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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase. A report published on Tuesday is only the latest one involving Magecart, an umbrella term given to competing crime groups that infect e-commerce sites with skimmers. Over the past few years, thousands of sites have been hit by exploits that cause them to run malicious code. When visitors enter payment card details during purchase, the code sends that information to attacker-controlled servers. Sansec, the security firm that discovered the latest batch of infections, said the compromised sites were all loading malicious scripts hosted at the domain naturalfreshmall[.]com. "The Natural Fresh skimmer shows a fake payment popup, defeating the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form," firm researchers wrote on Twitter. "Payments are sent to https://naturalfreshmall.com/p...." The hackers then modified existing files or planted new files that provided no fewer than 19 backdoors that the hackers could use to retain control over the sites in the event the malicious script was detected and removed and the vulnerable software was updated. The only way to fully disinfect the site is to identify and remove the backdoors before updating the vulnerable CMS that allowed the site to be hacked in the first place. Sansec worked with the admins of hacked sites to determine the common entry point used by the attackers. The researchers eventually determined that the attackers combined a SQL injection exploit with a PHP object injection attack in a Magento plugin known as Quickview. [...] It's not hard to find sites that remain infected more than a week after Sansec first reported the campaign on Twitter. At the time this post was going live, Bedexpress[.]com continued to contain this HTML attribute, which pulls JavaScript from the rogue naturalfreshmall[.]com domain. The hacked sites were running Magento 1, a version of the e-commerce platform that was retired in June 2020. The safer bet for any site still using this deprecated package is to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Commerce. Another option is to install open source patches available for Magento 1 using either DIY software from the OpenMage project or with commercial support from Mage-One.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Isolation rooms, fears of positive Covid-19 tests and the absence of cheering crowds are squeezing all the joy from the Beijing Games. From a report: On the day Team USA flag bearer Elana Meyers Taylor was supposed to march her country into the Olympic Stadium, she was in a Chinese isolation hotel. She had tested positive for Covid-19 and watched the Opening Ceremony on TV in a room she wasn't allowed to leave. Ms. Meyers Taylor was one of the lucky ones. She has since recovered and is scheduled to compete as one of the medal favorites in two bobsled events. In the gloom of the Beijing Winter Olympics, luck is a relative term. The Games are supposed to be an ebullient, global sporting bonanza, but they have never felt so downbeat. Rather than "Faster, Higher, Stronger -- Together," the Olympic motto, the Beijing Games so far have been sadder and quieter. Olympians compete in nearly empty arenas without friends or family. Some wear N95 masks, in practice and even in competition, to limit the risk of infection. The rest live with the daily fear of testing positive, being sent to isolation and watching years of training slip away. Natalia Maliszewska, a short-track speedskater from Poland, was awoken at 3 a.m. one night this week, before she was set to compete, and transported to isolation before learning that authorities had made a mistake. It later turned out that she had tested positive and was returned to isolation. "To me, this is a big joke," Ms. Maliszewska said. "I hope whoever is managing this has a lot of fun. My heart and my mind can't take this anymore." The usual stresses, strains and tolls of competing at the Games have been amplified by a pandemic that has shrunk the event to fit into a suffocating bubble. American figure skater Vincent Zhou felt a sense of desperation from inside his isolation hotel room this week after he tested positive for Covid-19. With his chance to compete now over -- he skated in the team event but missed his individual event -- he was awaiting the two negative PCR tests that would return his freedom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel is entering the blockchain mining market with an upcoming GPU capable of mining Bitcoin. From a report: Intel insists the effort won't put a strain energy supplies or deprive consumers of chips. The goal is to create the most energy-efficient blockchain mining equipment on the planet, it says. "We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1,000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining," Intel's General Manager for Graphics, Raja Koduri, said in the announcement. (SHA-256 is a reference to the mining algorithm used to create Bitcoins.) News of Intel's blockchain-mining effort first emerged last month after the ISSCC technology conference posted details about an upcoming Intel presentation titled: "Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC." ASICs are chips designed for a specific purpose, and also refer to dedicated hardware to mine Bitcoin. Friday's announcement from Koduri added that Intel is establishing a new "Custom Compute Group" to create chip platforms optimized for customers' workloads, including for blockchains.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua Benton, writing for NiemanLab: If you need a refresher: The Gordon Gecko 1980s and NASDAQ-boom 1990s were both very good to Forbes, but things started to drift downward in the 2000s, both in print and in the new world online. When the financial crisis hit, there were cuts and layoffs and, for the first time, a non-Forbes hired to run the place, Mike Perlis. He and chief product officer Lewis D'Vorkin came up with a revival strategy that just screams early 2010s digital media: It's all about scale, baby, scale. Forbes' staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside "contributors" -- barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were "contributors" -- or as they told people at parties, "I'm a columnist for Forbes." Let's think about incentives for a moment. Only a very small number of these contributors can make a living at it -- so it's a side gig for most. The two things that determine your pay are how many articles you write and how many clicks you can harvest -- a model that encourages a lot of low-grade clickbait, hot takes, and deceptive headlines. And many of these contributors are writing about the subject of their main job -- that's where their expertise is, after all -- which raises all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions. And their work was published completely unedited -- unless a piece went viral, in which case a web producer might "check it more carefully." All of that meant that Forbes suddenly became the easiest way for a marketer to get their message onto a brand-name site. And since this strategy did build up a ton of new traffic for Forbes -- publishing an extra 8,000 pieces a month will do that! -- lots of other publications followed suit in various ways.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not just the office pool anymore. More than half of U.S. states now allow legalized sports betting, and in many cases it's as easy as opening an app on your smartphone and making a wager. From a report: A whopping 17.6 million people are expected to place a bet on Sunday's Super Bowl online or in person at a sportsbook, according to the American Gaming Association. It's not all profits for the operators, though. Sportsbooks are putting up their own money in the form of a massive advertising campaign targeting the millions of sports fans who will be glued to their TVs for the matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. "TV sportsbook advertising has grown exponentially this year and in the last couple of years overall," Adam Candee, managing editor of the trade publication Legal Sports Report, told NPR. Candee said the sudden growth of legalized gambling in states across the country has sportsbook operators jockeying for a piece of the huge new customer base -- and the Super Bowl is their latest opportunity to sell themselves to potential bettors. "It is happening in the here and now, moment to moment, as they compete for customers. That is because this is essentially a new industry that is rising up from the ground," he said. Sports gambling could become a $37 billion industry by 2025, according to the investment management company ARK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a striking reversal, federal regulators and Pfizer-BioNTech said on Friday that they would wait for data on whether three doses of the companies' coronavirus vaccine are effective in children younger than five before deciding whether to authorize a vaccine for the age group. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration will postpone a meeting of outside experts that was scheduled for Tuesday; the experts were to weigh the evidence and make a recommendation on whether to authorize two doses of the vaccine in young children, as Pfizer had requested. In a news release, Pfizer-BioNTech said that their three-dose trial for young children was moving briskly, and that the new timetable would allow the F.D.A. to get more data and thoroughly review it. Results are expected in early April. "Given that the study is advancing at a rapid pace, the companies will wait for the three-dose data as Pfizer and BioNTech continue to believe it may provide a higher level of protection in this age group," the companies said. Regulators and vaccine manufacturers have been wrestling with how quickly to move to vaccinate roughly 18 million children under the age of five, the only Americans still ineligible for shots. The highly transmissible Omicron variant is receding in much of the nation, but federal officials have said that nearly 400 children under five have died of Covid-19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to top intelligence officials calling for more details about the program to be declassified. Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out. Wyden and Heinrich said the program operated "outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection." "CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission," Kristi Scott, the agency's privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement. "CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods." The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose. "However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries," the board said. According to Wyden and Heinrich's letter, the CIA's bulk collection program operates outside of laws passed and reformed by Congress, but under the authority of Executive Order 12333, the document that broadly governs intelligence community activity and was first signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. "It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a ... CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC's collection of their records," the senators wrote in their letter. There was a redaction in the letter before "CIA program." Additional documents released by the CIA Thursday also revealed limited details about a program to collect financial data against the Islamic State. That program also has incidentally snared some records held by Americans. "These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans," Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung held a launch event for its new Galaxy smartphones in a metaverse this week but many people struggled to gain access as they encountered technical difficulties. CNBC reports: The South Korean tech giant hosted the event Wednesday on Decentraland, a cryptocurrency-focused virtual world that users can create, explore and trade in. Decentraland, one of many metaverse efforts, is accessed via a desktop browser. Users create an avatar which they can then navigate around the blockchain-powered virtual world using a mouse and keyboard -- something that isn't exactly intuitive for non-gamers. The event specifically took place in Samsung 837X, a virtual building that Samsung has built on Decentraland that's designed to be a replica of its flagship New York experience center. Samsung 837X is there all the time but there just happened to be an event inside the building's "Connectivity Theatre" on Wednesday. But CNBC, and many others, struggled to find the 837X building and when we did many of us were unable to gain access to it. When an avatar is first created on Decentraland, it lands in a sort of atrium where clouds appear to be gliding across the floor. There's a round pool in the middle that has a worrying vortex in the center. Our avatar was soon surrounded by around 20 others. A chat box in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen was full of messages like "help" and "I hate this game." One user named claireinnit#87fa, boldly claimed "we're in the ----in future." On the opposite side of the intimidating pool, three large boards read "classics, events and crowd." An ad for Samsung 837X hang on the "crowd" board. Once clicked (easier said than done), you're then given the option to "jump in." After jumping in, you're transported to Samsung's little world on Decentraland and you can see the 837X building. There's a pizza store next door, but not much else. CNBC immediately noticed a large line of people at the main entrance to the 837X building. People were struggling to get in. Some users were getting their avatars to jump on other people's heads as they clambered to the front of the queue but it didn't help. The doors wouldn't open and the chatbox was again full of pleas for help. A rumor circulated that a YouTuber had managed to find a way in, while a CNET journalist wrote on Twitter that they had managed to gain access by switching to the "ATHENA" server. It wasn't immediately obvious how to do this. "Many people were unable to actually enter Samsung 837X before the event started," wrote CNET's Russell Holly. [...] After around 30 minutes of trying to access Samsung's building in the metaverse, CNBC gave up and went back to the real world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom's Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they've already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel's Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. "Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window," said de Goede. Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter reported weaker-than-expected quarterly advertising revenue and user growth on Thursday and forecast revenue short of Wall Street targets, indicating that its turnaround plan has yet to bear fruit. Reuters reports: Still, the social networking site said it made "meaningful progress" toward its goal of reaching 315 million users and $7.5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2023, and said user growth should accelerate in the United States and internationally this year. Shares of the San Francisco-based company rose more than 8% after the results, but pared those gains in morning trading. Monetizable daily active users, or users who see ads, grew 13% to 217 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing consensus estimates of 218.5 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. That was up from 211 million users in the previous quarter. [...] Advertising revenue for the fourth quarter grew 22% year over year to $1.41 billion, missing analysts' estimates of $1.43 billion. Twitter gained 6 million users during the quarter, but will need to add over 12 million each quarter over the next two years to hit its target of 315 million people by the end of 2023, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, calling it "an incredibly lofty goal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting this year, the federal government will begin doling out $5 billion to states over five years to build a nationwide network of fast chargers. The plan initially focuses on the Interstate Highway System, directing states to build one charging station every 50 miles. Those stations must be capable of charging at least four EVs simultaneously at 150 kW. Once states have completed the Interstate charging network, they'll be able to apply for grants to fill in gaps elsewhere. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, a new agency formed to help the Transportation and Energy Departments administer the program, will allow case-by-case exceptions to the 50-mile requirement if, for example, no grid connection is available nearby. Funding for the initial Interstate portion of the program will be allocated using a formula that mimics how federal highway grants are distributed. Starting in fiscal year 2022, $615 million will be available to build charging stations, and $300 million will be allocated to set up the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Ten percent of each year's funding will go toward filling gaps in the network. After the initial $5 billion program is launched, another $2.5 billion in discretionary grants will be available to build chargers in rural and underserved areas. As part of their plans submitted to the federal government, states will need to ensure that the charging stations will be reliable -- at least one charger per station needs to be working more than 97 percent of the time -- and that they will limit their impact on the electric grid. States are also directed to design stations so they can be easily expanded and upgraded as demand grows and charging rates increase. The new program also encourages states to site chargers near travel centers, convenience stores, visitor centers, or restaurants. To get credit for their Interstate build-out, states will have to install chargers that use the Combined Charging System, also known as CCS. [...] The new program also prioritizes domestic production of chargers, which has already spurred some manufacturers to begin setting up operations in the US. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg says the agency is looking at how people will pay for charging. "Part of this program is going to be a shared standard. If we're going to use taxpayers' dollars to help private actors put in charging stations, then of course we need to make sure the citizen is getting good value out of it. There may be any number of network benefits through loyalty programs. That's fine," he said, "but we've got to make sure... everybody can benefit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MoviePass, the defunct discount ticketing service, will return this summer without the firm that ran it into the ground, says co-founder Stacy Spikes. The Verge reports: The company, recently bought by Spikes after his unceremonious ouster from MoviePass in 2018, held its launch event today at the Walter Reade Theater Lincoln Center in NYC. Spikes began by wasting absolutely no time addressing the Helios and Matheson Analytics-shaped elephant in the room. The firm is now infamous for being the parent company of MoviePass that managed to blow the entire thing up shortly after the firm bought the startup, which became famous for offering unlimited movie tickets for a monthly fee."A lot of people lost money, a lot of people lost trust," Spikes said, claiming he was among those who were hurt by the company's mismanagement. During the opening moments of the event, Spikes oscillated between addressing the disappointment of being pushed out of his company, joking about MoviePass' loyal consumers -- as well as its power users, who Spikes cracked are the reason the company went out of business -- and finally, the process of snapping the company back after its parent company went bankrupt in 2020. "We're looking at this from another point of view," Spikes said of the company's relaunch, adding that he now plans to run the business like a "co-op." Spikes added that MoviePass users will be able to hold partial ownership of the company, with its most premium tier inclusive of a lifetime subscription. The company's original engineering team is returning for the business's relaunch, according to Spikes, and the service will launch this summer. Under the new model, MoviePass will run on tradable credits that roll over month to month. Subscribers will also be able to use their credits to bring a friend, a markedly different approach from the single-user card system that MoviePass used previously, which could prove annoying for non-cardholders. MoviePass 2.0 will also work on a tiered system, Spikes said. Spikes shared images of a beta version of the new app and the credit-based system, which will vary based on things like peak moviegoing hours. MoviePass' ambitions for subscribers are, charitably, ambitious. Spikes wants to claim 30 percent of the moviegoer market by 2030, MoviePass' "moonshot" goal. Somewhat unsurprisingly, MoviePass will incorporate aspects of Spikes' existing business PreShow, a technology that has been used to allow gamers to trade ad views for in-game currency. [...] Spikes told attendees at the event that MoviePass' most loyal fans will be "deputized" to beta users and will be able to use the experience for its first year for free. At some point during the summer, these users will be contacted about the beta programming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first operational launch of Astra's Rocket 3.3 vehicle failed Feb. 10 when the rocket's upper stage appeared to tumble out of control after stage separation. SpaceNews reports: The rocket, designated LV0008 by Astra, lifted off from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3 p.m. Eastern. The launch suffered several days of delays because of a range issue as well as a last-second scrub during the previous launch attempt Feb. 7. However, onboard video of the vehicle showed the upper stage tumbling shortly after separation from the first stage, three minutes after liftoff. The video suggests a potential issue with the separation of the payload fairing, which, according to a mission timeline provided by the company, takes place seconds before stage separation. This was the fifth orbital launch attempt by Astra of its Rocket 3 vehicle. The first three launches, from September 2020 through August 2021, all failed to reach orbit. The fourth, in November 2021, did reach orbit but did not carry a satellite payload. This launch was carrying four NASA-sponsored cubesats on a mission called Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) 41 by NASA. The agency awarded Astra a $3.9 million contract in December 2020 for the launch through its Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demo 2 competition. "An issue has been experienced during flight that prevented the delivery of our customer payloads to orbit today. We are deeply sorry to our customers," said Carolina Grossman, director of product management at Astra, during the launch webcast. The company did not disclose any additional information about the failure. "I'm with the team looking at data, and we will provide more info as soon as we can," Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, tweeted minutes after the failure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the virus that causes AIDS, died on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was 89. [...] The discovery of H.I.V. began in Paris on Jan. 3, 1983. That was the day that Dr. Montagnier (pronounced mon-tan-YAY), who directed the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute, received a piece of lymph node that had been removed from a 33-year-old man with AIDS. Dr. Willy Rozenbaum, the patient's doctor, wanted the specimen to be examined by Dr. Montagnier, an expert in retroviruses. At that point, AIDS had no known cause, no diagnostic tests and no effective treatments. Many doctors, though, suspected that the disease was triggered by a retrovirus, a kind of germ that slips into the host cell's DNA and takes control, in a reversal of the way viruses typically work; hence the name retro. From this sample Dr. Montagnier's team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus. The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS. The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS (for acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones. When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute. And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress. Dr. Montagnier sued Dr. Gallo for using his discovery for a U.S. patent. The suit was settled out of court, mediated by Jonas Salk, who had years earlier been involved in a similar battle with Albert Sabin over the polio vaccine. Both Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. That same year, the AIDS virus, known by Americans as H.T.L.V.