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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: UNDARK has an interesting interview with NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus (PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) about Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult for AI. Marcus, who has had a front-row seat for many of the developments in AI, says we need to take AI advances with a grain of salt. Starting with GPT-3, Marcus begins, "I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think that people are led to believe that this system actually understands human language, which it certainly does not. What it really is, is an autocomplete system that predicts next words and sentences. Just like with your phone, where you type in something and it continues. It doesn't really understand the world around it. "And a lot of people are confused by that. They're confused by that because what these systems are ultimately doing is mimicry. They're mimicking vast databases of text. And I think the average person doesn't understand the difference between mimicking 100 words, 1,000 words, a billion words, a trillion words — when you start approaching a trillion words, almost anything you can think of is already talked about there. And so when you're mimicking something, you can do that to a high degree, but it's still kind of like being a parrot, or a plagiarist, or something like that. A parrot's not a bad metaphor, because we don't think parrots actually understand what they're talking about. And GPT-3 certainly does not understand what it's talking about." Marcus also has cautionary words about Google's LaMDA ("It's not sentient, it has no idea of the things that it is talking about."), driverless cars ("Merely memorizing a lot of traffic situations that you've seen doesn't convey what you really need to understand about the world in order to drive well"), OpenAI's DALL-E ("A lot of AI right now leverages the not-necessarily-intended contributions by human beings, who have maybe signed off on a 'terms of service' agreement, but don't recognize where this is all leading to"), and what's motivating the use of AI at corporations ("They want to solve advertisements. That's not the same as understanding natural language for the purpose of improving medicine. So there's an incentive issue."). Still, Marcus says he's heartened by some recent AI developments: "People are finally daring to step out of the deep-learning orthodoxy, and finally willing to consider "hybrid" models that put deep learning together with more classical approaches to AI. The more the different sides start to throw down their rhetorical arms and start working together, the better."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week the Los Angeles Times published a sympathetic portrait of Robbi Jade Lew, the woman facing unproven allegations of cheating in a high-stakes poker match. This week the newspaper profiled the man making those accusations — Garrett Adelstein, known "as an affable guy who is known for taking even big losses in stride.""Garrett would have reacted normally if his opponent made a good, even heroic, call that cost him $100,000," said Jennifer Shahade, a pro poker player and chess champion. "I think the initial hand, the call and the situation would be suspicious under any circumstances, any gender." In the profile we learn that Adelstein has 14 years of experience as a professional poker, and is "one of the game's best and most profitable high-stakes cash players, known to viewers of popular casino broadcasts for his loose-aggressive style of no-limit hold 'em and his willingness to buy in for enormous sums of money, bringing as much as $1 million to the table.... "On Sept. 29, Adelstein made the biggest bet of his life: risking his well-respected reputation, and possibly his poker career, when he accused rookie player Robbi Jade Lew of cheating in a $269,000 hand against him on Hustler Casino Live..."Adelstein, 36, hasn't played poker since. Whereas he once spent much of his time studying optimal strategy, reviewing past hands and appearing on streams from Hustler Casino in Gardena and Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, he is now hyper-focused on conducting his own investigation to prove his case. In a more than four-hour interview from his Manhattan Beach home on Tuesday, Adelstein said he was "extremely confident" that he was the target of a cheating ring involving not just Lew but other players and at least one member of the show's production crew. Lew, 37, denied the allegation, which she called "defamatory." The drama has left Adelstein uncertain when he'll return to the poker table.... Adelstein says he has been cheated before. When he was 26, he was invited to a home game where he bought in for $100,000.... Adelstein said, he laid out his suspicions about the intricacies of the operation to the host and a business partner, and said he would go public with what happened. "They offered me a deal where they would refund me my money in exchange for my silence," he said. "And then they paid me in six installments, once a month, for a six-month period." The incident, which he relayed on a poker podcast last year, showed Adelstein the darker side of poker and left him cautious. He never played in a high-stakes home game with strangers again, choosing to exclusively play in casinos, where he reasoned cheating would be less likely. Still, "I'm always looking out for it," he said. "I'm not the world's most trusting guy when it comes to poker." The article notes how major poker sites were busted 15 years ago for "superuser" accounts with cheating privileges — and a 2019 lawsuit in which dozens of pros sued a player and gambling hall accused of leaking info from the RFID-tagged cards uesd in their livestreams."When it comes to stream security and these types of games, as professionals we're obviously always on the lookout so it doesn't happen again," poker player Matt Berkey said of the aftermath. "Garrett's one of the biggest players who plays on stream, so he himself is more of a potential target." "Hustler Casino Live," the streaming show that hosted the now-infamous Sept. 29 game, also uses RFID playing cards. Since its first show aired in August 2021, it has become the world's most-watched poker stream, combining the drama of the game with huge amounts of cash, poker's top players, celebrities and other colorful personalities. "Hustler Casino Live" now has more than 1 million monthly unique viewers and 185,000 subscribers. The show's games are streamed five days a week on a delay of one to four hours to prevent information from being passed to players live. But now its stream security has been called into question, with players saying tighter protocols need to be implemented. They've raised concerns over the number of employees who had access to the control room where hole cards were being monitored, and a few have said the stream should temporarily shut down while the investigation is ongoing.... "I thought that streamed poker was, at least by comparison to the other options, one of the last safe havens," Adelstein said. "And at this point, I have so little faith in that...." "Live at the Bike," on which Adelstein has played several times, has been hitting him up since Sept. 29 in the hopes that he will join its stream. But he says he's not in the right headspace for it. "There's I guess a world in the next several weeks or months where maybe I'm able to process this and want to play a poker game. But at the moment, that's not how I feel," he said. "I'm not playing poker on a stream again unless I see tangible, noticeable, measurable differences in livestream security," he continued. "That's for my own benefit and it's for the benefit of the poker community at large."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Securities and Exchanges Commission received a letter Thursday from Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper urging clearer regulations of digital assets:The lawmaker asked the agency to clarify what types of digital assets are securities, address how to issue and list digital securities, establish a registration service for digital asset security trading platforms, set regulations on how trading and custody of digital assets should be carried out, and determine what disclosures are required for potential investors to be informed about. "Given the complexity of these issues, and recognizing that some digital assets are securities, others may be commodities, and others may be subject to a completely different regulatory regime, a formal regulatory process is needed now," Hickenlooper wrote in his letter. "This will significantly improve policy development and allow the SEC to collect views and understand concerns. Furthermore, it will create clear rules that will benefit investors who currently may not be fully aware of the risks associated with digital asset investments...." Hickenlooper also wrote that applying old market regulations to cryptocurrency would lead to financial services being more expensive and less accessible; leading to the agency's disclosure regime being less useful to U.S. residents. "I recognize these questions are complicated, but it is time for the SEC to engage. Empowering innovators, fostering financial innovation, protecting investors, and ensuring market integrity are consistent principles," the lawmaker concluded in his letter. "I look forward to working with you to build prudent rules as this powerful technology continues to develop." Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants some changes of its own, reports Reuters:The U.S. Congress should give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission more powers to police cryptocurrency stablecoins to reduce risks to the financial system, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler said on Friday.... With around $150 billion in market capitalization, stablecoins have many similarities to money market funds, and need to be regulated accordingly, Gensler said at a conference held by Georgetown University's Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy in Washington.... "I think the CFTC could have greater authorities. They currently do not have direct regulatory authorities over the underlying non-security tokens," he said.... The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a U.S. regulatory panel comprising top financial regulators, earlier this month recommended that Congress pass legislation addressing the risks digital assets pose to the financial system, including bills to bolster oversight of crypto spot markets and stablecoins. It remains unclear when Congress might pass crypto-related legislation, although several bills have been introduced to address stablecoins and digital commodities regulation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: Hyperion Entertainment is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a very substantial and comprehensive update of the Software Development Kit (SDK) for AmigaOS 4.1 54.16. Also Linux: Kernel 6.0 for AmigaOne X1000/X5000 has been released and the biggest Amiga event of the year will be held upcoming weekend in Mönchengladbach, Germany: the Amiga37 event.