popular open source projects."While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. You can read Max's launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. The paper describes the proposed solution as "a decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem and enacted through the tea incentive algorithm applied across all entries in the tea registry."And the launch post calls tea "our revolution against a failing system," arguing "We're taking our knowledge of how to make development more efficient and throwing innovations nobody has ever really considered before. "Package managers haven't been sexy. Until now. Most importantly, we're moving the package registry on-chain (relax, we'll use a low-energy proof of stake chain). This has numerous benefits due to the inherent benefits of blockchain technology." For starters, decentralized storage will make the packages always-available and immutable, signed by maintainers themselves. But there's more:web3 has enabled novel new ways to distribute value, and with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it. Periodically, we reward this staking because it is securing our token network. We give a portion of these rewards to the staker and a portion to packages of their choice along with all the dependencies of those packages. Note that no portion goes to us. We're not like the other app stores....tea is the home to a DAO that will ensure the open source maintainers that keep the Internet running are rewarded as they deserve. An introduction to the white paper adds that in the spirit of the open source movement, "we're inviting developers, speculators, and enthusiasts alike to contribute to our white paper and help brew the future of the internet. This is our revolutionary undertaking to create equitable openâsource for web3, and we want you to be a part of laying its groundwork." Thanks to guest reader for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched last week on the Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Steam, Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection contains over 100 games, and also "over an hour of exclusive video interviews with key players in the games industry" (according to its web site). Forbes says the compilation "may well be the best game collection ever made." The Verge says the compilation is "huge, detailed, and does an amazing job of explaining why these games are so important." But Ars Technica complains it's "stuffed with historical filler." And yet, "one new game contained in the package won't let me go..." their reviewer adds. "I'm talking about Vctr Sctr, a retro-style arcade shooter that melds the addictive gameplay of classics like Asteroids and Tempest with modern gameplay concepts."As a package, Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection sets a new high-water mark for retro video game compilations. The collection's "timeline" feature deftly weaves archival materials like design documents and manuals, explanatory context and contemporary quotes from the game's release, and new video interviews with game creators into an engaging, interactive trip through gaming history. But while the presentation shines, the games contained within Atari 50 often don't. Sure, there are a few truly replayable classics on offer here, especially in the games from Atari's glorious arcade era. That said, the bulk of Atari 50's selection of over 100 titles feels like filler that just doesn't hold up from a modern game design perspective. Dozens of "classic" Atari games — from 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe on the Atari 2600 to Missile Command 3D on the Jaguar — boil down to mere historical curiosities that most modern players would be hard-pressed to tolerate for longer than a couple of minutes. Then there's Vctr Sctr, one of a handful of "reimagined" games on Atari 50 that attempt to re-create the feel of a classic Atari title with modern hardware and design touches.... More than just the look, Vctr Sctr does a great job capturing and updating what vector games of the early arcade era felt like to play. Vctr Sctr apparently manages to combine updated versions of Asteroids, Lunar Lander, , and Tempest (in increasingly difficult waves). The article notes it's just one of six "reimagined" titles in Atari 50, but calls Vctr Sctr "a perfect brain-break game, an excuse to ignore the outside world for a quick, distracting burst of focused, high-energy chaos. "In that way, it might be Atari 50's best demonstration of what the classic arcade era was really like."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"American billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates has pledged to use 5.4% of his net worth to finance Africa's health and agriculture sectors," reports Quartz, "which he believes anchor the continent's progress."Since landing in Nairobi on Nov.15, Gates has visited both rural and urban parts of the country, including primary healthcare centers, medical and agricultural research institutes, and smallholder farms to understand "what approaches are making an impact, and what obstacles remain." His tour culminated in a town hall meeting with hundreds of students at the University of Nairobi on Nov. 17 where he announced $7 billion funding to help Africa fight diseases and boost agricultural capacity in the next four years. "The big global challenges we face are persistent. But we have to remember, so are the people solving them," said Gates. He added that his foundation will keep finding solutions to improving the two sectors "and the systems to get them out of the labs and to the people who need them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Browser Company's Chromium-based Arc browser "isn't perfect, and it takes some getting used to," writes the Verge. "But it's full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web — and it's right about most of them."Arc wants to be the web's operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen. Another way to think about it is that Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components for you to pull apart, play with, and use to create something of your own. Want something to look better or have an idea for what to do with it? Go for it. This is a fun moment in the web browser industry. After more than a decade of total Chrome dominance, users are looking elsewhere for more features, more privacy, and better UI. Vivaldi has some really clever features; SigmaOS is also betting on browsers as operating systems; Brave has smart ideas about privacy; even Edge and Firefox are getting better fast. But Arc is the biggest swing of them all: an attempt to not just improve the browser but reinvent it entirely.... Right now, Arc is only available for the Mac, but the company has said it's also working on Windows and mobile versions, both due next year. It's still in a waitlisted beta and is still very much a beta app, with some basic features missing, other features still in flux, and a few deeply annoying bugs. But Arc's big ideas are the right ones. I don't know if The Browser Company is poised to take on giants and win the next generation of the browser wars, but I'd bet that the future of browsers looks a lot like Arc.... In a way, Arc is more like ChromeOS than Chrome. It tries to expand the browser to become the only app you need because, in a world where all your apps are web apps and all your files are URLs, who really needs more than a browser? The article describes Arc as a power user tool with vertical sidebar combining bookmarks, tabs, and apps. (And sets of these can apparently be combined into different "spaces".) These are enhanced with a hefty set of keyboard shortcuts (including tab searching), along with built-in media controls for Twitch/Spotify/Google Meet (as well as a picture-in-picture mode). BR.Arc even has a shareable, collaborative whiteboard app "Easel". And it also offers powerful features like the ability to rewrite how your browser displays any site's CSS. ("I have one that removes the Trending sidebar from Twitter and another that cleans up my Gmail page.