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YouTube is the latest company to offer free shows TV with ads. The video giant says you'll now be able to stream nearly 4,000 episodes of TV for free, as long as you're also willing to watch ads during the show. From a report: Shows available include Hell's Kitchen, Andromeda, and Heartland, and you'll be able to watch them in the US on the web, mobile devices, and "most connected TVs via the YouTube TV app," YouTube says in a blog post. With the new free TV shows, YouTube is taking on a number of major competitors. One is over-the-air television -- by offering free TV on demand, YouTube is likely hoping that you'll see what's available on its platform instead of channel surfing to see what else might be on. And there are already many options for streaming ad-supported TV for free, including Tubi, Xumo, Plex, Roku, and offerings from Vizio, and Samsung -- just to name a few -- so YouTube is late to the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abnormally hot air has hit both of the world's poles at once, while the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have been historically low this winter. From a report: Temperature records were broken in Antarctica as warm air swept unusually far into the heart of the continent. Concordia station, which is high above sea level and has an annual average temperature of -50C, reached an all-time high of -12.2C on 18 March, beating the -13.7C record set in December 2016. Another research station, Vostok, also saw record high temperatures. "The Antarctic [heat] is really extreme. I haven't seen anything like that. Colleagues haven't seen anything this extreme," says Walt Meier at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. A band of westerly winds around Antarctica usually isolates the continent from other weather systems. But in the past week, an "atmospheric river" of hot air, originating in the mid-latitudes, travelled down from Tasmania and South Australia, breaching those winds to travel far across the ice, says John Turner at the British Antarctic Survey. Although such events aren't unprecedented, the temperatures this time are very high. Turner says while it is undoubtedly an "extreme event," he thinks the Antarctic heat looks like natural variability rather than climate change. Past research by Turner has found no discernible trend in extreme temperatures in Antarctica, where the hole in the ozone layer appears to have cancelled out the impact of global warming so far. The recent highs won't have any consequences such as impacts on landing strips for scientists stationed on the continent either, says Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado, Boulder, because most have already departed ahead of the Antarctic winter and those remaining are hunkered down with supplies. The record temperatures come shortly after Antarctic sea ice declined to a record low minimum extent, at 1.92 million square kilometres on 25 February. "It was quite a lot lower than anything else in the 40-plus year record," says Scambos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox is finally gaining proper AV1 support. Neowin reports: According to an update made to a post on Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation is finally ready to add hardware acceleration for the AV1 video format. Developers plan to implement improved AV1 support in the upcoming release of Firefox 100, scheduled to arrive on May 3, 2022. Hardware acceleration for AV1 video brings several noticeable benefits to customers. The standard developed by Alliance for Open Media and initially released in March 2018 offers better video compression than H.264 (about 50%) and VP9 (about 20%). Shifting AV1 video processing from software to hardware improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption, resulting in better battery life on tablets and laptops. Google and Microsoft announced hardware-accelerated AV1 video in Chrome and Edge in late 2020. Mozilla, on the other hand, did not rush to introduce improved AV1 support in Firefox. While it is easy to dunk on Firefox, there is a reason why developers took their time. Hardware-accelerated AV1 video is not something you can add to any computer with Windows 10, and it requires a PC with the most recent and powerful hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A digital extortion gang with a murky background and unconventional methods -- one researcher called them "laughably bad" at times -- has claimed responsibility for a string of compromises against some of the world's largest technology companies. The group, known as Lapsus$, said in a series of public posts on the messaging app Telegram this week that it had accessed Okta, the San Francisco-based identity-management firm that provides authentication tools for an array of business clients. Okta said Tuesday that attackers may have viewed data from approximately 2.5% of its customers after breaching the laptop of an engineer at a third-party vendor. Lapsus$ previously claimed to breach organizations including Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, and the gaming company Ubisoft Entertainment. The group said it also accessed data from Microsoft, saying it had gathered source code from the company's Bing search engine, Bing Maps and the Cortana digital assistant. Microsoft said attackers gained "limited access" to its systems, and that attackers had compromised a single account to gather data. In recent years, most hacking groups have used malware to encrypt a victim's files, then demanded payment to unlock them, so-called ransomware. Sometimes the groups steal sensitive data and threaten to make it public unless they are paid. Lapsus$ functions as a "large-scale social engineering and extortion campaign," though it does not deploy ransomware, Microsoft said. The group uses phone-based tactics to target personal email accounts at victim organizations and pays individual employees or business partners of an organization for illicit access, according to Microsoft. Lapsus$ also is known for hijacking individual accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges to drain user holdings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kenya's great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people. From a report: One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo, Kenya's fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up. "Prof," he said. "We don't care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the water has entered our schools." Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news. Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them. From a report: The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published. The group pulled the ads before they were posted or paid for, but the results confirmed that despite its promises to do better, Facebook's leaky controls still fail to detect hate speech and calls for violence on its platform. The army conducted what it called a clearance campaign in western Myanmar's Rakhine state in 2017 after an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh and security forces were accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes. On Feb. 1 of last year, Myanmar's military forcibly took control of the country, jailing democratically elected government officials. Rohingya refugees have condemned the military takeover and said it makes them more afraid to return to Myanmar. Experts say such ads have continued to appear and that despite its promises to do better and assurances that it has taken its role in the genocide seriously, Facebook still fails even the simplest of tests -- ensuring that paid ads that run on its site do not contain hate speech calling for the killing of Rohingya Muslims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roku device owners will soon have a whole host of new personalization features, including all-new Photo Streams, with the Roku OS 11. From a report: Firstly, when Roku OS 11 rolls out to users in the weeks ahead, they'll be able to change their screensaver to display their own photography or images with Photo Streams. Not only will Photo Streams allow users to display photos from their desktop or mobile device on Roku, but users will also be able to share Streams with other Roku device owners as well. Once a Stream is shared, other Roku owners will be able to add to it, allowing everyone to collaborate on a shared album. Roku OS 11 will also introduce a new "what to watch on Roku" menu, a personally curated hub added to the home screen menu that will suggest popular and recently released TV and movies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Messages and Dialer apps for Android devices have been collecting and sending data to Google without specific notice and consent, and without offering the opportunity to opt-out, potentially in violation of Europe's data protection law. From a report: According to a research paper, "What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?" [PDF], by Trinity College Dublin computer science professor Douglas Leith, Google Messages (for text messaging) and Google Dialer (for phone calls) have been sending data about user communications to the Google Play Services Clearcut logger service and to Google's Firebase Analytics service. "The data sent by Google Messages includes a hash of the message text, allowing linking of sender and receiver in a message exchange," the paper says. "The data sent by Google Dialer includes the call time and duration, again allowing linking of the two handsets engaged in a phone call. Phone numbers are also sent to Google." The timing and duration of other user interactions with these apps has also been