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Food service employees at the autonomous driving company Waymo are forming a union," reports NBC News, calling it "the latest push by support workers to organize at Silicon Valley's most prominent companies."The cafeteria workers at the Mountain View-based company cite the high cost of living in the Bay Area and the lack of strong benefits while working for one of the world's most valuable companies. Waymo is owned by Google parent company, Alphabet. The workers are employed by Sodexo, which contracts service work for Google and other companies. Organizers say they have a majority of union cards signed from the roughly two dozen-person bargaining unit.... Workers say the $24 an hour they make from the company is not enough to live adequately in the Bay Area. They also cite the prohibitive cost of the company's health plan, which has a $5,000 deductible. The living wage in the San Jose-Sunnyvale area is $27.74 for a single adult, and $52.74 for a single adult with a child, according to MIT's living wage calculator.... The workers are part of Silicon Valley's ranks of contractors who support and supplement the work at tech companies. Union campaigns have coursed through the industry as tech company profits — and the cost of living in the Bay Area — have escalated steeply in recent years. At Google, more than 4,000 of these workers have joined unions since 2018, including 2,300 cafeteria workers at its headquarters and satellite offices in the Bay Area in 2019, according to Unite Here.... "[Workers] see all the money around tech," said D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here. "And that's great. But they want to have a piece of the American dream." Ironically, one of the workers said they were inspired by Hasan Piker, who NBC News describes as "a leftist Twitch streamer and political commentator" with large followings on Twitter — and on Google-owned YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"You know you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge," says Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research tells the BBC — holding up a tiny vial with a light film at the bottom: But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. "That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds," says Zielinski. Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers. The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings. Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths... Olgica Milenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, acknowledges that DNA can be damaged by things like humidity, acids, and radiation — "But if it's kept cold and dry, it's good for hundreds of years." And if it's stored in an ice vault, "it can last forever, pretty much." (And unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete.) It's not the only option. Peter Kazansky, a professor in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, has created an optical storage technology that etches nano-structures onto glass disks. But Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, believes we're just decades away from being able to store the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have produced by 2025 in a space the size of a ping-pong ball.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When a kernel developer asked Linus Torvalds if he'd missed a Git pull, Torvalds "revealed the request was still in his queue as 'I'm doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive,'" reports The Register:Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as "some instability on my main desktop... with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc." The Linux boss's first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem — which isn't good but sometimes happens. His instinct was wrong. "It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable," he wrote. "Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight." Torvalds appears to have been tracking delivery of the new DIMMs as he reported replacement memory was "out for delivery" and predicted it should arrive later on Sunday evening.... His post also mentions that his main PC was set up for error correction code memory (ECC memory), but "during the early days of COVID when there wasn't any ECC memory available at any sane prices. And then I never got around to fixing it, until I had to detect errors the hard way." "I absolutely *detest* the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that have made ECC memory so 'special'," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When a kernel developer asked Linus Torvalds if he'd missed a Git pull, Torvalds "revealed the request was still in his queue as 'I'm doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive,'" reports The Register:Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as "some instability on my main desktop... with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc." The Linux boss's first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem — which isn't good but sometimes happens. His instinct was wrong. "It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable," he wrote. "Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight." Torvalds appears to have been tracking delivery of the new DIMMs as he reported replacement memory was "out for delivery" and predicted it should arrive later on Sunday evening.... His post also mentions that his main PC was set up for error correction code memory (ECC memory), but "during the early days of COVID when there wasn't any ECC memory available at any sane prices. And then I never got around to fixing it, until I had to detect errors the hard way." "I absolutely *detest* the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that have made ECC memory so 'special'," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself," reports the New York Times:On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes. On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn't play dice, Einstein often complained. Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other; this left scientists ill-equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the beginning of the universe. But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr. Strange. "It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing," Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. "But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other." That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the universe began.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A researcher from cloud and endpoint protection provider WithSecure has discovered an unpatchable flaw in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption," reports VentureBeat. "The flaw enables a hacker to infer the contents of encrypted messages."OME uses the electronic codebook (ECB) block cipher, which leaks structural information about the message. This means if an attacker obtains many emails they can infer the contents of the messages by analyzing the location and frequency of patterns in the messages and matching these to other emails. For enterprises, this highlights that just because your emails are encrypted, doesn't mean they're safe from threat actors. If someone steals your email archives or backups, and accesses your email server, they can use this technique to sidestep the encryption. The discovery comes shortly after researchers discovered hackers were chaining two new zero-day Exchange exploits to target Microsoft Exchange servers. WithSecure originally shared its discovery of the Office 365 vulnerability with Microsoft in January 2022. Microsoft acknowledged it and paid the researcher through its vulnerability reward program, but hasn't issued a fix.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pine64 has announced a new "sub $10 Linux capable single board computer" called the Ox64. Liliputing says the tiny SBC "looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi Pico. But while Raspberry Pi's tiny board is powered by an RP2040 microcontroller, the Ox64 has a dual-core RISC-V processor, 64MB of embedded RAM, and support for up to 128Mb of flash storage plus a microSD card for additional storage."It's expected to support RTOS and Linux and blurs the lines between a microcontroller and a (very low power) single-board PC. It's expected to go on sale in November with prices starting at $6 for an RTOS-ready version of the board and $8 for a Linux-compatible model. As spotted by CNX Software earlier this month, the board is designed to be a small, inexpensive single-board computer with a RISC-V processor that's aimed at developers. Pine64's October update also reveals that their Star64 and QuartzPro64 single-board computers "now boot Linux (and run it well too already!)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been one year since Facebook changed its name to "Meta Platforms" remembers The Street. So after Mark Zuckerberg "bought the Oculus Quest VR headset, rebranded it Meta Quest, and formed Reality Labs solely to work on all projects related to the metaverse" — what happened next?Meta's shares and market value have dropped and Zuckerberg's personal fortune has shrunk, falling from $125 billion in January to $49.1 billion at last check, putting him No. 23 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Reality Labs is facing the hard reality that it's pouring out gallons of red ink, losing $10 billion last year and about $5.7 billion so far in 2022. And leaked internal documents reveal discussions between Reality Labs management and employees, indicating that "Horizon Worlds" [Meta's flagship metaverse for consumers] is ridden with game-breaking bugs, leading to a "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year. In fact, Horizon Worlds is also "failing to meet internal performance expectations," reports CNBC, citing internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal:Meta initially aimed to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year, but the current figure is less than 200,000, according to the report. Additionally, the documents showed that most users didn't return to Horizon after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has steadily declined since spring, the Journal said. Only 9% of worlds are visited by at least 50 people, and most are never visited at all, according to the report." "An empty world is a sad world," one internal document reportedly adds. And Fortune cited some more discouraging statistics from the