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Iran has one nuclear power plant. The email system of the company operating it was just breached, according to Iran's civil nuclear arm. The Associated Press reports:An anonymous hacking group claimed responsibility for the attack on Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, demanding Tehran release political prisoners arrested in the recent nationwide protests. The group said it leaked 50 gigabytes of internal emails, contracts and construction plans related to Iran's Russian-backed nuclear power plant in Bushehr and shared the files on its Telegram channel. It was unclear whether the breached system contained classified material. The hack comes as Iran continues to face nationwide unrest...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget writes:After nearly three weeks of escalating rhetoric, The Wire is retracting its reporting on Meta. On Sunday, the nonprofit publication said it had discovered "certain discrepancies" with the material that had informed its reporting on the social media giant since October 6th. "The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories," the outlet said, pointing to the fact it could not authenticate two emails that were critical to its previous coverage of Meta. One of the emails The Wire said it could not verify includes a message the outlet had attributed to Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. "Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time," The Wire said. "We are still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that it was deliberately sought to misinform or deceive The Wire." The Wire had reported Meta "had given an influential official from India's ruling party the extraordinary power to censor Instagram posts that he didn't like," according to the Washington Post. But it took a weird turn when The Wire published a video of a takedown request, according to Engadget. "One day later, Meta said an internal investigation found the video showed a Workspace account created on October 13th, suggesting someone made the account to back up The Wire's reporting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Auto industry insiders have waxed poetic about the safety benefits of the 'software-defined vehicle' — which also enables revenue-boosting data collection and subscriptions that make it safer to be an auto executive too," writes Wired. "Less talked about are the consequences of computerized cars at the auto shop."Fixing complex vehicles requires increasingly expert and expensive knowledge, and tools that are in limited supply.... [T]he upshot can be that it takes longer to get your car fixed. The trend is worsened by an ongoing decline in the number of U.S. auto shops, driven by consolidation and owners taking retirement.... There are now significantly fewer places to get your car fixed in the U.S. than there were just five years ago. One industry publication found that for every active service bay inside U.S. auto shops there were 225 cars and trucks on the road in 2016. Now there are 246 vehicles per bay. Pandemic supply-chain jams for computer chips and auto parts, and a nationwide labor shortage of car technicians, have worsened the problem. Cars took an average of 2.1 days longer to repair in 2021 than in 2019, according to CCC Intelligent Solutions, which sells software to automotive and insurance agencies, nearly 11 days in all. Industry experts say the problem will only get worse. "In 10 years, I see a lot fewer shops, and I see a lot more people looking for shops," says Rick White, who coaches auto repair shop owners through his company, 180biz. An industry survey taken late last year found 96 percent of shops reporting delays, with an average scheduling backlog of 3.4 weeks, compared to 1.7 weeks in late 2019.... Some brands of vehicle can only be calibrated with specialized and expensive tools.... In all, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire the tools and make the shop adjustments to repair just a few car makes. That's before the cost of training workers to use those tools, with shops paying thousands each year to keep their staff certified to fix specific cars. Investing for the future, then, can set shop owners back by millions. Wired interviewed the former owner of a collision repair shop. Their assessment? Shop owners are just "fed up... we went from a very simple industry to a very complex industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It might be a while before you can buy a 'Roomba for laundry'," jokes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac, pointing out that "while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types." But NPR reports laundry-folding robots are getting closer:As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles That's not to say that it's completely impossible. University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel spent years teaching a robot how to fold a towel, eventually cutting that process down from 20 minutes to a whopping minute and a half. And Silicon Valley-based company FoldiMate raised hopes and eyebrows when it showed off a prototype of its eponymous laundry-folding robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2019. It said the machine could fold some 25 pieces of laundry — except for small items like socks and large items like sheets — in under five minutes, with an estimated price tag of $980. It's unclear what happened to that company — its website is down and it hasn't tweeted since April 2020. Its sole competitor, a Japanese company with an AI-powered prototype, filed for bankruptcy. In sum, most robots have not generally been equipped for the task. But an international group of researchers say their new method could change that — or at least speed up the process. Researchers are calling the new method, SpeedFolding. It's a "reliable and efficient bimanual system" — meaning it involves two hands — that's able to smooth and fold a crumpled garment in record speed (for robots, that is). SpeedFolding can fold 30 to 40 strewn-about garments per hour, compared to previous models that averaged three to six garments in that same time span, according to researchers. They say their robot can fold items in under two minutes, with a success rate of 93%. "Real-world experiments show that the system is able to generalize to unseen garments of different color, shape, and stiffness," they add. According to the article, the team will be presenting their paper at a robotics conference in Kyoto this month, and they've also posted a one-minute video on YouTube. (Their solution involves both an overhead camera and a novel neural network called BiManual Manipulation Network that "studied 4,300 human and machine-assisted actions in order to learn how to smooth and fold garments from a random configuration." "While researchers describe SpeedFolding as a significant improvement, it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon," notes NPR. "For one, Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports that "Standard electric-vehicle batteries can recharge much of their range in just 10 minutes with the addition of a thin sheet of nickel inside them, a new study finds."This could provide a welcome and economically attractive alternative to expensive EVs that carry massive and massively expensive battery packs. If faster-charging options were available, enabling the EV's sticker price to drop substantially, some researchers suspect consumers' EV phobia and industry dogma against "range anxiety" could be overcome.... In the new study, researchers experimented with a lithium-ion battery with a roughly 560-kilometer range when fully charged. (The battery's energy density was 265 watt-hours-per-kilogram.) By adding an ultrathin nickel foil to its interior [to heat the battery quickly], they could recharge it to 70 percent in 11 minutes for a roughly 400-km range, and 75 percent in 12 minutes for a roughly 440-km range. "Our technology enables smaller, faster-charging batteries to be deployed for mass adoption of affordable electric cars," says study senior author Chao-Yang Wang, a battery engineer at Pennsylvania State University.... The scientists detailed their findings online in the journal Nature. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gunner2028 for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer science professor Moshe Y. Vardi is the Senior Editor of Communications of the ACM. And he's concerned about the state of cybersecurity today: In 2017, I wrote: "So here we are, 70 years into the computer age and after three ACM Turing Awards in the area of cryptography (but none in cybersecurity), and we still do not seem to know how to build secure information systems." What would I write today? Clearly, I would write: "75 years," but I would not change a word in the rest of the sentence.... The slow progress in cybersecurity is leading many to conclude the problem is not due to just a lack of technical solution but reflects a market failure, which disincentivizes those who may be able to fix serious security vulnerabilities from doing so. As I argued in 2020, the computing fields tend to focus on efficiency at the expense of resilience. Security usually comes at a cost in terms of performance, a cost that market players seem reluctant to pay. To discuss the market-failure issue and how to address it, the Computing Community Consortium organized in August this year a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security. The opening talk was given by Paul Rosenzweig, an attorney who specializes in national security law. He argued that technological development is founded, at the end, on human behavior. So, the key to good cybersecurity is to incentivize humans. Thus, the answer lies in the economics of cybersecurity, which is, mostly, a private domain with lots of externalities, where prices do not capture all costs.... As the philosopher Helen Nissenbaum pointed out in a 1996 article, while computing vendors are responsible for the reliability and safety of their product, the lack of liability results in lack of accountability. She warned us more than 25 years ago about eroding accountability in computerized societies. The development of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture in this century shows that her warning was on the mark.... If we want to address the cyber-insecurity issue, we should start by welcoming liability into computing. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader shanen for sharing the articleRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Gates's climate-oriented venture fund "is plowing more money into climate adaptation," reports MIT Technology Review:To date, the fund has focused on "climate mitigation," which largely concentrates on driving down climate pollution. Climate adaptation refers to developing ways of bolstering protections against the dangers of climate change, rather than just preventing it. The firm's new focus will include ways to help farmers and communities grapple with increasingly common or severe droughts [possibly through advanced desalination technology or systems that pull moisture out of the air], and helping crops remain productive as the world becomes hotter, wetter, or drier; potentially through indoor farming and genetic alteration. Strengthening the infrastructure of global ports, which face growing threats from sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms, will also be investigated. "Investment opportunities there could include dynamic mooring systems that automatically respond to storm surges, cranes that can operate safely in hotter and harsher conditions, and ships that are more rugged," said Eric Toone, technical lead for Breakthrough Energy Ventures' investment committee, in an interview with MIT Technology Review. "Mitigation's just not going to get us there fast enough, and suffering is unacceptable...." Toone says. "So while our focus will continue to be on mitigation, we will expand our scope to include adaptation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry Halpin helped create uniform cryptography standards for the World Wide Web Consortium, reports Quanta magazine — but "he also wanted to protect the lower, foundational level: the network through which the information is transmitted. "In 2018, he started Nym Technologies to take on this problem.... Halpin spoke with Quanta from Nym's headquarters in Neuchâtel, Switzerland." Halpin: The trickier problem is this: How do I communicate with you so that no one else knows I'm communicating with you, even if our messages are encrypted? You can get a sense of what people are saying from the pattern of communication: Who are you talking with, when are your conversations, how long do they last...? There are two key elements: One is the "mixnet," a technology invented by David Chaum in 1979 that my team has improved. It relies on the premise that you can't be anonymous by yourself; you can only be anonymous in a crowd. You start with a message and break it into smaller units, communications packets, that you can think of as playing cards. Next, you encrypt each card and randomly send it to a "mixnode" — a computer where it will be mixed with cards from other senders. This happens three separate times and at three separate mixnodes. Then each card is delivered to the intended recipient, where all the cards from the original message are decrypted and put back into the proper order. No person who oversees mixing at a single mixnode can know both the card's origin and its destination. In other words, no one can know who you are talking to. Q: That was the original mixnet, so what improvements have you made? Halpin: For one thing, we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz, a computer privacy professor at KU Leuven and Nym's chief scientist. Each packet you receive on the Nym network has a probability attached to it that tells you, for instance, the odds that it came from any given individual.... Our system uses a statistical process that allows you both to measure entropy and to maximize it — the greater the entropy, the greater the anonymity. There are no other systems out there today that can let users know how private their communications are. Q: What's the second key element you referred to? Halpin: Mixnets, as I said, have been around a long time. The reason they've never taken off has a lot to do with economics. Where do the people who are going to do the mixing come from, and how do you pay them? We think we have an answer. And the kernel of that idea came from a conversation I had in 2017 with Adam Back, a cryptographer who developed bitcoin's central "proof of work" algorithm. I asked him what he would do if he were to redesign bitcoin. He said it would be great if all the computer processing done to verify cryptocurrency transactions — by solving so-called Merkle puzzles that have no practical value outside of bitcoin — could instead be used to ensure privacy. The computationally expensive part of privacy is the mixing, so it occurred to me that we could use a bitcoin-inspired system to incentivize people to do the mixing. We built our company around that idea.... A new paper that came out in June shows that this approach can lead to an economically sustainable mixnet.... We are not building a currency system or trying to replace the dollar. We just want to provide privacy to ordinary people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google is giving Apple a taste of its own medicine," reports Business Insider, arguing that the latest update to Android's messaging app "is going to make texting between iPhone and Androids even more annoying than it already is." [Alternate URL]The updates are great if you're an Android user. Google Messages' new features include the ability to reply to individual messages, star them, and set reminders on texts. But these features and some other updates to Messages are RCS-enabled, meaning they're not going to be very compatible with SMS, which is the texting standard that iMessage switches to when messaging someone without an iPhone. iPhones exchange messages using iMessage, Apple's proprietary messaging system, but revert to SMS when texting an Android. One feature that's part of Google's payback to Apple is that now, when Messages users react to an SMS text with an emoji, iPhone users will get a text saying the other person reacted to their text with a description of whatever emoji the person used. It's similar to when iMessage users react to an SMS text, with the recipient getting a "so and so loved" message instead of seeing the heart emoji reaction.... In August, Android launched a page on its website calling Apple out for refusing "to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other." The page has buttons that take users to Twitter to tweet at Apple to "stop breaking my texting experience. #GetTheMessage" with a link to Android's page urging Apple to "fix texting." "We would much prefer that everybody adopts RCS which has the capability to support proper reactions," Jan Jedrzejowicz, Google Messages product manager, said in a briefing before the Messages updates were announced. "But in the event that's not possible or hasn't happened yet, this feels like the next best thing." Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn't get a lot of feedback from iPhone users that Apple needs to fix messaging between iPhones and Androids. Apple doesn't have much incentive to do so, either. In legal documents from a 2021 lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, an Apple executive said "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times. "Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today."Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech.... The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy. With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday a Forbes senior writer reported:A China-based team at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes. The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance's Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang. The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users' devices. Challenging the article, TikTok responded on Twitter that their service "does not collect precise GPS location information from U.S. users, meaning TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested." But Forbes' senior writer thinks that's a misleading denial, writing on Twitter that "We never mentioned GPS in the story. In fact, we quoted their spokesperson saying they collect approximate location via IP address. Not using GPS does not mean they could not use that approximate location to monitor certain individuals." TikTok also acknowledged on Twitter that they do have a team that will "acquire information they need to conduct internal investigations of violations of the company codes of conduct," but says the team follows a specific set of policies and processes "as is standard in companies across our industry." In Forbes' article, TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information (based on IP addresses) to "among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior." But Forbes' senior writer said in their article that "the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes."The Internal Audit and Risk Control team runs regular audits and investigations of TikTok and ByteDance employees, for infractions like conflicts of interest and misuse of company resources, and also for leaks of confidential information. Internal materials reviewed by Forbes show that senior executives, including TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, have ordered the team to investigate individual employees, and that it has investigated employees even after they left the company. TikTok's response on Twitter? Behavior like that would be a firing ofference. "Any use of internal audit resources as alleged by Forbes would be grounds for immediate dismissal of company personnel." TikTok also said on Twitter that their service "has never been used to 'target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists, nor do we serve them a different content experience than other users." The response of Forbes' senior writer? "I'm glad they say TikTok hasn't been used to 'target' some specific groups. I am nonetheless concerned that they planned to use it to monitor specific Americans, which is what we reported. "Also, for what it's worth, they didn't answer this question when we asked it to them on Wednesday.... Neither TikTok nor ByteDance denied anything we reported, either in the pre-publication process, when we told them what we planned to report and asked for comment, or since then. They have also not requested a story update." Thanks to Slashdot reader koavf for submitting the storyRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"Farmers have urged whoever succeeds Liz Truss as UK prime minister to abandon plans to ban solar energy from most of England's farmland," reports the Guardian, "arguing that it would hurt food security by cutting off a vital income stream."Truss, who resigned on Thursday, and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, hoped to ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land, the Guardian revealed last week. They planned to do this by reclassifying less productive farmland as "best and most valuable", making it more difficult to use for energy infrastructure. Members of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 33,000 landowners, told the Guardian having solar on their less productive land allowed them to subsidise food production during less successful years, as well as providing cheap power for their estates and homes in their local area. One farmer made the case succinctly to the Guardian. "We make unequivocally more from our solar panels than from farming."