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Dear internet service providers of America: We're onto your tricks," writes Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler:Last year, I encouraged Washington Post readers to participate in a major nationwide study of ISPs by uploading a copy of their monthly bills to Fight for Fair Internet, a project of Consumer Reports and other partners. Some 22,000 Americans did, and the results released Thursday reveal the many ways internet and cable companies get away with jacking up our bills. For you and me, the study of big and small ISPs alike offers a clearer view of their worst behaviors — and how to fight back. The most important cost-saving lesson: Calling up and threatening to quit your internet service works. It's super annoying, I know, but Verizon (for example) applied discounts to 58 percent of the bills people submitted, with an astounding monthly median discount of $40. The study's spotlight on ISP tricks, including bogus fees, data caps and wildly inconsistent pricing, also is fresh evidence that in many parts of the United States, there just isn't a competitive market for internet service. Who would put up with it if there were? About 200 million people live in parts of the country with only one or two choices for reliable, fast internet, according to a 2021 report from the White House. The report identified the U.S. internet providers charging the highest equipment rental fees (Wave Broadband) and the highest data-cap fees (Cox Communications), as well as the ones with the lowest and highest monthly service fees. But in addition, Consumer Reports notes that "Download speeds routinely fail to match the advertised 'up to' speeds of several ISPs. This was especially true of consumers paying for 'premium' plans purporting to offer download speeds of between 940 and 1,200 Mbps, who in fact experienced median speeds of between 360 and 373 Mbps." The Washington Post highlights one case "Where you might pay more for less: AT&T"On volunteer bills, AT&T's median pricing across different speed plans was all over the map. People getting: 12 mbps paid $63. 45 mbps paid $80. 100 mbps paid $60. 1000 mbps paid $80. Why should people who aren't even getting minimum broadband speeds (25 mbps) be paying more than people getting zippy service? ISPs can and will charge whatever they can get away with in your neighborhood. "The charges on those bills may reflect older plans that we no longer sell," said AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly. "Customers with older plans can check on our website or call in to see if a lower cost offer is available to them for faster speeds and switch service." That's another lesson for all of us: It's always worth checking to see if there's a new deal available. Unlike the cellphone carriers, ISPs rarely proactively switch consumers into cheaper or better plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian notes that "While leap seconds pass by unnoticed for most people, they can cause problems for a range of systems that require an exact, uninterrupted flow of time, such as satellite navigation, software, telecommunication, trade and even space travel." So now Nature magazine reports that "The practice of adding 'leap seconds' to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth's rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world's foremost metrology body has decided."The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have drifted apart by more than 0.9 seconds, a leap second has been added.... Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Google are among the tech companies that have called for leap seconds to be scrapped. The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to put on how much they be allowed to diverge.... Although in the long term Earth's rotation slows due to the pull of the Moon, a speed-up since 2020 has also made the issue more pressing, because for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed, rather than added. UTC has only ever had to slow a beat to wait for Earth, not skip ahead to catch up with it. "It's kind of being described as a Y2K issue, because it's just something that we've never had to deal with," said Elizabeth Donley, who leads the Time and Frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, America's Food and Drug Administration has "approved a treatment that can delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes," reports ABC News:Teplizumab, a monoclonal antibody that will be marketed under the brand name Tzield from pharmaceutical companies ProventionBio and Sanofi, is administered through intravenous infusion. The injection was shown in clinical trials to delay onset of insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes for patients with autoantibody markers of early risk by over two years, with hopes for some that it can delay onset even longer.... Tzield was approved to delay the onset of stage 3 Type 1 diabetes in adults and children ages 8 and up who currently have stage 2 Type 1 diabetes. The medication is thought to slow down the body's attack on its own insulin-producing cells and thus give people more time before they become dependent on pharmaceutical insulin. Tzield is not suitable for people with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes, people who are pre-Type 2 diabetics or those with type 2 diabetes. "This approval is a watershed moment for the treatment and prevention of type 1 diabetes," said Dr. Mark S. Anderson, director of the University of California San Francisco Diabetes Center. "Until now, the only real therapy for patients has been a lifetime of insulin replacement. This new therapy targets and helps to halt the autoimmune process that leads to the loss of insulin...." Studies have shown that 75% of people with these diagnostic markers usually become insulin-dependent within five years and nearly 100% at some point in their lifetime. ABC News also shares this quote from Dr. John Sharretts, director of the Division of Diabetes, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "The drug's potential to delay clinical diagnosis of type 1 diabetes may provide patients with months to years without the burdens of disease."