transmitted to Google. And Google offers no way to opt-out of this data collection. [...] Both pre-installed versions of these apps, the paper observes, lack app-specific privacy policies that explain what data gets collected -- something Google requires from third-party developers. And when a request was made through Google Takeout for the Google Account data associated with the apps used for testing, the data Google provided did not include the telemetry data observed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Limiters cap amount of electricity households can use, making many appliances unusable. From a report: Josie Gagne was stumbling in the dark, sobbing while on the phone with an Enmax customer assistant, as she tried to locate the tiny orange button under the utility meter that would restore heat inside. It was the shock that got her. The young single mother with two kids under two returned home one winter day last year to find a note on her door from Enmax. She'd fallen behind on bills; the home was now on a limiter, capping her electricity. The furnace was off and at that point, she had no idea what a limiter even was. "I'm freaking out. I'm crying, thinking 'What am I going to do?'" she said. "It's the middle of winter, it's still cold outside. How am I going to feed my children when my oven doesn't work?" Rising utility bills have community advocates worried the number of Calgarians facing this scenario will increase, and many don't know what a load limiter is. It's often the first step before disconnection. Several Calgary residents flagged the issue while sharing their utility bill experiences with CBC Calgary through text messaging, and on Calgary Kindness, a mutual aid Facebook group. They've shared their personal stories with CBC journalists so others know what to expect. Contributors said they were scared their fridge would lose power and their groceries would rot. They relied on air fryers, barbecues or a hot plate to make it through. The extra fees -- $52 for the notice, $52 to remove the limiter -- only made it worse. Plus, the black mark on their files means they often can't get a contract with more favourable fixed rates. When the device is installed, a stove or anything else requiring 240 volts of electricity won't work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes: In its final stages, the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can bring extreme isolation. People lose control of their muscles, and communication may become impossible. But with the help of an implanted device that reads his brain signals, a man in this "complete" locked-in state could select letters and form sentences, researchers report this week. "People have really doubted whether this was even feasible," says Mariska Vansteensel, a brain-computer interface researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht who was not involved in the study, published in Nature Communications. If the new spelling system proves reliable for all people who are completely locked in -- and if it can be made more efficient and affordable -- it might allow thousands of people to reconnect to their families and care teams, says Reinhold Scherer, a neural engineer at the University of Essex.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Blue Origin nears the critical point of delivering flight-ready BE-4 rocket engines to United Launch Alliance, the engineer in charge of the company's rocket engine program has decided to leave. ArsTechnica reports: Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith recently informed employees of the departure of John Vilja, the senior vice president of Blue Engines. In Smith's email to employees, obtained by Ars, Vilja is said to be leaving Blue to pursue his "many" interests and hobbies outside of work. "During his time at Blue, John led the team to support eight New Shepard missions powered by BE-3PM engines, countless hot fire tests, and made progress on multiple engines development programs," Smith wrote. "He also built a world-class Engines team, recruiting some of the best talent in the business." Sources familiar with Vilja's work confirmed that he was a good manager and engineer who helped get the BE-4 rocket engine program back on track. As Ars reported last August, before Vilja's arrival, the numerous challenges faced by the engineers and technicians working to build and test BE-4 development engines included being "hardware poor."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the official kick off of a policy advocacy lobby group that's being branded the Open Internet Alliance (OIA). From a report: Alongside Twitter, video streaming platform Vimeo; Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr; the Czech and Slovak focused search engine company, Seznam; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network, are named as founding members. Twitter said the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance has been some two years in the making. Notably Mozilla -- which had joined Twitter, Auttomatic and Vimeo in a earlier call for incoming EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than hone in on content censorship -- is not being named as a founding member so appears to be sitting this one out. At the time of writing it's unclear why Mozilla is missing. But the Alliance is putting out a wider call for other "middle-layer" Internet companies to join the initiative -- so the grouping may grow in size. Albeit -- very clearly -- big tech need not apply. Speaking during a Twitter Spaces event today to discuss the formation of the alliance, Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's global policy VP, said the group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web ecosystem -- rather than see the Internet as "a monolith" comprised of just a handful of tech giants. "Our plea in aid of the open Internet is that [lawmakers] not view the Internet as a monolith, nor indeed view it as fixing the Internet solving all of societies problems," she said, urging policymakers to: "Take a wider focus when they're looking at solutions -- not look at the Internet just through the lens of a handful of companies. And really think about the entire ecosystem -- and get away from this sense 'oh big tech is the problem.' Because -- in actual fact, in their efforts to tackle so called 'big tech -- that is all we may end up with."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Non-fungible tokens have risen in interest and value over the last year, with Bored Ape Yacht Club among the most popular and valuable collections. Here's what one of the Ethereum co-founders had to say about the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The rise of NFTs has led to a rise in Ethereum's price and use cases. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was interviewed by TIME in a cover story, labeling him the "Prince of Crypto." In the interview, Buterin said there are increasing dangers with cryptocurrencies, including overeager investors and soaring transaction fees. "Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong," Buterin said. The Ethereum co-founder went on to take an apparent shot at Bored Ape Yacht Club, an NFT collection that was minted on the Ethereum blockchain in April 2021. "The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys, and it becomes a different kind of gambling." Buterin said a lot of people are buying yachts and lambos, but he hopes that in the future crypto is used for fair voting systems, urban planning and universal basic income. "If we don't exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable." Buterin, who has openly supported Ukraine during the invasion of the country by neighbor Russia, highlighted the amount of money raised for the country through crypto, while once again mentioning Bored Apes. "One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that is has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it's to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world," Buterin said in an email to TIME on Mar. 14, 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This may feel like deja vu because Google itself mistakenly leaked this announcement a few days ago, but the company today officially announced the launch of Steam OS on Chrome OS. Before you run off to install it, there are a few caveats: This is still an alpha release and only available on the more experimental and unstable Chrome OS Dev channel. The number of supported devices is also still limited since it'll need at least 8GB of memory, an 11th-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and Intel Iris Xe Graphics. That's a relatively high-end configuration for what are generally meant to be highly affordable devices and somewhat ironically means that you can now play games on Chrome OS devices that are mostly meant for business users. The list of supported games is also still limited but includes the likes of Portal 2, Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Half-Life 2, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Stellaris, Civilization V, Fallout 4, Dico Elysium and Untitled Goose Game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After much speculation, Nvidia today at its March 2022 GTC event announced the Hopper GPU architecture, a line of graphics cards that the company says will accelerate the types of algorithms commonly used in data science. Named for Grace Hopper, the pioneering U.S. computer scientist, the new architecture succeeds Nvidia's Ampere architecture, with launched roughly two years ago. From a report: The first card in the Hopper lineup is the H100, containing 80 billion transistors and a component called the Transformer Engine that's designed to speed