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vice reports:Sure, you may be trying to cut down on screen time by tracking your minutes in an app on the very same smartphone you're trying to unplug from, but how about a smartphone that doesn't even have a screen to stare at in the first place? Enter MyManu's Titan screenless smartphone... Titan is a set of eSim-enabled, voice controlled earbuds with embedded live voice translation.... So, what can you do with a "screenless smartphone, anyway? According to MyManu, you can make calls, send messages, listen to music or other streamed content, and even translate speech into over 30 languages using its built-in MyJune app — so basically, all of the "phone" parts of having a smartphone minus the hours of fucking around on apps, games, and social media. Its web site promises the phone allows you to:Interact without constant screen glareGet better sleep, reduce eyestrain and headachesReduce anxietyAvoid nasty bacteria or viruses [from constantly touching your screen]The downside? There's no screen....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post spotlights millions of workers newly allowed to work remotely since the pandemic — including the head of Block's global policy partnerships who moved to a tiny town in Michigan to be closer to her grandfather. And on the plus side, there's a 34-year-old who "has spent the last two years jet-setting across Spain, Italy, Greece and her motherland of Romania. She's also thrown herself into road cycling..." Remote workers say they enjoy connecting with nature, exploring the world and spending more time with family, noting that their outlook on work has changed forever. But it's not rosy all the time: Some say their new lifestyles have introduced complications like time-zone coordination, a different approach to connecting with colleagues, slow internet connectivity, the fear of missing out in-person, and sorting out international health care and travel restrictions.... Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO of Australian software company Atlassian, moved to a farm two hours south of the company's Sydney headquarters.... "We decided that ... nobody had to come back to an office," he said. "That reduced pressure." For Cannon-Brookes, allowing his employees to work from anywhere seemed to make the most sense. But he admits Atlassian had to do a lot of retooling to make the policy functional. It had to adjust salaries based on location, coordinate time zones so that teams could work together, create moments for in-person interactions and recruit in areas it hadn't explored. While it's still working social connection, Atlassian now has a larger hiring pool and happier employees, he says. And many got to be with family. "There's a number of people who've sent beautiful, tearful messages, especially older employees who have worked awhile and realized how unusual this is," he said. Atlassian software developer Christina Bell, 27, says the change allowed her to keep her job to spend time with her grandmother, who was diagnosed with cancer, in her homeland of New Zealand. "We went to the beach, did puzzles together, had quality time," she said of her grandmother who was an early supporter of her engineering interests. "In a good twist of events, my nana is in remission, and she's still with us a year and a half later. I'm making the most of our time." Quality time with family is a common thread among several workers who moved thanks to new work policies.... Some workers found relief leaving their cities for nature. That was the case for Naomi Barnett of Spotify and Helen Prowse of Block.... Tempe, Ariz., resident Devin Miller, who works in Yelp's people operations department, says the permanent shift to remote work made room for a new ritual: occasionally working from a cabin in the mountainous town of Pinetop-Lakeside, Ariz. There, he can watch a herd of elk parade across the front yard and take a conference call from a swinging hammock — assuming his internet signal isn't weak. "It's a total refresh for both of us," he said, referring to his partner. "Being stuck in our house put a lot of pressure on our relationship."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First released in 1998, the BSD-licensed software Zeek (originally named "Bro") is about to get more widely adopted, writes long-time Slashdot reader skinfaxi:Zeek, the open source network security monitoring platform, is being integrated into Windows and "is now deployed on more than one billion global endpoints," according to an announcement from Corelight. From Corelight's press release: Corelight, the leader in open network detection and response, today announced the integration of Zeek, the world's most popular open source network security monitoring platform, as a component of Microsoft Windows and Defender for Endpoint. The integration will help security teams respond to the most challenging attacks by providing "richer signals for advanced threat hunting, complete and accurate discovery of IoT devices, and more powerful detection and response capabilities." Originally created by Corelight co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Vern Paxson while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Zeek transforms network traffic into compact and high-fidelity logs, file content, and behavioral analytics to accelerate security operations. Vital funding for Zeek came initially from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. As adoption increased, Corelight was founded to provide a financial model and corporate sponsor for the project.... "Microsoft is strongly committed to supporting open source projects and ecosystems," said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft. "We're proud to be working with Zeek and are thrilled to bring this level of network intelligence and monitoring to our customers." "This is an amazing development for Zeek and its community of contributors and users," said Paxson. "I never imagined that the tool I developed for network monitoring would find broader application in defending endpoints — but that's part of the creative magic of open source development. "We are grateful for Microsoft's contributions and support, and we are excited that the project's impact, and that of the community of contributors, will increase so dramatically."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hardcore overclocker Elmor "officially broke the CPU frequency world record with Intel's brand-new Core i9-13900K 24-core processor," reports Tom's Hardware — by hitting "a staggering 8.812GHz using liquid nitrogen cooling, dethroning the 8-year reigning champion, the FX-8370, by 90MHz."That's right; it took eight years for a new CPU architecture to dethrone AMD's FX series processors. Those chips are infamous for their mediocre CPU performance at launch; however, these chips scaled incredibly well under liquid nitrogen overclocking.... Elmor accomplished this monumental feat thanks to Intel's new highly-clocked 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU architecture. Out of the box, the Core i9-13900K can run over 5.5GHz on all P-cores while also hitting 5.8GHz under lightly threaded workloads. The 13900K is, by far, Intel's highest-clocking chip to date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A U.S. judge in Texas ruled on Friday that people killed in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes are legally considered 'crime victims,'" reports Reuters, "a designation that will determine what remedies should be imposed."In December, some crash victims' relatives said the U.S. Justice Department violated their legal rights when it struck a January 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the planemaker over two crashes that killed 346 people. The families argued the government "lied and violated their rights through a secret process" and asked U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor to rescind Boeing's immunity from criminal prosecution — which was part of the $2.5 billion agreement — and order the planemaker publicly arraigned on felony charges. O'Connor ruled on Friday that "in sum, but for Boeing's criminal conspiracy to defraud the (Federal Aviation Administration), 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes." Paul Cassell, a lawyer for the families, said the ruling "is a tremendous victory" and "sets the stage for a pivotal hearing, where we will present proposed remedies that will allow criminal prosecution to hold Boeing fully accountable." Boeing did not immediately comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RedMonk has released its latest quarterly rankings of popular programming languages, arguing that "The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends." Their methodology? "We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction." Below are this quarter's results: 1. JavaScript2. Python3. Java4. PHP5. C#6. CSS7. C++7. TypeScript9. Ruby10. C11. Swift12. R12. Objective-C14. Shell15. Scala15. Go17. PowerShell17. Kotlin19. Rust19. Dart Their analysis of the latest rankings note "movement is increasingly rare.... the top 20 has been stable for multiple runs. As has been speculated about in this space previously, it seems increasingly clear that the hypothesis of a temporary equilibrium of programming language usage is supported by the evidence.... [W]e may have hit a point of relative — if temporary — contentment with the wide variety of languages available for developers' usage." And yet this quarter TypeScript has risen from #8 to #7, now tied with C++, benefiting from attributes like its interoperability with an existing popular language with an increased availability of security-related features. "There is little suggestion at present that the language is headed anywhere but up. The only real question is on what timeframe."Unlike TypeScript, Go's trajectory has been anything but clear. While it grew steadily and reasonably swiftly as languages go, it has appeared to be stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs. This quarter, however, Go rose one spot in the rankings back up to 15. In and of itself, this is a move of limited significance, as the further one goes down the rankings the less significant the differences between them are, ranking-wise. But it has been over a year since we've seen movement from Go, which raises the question of whether there is any room for further upward ascent or whether it will remain hovering in the slot one would expect from a technically well regarded but not particularly versatile (from a use case standpoint) language. Like Go, Kotlin had spent the last three runs in the same position. It and Rust had been moving in lockstep in recent quarters, but while Rust enters its fourth consecutive run in 19th place, Kotlin managed to achieve some separation this quarter jumping one spot up from 18 to 17.