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Triple threat. Tripledemic. A viral perfect storm. These frightening phrases have dominated recent headlines as some health officials, clinicians, and scientists forecast that SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) could surge at the same time in Northern Hemisphere locales that have relaxed masking, social distancing, and other COVID-19 precautions. But a growing body of epidemiological and laboratory evidence offers some reassurance: SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses often "interfere" with each other. Although waves of each virus may stress emergency rooms and intensive care units, the small clique of researchers who study these viral collisions say there is little chance the trio will peak together and collectively crash hospital systems the way COVID-19 did at the pandemic's start. "Flu and other respiratory viruses and SARS-CoV-2 just don't get along very well together," says virologist Richard Webby, an influenza researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "It's unlikely that they will circulate widely at the same time." "One virus tends to bully the others," adds epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. During the surge of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in Hong Kong in March, Cowling found that other respiratory viruses "disappeared ... and they came back again in April." When a respiratory virus sweeps through a community, interferons can broadly raise the body's defenses and temporarily erect a populationwide immune barrier against subsequent viruses that target the respiratory system. "Basically, every virus triggers the interferon response to some extent, and every virus is susceptible to it," says immunologist Ellen Foxman at Yale University, who has been exploring interference between SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in a laboratory model of the human airway. Rhinoviruses, which cause common colds, can trip up influenza A (the most prevalent flu virus). RSV can bump rhinoviruses and human metapneumoviruses. Influenza A can thwart its distant cousin influenza B. "There are a lot of major health implications from viral interference," says Guy Boivin, a virologist at Laval University who co-authored a review (PDF) on viral interference earlier this year. Now, viral interference researchers are closely watching the newest respiratory virus to circle the globe. "What interactions could SARS-CoV-2 have with other viruses?" Murcia asks. "To this day, there are no robust epidemiological data." For one thing, the widespread social distancing and mask wearing in many countries meant there was little chance to see interference in action. "There was almost no circulation of other respiratory viruses during the first 3 years of the pandemic," Boivin says. Also, SARS-CoV-2 has many defenses against interferons, including preventing their production, which might affect its interactions with other viruses. Still, Foxman has published evidence that, in her organoid model, rhinovirus can interfere with SARS-CoV-2. And Boivin's team has reported (PDF) that influenza A and SARS-CoV-2 each can block the other in cell studies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Phys.Org reports: Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies, is available online, where it can also be downloaded for free. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. Night after night for years, the telescope aimed at slightly different locations to capture this unusually broad perspective. The map, which [map creator Brice Manard] assembled with the help of former Johns Hopkins computer science student Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies -- each dot on the map is a galaxy and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is simply one of these dots, the one at the very bottom of the map. The expansion of the universe contributes to make this map even more colorful. The farther an object, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first flash of radiation emitted soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. "In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets," Manard says. "We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale." For those interested, Johns Hopkins University published a video about the map on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to documents recently declassified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a classified satellite image of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR reports: Now, three years after Trump's tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public. Many details on the original image remain redacted -- a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the U.S. government's most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists. "He was getting literally a bird's eye view of some of the most sensitive US intelligence on Iran," he says. "And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter." "[A]erospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft," adds Gizmodo. "The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble Telescope, but instead of getting a closer look at the stars, it views the Earth's surface."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Say hello to ronnagrams and quettameters: International scientists gathered in France voted on Friday for new metric prefixes to express the world's largest and smallest measurements, prompted by an ever-growing amount of data. It marks the first time in more than three decades that new prefixes have been added to the International System of Units (SI), the agreed global standard for the metric system. Joining the ranks of well-known prefixes like kilo and milli are ronna and quetta for the largest numbers -- and ronto and quecto for the smallest. The change was voted on by scientists and government representatives from across the world attending the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which governs the SI and meets roughly every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris. The prefixes make it easier to express large amounts -- for example, always referring to a kilometer as 1,000 meters or a millimeter as one thousandth of a meter would quickly become cumbersome. Since the SI was established in 1960, scientific need has led to a growing number of prefixes. The last time was in 1991, when chemists wanting to express vast molecular quantities spurred the addition of zetta and yotta. The new prefixes can simplify how we talk about some pretty big objects. "If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams," which is a six followed by 27 zeroes, [sad Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory]. "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added -- a two followed by 30 zeros. Brown said he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. Google in particular