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UnknowingFool writes: In November 2021, Roblox sued YouTuber, Benjamin Simon aka "Ruben Sim" for $1.6M accusing him of griefing: harassment of users, harassment of employees, and disrupting the October 2021 Roblox Developers Conference by posting a false bomb threat. Ruben Sim has settled the suit with actions including: paying $150,000, staying off the platform [for several years], staying away from all Roblox facilities, and taking down all his YouTube videos regarding Roblox [if they make false statements, encourage violence, or glamorize Roblox rule-breaking].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg reports:A decade from now, offices shall be used for one thing and one thing only: quality time with colleagues. This seemingly bold prediction comes from Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor and expert on remote work. âoeWe will probably in 10 years stop calling this âremote workâ(TM). Weâ(TM)ll just call it work,â he said.... His research showed that a hybrid workforce is more productive, more loyal and less likely to leave. With companies from Twitter Inc. to PwC now giving employees the option to work virtually forever, Choudhury said businesses that donâ(TM)t adapt risk higher attrition... "For employers, itâ(TM)s a win as well because you are not constrained to hiring from the local labor market â" where you have an office... This is a once-in-a-generation moment when people are not going to be forced to live where they donâ(TM)t want to. Some people will find a permanent place to live; some will move around. The digital nomad revolution is going on...." "We should not care about how many days or hours anyone works. Every job and task should have objective metrics, which are output based, and if an employee can perform those metrics in two days, so be it. I am a firm believer that we should stop counting time. We should give people the flexibility to work when they want to, whichever hours they want to, whichever days they want to, and care only about their work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:Google announced it will begin the process of getting rid of long-standing ad trackers on its Android operating system, upending how advertising and data-collection work on phones and tablets used by more than 2.5 billion people around the world. Right now, Google assigns special IDs to each Android device, allowing advertisers to build profiles of what people do on their phones and serve them highly targeted ads. Google will begin testing alternatives to those IDs this year and eventually remove them completely, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google said the changes will improve privacy for Android users, limiting the massive amounts of data that app developers collect from people using the platform. But the move also could give Google even more power over digital advertising, and is likely to deepen concerns regulators have already expressed about the company's competitive practices... It made $61 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone.... The announcement comes over a year after Apple began blocking trackers on its own operating system, which runs on its iPhones, giving customers more tools to limit the data they share with app developers.... Google contrasted its plan with Apple's, saying it would make the changes over the next two years, working closely with app developers and the advertising industry to craft new ways of targeting ads and measuring their effectiveness before making any drastic changes. "We realize that other platforms have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers," said Anthony Chavez, vice president of product management for Android security and privacy, in the blog post. "We believe that without first providing a privacy-preserving alternative path such approaches can be ineffective and lead to worse outcomes for user privacy and developer businesses." The Post also includes this quote from the chief security office of Mozilla (which began restricting ad tracking in Firefox several years ago). "Google's two year plan is too long. People deserve better privacy now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past few weeks the sun "has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space," reports Science Alert:Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February 15 just before midnight. Based on the size, it's possible that the eruption was in the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable: an X-class flare. Because the flare and CME were directed away from Earth, we're unlikely to see any of the effects associated with a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when material from the eruption slams into Earth's atmosphere. These include interruptions to communications, power grid fluctuations, and auroras. But the escalating activity suggests that we may anticipate such storms in the imminent future. "This is only the second farside active region of this size since September 2017," astronomer Junwei Zhao of Stanford University's helioseismology group told SpaceWeather. "If this region remains huge as it rotates to the Earth-facing side of the Sun, it could give us some exciting flares." According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January. The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29. The article suggests this is normal activity, since the sun is about halfway towards "solar maximum" (its peak of sunspot and flare activity) expected to arrive in 2025, while the "solar minimum" was in 2019. Further Reading: SciTechDaily reports that the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has now "captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the storyRead more of this story at Slashdot.

From Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column:The 20th anniversary of .NET is upon us this week and with it, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in celebration of what it says is "the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now — 2019, 2020, 2021, according to Stack Overflow's developer survey." First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years. It went from a company embroiled in a monopoly case just a year before this release, to one that later decided to turn around, mend its former ways, and open source .NET Core. "When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time towards open source, .NET was also at the forefront," Microsoft writes in this week's celebratory blog post. "By 2012, we had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft's first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, we started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and were floored at the incredible support and contributions from the open-source community...." Certainly, in comparison to the Microsoft we once knew, there has been a massive shift in its approach to open source software and openness in general. Indeed, these days, Microsoft is also synonymous with another giant in the world of open source, its now-subsidiary GitHub — as well as the npm Registry and countless other projects. Microsoft has transformed from a company that was once led by a man who said that "Linux is a cancer" to one that has more recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop, among numerous other open source endeavors. The column ends by remembering what it calls "Microsoft 'hot reload' drama" last year — Microsoft's removal of the feature from the .NET SDK repo (and its subsequent return, with an apology). "All that's to say, perhaps all's well that ends well, and we should indeed celebrate 20 years of success with a now open source framework. In the same breath, vigilance may be necessary should we want to celebrate another such anniversary in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He produced the science fiction film THX 1138 — George Lucas's first movie — in 1971. 28 years later he supervised the re-editing of the science fiction film Supernova. But now 82-year-old Francis Ford Coppola — who has also made a second fortune in the wine business — has an even grander vision. GQ reports:It is a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can't, because Coppola can't either. Ask him. "It's very simple," he'll say. "The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it's basically... I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?" The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it's set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life — a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. "On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it." Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes. Annually.... [T]his is Coppola's plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune, at 82 years of age, and make the damn movie himself. The article describes it as the kind of "personal" movie that Coppola had wanted to make back when his studio had insisted he instead direct The Godfather.This, of course, is the paradox of Coppola's career: that for all his success, he has, to some extent, been waiting to make his own films, rather than someone else's, for practically his entire life.... "If you're going to make art, let it be personal. Let it be very personal to you." Megalopolis "remains in development for now," reports Variety. "Coppola has not yet announced a production start date."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tThe Washington Post reports:Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure "almost everyone in the world will be identifiable," according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post. Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar. The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month. With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation." The article notes that major tech companies like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all limited or ended their own sales of facial recognition technology — adding that Clearview's presentation simple describes this as a major business opportunity for themselves. In addition, the Post reports Clearview's presentation brags "that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its 'facial database' is connected to 'public source metadata' and 'social linkage' information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports:Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.... The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.... Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports. "Today, most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel..." reports Ars Technica:The extra land put under the plow released a significant amount of carbon, enough to flip the assessment of corn ethanol from a carbon-negative fuel to a carbon-emitting one. The biggest decline came when new cropland released carbon that had been stored in soils and vegetation, including roots of living plants. Farmers were also less likely to enter a field into the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant perennial vegetation on unused farmland. After the fertilizer was applied, it released a significant amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 300 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The researchers' estimates of the carbon impact of the fertilizer are probably low, too, since the authors didn't calculate how much additional pollution the manufacturing process released or the extent to which degraded water quality in downstream waterways released more greenhouse gases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As of the 1st of May, the Alexa web traffic ranking engine is going to stop its services," the TIOBE Index reminds us. So for the first time, TIOBE has switched to Similarweb this month to choose which search engines' results to use for its ranking of the popularity of programming languages.Fortunately, there are no big changes in the index due to this swap. The only striking difference is that the top 3 languages, Python, C, and Java, all gained more than 1 percent in the rankings. We are still fine-tuning the integration with Similarweb, which is combined with a shift to HtmlUnit in the back-end. Some websites are not onboarded yet, but will follow soon. Now that HtmlUnit is applied for web crawling, it will become possible to add more sites to the index, such as Stackoverflow and Github. This will hopefully happen in the next few months. TechRepublic reports: Python continues to sit atop the index, with C and Java directly behind it. In Feb. 2021, those three also occupied the top spot, but with Python in the number three position, C at top, and Java in second place. Beyond the top three, there hasn't been much movement in the index, with positions four through eight unchanged from the same time last year. Those slots are occupied, respectively, by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript and PHP. Positions nine and 10 swapped from Feb. 21 to now, with Assembly Language and SQL now occupying each other's positions. The one big move of note between Feb. 2021 and Feb. 2022 was with the Groovy programming language, an object-oriented language for Java. Over the course of the year, Groovy fell from 12th position all the way to 20th, putting it perilously close to the "other programming languages" list. Thanks to Amigan (Slashdot reader #25,469) for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protocol reports that Google "plans to reduce the equity packages for Durham, North Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Houston, Texas, in January 2022, according to an Alphabet Workers Union petition circulating today that demands a reversion to pay and equity cuts." The Washington Post notes that "For some employees, that means their stock grants could be 25 percent lower than if they worked at other Google offices, like in Atlanta, the workers said in the letter." With over 800 members the Alphabet Workers Union is part of a larger effort to organize workers at tech companies. Protocol writes:The Research Triangle area, where the Durham, North Carolina, office is located, was also moved from the "National" pay band to a "Discount" pay band in late 2020, according to the Amazon Workers Union petition. The union said it would affect 300 workers there, but that Google plans to expand to 1,000 employees in the coming years.... Many workers relocated there before the changes in pay and equity were made, the union wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPI reports on the results of a new randomized-controlled trial of ivermectin, the "gold standard" of medical research. UPI reports that treatment with ivermectin "failed to prevent patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from progressing to serious illness, a study published Friday by JAMA Internal Medicine found."Of 241 patients in the study with mild to moderate symptoms treated with the medication, 52, or 22% developed severe COVID-19, the data showed. Meanwhile, 43 of 249 patients, or 17%, who received "standard" treatment, including corticosteroids and, in a handful of cases, other experimental drugs, progressed to serious illness from the virus, the researchers said. "Essentially, our study findings have dismissed the notion of ivermectin being a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19," study co-author Dr. Steven Chee Loon Lim told UPI in an email.... In addition, study participants treated with ivermectin reported more side effects than those given other drugs, Lim said. This "raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug," he said.... 14 of the ivermectin patients developed severe diarrhea and four suffered potentially life-threatening kidney damage, the researchers said. The new study also examined whether patients had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections — and discovered "there were no significant differences between groups." And the researchers' study also points out that two additional randomized clinical trials conducted in 2021 also "found no significant effect of ivermectin on symptom resolution and hospitalization rates." UPI now quotes Dr. Lim as saying Friday that despite early hopes for ivermectin, "large and well-designed randomized clinical trials, including ours, have consistently shown that ivermectin offered little or no significant clinical benefits. "I believe the findings in our study will likely 'close the door' on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The delayed 5G BlackBerry phone is dead, OnwardMobility has confirmed on its website. "It is with great sadness that we announce that OnwardMobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard," OnwardMobility said in a message posted Friday, as spotted earlier by CrackBerry. "Please know that this was not a decision that we made lightly or in haste. We