-III and the French as L.A.V., was officially given one name, H.I.V., for human immunodeficiency virus. The following year, with the dispute between the doctors still raging, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France stepped into the fray and signed an agreement to share patent royalties, proclaiming both scientists co-discoverers of the virus. In 2002, the two scientists appeared to have resolved their rivalry, at least temporarily, when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barre-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today announced the first developer release of Android 13. These very early releases, which are only meant for developers and aren't available through over-the-air updates, typically don't include too many user-facing changes. From a report: That's true this time as well, but even in this early release, the company is already showing off a few changes that will impact how you'll use your Android phone. Unlike with Android 12, Google plans to have two developer releases and then launch a beta in April, a month earlier than in 2021. The final release could come as early as August, based on Google's roadmap, whereas Android 12 launched in early October. All of this is happening while Android 12L, the Android release for large-screen devices, is still in development, too, though Google notes that it will bring some of those features to Android 13 as well. These include improved support for tablets, foldables and Android apps on Chromebooks. One of the most visible changes in Android 13 so far is that Google will bring the dynamic color feature of Material You, which by default takes its cues from your home screen image to all app icons. Developers will have to supply a monochromatic app icon for this to work, which many will hopefully do, because the current mix of themed and un-themed icons doesn't make for a great look. For now, this will only be available on Pixel devices, though, and Google says it will work with its partners to bring it to more devices. With this release, Google supports the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, and Pixel 4.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As natural resources diminish and the climate crisis grows more acute, the notion of a circular economy has been gaining traction around the globe. Most modern economies are linear -- they rest on a "take, make, waste" model in which natural resources are extracted, their valuable elements are transformed into products, and anything left over (along with the products themselves when they are no longer useful) is discarded as waste. In contrast, a circular economy replaces the extraction of resources with the transformation of existing products and essentially does away with the notion of waste altogether. A growing number of governments, from the municipal to the international, have thrown their weight behind the idea. The E.U. launched its action plan for the transition to a circular economy in 2015, then updated it in 2020 as part of the Green Deal to include initiatives that encourage companies to design products -- from laptops to jeans -- so that they last longer and can be more easily repaired. In February, the European Parliament passed a resolution demanding additional measures that would allow it to adopt a fully circular carbon-neutral economy by 2050. Some member states, including the Netherlands, have also drafted similar plans at the national level. Among them, Finland stands out for the comprehensiveness of its approach. Back in 2016, it became the first to adopt a national "road map" to a circular economy -- a commitment it reaffirmed last year by setting targeted caps on natural-resource extraction. Like other nations, Finland supports entrepreneurship in creative reuse, or upcycling (especially in its important forestry industry), urges public procurements that rely on recycled and repurposed materials, and seeks to curb dramatically the amount of waste going to landfill. But from the beginning, the country of 5.5 million has also focused closely on education, training its younger generations to think of the economy differently than their parents and grandparents do. "People think it's just about recycling," says Nani Pajunen, a sustainability expert at Sitra, the public innovation fund that has spearheaded Finland's circular conversion. "But really, it's about rethinking everything -- products, material development, how we consume." To make changes at every level of society, Pajunen argues, education is key -- getting every Finn to understand the need for a circular economy, and how they can be part of it. A pilot program to help teachers incorporate the notion into curriculums in 2017 "just snowballed," says Pajunen. "By the end of the two years, 2,500 teachers around the country had joined the network -- far more than we had directly funded." Since then, studying the circular economy has taken on a life of its own, starting with the youngest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having devoted his life to the conundrums of the cosmos, Prof Stephen Hawking has left behind a mystery of his own amid the eclectic contents of his former office. From a report: The Cambridge cosmologist, who died in 2018 at the age of 76, treasured a blackboard that became smothered with cartoons, doodles and equations at a conference he arranged in 1980. But what all the graffiti and in-jokes mean is taking some time to unravel. The blackboard -- as much a perplexing work of art as a memento from the history of physics -- goes on display for the first time on Thursday as part of a collection of office items acquired by the Science Museum in London. The hope for Juan-Andres Leon, the curator of Stephen Hawking's office, is that surviving attenders of the conference on superspace and supergravity held in Cambridge more than 40 years ago swing by and explain what some of the sketches and comments mean. "We'll certainly try and extract their interpretations," Leon said. Joining the blackboard in a temporary display called Stephen Hawking at Work is a rare copy of the physicist's 1966 PhD thesis, his wheelchair, a formal bet that information swallowed by a black hole is lost for ever, and a host of celebrity memorabilia, including a personalised jacket given to him by the creators of the Simpsons for his many appearances on the show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft's ongoing NFT odyssey continues to bewilder and demoralize not just longtime fans but also its own developers. The company recently held another workshop aimed specifically at addressing the concerns of skeptical employees, yet also started giving out special NFTs to some members of the Ghost Recon team to "celebrate" the series' 20th anniversary. From a report: One developer likened it to the staff saying "We hate this crypto stuff," and Ubisoft responding with, "OK, come get some." Last week, VP of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab, Nicolas Pouard, claimed in an interview that players' overwhelmingly negative reaction to the company's NFT rollout was because "they don't get it." His remark was roundly derided on social media, but also by some within the company, according to posts from Ubisoft's internal communications platform viewed by Kotaku. In addition to disagreeing with Pouard's position, they expressed frustration over the company's continued botched messaging around the controversial tech. "They don't get it" was also the tone of a recent internal Q&A with the Quartz team aimed at addressing skeptical employees, sources familiar with the event told Kotaku. (Quartz is the name of Ubisoft's recently introduced proprietary crypto platform.) Instead, it bolstered some developers' concerns about security vulnerabilities in the Quartz technology and its lack of interesting design possibilities. Pouard and other blockchain proponents have pitched scenarios in which cosmetic items can follow players between games. That's not something current Quartz NFTs are set up to do, however, and according to sources, Pouard admitted internally that the "interoperability" question remains unanswered. In the meantime, the core use-case for Quartz NFTs remains in-game hats.