Journal's article:- Meta wants users to create their own worlds using Horizon's tools. Less than 1% are doing so. - A tip feature to reward creators for their efforts has generated payouts of under $500 globally. Cumulatively, Horizon's worlds have brought in only about $10,000 in "In-World Payments". - Retention rates for the Quest virtual-reality headsets — sold by Meta to access Horizons — have dropped in each of the past three years. CNBC also notes that the report "comes as the company's stock falls, user numbers decline and advertisers cut spending. Meta shares are down 62% so far this year...." So how did Meta respond to the Journal's article?A Meta spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the company continues to make improvements to the metaverse, which was always meant to be a multiyear project. Representatives for Meta didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Meta has said it will release a web version of Horizon for mobile devices and computers this year, but the spokesman didn't have any launch dates to disclose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader orsayman writes: Remember the MICROSCOPE satellite ? In 2017, based on its first results, scientists were able to confirm Einstein's equivalence principle (a key assumption in General Relativity) to unprecedented precision. Recently, they were able to improve precision by almost another order of magnitude by using all the data. Fortunately (or not) no violation of the principle was detected which could help physicists to improve their theories of quantum gravity. Apparently the team expects to send a new mission "in the second half of the 2030s" aiming for another huge improvement in precision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:Elon Musk's latest internet jest has taken the form of a perfume with an unsavory scent: "Burnt Hair. "The tech mogul, entrepreneur and sometimes internet troll announced the launch of the product on Twitter on Tuesday, calling it "the finest fragrance on Earth." The perfume is apparently being sold on The Boring Company's website for $100 and will ship in the first quarter of 2023.... The product is the successor to other Musk memes, like the $500 flamethrowers he sold in 2018 or the Tesla-branded satin shorts he debuted as investors "shorted" the company in 2020.... Musk appears to be enjoying the media attention on his newest lark. He switched his Twitter bio to "Perfume Salesman" and claimed to have sold 20,000 bottles.... "Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter," he wrote on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from the Boston Globe's health-news site STAT:The scientist flicked on a laser, filling the rat's brain with blue light. The rodent, true to its past two weeks of training, scampered across its glass box to a tiny spout, where it was duly rewarded with a drink of water. From the outside, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill neuroscience experiment, except for the fact that the neurons directing the rat to its thirst-quenching reward didn't contain any rat DNA. Instead, they came from a human "mini-brain" — a ball of human tissue called an organoid — that researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine had grown in a lab and implanted in the rodent's cortex months before. The experiment — part of a study published Wednesday in Nature — is the first describing human neurons influencing another species' behavior. The study also showed that signals could go the other way; tendrils of human neurons mingled with the rodent brain cells and fired in response to air rustling the rats' whiskers. The advance opens the door to using such human-rodent chimeras to better understand how the human brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and epilepsy. When the Stanford scientists implanted organoids grown from the cells of patients with a severe genetic brain disorder, they could watch the neurons develop abnormally with unprecedented clarity. "This paper really pushes the envelope," said neuroscientist Tomasz Nowakowski, of the University of California, San Francisco, who uses brain organoids in his research on neurodevelopmental disorders but was not involved in the new work. "The field is desperate for more experimental models. And what's really important about this study is it demonstrates that brain organoids can complete their maturation trajectory when transplanted. So it really expands our toolkit for asking more nuanced questions about how genetic mutations lead to behavioral disorders." It's an example of how stem cells have revolutionized brain research. By "doing their experiments in very young rats whose cortexes are not yet saturated with synapses," the article points out, the researchers "found that the human neurons easily integrated into the animals' rapidly expanding circuitry, which provided them with the stimulation they needed to push past previous developmental barriers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it will not rebuild a renowned radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which was one of the world's largest until it collapsed nearly two years ago. The Associated Press reports: Instead, the agency issued a solicitation for the creation of a $5 million education center at the site that would promote programs and partnerships related to science, technology, engineering and math. It also seeks the implementation of a research and workforce development program, with the center slated to open next year in the northern mountain town of Arecibo where the telescope was once located. The solicitation does not include operational support for current infrastructure at the site that is still in use, including a 12-meter radio telescope or the Lidar facility, which is used to study the upper atmosphere and ionosphere to analyze cloud cover and precipitation data. The decision was mourned by scientists around the world who used the telescope at the Arecibo Observatory for years to search for asteroids, planets and extraterrestrial life. The 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish also was featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The reflector dish and the 900-ton platform hanging 450 feet above it previously allowed scientists to track asteroids headed to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and determine if a planet is potentially habitable. The Arecibo Observatory collapsed in on itself in December 2020, after the telescope suffered two major cable malfunctions in the two months prior. The National Science Foundation released shocking footage of the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple AirTags "are allowed on Lufthansa flights," Lufthansa announced this week — the opposite of their position last Sunday, remembers SFGate:The airline insisted the tech was "dangerous" and referred to International Civil Aviation Organization guidelines (set by the United Nations's specialized agency that recommends air transport policy) stipulating that baggage trackers are subject to the dangerous goods regulations. ["Furthermore, due to their transmission function, the trackers must be deactivated during the flight if they are in checked baggage," Lufthansa added on Twitter, "and cannot be used as a result"] Ars Technica reports on the public relations debacle that then ensued:Outcry, close reading of the relevant sections (part 2, section C) of ICAO guidelines, and accusations of ulterior motives immediately followed. AppleInsider noted that the regulations are meant for lithium-ion batteries that could be accidentally activated; AirTag batteries are not lithium-ion, are encased, and are commonly used in watches, which have not been banned by any airline. The site also spoke with "multiple international aviation experts" who saw no such ban in ICAO regulations. One expert told the site the ban was "a way to stop Lufthansa from being embarrassed by lost luggage...." Numerous people pointed out that Lufthansa, in its online World Shop, sells Apple AirTags. One Ars staffer noted that Lufthansa had previously dabbled in selling a smart luggage tag, one that specifically used RFID and BLE to program an e-ink display with flight information. On Tuesday, Apple told numerous publications that it, too, disagreed with Lufthansa's interpretation. It went unsaid but was strongly implied that a company that is often the world's largest by revenue would take something like air travel regulations into consideration when designing portable find-your-object devices.... Representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration said early this week that Bluetooth-based trackers were allowed in checked luggage. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency said its regulations could "not in itself ban or allow" trackers, but airlines could determine their own guidelines. On Wednesday, Lufthansa walked back the policy under the cover of "The German Aviation Authorities (Luftfahrtbundesamt)," which the airline said in a tweet "shared our risk assessment, that tracking devices with very low battery and transmission power in checked luggage do not pose a safety risk." This would seem to imply either that Lufthansa was acting on that authority's ruling without having previously mentioned it, or that Lufthansa had acted on its own and has now found an outside actor to approve their undoing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alberta's engineering regulator is in a fight with the province's technology sector, insisting anyone with the title "software engineer" must hold a permit -- and pay fees for that right. The Globe and Mail reports: The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), has asked a court to order one of the province's leading software companies, Octopusapp, known as Jobber, to stop using the term "engineer" in job titles and postings unless it gets a permit from the regulator. That has caused an uproar in Alberta's tech sector. On Friday, the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) published an open letter signed by chief executive officers of 32 Alberta tech companies, including Jobber's Sam Pillar, calling on Premier Danielle Smith to stop "regulator overreach" by APEGA. The letter says APEGA's "aggressive position" would result in "onerous, restrictive and unnecessary certification requirements" for developers, and harm companies' ability to compete for talent. "If we cannot effectively compete for the best employees while headquartered in Alberta, we must seriously consider whether this is a place where our companies can succeed,â states the letter signed by CEOs of Benevity, Symend, Neo Financial Technologies and others. CCI president Benjamin Bergen said he hoped Ms. Smith, who pledged to cut red tape while campaigning to lead the United Conservative Party, would take action "because this is really a red tape issue. It is the only