share your disappointment in this news and assure you this is not the outcome we worked and hoped for." Android Police and CrackBerry originally reported the phone had been cancelled on Feb. 11, saying OnwardMobility, a Texas-based startup seeking to revitalize the iconic brand through an Android-based, next-gen Wi-Fi device, lost the license from BlackBerry Ltd. to use the BlackBerry brand name. OnwardMobility did not expand on why it is shutting down and cancelling production of the phone. The news comes after BlackBerry ended service for its legacy devices in early January. "Before OnwardMobility picked up the license, Chinese manufacturer TCL was the most recent maker of BlackBerry-branded phones," adds CNET. Most recently, the company sold its prized patent portfolio to "Catapult IP Innovations Inc." for $600 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn't drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. New Scientist reports: Mischa von Krause at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues analysed data collected from around 1.2 million people aged 10 to 80 who took part in an experiment that was originally designed to measure implicit racial bias. During the task, participants were asked to sort words and images, for example by labelling faces as white or Black, or classifying words such as "joy" or "agony" as good or bad, by pressing one of two buttons. In support of previous studies, the researchers found that people's reaction times speed up from their teens to around age 20, then slow down as they get older. This decline has typically been attributed to slower mental speed, but this isn't the case, says von Krause. The team used an established model of cognition based on previous research, which assumes people make decisions by continuously considering information until they reach a threshold of certainty. According to this model, the decrease in reaction time from age 20 is probably due to people wanting more certainty before making decisions as they age, visual information taking more time to travel from their eyes to their brain and people taking longer to physically hit the button as they get older. The analysis suggests that people's mental speed increases in their 20s, and stays high until age 60. [...] While the team expects the results will apply to a wide range of cognitive tasks, it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space." You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Wall Street institutions' growing connections to crypto markets could threaten financial stability and cause a credit crunch-style financial crisis, global regulators have warned. The Financial Stability Board said (PDF) "ongoing vigilance" of institutional investors such as big banks and hedge funds is needed as they deepen their involvement in the $1.9 trillion crypto market. "If the current trajectory of growth in scale and interconnectedness of crypto-assets to these institutions were to continue, this could have implications for global financial stability," the FSB said in a report published Wednesday. The FSB was concerned the volatility in cryptocurrency markets -- even though crypto makes up just a fraction of global assets -- could feed through as digital and traditional finance become more interconnected. "If financial institutions continue to become more involved in crypto-asset markets, this could affect their balance sheets and liquidity in unexpected ways," it said. The regulator compared the risk from a crypto event to the credit crunch that sparked the 2008 financial crisis. "As in the case of the US subprime mortgage crisis, a small amount of known exposure does not necessarily mean a small amount of risk, particularly if there exists a lack of transparency and insufficient regulatory coverage," it said. It noted that "systemically important" banks and other financial firms are increasingly keen to play a role in and gain exposure to crypto assets. Systemically important institutions are ones which, if they failed, could set off a financial crisis. The overall value of the cryptocurrency market grew 3.5 times in 2021 to $2.6 trillion as institutional interest soared, the FSB noted. Its worth has fallen in the early months of 2022 as prices slumped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, have provided evidence to suggest that fish have the capacity for MSR, a behavioral test to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. As Phys.Org explains, an animal's capacity for MSR is determined when they "touch or scrape a mark placed on their body in a location that can only be indirectly viewed in a mirror." From the report: Professor [Masanori Kohda] says, "Previously, using a brown marking on the throat area of [cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus], we had shown three out of four cleaner fish to scrape their throats several times after swimming in front of a mirror, a number on par with similar studies done on other animals like elephants, dolphins, and magpies." However, one of the criticisms laid against this result was sample size and the need for repeated studies showing positive results. Teaming up with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, this study increased the sample size to 18 cleaner fish, with a 94% positive result of 17 of them demonstrating the same behavior from the previous study.[...]Prof. Kohda says, "Our previous study demonstrated MSR in L. dimidiatus; however, studies with other animals have shown that simply moving a mirror reignites aggressive behavior, suggesting the animal has only learned a spatial contingency, not MSR." To address this, the team transferred mirror-trained cleaner fish to a tank with a mirror on one side of the tank and then three days later to a tank with a mirror on the other side, and saw the fish show no aggression toward their mirror image in both tanks. Also, to ensure the L. dimidiatus that passed the mark test truly are recognizing themselves, they placed mirror-trained fish in adjacent tanks that were separated by transparent glass. After two to three days, when fish largely reduced their aggressive behavior towards each other, they were marked the standard way the following night. None of the fish scraped their throat during the 120 mins of exposure to each other the following morning. This new experiment was recently published in PLOS Biology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report from the Washington Post, Apple Store employees at several retail stores in the US are said are said to be planning to unionize. 9to5Mac reports: Groups at two stores are reportedly preparing paperwork to file with the National Labor Relations Board, with about six more locations at earlier stages of planning. The Post says the main source of unrest is due to wages. Apple pays retail employees in the range of $17-$30 per hour, depending on role and seniority. However, the workers say these rates have not kept up with inflation. Inspired by recent successful union votes at more than 90 Starbucks stores, the report says that efforts to unionize have recently accelerated. Operations are largely happening in secret in case of retaliation from management. However, the Post says that at one store managers have already began discussing how unions will hurt employee working conditions: "Apple Store employees at one store said managers have already begun pulling employees aside and giving speeches about how unions will hurt employees, lower their wages and force Apple to take away benefits and opportunities, such as the 'career experience' that Herbst described. Managers try to eavesdrop on employees, they said, while pretending to do something else."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since being rolled out to users in the U.S. and Canada, Meta's social VR platform for the Quest headset, Horizon Worlds, has grown its monthly user base by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people. "Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics," reports The Verge. "The number doesn't include Horizon Workrooms, a VR conferencing experience that relies on an invite system." From the report: Before its December rollout, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta for creators to test its world-building tools. Similarly to how the gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft's Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments to hang out and play games in as legless avatars. Meta announced this week that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date, and its private Facebook group for creators now numbers over 20,000 members. Meta still hasn't disclosed how many Quest headsets it has sold to date, which makes it hard to gauge Horizon's success relative to the underlying hardware platform it runs on. But several third-party estimates peg sales at over 10 million for the Quest. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta would release a version of Horizon for mobile phones later this year to "bring early metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR." "So while the deepest and most immersive experiences are going to be in virtual reality, you're also going to be able to access the worlds from your Facebook or Instagram apps as well, and probably more over time," the CEO said on Meta's last earnings call. Bringing Horizon to mobile would position it as even more of a competitor to Rec Room, a well-funded, social gaming app with 37 million monthly users across gaming consoles, mobile phones, and VR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers aligned with the government of Iran are exploiting the critical Log4j vulnerability to infect unpatched VMware users with ransomware, researchers said on Thursday. Security firm SentinelOne has dubbed the group TunnelVision. The name is meant to emphasize TunnelVision's heavy reliance on tunneling tools and the unique way it deploys them. In the past, TunnelVision has exploited so-called 1-day vulnerabilities -- meaning vulnerabilities that have been recently patched -- to hack organizations that have yet to install the fix. Vulnerabilities in Fortinet FortiOS (CVE-2018-13379) and Microsoft Exchange (ProxyShell) are two of the group's better-known targets. [...] The SentinelOne research shows that the targeting continues and that this time the target is organizations running VMware Horizon, a desktop and app virtualization product that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Apache Tomcat is an open source Web server that VMware and other enterprise software use to deploy and serve Java-based Web apps. Once installed, a shell allows the hackers to remotely execute commands of their choice on exploited networks. The PowerShell used here appears to be a variant of this publicly available one. Once it's installed, TunnelVision members use it to: Execute reconnaissance commands; Create a backdoor user and adding it to the network administrators group; Harvest credentials using ProcDump, SAM hive dumps, and comsvcs MiniDump; and Download and run tunneling tools, including Plink and Ngrok, which are used to tunnel remote desktop protocol traffic. The hackers use multiple legitimate services to achieve and obscure their activities. Those services include: transfer.sh, pastebin.com, webhook.site, ufile.io, and raw.githubusercontent.com. People who are trying to determine if their organization is affected should look for unexplained outgoing connections to these legitimate public services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Search is now testing a row of widgets on desktop web for an experience that's similar to Discover. 9to5Google reports: These cards appear at the very bottom of google.com. There's a "Hide content" toggle in the bottom-right corner, while Google notes your zip code/city and explains that the information offered is "Based on your past activity." When the window is fully expanded, six cards are offered and they all expand on hover: - Weather: Condition (with) icon + temperature. Three-day forecast on hover- Trending: Cover image with search count- What to Watch: Shows and movies with cover art- Stocks/markets: Day graph on hover- Local Events: With date - COVID News Tapping opens the full web result with the usual Knowledge Panel card and/or related Google Search experience. The number of cards that appear depends on the size of your screen with no way to scroll and see more without physically expanding the window. We're only seeing this rolled out on two Google Accounts, albeit across several signed-in devices, today. As such, this is very likely a test to determine whether a full rollout is warranted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent. Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren A. Miles, who had been a manager of global community development, is no longer employed by the company after a video went viral on YouTube, which was then reposted on Reddit and other sites, featuring him in a sting operation conducted by amateurs with the intent of catching paedophiles. The two-hour video, posted by an amateur group called PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis on its YouTube page, does not depict Miles caught in any sex act, nor admitting to any specific sex act, nor admitting to intending to carry out any sex act. And it is not clear what the legal ramifications of this will be, if any. But it does feature two people questioning Miles, who in the course of the interrogation admits to having graphic and inappropriate communications with a 13-year-old boy. It's a damning enough exchange that Miles has subsequently deleted his social profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and -- whether he was fired or resigned voluntarily -- Miles has left his role at Facebook over the matter. "The seriousness of these allegations cannot be overstated. The individual is no longer employed with the company. We are actively investigating this situation and cannot provide further comment at this time," said a statement from a Meta spokesperson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With people more wary than ever about clicking on suspicious links in emails and text messages, zero-click hacks are being used more frequently by government agencies to spy on activists, journalists and others, according to more than a dozen surveillance company employees, security researchers and hackers interviewed by Bloomberg News. From a report: Once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies, the technology needed for zero-click hacks is now being sold to governments by a small number of companies, the most prominent of which is Israel's NSO Group. Bloomberg News has learned that at least three other Israeli companies -- Paragon, Candiru and Cognyte Software -- have developed zero-click hacking tools or offered them to clients, according to former employees and partners of those companies, demonstrating that the technology is becoming more widespread in the surveillance industry. There are certain steps that a potential victim can take that might reduce the chances of a successful zero-click attack, including keeping a device updated. But some of the more effective methods -- including uninstalling certain messaging apps that hackers can use as gateways to breach a device -- aren't practical because people rely on them for communication, said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that focuses on abuses of surveillance technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous. Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government's "dithering" has left the country "well behind" China in the race to build out 5G technology, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, as he urged Washington to step up investment in the next-generation internet technology. From a report: Writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt and Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, said that America is "far behind in almost every dimension of 5G while other nations -- including China -- race ahead." The authors urged the Biden administration to make 5G a "national priority." Otherwise, they said, "China will own the 5G future." 5G refers to next-generation wireless internet that promises super-fast download speeds. But it could also form the basis for industrial and military applications and form a way for devices to communicate with each other. That's why it's seen as a critical technology and one of the reasons China is moving quickly with its own 5G rollout and future applications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nray writes: Mayor Eric Adams called for people to revive the state's economy by getting "back to work" -- and said he was tired of hearing excuses about the COVID-19 pandemic. "New Yorkers, it's time to get back to work," Adams said during a speech at the state Democratic Committee's Nominating Convention. "You can't tell me you're afraid of COVID on Monday and I see you in a nightclub on Sunday." The crack sparked laughter among the audience at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. Adams said that white-collar workers who continued working from home were hurting service-oriented businesses that rely on a steady stream of customers. "That accountant that's not in his office space is not going to the cleaners," he said. "It's not going to the restaurant. It's not allowing the cooks, the waiters, the dishwashers [to make a living]."