up specific categories of AI models. Another architectural highlight includes Nvidia's MIG technology, which allows an H100 to be partitioned into seven smaller, isolated instances to handle different types of jobs. "Datacenters are becoming AI factories -- processing and refining mountains of data to produce intelligence," Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. "Nvidia H100 is the engine of the world's AI infrastructure that enterprises use to accelerate their AI-driven businesses." The H100 is the first Nvidia GPU to feature dynamic programming instructions (DPX), "instructions" in this context referring to segments of code containing steps that need to be executed. Developed in the 1950s, dynamic programming is an approach to solving problems using two key techniques: recursion and memoization. Recursion in dynamic programming involves breaking a problem down into sub-problems, ideally saving time and computational effort. In memoization, the answers to these sub-problems are stored so that the sub-problems don't need to be recomputed when they're needed later on in the main problem. Dynamic programming is used to find optimal routes for moving machines (e.g., robots), streamline operations on sets of databases, align unique DNA sequences, and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More adolescents failed to quit smoking in 2020 than in any of the previous 13 years, according to new data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 2020 was the first year the research team had data on attempts to quit e-cigarettes, and it showed that around 4 percent of adolescents unsuccessfully attempted to quit e-cigarettes. From a report: E-cigarettes have been pushed to adult smokers as an alternative to traditional, combustible cigarettes -- some evidence shows they might be less dangerous, and there's mixed evidence that they could push adults to quit smoking altogether. But the picture might be different for teens, who started vaping in droves in 2018 and are far less likely to be cigarette smokers first. The new analysis shows that for younger people, the introduction of e-cigarettes made quitting more difficult. The new study includes data from the Monitoring the Future study, which surveys eighth, 10th, and 12th grade students. It includes a question asking the participants if they had ever tried to stop smoking and found that they could not. In 2020, it added a question asking if they'd ever tried to stop vaping nicotine and found that they could not. From 1997 to 2019, the survey found that the number of students who reported using cigarettes and the percent of adolescents estimated to have tried and failed to quit smoking both dropped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Authentication services provider Okta is investigating a report of a digital breach, the company said on Tuesday, after hackers posted screenshots showing what they claimed was its internal company environment. From a report: A hack at Okta could have major consequences because thousands of other companies rely on the San Francisco-based firm to manage access to their own networks and applications. The company was aware of the reports and was investigating, Okta official Chris Hollis said in a brief statement. "We will provide updates as more information becomes available," he added. The screenshots were posted by a group of ransom-seeking hackers known as LAPSUS$ on their Telegram channel late on Monday. In an accompanying message, the group said its focus was "ONLY on Okta customers." TechCrunch adds: Okta chief executive Todd McKinnon confirmed the breach in a tweet thread overnight on March 22: "In late January 2022, Okta detected an attempt to compromise the account of a third party customer support engineer working for one of our subprocessors. The matter was investigated and contained by the subprocessor. We believe the screenshots shared online are connected to this January event. Based on our investigation to date, there is no evidence of ongoing malicious activity beyond the activity detected in January."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is suing Grubhub for deceptive business practices, saying its food delivery app covertly inflates prices for diners who order through it. The suit demands an end to a laundry list of allegedly illegal practices as well as financial restitution and civil penalties. The newly filed lawsuit (PDF) argues that Grubhub's promises of "free" online orders -- and "unlimited free delivery" for Grubhub Plus -- are misleading. While customers can make pickup orders for free, the company charges delivery and service fees for standard orders and service fees for Grubhub Plus orders, displaying the service fee until recently as part of a single line with sales taxes. "Grubhub misled District residents and took advantage of local restaurants to boost its own profits, even as District consumers and small businesses struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic," said Racine in a statement. "Grubhub charged hidden fees and used bait-and-switch advertising tactics -- which are illegal." The complaint says Grubhub orders often cost more than ordering the same item at a restaurant and argues that the company fails to reasonably disclose this to consumers. "Because Grubhub already charges consumers several different types of fees for its services ... consumers expect that the menu prices listed on Grubhub are the same prices offered at the restaurant or on the restaurant's website," it says. Grubhub has also listed many restaurants without their permission to expand its service, routing orders through its services and taking a commission. The complaint says it listed "over a thousand" restaurants in DC that had no connection with the company, asserting that the unapproved listings often contained menu errors and resulted in orders that would "take longer to fill, would be filled incorrectly, would be delivered cold, or would eventually be cancelled altogether." Grubhub -- which also operates Seamless and several other food delivery apps -- has made more elaborate attempts to insert itself into restaurant transactions as well. The lawsuit notes its launch of unsanctioned microsites that appear to be official restaurant sites, as well as custom phone numbers that let it charge fees when customers call restaurants, even when the calls didn't result in orders. The company also offered a "Supper for Support" promotion that required restaurants to foot the bill for a special discount; it offered restaurants $250 in compensation after a backlash. "During the past year, we've sought to engage in a constructive dialogue with the DC attorney general's office to help them understand our business and to see if there were any areas for improvement," said Katie Norris, director of corporate communications, in a statement. "We are disappointed they have moved forward with this lawsuit because our practices have always complied with DC law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued. We will aggressively defend our business in court and look forward to continuing to serve DC restaurants and diners." According to The Verge, Grubhub "says the app no longer lists restaurants that haven't agreed to work with it, and it's retired its microsites and the Supper for Support program." It will also make it more clear to users that prices might be lower when ordering directly from the restaurant, "and it will specify in marketing that only pickup orders are free," adds The Verge. The company maintains that it "has not misrepresented its fees," however.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite being easily removable since it is not soldered down, the Mac Studio's SSD storage is not currently user-upgradeable due to a software block, YouTuber Luke Miani has discovered. MacRumors reports: Initial teardowns suggested that the Mac Studio's storage could be upgradeable since it is not soldered in place. Each Mac Studio contains two internal SSD slots, and the SSDs themselves can be freely swapped between the connectors. In a video on his YouTube channel, Miani tested if the Mac Studio's storage is user upgradeable in practice. Miani wiped the SSD of a Mac Studio, removed it from the machine, and inserted it into an empty SSD slot in another Mac Studio, but the Mac's status light blinked SOS and would not boot. The Mac Studio recognizes the SSD, but Apple's software prevents it from booting, suggesting that this is a conscious decision by Apple to prevent users from upgrading their storage themselves. On its website, Apple claims that the Mac Studio's SSD storage is "not user accessible" and encourages users to configure the device with enough storage at the point of purchase. It now seems that the purpose of the easily replaceable storage is to aid repairs performed by authorized technicians, who likely will have software tools that enable the Mac Studio to boot from different internal storage. Since the prevention of user-upgradeability appears to simply be due to a software block, Apple could enable users to upgrade their own storage in the future via an update.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA JPL announced a cosmic milestone with the confirmed discovery of over 5,000 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system). CNET reports: A new batch of 65 planets joined the NASA Exoplanet Archive on Monday, triggering a celebratory mood. "It's not just a number," Exoplanet Archive science lead Jessie Christiansen said in a statement. "Each one of them is a new world, a brand new planet. I get excited about every one because we don't know anything about them." The first exoplanets were confirmed in the early 1990s, which means we've set an impressive pace for discovery. NASA announced the planet count had hit 4,000 in June 2019 and it took less than three years to add another thousand to that haul. [...] We haven't definitively found an Earth clone yet, but the exoplanets spotted so far range from rocky worlds like ours to jumbo gas giants bigger than Jupiter. While 5,000 is an impressive number, it's just a tiny sliver of what's out there. Said NASA, "We do know this: Our galaxy likely holds hundreds of billions of such planets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test. It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.) Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: A California company says it can decipher almost all the DNA code of a days-old embryo created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) -- a challenging feat because of the tiny volume of genetic material available for analysis. The advance depends on fully sequencing both parents' DNA and "reconstructing" an embryo's genome with the help of those data. And the company suggests it could make it possible to forecast risk for common diseases that develop decades down the line. Currently, such genetic risk prediction is being tested in adults, and sometimes offered clinically. The idea of applying it to IVF embryos has generated intense scientific and ethical controversy. But that hasn't stopped the technology from galloping ahead. Predicting a person's chance of a specific illness by blending this genetic variability into what's called a "polygenic risk score" remains under study in adults, in part because our understanding of how gene variants come together to drive or protect against disease remains a work in progress. In embryos it's even harder to prove a risk score's accuracy, researchers say. The new work on polygenic risk scores for IVF embryos is "exploratory research," says Premal Shah, CEO of MyOme, the company reporting the results. Today in Nature Medicine, the MyOme team, led by company co-founders and scientists Matthew Rabinowitz and Akash Kumar, along with colleagues elsewhere, describe creating such scores by first sequencing the genomes of 10 pairs of parents who had already undergone IVF and had babies. The researchers then used data collected during the IVF process: The couples' embryos, 110 in all, had undergone limited genetic testing at that time, a sort of spot sequencing of cells, called microarray measurements. Such analysis can test for an abnormal number of chromosomes, certain genetic diseases, and rearrangements of large chunks of DNA, and it has become an increasingly common part of IVF treatment in the United States. By combining these patchy embryo data with the more complete parental genome sequences, and applying statistical and population genomics techniques, the researchers could account for the gene shuffling that occurs during reproduction and calculate which chromosomes each parent had passed down to each embryo. In this way, they could predict much of that embryo's DNA. The researchers had a handy way to see whether their reconstruction was accurate: Check the couples' babies. They collected cheek swab samples from the babies and sequenced their full genome, just as they'd done with the parents. They then compared that "true sequence" with the reconstructed genome for the embryo from which the child originated. The comparison revealed, essentially, a match: For a 3-day-old embryo, at least 96% of the reconstructed genome aligned with the inherited gene variants in the corresponding baby; for a 5-day-old embryo, it was at least 98%. (Because much of the human genome is the same across all people, the researchers focused on the DNA variability that made the parents, and their babies, unique.) Once they had reconstructed embryo genomes in hand, the researchers turned to published data from large genomic studies of adults with or without common chronic diseases and the polygenic risk score models that were derived from that information. Then, MyOme applied those models to the embryos, crunching polygenic risk scores for 12 diseases, including breast cancer, coronary artery disease, and type 2 diabetes. The team also experimented with combining the reconstructed embryo sequence of single genes, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that are known to dramatically raise risk of certain diseases, with an embryo's polygenic risk scores for that condition -- in this case, breast cancer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

apoc.famine shares a report from Ars Technica: Hundreds of thousands of sites use the OAuth protocol to let visitors login using their existing accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, or Apple. Instead of having to create an account on the new site, visitors can use an account that they already have -- and the magic of OAuth does the rest. The Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) technique capitalizes on this scheme. Instead of opening a genuine second browser window that's connected to the site facilitating the login or payment, BitB uses a series of HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) tricks to convincingly spoof the second window. The URL that appears there can show a valid address, complete with a padlock and HTTPS prefix. The layout and behavior of the window appear identical to the real thing. While the method is convincing, it has a few weaknesses that should give savvy visitors a foolproof way to detect that something is amiss. Genuine OAuth or payment windows are in fact separate browser instances that are distinct from the primary page. That means a user can resize them and move them anywhere on the monitor, including outside the primary window. BitB windows, by contrast, aren't a separate browser instance at all. Instead, they're images rendered by custom HTML and CSS and contained in the primary window. That means the fake pages can't be resized, fully maximized or dragged outside the primary window. All users should protect their accounts with two-factor authentication. One other thing more experienced users can do is right click on the popup page and choose "inspect." If the window is a BitB spawn, its URL will be hardcoded into the HTML.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Dru Nemeton shares a report from 9to5Mac: Apple's new Studio Display officially hit the market on Friday, and we continue to learn new tidbits about what exactly's inside the machine. While Apple touted that the Studio Display is powered by an A13 Bionic inside, we've since learned that the Studio Display also features 64GB of onboard storage, because who knows why... [...] as first spotted by Khaos Tian on Twitter, the Studio Display also apparently features 64GB of onboard storage. Yes, 64GB: double the storage in the entry-level Apple TV 4K and the same amount of storage in the entry-level iPad Air 5. Also worth noting: the Apple TV 4K is powered by the A12 Bionic chip, so the Studio Display has it beat on that front as well. Apple hasnâ(TM)t offered any explanation for why the Studio Display features 64GB of onboard storage. It appears that less than 2GB of that storage is actually being used as of right now. One unexciting possibility is that the A13 Bionic chip used inside the Studio Display is literally the exact same A13 Bionic chip that was first shipped in the iPhone 11. As you might remember, the iPhone 11 came with 64GB of storage in its entry-level configuration, meaning Apple likely produced millions of A13 Bionic chips with 64GB of onboard storage. What do you think? Will Apple ever tap into the A13 Bionic chip and 64GB storage inside the Studio Display for something more interesting?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.") Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A judge on Brazil's Supreme Court has reversed a ban on Telegram, two days after blocking the messaging app for ignoring orders. Engadget reports: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said the company missed the court's emails. "We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address," Durov wrote on Telegram on Friday. "Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us. As a result, we missed its decision in early March that contained a follow-up takedown request. Luckily, we have now found and processed it, delivering another report to the Court today." Durov added that Telegram will appoint a representative in Brazil and set up a framework so it can address requests more promptly. According to The New York Times, Telegram complied with the court's demands by taking down classified information posted on President Jair Bolsonaro's channel and deleting the accounts of a Bolsonaro supporter who was allegedly spreading misinformation. The court then reversed the ban. Telegram reacted so swiftly that the ban (which was imposed by a judge who is running multiple investigations into Bolsonaro and his allies for spreading misinformation) was never actually in effect. The court order gave Apple, Google, ISPs and phone providers five days to block the app. Telegram will also "start promoting verified information and labeling posts containing falsehoods," adds Engadget. "It will also monitor the 100 most popular channels in the country," which account for 95 percent of views of public posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says they are investigating claims that the Lapsus$ data extortion hacking group breached their internal Azure DevOps source code repositories and stolen data. BleepingComputer reports: Unlike many extortion groups we read about today, Lapsus$ does not deploy ransomware on their victim's devices. Instead, they target the source code repositories for large companies, steal their proprietary