jurisdiction globally that is pushing this. It's making Alberta uncompetitive in the tech sector." APEGA and Canada's 11 other provincial and territorial engineering regulators have complained for years about companies or individuals who use the titles "software engineer" and "computer engineer," arguing they are prohibited from doing so. In July, Engineers Canada, which represents the regulators, issued a joint statement calling for individuals to be prohibited from using the offending titles unless they are licensed as engineers. "Professional engineers are held to high professional and ethical standards and work in the public interest," it said. "The public places a high degree of trust in the profession and these layers of accountability and transparency help keep Canadians safe." The regulators are mandated to enforce their relative statutes and have sporadically taken legal action to protect their turf. [...] Provincial and territorial laws regulating engineers vary. Alberta's Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act states no individual, corporation or partnership can use the word "engineer" in a job title unless they are "a professional engineer, licensee or permit holder entitled to engage in the practice of engineering." A spokesperson for Alberta labour minister Kaycee Madu said in an e-mail the government would work with the parties to resolve the issue, adding: "We are concerned by any regulations that impede our competitiveness in the world skilled-labour market." Meanwhile, Erum Afsar, director of enforcement with APEGA, said in an interview: "What we are doing is regulating what the government has legislated us to do. If you're using that title, you should be registered with APEGA." Further reading: Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoetop, the firm that owns Shein and its sister brand Romwe, has been fined (PDF) $1.9 million by New York for failing to properly disclose a data breach from 2018. TechCrunch reports: A cybersecurity attack that originated in 2018 resulted in the theft of 39 million Shein account credentials, including those of more than 375,000 New York residents, according to the AG's announcement. An investigation by the AG's office found that Zoetop only contacted "a fraction" of the 39 million compromised accounts, and for the vast majority of the users impacted, the firm failed to even alert them that their login credentials had been stolen. The AG's office also concluded that Zoetop's public statements about the data breach were misleading. In one instance, the firm falsely stated that only 6.42 million consumers had been impacted and that it was in the process of informing all the impacted users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soon, Apple Card users will be able to open a "new high-yield Savings account," Apple says. There's just one hitch: Apple won't say what interest rate it's offering. There's also no specific timeline for when consumers can access these savings accounts. The Verge reports: Apple has been moving into fintech with the Apple Card, which it partners with Goldman Sachs on. As one of its perks, card users get Daily Cash, Apple's special branding on the more mundane cashback rewards, on their purchases. The promise of this "high-yield" savings account is that cardholders can have their Daily Cash deposited into it "with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements," the company says. Apple, which also offers buy now, pay later services, appears to have decided that competing with tech companies isn't enough. It also wants to compete with banks. Of course, banks generally tell you what the interest rates on their savings accounts are. Anyone who has the account can also deposit funds into the new savings account from a linked bank account or from their existing Apple Cash balance. Once it's set up, all Daily Cash received will automatically be deposited into it, although users can change that to put it directly on the Apple Cash card in the Wallet app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The FDA has confirmed the nation is experiencing a shortage of Adderall after many pharmacies around the country have been unable to fill prescriptions and keep up with demand. The drug, which is also known as mixed amphetamine salts, is used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy. "We will continue to monitor supply and assist manufacturers with anything needed to resolve the shortage and will update our website with new supply information as it becomes available," the FDA said. Expected recovery times for manufacturers' supplies of the prescription vary. Teva Pharmaceuticals, which sells the most Adderall in the U.S., has a 10 mg dosage of Adderall that is expected to rebound in October. But many of its generic brand offerings aren't expected to recover until March 2023. Manufacturer SpecGX's higher doses won't recoup until January 2023, while Rhodes Pharmaceuticals has a shortage of an active ingredient. Bloomberg health reporter Ike Swetlitz told NPR last month the shortages began due to a labor shortage at Teva, causing production delays that began showing up at other companies. Additionally, an increase in ADHD diagnoses has been driving up demand for Adderall in recent years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trevor Milton, the founder and former chairman and CEO of electric heavy truck maker Nikola, was found guilty in federal court on Friday of three of four counts of fraud relating to false statements he made to drive up the value of Nikola's stock. CNBC reports: Milton was charged with two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, all related to statements he made about Nikola's business while he was chairman and CEO of the company. Jurors found him guilty on one count of securities fraud and both of the wire fraud counts. Milton faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted on all four counts. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan had alleged that Milton lied about "nearly all aspects of the business" he founded in 2014 during his time leading the company. Those lies, prosecutors said, were intended to induce investors to bid up the price of Nikola's stock. "On the backs of those innocent investors taken in by his lies, he became a billionaire virtually overnight," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said in his opening statement in September. Timeline of events: June, 2016: Nikola Motor Receives Over 7,000 Preorders Worth Over $2.3 Billion For Its Electric Truck December, 2016: Nikola Motor Company Reveals Hydrogen Fuel Cell Truck With Range of 1,200 Miles February, 2020: Nikola Motors Unveils Hybrid Fuel-Cell Concept Truck With 600-Mile Range June, 2020: Nikola Founder Exaggerated the Capability of His Debut Truck September, 2020: Nikola Motors Accused of Massive Fraud, Ocean of Lies September, 2020: Nikola Admits Prototype Was Rolling Downhill In Promo Video September, 2020: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Steps Down as Chairman in Battle With Short Seller October, 2020: Nikola Stock Falls 14 Percent After CEO Downplays Badger Truck Plans November, 2020: Nikola Stock Plunges As Company Cancels Badger Pickup Truck July, 2021: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Indicted on Three Counts of Fraud December, 2021: EV Startup Nikola Agrees To $125 Million Settlement September, 2022: Nikola Founder Lied To Investors About Tech, Prosecutor Says in Fraud TrialRead more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX returned its fourth operational crew mission from the International Space Station on Friday, with the quartet of astronauts splashing down in the company's capsule off the coast of Florida. CNBC reports: The company's Crew Dragon spacecraft "Freedom" undocked from the ISS at around noon ET to begin the trip back to Earth, with splashdown happening around 5 p.m. ET. "Welcome home -- thanks for flying SpaceX," the company's mission control told the crew shortly after landing. "Thank you for an incredible ride to orbit, and an incredible ride home," Crew-4 commander Kjell Lindgren said in response. Crew-4 includes NASA astronauts Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The mission launched in April for a six-month stay on the orbiting research laboratory. Elon Musk's company launched the Crew-5 mission last week, bringing four other astronauts to the ISS. SpaceX has now flown 30 people to orbit since its first crewed launch in May 2020, with six government missions and two private ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: In a major blow to America's seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem. An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population. Ben Daly, a researcher with ADF&G, is investigating where the crabs have gone. He monitors the health of the state's fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation's seafood. "Disease is one possibility," Daly told CBS News. He also points to climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska is the fastest warming state in the country, and is losing billions of tons of ice each year -- critical for crabs that need cold water to survive. "Environmental conditions are changing rapidly," Daly said. "We've seen warm conditions in the Bering Sea the last couple of years, and we're seeing a response in a cold adapted species, so it's pretty obvious this is connected. It is a canary in a coal mine for other species that need cold water." "Did they run up north to get that colder water?" asked Gabriel Prout, owner of a Kodiak Island fishing business heavily reliant on the snow crab population. "Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?" Prout said there needs to be a relief program for fisherman, "similar to programs for farmers who experience crop failure, or communities affected by hurricanes or flooding," notes the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global animal populations are declining, and we've got limited time to try to fix it. From a report: That's the upshot of a new report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, which analyzed years of data on thousands of wildlife populations across the world and found a downward trend in the Earth's biodiversity. According to the Living Planet Index, a metric that's been in existence for five decades, animal populations across the world shrunk by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018. Not all animal populations dwindled, and some parts of the world saw more drastic changes than others. But experts say the steep loss of biodiversity is a stark and worrying sign of what's to come for the natural world. "The message is clear and the lights are flashing red," said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini. According to the report's authors, the main cause of biodiversity loss is land-use changes driven by human activity, such as infrastructure development, energy production and deforestation. But the report suggests that climate change -- which is already unleashing wide-ranging effects on plant and animal species globally -- could become the leading cause of biodiversity loss if rising temperatures aren't limited to 1.5C.