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a desperate bid to get his children offline, some guy in France apparently blitzed his entire town's internet connection -- by accident, that is. He now faces up to six months in prison for the outage. From a report: A report from the outlet France Bleu says the unnamed dad tried to use a multi-wave band jammer to temporarily cut off the internet connection at his residence in the town of Messanges. Jammers, which are illegal in France (and also in the U.S.), work by interfering with telecommunication signals, thus stifling connections. Despite their illegality, people still get arrested for using them, pretty much all the time. In this case, the dad in question deployed the device in the hopes of prying his social-media-addicted children away from the grips of their devices. When later questioned by a government official, the man apparently admitted that he only wanted to cut off the connectivity to his house at night, between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. -- probably so his kids would put the phones down and just go to bed already. Unfortunately for the padre, the jamming device was powerful enough to cut connectivity not just to his own residence but, unbeknownst to him, to those of many, many others in the surrounding area. His neighbors eventually started reporting their outages, after which the government was forced to investigate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world's most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world. It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone. Reuters: An unusual error in NSO's spyware allowed Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers. The discovery on al-Hathloul's phone last year ignited a storm of legal and government action that has put NSO on the defensive. How the hack was initially uncovered is reported here for the first time. Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia's most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security. Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters. After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target. He said the finding, computer code left by the attack, provided direct evidence NSO built the espionage tool. "It was a game changer," said Marczak. "We caught something that the company thought was uncatchable." The discovery amounted to a hacking blueprint and led Apple to notify thousands of other state-backed hacking victims around the world, according to four people with direct knowledge of the incident.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pandemic has accelerated the usage of QR codes, taking them from niche status to an essential tool for businesses and marketers. From a report: Look no further than Sunday's Super Bowl commercial of nothing but a floating QR code sending users to the website of Coinbase. [...] Law enforcement officials are sounding the alarm about the risks. The FBI issued an alert in January warning Americans that cybercriminals "are tampering with QR codes to redirect victims to malicious sites that steal login and financial information." If you're scanning a physical code, make sure it hasn't been tampered with. For example, watch out for "a sticker placed on top of the original code," the FBI advises.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A burning car transport ship drifted in the mid-Atlantic on Thursday after the huge vessel's 22 crew members were evacuated due to the blaze, the Portuguese navy said. From a report: Shipping in the area was warned that the 200-meter-long (650-feet-long) Felicity Ace was adrift near Portugal's Azores Islands after the crew were taken off on Wednesday, Portuguese navy spokesman Cmdr. Jose Sousa Luis said. The Felicity Ace can carry more than 17,000 metric tons (18,700 tons) of cargo. Typically, car transport ships fit thousands of vehicles on multiple decks in their hold. Volkswagen Group said in a brief statement the Felicity Ace was transporting to the U.S. vehicles that the German automaker produced. The company declined to comment on what consequences the incident might have for U.S. customers or the VW Group. The ship's operator, Japan's Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, said in an email to the AP it could not provide information about the cargo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AnandTech reports: It's no secret that Intel's enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations. Compared to the competition, Intel is chasing its multi-die strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn't offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Xeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood, with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap. Currently in the market is Intel's Ice Lake 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable platform, built on Intel's 10nm process node with up to 40 Sunny Cove cores. The die is large, around 660 mm2, and in our benchmarks we saw a sizeable generational uplift in performance compared to the 2nd Generation Xeon offering. The response to Ice Lake Xeon has been mixed, given the competition in the market, but Intel has forged ahead by leveraging a more complete platform coupled with FPGAs, memory, storage, networking, and its unique accelerator offerings. Datacenter revenues, depending on the quarter you look at, are either up or down based on how customers are digesting their current processor inventories (as stated by CEO Pat Gelsinger). Further reading: Intel Arc Update: Alchemist Laptops Q1, Desktops Q2; 4M GPUs Total for 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No province is too small or remote for Beijing's careful attention. Bloomberg Businessweek: Chinese technology and money have helped build one of Latin America's largest solar energy plants in Jujuy (pronounced hu-HUY), where hundreds of thousands of panels coat the desert like giant dominoes. Chinese security cameras guard government buildings across the provincial capital. Servers hum in a Chinese data storage plant. Beneath the remote, craggy hills and vast salt lakes lie veins of copper, lithium, and zinc, the raw materials of 21st century -- technology -- including Chinese-made electric-car batteries. It's no secret that China has been pouring resources into South America this century, chipping away at the U.S.'s historic dominance and making itself the continent's No. 1 trading partner. But while international focus has turned in recent years to China's ventures in Africa and Asia, an important shift has gone largely unnoticed in the country's approach to South America: going local to expand and strengthen its financial grip. Instead of focusing on national leaders, China and its companies have built relationships from the ground up. In 2019 alone, at least eight Brazilian governors and four deputy governors traveled to China. In a September 2019 speech, Zou Xiaoli, China's ambassador to Argentina, said his country's infrastructure push was helping weave Latin America into the global marketplace. "China will lend strong support to Argentina's economic and social development," he said. As Argentina's Jujuy province illustrates, no region is too remote for China's scrupulous attention. With perhaps a touch of hyperbole, Gabriel Marquez, chief executive officer of a Jujuy lithium research and development center, describes the effectiveness of the approach: "You have this poor governor from Argentina who has Xi Jinping's phone number."