has been using hella for bytes since 2010. "Those were terms that were unofficially in circulation, so it was clear that the SI had to do something," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, agents from both the FBI and the U.S. Air Force raided multiple homes belonging to a man who runs a little-known blog about Area 51. Gizmodo reports: That man, Joerg Arnu, said the swarm of federal agents in riot gear busted into his primary residence, handcuffed him, then marched him outside to wait in the freezing cold while they rifled through his apartment and took pretty much every piece of electronic equipment that he owned. So far, the government has been pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, but officials did verify that it happened. In a statement provided to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Lt. Col. Bryon McGarry confirmed the raid. He did not elaborate on its purpose, saying only: "This is an open and ongoing law enforcement investigation between the Las Vegas FBI and Air Force OSI." What did cops want? It's not exactly clear. Since 1999, Arnu has run Dreamland Resort, a website that covers activities in and around Area 51, the notoriously secretive government facility located in Groom Lake, Nevada. Long the subject of speculation and curiosity, the highly classified facility is the site of myriad UFO sightings. Coincidentally (or not), it is also the location where the Air Force reportedly tests and develops some of its most sensitive and experimental new projects and aircraft (see: the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s, for instance). Among other things, Arnu's site features pictures and writing about the Air Force's so-called "black projects" -- opaque, classified operations carried out behind a veil of government secrecy. Arnu claims that the agents confiscated his "laptops, phones, backup drives, camera gear, and my drone were seized." He describes the situation in detail in a blog post on his website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"China has submitted the most research papers accepted at a prestigious international academic conference focused on semiconductors, underscoring the country's growing presence in the field and bumping the U.S. into second place (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source)," reports Nikkei Asia. The committee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) was held in South Korea on Nov. 16. From a report: According to the committee, a total of 629 research papers were submitted for next year's ISSCC, including 198 that passed the screening. The 198 include 59 from China, 42 from the United States and 32 from South Korea. China rose from third to first and South Korea's number decreased by nine compared to the previous one. "China increased its selected research paper count in every category and the Chinese government played an important role in this," one of the participants said [...]. The academic conference in the field of semiconductor integrated circuit design was first held in 1954. It is the largest and most renowned international conference in this field and next year's conference will start on Feb. 19 in San Francisco. More than 3,000 researchers from over 30 countries will attend it to share the latest technologies in the field.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Fortnite developer Epic Games said Google paid the equivalent of $360 million to Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard as part of a broad agreement that included a promise the gaming giant would not create a rival app store. The move, Epic said, helped solidify Google's hold on phones and tablets powered by its Android software. In the filing, newly unredacted Thursday, Epic said Google paid other developers in a similar way to Activision. Epic cited an agreement Google struck with Tencent, the Chinese company that owns League of Legends developer Riot Games, giving it about $30 million over one year. Like Activision, that money too was part of a larger agreement for Riot to maintain its Google-powered games and spend money promoting them as part of Android. Google and Activision Blizzard both denied Epic's allegations about competing app stores. Google said the agreements are designed to provide incentives for developers to create apps for Google Play. "Epic is mischaracterizing business conversations," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "It does not prevent developers from creating competing app stores, as Epic falsely alleges." Activision, for its part, said Google never "asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play." Activision is in the midst of being acquired by software giant Microsoft for $68.7 billion. [...] The filing is the latest allegation in Epic's ongoing lawsuit against Google, which it accuses of operating a monopoly with Google Play, which sells apps for Android. Epic's ongoing lawsuit is similar to another battle it's waging against Apple and its App Store over similar concerns of monopolistic practices. In both cases, Epic is pushing the companies to reduce the control they exert over their respective platforms, both in terms of how phone and tablet owners pay for apps and where to download them from. It's unclear whether Epic's argument that Google paid developers to not compete will win in an eventual court case. Epic said in its complaint that "Google understood" the agreement would mean that Activision would "abandon its plans to launch a competing app store, and Google intended this result." But Armin Zerza, now Activision Blizzard's finance chief, said in one of the court filings that the company chose not to launch a rival app store because of the risk of failure, in addition to costs for development and marketing. When asked about entering a deal with Google that "accomplished your objectives," Zerza said that the Activision Blizzard board approved a deal with the Android maker because it "created multi-hundred-million dollars of value for us across multiple ecosystems." If Activision is ultimately purchased by Microsoft though, it may end up helping create an app store after all. Microsoft told regulators in October that it intends to build its own mobile app store to rival Google and Apple. Activision's deep library of popular games, including Candy Crush Saga and World of Warcraft, will be a key part of that effort. "Epic's allegations are nonsense," an Activision representative said in a statement sent to PC Gamer. "We can confirm that Google never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play -- and we've already submitted documents and testimony that prove this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Six years after we saw the FCC formally propose "nutrition labels" for your carrier's potentially confusing array of plans, the agency says it's finally happening. The Verge reports: This week, it's ordering US internet service providers to adopt the label format you're looking at [here] -- or it will, as soon as some last bureaucratic elements get worked out. They've changed a bit since 2016 -- now, each plan will apparently have its own label rather than ISPs trying to cram all of them into a single sheet, they don't warn you about coverage, and apparently, ISPs will be able to point you to their network management policy legalese instead of having to ding themselves for throttling data or giving some apps a fast lane. They won't have to report packet loss, either, it seems. Thankfully, ISPs will still need to report their typical speeds and latency, not just reiterate their advertised speed. Hopefully, someone will audit that. Most big ISPs will have six months to slap the new labels onto their websites and distribute them in stores, though the FCC's giving ones with less than 100,000 subscribers a full year to comply. But none of those shot clocks start until the Office of Management and Budget reviews the order to make sure it complies with the Paperwork Reduction Act and similar statutes, the FCC notes, so it might be a bit longer. In the meanwhile, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel suggests that ISPs might want to get ahead of things and adopt them on their own. The FCC also says it hopes these labels will evolve from here [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VMware today announced the launch of Fusion 13, the latest major update to the Fusion virtualization software. MacRumors reports: For those unfamiliar with Fusion, it is designed to allow Mac users to operate virtual machines to run non-macOS operating systems like Windows 11. Fusion 13 Pro and Fusion 13 Player are compatible with both Intel Macs and Apple silicon Macs equipped with M-series chips, offering native support. VMware has been testing Apple silicon support for several months now ahead of the launch of the latest version of Fusion. With Fusion 13, Intel and Apple silicon Mac users can access Windows 11 virtual machines. Intel Macs offer full support for Windows 11, while on Apple silicon, VMware says there is a first round of features for Windows 11 on Arm. Users who need to run traditional win32 and x64 apps can do so through built-in emulation. Fusion 13 also includes a TPM 2.0 virtual device that can be added to any VM, storing contents in an encrypted section of the virtual machine files and offering hardware-tpm functionality parity. To support this feature, Fusion 13 uses a fast encryption type that encrypts only the parts of the VM necessary to support the TPM device for performance and security. The software supports OpenGL 4.3 in Windows and Linux VMs on Intel and in Linux VMs on Apple silicon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced Friday in a federal court to 135 months, more than 11 years in prison following her conviction on four counts of criminal fraud. The court found she deceived investors, including News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and a host of other luminaries, about the efficacy of Theranos' blood-testing technology. CNBC reports: Holmes cried while speaking to the court ahead of her sentencing. "I loved Theranos. It was my life's work," Holmes said. "My team meant the world to me. I am devastated by my failings. I'm so so sorry. I gave everything I had to build my company." Her defense team argued she should face a maximum sentence of 18 months, according to court filings. The Wall Street Journal first broke the story of how Theranos' blood-testing technology was struggling to meet expectations in 2015. Whistleblowers and other witnesses came forth to provide detailed accounts of how Holmes and former operating chief Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani deceived patients, partners, investors and employees about the company's progress and the capabilities of its technology. "Thank you for having me. Thank you for the courtesy and respect you have shown me," she said Friday. "I have felt deep pain for what people went through because I failed them. To investors, patients, I am sorry." Prosecutors sought a 15 year sentence for the pregnant 38-year-old former billionaire and Silicon Valley celebrity. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sold a stake in the company worth $300 million when the crypto exchange raised capital last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing the firm's financial records and people familiar with the transaction. At the time, Bankman-Fried told investors it was a partial reimbursement of money he'd spent to buy out rival Binance's stake in FTX a few months earlier, the report added. The Journal's report cited FTX's October 2021 funding round where the company had raised $420 million from a clutch of big name investors including Temasek and Tiger Global, valuing the crypto exchange at $25 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Spanish police have dismantled a network of pirated streaming sites that illegally distributed content from 2,600 TV channels and 23,000 movies and series to roughly 500,000 users. From a report: The law enforcement action took place in a joint operation involving the Spanish police and EUROPOL, resulting in the arrest of four operators in Malaga. Additionally, 95 resellers in Spain, Malta, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, and the United Kingdom have been identified. The pirated TV network used numerous websites to advertise and promote subscription-based streaming services, listing unlimited access to channels from different platforms. The live streams from these platforms were decoded with stolen or abused accounts and passwords and then re-broadcasted to the subscribers' video player clients. The resellers bought the subscription packages from the organization operators and resold them to thousands of people in their local countries to profit from the price difference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster, whose sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets descended into chaos this week, The New York Times reported Friday, citing sources. The investigation is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry. From the report: That power has been in the spotlight after Ticketmaster's systems crashed while Ms. Swift fans were trying to buy tickets in a presale for her upcoming tour, but the investigation predates the botched sale, the people said. Staff members at the agency's antitrust division have in recent months contacted music venues and players in the ticket market, asking about Live Nation's practices and the wider dynamics of the industry, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is sensitive. The inquiry appears to be broad, looking at whether the company maintains a monopoly over the industry, said one of the people. Officials in the Biden administration have spent the last two years trying to push the boundaries of antitrust law. The Justice Department has mounted several challenges to major mergers, successfully convincing a judge to block Penguin Random House's purchase of Simon & Schuster but losing some other cases. The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block Meta, Facebook's parent company, from acquiring a small virtual reality