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Russian court has sentenced three Siberian teenagers for terrorism Thursday for activities including plotting to blow up a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building in the popular online game Minecraft. From a report: Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko and Bogdan Andreyev from Kansk, a town in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, were arrested in June 2020 for hanging up political leaflets on the local FSB office that included slogans such as "the FSB is the main terrorist" and support for Azat Miftakhov, an anarchist who was sentenced to six years in prison. All three suspects were 14 at the time of their arrest. The Eastern Military Court in Krasnoyarsk found Uvarov, Mikhailenko and Andreyev guilty of "undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities" on Thursday. Uvarov was sentenced to five years in a penal colony, while Mikhailenko and Andreyev were handed three and four-year suspended sentences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new bipartisan bill, introduced on Wednesday, could mark Congress' first step toward addressing algorithmic amplification of harmful content. The Social Media NUDGE Act, authored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), would direct the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study "content neutral" ways to add friction to content-sharing online. From a report: The bill instructs researchers to identify a number of ways to slow down the spread of harmful content and misinformation, whether through asking users to read an article before sharing it (as Twitter has done) or other measures. The Federal Trade Commission would then codify the recommendations and mandate that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter put them into practice. "For too long, tech companies have said 'Trust us, we've got this,'" Klobuchar said in a statement on Thursday. "But we know that social media platforms have repeatedly put profits over people, with algorithms pushing dangerous content that hooks users and spreads misinformation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce told employees at a sales kickoff on Wednesday that the company plans to release an NFT Cloud. CNBC reports: Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor both talked about the strategy at the online event, said one person who attended. The person asked not to be named because the event was private. Executives at the meeting referenced NFT-related work that Pepsi has done as an example, another person said. Salesforce, which provides cloud-based software for sales reps, marketing departments and e-commerce vendors, wants to offer a service for artists to create content and release it on a marketplace like OpenSea, one person said. Last month, OpenSea said it raised $300 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, on the back of a surge in NFT trading, which surpassed $23 billion in 2021, according to DappRadar, a store for decentralized apps. Salesforce could also potentially integrate the tool into its own ecosystem, where transactions could be managed, the people said. A Salesforce-owned marketplace could mean there wouldn't be a need to use OpenSea.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's decision to enable two-factor authentication by default has resulted in a 50 percent decrease in account breaches among those users where the feature was auto-enabled. Engadget reports: The company didn't say how rapidly it expected 2FA to spread, but promised to continue the rollout through 2022. More than 150 million people have been auto-enrolled so far, including more than 2 million YouTube creators. The company also promised more security upgrades to help mark Safer Internet Day. As of March, Google will let you opt-in to an account-level safe browsing option that keeps you from visiting known harmful sites. Google is also expanding Assistant's privacy-minded Guest Mode to nine new languages in the months ahead, and has promised to ramp up safeguards for politicians ahead of the US midterm elections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's Security Service said it has shut down a troll farm in the city of Lviv. "The SSU cyber specialists uncovered and dismantled two bot farms in Lviv with a total capacity of 18,000 fake accounts," an SSU press release said. "According to preliminary information, organizers from Russia supervised the administrators of the bot farms." According to the press release, three people in two different residences were involved. Two gave over their apartments to the operation while a third took care of maintaining the accounts and equipment. "The bot farms worked mostly in social networks: distributed fakes to spread panic," the press release said. "The bots also published false information about bomb threats at various facilities." The SSU said it seized two sets of GSM gateways, 3,000 SIM cards, laptops, and accounting records. GSM gateways are equipment that allows people to use SIM cards to connect to networks outside the default network they're meant to be connected to. They're popular tools for hackers and other cyber criminals, who can use them to manage several phone numbers, and to connect to Voice Over IP, or VoIP networks. The photos of the bust show dozens of GSM gateways stuffed with blurred SIM cards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An electric shock might be just the thing to persuade a cloud to produce some rain. New research suggests that supercharging a cloud could increase the attractive forces between droplets and help raindrops to grow. Have we finally found the recipe for making rain? From a report: Electric charge is all around us. Thunderclouds literally crackle with it, but even the air we breathe has some charged aerosols and droplets in it. Giles Harrison, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, and colleagues have been investigating the electric charge of drops in non-thunderstorm clouds. In calculations led by Maarten Ambaum and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, they show that the greater the variation in charges, the stronger the attraction between droplets. "This advances our understanding of how charge influences drop growth and brings a new aspect to answering the age-old question: why does it rain?" says Harrison. Last year Harrison and his colleagues, who have been funded by the United Arab Emirates to research rain enhancement, flew drones equipped with ionisers into clouds and experimented with releasing positive and negative charges into the air. The new results will help them fine-tune these experiments, potentially to find ways to hasten the formation of rain where it is needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into Apple's use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), including whether the tech giant misled investors on the matter, according to a whistleblower contacted by the agency and documents reviewed by The Technology 202. From a report: Cher Scarlett, a former Apple employee who last year filed an SEC complaint alleging the company made false statements to the agency about its policies on NDAs, said in an interview Monday that the SEC contacted her in late January to inquire about her allegations. It's unclear whether the agency has opened a formal investigation into Apple's statements and its rules on NDAs, or what the full scope of any inquiry may be. "The SEC does not comment on the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation," SEC spokesperson Cory Jarvis said.But it's the first indication that federal regulators are digging deeper into Apple's policies on NDAs, which the company said it doesn't allow -- a fact that workers like Scarlett have disputed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has acknowledged an iOS 15 bug that may have recorded interactions with Siri on some devices, regardless of whether the user opted out, according to a report from ZDNet. From a report: The bug automatically enabled the Improve Siri & Dictation setting that gives Apple permission to record, store, and review your conversations with Siri. Apple tells The Verge that it identified the bug shortly after the release of iOS 15, stopped reviewing any recordings inadvertently received, and is deleting info received from affected devices. After discovering the bug, the company turned off the feature for "many" users and corrected the opt-in setting when it released iOS 15.2. As ZDNet points out, this is the reason why you might get a prompt asking for your permission to enable the Improve Siri & Dictation feature once you install the new 15.4 beta or, eventually, its official release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost a decade after the term "unicorn" was coined to describe a rare breed of private company, about two new companies are joining the herd daily. From a report: The term unicorn emerged almost a decade ago, a time when startups worth $1 billion were rare and treasured, something only the luckiest of founders and investors would ever glimpse with their own eyes. Now the production of unicorns is reaching the scale of industrial agriculture. Productboard [an anecdote in the story] was particularly notable in one way, though: It became the 1,000th unicorn, marking the first time the herd has crossed into four digits, according to startup-tracking service CB Insights. That same week, six other companies became unicorns. On the day of Productboard's internal