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden is expected to issue an executive order next week directing agencies across the government to study cryptocurrencies and a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and come up with a government-wide strategy to regulate digital assets. Yahoo Finance: According to an administration official familiar with the matter, the forthcoming directive will commission a study of a CBDC and ask a range of agencies -- including the Departments of Treasury, State, Justice and Homeland Security -- to develop a report on the future of money and payment systems. Meanwhile, the Director of the Office of Science and Tech policy will do a technical evaluation of what might be needed to support a CBDC system. The move comes as Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that a rift has developed between the White House and Treasury over crypto regulation, but a Treasury official disputed the account as "inaccurate." The administration is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to regulate the sector, with the FBI forming a new crypto unit led by a seasoned computer crimes prosecutor. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), created after the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks to the system, will be asked to study financial stability issues that arise from digital assets. The President's Working Group on Financial Markets has already tasked the FSOC with looking into systemic risks of stablecoins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Repeated heading and accidental head impacts in football cause changes to blood patterns in the brain, potentially interfering with signalling pathways, according to a study of players in Norway. From a report: The peer-reviewed research, published in the Brain Injury journal, is the latest item in a growing body of evidence pointing to the dangers of heading. It discovered "specific alterations" in levels of microRNAs in the brain upon analysing blood samples from 89 professional players in the country's top flight. MicroRNAs are molecules that help to regulate gene expression, through which DNA instructions are converted into products such as proteins, in bodily fluids. The findings suggest that, given the change in levels, they may be able to be used as biomarkers to detect brain injury. Blood samples were taken from players after accidental head impacts in matches and after specifically designed training sessions. Forty-eight of the players, drawn from three teams, took part in a session that included repetitive heading drills from set pieces and similar scenarios; they also undertook one that involved other high-intensity exercise, with no head contact allowed. The results found specific changes in certain microRNA levels whose numbers were unaffected by the other high-intensity exercise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple geeks may be aware of the mystery of the handwritten Apple 1 serial number present on some of the surviving machines. Namely, no one knew how they got there. Steve Wozniak said that he didn't write them. Steve Jobs said the same. Daniel Kottke, who assembled and tested some of the boards, said it wasn't him. Likewise for Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell, who bought a batch of 50 of them... Achim Baque, who maintains the Apple-1 Registry (a listing of all Apple 1 computers), finally decided to try to solve the mystery. This, it turned out, would not be a trivial task. Despite Steve Jobs' denial, the handwriting on the boards did seem to match his. However, since Steve rarely signed autographs, making his signature and handwriting especially valuable, the potential impact on the value of the machines with serial numbers meant that as much certainty as possible was needed. Baque asked one of the world's leading handwriting authentication services to compare the serial numbers on two of the Apple 1 boards with known samples of Steve's writing. California-based PSA said that they could do it, but photos wouldn't be sufficient -- they would need to carry out a physical examination of both the boards and the handwriting samples. The company's analysis would include the slant, flow, pen pressure, letter size, and other characteristics. Daniel Kottke, who was a close friend of Steve, provided a number of letters and postcards written by Steve. Helpfully, these documents include a number of handwritten numbers. Baque then personally transported two of the boards, and the handwriting samples, to California for examination by PSA. The company took three months to perform the analysis, also studying many photos, before authenticating the handwriting on the boards as that of Steve Jobs. Finally, the mystery is solved! Steve clearly just didn't recall doing it. The full story has been reported at the Apple-1 Registry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The little known Turlock Irrigation District (TID) in California has taken a bold and ambitious step to put solar panels on its open water canals, the first such project in the U.S. Interesting Engineering reports: Encouraged by a $20 million grant from the state, TID has announced Project Nexus that will trial the concept on two canal segments, to begin with. The project is the on-ground realization of a study conducted by researchers at the University of California Merced and University of California Santa Cruz. Published last year, the study used simulations to calculate that California's open canal system could save 63 billion gallons of water every year if it put a lid on top of its canals. The researchers had suggested putting solar panels would help the canals become a hub of renewable energy as they could potentially produce 13 gigawatts of electricity. This is about a sixth of the energy that the state of California generates, TID said in its press release. The solar panels could be installed on top of the canals using suspension cables and the cooling effect of the water running below would also maintain the efficiency of the panels that are known to drop output on very hot days. The 63 billion gallons of water saved could be used to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or supply drinking water to as many as two million people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Herman Pontzer, a biological anthropologist at the Pontzer lab at Duke University, works with his colleagues to "systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life," reports Science.org. "The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn't help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don't expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don't burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass." Here's an excerpt from the report: Pontzer's skill as a popularizer can rankle some of his colleagues. His message that exercise won't help you lose weight "lacks nuance," says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits. But others say besides busting myths about human energy expenditure, Pontzer's work offers a new lens for understanding human physiology and evolution. As he wrote in Burn, "In the economics of life, calories are the currency." "His work is revolutionary," says paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which has funded Pontzer's work. "We now have data ... that has given us a completely new framework for how we think about how humans adapted to energetic limits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: There have been more than 1 million excess deaths in the US during the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The deaths are mainly attributable to Covid-19, as well as conditions that may have resulted from delayed medical care and overwhelmed health systems. At least 923,000 Americans have died from confirmed Covid cases, according to the CDC. Other causes of death above the normally expected number have included heart disease, hypertension and Alzheimer's disease. Some Americans also die months after their initial Covid diagnosis, because the virus created other fatal complications. Excess deaths are calculated by looking at previous years' fatalities. In 2019, there were 2.8 million deaths in the US; in 2020, it was approximately 3.3 million. While cause of death can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, and political pressures can lead to miscounting, excess deaths can indicate the broad scope of a health emergency. These figures can reveal the truer toll of Covid -- including deaths directly from infection as well as deaths from the circumstances of the crisis. The global number of excess deaths may be millions higher than the official count of Covid deaths. Excess deaths are also known as untimely or "early" deaths. While the majority of excess deaths in the US occurred among those 65 and older, many of those Americans had many years left to live.