start-up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Italian administrative court on Friday rejected an appeal by Alphabet's Google against a decision by Italy's antitrust authority to fine the group, but accepted iPhone maker Apple's appeal against the watchdog's ruling. From a report: Last year, Italy's antitrust regulator fined Google and Apple 10 million euros ($10.36 million) each, claiming that the two tech groups had not provided "clear and immediate information" on how they collect and use the data of those who access their services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happens when old atomic bombs are retired? Last month, the Biden administration announced its intention to withdraw the nation's most powerful weapon from the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From a report: The bomb is called the B83. It is a hydrogen bomb that debuted in 1983 -- a time when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "an evil empire." The government made 660 of the deadly weapons, which were to be delivered by fast bombers. The B83 was 12 feet long, had fins and packed an explosive force roughly 80 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Its job was to obliterate hardened military sites and command bunkers, including Moscow's. What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. Yesterday the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out. From a report: Meta's misstep -- and its hubris -- show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models. There is a large body of research that highlights the flaws of this technology, including its tendencies to reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts. Galactica is a large language model for science, trained on 48 million examples of scientific articles, websites, textbooks, lecture notes, and encyclopedias. Meta promoted its model as a shortcut for researchers and students. In the company's words, Galactica "can summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more." But the shiny veneer wore through fast. Like all language models, Galactica is a mindless bot that cannot tell fact from fiction. Within hours, scientists were sharing its biased and incorrect results on social media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says token theft attacks are on the rise. From a report: Microsoft has outlined several mitigations to protect against attacks on multi-factor authentication that will unfortunately make life more difficult for your remote workers. Three years ago, attacks on multi-factor authentication (MFA) were so rare that Microsoft didn't have decent statistics on them, largely because few organisations had enabled MFA. But with MFA use rising as attacks on passwords become more common, Microsoft has seen an increase in attackers using token theft in their attempts to sidestep MFA. In these attacks, the attacker compromises a token issued to someone who's already completed MFA and replays that token to gain access from a different device. Tokens are central to OAuth 2.0 identity platforms, including Azure Active Directory (AD), which aim to make authentication simpler and faster for users, but in a way that's still resilient to password attacks. Moreover, Microsoft warns that token theft is dangerous because it doesn't require high technical skills, detection is difficult and, because the technique has only recently seen an uptick, few organisations have mitigations in place. "Recently, the Microsoft Detection and Response Team (DART) has seen an increase in attackers utilizing token theft for this purpose," Microsoft says in a blogpost. "By compromising and replaying a token issued to an identity that has already completed multifactor authentication, the threat actor satisfies the validation of MFA and access is granted to organizational resources accordingly. This poses to be a concerning tactic for defenders because the expertise needed to compromise a token is very low, is hard to detect, and few organizations have token theft mitigations in their incident response plan."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon will be cutting jobs again at some point in early 2023, CEO Andy Jassy informed employees in a memo on Thursday. The company publicly confirmed some layoffs on Wednesday, and Jassy says that as Amazon's annual planning process extends into the new year, "there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments." From a report: Jassy says the company hasn't determined exactly how many additional roles will be cut but did state that there will be "reductions in our Stores and [People, Experience, and Technology] organizations." Amazon will inform who will be impacted by the future cuts early next year. In the Wednesday notice, devices and services SVP Dave Limp said that some staffers in the organization were being laid off, and Jassy said Thursday that the company has extended voluntary buyouts to some of its HR organization, confirming reporting from Vox. Vox's article highlighted how layoffs have been communicated internally before top executives shared information publicly, and based on Jassy's note, it seems that approach will continue. "As has been the case this week, we will prioritize communicating directly with impacted employees before making broad public or internal announcements," Jassy wrote. The company will try to find roles for impacted people internally, and if it can't, workers will be offered severance packages, according to Jassy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's core consumer inflation accelerated to a 40-year high in October as a weak yen pushed up the cost of imported commodities, which were already surging due to global supply constraints. From a report: The data suggests Japanese companies may be shaking off their deflationary mindset as they gradually raise prices of everything from fuel to food while coming under pressure from cost-push inflation. The nationwide core consumer price index (CPI), which excludes volatile fresh food prices but includes energy, rose 3.6% year on year in October, versus a 3.5% rise expected by economists, and accelerating from the prior month's 3.0% gain. The jump marked the fastest gain since February 1982. It also confirmed CPI growth remained above the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) 2% inflation goal for a seventh straight month. Despite broadening price pressures, which are a growing concern for households, however, the BOJ would not join a global trend of tightening monetary policy through rate hikes. BOJ Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda reiterated on Thursday a pledge to maintain monetary stimulus to support a fragile economy facing still weak inflation and reeling from the COVID downturn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India launched its first rocket developed by a startup into space on Friday, with the aim of testing the company's technology that will be used to design three orbital vehicles. From a report: The Vikram-S rocket, developed by Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace, took