data, and then attempt to ransom that data back to the company for millions of dollars. While it is not known if the extortion group has successfully ransomed stolen data, Lapsus has gained notoriety over the past months for their confirmed attacks against NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, Ubisoft, and Mercado Libre. Unfortunately, Lapsus$ has a good track record, with their claims of attacks on other companies later confirmed to be true. While the leaking of source code makes it easier to find vulnerabilities in a company's software, Microsoft has previously stated that leaked source code does not create an elevation of risk. Microsoft says that their threat model assumes that threat actors already understand how their software works, whether through reverse engineering or previous source code leaks. "At Microsoft, we have an inner source approach -- the use of open source software development best practices and an open source-like culture -- to making source code viewable within Microsoft. This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code," explained Microsoft in a blog post about the SolarWinds attackers gaining access to their source code. "So viewing source code isn't tied to elevation of risk." However, source code repositories also commonly contain access tokens, credentials, API keys, and even code signing certificates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy have introduced the SMART Copyright Act of 2022. The bill requires online hosting services to implement standard technical protection measures, designated by the Copyright Office. The general idea is to grant the Copyright Office the power to designate standard technical protection measures to be implemented by online hosting platforms. These STMs can be tailored to specific niches such as audio and video, which offers much more flexibility than the current regime under the DMCA. In short, the bill will give the government more tools to facilitate and encourage the implementation of anti-piracy mechanisms, while allowing online services to keep their safe harbors. The full text of the bill provides more details on how the approval process of a proposed protection measure works. In addition to hearing stakeholders, experts, and the public, the designated protection measures have to be weighed on factors such as cost and availability. They shouldn't create any major burdens for online services. Similarly, the rights of the public are taken into account as well. This includes the impact a technical measure may have on privacy and data protection, as well as on free speech issues such as criticism and news. Finally, it is worth noting that online services will be able to appeal officially designated protection measures in court. In addition, they can also choose not to implement them. However, that opens the door to lawsuits from copyright holders. The statutory damages amounts for services that fail to implement the designated technical protection measures are capped at $150,000 for a single violation, but that number can shoot up for repeat offenders. [...] Rightsholders see the proposal as a great step forward to protect creators, while opponents classify it as a filtering tool that will censor free speech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden on Monday urged American companies to put up their cyber-defenses, citing "evolving intelligence that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks" against the U.S. From a report: "The Federal Government can't defend against this threat alone," Biden said in a lengthy statement released by the White House. He called on the private sector, as "critical infrastructure owners and operators," to "accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors." [...] "I urge our private sector partners to harden your cyber defenses immediately," Biden said in the statement. In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, the White House repeatedly publicized its intelligence about Moscow's plans in an effort to deter them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report: About 10 years ago, when Erik Arbuthnot first started hearing about phony-kidnapping hustles, his fellow agents at the FBI scoffed at the cases. "Don't worry about those," they told Arbuthnot. "Those are fake. We handle the real ones." Now the cases have become so widespread that the bureau has a name for them: virtual kidnappings. "It's a telephone extortion scheme," says Arbuthnot, who heads up virtual-kidnapping investigations for the FBI out of Los Angeles. Because many of the crimes go unreported, the bureau doesn't have a precise number on how widespread the scam is. But over the past few years, thousands of families like the Mendelsteins have experienced the same bizarre nightmare: a phone call, a screaming child, a demand for ransom money, and a kidnapping that -- after painful minutes, hours, or even days -- is revealed to be fake. There's the pastor in Memphis who, like Mendelstein, was told his daughter had been kidnapped. The man in Miami who thought his wife and baby daughter were being held for ransom. The guy in Missouri who got conned into thinking his elderly mother had been taken. Overall, the FBI reports, internet scams nearly doubled in 2020 -- and extortion cases like virtual kidnapping have rung up the third-most victims, right behind phishing schemes and phony sales calls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OneWeb, the satellite company part-owned by the British state, is turning to Elon Musk's SpaceX for help after it was barred from using Russian rockets to launch its latest orbiters. From a report: Under the arrangement, the communications firm will partner with SpaceX for its first launches later this year, adding to the 428 micro-satellites it already has in low-earth orbit. OneWeb and SpaceX did not disclose the terms of the launch arrangement. The company quotes a standard price of $67m to launch a Falcon 9 rocket â" up from $62m earlier this year, "to account for excessive levels of inflation." The 12% increase is the first in nearly six years. OneWeb was forced to abandon its plans to launch on one of Russia's Soyuz rockets earlier this month, after Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, demanded the satellites not be used for military purposes and the British government halt its financial backing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules today that could require companies to update investors annually on how much planet-heating pollution they're pumping out and how that pollution could ultimately affect their earnings. From a report: A slew of companies from Apple to Amazon have pledged to become carbon neutral in coming decades. Consistent updates on how much pollution they generate help ensure that climate pledges aren't just greenwashing or making false promises. The proposed rules are also supposed to protect investors as companies cope with disasters linked to climate change, like more extreme weather. "We are concerned that the existing disclosures of climate-related risks do not provide investors with the detailed and reliable climate-related information they need to make informed investments and voting decisions," Renee Jones, director of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, said during an SEC open meeting today. If the rules go into effect, public companies would need to share greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and electricity use. The SEC also sought to hold some companies responsible for indirect emissions that come from their supply chains and consumers using their products, a more contentious disclosure. Some companies have excluded these indirect emissions from climate pledges, arguing that this pollution is out of their control. The SEC said today that smaller companies won't have to disclose those indirect emissions, and larger companies only need to share the indirect emissions that are "material" or essential for investors' understanding of a company's financial situation -- a murky distinction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A data breach at HubSpot, a tool used by many companies to manage marketing campaigns and on-board new users, has affected BlockFi, Swan Bitcoin, NYDIG and Circle. From a report: However, all the companies said their operations were not affected and their treasuries were not at risk. HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool used to store users' names, phone numbers and email addresses for marketing purposes, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While user information was leaked to hackers, the affected companies said passwords and other internal information were not affected. In outreach emails seen by CoinDesk, the companies said HubSpot is an external tool and hackers did not gain access to internal systems. HubSpot said the breach was the result of a bad actor getting access to an employee account and using it to target stakeholders in the cryptocurrency industry.The company said 30 clients were affected, but has not published a full list.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk signaled plans to scale Tesla to the "extreme" while teasing the release of Tesla's "Master Plan Part 3" on Twitter one day before opening the automaker's first European factory. From a report: On Monday, Musk revealed on Twitter the themes that will dominate the next installment in Tesla's long-term playbook: artificial intelligence and scaling the automaker's operations. "Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI," Musk tweeted. "But I will also include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company."The plan may detail what "extreme size" looks like for Tesla and outline the automaker's strategy for scaling its manufacturing and supply chain amid a global pandemic and supply chain crunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's proposed taxation law of virtual digital assets won't permit individuals to offset loss from one asset against profit of another, the Ministry of Finance said Monday in a move that the head of the nation's top cryptocurrency exchange termed as "detrimental" and "regressive." From a report: India proposed law for taxing virtual currencies in February this year. It proposed taxing income from the transfer of any virtual assets at 30%. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, New Delhi proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. In a clarification posted on Monday, the Ministry of Finance today announced its intention to tax each digital asset investment independently, a departure from how the nation regulates transactions at the stock market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Moscow court on Monday found Meta Platforms guilty of "extremist activity", but said its decision would not affect the WhatsApp messenger service, focusing its ire on the company's already banned Facebook and Instagram social networks. From a report: Moscow's Tverskoi District Court upheld a lawsuit filed by Russian state prosecutors on banning the activities of Meta on Russian territory, the court's press service said in a statement. The U.S. company's lawyer, Victoria Shagina, had said in court earlier on Monday that Meta was not carrying out extremist activities and stood against Russophobia, the Interfax news agency reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uptake of the open-video codec AV1 has been slow, with major video providers waiting for broader device support. Things could change over the coming months, as both consumer electronics companies and chipset providers are poised to introduce new hardware with native AV1 decoding capabilities. From a report: Chief among them is Qualcomm, which is planning to add support for AV1 to its upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor, Protocol has learned from a source who has seen spec sheets for the chip. Internally known as SM8550, the chip is expected to be introduced at the end of this year at the earliest, which means we shouldn't expect any phones powered by it until 2023. The chip's Adreno video-processing unit will support native AV1 decode, something that none of Qualcomm's previous chips have offered. That's barring any major changes, with our source cautioning that things could shift before the chip actually enters production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is pushing ahead with plans to warn Windows 11 users that have installed the operating system on unsupported hardware. In a new update to Windows 11, a watermark has appeared on the desktop wallpaper for unsupported systems, alongside a similar warning in the landing page of the settings app. From a report: Microsoft had been testing these changes last month, but they're now rolling out to Release Preview just ahead of a full release to all Windows 11 users in the coming days. While Microsoft doesn't mention the addition of a watermark in its "improvements" list for this update, testers have noticed it's included. If Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware, a new desktop watermark will state "System requirements not met. Go to settings to learn more." It's similar, but far less prominent, to the semi-transparent watermark that appears in Windows if you haven't activated the OS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in a remote mountainous area of southern China on Monday, officials said, setting off a forest fire visible from space in the country's worst air disaster in nearly a decade. From a report: More than seven hours after communication was lost with the plane, there was still no word of survivors. The Civil Aviation Administration of China said in a statement the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. The flight was traveling from Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan to the industrial center of Guangzhou along the east coast, it added. Villagers were first to arrive at the forested area where the plane went down, sparking a blaze big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images. Hundreds of rescue workers were swiftly dispatched from Guangxi and neighboring Guangdong province. State media reported all 737-800s in China Eastern's fleet were ordered grounded, while broadcaster CCTV said the airliner had set up nine teams to deal with aircraft disposal, accident investigation, family assistance and other pressing matters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Swiss municipality of Arbedo-Castione, a 70-meter crane stands tall. Six arms protrude from the top, hoisting giant blocks into the sky. But these aren't building blocks, and the crane isn't being used for construction. From a report: The steel tower is a giant mechanical energy storage system, designed by American-Swiss startup Energy Vault, that relies on gravity and 35-ton bricks to store and release energy. When power demand is low, the crane uses surplus electricity from the Swiss grid to raise the bricks and stack them at the top. When power demand rises, the bricks are lowered, releasing kinetic energy back to the grid. It might sound like a school science project, but this form of energy storage could be vital as the world transitions to clean energy. "There's a big push to get renewables deployed," Robert Piconi, founder of Energy Vault, tells CNN Business, adding that companies are under increasing pressure from governments, investors and employees to decarbonize. But relying on renewables for consistent power is impossible without energy storage, he says. Unlike a fossil fuel power station, which can operate night and day, wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning that if a cloud blocks the sun or there's a lull in the wind, electricity generation drops. To compete with fossil fuels, you need to "make renewables predictable," says Piconi, which means storing excess energy and being able to dispatch it when required. [...] Instead, Energy Vault decided to base its technology on a method developed over 100 years ago, which is widely used to store renewable energy: pumped storage hydropower. During off-peak periods, a turbine pumps water from a reservoir on low ground to one on higher ground, and during periods of peak demand, the water is allowed to flow down through the turbine, generating electrical energy. Piconi says Energy Vault relies on gravity in the same way, but "instead of using water, we're using these composite blocks." By doing it this way, he says the company is not dependent on topography and doesn't have to dig out reservoirs or create dams, which can have negative effects on the environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet describes CafePress as "a U.S. platform offering print-on-demand products" like custom t-shirts, hats, and mugs. "CafePress's past owner has been fined $500,000 over a litany of security failures and data breaches," ZDNet reported this week:CafePress became the subject of a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation surrounding how it handled security — and how the firm allegedly "failed to secure consumers' sensitive personal data and covered up a major breach." On March 15, the US regulator said that Residual Pumpkin is required to pay $500,000 in damages. According to the FTC's complaint (PDF), issued against the platform's former owner Residual Pumpkin Entity, LLC, and its current owner PlanetArt, LLC, there was a lack of "reasonable security measures" to prevent data breaches. In addition, the FTC claims that CafePress kept user data for longer than necessary, stored personally identifiable information including Social Security numbers and password reset answers in cleartext, and did not patch against known system vulnerabilities. "As a result of its shoddy security practices, CafePress' network was breached multiple times," the FTC says. CafePress experienced a major security incident in 2019. An attacker infiltrated the platform in February 2019 and was able to access data belonging to millions of users. This included email addresses, poorly-encrypted passwords, names, home addresses, security questions and answers, some partial card payment records, phone numbers, and at least 180,000 unencrypted Social Security numbers.... According to the FTC, CafePress was notified a month after the breach and did patch the security flaw — but did not investigate the breach properly "for several months." Customers were also not told. Instead, CafePress implemented a forced password reset as part of its "policy" and only informed users in September 2019, once the data breach had been publicly reported. In a separate case in 2018, CafePress allegedly was made aware of shops being compromised. These accounts were closed — and the shopkeepers, the victims, were then charged $25 account closure fees. The FTC also claims that the company "misled" users by using consumer email addresses for marketing, despite promises to the contrary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Music was one of the first industries that felt the sonic boom of the internet, starting with song-sharing websites like Napster in the late 1990s and iTunes digital downloads later," writes the New York Times. They take a quick look at how the music industry "survived an online revolution," arguing that streaming services "saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet," making it financially healthy and giving it a wider reach. "But all is not entirely well."Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There's a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they're not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation.... First, I'll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month. The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs.... Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999. Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.) There aren't an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That's what worries people who believe the music industry's digital success has peaked. Finally, the article points out that even the most-popular songs...aren't as popular as songs got in the past. And then it links to a story headlined "Streaming Saved Music. Artists Hate It." "The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The board members of the FIDO alliance include Amazon, Google, PayPal, RSA, and Apple and Microsoft (as well as Intel and Arm). It describes its mission as reducing the world's "over-reliance on passwords." Today Wired reports that the group thinks "it has finally identified the missing piece of the puzzle" for finally achieving large-scale adoption of a password-supplanting technology:On Thursday, the organization published a white paper that lays out FIDO's vision for solving the usability issues that have dogged passwordless features and, seemingly, kept them from achieving broad adoption.... The paper is conceptual, not technical, but after years of investment to integrate what are known as the FIDO2 and WebAuthn passwordless standards into Windows, Android, iOS, and more, everything is now riding on the success of this next step.... FIDO is looking to get to the heart of what still makes passwordless schemes tough to navigate. And the group has concluded that it all comes down to the procedure for switching or adding devices. If the process for setting up a new phone, say, is too complicated, and there's no simple way to log in to all of your apps and accounts — or if you have to fall back to passwords to reestablish your ownership of those accounts — then most users will conclude that it's too much of a hassle to change the status quo. The passwordless FIDO standard already relies on a device's biometric scanners (or a master PIN you select) to authenticate you locally without any of your data traveling over the Internet to a web server for validation. The main concept that FIDO believes will ultimately solve the new device issue is for operating systems to implement a "FIDO credential" manager, which is somewhat similar to a built-in password manager. Instead of literally storing passwords, this mechanism will store cryptographic keys that can sync between devices and are guarded by your device's biometric or passcode lock. At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last summer, the company announced its own version of what FIDO is describing, an iCloud feature known as "Passkeys in iCloud Keychain," which Apple says is its "contribution to a post-password world...." FIDO's white paper also includes another component, a proposed addition to its specification that would allow one of your existing devices, like your laptop, to act as a hardware token itself, similar to stand-alone Bluetooth authentication dongles, and provide physical authentication over Bluetooth. The idea is that this would still be virtually phish-proof since Bluetooth is a proximity-based protocol and can be a useful tool as needed in developing different versions of truly passwordless schemes that don't have to retain a backup password. Christiaan Brand, a product manager at Google who focuses on identity and security and collaborates on FIDO projects, says that the passkey-style plan follows logically from the smartphone or multi-device image of a passwordless future. "This grand vision of 'Let's move beyond the password,' we've always had this end state in mind to be honest, it just took until everyone had mobile phones in their pockets," Brand says.... To FIDO, the biggest priority is a paradigm shift in account security that will make phishing a thing of the past.... When asked if this is really it, if the death knell for passwords is truly, finally tolling, Google's Brand turns serious, but he doesn't hesitate to answer: "I feel like everything is coalescing," he says. "This should be durable." Such a change won't happen overnight, the article points out. "With any other tech migration (ahem, Windows XP), the road will inevitably prove arduous."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were trying to understand how water might behave under the high pressures inside distant planets. But along the way the team discovered a new form of ice, reports Phys.org, "redefining the properties of water at high pressures."Solid water, or ice, is like many other materials in that it can form different solid materials based on variable temperature and pressure conditions, like carbon forming diamond or graphite. However, water is exceptional in this aspect as there are at least 20 solid forms of ice known to us. A team of scientists working in UNLV's Nevada Extreme Conditions Lab pioneered a new method for measuring the properties of water under high pressure. The water sample was first squeezed between the tips of two opposite-facing diamonds — freezing into several jumbled ice crystals. The ice was then subjected to a laser-heating technique that temporarily melted it before it quickly re-formed into a powder-like collection of tiny crystals. By incrementally raising the pressure, and periodically blasting it with the laser beam, the team observed the water ice make the transition from a known cubic phase, Ice-VII, to the newly discovered intermediate, and tetragonal, phase, Ice-VIIt, before settling into another known phase, Ice-X.... While it's unlikely we'll find this new phase of ice anywhere on the surface of Earth, it is likely a common ingredient within the mantle of Earth as well as in large moons and water-rich planets outside of our solar system. The team's findings were reported in the March 17 issue of the journal Physical Review B.... The work also recalibrates our understanding of the composition of exoplanets, UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat added. Researchers hypothesize that the Ice-VIIt phase of ice could exist in abundance in the crust and upper mantle of expected water-rich planets outside of our solar system, meaning they could have conditions habitable for life. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post looks at what happened after Starlink activated its satellite-based internet service to help Ukraine:Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk's companies and European allies, which has proved "very effective," Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday. "The quality of the link is excellent," Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. "We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day...." A person familiar with Starlink's effort in Ukraine, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there are more than 5,000 terminals in the country.... Internet flows deteriorated on the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and have not fully recovered, according to data-monitoring services. But since that initial dip, connectivity has remained fairly stable, with mainly temporary, isolated outages even during heavy Russian shelling. "Every day there are outages, but generally service comes back," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which monitors global data flows. Even before Fedorov tweeted at Musk for help, SpaceX was working on a way to get Starlink to Ukraine. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a talk at California Institute of Technology this month that the company had been working for several weeks to get regulatory approval to allow the satellites to communicate in Ukraine. In addition, the Washington Post reports, this week on Twitter Elon Musk also "challenged Putin to a fight and followed up by pledging he would use just one hand if Putin was scared. And he told Putin he could bring a bear." Reached for comment by the Post's reporters, Elon Musk responded by telling The Post to give his regards "to your puppet master Besos," following it with two emojis. But the Post's article also argues Starlink's technology "could have widespread implications for the future of war. Internet has become an essential tool for communication, staying informed and even powering weapons." And The Telegraph reports that Starlink "is helping Ukrainian forces win the drone war as they use the technology in their effort to track and kill invading Russians."In the vanguard of Ukraine's astonishingly effective military effort against Vladimir Putin's forces is a unit called Aerorozvidka (Aerial Reconnaissance) which is using surveillance and attack drones to target Russian tanks and positions. Amid internet and power outages, which are expected to get worse, Ukraine is turning to the newly available Starlink system for some of its communications. Drone teams in the field, sometimes in badly connected rural areas, are able to use Starlink to connect them to targeters and intelligence on their battlefield database. They can direct the drones to drop anti-tank munitions, sometimes flying up silently to Russian forces at night as they sleep in their vehicles... Should Ukraine's internet largely collapse, the "drone warriors" of Aerorozvidka would still be able to communicate with their bases by sending signals from mobile Starlink terminals, and using ground stations in neighbouring countries including Poland.... As Ukraine's internet is inevitably degraded, Starlink will be an alternative. General