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new exclusive analysis of NPD Game Pulse data conducted by Ars Technica, the number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital console games explodes. From the report: In terms of distinct game titles released in the United States, the raw number of new games available on physical media (i.e. discs or cartridges) declined from 321 in 2018 to just 226 in 2021, a nearly 30 percent decline (games released on multiple consoles are counted as a single title in this measure). The number of digital games released each year, on the other hand, remained relatively flat from 2018 through 2020. Then, in 2021, that number exploded to nearly 2,200 digital titles, a 64 percent increase from 2020. All told, the proportion of all new console games available exclusively as digital downloads increased from 75 percent in 2018 to nearly 90 percent in 2021. These divergent trends suggest that the decline in new physical releases is not simply an artifact of consoles like the Xbox One and PS4 nearing the end of their lifecycles. Instead, as a whole, publishers seem to see a physical release as a less relevant market for an increasing proportion of titles. But the transition away from physical console games is not distributed evenly across all publishers. The largest publishers are much more likely to go through the hassle and expense of a physical release for their marquee titles. Among major publishers, a slight majority (56.4 percent) of distinct titles released in 2021 were available as physical releases. That's still a major decline from 2018, though, when nearly 80 percent of titles from those publishers merited a physical launch. When those large publishers are filtered out, though, physical game releases quickly become a very minor part of the market. Just 8.1 percent of new games from those smaller companies were available on physical media in 2021, down in terms of both proportion and raw numbers from 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. produced more petroleum than it consumed in 2020, and the numbers were essentially in balance in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. Axios reports: The surge in oil prices taking place in 2022 has radically different implications for the U.S. economy -- and for key geopolitical relationships in the Middle East and Russia -- than in past episodes when energy prices have risen. In the past, when oil prices spiked, the impact on the U.S. economy was straightforward: It made America poorer, as more of our income went overseas to pay for imported energy. Now, after the shale gas revolution of the last 15 years, the impact is more subtle. Higher fuel prices disadvantage consumers and energy-intensive industries, yes. But there is a counteracting surge in incomes for domestic energy producers and their workers. Higher oil prices no longer depress overall measures of prosperity like GDP and national income, but rather shift it around toward certain regions. Texas and North Dakota win; Massachusetts and North Carolina lose. As recently as 2010, America imported 9.4 million barrels a day of oil more than it exported. That had swung to a 650,000 barrel per day surplus in 2020, and preliminary numbers for 2021 show trade pretty much in balance last year. To the degree the U.S. does still import oil, more of it is coming from our closest ally. Canada was the source of 51% of U.S. petroleum imports in the first 10 months of 2021, compared with 8% from the Persian Gulf. By contrast, the Gulf states supplied more than 30% of American petroleum imports in 2008.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared a smartphone app from Tandem Diabetes Care to program insulin delivery for its t:slim X2 insulin pump, the company announced Wednesday. The Verge reports: It's the first phone app for both iOS and Android to able to deliver insulin, the company said in a statement. Previously, delivery had to be handled through the pump itself. With this update, pump users will be able to program or cancel bolus doses of insulin, which are taken at mealtimes and are crucial in keeping blood glucose levels under control. "Giving a meal bolus is now the most common reason a person interacts with their pump, and the ability to do so using a smartphone app offers a convenient and discrete solution," John Sheridan, president and CEO of Tandem Diabetes Care, said in a statement. [...] Tandem said in the statement that it will launch the new bolus delivery update for select users this spring ahead of a wider launch this summer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now that Windows 11's first major post-release update has been issued, Microsoft has started testing a huge collection of new features, UI changes, and redesigned apps in the latest Windows Insider preview for Dev channel users. By and large, the changes are significant and useful -- there's an overhauled Task Manager, folders for pinned apps in the Start menu, the renewed ability to drag items into the Taskbar (as you could in Windows 10), improvements to the Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, new touchscreen gestures, and a long list of other fixes and enhancements. But tucked away toward the bottom of the changelog is one unwelcome addition: like the Home edition of Windows 11, the Pro version will now require an Internet connection and a Microsoft account during setup. In the current version of Windows 11, you could still create a local user account during setup by not connecting your PC to the Internet -- something that also worked in the Home version of Windows 10 but was removed in 11. That workaround will no longer be available in either edition going forward, barring a change in Microsoft's plans. While most devices do require a sign-in to fully enable app stores, cloud storage, and cross-device sharing and syncing, Windows 11 will soon stand alone as the only major consumer OS that requires account sign-in to enable even basic functionality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roku, the leading supplier of smart TV OS in North America, is looking at possibly building its own TV sets. Nexttv reports: According to Business Insider, Roku convened a focus group earlier this month in which participants were shown "different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points," of smart TVs, according to an individual "familiar" with the event. This unnamed person told the news site that the moderator made it clear that Roku is exploring the possibility of "going it alone" with its own "manufacturing operation," and not merely attaching its brand to an existing smart TV manufacturer's product line.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers backed by the Russian government have breached the networks of multiple US defense contractors in a sustained campaign that has revealed sensitive information about US weapons-development communications infrastructure, the federal government said on Wednesday. Wired reports: The campaign began no later than January 2020 and has continued through this month, according to a joint advisory by the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The hackers have been targeting and successfully hacking cleared defense contractors, or CDCs, which support contracts for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community. "During this two-year period, these actors have maintained persistent access to multiple CDC networks, in some cases for at least six months," officials wrote in the advisory. "In instances when the actors have successfully obtained access, the FBI, NSA, and CISA have noted regular and recurring exfiltration of emails and data. For example, during a compromise in 2021, threat actors exfiltrated hundreds of documents related to the company's products, relationships with other countries, and internal personnel and legal matters." The exfiltrated documents included unclassified CDC-proprietary and export-controlled information. This information gives the Russian government "significant insight" into US weapons-platforms development and deployment timelines, plans for communications infrastructure, and specific technologies being used by the US government and military. The documents also include unclassified emails among employees and their government customers discussing proprietary details about technological and scientific research. The hackers have used a