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A federal judge has blocked Penguin Random House's proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster, agreeing with the Justice Department that the joining of two of the world's biggest publishers could "lessen competition" for "top-selling books." From a report: The ruling reinforced the Biden administration's tougher approach to proposed mergers, a break from decades of precedent under Democratic and Republican presidents. U.S. District Court Judge Florence Y. Pan announced the decision in a brief statement Monday, adding that much of her ruling remained under seal at the moment because of "confidential information" and "highly confidential information." She asked the two sides to meet with her Friday and suggest redactions. Penguin Random House quickly condemned the ruling, which it called "an unfortunate setback for readers and authors." In its statement Monday, the publisher said it would immediately seek an expedited appeal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Schmidt wants to reshape Washington's industrial policy to combat an intensifying US-China tech rivalry. The former Google chief executive officer's philanthropic arm issued recommendations aimed at encouraging US politicians to counter China's rising technological ambitions by ramping up regulatory scrutiny, encouraging more private investment and offering tax credits to train workers. From a report: China surprised the US on key "battleground" technologies -- including wireless 5G, microelectronics and AI -- as the Asian nation's industrial policy enabled it to dominate markets for drones, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals, solar panels, turbines and shipbuilding, the Schmidt-backed Special Competitive Studies Project said Tuesday in a report. "The US has some immense economic advantages, but there are some warning lights flashing," Liza Tobin, the project's senior director and a former China director for the US National Security Council, said on a call with reporters. "The US needs an America-style industrial strategy that leverages competition in our dynamic private sector and has carefully targeted incentives in sectors where we need to lead." The report calls on the US government to boost microelectronic production with the help of a large fund to unlock private capital, create an open-source security center to assist investments in digital infrastructure, establish a national security commission on digital finance and give regulators more power to screen investment flows to China that could threaten US national security.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft President Brad Smith is calling for companies, schools and governments to dramatically increase training workers for new and redesigned roles tackling the climate crisis. From a report: The software giant, which has pledged to remove more carbon than it emits by 2030, says the lack of skills in areas like carbon accounting, green procurement and supply chain management is a threat to the kind of progress needed to arrest global warming. The company, along with the Boston Consulting Group, studied 15 companies they said were leading the pack in sustainability innovation to produce a report on what's needed. Microsoft plans to develop and share more training resources through its LinkedIn business, work with United Nations and International Monetary Fund groups and NGOs, as well as convening a conference of corporate chief sustainability officers to share best practices. As you see it, what is the challenge? Brad Smith: Roughly 3,900 companies around the world have signed up for climate pledges. But what we're finding as a leading technology provider to these companies, is that we all now need to figure out how to turn these pledges into progress. That's easier said than done. It takes a real revolution in different business processes and in the use of digital technology as core components. But foundationally, it all relies on building a more skilled workforce. How do we we know we have a shortfall in these types of skills? LinkedIn did a study a year ago -- what it showed was that the number of jobs in the economy that require sustainability skills is growing by 8% a year but the number of people in the workforce that have these skills is growing by only 6% a year. So we're seeing a gap, and in fact, we're seeing a widening of this gap. When we entered the digital era, we needed to bring computer science into schools and we needed to bring digital fluency into the workplace. When we've reviewed the data, employers around the world really invested more in employee training between 1980 and 2000. Computers entered the workforce -- people needed to be trained how to use them. But we saw employer investments in employee training really declining after the year 2000 and have been stagnating ever since. We're going to need to reinvest in employee training.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CVS and Walgreens have agreed to pay more than $10 billion in a landmark settlement to resolve opioid-crisis lawsuits brought by states, cities and other governments. From a report: The two largest U.S. drugstore chains said they reached a framework to settle the collection of lawsuits brought by governments and Native American tribes blaming pharmacies for helping fuel the nation's opioid epidemic. Under the proposed deal, CVS would pay $4.9 billion to states and municipalities and $130 million to tribes over the next 10 years starting in 2023. The company said the agreement isn't an admission of guilt and that it would continue to defend against any litigation that the settlement doesn't resolve. Walgreens said it has offered to pay up to $4.79 billion to states over 15 years and about $155 million to tribes. It also expects to pay up to $753.5 million in attorneys fees over six years. The company said the settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing. Each state, local government and tribe still must decide whether to participate in the settlement. Plaintiffs' attorneys appointed to lead the negotiations said they encouraged governments and tribes to join the settlement, which they said holds the pharmacies accountable. CVS Chief Executive Karen Lynch, on a call with analysts, said the settlement is in the "best interests of all parties and helps put a decades-old issue behind us." CVS has been in a separate legal battle with its insurers over whether they should cover some of the liability the company faces for the opioid lawsuits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google is preparing to shut down the dedicated Street View app on Android, keeping the feature in Google Maps. Google's Street View is an easy way to get a 360-degree look at almost any given street on the planet, perfect for getting a sense of your next travel destination or simply exploring the world from the comfort of home. While the Google Maps app has long offered an easy way to hop into Street View, there has also been a dedicated Street View app on Android and iOS. This standalone app served two distinct groups of people -- those who wanted to deeply browse Street View and those who wanted to contribute their own 360 imagery. Considering the more popular Google Maps app has Street View support and Google offers a "Street View Studio" web app for contributors, it should be no surprise to learn that the company is now preparing to shut down the Street View app. In the latest update, version 2.0.0.484371618, Google has prepared a handful of deprecation/shutdown notices for the Street View app. These notices are not yet visible in the app today, but our team managed to enable them. In the notice, Google confirms that the Street View app is set to shut down on March 31, 2023, encouraging users to switch to either Google Maps or Street View Studio. However, one feature that is being fully shut down with the Street View app's demise is that of "Photo Paths." First launched last year, Photo Paths were intended as a way to let nearly anyone with a smartphone contribute simple 2D photos of a road or path that had not yet been documented by Street View. Unlike every other feature of the Street View app, there is no replacement for Photo Paths on the web app or Google Maps app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Chinese Navy could finally use lithium technology to replace the lead-acid batteries that are now used in its fleet of conventional submarines. Interesting Engineering reports: Since lithium batteries had a higher risk of catching fire or exploding, the navy was hesitant to replace the submarine fleet's current batteries with them. But, "after solving these problems, the replacement of lead-acid batteries with lithium batteries in conventional submarines is just around the corner," said Wang Feng, study lead and a submarine designer. The study claims that technical answers have been discovered through significant testing and development in China's electric car sector, and lithium batteries have been demonstrated to operate safely under difficult circumstances. The modifications could considerably