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A young man who was not even old enough to drive back in 2018 managed to yoink nearly $24 million from a major crypto investor's account. Now, over four years later and thousands likely invested in both an investigation and lawyers fees, Michael Terpin can now claim he has reclaimed $22 million from the the original hack, according to a recently filed agreement. From a report: The original complaint filed in New York Southern District Court back in 2020 named the then-18-year-old Ellis Pinsky of leading a 20-person group that met on the OGUsers' forum that attacked people's crypto wallets using stolen SIM card data. Pinsky allegedly performed this hack when he was only 15 years old while living with his mother in upstate New York. The only other hacker named in the original complaint was 20-year-old Nick Truglia, who had been previously jailed on federal charges for a separate crypto theft. Terpin was a major name in the tech and crypto world, especially back in the late 20-teens as the co-founder of crypto investment firm BitAngels along with early work launching Motley Fool and Match.com. At the time, Terpin's phone hack was one of the largest crypto hacks of its kind. Nowadays, however, $24 million would be chump change to some of the funds modern crypto hackers seem to be rolling in by attacking crypto exchanges, protocols, and cross-chain bridges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that one in 20 people who had been sick with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another four in 10 said they had not fully recovered from their infections many months later. From a report: The authors of the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, tried to home in on the long-term risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of symptoms in people with and without previous Covid diagnoses. People with previous symptomatic Covid infections reported certain persistent symptoms, such as breathlessness, palpitations and confusion or difficulty concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as high as uninfected people in surveys from six to 18 months later, the study found. Those patients also experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other symptoms relating to the heart, respiratory health, muscle aches, mental health and the sensory system. The findings strengthened calls from scientists for more expansive care options for long Covid patients in the United States and elsewhere, while also offering some good news. The study did not identify greater risks of long-term problems in people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections. It also found, in a much more limited subset of participants who had been given at least one dose of Covid vaccine before their infections, that vaccination appeared to help reduce if not eliminate the risk of some long Covid symptoms. People with severe initial Covid cases were at higher risk of long-term problems, the study found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The nation's telecommunications regulator has been without a Democratic majority for the entirety of President Biden's 21-month tenure, hamstringing efforts to restore open internet protections and close the digital divide. From a report: Breaking the deadlock at the Federal Communications Commission hinges on confirming Gigi Sohn, a longtime public interest advocate and former Democratic FCC official who was first nominated by the White House nearly a year ago. As the midterm elections approach and Democrats' ability to retain their narrow control of the Senate remains uncertain, Sohn's supporters are warning Congress that the clock is ticking to lock in a majority at the agency. On Friday, about 250 industry and public interest groups wrote a letter to top Senate leaders calling for a vote on Sohn's nomination before Congress adjourns at the end of the year. "The FCC needs a full commission as it begins to deliberate on upcoming critical decisions that will have profound impacts on the economy and the American people," leaders from groups including the Consumer Technology Association, Rural Wireless Association and Color Of Change wrote in a letter shared exclusively with The Washington Post. The push from Sohn's supporters follows what her allies describe as an unprecedented effort from some telecommunications and media lobbyists to block her nomination. Biden's failure to secure a majority or full complement of commissioners at the FCC marks one of the longest delays in recent memory for a first-term president. "It's insane," said Greg Guice, the director of Public Knowledge's government affairs team who has worked in roles related to tech regulation for more than 20 years. (Sohn previously worked at Public Knowledge, which is among the signatories of the Friday letter). Lobbyists "know that being down one seat means they can better control the agenda," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the newer Xbox features that Microsoft has been working to bring to Windows is DirectStorage, a collection of features that allows fast PCI Express-based NVMe SSDs to communicate directly with your GPU. For DirectStorage 1.0, the main benefit was faster load times -- up to 40 percent faster, according to Microsoft. This week Microsoft announced that it's readying DirectStorage 1.1 for release later this year, which will allow game assets to be decompressed on the GPU instead of the CPU, speeding up decompression operations and freeing up your processor to do other things. Normally, compressed game assets are loaded into system memory and decompressed by the CPU before being sent to the GPU. This circuitous route adds to game load times and can contribute to "pop-in" in games with big open worlds -- that effect where you see a bland, less-detailed version of an object for a brief instant before more detailed textures and models have time to load in. DirectStorage's GPU-based decompression works with a new GPU-optimized compression format called "GDeflate," originally created by Nvidia. Microsoft's sample image comparing GPU decompression with GDeflate and CPU decompression using Zlib showed much faster load times (0.8 second on the GPU, compared to 2.36 seconds on the CPU) along with much lower CPU usage, though Microsoft says that the exact results will vary based on your hardware and the game you're loading.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth to temper the effects of global warming, a process sometimes called solar geoengineering or sunlight reflection. From a report: The research plan will assess climate interventions, including spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, and should include goals for research, what's necessary to analyze the atmosphere, and what impact these kinds of climate interventions may have on Earth, according to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. Congress directed the research plan be produced in its spending plan for 2022, which President Joe Biden signed in March. Some of the techniques, such as spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, are known to have harmful effects on the environment and human health. But scientists and climate leaders who are concerned that humanity will overshoot its emissions targets say research is important to figure out how best to balance these risks against a possibly catastrophic rise in the Earth's temperature. Getting ready to research a topic is a very preliminary step, but it's notable the White House is formally engaging with what has largely been seen as the stuff of dystopian fantasy. In Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction novel, "The Ministry for the Future," a heat wave in India kills 20 million people and out of desperation, India decides to implement its own strategy of limiting the sunlight that gets to Earth. Chris Sacca, the founder of climate tech investment fund Lowercarbon Capital, said it's prudent for the White House to be spearheading the research effort.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia is pausing the launch of its upcoming 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. After originally unveiling the 12GB RTX 4080 last month alongside a much more powerful 16GB model, Nvidia now admits it messed up with the naming. From a report: "The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it's not named right," says Nvidia in a blog post. "Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing." Nvidia is now pausing the launch of the 12GB RTX 4080 model but will still go ahead and launch the 16GB version on November 16th. Criticism had been building over Nvidia's decision to label the 12GB model as an RTX 4080, particularly when the 16GB model was so different.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple keeps on losing court battles in Brazil over its decision to stop shipping iPhones with a charger. From a report: The Sao Paulo state court has ruled against the tech giant and slapped it with a 100 million real ($19 million) fine in a lawsuit filed by the Brazilian Consumers' Association, a group of borrowers, consumers and taxpayers. In addition, the court has ordered Apple to supply all customers in Brazil who purchased the iPhone 12 or 13 over the past couple of years with a charger, as well as to start including them with all new purchases. Apple, as you'd expect, told the news organization that it will appeal the decision. According to Barron's, the judge in charge of the case called the non-inclusion of chargers in phone purchases an "abusive practice" that "requires consumers to purchase a second product in order for the first to work." Apple has been at odds with Brazilian authorities over the issue for a while now. In 2021, Sao Paulo consumer protection agency Procon-SP fined Apple around $2 million for removing the power adapter from the iPhone 12, telling the company that it was in violation of Brazil's Consumer Defense Code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turkey criminalized the spread of what authorities describe as false information on digital platforms, giving the government new powers in the months remaining before elections. From a report: The measure, proposed by the governing AK Party and its nationalist ally MHP, is part of a broader "disinformation" law that was adopted by parliament on Thursday. It mandates a jail term of one to three years for users who share online content that contains "false information on the country's security, public order and overall welfare in an attempt to incite panic or fear." Media