off at 11:30 a.m. local time from Sriharikota, an island near Chennai in southeastern India. The rocket reached an altitude of 89.5 kilometers (56 miles) and all systems worked as planned, Pawan Goenka, head of an industry space body said. "It's a major step forward to India developing its own space ecosystem and emerging as a front-line nation in space," Space Minister Jitendra Singh said. Built in just two years, the sub-orbital validated the pressure, temperature and vibration in Skyroot's orbital vehicles, with the first of the series, Vikram I, scheduled to launch next year. It carried a payload from two Indian aerospace startups and a non-profit space research laboratory in Armenia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frederick Brooks, the famed computer architect who discovered the software tar pit and designed OS/360, died Thursday. He also debunked the concept of the Mythical Man-Month in his book, writing: "Adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer." A true icon, who won the Turing Award in 2000, Brooks was one of the great thinkers in computing. Industry tributes are pouring in the celebration of his contribution and life. Further reading: His interview with Grady Booch for Computer History Museum [PDF].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Peter is an IT manager for a technology manufacturer that got hit with a Russian ransomware strain called "Zeppelin" in May 2020. He'd been on the job less than six months, and because of the way his predecessor architected things, the company's data backups also were encrypted by Zeppelin. After two weeks of stalling their extortionists, Peter's bosses were ready to capitulate and pay the ransom demand. Then came the unlikely call from an FBI agent. "Don't pay," the agent said. "We've found someone who can crack the encryption." Peter, who spoke candidly about the attack on condition of anonymity, said the FBI told him to contact a cybersecurity consulting firm in New Jersey called Unit 221B, and specifically its founder -- Lance James. Zeppelin sprang onto the crimeware scene in December 2019, but it wasn't long before James discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the malware's encryption routines that allowed him to brute-force the decryption keys in a matter of hours, using nearly 100 cloud computer servers. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, James said Unit 221B was wary of advertising its ability to crack Zeppelin ransomware keys because it didn't want to tip its hand to Zeppelin's creators, who were likely to modify their file encryption approach if they detected it was somehow being bypassed. This is not an idle concern. There are multiple examples of ransomware groups doing just that after security researchers crowed about finding vulnerabilities in their ransomware code. "The minute you announce you've got a decryptor for some ransomware, they change up the code," James said. But he said the Zeppelin group appears to have stopped spreading their ransomware code gradually over the past year, possibly because Unit 221B's referrals from the FBI let them quietly help nearly two dozen victim organizations recover without paying their extortionists. [...] The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects. "If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" [James and co-author Joel Lathrop wrote in a blog post]. "The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key." Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key. From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them. The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys. A more technical writeup on Unit 221B's discoveries (cheekily titled "0XDEAD ZEPPELIN") is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The iPhone 15 Pro models are in line for a massive upgrade to their wired transfer speeds with the switch to USB-C, according to noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Unfortunately, he doesn't believe that benefit is coming to the regular 2023 iPhones. The Verge reports: He predicts that the 15 and 15 Plus will also swap in USB-C ports but, just like the 2022 10th-gen iPad, they'll be stuck with the same USB 2.0 speeds they had with Lighting. Kuo made the prediction in a series of tweets on Wednesday and says the information is from his "latest survey." (The analyst is known for getting information from supply chain sources.) He specified by predicting that the "15 Pro & 15 Pro Max will support at least USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3." If that's true, that'd mean they could transfer data at speeds up to 40 Gbps -- a boon for people who actually use the Pro phones to shoot a lot of ProRes video and raw photos, where even fast WiFi and cloud uploads aren't really a good substitute.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's first vaccine to treat deadly cancerous brain tumors can potentially give patients years of extra life, a global clinical trial has concluded. The Guardian reports: A senior NHS doctor who was one of the trial's chief investigators said the evidence showed DCVax had resulted in "astonishing" enhanced survival for patients. One patient in the 331-person multicenter global study lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax. In Britain, 53-year-old Nigel French is still alive seven years after having it. If approved by medical regulators, DCVax would be the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and the first in 27 years for people in whom it had returned. "The total results are astonishing," said Prof Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College hospital in London who was the European chief investigator of the trial. "The final results of this phase three trial... offer fresh hope to patients battling with glioblastoma." Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology. The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn't take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake nude imagery of celebrities. But while Reddit quickly shut down many of the subreddits dedicated to AI porn, and communities like NewGrounds, which allows some forms of adult art, banned AI-generated artwork altogether, new forums emerged to fill the gap. By far the largest is Unstable Diffusion, whose operators are building a business around AI systems tailored to generate high-quality porn. The server's Patreon -- started to keep the server running as well as fund general development -- is currently raking in over $2,500 a month from several hundred donors. "In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators," Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, told TechCrunch in a conversation via Discord. "We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from." Unsurprisingly, some AI ethicists are as worried as Chaudhry is optimistic. While the use of AI to create porn isn't new [...] Unstable Diffusion's models are capable of generating higher-fidelity examples than most. The generated porn could have negative consequences particularly for marginalized groups, the