improve a submarine's capacity for survival and battle, according to research that was released on October 15 in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Marine Electric and Electronic Engineering. For more than a decade, the Chinese military has planned to replace the lead-acid batteries in its fleet of conventional submarines with lithium technology. The lead-acid batteries on these submarines, which have not seen significant development since World War II, have proved problematic due to their poor energy storage capacity, delayed charging, limited power output, short lifespan, and harmful gas leaks, according to the paper. Nickel and cobalt, which are added to batteries to increase performance, were a contributing factor to mishaps; however, some Chinese battery manufacturers have begun using iron and phosphate in their place recently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Black holes have properties characteristic of quantum particles, a new study reveals, suggesting that the puzzling cosmic objects can be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary Schrodinger's cat. Space.com reports: The new study, based on computer modeling, aimed to find the elusive connection between the mind-boggling time-warping physics of supermassive objects such as black holes and the principles guiding the behavior of the tiniest subatomic particles. The study team developed a mathematical framework that placed a simulated quantum particle just outside a giant simulated black hole. The simulation revealed that the black hole showed signs of quantum superposition, the ability to exist in multiple states at once -- in this case, to be at the same time both massive and not massive at all. The best known example of quantum superposition is the legendary SchrÃdinger's cat, a thought experiment designed by early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate some of the key issues with quantum physics. According to quantum theories, subatomic particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until they interact with the external world. This interaction, which could be the simple act of being measured or observed, throws the particle into one of the possible states. Schrodinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, intended the experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory, as it would suggest that a cat locked in a box can be at the same time dead and alive based on the random behavior of atoms, until an observer breaks the superposition. However, as it turned out, while a cat in a box could be dead regardless of the observer's actions, a quantum particle may indeed exist in a double state. And the new study indicates that a black hole does as well. The new study was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters on Friday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup's search engine. And now, he's leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers a lot of personalization options, and is meant for people who live their computing life in a browser (which is increasingly most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building "the internet computer," too, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful. Fisher has been an advisor to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Ahead of his new gig, Fisher and I got on a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention -- and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it. The answer starts with the browser's defining feature: tabs. Fisher doesn't hate tabs -- in fact, he helped popularize them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves opening a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again. "I remember when tabbed browsing was novel," Fisher says, "and helped people feel less cluttered because you don't have as many windows." But now, "even when I use Chrome," Fisher says, "I get a bunch of clutter. At some point, I just say, 'Forget it, I'm not even going to bother trying to sort through all these tabs. If it's important, I'll open it again.'" Browsers need better systems for helping you manage tabs, not just open more of them. The best way to improve the browser, Fisher ultimately decided, is to just start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites. The experience can be jarring because it's so different, but Fisher says that's part of what he's excited about. "This is not stuff people haven't talked about before," he says, "but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think that's where there's so much opportunity." Fisher likes to compare a browser to an operating system, which matches with The Browser Company's idea that Arc isn't just a browser but rather an iOS-like system for the open web. "It has task management UI, it has UI for creating and starting a journey, but there's so much more in between," he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he's interested in improving the way files move around the internet, for instance, finding a better way than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. He likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling your YouTube video out when you switch tabs. All these make the web feel more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line. The Browser Company also plans to reinvent the internet browser for mobile, too. On mobile, in particular, he says, "there are so many opportunities because the starting point is so archaic." "He's vague on the details of his plans -- and The Browser Company hasn't really started working on a mobile browser yet anyway -- but says that's a big focus for him going forward," adds The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music. Ars Technica reports: Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Defossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec. Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate "latent space" representation. The "quantizer" then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU. Meta's use of discriminators proves key to creating a method for compressing the audio as much as possible without losing key elements of a signal that make it distinctive and recognizable: "The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans, as perfect reconstruction is impossible at low bit rates. To do so, we use discriminators to improve the perceptual quality of the generated samples. This creates a cat-and-mouse game where the discriminator's job is to differentiate between real samples and reconstructed samples. The compression model attempts to generate samples to fool the discriminators by pushing the reconstructed samples to be more perceptually similar to the original samples."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting Tuesday, New York City employers must disclose salary information in job ads, thanks to a new pay transparency law that will reverberate nationwide. Axios reports: What's happening: Employers have spent months getting ready for this. They'll now have to post salary ranges for open roles -- but many didn't have any established pay bands at all, says Allan Bloom, a partner at Proskauer who's advising companies. Already, firms like American Express, JPMorgan Chase and Macy's have added pay bands to their help-wanted ads, reports the Wall Street Journal. How it works: Companies with more than four employees must post a salary range for any open role that's performed in the city -- or could be performed in the city. Violators could ultimately be fined up to $250,000 -- though a first offense just gets a warning. Reality check: It's a pretty squishy requirement. The law requires only that salary ranges be in "good faith" -- and there's no penalty for paying someone outside of the range posted. It will be difficult for enforcement officials to prove a salary range is in bad faith, Bloom says. "The low-hanging fruit will be [going after] employers that don't post any range whatsoever." Many of the ranges posted online now are pretty wide. A senior analyst role advertised on the Macy's jobs site is listed as paying between $85,320 and $142,080 a year. A senior podcast producer role at the WSJ advertises an "NYC pay range" of $50,000 - $180,000. The wide ranges could be particularly reasonable if these roles can be performed remotely, as some companies adjust pay according to location.