announcement, Dune Analytics, a Norwegian crypto analytics startup, gained its horn by raising a cheeky $69,420,000. In January, 42 startups became unicorns and four became "decacorns" -- the clumsy nickname given to startups worth $10 billion or more. "When you have 1,000 unicorns," says Brian Lee, who oversees research at CB Insights, "that's almost an oxymoron." It's hard not to see the number of billion-dollar startups as proof that the private markets are overheated -- something people have been saying for years. Even in the face of volatile public markets, inflation, and rising interest rates, the mood among private market investors appears to be as ebullient as ever. Some of that undaunted growth is valid, says Lee: As more of the world's services become digital, software companies become more valuable, and infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services makes it easier than ever to start a tech business. In the past, companies the size of the most valuable unicorns -- ByteDance, SpaceX, and Stripe -- would probably have already gone public. Today entrepreneurs feel less pressure to do so, given how easy it is for them to raise the money they need from private funders. Staying private allows many companies to avoid the additional scrutiny and potential loss of control that comes with an initial public offering. Plenty of investors are eager to get in early on rapidly evolving industries such as crypto, pushing up valuations. "You can't discount the power of FOMO," Lee says. "People are willing to go in with more capital."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Drivers of certain vehicles in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington are shouting at their car radios this week. Not because of any particular song or news item that's being broadcast, but because an apparent technical glitch has caused the radios to be stuck on public radio station KUOW. From a report: The impacted drivers appear to all be owners of Mazda vehicles from between 2014 and 2017. In some cases the in-car infotainment systems have stopped working altogether, derailing the ability to listen to the radio at all or use Bluetooth phone connections, GPS, the rear camera and more. According to Mazda drivers who spoke with GeekWire, and others in a Reddit thread discussing the dilemma, everyone who has had an issue was listening to KUOW 94.9 in recent weeks when the car systems went haywire. KUOW sounded unsure of a possible cause; at least one dealership service department blamed 5G; and Mazda told GeekWire in an official statement that it identified the problem and a fix is planned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

COVID-19 pandemic restrictions could end "soon," even as early as this year, NIAID director Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday. From a report: Fauci explained that he does not believe "we are going to eradicate this virus," but said that it will instead reach an "equilibrium." He said, "I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the COVID restrictions will soon be a thing of the past." Fauci added that he hoped restrictions would end "soon," agreeing with a suggestion that they could largely end this year. Fauci also said that as the U.S. is "certainly heading out" of a particularly difficult phase of the pandemic driven largely by Omicron, local health departments will be the ones to make virus-related decisions instead of the Biden administration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter told a U.S. senator it is cutting ties with a European technology company that helped it send sensitive passcodes to its users via text message. From a report: The social media firm said in a disclosure to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, that it is "transitioning" its service away from working with Mitto AG, according to a Wyden aide. A co-founder of Mitto operated a service that helped governments secretly surveil and track mobile phones, according to former employees and clients, as Bloomberg News and London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in December. Twitter cited media reports as the motivating factor behind its decision, the Wyden aide said. Several other companies have allegedly already cut ties with Mitto. In recent weeks, messaging companies Kaleyra and MessageBird have both ceased commercial relationships with Mitto, according to three people familiar with the matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: As the race against China's development of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) known as the digital yuan continues, the U.S. Federal Reserve accomplished a feat in testing a design for a U.S. digital dollar that in one of two tests, managed to handle 1.7 million transactions per second. A report released last Thursday provided the initial findings of research conducted as a collaboration between the Boston Fed and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dubbed 'Project Hamilton,' the report describes a theoretical high-performance and resilient transaction processor for a CBDC that was developed using open-source research software called 'OpenCBDC'. According to the Fed's Report, a core processing engine for a hypothetical general purpose CBDC was created that produced one code base capable of handling 1.7 million transactions per second. According to the Fed, the vast majority of transactions reached settlement finality in under two seconds. The Fed revealed the design of the CBDC transaction processor was also released on GitHub. According to the Boston Fed, the second phase of Project Hamilton will demonstrate how OpenCBDC will build upon the initial model to allow flexibility in design that will incorporate how policymakers may implement an actual CBDC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Brown University physicists has developed a technique that can potentially generate millions of random digits per second by harnessing the behavior of skyrmions -- tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in certain two-dimensional materials. Phys.Org reports: Their research, published in Nature Communications, reveals previously unexplored dynamics of single skyrmions, the researchers say. Discovered around a half-decade ago, skyrmions have sparked interest in physics as a path toward next-generation computing devices that take advantage of the magnetic properties of particles -- a field known as spintronics. [...] Skyrmions arise from the "spin" of electrons in ultra-thin materials. Spin can be thought of as the tiny magnetic moment of each electron, which points up, down or somewhere in between. Some two-dimensional materials, in their lowest energy states, have a property called perpendicular magnetic anisotropy -- meaning the spins of electrons all point in a direction perpendicular to the film. When these materials are excited with electricity or a magnetic field, some of the electron spins flip as the energy of the system rises. When that happens, the spins of surrounding electrons are perturbed to some extent, forming a magnetic whirlpool surrounding the flipped electron -- a skyrmion. Skyrmions, which are generally about 1 micrometer (a millionth of a meter) or smaller in diameter, behave a bit like a kind of particle, zipping across the material from side to side. And once they're formed, they're very difficult to get rid of. Because they're so robust, researchers are interested in using their movement to perform computations and to store data. This new study shows that in addition to the global movement of skyrmions across a material, the local behavior of individual skyrmions can also be useful. For the study, which was led by Brown postdoctoral fellow Kang Wang, the researchers fabricated magnetic thin films using a technique that produced subtle defects in the material's atomic lattice. When skyrmions form in the material, these defects, which the researchers call pinning centers, hold the skyrmions firmly in place rather than allowing them to move as they normally would. The researchers found that when a skyrmion is held in place, they fluctuate randomly in size. With one section of the skyrmion held tightly to one pinning center, the rest of the skyrmion jumps back and forth, wrapping around two nearby pinning centers, one closer and one farther away. The change in skyrmion size is measured through what's known as the anomalous Hall effect, which is a voltage that propagates across the material. This voltage is sensitive to the perpendicular component of