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: As the US escalates its campaign to undermine the Chinese semiconductor industry, Europe is trying -- with some success -- to avoid becoming collateral damage. At the center of the maneuvering is ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of chipmaking equipment and Europe's most valuable tech company. It's one of the very few producers of the sophisticated lithography machines needed to make midgrade semiconductors, and the only manufacturer of the equipment needed to make the most cutting-edge chips. That puts ASML in the spotlight for policymakers. ASML has never sold its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, or EUVs, to Chinese clients. The Biden administration, as part of its attempt to keep China from developing the capability to make advanced semiconductors, has been trying to push the Dutch government to withhold ASML's older machines called immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, or DUVs, that can be used in combination with other technology to make advanced chips. The European Commission, as well as the Dutch and German governments, have undertaken a coordinated lobbying campaign to oppose restrictions on a critical European company while US competitors continue to do business with Chinese companies, according to officials who spoke under the condition of anonymity because the talks are sensitive. They've argued in part that such restrictions are now pointless given that ASML, which generated 15% of its revenue in China last year, has already sold many of these machines to Chinese companies. When the US did push ahead in early October with more severe restrictions against doing business in China, its specific policies came as a relief to ASML and its political supporters. ASML wasn't hit directly by the new restrictions, which did make it harder for its US peers, such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, to sell advanced chip gear to China. Both companies warned investors that the new restrictions would significantly affect their financial performance. The US Department of Commerce, which is responsible for the majority of rulemaking and enforcement, won't comment directly on specific companies or its negotiations with other governments. ASML is not an American company, limiting the US's power over its operations. But it commonly uses parts from the US, which gives Washington a degree of leverage. In the past, export controls have applied to products when at least 25% of their components are sourced from the US. But senior US officials now say products that contain any US components or intellectual property could be subjected to Washington's export approval process. Such a broad interpretation of the rules would be difficult for a company like ASML to work around. "Europeans feared the new US policy would include provisions affecting immersion DUVs," adds Bloomberg. According to SML's chief executive officer, Peter Wennink, the company's initial assessment is that the new restrictions don't apply to ASML's products shipped out of the Netherlands. Roger Dassen, the chief financial officer, also said the direct impact is fairly limited, thanks to "the fact that we are a European company with limited US technology in it." However, Bloomberg notes ASML's shares "dropped as much as 19% in the days after the Oct. 7 announcement, although they partially recovered after it posted strong earnings." "The US runs the risk of setting off a confrontation with Europe if it chooses to go ahead with new restrictions on immersion DUV machines," concludes the report. "It's unclear what chance officials have to convince their Dutch counterparts to impose additional restrictions on DUV sales, but there's little doubt the two allies aren't yet on the same page. China is the Netherlands's third-biggest trading partner after Germany and Belgium."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A leaker has claimed that Apple is working on a version of macOS exclusive for the M2 iPad Pro, with it expected at some point in 2023. Apple Insider reports: Leaker Majin Bu's sources have shared that Apple is working on a "smaller" version of macOS exclusively for the M2 iPad Pro. It is said to be codenamed Mendocino and will be released as macOS 14 in 2023. Testing is being done with a 25% larger macOS UI so it is suitable for touch. However, apps run on the product would still be iPad-optimized versions, not macOS ones. It isn't clear why Apple would move the iPad to a macOS interface in a half-step like this. Those clamoring for macOS on iPad do so for the software more than the interface. [...] The other possible explanation is this wasn't macOS at all. Apple could be working to bring iPadOS even closer to macOS by adding a Menu Bar and other Mac-like interactions. It already introduced a Mac windowing feature in iPadOS 16 called Stage Manager, this could be the next iteration. Majin Bu also suggests that the exclusivity to M2 iPad Pro could be a marketing push. If the feature is only available on that iPad, more people would buy it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Cardiff University have identified a peculiar twisting motion in the orbits of two colliding black holes, an exotic phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity. Phys.Org reports: Their study, which is published in Nature and led by Professor Mark Hannam, Dr. Charlie Hoy and Dr. Jonathan Thompson, reports that this is the first time this effect, known as precession, has been seen in black holes, where the twisting is 10 billion times faster than in previous observations. The binary black hole system was found through gravitational waves in early 2020 in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. One of the black holes, 40 times bigger than our Sun, is likely the fastest spinning black hole to be found through gravitational waves. And unlike all previous observations, the rapidly revolving black hole distorted space and time so much that the binary's entire orbit wobbled back and forth. This form of precession is specific to Einstein's theory of general relativity. These results confirm its existence in the most extreme physical event we can observe, the collision of two black holes. In the fastest example previously measured from orbiting neutron stars called binary pulsars, it took over 75 years for the orbit to precess. The black-hole binary in this study, colloquially known as GW200129 (named after the date it was observed, January 29, 2020), precesses several times every second -- an effect 10 billion times stronger than measured previously. "So far most black holes we've found with gravitational waves have been spinning fairly slowly," said Dr. Charlie Hoy, a researcher at Cardiff University during this study, and now at the University of Portsmouth. "The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible. Our current models of how binaries form suggest this one was extremely rare, maybe a one in a thousand event. Or it could be a sign that our models need to change."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BetaNews: Slack developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app four years ago, updating it shortly afterwards to allow it to run gaming classics like Doom. Now he rolls out a new version which can run on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. Based on the Electron framework, Rieseberg's Windows 95 is written entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't run as smoothly as it would if it was a native app, but you shouldn't let that put you off. This is the second update of the year, which brings it up to version 3.1.1 and includes two important changes: - Upgraded from Electron v18 to Electron v21 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (sound is back!) The earlier update (in June) brought the software up to 3.0.0 and introduced the following changes: - Upgraded from Electron v11 Electron v18 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (now using WASM) - Upgraded various smaller dependencies - Much better scaling on all platforms - On Windows, the link to OSFMount was broken and is now fixed. - On Windows, you can now see a prettier installation animation. - On Windows, windows95 will have a proper icon in the Programs & Features menu. You can download the latest version of the Windows 95 app for Windows, macOS, and Linux at their respective links.