variety of methods to breach their targets. The methods include harvesting network passwords through spear phishing, data breaches, cracking techniques, and exploitation of unpatched software vulnerabilities. After gaining a toehold in a targeted network, the threat actors escalate their system rights by mapping the Active Directory and connecting to domain controllers. From there, they're able to exfiltrate credentials for all other accounts and create new accounts. The hackers make use of virtual private servers to encrypt their communications and hide their identities, the advisory added. They also use "small office and home office (SOHO) devices, as operational nodes to evade detection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's been less than a month since the New York Times bought Wordle, but it's wasting no time in ruining everyone's favorite word game in all the shitty ways you'd expect from a billion-dollar behemoth. And -- you guessed it -- that means your little daily puzzles are being loaded with ad trackers now, too. Most of us assumed that this was going to happen eventually. I mean, the Times dropped a cool seven-figure sum on a game that's still free to play (at least for right now), so those profits would need to be recouped from somewhere. And this week, some code-savvy Worlders stumbled onto where that "somewhere" was: a dozen different trackers shoved into places where there were literally zero before. Taking a look for ourselves, Gizmodo found that some of the trackers were from the New York Times proper, but most were used to send data to third-party players like Google. [...] Here's just one nightmare scenario out of the bajillion or so that could come out of a system like this: Ad trackers were created to shove t-shirts and mugs onto all of our timelines, but they can also be used for outright surveillance. There are countless cases of cops using the data gleaned from those shitty ads to track protestors, immigrants, and anyone else they'd want completely warrant-free. And two of the companies that officers tap on the regular for this work -- Google and Oracle (via its infamous Bluekai subsidiary) -- are tied up in Wordle's shiny new trackers. Every time you open the page to see the day's puzzle to complain about how hard it is, the page pings details back to those companies -- and the data it shares can be extremely detailed, as Bluekai's own documents (PDF) lay out. At the very least, it's likely sending broad strokes to say you were on the site at a certain time, while your device was at a certain location. Sure, adtech players can (and will) pull much shadier shit to share more data on the regular. But as a for instance, if a cop wanted to set a geofence warrant around your neighborhood -- tracking which devices are caught in a specific area at a specific time -- they could easily tap into Bluekai's ad data to get those wheres and whens. And now the fact that you Wordle'd at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday becomes one of the reasons that you ended up on some fed's watch list for a crime you didn't commit but will somehow end up jailed for anyway. This absolute nightmare is almost certainly not what's happening on Wordle right now (phew). And again, this scenario applies to most of the sites you likely visit every day, not just Wordle. But the real scary part about all of this -- at least to me -- is that it can.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India unveiled its hydrogen roadmap, offering incentives for investors to produce the fuel at low costs and help the nation shift away from its reliance on fossil fuels. From a report: The first part of the plan announced Thursday offers free transmission of renewable electricity from one state to the other for the production of hydrogen and ammonia, helping drive down costs for an industry that's already winning support from billionaires like Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. The government is considering offering subsidies and obliging oil refineries and fertilizer plants to use the fuel in the second phase, which is still being prepared, Power Minister Raj Kumar Singh said Wednesday. Green hydrogen, made from water and renewable electricity, will likely play a major role in cutting emissions globally, offering a route to decarbonization for heavy industries like steel and cement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government aims to make India -- one of the largest importers of oil and coal -- a global hub for production and export of hydrogen, even though the fuel is still a long way from being commercially viable. "The mission aims to aid the government in meeting its climate targets and making India a green hydrogen hub," the power ministry said in a statement. It will also help meet a target of producing 5 million tons of green hydrogen by 2030, it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of Intel's annual investor meeting taking place today, Raja Koduri, Intel's SVP and GM of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group delivered an update to investors on the state of Intel's GPU and accelerator group, including some fresh news on the state of Intel's first generation of Arc graphics products. AnandTech: Among other things, the GPU frontman confirmed that while Intel will indeed ship the first Arc mobile products in the current quarter, desktop products will not come until Q2. Meanwhile, in the first disclosure of chip volumes, Intel is now projecting that they'll ship 4mil+ Arc GPUs this year. In terms of timing, today's disclosure confirms some earlier suspicions that developed following Intel's CES 2022 presentation: that the company would get its mobile Arc products out before their desktop products. Desktop products will now follow in the second quarter of this year, a couple of months behind the mobile parts. And finally, workstation products, which Intel has previously hinted at, are on their way and will land in Q3.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal investigators spent years hunting for clues in the 2016 hacking of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, when thieves stole bitcoin now worth $4.5 billion. In the end, what helped lead them to two suspects was something much more quotidian: a $500 Walmart gift card. From a report: That card and more than a dozen others like it, including for Uber, Hotels.com and PlayStation, were linked to emails and cloud service providers belonging to a young Manhattan couple, Ilya "Dutch" Lichtenstein and Heather R. Morgan, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities arrested the couple after seizing $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin allegedly in their control -- the Justice Department's largest financial seizure ever. New details have since emerged about the investigation, in particular how it took advantage of not only advanced forensic tools but also the growing push to rein in crypto crime, including by the industry itself. The discoveries would have been less likely to happen around the time of the hack, when bitcoin was far outside the mainstream of the financial world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Air pollution may affect semen quality, specifically sperm motility -- the ability of sperm to swim in the right direction -- according to a new study analysing the sperm of over 30,000 men in China. From a report: The research, published today in the journal JAMA Networks, also suggests that the smaller the size of the polluting particles in the air, the greater the link with poor semen quality. "Our findings suggest that smaller particulate matter size fractions may be more potent than larger fractions in inducing poor sperm motility," wrote the authors of the paper. The researchers believe that these findings highlight yet another reason for the need to reduce exposure to air pollution among men in their reproductive age.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five major Canadian banks went offline for hours blocking access to online and mobile banking as well as e-transfers for customers. From a report: The banks reportedly hit by the outage include Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BMO (Bank of Montreal), Scotiabank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). Canada's five major banks went offline yesterday impeding access to e-Transfers, online and mobile banking services for many.Read more of this story at Slashdot.