groups and opposition parties have decried the bill as censorship, seeing it as a move to stifle critics and journalists in the run-up to elections set for next year. "The crime is defined with rather vague and open-ended terms," said Mustafa Kuleli, vice president of the European Federation of Journalists. "It is not clear how prosecutors will take action against those who allegedly spread false information." Other articles in the law range from amendments to issuance of press cards to the procedure of correcting "false" information online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit-reporting giant Equifax has fired at least two dozen employees for working undisclosed jobs, and used extensive work-history records it holds on more than 100 million Americans to catch them, according to documents and interviews with people familiar with the matter. From a report: In one of the latest signs of corporate America trying to regain control of an increasingly remote workforce, CEO Mark Begor this week informed employees that some of their "teammates" were fired for having "a second full-time job while maintaining their full-time role at EFX," which is the ticker symbol for Equifax. "We expect our team to be fully dedicated to EFX and have one role â¦their job at EFX," Begor wrote in a recent company-wide email, a copy of which was obtained by Insider. "I am sure you are as disappointed as I am." The crackdown was the result of an investigation that unfolded in recent months conducted by Equifax employees, including HR and cybersecurity, according to a document seen by Insider. Those leading the investigation combed through work histories and activity records for more than 1,000 employees and contractors, according to an Equifax employee who was not authorized to speak publicly and internal records seen by Insider. The company used various code names for its investigation, including "Project Home Alone" and "Project Page 12," according to the employee and company records. "Project Page 12" is named after the section of the company handbook that bans employees from working two jobs without approval, this person said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company formerly known as Facebook earlier this week announced -- and demonstrated -- that avatars on its metaverse will soon have legs. Here's an update on that: While the updates bringing full-body avatars aren't expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he? Anyone who has ever been around any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help. As UploadVR's Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, "To enable this preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By the time Apple introduces its much-anticipated mixed reality headset -- planned for sometime next year -- Meta Platforms will have had the advantage of selling products in the category to the public for almost seven years. But Apple's device will also have a few technological tricks up its sleeve that even the latest Meta headset can't boast of. From a report: For example, Apple's device is expected to have the ability to scan the irises of people wearing the headsets so they can quickly log into their accounts simply by putting the devices on their heads, according to two people who helped develop the Apple headset. The capability will make it easier for multiple people to use the same device and allow them to quickly make payments inside the headset, just as iPhones allow people to confirm payments using scans of their fingerprints or faces, the people said. The planned iris-scanning features, which haven't been previously reported, fill out the details about the Apple headset that have begun trickling out over the last year or so. Apple's device is also expected to have 14 cameras, as The Information previously reported, compared to the 10 on the headset Meta announced earlier this week, the Quest Pro. The abundance of cameras is designed to better capture the body movements of people wearing the headsets so Apple's technology can more faithfully represent them through their digital avatars. The setup includes two downward-facing cameras to capture a user's legs, a feature the Quest Pro doesn't have, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: More than five billion of the estimated 16 billion mobile phones possessed worldwide will likely be discarded or stashed away in 2022, experts said Thursday, calling for more recycling of the often hazardous materials they contain. Stacked flat on top of each other, that many disused phones would rise 50,000 kilometers (30,000 miles), more than a hundred times higher than the International Space Station, the WEEE research consortium found. Despite containing valuable gold, copper, silver, palladium and other recyclable components, almost all these unwanted devices will be hoarded, dumped or incinerated, causing significant health and environmental harm. "Smartphones are one of the electronic products of highest concern for us," said Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, a not-for-profit association representing forty-six producer responsibility organizations. "If we don't recycle the rare materials they contain, we'll have to mine them in countries like China or Congo," Leroy told AFP. Many of the five billion phones withdrawn from circulation will be hoarded rather than dumped in the trash, according to a survey in six European countries from June to September 2022. This happens when households and businesses forget cell phones in drawers, closets, cupboards or garages rather than bringing them in for repair or recycling. Up to five kilos (8 pounds) of e-devices per person are currently hoarded in the average European family, the report found. According to the new findings, 46 percent of the 8,775 households surveyed considered potential future use as the main reason for hoarding small electrical and electronic equipment. Another 15 percent stockpile their gadgets with the intention to sell them or giving them away, while 13 percent keep them due to "sentimental value." "People tend not to realize that all these seemingly insignificant items have a lot of value, and together at a global level represent massive volumes," said Pascal Leroy. "But e-waste will never be collected voluntarily because of the high cost. That is why legislation is essential."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has announced the availability of its first OTC hearing aids, the $1,000 CRE-C10 and $1,300 CRE-E10, built in partnership with WS Audiology. Engadget reports: The devices are built for daily use for those with mild to moderate hearing loss. They're controlled via Sony's "Hearing Control" app that guides users through setup and allows them to personalize settings like volume control. It also allows a "self-fit" that adjusts to appropriate pre-defined hearing profiles "based on thousands of actual, real-life audiogram results," Sony said. The CRE-C10 model (above) offers a battery life of up to 70 hours of continuous use. Sony says they're one of the smallest OTC hearing aids on the market, offering a discreet design that's "virtually invisible when worn" and "exceptional sound quality." It goes on sale this month for $1,000 at Amazon, Best Buy, and select hearing-care professionals. Meanwhile, the CRE-E10 has a more earbud-like design, powered by a rechargeable battery with up to 26 hours of life between charges. It's Bluetooth compatible as well, so users can connect to devices and listen to streaming audio or music, though only on iOS, Sony says. Those will go on sale for $1,300 sometime this winter at Sony's website. In August, the FDA decided to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and without a prescription to adults.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a press release on Wednesday, Amazon said it will launch two prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation in early 2023. They will be riding into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA). The Verge reports: The company says the launch will let it perform tests on its satellite network technology with data from space and that the data will "help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system." The timeframe marks a slight delay from Amazon's original plan; last year, the company announced it would launch the prototypes in Q4 of 2022, using a completely different rocket from a company called ABL Space Systems. Early 2023 isn't too far away, but there are still a lot of things that have to go right for the launch to happen on schedule. For one, Amazon needs to actually finish building the satellites, which its press release says will be completed later this year. The rocket also isn't done yet -- ULA said in a press release on Wednesday that it expects to have Vulcan fully assembled by November and tested by December -- for now, though, it still has to install the engines. It's not exactly a proven launch platform, either; this will be the rocket's first flight. Both companies have deadlines to meet. As The Washington Post points out, ULA has to launch Vulcan twice before Q4 2023 to prove that it's reliable enough to carry out missions for the US Space Force. Meanwhile, Amazon has to launch half of its satellites by 2026 to keep its FCC license. That's further away than the end of next year, but given that Amazon's constellation is set to be made up of 3,236 satellites, that's going to require quite a few launches in the next few years. Thirty-eight of them are set to use the Vulcan, while several others will be with rockets from Arianespace and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. (Fun fact: the BE-4 engines that Vulcan uses are also from Blue Origin.) Notably absent from its list of partners is SpaceX, which other satellite providers like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile have used to launch equipment into space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI, is eyeing a seat in parliament as it hopes to run in the country's November general election. The party was founded in May by the artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party's public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20 percent of Danes who do not vote in the election. Leader Lars won't be on the ballot anywhere, but the human members of The Synthetic Party are committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform. Leader Lars is an AI chatbot that people can speak with on Discord. You can address Leader Lars by beginning your sentences with an "!". The AI understands English but writes back to you in Danish. Some of the policies that The Synthetic Party is proposing include establishing a universal basic income of 100,000 Danish kroner per month, which is equivalent to $13,700, and is over double the Danish average salary. Another proposed policy change is to create a jointly-owned internet and IT