electron spins. When the skyrmion size changes, the voltage changes to an extent that is easily measured. Those random voltage changes can be used to produce a string of random digits. The researchers estimate that by optimizing the defect-spacing in their device, they can produce as many as 10 million random digits per second, providing a new and highly efficient method of producing true random numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA on Monday announced that it has selected the aerospace company Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), a small rocket that will launch pristine Red Planet samples back toward Earth a decade or so from now. Space.com reports: Mars Sample Return is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The project is already well underway, thanks to NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021.The six-wheeled robot has collected a handful of samples thus far and will eventually snag several dozen more, if all goes according to plan. The next big steps are scheduled to come in the mid-2020s, with the launch of two additional missions -- the NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) and ESA's Earth Return Orbiter (ERO). SRL will deliver an ESA "fetch rover" and the MAV to the Martian surface. The fetch rover will carry the collected samples from Perseverance -- or the spot(s) where Perseverance has cached them -- to the MAV, which will then launch them into orbit around the Red Planet. A container holding the samples will then meet up with the ERO, which will haul it home to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031. Once the samples are down on the ground, scientists in well-equipped labs around the world will study them for signs of ancient Mars life, clues about the planet's evolutionary history and other topics of interest, NASA officials have said. [...] The newly announced MAV contract has a potential value of $194 million, NASA officials said in today's statement. The contracted work will begin on Feb. 25 and run for six years. During this time, Lockheed Martin will build multiple MAV test units as well as the flight unit. "Committing to the Mars Ascent Vehicle represents an early and concrete step to hammer out the details of this ambitious project not just to land on Mars, but to take off from it," Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. "We are nearing the end of the conceptual phase for this Mars Sample Return mission, and the pieces are coming together to bring home the first samples from another planet," Zurbuchen added. "Once on Earth, they can be studied by state-of-the-art tools too complex to transport into space."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A section of the New York Police Department (NYPD) focused on intelligence gathering received a demo of NSO Group's controversial Pegasus spyware product, according to an email obtained by Motherboard. The news provides more insight into Israeli company NSO Group's push into the surveillance market in the United States, and specifically its pitching of the company's technology to American police forces. The findings come after the New York Times reported that the FBI bought a Pegasus license in 2019 for evaluation purposes. "There will be a demo of the attached investigative software at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice," James Sheehan, a program manager from the Northern New Jersey-Newark/Jersey City UASI, wrote in the August 2015 email. The UASI is the Urban Area Security Initiative, a program administered by the Department of Homeland Security which brings together bodies from law enforcement, fire service, public health, and more to address threats of terrorism and other issues. "The audience is the UASI/CorrStat region and NYPD intel," Sheehan continued. Recipients on Sheehan's email inviting people to attend included representatives from the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, Jersey City's public safety agency, and the Paterson Police Department, a city of just over 150,000. Attached to Sheehan's email was a brochure for Pegasus, NSO Group's hacking product, which advertised the tool's ability to obtain a target's calls, contacts, emails, WhatsApp messages, track their location, and more. The brochure contains a logo for WestBridge, NSO Group's North American branch. "Turn Your Target's Smartphone into an Intelligence Gold Mine," the Pegasus brochure reads. "NYPD intel" likely refers to the NYPD's Intelligence Bureau. Its mission is to "detect and disrupt criminal and terrorist activity through the use of intelligence-led policing. In combination with traditional policing methods, uniformed officers and civilian analysts in the Intelligence Bureau collect and analyze information from a variety of sources in order to advance criminal and terrorist investigations," according to the NYPD's website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ExpressVPN has updated its bug bounty program to make it more inviting to ethical hackers, now offering a one-time $100,000 bug bounty to whoever can compromise its systems. Bleeping Computer reports: Today, ExpressVPN announced that they are now offering a $100,000 bug bounty for critical vulnerabilities in their in-house technology, TrustedServer. "This is the highest single bounty offered on the Bugcrowd platform and 10 times higher than the top reward previously offered by ExpressVPN," the company shared in an email to BleepingComputer. The new $100,000 one-time bounty is offered with the following conditions: - The first person to submit a valid vulnerability, granting unauthorized access or exposing customer data, will receive the $100,000 bounty. This one-time bonus is valid until the prize has been claimed.- The one-time $100,000 bounty is only eligible for vulnerabilities in ExpressVPN's VPN Server.- Activities should remain in scope to the TrustedServer platform. If unsure that your testing is considered in-scope, please reach out to support@bugcrowd.com to confirm first. ExpressVPN also invites security researchers to uncover possible ways to leak the actual IP address of clients and monitor user traffic. The bug bounty program is run through BugCrowd, which offers a safe harbor for researchers who attempt to breach ExpressVPN's servers as part of the program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father's death followed a "two-year battle" with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke. Engadget reports: Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film's Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick's high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull's ad hoc technique "was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do," he said during a lecture at TIFF. Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996. Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. [...] He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today's film industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to tech reporter and Apple leaker Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to launch four M2 Macs throughout 2022. MacWorld reports: The first models will likely arrive later in the year, with the redesigned MacBook Air leading the way, followed by a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and entry-level Mac mini. A DigiTimes report on Tuesday said the 13-inch MacBook Pro may launch at Apple's spring event to usher in the new chip. Like 2021, Apple will be releasing Macs with several different chips in 2022. The M2 will be a successor to the M1, likely with the same 8-core design (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), and the M1 Pro and M1 Max will make their way into more high-end Macs. The first of those, the 27-inch iMac, could arrive at Apple's spring event, with a Mac mini coming later in the year. [...] There's also a new Mac Pro due in 2022 as the culmination of the Apple silicon transition. That would mean every Mac line is due for a refresh this year and nearly every model, with only the recently released 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro escaping without a refresh.