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tumblr has made an update it hinted at in September, changing its rules to allow nudity -- but not sexually explicit images -- on the platform. The Verge reports: The company updated its community guidelines earlier today, laying out a set of rules that stops short of its earlier permissive attitude toward sexuality but that formally allows a wider range of imagery. "We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form). So, even if your creations contain nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, you can now share them on Tumblr using the appropriate Community Label," the post says. "Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr." A help center post and the community guidelines offer a little more detail. They say that "text, images, and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, sexual themes, or mature subject matter" is allowed on Tumblr, but "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia)" aren't. There's an exception for "historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts -- such as from India's Sunga Empire," although it must be labeled with a mature content or "sexual themes" tag so that users can filter it from their dashboards. "Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We're not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer," say the community guidelines. However, users can't post links or ads to "adult-oriented affiliate networks," they can't advertise "escort or erotic services," and they can't post content that "promotes pedophilia," including "sexually suggestive" content with images of children. On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr permanently banned adult content from its platform. The site was owned by Verizon at the time and later sold to WordPress.com owner Automattic, which largely maintained the ban "in large part because internet infrastructure services -- like payment processors and Apple's iOS App Store -- typically frown on explicit adult content," reports The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to the Recording Industry Association of America's Mid-Year 2022 report (PDF), vinyl is continuing a trend initiated in 2020, when vinyl revenue surpassed CD revenue -- a state of affairs we haven't seen since 1986, according to the RIAA [PDF]. The RIAA reported that vinyl revenue grew 22 percent in the first half of this year to $570 million, outpacing CDs ($200 million) and representing physical music's largest revenue share. Japanese audio brand Audio-Technica has seemingly taken note of this trend and has decided to rerelease its Sound Burger portable record player. The product is one of several that the company is releasing to celebrate its 60th birthday. Based on a plate on the player's side, the company is producing just 7,000 units. Debuting in 1980, the original Sound Burger AT727 offered a way for people to listen to their 33-1/3 and 45 vinyl records outside of their homes. There were some caveats, though; records stuck precariously out of the unit and, as noted by SlashGear, the player needed to sit on a flat surface during operation. The new Sound Burger AT-SB2022 looks much like the old one, but Audio-Technica added Bluetooth 5.2 support, so you can listen to your vinyl through wireless headphones. There's also a 3.5 mm jack this time around instead of stereo RCA outputs, but Audio-Technica is also including a dual RCA adapter. Additionally, there's no longer a need for clunky batteries, as the refreshed portable record player charges over USB-C. Audio-Technica claims the record play will last for about 12 hours before needing a charge, which it says will take around 12 hours to complete. As noted by Digital Trends, the original Sound Burger, also known as Mister Disc in some geographies, required user maintenance to make sure records continued spinning at the proper speed. But Audio-Technica's 2022 record player has a DC servo motor driving its belt-drive system for "stable rotation," the record player's product page says. "Designed for both portability and stability, the tonearm employs a dynamic balance system in which stylus pressure is applied through a spring," the page says. Audio-Technica says its ATN3600L stylus works with the new record player. Other specs for the Sound Burger include a 50 dB output and a 20-20,000 Hz transmission band. Audio-Technica is selling the 2022 Sound Burger for $200.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New EU rules came into force today that could compel Apple to let users access third-party app stores and permit app sideloading on iPhones and iPads, among other sweeping changes designed to make the digital sector fairer and more competitive. MacRumors reports: Under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the rules will apply to tech giants that meet its "gatekeeper" criteria and force them to open up their various services and platforms to other companies and developers. Apple is almost certain to be classified as a "gatekeeper" due to the size of its annual turnover in the EU, its ownership and operation of platforms with a large number of active users, and its "entrenched and durable position" due to how long it has met these criteria, and will therefore be subject to the rules set out in the DMA. The DMA could force Apple to make major changes to the way the App Store, Messages, FaceTime, and Siri work in Europe. For example, it could be forced to allow users to install third-party app stores and sideload apps, give developers the ability to closely interoperate with Apple's own services and promote their offers outside the App Store and use third-party payment systems, and access data gathered by Apple. One of the more recent additions to the DMA is the requirement to make messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable. The interoperability rules theoretically mean that Meta apps like WhatsApp or Messenger could request to interoperate with Apple's iMessage framework, and Apple would be forced to comply within the EU. The DMA was proposed by the European Commission in December 2020 and agreed by the European Parliament and the Council in record-time, in March 2022. It now moves into a six-month implementation phase and will start to apply on May 2, 2023. After that, within two months and at the latest by July 3, 2023, potential gatekeepers will have to inform the Commission of their core platform services if they meet the thresholds established by the DMA. Once the Commission has received the complete information, it will have 45 working days to make an assessment as to whether the company in question meets the thresholds and to designate them as gatekeepers. Following their designation, gatekeepers will have six months to comply with the requirements in the DMA, at the latest by March 6, 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has had record sales of $800 million worldwide in sell-through following the first three days from its release. VentureBeat reports: The full title debuted on October 28 after hitting early-access release for the single-player campaign on October 20, breaking all previous three-day sales records since the franchise debuted in 2003. The blockbuster opening tops any of the biggest worldwide box office openings of 2022, surpassing Top Gun: Maverick, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness worldwide box office openings combined, Activision Blizzard announced (based on data from boxofficemojo.com). The company didn't say the exact number of copies sold, but it beat out the titles from the past two years as well as 2019's hit Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's opening. Modern Warfare II also set a new franchise opening-weekend record as the No. 1 top-selling Call of Duty digital opening through its first three days. Developed by Infinity Ward (and nine other Activision studios), the release of Modern Warfare II represents a revival for the entertainment franchise, which will continue with the upcoming release of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 on November 16. [...] Modern Warfare II's opening topped the previous five-day franchise record set in 2011 by Modern Warfare 3 in sell-through, to become the biggest opening ever in Call of Duty. That title sold $650 million in its opening five days, with the primary lower price of $60 compared to today's $70. Further reading: Microsoft Promises Eternal Support for Call of Duty on PlayStation Physical 'Copies' of the New Call of Duty Are Just Empty DiscsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Remote working may have peaked in the UK as a loosening labor market hands power back to employers, according to research by LinkedIn. In September, 12% of UK jobs advertised on the site were remote, compared with 16% in January, as "paranoid" employers worry about the productivity of working from home, said Josh Graff, the managing director of LinkedIn for EMEA and Latin America. The company also found that three out of four bosses in the UK are concerned that the current economic slowdown means they will have to go back on flexible working, in a global survey of around 3,000 C-suite executives at large organizations. Despite the falling percentage of remote and hybrid work being advertised, it is still popular with candidates, said Graff. He noted that although just 12% of jobs advertised were remote, they got 20% of all applications. Graff described this as a "growing disconnect between what professionals want and what employers are offering." Graff added that staff and bosses also disagree about the efficacy of working from home, with "paranoia" about the amount getting done. Microsoft research found that 80% of managers felt their teams were less productive when they were not in the office. About 85% of managers worry they can't tell if employees are getting enough done, while 87% of workers say