James Dickinson, commander of US Space Command, told the Senate armed services committee: "What we're seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation, or a proliferated architecture, can provide in terms of redundancy and capability." It's not all Starlink. The Telegraph points out that "The Ukrainian system benefitted from equipment given by Western countries, including radio communications which superceded Soviet-era technology, and the US has also poured in millions of dollars to protect against Russian hacking, jamming of signals and attempts to 'spoof' GPS technology." And meanwhile, weakness in Russia's own communications infrastructure may have played a role in the killing of five senior Russian generals in the last three weeks, according to a recent CNN interview with retired U.S. army general and former CIA director David Petraeus:"The bottom line is that [Russia's] command-and-control has broken down. Their communications have been jammed by the Ukranians. Their secure comms didn't work. They had to go single-channel. That's jammable, and that's exactly what the Ukranians have been doing to that. They used cellphones. The Ukranians blocked the prefix for Russia, so that didn't work. Then they took down 3G. [The Russians] are literally stealing cellphones from Ukranian civilians to communicate among each other. So what happens? The column gets stopped. An impatient general is sitting back there in his armored or whatever vehicle. He goes forward to find out what's going on... And the Ukranians have very, very good snipers, and they've just been picking them off left and right. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Exposure to even moderate ambient lighting during nighttime sleep, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms your cardiovascular function during sleep and increases your insulin resistance the following morning," announced Northwestern Medicine, citing a new study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Washington Post reports:Researchers at Northwestern University had two groups of 10 young adults sleep in differently lit rooms. One group slept in rooms with dim light for two nights; the other slept one night in a room with dim night and the next in a room with moderate overhead light — about the equivalent of an overcast day. Participants wore heart monitors at night. In the morning, they did a variety of glucose tests. Both groups got the same amount of sleep but their bodies experienced very different nights. Both groups responded well to insulin the first night, when they both slept in dim lighting. On the second night, however, the group sleeping in brighter lighting didn't respond as well to insulin. The dim light sleepers' insulin resistance scores fell about 4 percent on the second night, while the bright sleepers' rose about 15 percent. Their heart rates were faster on the bright night, too. "[J]ust a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome," concludes senior study author Dr. Phyllis Zee. "It's important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep." From Northwestern's announcement:There is already evidence that light exposure during daytime increases heart rate via activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks your heart into high gear and heightens alertness to meet the challenges of the day. "Our results indicate that a similar effect is also present when exposure to light occurs during nighttime sleep," Zee said.... An earlier study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at a large population of healthy people who had exposure to light during sleep. They were more overweight and obese, Zee said. "Now we are showing a mechanism that might be fundamental to explain why this happens. We show it's affecting your ability to regulate glucose," Zee said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday."Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue. It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated. For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...." Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions. Earlier this month a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) argued in the Wall Street Journal that"An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers, as the U.S. was encroaching on Russia's largest nuclear export market...." "The project was intended to allow Ukraine to store this fuel safely without shipping it back to Russia for reprocessing. The processing and storage facility was completed in 2020, and Holtec and SSE Chernobyl were loading the canisters to be stored when the war began on February 24..."By taking over Chernobyl, Russia gives itself control of the disposal of its spent fuel, which it can store in canisters at the site or ship to a reprocessing facility in Russia. Either way, this represents hundreds of millions of dollars for Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear enterprise.... The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday."Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue. It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated. For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...." Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New Yorker argues that photos on newer iPhones are "coldly crisp and vaguely inhuman, caught in the uncanny valley where creative expression meets machine learning...." "[T]he truth is that iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of 'computational photography,' a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information. Each picture registered by the lens is altered to bring it closer to a pre-programmed ideal."In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro... But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, "I feel a little duped." Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl's upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that, when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), "what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture." The new iPhone promises "next level" photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. "Make it less smart — I'm serious," she said. Lately she's taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google's line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures.... Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, "I've tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing." A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device "sees the things I'm trying to photograph as a problem to solve," he added. The image processing also eliminates digital noise, smoothing it into a soft blur, which might be the reason behind the smudginess that McCabe sees in photos of her daughter's gymnastics. The "fix" ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original. Earlier this month, Apple's iPhone team agreed to provide me information, on background, about the camera's latest upgrades. A staff member explained that, when a user takes a photograph with the newest iPhones, the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a "Deep Fusion" feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. This process is an extreme version of high-dynamic range, or H.D.R., a technique that previously required some software savvy.... The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame — faces, landscapes, skies — and exposes each one differently. On both the 12 Pro and 13 Pro, I've found that the image processing makes clouds and contrails stand out with more clarity than the human eye can perceive, creating skies that resemble the supersaturated horizons of an anime film or a video game. Andy Adams, a longtime photo blogger, told me, "H.D.R. is a technique that, like salt, should be applied very judiciously." Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not.... The average iPhone photo strains toward the appearance of professionalism and mimics artistry without ever getting there. We are all pro photographers now, at the tap of a finger, but that doesn't mean our photos are good.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quanta magazine describes an "explosion of interest" in what they're calling algorithms with predictions, arguing that machine learning tools "have, in a real way, rejuvenated research into basic algorithms."Machine learning and traditional algorithms are "two substantially different ways of computing, and algorithms with predictions is a way to bridge the two," said Piotr Indyk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a way to combine these two quite different threads...." In the past few years, researchers have shown how to incorporate algorithms with predictions into scheduling algorithms, chip design and DNA-sequence searches. In addition to performance gains, the field also advances an approach to computer science that's growing in popularity: making algorithms more efficient by designing them for typical uses.... By ignoring the worst-case scenarios, researchers can design algorithms tailored to the situations they'll likely encounter. For example, while databases currently treat all data equally, algorithms with predictions could lead to databases that structure their data storage based on their contents and uses.... [M]ost of these new structures only incorporate a single machine learning element. Tim Kraska, a computer scientist at MIT, imagines an entire system built up from several separate pieces, each of which relies on algorithms with predictions and whose interactions are regulated by prediction-enhanced components. "Taking advantage of that will impact a lot of different areas," Kraska said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.