sector in the government that is on par with other public institutions. The Synthetic Party's mission is also dedicated to raising more awareness about the role of AI in our lives and how governments can hold AI accountable to biases and other societal influences. The party hopes to add an 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to the United Nations SDGs, which are goals relating to issues such as poverty, inequality, and climate change, to be achieved by all nations by 2030. The Synthetic Party's proposed SDG is called Life With Artificials and focuses on the relationship between humans and AI and how to adapt and educate people to work with machines. [...] So far, The Synthetic Party has only 11 signatures out of the 20,000 that would make it eligible to run in this November's election. If the party were to be in the parliament, [...] it would be the AI powering policies and its agenda, and humans acting as the interpreter of the program. "Leader Lars is the figurehead of the party. Denmark is a representative democracy, so would have humans on the ballot that are representing Leader Lars and who are committed to acting as a medium for the AI," said Asker Staunaes, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at MindFuture. "People who are voting for The Synthetic Party will have to believe what we are selling ourselves as, people who actually engage so much with artificial intelligence that we can interpret something valuable from them," Staunaes said. "We are in conversations with people from around the world, Colombia, France, and Moldova, about creating other local versions of The Synthetic Party, so that we could have some form of Synthetic International."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix multiplication, conquering a 50-year-old record. This week, two Austrian researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz claim they have bested that new record by one step. Ars Technica reports: In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4x4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4x4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen's algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications. Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week. To discover more efficient matrix math algorithms, DeepMind set up the problem like a single-player game. The company wrote about the process in more detail in a blog post last week. DeepMind then trained AlphaTensor using reinforcement learning to play this fictional math game -- similar to how AlphaGo learned to play Go -- and it gradually improved over time. Eventually, it rediscovered Strassen's work and those of other human mathematicians, then it surpassed them, according to DeepMind. In a more complicated example, AlphaTensor discovered a new way to perform 5x5 matrix multiplication in 96 steps (versus 98 for the older method). This week, Manuel Kauers and Jakob Moosbauer of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, published a paper claiming they have reduced that count by one, down to 95 multiplications. It's no coincidence that this apparently record-breaking new algorithm came so quickly because it built off of DeepMind's work. In their paper, Kauers and Moosbauer write, "This solution was obtained from the scheme of [DeepMind's researchers] by applying a sequence of transformations leading to a scheme from which one multiplication could be eliminated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Sony and Honda have officially launched their joint mobility venture that aims to start delivering premium electric vehicles with automated driving capabilities in the United States in the spring of 2026, followed by Japan in the second half of 2026," reports TechCrunch. Details are scarce but the partnership appears to produce what the companies promise to be a wildly smart vehicle that's heavily focused on keeping its passengers entertained. Slashdot reader SouthSeb shares the news with us, writing: Since cars are expected to fully drive themselves in a near future, how to maintain their occupants entertained seems to be the next big question. It makes one wonder if cars are going to radically change and become more and more like living rooms or office spaces on wheels. "The new EV, which will be initially manufactured at Honda's North America factory, will be developed with Level 3 automated driving capabilities under limited conditions, and with Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems that can handle situations as complex as urban driving," reports TechCrunch. "Sony will provide the sensors and tech for the autonomous capabilities, as well as all of the other software, from cloud-based services to entertainment, that drivers will hopefully be able to enjoy all the better for not having to actually drive the car all the time. The companies didn't share too much about what the infotainment system would look like, but they did say the metaverse would be involved." "[Sony Honda Mobility] aims to evolve mobility space into entertainment and emotional space, by seamlessly integrating real and virtual worlds, and exploring new entertainment possibilities through digital innovations such as the metaverse," according to SHM.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A year after announcing its "Project Starline" video booth idea, Google says it's expanded enterprise testing with third parties and is working on making Starline "more accessible," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Project Starline basically asks the question, "What if Zoom was a giant, sit-down arcade machine?" While the home console version of video chat just involves a tiny camera above your laptop screen, Starline brings 3D video chat to life in a 7x7-foot sit-down booth, with seemingly no regard given to cost, size, or commercialization. The goal is to make it seem like the other person is in the room with you, and Google categorizes it as a "research project." As for what Starline actually is, a Google Research paper contains a good amount of detail. The display side of the video booth features 14 cameras and 16 IR projectors, which all work to create, capture, and track a real-time, photorealistic 3D avatar of the user. Four microphones and two speakers don't just play back speech; spatialized audio and dynamic beamforming supposedly make the speech sound like it's coming out of the avatar's mouth. People who have tried Starline seem to like it, but considering you have to be personally invited by Google to try it, that's only a very small handful of people. It's hard to imagine much of a market for what must be a six-figure video booth the size of a small bathroom, but Google is pushing ahead with more testing. A Google statement says: "Today, Project Starline prototypes are found in Google offices across the US, with employees using the technology every day for meetings, employee onboarding and building rapport between colleagues." The company continues: "Beyond Google employees, we've also invited more than 100 enterprise partners in areas like media, healthcare and retail to participate in demos at Google's offices and provide us with feedback on the experience and applications to their businesses. We see many ways Project Starline can add business value across a number of industries, and we remain focused on making it more accessible." Salesforce, WeWork, T-Mobile, and Hackensack Meridian Health have signed up to try it. WeWork, a company based around renting too-expensive-to-own office space, seems particularly enthused with the idea.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On June 8, 2020, an individual claiming to be billionaire film producer and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel contacted brokerage Charles Schwab by phone and stated that he had uploaded a wire disbursement form using the service's secure email service. The only problem was the call apparently came from prison. Still, the caller made reference to a transfer verification inquiry earlier that day by his wife -- a role said to have been played by a female co-conspirator. The individual allegedly posing as Kimmel had contacted a Schwab customer service representative three days earlier -- on June 5, 2020 -- about opening a checking account, and was told that a form of identification and a utility bill would be required. On June 6, a co-conspirator is alleged to have provided a picture of Kimmel's driver's license and a Los Angeles Water and Power utility bill. According to court documents [PDF] filed by the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Georgia, the uploaded documents consisted of a request for funds to be wired to an external bank and a forged letter of authorization -- both of which appeared to be signed by Kimmel. On June 9, satisfied that Kimmel had been adequately authenticated, the brokerage sent $11 million from Kimmel's Schwab account to a Zions Bank account for Money Metal Exchange, LLC, an Eagle, Idaho-based seller of gold coins and other precious metals. The real Kimmel had no knowledge of the transaction, which resulted in the purchase of 6,106 American Eagle gold coins. The individual who orchestrated the fraudulent purchase of the coins is alleged to have hired a private security firm on June 13, 2020 to transport the coins from Boise, Idaho to Atlanta, Georgia on a chartered plane. An associate of the fraudster allegedly took possession of the coins three days later. All the while the alleged mastermind, Arthur Lee Cofield Jr, was incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Butts County, Georgia, according to the government. Cofield is serving a 14-year sentence for armed robbery and is also under indictment in Fulton County, Georgia for attempted murder. The day after the coins were purchased, prison staff are said to have searched Cofield's cell and recovered a blue Samsung cellphone hidden under his arm. The prison forensic unit apparently determined that Cofield had been using an account on free voice and messaging service TextNow and matched the phone number with calls made to Money Metals Exchange. On December 8, 2020, a federal grand jury indicted Cofield and two co-conspirators for conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering. Cofield's attorney, Steven Sadow, subsequently sought to suppress the cellphone evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, arguing that the warrantless search of the device by prison officials was unrelated to the legitimate function of prison security and maintenance. The government said otherwise, insisting that Cofield does not have standing to contest the search, having no "legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of a contraband cell phone." The judge overseeing the case sided with the government [PDF] and certified the case to proceed to trial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tether, the world's largest stablecoin, has slashed back its commercial paper holdings to zero, replacing them with U.S. Treasury bills instead, according to a blog post. CNBC reports: The popular U.S.