ethicists say, including the artists and adult actors who make a living creating porn to fulfill customers' fantasies. Unstable Diffusion got its start in August -- around the same time that the Stable Diffusion model was released. Initially a subreddit, it eventually migrated to Discord, where it now has roughly 50,000 members. [...] Today, the Unstable Diffusion server hosts AI-generated porn in a range of different art styles, sexual preferences and kinks. [...] Users in these channels can invoke the bot to generate art that fits the theme, which they can then submit to a "starboard" if they're especially pleased with the results. Unstable Diffusion claims to have generated over 4,375,000 images to date. On a semiregular basis, the group hosts competitions that challenge members to recreate images using the bot, the results of which are used in turn to improve Unstable Diffusion's models. As it grows, Unstable Diffusion aspires to be an "ethical" community for AI-generated porn -- i.e. one that prohibits content like child pornography, deepfakes and excessive gore. Users of the Discord server must abide by the terms of service and submit to moderation of the images that they generate; Chaudhry claims the server employs a filter to block images containing people in its "named persons" database and has a full-time moderation team. "Chaudhry sees Unstable Diffusion evolving into an organization to support broader AI-powered content generation, sponsoring dev groups and providing tools and resources to help teams build their own systems," reports TechCrunch. "He claims that Equilibrium AI secured a spot in a startup accelerator program from an unnamed 'large cloud compute provider' that comes with a 'five-figure' grant in cloud hardware and compute, which Unstable Diffusion will use to expand its model training infrastructure." In addition to the grant, Unstable Diffusion will launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek venture funding, Chaudhry says. "We plan to create our own models and fine-tune and combine them for specialized use cases which we shall spin off into new brands and products," Chaudhry added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has confirmed that it's removing addresses, "interested in", political views and religion from Facebook profiles as of December 1st. Engadget reports: The move is meant to make Facebook "easier to navigate and use," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. If you've filled out any of these fields, you'll get a notification about the change. Other details you provide, such as your contact information and relationship status, will persist. You can download a copy of your Facebook data before December 1st if you're determined to preserve it, and you still have control over who can see the remaining profile content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: Yikes, gadzooks, and shiver my timbers! Elastic Labs has found surprisingly that 50% of malware comes from one app: MacKeeper, ironically. Ironic in that MacKeeper claims to "keep your Mac clean and safe with zero effort." MacKeeper also has a tainted reputation for being difficult to completely uninstall and as a malicious antivirus. A new spin on the biblical phrase, "Am I my brother's keeper..." Well, when the inmate is running the asylum. The findings appear in Elastic Security Labs' recently released 2022 Global Threat Report. As Neowin reports, MacKeeper "can be abused by threat actors because it has extensive permissions and access to processes and files." With that said, the report found that only 6.2% of malware ends up on macOS devices, compared to 54.4% and 39.4% on Windows and Linux, respectively.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced today that it's introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed a majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users. TechCrunch reports: Search Starting today, users will be able to use Search to find their favorite dish at a restaurant near them. For example, you can search "truffle mac and cheese near me" to see which nearby restaurants carry the dish on their menu. Once you find a specific dish that you're looking for, you can get more information about its price, ingredients and more. Another new Search functionality lets you use Google's multisearch feature to find specific food near you. Say you see something tasty-looking online, but don't know what it is or where to find it. You can now use Lens in the Google app for Android or iOS to snap a picture or take a screenshot of a dish and add the words "near me" to find a place that sells it nearby. Later this year, Google is going roll out an update to its Lens AR Translate capabilities so users can more seamlessly translate text on complex backgrounds. Instead of covering up the original text like it currently does, Google is going to erase the text and re-create the pixels underneath with an AI-generated background, and then overlay the translated text on top of the image. Maps As for the new Maps features, Google is launching a new visual search experience called Live View in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. [...] In addition to displaying information about where places are, users will be able to see key information about each spot overlaid, such as whether the location is busy, if its open, what the price range is, etc. Another new Maps feature makes it easier for EV owners to find the best charging station for their vehicle. Now, you can search for "EV charging stations" and select the "fast charge" filter. You can also filter for stations that offer your EV's plug type. Google also announced that it's expanding its "accessible places" feature globally after initially launching it in the U.S., Australia, Japan and the U.K. in 2020. The feature is designed to help people determine whether a place is wheelchair accessible. Shopping Google has announced a new AR shopping feature that is designed to make it easier to find your exact foundation match. The company says its new photo library features 148 models representing a diverse spectrum of skin tones, ages, genders, face shapes, ethnicities and skin types. As a result, it should be easier for shoppers to better visualize what different products will look like on them. [...] Users can now also shop for shoes using AR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars. The fact that electric vehicles are "simpler" than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has long been a talking point of electric vehicle fans and evangelists (aka EVangelists). This has mostly come into play when talking about lower maintenance costs. There aren't all the belts, tubes, hoses, etc. that you find in a gasmobile. That means fewer parts that can break and less maintenance over time. What is less discussed is what Jim Farley has highlighted this week -- that it also means simpler production and a smaller labor force manufacturing the world's cars and trucks. Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges. The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.