their productivity is just fine, Microsoft found. The UK labor market is still running hot with the 3.5% unemployment rate the lowest since 1974, according to the Office for National Statistics. However, Graff said the hiring rate on LinkedIn fell by 10% in the UK in September from a year earlier, in a sign of slowdown. Graff cautioned that returning to "command and control" structures might not be good for businesses, as they risk losing "motivated employees at a moment when they need them most." "While difficult decisions undoubtedly have to be taken, it's important to remember that your employees are your company's most precious asset," he said. "They have experience of your systems, your processes. They're aligned with your culture and values and importantly they are the ones that hold deep customer relationships as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An OpenSSL vulnerability once signaled as the first critical-level patch since the Internet-reshaping Heartbleed bug has just been patched. It ultimately arrived as a "high" security fix for a buffer overflow, one that affects all OpenSSL 3.x installations, but is unlikely to lead to remote code execution. From a report: OpenSSL version 3.0.7 was announced last week as a critical security fix release. The specific vulnerabilities (now CVE-2022-37786 and CVE-2022-3602) had been largely unknown until today, but analysts and businesses in the web security field hinted there could be notable problems and maintenance pain. Some Linux distributions, including Fedora, held up releases until the patch was available. Distribution giant Akamai noted before the patch that half of their monitored networks had at least one machine with a vulnerable OpenSSL 3.x instance, and among those networks, between 0.2 and 33 percent of machines were vulnerable. But the specific vulnerabilities -- limited-circumstance, client-side overflows that are mitigated by the stack layout on most modern platforms -- are now patched, and rated as "High." And with OpenSSL 1.1.1 still in its long-term support phase, OpenSSL 3.x is not nearly as widespread. Malware expert Marcus Hutchins points to an OpenSSL commit on GitHub that details the code issues: "fixed two buffer overflows in puny code decoding functions." A malicious email address, verified within an X.509 certificate, could overflow bytes on a stack, resulting in a crash or potentially remote code execution, depending on the platform and configuration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charter is raising prices on Spectrum home Internet service by $5 a month starting today, a company spokesperson confirmed to Ars. Standalone broadband prices are rising to $79.99 a month for 300Mbps download speeds, $99.99 a month for 500Mbps, and $119.99 a month for 1Gbps. 300Mbps is the advertised download speed for Charter's entry-level tier. From a report: The price increase takes effect today in most of Charter's 41-state territory, the company said. It affects broadband-only customers and broadband users who also subscribe to a Spectrum streaming TV package, but not cable TV customers. "The price for Spectrum Internet reflects the cost of delivering the best value in broadband for your family: 300Mbps starting speeds with no modem fees, data caps or contracts," the company said. Charter also said this is its first price increase on standalone broadband since December 2020. Customers currently on a promotional rate will keep paying that rate until the promotion expires. They'll pay the new, higher regular rate after that.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report: Boeing lost $766 million in Q3 on the project to build Air Force One aircraft. It increases Boeing's total losses on the two jets to $1.9 billion since the build began. Boeing bears the cost of any delays under a deal struck with the Trump Administration. schwit1 adds some commentary: "All government contracts should be like this. Cost savings are yours to keep. Cost overruns are yours to eat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber recently launched its new advertising division and in-app ads. Apparently, those ads aren't staying within the app. From a report: Instead, ads from other companies are being sent out as push notifications, much to the chagrin of some Uber users. Over the weekend, people turned to Twitter to complain about the notifications, sharing screenshots of ads, including one particularly popular one from Peloton that Uber had sent out. One of the primary complaints: notifications are being sent out when users aren't engaging with the app. When Uber first announced its in-app ad "experience," the company didn't mention the potentially intrusive implications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US financial institutions spent nearly $1.2 billion on likely ransomware-related payments last year, most commonly in response to breaches originating with Russian criminal groups, according to the Treasury Department. From a report: The payments more than doubled from 2020, underscoring the pernicious damage that ransomware continues to wreak on the private sector. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, said its analysis "indicates that ransomware continues to pose a significant threat to U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, businesses and the public." Financial institutions filed 1,489 incidents related to ransomware in 2021, up from 487 the year before, according to data collected under the Bank Secrecy Act. FinCEN's analysis included extortion amounts, attempted transactions and payments that were unpaid. FinCEN said the top five highest-grossing ransomware variants from the second half of 2021 are connected to Russian cybercriminals. The damage from Russian-related ransomware during that period totaled more than $219 million, according to the data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big changes are underway at Twitter. Elon Musk, in a Twitter thread: Twitter's current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month. Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity. You will also get:- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam- Ability to post long video & audio- Half as many ads And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) should take action to ban TikTok, Brendan Carr, one of five commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, told Axios in an interview. From the report: "I don't believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr said, citing recent revelations about how TikTok and ByteDance handle U.S. user data. Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States. There simply isn't "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it's not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party]," Carr said. Carr sent letters to Apple and Google in June asking the companies to remove the apps from their stores due to concerns about data flowing back to China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Hangouts is scheduled for death today. The phone app has been individually booting people off the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, will be shut down today. From a report: For a brief period, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious, most popular messaging effort, but 5 billion downloads later, Google is moving on. Hangout's next of kin, Google Chat, should have all of your messages and contacts automatically imported by now, but the new service is a mere shadow of the original plan for Hangouts. The closing of Hangouts is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google's messaging history. Google Talk launched 17 years ago, and Google still doesn't have a competitive message platform. Part of the reason we're on Google's umpteenth messaging app is that there is no solid, stable home for messaging inside Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon today announced a new benefit for its Prime members which could lure some subscribers away from other music services, like Apple Music or Spotify. From a report: The company said it will now offer Prime subscribers a full music catalog with 100 million songs, instead of the previously more limited selection of just 2 million songs, and will make most of the top podcasts on its service available without ads. In addition, the Amazon Music app is getting a revamp, which includes a new "Podcast Previews" feature that will allow customers to listen to short clips as a way to discover new podcasts they may like. The move is a direct shot at streaming music competitors, especially Spotify, which has been moving into the podcasts market as a means of generating additional revenue. But Spotify's paying subscriber base is growing frustrated with the fact that they still have to listen to podcast ads, despite paying for the service. Amazon Music's promise of ad-free podcasts along with a full music catalog could make for a compelling alternative, the retail giant hopes. Among the ad-free podcasts are shows from top brands like CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and ESPN. Other ad-free shows include the Wondery catalog of podcasts, like "Dr. Death," "SmartLess," and "Even the Rich," and new Amazon Exclusive shows including "MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories;" "Suspect: Vanished in the Snow;" "COLD Season Three: The Search for Sheree;" "Killer Psyche Daily;" "I Hear Fear," narrated by Academy Award-nominated actress Carey Mulligan; and a weekly bonus episode of "The Old Man and the Three," hosted by former NBA player JJ Redick. The Amazon Exclusive podcast series "Baby, this is Keke Palmer," from the actress and entrepreneur Keke Palmer (NOPE) also debuts today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British communications regulator has sounded the death knell of the fax machine, just over 30 years after it revolutionised office life. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday it had started the process to scrap legislation compelling BT, the former state-owned monopoly, to provide dedicated landlines for the devices at affordable prices. The facsimile machine, first commercialised by Xerox in 1964, became a ubiquitous feature of offices around the world from the late 1980s, but has since been displaced by a combination of email, scanners, cloud and instant messaging services. The old technology works by processing the contents of a fixed graphic image, transmitting it through the landline via audio-frequency tones, which are then received by another fax machine, interpreted and reconstructed into a printed replica of the original. "As digital technology and broadband services have developed, the fax machine has been overtaken by email and document sharing software that offer the same or better functionality," Ofcom said in a statement. "We're now consulting on changes to telecoms rules that could see the fax machine become a thing of the past."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's rolling out a handful of new shopping features that should make it easier to find good deals directly from search. When you search for a product, Google will now surface results with coupon codes that you can copy and paste during checkout. From a report: Any products with a coupon available will have a new "Special Offer" badge in the top-left corner of their thumbnail. Google previously only labeled products when they were on sale or when their price dropped, but this new badge makes it more obvious when coupons are available. The search giant's launching this feature on desktop and mobile within the "coming weeks." In addition to adding clippable coupons to Google search, Google's introducing a way to compare deals side by side on mobile starting later this month. Instead of showing you a mishmash of products when you search for an item, it'll start grouping any products on sale in a "deals" category that you can expand and browse directly in your search results. It's also bringing price insights, which Google already offers in its Shopping tab, to search. This means you'll start seeing relevant information about a product's price history, such as when it was at its lowest and where, when browsing through results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, the world's most-powerful active rocket, lifted off for the first time in more than three years on Monday from Florida's Cape Canaveral, with Elon Musk's company sending a group of satellites into orbit for the U.S. Space Force. From a report: The rocket system, representing three Falcon 9 boosters strapped side-by-side, lifted off at a SpaceX launch pad. The rocket's two side boosters were due to land in synchrony on adjacent concrete slabs along Florida's east coast roughly eight minutes after liftoff.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: It's been five years since the advent of the eSIM card on smartphones, and yet the computer in our pockets is still tied down to a plastic tab that hasn't changed all that much since its debut in 1991. What gives? [...] An eSIM-enabled phone can store multiple SIM cards on the device. It makes switching networks as simple as switching your Wi-Fi network, and that's anything but convenient for mobile operators. For users in areas with spotty connectivity or rural networks, easier switching to alternative operators means loss of business for major players like Verizon or AT&T. In markets like India, dual-wielding SIM cards for better data, voice, or preferential rates are exceptionally common. Taking away the friction involved in changing physical SIM cards carries the risk of losing a customer, and it's no secret that operators have been dragging their feet to avoid that. Theoretically, setting up an eSIM on any network should be as straightforward as pointing your camera at a QR code and activating a line. In practice, that's rarely true. Verizon's support page suggests that Android users need to call up a support desk to activate an eSIM. iPhone users have it slightly easier and can directly add the line to the phone through Verizon's website. Meanwhile, Vodafone requires you to install an app. Finally, the likes of Airtel India ask you to play a game of the fastest finger first by requiring an SMS response within 60 seconds to proceed with adding an eSIM to your line. None of these are as simple as just popping out a tray and plopping in your SIM card. Meanwhile, as internet-based calling, texting, and video messaging become the norm, carriers are left with increasingly few add-ons to increase revenues. Tack on sky-high spectrum prices for resources like 5G and eSIMs become even less enticing to carriers. Tangential features like premium-priced international roaming plans are yet another profit driver that eSIMs circumvent. When done right, getting started with an international eSIM can be a simple two to three-click process to get you onboarded and ongoing. My colleague Rita and I have had a fantastic experience with travel eSIM services like Airalo. When I tried out Airalo earlier this year, the process took just a few taps indicating that there was no real reason for eSIMs to be complicated. However, for most operators, that just isn't the case. While hard to quantify, this needless friction has certainly hampered consumer perception of eSIMs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A team of researchers has detected a trio of near-Earth asteroids in the inner solar system, one of which is the largest found since 2014 that poses a potential risk to the planet. The asteroids remained undetected until now because they occupy a region of the sky hidden by the Sun's glare. Gizmodo reports: Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are two types of near-Earth objects that space agencies like to keep track of. Despite the scary-sounding names, none of them pose any imminent threat to us. Currently, there are 1,454 NEAs that have a non-zero probability of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. You can find a complete list of NEOs at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The three near-Earth asteroids were found using the Dark Energy Camera in Chile. The camera took deep-field images close to Earth's horizon during twilight, to combat the Sun's glare and atmospheric distortions. The team's results are published in The Astronomical Journal. Two of the recently observed asteroids have orbits that safely skirt Earth, but one of the rocks -- a 0.93-mile-wide (1.5-kilometer) asteroid dubbed 2022 AP7 -- has an orbit that may eventually put it on a collision course with Earth. To be perfectly clear: The asteroid is not currently barreling toward Earth, but its path could bring it close enough one day that NASA will want to keep tabs on it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The third and final module has arrived at China's Tiangong space station. Space.com reports: The Mengtian module launched to Earth orbit atop a Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket from Wenchang, south China, at 3:37 a.m. EDT (0737 GMT and 3:37 p.m Beijing time) on Monday (Oct. 31), according to the state-run outlet Xinhua News. Mengtian arrived at Tiangong as planned about 13 hours after liftoff, according to the China Manned Space Agency. The launch marked China's ninth space station-related mission since sending the Tianhe core module into orbit in April last year. Mengtian, whose name means "Dreaming of the Heavens," is a 58.7-foot-long (17.9 meters) and roughly 48,500-pound (22 metric tons) spacecraft designed mainly to host an array of science racks and experiments. Equipment installed on board Mengtian will be used for experiments related to microgravity, fluid physics, materials science, combustion science, fundamental physics and more. The docking of Mengtian with Tiangong marks the end of the space station's assembly phase and the start of full operations, Chinese space officials have said. Mengtian's arrival allows China to realize a vision for a space station approved way back in 1992. The Tiangong space station consists of Tianhe, Mengtian and a module called Wentian. The T-shaped Tiangong will host three astronauts for six months at a time, or six crew members for a brief time during crew handovers. Tiangong's first crew handover is expected before the end of the year when the ongoing Shenzhou 14 mission astronauts welcome aboard the new Shenzhou 15 crew, who will launch on a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert. Ahead of this, China will launch the Tianzhou 5 cargo mission to Tiangong in November to deliver supplies to support the new crew expedition. [...] The space station will also support a powerful survey space telescope named Xuntian that China plans to launch as soon as late 2023. The Hubble-class observatory will operate in a similar orbit to that of Tiangong, meaning it will be able to dock at the station for refueling, upgrades and repairs. Meanwhile, China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said earlier this year that Tiangong could be opened to tourism in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents -- obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents -- illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate -- the war on terror -- has been wound down. Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. [...] There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the "content request system" at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. These are the key takeaways from the report: - Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.- DHS plans to target inaccurate information on 'the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine." - Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly. - The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure.- DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August.- DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts. - The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A study published last week in the scientific journal Nature Energy studied the effects of traffic and travel time in a city when micromobility options like electric scooters and e-bikes are banned. The results documented exactly how much traffic increased as a result of people switching back to personal cars instead of smaller, more urban-appropriate vehicles. Electrek reports: The study, titled "Impacts of micromobility on car displacement with evidence from a natural experiment and geofencing policy," was performed using data collected in Atlanta. The study was made possible due to the city's sudden ban on shared micromobility devices at night. That ban provided a unique opportunity to compare traffic levels and travel times before and after the policy change. The ban occurred on August 9, 2019, and restricted use of shared e-bikes and e-scooters in the city between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. The study's authors used high-resolution data from June 25, 2019, to September 22, 2019, from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times before and after the policy implementation. That created a window of analysis of 45 days with and without shared e-bike and e-scooter use at night. The study found that on average, travel times for car trips in Atlanta during evening hours increased between 9.9-10.7% immediately following the ban on shared micromobility. For an average commuter in Atlanta, that translated to an extra 2-5 minutes per evening trip. The authors also concluded that the impact on commute times would likely be higher in other cities across the country. According the study, "based on the estimated US average commute time of 27.6 minutes in 2019, the results from our natural experiment imply a 17.4% increase in travel time nationally." The study went on to consider the economic impact of that added congestion and increased travel time. [...] The economic impact on the city of Atlanta was calculated at US $4.9 million. The study estimated this impact on the national level could be in the range of US $408M to $573 million. Interestingly, the entirety of the study's data comes from before the COVID-19 pandemic, which played a major role in promoting the use of shared micromobility. A similar study performed today could find an even greater impact on congestion, travel times, and economic impact on cities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format. Phoronix reports: As noted yesterday, a patch is pending for the Google Chrome/Chromium browser to deprecate the still-experimental (behind a feature flag) JPEG-XL image format support from their web browser. The patch marks Chrome 110 and later as deprecating JPEG-XL image support. No reasoning was provided for this deprecation, which is odd considering JPEG-XL is still very young in its lifecycle and has been receiving growing industry interest and support. Now this evening is a comment from a Google engineer on the Chromium JPEG-XL issue tracker with their expressed reasons: "Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons: - Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL- The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default- By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Embattled cryptocurrency lender Hodlnaut downplayed its exposure to the collapsed digital-token ecosystem created by fugitive Do Kwon yet suffered a near $190 million loss from the wipeout. Bloomberg reports: The loss is among the findings of an interim judicial managers' report seen by Bloomberg News. It is the first such report since a Singapore court in August granted Hodlnaut protection from creditors to come up with a recovery plan. "It appears that the directors had downplayed the extent of the group's exposure to Terra/Luna both during the period leading up to and following the Terra/Luna collapse in May 2022," the report said. Kwon's TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and sister token Luna suffered a $60 billion wipeout in May as confidence in the project evaporated, exacerbating this year's crypto meltdown. Hodlnaut's Hong Kong arm made the near $190 million loss when it offloaded the stablecoin as its claimed dollar peg frayed. In a letter dated July 21, Hodlnaut's directors "made an about-turn" about the impact and informed a Singapore police department that digital assets had been converted to TerraUSD, according to the report. Much of the latter was lent out on the Anchor Protocol, the report said, a decentralized finance platform developed on the Terra blockchain. Hodlnaut, which operates out of Singapore and Hong Kong, halted withdrawals in August. The judicial report said more than 1,000 deleted documents from Hodlnaut's Google workspace could have helped shed light on the business. The judicial managers haven't been able to obtain several "key documents" in relation to Hodlnaut's Hong Kong arm, which owes $58.3 million to Hodlnaut Pte in Singapore. About S$776,292 appeared to have been withdrawn by some employees between July and when withdrawals were halted in August, the report stated. Most of the company's investments into DeFi were made via the Hong Kong division, it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article written by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf: Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather's credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, "Why did they stop using those?" If that happens, I'll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. "Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus," the federal agency advised (PDF). "Use disposable or digital menus." The QR-code menu -- which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone -- has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I'll be for heaven if I'm lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I'll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another's eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right -- when everyone's phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works -- they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. "You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be," Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, "but from there it's easy to start checking texts and emails." And wasn't it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study "Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions," where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones "enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted." He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes "are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, " the ACLU has warned. "In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior." In closing, Friedersdorf writes: "[...] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus." "What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amir Rahimi, vice president of game studios at Netflix, said in a blog post that, close to the first anniversary of launching games a year ago, Netflix is announcing that Spry Fox is joining as its sixth in-house games studio. VentureBeat reports: Spry Fox is an award-winning independent studio focused on cozy, original games. Their unique approach to game development and success with titles like Triple Town, Alphabear and Cozy Grove will help accelerate Netflix's creative development in another beloved genre and add to the growing variety of Netflix's games catalog that will have something for everyone, Rahimi said. Rahimi said Netflix looks forward to creating games with a studio whose values -- a relentless focus on employee and player joy -- align closely with its own. "Our games journey has only just begun, but I'm proud of the foundational work we've been doing to build out our in-house creative capacity so that we can deliver the best possible games experience -- including no ads and no in-app purchases -- to our members as part of their membership," Rahimi said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Russian telegram channels, the former World Chess Champion, Antoly Karpov, was "rushed to the hospital with multiple head injuries in which he was placed in an induced coma," reports ChessBase. "Karpov was put on a ventilator now, and has been diagnosed with cerebral edema, fractures of the right parietal and right temporal bones, multiple head hematomas, and traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage." From the report: On a few things none of the reports still in circulation disagree: the 12th World Champion and current member of Duma, Anatoly Karpov, 71, was found on the ground outside of the Duma, and unresponsive. His blood alcohol levels were very elevated, and he was rushed to the hospital into intensive care. Some early reports claimed he was the victim of an assault and in induced coma. This was later reiterated by other outlets such as Marca from Spain. The source of this, according to Tass, Andrei Kovalev, chairman of the All-Russian Movement of Entrepreneurs, announced in his Telegram channel that Karpov was in intensive care after an attack by unknown people and put into an artificial coma. However Karpov's assistant denied this and said he was fine, had no injuries and was in stable condition. Which begs the question, how fine can he be if there is a need to reassure others he is in 'stable condition'. Since Russian media is under very tight control by the Russian State, it is impossible to know where the truth really lies. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The White House is bringing together three dozen nations, the European Union and a slew of private-sector companies for a two-day summit starting Monday that looks at how best to combat ransomware attacks. The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults. A senior Biden administration official cited recent attacks such as one that targeted the Los Angeles school district last month to underscore the urgency of the issue and the summit. The official previewed the event on the condition of anonymity. Among the administration officials planning to participate in the event are FBI Director Christopher Wray, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. President Joe Biden is not expected to attend. Participating countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer said he intends to continue to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to." From a report: The new promise comes weeks after Sony lambasted an "inadequate" offer to extend Call of Duty's cross-platform access for three years past the current agreement and as Microsoft faces continuing scrutiny from international governments over its proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. "We're not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation," Spencer said directly in an interview with the Same Brain podcast. "That's not our intent." Instead, Spencer said Microsoft's plan for Call of Duty is "similar to what we've done with Minecraft," which has remained a cross-platform staple since Microsoft's $2.5 billion purchase of developer Mojang in 2014. Since then, Spencer said, "we've expanded the places where people can play Minecraft... and it's been good for the Minecraft community, in my opinion. I want to do the same as we think about where Call of Duty can go over the years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The social media platform Discord recently published its quarterly safety report which notes that some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022. From a report: According to the company, the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses." The number of accounts that were disabled for reasons other than spam definitely pales in comparison, amounting to a mere 1,821,721. The bans in this category were mostly handed out for issues relating to "child safety" or "exploitative and unsolicited content." Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter of this year, meaning that of the 235,945 users who called for a second opinion about their ban, only 3,098 of them were reinstated on the platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After passing with near unanimous support in both houses of the state Legislature, a bill that would allow New Yorkers to repair their electronic devices is all ready to become law as it awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul's signature. From a report: The bill's sponsor in the Assembly, Assemblywoman Pat Fahy of Albany, said the bill would create a system that we use for cars but for the electronic devices we use each day. The bill, known as "Right to Repair," would force companies to provide tools and parts for independent repair shops or individuals to repair devices like cell phones. Opponents of the legislation have cited safety and cybersecurity threats as their issues with the legislation. Supporters of the bill, including Fahy, said the bill will allow for economic growth in this sector and could help the "tinkerers of today" become the "inventors of the future." The Federal Trade Commission has called the bill a milestone and has said it does not harm intellectual property rights.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, Bloomberg News reports, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter. From the report: Apple has been gearing up to launch a slew of new Macs, and now we have a clearer idea of when that will occur: early next year. I'm told that Apple is aiming to introduce the upgraded models -- including M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros -- in the first quarter of calendar 2023 and has tied the launches to the upcoming macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3. Those software updates are expected to debut between early February and the beginning of March. [...] The new MacBook Pros will continue to look like the current models, but they'll trade their M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the first M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The M2 Max will go to 12 CPU cores, up from 10, and see its top graphics option move to 38 cores from 32. A new Mac mini remains in development, and the company continues to test versions with the same M2 chip as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as an M2 Pro chip, which hikes the CPU and graphics counts. If Apple indeed launches the M2 Pro variation, we can expect the company to probably wind down the still-available Intel model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done -- and there's evidence they're right to be spooked. From a report: In the first half of 2022, productivity -- the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour -- plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when "quiet quitting" -- doing only what's expected and no more -- is resonating, especially with younger workers. Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it's down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren't as easy to measure. "It is strange," Comin said. "The data is very odd these past couple of quarters in so many different ways. It's hard to even tell a coherent story." Tech CEOs such as Google's Sundar Pichai and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said his company coined the term "productivity paranoia" to describe employers' anxieties about whether their employees are working hard enough.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond. Quanta magazine: Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson -- later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) -- was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated. Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required. Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory. We are all familiar with knots -- they keep shoes on our feet, boats secured to docks, and mountain climbers off the rocks below. But those knots are not exactly what mathematicians (including Tait) would call a knot. Although a tangled extension cord may appear knotted, it's always possible to disentangle it. To get a mathematical knot, you must plug together the free ends of the cord to form a closed loop. Because the strands of a knot are flexible like string, mathematicians view knot theory as a subfield of topology, the study of malleable shapes. Sometimes it is possible to untangle a knot so it becomes a simple circle, which we call the "unknot." But more often, untangling a knot is impossible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, said Monday it had fired its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou. From a report: The San Diego-based company said in a news release and securities filing that its board of directors on Sunday had ousted Mr. Hou, who was also the board chairman and chief technology officer. Mr. Hou was fired in connection with a continuing investigation by members of the board, the release said. That review "led the board to conclude that a change of Chief Executive Officer was necessary," the company said in the release. The securities filing said that the board's investigation found that TuSimple this year shared confidential information with Hydron, a trucking startup with operations mostly in China and funded by Chinese investors. The filing also said that TuSimple's decision to share the confidential information hadn't been disclosed to the board before TuSimple entered into a business deal with Hydron. TuSimple said it didn't know whether Hydron shared, or publicly disclosed, the confidential information, the securities filing said. WSJ, reporting on Sunday: TuSimple faces federal investigations into whether it improperly financed and transferred technology to a Chinese startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The people said the concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cfius, are examining TuSimple's relationship with Hydron, a startup that says it is developing autonomous hydrogen-powered trucks and is led by one of TuSimple's co-founders. Investigators at the FBI and SEC are looking at whether TuSimple and its executives -- principally Chief Executive Xiaodi Hou -- breached fiduciary duties and securities laws by failing to properly disclose the relationship, the people familiar with the matter said. They are also probing whether TuSimple shared with Hydron intellectual property developed in the U.S. and whether that action defrauded TuSimple investors by sending valuable technology to an overseas adversary, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday cracked down on Chegg, an education technology firm based in Santa Clara, Calif., saying the company's "careless" approach to cybersecurity had exposed the personal details of tens of millions of users. From a report: In a legal complaint, filed on Monday morning, regulators accused Chegg of numerous data security lapses dating to 2017. Among other problems, the agency said, Chegg had issued root login credentials, essentially an all-access pass to certain databases, to multiple employees and outside contractors. Those credentials enabled many people to look at user account data, which the company kept on Amazon Web Services' online storage system. As a result, the agency said, a former Chegg contractor was able to use company-issued credentials to steal the names, email addresses and passwords of about 40 million users in 2018. In certain cases, sensitive details on students' religion, sexual orientation, disabilities and parents' income were also taken. Some of the data was later found for sale online. Chegg's popular homework help app is used regularly by millions of high school and college students. To settle the F.T.C.'s charges, the agency said Chegg had agreed to adopt a comprehensive data security program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new art exhibition in San Francisco showcases some of the unique ways that artists have begun to incorporate Dall-E 2, GPT-3 and other AI systems into their work -- efforts that go well beyond just typing some text and seeing what pops out. From a report: The exhibit, "Artificial Imagination," comes amid a broad debate over the legal and artistic merits of AI-created art, as well as concerns that more powerful computers could take jobs away from humans. "Artificial Imagination" includes a range of work, from videos to still images and sculpture. While many of the pieces used Dall-E 2 to help generate images, others took a different approach. Alexander Reben, for example, used text generated by GPT-3 and then built his interpretation of the computer's description. The artists and curators said the exhibition, believed to be the first of its kind, is an important recognition that AI art is indeed art.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hong Kong has proposed allowing retail investors to trade in cryptocurrencies and crypto exchange-traded funds and plans to conduct pilots in NFT issuance and CBDC as it looks to regain its status as a global financial hub. From a report: The city had last year proposed limiting crypto trade to professional investors, a move that saw many crypto entrepreneurs shift base to friendlier jurisdictions such as Dubai and Singapore. Hong Kong will review property rights for tokenized assets and explore legalizing smart contracts "to provide a solid legal foundation for their development," it said. It is also planning to put in place "appropriate regulations" on aspects such as "governance, stabilization and redemption mechanism" of stablecoin. The proposal comes at a time when China has ramped up its efforts to crackdown on crypto transactions and Singapore is exploring a series of stringent guidelines surrounding virtual digital assets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet's dust-producing deserts — information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust's effects on climate," NASA announced this week. "But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas."In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 "super-emitters" in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates. "Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The International Space Station and NASA's more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth's climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas — and stop it at the source...." "These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale," said David Thompson, EMIT's instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. "It's a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities." Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it's estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.... "Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. "What we've found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations." For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas. In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).... With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters — some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown. "As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects," said Robert Green, EMIT's principal investigator at JPL.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "What is your biggest pain point?", North Carolina State University PhD student Samim Mirhosseini and Microsoft Researchers Austin Z. Henley & Chris Parnin asked 32 computer science instructors at universities and community colleges. Their feedback is summed up in a just-posted paper that will be presented at SIGCSE 2023. Instructors cited understanding what students are struggling with, answering students' questions, limited teaching assistant (TA) support, grading & feedback, course material preparation, and administrative tasks as challenges, pain points, and things they wish they could change. Interestingly, instructors indicated that some of the attempts to address pain points — including the increased use of TA's, interactive textbooks/exercises, automated grading, "flipped" classrooms [where lectures are assigned as video homework, with classtime reserved for interaction], and peer instruction — aren't always what they're cracked up to be. - "Some TAs are not mature programmers," instructors noted. "TAs sometimes only run the unit tests and never read the code, [so] two submissions that were nearly identical, but one got [high] marks and the other got [low] marks." - Automation brings its own challenges, instructors added, citing the problem of interactive textbooks that give grades but deduct points even if there is only a whitespace difference with the solution ("My students struggle so much with it and they spend hours trying to get the white space correct in their program when in reality that's not what I want them spending time on"). - Instructors also cited struggles with "how to design 'Copilot-proof' assignments, to prevent students from completing homework assignments in seconds with little conceptual knowledge. - Regarding the flipped classroom, one instructor confessed, "I've checked and there's very few people watching these videos." While grading was cited as "probably the biggest burden of the courses" and "an impossible task," one instructor still noted a preference to grade things themselves even if they have TAs "because [of] the feedback I can get from [...] their homework and assignments." Along the same lines, another noted that while they also wish for more automation of mundane tasks, they are strongly opposed to automating feedback to students because "I think this is the wrong direction for education. Striping away community and humanity from learning."Read more of this story at Slashdot.