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits. The Guardian reports: Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: "France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty." Quitting the ECT was "coherent" with the Paris climate deal, he added. Macron's statement follows a recent vote by the Polish parliament to leave the 52-nation treaty and announcements by Spain and the Netherlands that they too wanted out of the scheme. The European Commission has proposed a "modernization" of the agreement, which would end the writ of the treaty's secret investor-state courts between EU members. That plan is expected to be discussed at a meeting in Mongolia next month. A French government official said Paris would not try to block the modernization blueprint within the EU or at the meeting in Mongolia. "But whatever happens, France is leaving," the official said. While France was "willing to coordinate a withdrawal with others, we don't see that there is a critical mass ready to engage with that in the EU bloc as a whole," the official added. The French withdrawal will take about a year to be completed, and in that time, discussion in Paris will likely move on to ways of neutralizing or reducing the duration of a "sunset clause" in the ECT that allows retrospective lawsuits. Progress on that issue is thought possible by sources close to ongoing legal negotiations on the issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) has announced the launch of its fully operational metaverse, initially designed for activities such as immersive training courses for forensic investigations. Decrypt reports: Unveiled at the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, the INTERPOL Metaverse is described as the "first-ever Metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide." Among other things, the platform will also help law enforcement across the globe to interact with each other via avatars. "For many, the Metaverse seems to herald an abstract future, but the issues it raises are those that have always motivated INTERPOL -- supporting our member countries to fight crime and making the world, virtual or not, safer for those who inhabit it," Jurgen Stock, Interpol's secretary general said in a statement. One of the challenges identified by organizations is that something that is considered a crime in the physical world may not necessarily be the same in the virtual world. "By identifying these risks from the outset, we can work with stakeholders to shape the necessary governance frameworks and cut off future criminal markets before they are fully formed," said Madan Oberoi, Interpol's executive director of Technology and Innovation. "Only by having these conversations now can we build an effective response." In a live demonstration at the event, Interpol experts took to a Metaverse classroom to deliver a training course on travel document verification and passenger screening using the capabilities of the newly-launched platform. Students were then teleported to an airport where they were able to apply their newly-acquired skills at a virtual border point. Additionally, Interpol has created an expert group that will be tasked with ensuring new virtual worlds are "secure by design." The report notes that Interpol has also joined "Defining and Building the Metaverse," a World Economic Forum initiative around metaverse governance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that's designed to boost your computer's performance. The Verge reports: Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft's PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows. Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There's even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now. The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there's also a full cleanup scan available or a scan to find large files on your drives. The process management feature is a more simplified version of the Task Manager so you can quickly kill processes that might be eating up RAM. Hitting the main "boost" button will clear temporary files and free up memory, which could be useful on older PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Renters filed a lawsuit (PDF) this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation's biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law. The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both. [...] RealPage's software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals -- not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica. ProPublica's investigation found that the software's design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country's biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing -- potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings. RealPage told ProPublica that the company "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing." The lawsuit said that RealPage's software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers "thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the 'heads in the beds') to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher," it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid "a race to the bottom" on rents, the lawsuit said. RealPage brags that clients -- who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data -- experience "rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market," the lawsuit said. RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said. A RealPage representative told ProPublica that the company "strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit." RealPage "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google unveiled a new open source security project on Thursday centered around software supply chain management. The Record reports: Given the acronym GUAC -- which stands for Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition -- the project is focused on creating sets of data about a software's build, security and dependency. Google worked with Purdue University, Citibank and supply chain security company Kusari on GUAC, a free tool built to bring together many different sources of software security metadata. Google has also assembled a group of technical advisory members to help with the project -- including IBM, Intel, Anchore and more. Google's Brandon Lum, Mihai Maruseac, Isaac Hepworth pitched the effort as one way to help address the explosion in software supply chain attacks -- most notably the widespread Log4j vulnerability that is still leaving organizations across the world exposed to attacks. "GUAC addresses a need created by the burgeoning efforts across the ecosystem to generate software build, security, and dependency metadata," they wrote in a blog post. "GUAC is meant to democratize the availability of this security information by making it freely accessible and useful for every organization, not just those with enterprise-scale security and IT funding." Google shared a proof of concept of the project, which allows users to search data sets of software metadata. The three explained that GUAC effectively aggregates software security metadata into a database and makes it searchable. They used the example of a CISO or compliance officer that needs to understand the "blast radius" of a vulnerability. GUAC would allow them to "trace the relationship between a component and everything else in the portfolio." Google says the tool will allow anyone to figure out the most used critical components in their software supply chain ecosystem, the security weak points and any risky dependencies. As the project evolves, Maruseac, Lum and Hepworth said the next part of the work will center around scaling the project and adding new kinds of documents that can be submitted and ingested by the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A hacker who stole two unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and sold them on the dark web has been jailed for 18 months. Adrian Kwiatkowski traded the music by Sheeran and 12 songs by rapper Lil Uzi Vert in exchange for cryptocurrency. The 23-year-old, from Ipswich, managed to get hold of them after hacking the performers' digital accounts, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Kwiatkowski admitted 19 charges, including copyright infringement and possessing criminal property. He had made 131,000 pounds ($148,000) from the music, City of London Police said. According to police, seven devices, including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists, were seized. A document saved on the hard drive summarised the method he had used to obtain them along with a stash of Bitcoin which was seized. In August, Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty at Ipswich Magistrates Court to three charges of unauthorised access to computer material, 14 charges of selling copyrighted material, one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property. Chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec said Kwiatkowski had "complete disregard" for the musicians' creativity, hard work and lost earnings. "He selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web," she said. "We will be pursuing ill-gotten gains from these proceeds of crime."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Biden administration is exploring the possibility of new export controls that would limit China's access to some of the most powerful emerging computing technologies, according to people familiar with the situation. The potential plans, which are in an early stage, are focused on the still-experimental field of quantum computing, as well as artificial intelligence software, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing private deliberations. Industry experts are weighing in on how to set the parameters of the restrictions on this nascent technology, they said. The efforts, if implemented, would follow separate restrictions announced earlier this month aimed at stunting Beijing's ability to deploy cutting-edge semiconductors in weapons and surveillance systems. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in a speech last month on technology, competitiveness and national security, referred to "computing-related technologies, including microelectronics, quantum information systems and artificial intelligence" as among developments "set to play an outsized importance over the coming decade." He also noted the importance of export controls to "maintain as large of a lead as possible" over adversaries. Expanding the wall around advanced technologies risks further antagonizing China and forcing other countries to pick sides between the world's two top economies. The new ideas have been shared with US allies, according to the people. Officials are still determining how to frame the controls on quantum computing, which will probably focus on the level of output and the so-called error correction rate, the people said. [...] The Biden administration is also working on an executive order for an outbound investment review mechanism that would scrutinize money heading to certain Chinese technologies, and the quantum computing and artificial intelligence controls could be included, one of the people said. That could incorporate some aspects similar to a measure pushed by senators Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study finds that some people really are "mosquito magnets" and it probably has to do with the way they smell. From a report: The researchers found that people who are most attractive to mosquitoes produce a lot of certain chemicals on their skin that are tied to smell. And bad news for mosquito magnets: they stay loyal to their favorites over time. "If you have high levels of this stuff on your skin, you're going to be the one at the picnic getting all the bites," said study author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York. There is folklore about who gets bitten more, but many claims are not backed up with strong evidence, said Vosshall. The researchers designed an experiment pitting people's scents against each other, explained study author Maria Elena De Obaldia. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Cell. They asked 64 volunteers from the university and nearby to wear nylon stockings around their forearms to pick up their skin smells. The stockings were put in separate traps at the end of a long tube, then dozens of mosquitos were released. "They would basically swarm to the most attractive subjects," De Obaldia said. "It became very obvious right away." Scientists held a round-robin tournament and ended up with a striking gap: the biggest mosquito magnet was around 100 times more attractive to the mosquitoes than the last place finisher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French police said Friday they're investigating multiple cuts to fiber-optic cables in France's second-largest city. Operators said the cables link Marseille to other cities in France and Europe and that internet and phone services were severely disrupted. From a report: The disruptions in Marseille were a taste of what analysts warn could be far larger problems in other cases if cables are systematically attacked. The vulnerability of fiber-optic cables, especially those underwater, and other key infrastructure was highlighted by the sabotage last month in the Baltic Sea of natural gas pipelines from Russia. The damage in the city in southern France also appeared to resemble suspected acts of sabotage to other cables in the country earlier this year. French cable operator and internet service provider Free said its repair teams were mobilized before dawn Wednesday to deal with "an act of vandalism on our fiber infrastructure." It said the attacks were simultaneous and on multiple spots of its fiber network near Marseille. Photos that Free published on Twitter showed multiple cables completely severed in their concrete housings buried in the ground. It said the cuts led to major disruptions to its network and phone services in the Marseille area.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Communications to Shetland, the Scottish archipelago that lies across the sea from Norway and more than 100 miles north of mainland Britain, have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged. From a report: Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut. The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents. Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island. The Scottish government's resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added. She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: "There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been." MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored. He said the priority was fixing the issue but that resilience would also need to be looked at in future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. has rules limiting federal officials' stock-market investing. They can be waived. The Wall Street Journal: Mark Wu held more than $1 million of Amazon.com stock when President Biden tapped him to help craft a trade policy that would benefit U.S. technology companies and online retailers. Ethics officials at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said they gave Mr. Wu two options: Get rid of the stock or recuse himself from digital trade issues. He did neither. For several months, Mr. Wu continued working on the trade matter while keeping the shares. He had "not followed the requirements," the U.S. Trade Representative's chief of staff told him in a June 2021 phone call, an email describing the call shows. Eventually, Mr. Wu quit, citing family issues. He kept his Amazon stock. Mr. Wu said he didn't work on trade issues specific to Amazon and left the government when the restrictions became too much of a burden on his family. The U.S. has a law aimed at preventing the nation's thousands of obscure but powerful federal officials from using their influence on regulations, policies and investigations to benefit themselves. With penalties up to $50,000 and five years in prison, the law is supposed to ensure that officials in the executive branch don't work on any matter that could affect their personal finances. It doesn't. It has exceptions. Violations often go unpunished. When a problematic holding is identified, if the official resists selling it, the rules often are waived. The result is a system that largely relies on government employees to police their own stock investing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical blog: Codenamed "Kinetic Kudu," this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem. Ubuntu 22.10 delivers toolchain updates to Ruby, Go, GCC and Rust. OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received. This reduces the memory footprint of Ubuntu Server on smaller devices, VMs or LXD containers. Ubuntu 22.10 also comes with a new debuginfod service to help developers and admins debug programs shipped with Ubuntu. Debugging tools like gdb will automatically download the required debug symbols over HTTPS. Ubuntu 22.10 now supports MicroPython on a variety of microcontrollers, including the Raspberry Pi Pico W. rshell, thonny and mpremote are all available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu graphics stack transition to kms means developers can run Pi-based graphical applications using frameworks like Qt outside of a desktop session and without Pi specific drivers. This complements expanded support for a range of embedded displays for the Raspberry Pi, including the Inky eInk HAT series, Hyperpixel range and the Raspberry Pi Official Touchscreen. [...] All users will benefit from the refinements in GNOME 43, including GTK4 theming for improved performance and consistency. Quick Settings now provide faster access to commonly used options such as wifi, bluetooth, dark mode and power settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not content with doing $28.8 billion in revenue in 2021, YouTube has recently gone on the hunt for more revenue-generating strategies. Now, the Google division has announced a price hike for YouTube Premium family plans. From a report: As 9to5Google was the first to spot, the family plan is jumping over 27 percent in the US, from $17.99 to $22.99, with other regions also seeing price hikes. Instead of making an official announcement, Google is quietly emailing existing subscribers. So far, it does not seem like the single-person YouTube Premium price (still $11.99 per month) is going up. The family plan lets a user share ad-free YouTube Premium with up to five same-household family members for a discounted rate. On iOS, all the prices are higher if you sign up through the App Store, which charges a 30 percent fee on every transaction. In Apple land, YouTube Premium's family plan was always $22.99, and now it's jumping up to $29.99 a month. You can avoid the Apple tax by just paying Google directly through the YouTube website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: Hankey was named to the post in 2019 to replace Jony Ive, the company's iconic design chief for two decades. Before taking her current role as vice president of industrial design, Hankey spent several years at Apple reporting to Ive. Since then, she has reported to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. Hankey oversees several dozen industrial designers, and the company hasn't named a replacement. Her pending exit marks the first time that Apple will be without a de facto design chief since co-founder Steve Jobs retook control of the company in the late 1990s and appointed Ive to the job. Richard Howarth, a key designer on both Ive's and Hankey's teams, briefly held the role of head of industrial design, reporting to Ive, between 2015 and 2017.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has decided the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) -- its offering that runs Android VMs which behave just like another application in Windows -- is sufficiently stable that it can be designated version 1.0 and made available to all. From a report: While it's lovely that Windows can now run Android VMs, Hendrixson's tweet needs a little parsing. The "50,000 apps" he mentions are only available from the Amazon.com app store -- not the larger Google Play digital tat bazaar. Google's apps aren't in the Amazonian store, nor are Microsoft's. I couldn't find Twitter, WhatsApp, Slack, any of the banks I use, or the Australian government apps I need to access services. In fact it's tough work to find apps other than games in the store -- and when a search term does bear fruit it delivers what look like knockoff apps that scream "here be dragons."