-dollar-pegged cryptocurrency said the move is part of tether's "ongoing efforts to increase transparency" and back its tokens with "the most secure reserves in the market" -- in the ultimate hope of ensuring investor protection. There are now about 68.4 billion tether tokens in circulation, according to data from CoinMarketCap, up from 2 billion three years ago. The cryptocurrency has a market capitalization of $68.4 billion. "Tether has led the industry in transparency releasing attestations every three months, constantly reviewing the make up of its reserves," continued the statement. Commercial paper is a form of short-term, unsecured debt issued by companies, and it is considered to be less reliable than Treasury bills. In October, Tether's Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ardoino, tweeted that 58.1% of its assets were in T-bills, up from 43.5% in June. It is unclear where that percentage currently stands, but Ardoino did write in a post on Thursday that Tether was able to pay $7 billion, or 10% of its reserves, in 48 hours. "Ask your bank or other stablecoins if they can do that, in same time frame of course," he wrote. Thursday's statement went on to note that zeroing out the balance of its commercial paper holdings was also meant to be a step toward "greater transparency and trust, not only for tether but for the entire stablecoin industry." While not yet large enough to cause disruption in U.S. money markets, tether could eventually reach a size where its owning of U.S. Treasuries becomes "really scary," Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at Sussex University, said. "Suppose you go down the line and, instead of $80 billion, we've got $200 billion, and most of that is in liquid U.S. government securities," she said. "Then a crash in tether would have a substantial impact on U.S. money markets and would just tip the whole world into recession."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, Meta revealed the Meta Quest Pro, the company's most premium virtual reality headset to date with a new processor and screen, dramatically redesigned body and controllers, and inward-facing cameras for eye and face tracking. "To celebrate the $1,500 headset, Meta made some fun new additions to its privacy policy, including one titled 'Eye Tracking Privacy Notice,'" reports Gizmodo. "The company says it will use eye-tracking data to 'help Meta personalize your experiences and improve Meta Quest.' The policy doesn't literally say the company will use the data for marketing, but 'personalizing your experience' is typical privacy-policy speak for targeted ads." From the report: Eye tracking data could be used "in order to understand whether people engage with an advertisement or not," said Meta's head of global affair Nick Clegg in an interview with the Financial Times. Whether you're resigned to targeted ads or not, this technology takes data collection to a place we've never seen. The Quest Pro isn't just going to inform Meta about what you say you're interested in, tracking your eyes and face will give the company unprecedented insight about your emotions. "We know that this kind of information can be used to determine what people are feeling, especially emotions like happiness or anxiety," said Ray Walsh, a digital privacy researcher at ProPrivacy. "When you can literally see a person look at an ad for a watch, glance for ten seconds, smile, and ponder whether they can afford it, that's providing more information than ever before." Meta has already developed a ton of technology for these purposes. The company filed a patent for a system that "adapts media content" based on facial expressions back in January, and it has experimented with harnessing and manipulating people's emotions for more than a decade. In January, it patented a mechanical eyeball. Despite the public's privacy concerns about Meta, it may be hard for people who use the company's products to resist activating the eye-tracking features because of what they will allow your avatar to do. "If Meta is successful, there's going to be a stigma attached with denying that data," ProPrivacy's Walsh said. "You don't want to be the only one looking like an expressionless zombie in a virtual room full of people smiling and frowning." Of course, eye-tracking data could be used to determine what you're thinking about buying. Maybe you spend a few extra seconds glancing at an expensive digital fedora, and the company sends you a coupon code an hour later. But measuring your emotions opens up a whole new arena for targeted ads. Digital marketing is all about showing you the right ad at the right moment. Walsh says advertisers could build campaigns with content specifically designed for people who seem frustrated, or more cheerful ad for people who are in a good mood.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California's roads just got a little smarter with the passage of a bill that paves the way for the sale of digital license plates across the state. The technology allows for emergency messaging like marking the car stolen or indicating an Amber Alert, and can be personalized through an app with touts like "Go Warriors" or "Go Lakers" to cheer on the local sports teams. The pesky task of car registration also will become easier with DMV auto-renewals, eliminating the need for registration cards and stickers. California-based startup Reviver is the only company offering digital license plates right now, and they're expensive, costing up to $1,100 for four years for a hard-wired version. (The cost for a traditional license plate, registration card and sticker totals $69, according to state's DMV.) A battery-powered version is available for an about $20 per month subscription, or $215 a year, for four years. Privacy advocates have concerns that the devices could be hacked and tracked. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also been "fighting for years to restrict police from using automated license plate readers to surveil neighborhoods for location data that can detect travel patterns of targeted vehicles," reports Bloomberg. Despite this, Reviver has continued to expand to Arizona and Michigan, where digital license plates are already approved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly four years after its last major release, VirtualBox 7.0 arrives with a... host of new features. Chief among them are Windows 11 support via TPM, EFI Secure Boot support, full encryption for virtual machines, and a few Linux niceties. From a report: The big news is support for Secure Boot and TPM 1.2 and 2.0, which makes it easier to install Windows 11 without registry hacks (the kind Oracle recommended for 6.1 users). It's strange to think about people unable to satisfy Windows 11's security requirements on their physical hardware, but doing so with a couple clicks in VirtualBox, but here we are. VirtualBox 7.0 also allows virtual machines to run with full encryption, not just inside the guest OSâ"but logs, saved states, and other files connected to the VM. At the moment, this support only works through the command line, "for now," Oracle notes in the changelog. This is the first official VirtualBox release with a Developer Preview for ARM-based Macs. Having loaded it on an M2 MacBook Air, I can report that the VirtualBox client informs you, extensively and consistently, about the non-production nature of your client. The changelog notes that it's an "unsupported work in progress" that is "known to have very modest performance." A "Beta Warning" shows up in the (new and unified) message center, and in the upper-right corner, a "BETA" warning on the window frame is stacked on top of a construction-style "Dev Preview" warning sign. It's still true that ARM-based Macs don't allow for running operating systems written for Intel or AMD-based processors inside virtual machines. You will, however, be able to run ARM-based Linux installations in macOS Venture that can themselves run x86 processors using Rosetta, Apple's own translation layer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox Relay, a Mozilla service designed to hide your "real" email address by giving you virtual ones to hand out, is expanding to offer virtual phone numbers. From a report: In a blog post Mozilla product manager Tony Amaral-Cinotto explains that the relay service generates a phone number for you to give out to companies if you suspect they might use it to send you spam messages in the future, or if you think they might share it with others who will. The idea is that handing out this alternative phone number makes it easier to block spam phone calls or texts in the future. You can either block all calls or texts sent to your relay number, or just block specific contacts. Importantly it lets you keep your "real" phone number private, which is something you might want to consider if it's a number you use to receive sensitive information like two-step verification codes via SMS. Once you've signed up, the Firefox phone number masking service offers 50 minutes of incoming calls and 75 text messages a month. The phone number masking service is also more expensive at $4.99 a month (or $3.99 a month when paid annually), while the email service offers a choice between a free tier and a premium tier costing $1.99 a month ($0.99 a month when paid annually).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Climate change may be having more impact on the melting Greenland ice sheet than previously thought, new research suggests. From a report: The study found rising air temperatures amplify the effects of melting caused by ocean warming, leading to greater ice loss from the world's second largest ice sheet. Experts liken the effect to how ice cubes melt more quickly if they are in a drink that is being stirred -- the combination of warmer liquid and movement accelerates the melting process. Previous studies have shown that rising air and ocean temperatures both cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt, however the new study, by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh and California San Diego, reveals how one intensifies the effects of the other. Dr Donald Slater, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the study, said: "The effect we investigated is a bit like ice cubes melting in a drink -- ice cubes will obviously melt faster in a warm drink than in a cold drink, hence the edges of the Greenland ice sheet melt faster if the ocean is warmer. But ice cubes in a drink will also melt faster if you stir the drink, and rising air temperatures in Greenland effectively result in a stirring of the ocean close to the ice sheet, causing faster melting of the ice sheet by the ocean."Read more of this story at Slashdot.