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Would you pay for a username on social media? Telegram is hoping yes. From a report: The messaging app is soon to launch a username auction platform on The Open Network (TON) blockchain, the company said in an official channel on Thursday. Telegram founder Pavel Durov revealed the project in August, citing inspiration from the success of a recent TON auction for their wallet usernames. Some, including "casino.ton," sold for over $200,000. "If TON has been able to achieve these results, imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction," he said. But Durov isn't stopping there. "Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, including channels, stickers or emoji, could later also become part of this marketplace," he added. Paying for usernames isn't new. Over half a million people have paid for usernames on Ethereum through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), according to Non Fungible's market tracker. It's not just a web3 phenomenon either. It's becoming harder and harder to get the desired username on platforms like Twitter and Instagram and some people are going to great lengths to obtain them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has sued medical technology company Masimo in Delaware federal court, accusing its new W1 line of smartwatches of infringing several Apple Watch patents. From a report: The two lawsuits said Masimo copied Apple's technology while seeking bans on sales and imports of Apple Watches in earlier intellectual-property cases against the tech giant in California and at a U.S. trade tribunal. Apple said Masimo "carefully studied Apple's IP" during those cases and claimed a Masimo spinoff received confidential information about the Apple Watch. Apple accused Masimo of trying to use the litigation to remove Apple's watches from the market to "make way for Masimo's own watch." Irvine, California-based Masimo said in a statement that Apple's lawsuits are "retaliatory" and "appear to be an attempt to avoid the court in which the parties have been litigating their dispute for the past three years." Masimo, which specializes in health-monitoring devices for medical patients, sued Apple in California federal court in 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility. From a report: Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday. "The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks," Ofcom said in the report. Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon says over half a dozen hardware vendors have indicated that they cannot enter into a TV manufacturing relationship with the e-commerce group over fear of retaliation from Google, escalating tension with the search giant with whom it competes on several businesses. From a report: The revelation, officially shared by Amazon for the first time, was made by the company's unit in India to the Competition Commission of India as part the antitrust watchdog's years-long investigation into Google over claims that it abuses the dominant position in Android. Google does abuse its dominant position in Android, the regulator said Thursday in a statement, slapping a $162 million fine on Thursday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A good fall TV run comes to an end on Sunday when HBO airs its House of the Dragon season one finale, a week or so after Amazon wrapped up the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The shows aren't done yet providing content, though. Both Amazon and HBO offer companion podcasts to keep fans engaged, and both devised wildly different approaches for their audio. The podcasts offer behind-the-scenes chats with cast and crew and strive to become the definitive place to hear conversations around their respective programming. The shows' similarities end there, however. HBO, for example, released three episodes of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon before the actual TV series aired, choosing to hype listeners up for the debut through an interview George R.R. Martin, as well as an "everything we know"-style show. Since then, the program has been released weekly alongside new episodes of the series on Sunday evenings. Michael Gluckstadt, director of podcasts for HBO and HBO Max, says the podcast will continue even after the series breaks between seasons. "There's no end date for this in sight," he said, which is atypical for podcasts the network has released in the past, including for Succession and The Gilded Age. [...] The podcast is available on all platforms, as well as on YouTube and the HBO Max app. Meanwhile, Amazon didn't release any episodes of its The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast until the season finale. Marshall Lewy, chief content officer at Amazon's Wondery, said the team wanted the streaming series to "speak for itself." Wondery has created companion podcasts before, namely for its own podcasts that were adapted for streaming, like Dr. Death and WeCrashed, but this marks the first time the team has worked in coordination with an Amazon series. "This is really our first opportunity to do a partnership like this connected to Prime Video," Lewy said. The podcast now receives front-and-center promotion ahead of each streaming video episode, which is the first time the coveted space has promoted something other than a Prime video series, he said. A promotion for The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast that surfaces on Prime Video. The podcast is only available on Amazon Music, the Wondery app and Audible, a critical difference from HBO's strategy. Lewy said this decision made sense given that anyone watching the show is a Prime subscriber and can freely access Amazon Music. "The effort put into these podcasts not only speaks to the need to increase fan engagement with the programming but to create an ongoing dialogue with viewers so they don't drop off from season to season," writes Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. "A person's podcast time likely differs from their streaming time, which in theory minimizes the risk of cannibalizing the hours that viewers could be spending on other Amazon or HBO series." "The video services want more than just sixty minutes of their viewers' attention once a week -- they want to be a part of their day and part of their conversations with friends for as long as possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two state legislators in New Jersey are proposing a bill that would ban car companies from "[offering consumers] a subscription service for any motor vehicle feature" that "utilizes components and hardware already installed on the motor vehicle at the time of purchase." The Drive reports: The bill has one stipulation, however. The subscription would only be unlawful if there was no "ongoing expense to the dealer, manufacturer, or any third-party service provider." In other words, if an automaker or other associated party can prove that it costs money to maintain the feature and/or service in question, then it'd be legally allowed. This would include services like OnStar and such. The way "ongoing expense" is interpreted is going to be key here, assuming the bill makes it into law. This, obviously, is not guaranteed. In theory, a car company could claim that over-the-air updates and their associated data costs constitute an ongoing expense. That means anything to do with connected features could theoretically be charged for. Since a car needs an internet connection in order to purchase subscriptions, well, that might make this particular piece of legislation worthless. On the other hand, if the core value of the subscription is derived from the pre-installed hardware as opposed to the data connection itself, then there is probably a case to be made. Besides heated seats, the bill also mentions "driver assistance." That could be a problem for systems like Tesla's autopilot or General Motors' Super Cruise, both of which are going to a subscription model. Both of these systems cost money to maintain, though, especially Super Cruise. The system requires enabled highways to be scanned with Lidar. Tesla's AutoPilot and "Full Self-Driving" are also actively updated and maintained, which costs money. If automakers don't comply, they risk "civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation," notes the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a lush, highly detailed landscape -- the iconic Pillars of Creation -- where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. From NASA: The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations, but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear -- at times -- semi-transparent in near-infrared light. Webb's new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years. Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars. What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top -- the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old. Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to "pierce through" the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy's disk blocks our view of the deeper universe. This scene was first imaged by Hubble in 1995 and revisited in 2014, but many other observatories have also stared deeply at this region. Each advanced instrument offers researchers new details about this region, which is practically overflowing with stars. This tightly cropped image is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Networked doorbell surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are everywhere, and have changed the nature of delivery work by letting customers take on the role of bosses to monitor, control, and discipline workers, according to a recent report (PDF) by the Data & Society tech research institute. "The growing popularity of Ring and other networked doorbell cameras has normalized home and neighborhood surveillance in the name of safety and security," Data & Society's Labor Futures program director Aiha Nguyen and research analyst Eve Zelickson write. "But for delivery drivers, this has meant their work is increasingly surveilled by the doorbell cameras and supervised by customers. The result is a collision between the American ideas of private property and the business imperatives of doing a job." Thanks to interviews with surveillance camera users and delivery drivers, the researchers are able to dive into a few major developments interacting here to bring this to a head. Obviously, the first one is the widespread adoption of doorbell surveillance cameras like Ring. Just as important as the adoption of these cameras, however, is the rise of delivery work and its transformation into gig labor. [...] As the report lays out, Ring cameras allow customers to surveil delivery workers and discipline their labor by, for example, sharing shaming footage online. This dovetails with the "gigification" of Amazon's delivery workers in two ways: labor dynamics and customer behavior. "Gig workers, including Flex drivers, are sold on the promise of flexibility, independence and freedom. Amazon tells Flex drivers that they have complete control over their schedule, and can work on their terms and in their space," Nguyen and Zelickson write. "Through interviews with Flex drivers, it became apparent that these marketed perks have hidden costs: drivers often have to compete for shifts, spend hours trying to get reimbursed for lost wages, pay for wear and tear on their vehicle, and have no control over where they work." That competition between workers manifests in other ways too, namely acquiescing to and complying with customer demands when delivering purchases to their homes. Even without cameras, customers have made onerous demands of Flex drivers even as the drivers are pressed to meet unrealistic and dangerous routes alongside unsafe and demanding productivity quotas. The introduction of surveillance cameras at the delivery destination, however, adds another level of surveillance to the gigification. [...] The report's conclusion is clear: Amazon has deputized its customers and made them partners in a scheme that encourages antagonistic social relations, undermines labor rights, and provides cover for a march towards increasingly ambitious monopolistic exploits. As Nguyen and Zelickson point out, it is ingenious how Amazon has "managed to transform what was once a labor cost (i.e., supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labor of securing their own doorstep."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pizza slices, cupcakes, and carrots are just a few emojis that anti-vaccine activists use to speak in code and continue spreading COVID-19 misinformation on Facebook. Ars Technica reports: Bloomberg reported that Facebook moderators have failed to remove posts shared in anti-vaccine groups and on pages that would ordinarily be considered violating content, if not for the code-speak. One group that Bloomberg reviewed, called "Died Suddenly," is a meeting ground for anti-vaccine activists supposedly mourning a loved one who died after they got vaccines -- which they refer to as having "eaten the cake." Facebook owner Meta told Bloomberg that "it's removed more than 27 million pieces of content for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy, an ongoing process," but declined to tell Ars whether posts relying on emojis and code-speak were considered in violation of the policy. According to Facebook community standards, the company says it will "remove misinformation during public health emergencies," like the pandemic, "when public health authorities conclude that the information is false and likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm." Pages or groups risk being removed if they violate Facebook's rules or if they "instruct or encourage users to employ code words when discussing vaccines or COVID-19 to evade our detection." However, the policy remains vague regarding the everyday use of emojis and code words. The only policy that Facebook seems to have on the books directly discussing improper use of emojis as coded language deals with community standards regarding sexual solicitation. It seems that while anti-vaccine users' emoji-speak can expect to remain unmoderated, anyone using "contextually specific and commonly sexual emojis or emoji strings" does actually risk having posts removed if moderators determine they are using emojis to ask for or offer sex. In total, Bloomberg reviewed six anti-vaccine groups created in the past year where Facebook users employ emojis like peaches and apples to suggest people they know have been harmed by vaccines. Meta's seeming failure to moderate the anti-vaccine emoji-speak suggests that blocking code-speak is likely not currently a priority. Last year, when BBC discovered that anti-vaccine groups were using carrots to mask COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, Meta immediately took down the groups identified. However, BBC reported that soon after, the same groups popped back up, and more recently, Bloomberg reported that some of the groups that it tracked seemed to change names frequently, possibly to avoid detection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The RIAA has submitted its most recent overview of notorious markets to the U.S. Trade Representative. As usual, the music industry group lists various torrent sites, cyberlockers and stream-ripping services as familiar suspects. In addition, several 'AI-based' music mixers and extractors are added as an emerging threat. TorrentFreak reports: "There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists," RIAA writes. Songmastr is one of the platforms that's mentioned. The service promises to "master" any song based on the style of well-known music artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Coltrane, Bob Dylan, James Brown and many others. The site's underlying technology is powered by the open-source Matchering 2.0 code, which is freely available on GitHub. And indeed, its purported AI capabilities are prominently in the site's tagline. "This service uses artificial intelligence and is based on the open source library Matchering. The algorithm masters your track with the same RMS, FR, peak amplitude and stereo width as the reference song you choose," Songmastr explains. Where Artificial Intelligence comes into play isn't quite clear to us. The same can be said for the Acapella-Extractor and Remove-Vocals websites, which the RIAA lists in the same category. The names of these services are pretty much self-explanatory; they can separate the vocals from the rest of a track. The RIAA logically doesn't want third parties to strip music or vocals from copyrighted tracks, particularly when these derivative works are further shared with others. While Songmastr's service is a bit more advanced, the RIAA sees it as clearly infringing. After all, the original copyrighted tracks are used by the site to create derivative works, without the necessary permission. [...] The RIAA is clearly worried about these services. Interestingly, however, the operator of Songmastr and Acapella-Extractor informs us that the music group hasn't reached out with any complaints. But perhaps they're still in the pipeline. The RIAA also lists various torrent sites, download sites, streamrippers, and bulletproof ISPs in its overview, all of which can be found in the full report (PDF) or listed at the bottom of TorrentFreak's article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration said it will launch a cybersecurity labeling program for consumer Internet of Things devices starting in 2023 in an effort to protect Americans from "significant national security risks." TechCrunch reports: Inspired by Energy Star, a labeling program operated by Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to promote energy efficiency, the White House is planning to roll out a similar IoT labeling program to the "highest-risk" devices starting next year, a senior Biden administration official said on Wednesday following a National Security Council meeting with consumer product associations and device manufacturers. Attendees at the meeting included White House cyber official Anne Neuberger, FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, National Cyber Director Chris Inglis and Sen. Angus King, alongside leaders from Google, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and others. The initiative, described by White House officials as "Energy Star for cyber," will help Americans to recognize whether devices meet a set of basic cybersecurity standards devised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Though specifics of the program have not yet been confirmed, the administration said it will "keep things simple." The labels, which will be "globally recognized" and debut on devices such as routers and home cameras, will take the form of a "barcode" that users can scan using their smartphone rather than a static paper label, the administration official said. The scanned barcode will link to information based on standards, such as software updating policies, data encryption and vulnerability remediation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann filed a $100 million lawsuit against world champion Magnus Carlsen and others for alleged defamatory statements claiming that Niemann cheated in competition. The suit claims that the defendants, including Chess.com, inflicted "devastating damages" against Niemann by "egregiously defaming him" and "unlawfully colluding" to bar him from the professional chess world. "My lawsuit speaks for itself," Niemann said Thursday in a Twitter post. Niemann, 19, has admitted to cheating on two occasions, once when he was 12 years old and a second time when he was 16. But he denied claims that he cheated in an over-the-board match against Magnus Carlsen this year. Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup in September after losing to Niemann, and eventually came forward with concerns that Niemann had cheated in the match in which he defeated Carlsen. The suit claims that Carlsen's comments were a retaliatory attempt to keep Niemann from damaging his reputation. Chess.com subsequently banned Niemann after reporting that an internal investigation revealed evidence of more cheating than Niemann's public statements had expressed. The report from Chess.com did not find evidence of cheating in Niemann's over-the-board matches, including the match against Carlsen, though the website notes that its cheating detection is primarily used for online matches. The report does, however, allege that Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online chess games, including several prize money events. It also shows that Niemann's Chess.com "Strength Score" sits in the range of over a dozen anonymous grandmasters who have admitted to cheating. The report also notes that Niemann is by far the fastest-rising player by yearly gain in classical over-the-board chess. The lawsuit is available in full here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader lazyeye writes: The 53rd release of OpenBSD, version 7.2, has officially been released. Support for new platforms such as the Ampere Altra, Apple M2 chip, and support for Lenovo ThinkPad x13s and other machines using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC are now included, along with various kernel improvements. The announcement with all the details are available at the link [here] from the openbsd-announce mailing list.Read more of this story at Slashdot.