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer. To test the networked booting feature, you'll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to an SD card -- Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps. Once it's installed, there are a number of conditions that have to be met for network booting to work. It only works on Pi 4 boards (and Pi 4-derived devices, like the Pi 400 computer) that have both a keyboard and an Ethernet cable connected. If you already have an SD card or USB drive with a bootable OS connected, the Pi will boot from those as it normally does so it doesn't slow down the regular boot process. And you'll be limited to the OS image selection in the official Pi imager, though this covers a wide range of popular distributions, including Ubuntu, LibreELEC, a couple of retro-gaming emulation OSes, and Homebridge. For other OSes, downloading the image on a separate PC and installing it to an SD card manually is still the best way to go. To learn more about installing the bootloader or download the Pi OS over a network, you can view the Raspberry Pi Foundation's documentation here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6. This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major rightsholders and internet companies in Russia have signed a new memorandum of cooperation designed to make pirated movies, TV shows and other content harder to find. In addition to automatically removing reported infringing links within hours, search engines have agreed to completely deindex all domains that carry 100 or more links to infringing content. TorrentFreak reports: Signed in 2018, a memorandum of cooperation signed by major rightsholders and internet companies including Yandex changed the way infringing content is handled. Following the creation of a centralized database of pirated content, the Internet companies agreed to query it every few minutes in order to remove corresponding content from their platforms within six hours. Over a period of three years, more than 40 million infringing links have now been removed from search results. Since its introduction, the memorandum has been renewed several times alongside calls for the system to be opened up to a wider range of rightsholders, such as those operating in the publishing sector. While that is yet to happen, a new memorandum has just been signed by the original signatories containing an even more powerful anti-piracy tool. Under the current agreement (which is set to expire early September 2022), rightsholders must submit specific URLs to infringing content to the centralized database controlled by the Media Communications Union (ISS). These specific URLs are then delisted by search engines but rightsholders complain that the same content can reappear under a new URL, meaning that the process must be repeated. To deal with this type of 'pirate' countermeasure, the new memorandum requires search companies to take more stringent action. Any domain that has 100 or more 'pirate' links reported to the database will be deindexed entirely by search engines, meaning that they essentially become invisible to anyone using a search engine. This must be carried out quickly too, within 24 hours according to ISS. Given the number of links to infringing content posted to non-pirate sites, safeguards will also be introduced to protect legitimate resources from deindexing. These include media sites, government projects, search engines themselves, social networks, and official content providers. "Alongside the development of the memorandum a new law is being drafted, with the aim of enshrining its voluntary terms into local law," adds TorrentFreak. "That should allow other rightsholders that aren't current signatories to obtain similar benefits. At the time of writing, however, progress on the legal front is taking its time and might still take a few more months."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin Magazine: Users of Block's mobile payments platform Cash App can now make instant and free bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network, the company tweeted on Monday. The integration of Bitcoin's second-layer protocol for faster and cheaper transactions was made possible by the Lightning Development Kit, an open-source project developed by another company owned by Block, Spiral. The Lightning Development Kit (LDK) is a flexible Lightning implementation geared towards developers who want to integrate Bitcoin's Lightning Network into their applications frictionlessly. It abstracts away complexities of Lightning, enabling developers to integrate the network easier and faster into their apps. Jack Dorsey said in a fireside chat last week with Michael Saylor, the CEO of software intelligence company MicroStrategy, that having Cash App integrate Lightning through the Spiral's work was one of the proudest moments of his career. [...] Despite critics saying that Bitcoin cannot be used as a means of exchange due to its base layer's slow settlements, Lightning empowers Bitcoin to handle the smallest of payments for little to no cost. Now, all Cash App users can also leverage Lightning to send small payments instantly and for free. However, it seems that Cash App cannot yet receive Lightning transactions itself -- only send them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans tuning in to the Super Bowl on Sunday will be inundated with ads from cryptocurrency companies, including the trading platform FTX, which plans to give away millions of dollars in bitcoin. From a report: FTX has spent heavily on sports partnerships to try to make itself a brand name in crypto, including an ad with NFL star Tom Brady, a sponsorship with Major League Baseball and a $135 million deal to rename the Miami Heat's stadium the FTX Arena. Co-founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently moved FTX's headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, says the ads are as much about courting U.S. regulators as getting customers to download its trading app. "We want to make sure that we're painting, hopefully, a healthy image of ourselves and the industry," said Bankman-Fried, 29, who has a net worth of more than $24 billion, according to Forbes. "We're optimistic that we're going to be able to grow our U.S. business -- a lot of that is working with U.S. regulators on bringing new products to market." The crypto industry includes virtual currencies such as bitcoin and Ether, as well as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, that can provide proof of ownership for assets such as digital images or weapons within video games. Both cryptocurrencies and NFTs are built using an information-storing technology called blockchain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Players generate a wealth of revealing psychological data -- and some companies are soaking it up. From a report: While there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveilling their players in-game (although, as a recent article suggests, large publishers and developers like Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state they capture user data in their license agreements), a new industry of firms selling middleware "data analytics" tools, often used by game developers, has sprung up. These data analytics tools promise to make users more amenable to continued consumption through the use of data analysis at scale. Such analytics, once available only to the largest video game studios -- which could hire data scientists to capture, clean, and analyze the data, and software engineers to develop in-house analytics tools -- are now commonplace across the entire industry, pitched as "accessible" tools that provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace by companies like Unity, GameAnalytics, or Amazon Web Services. (Although, as a recent study shows, the extent to which these tools are truly "accessible" is questionable, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.) As demand for data-driven insight has grown, so have the range of different services -- dozens of tools in the past several years alone, providing game developers with different forms of insight. One tool -- essentially Uber for playtesting -- allows companies to outsource quality assurance testing, and provides data-driven insight into the results. Another supposedly uses AI to understand player value and maximize retention (and spending, with a focus on high-spenders). Developers might use data from these middleware companies to further refine their game (players might be getting overly frustrated and dying at a particular point, indicating the game might be too difficult) or their monetization strategies (prompting in-app purchases -- such as extra lives -- at such a point of difficulty). But our data is not just valuable to video game companies in fine-tuning design. Increasingly, video game companies exploit this data to capitalize user attention through targeted advertisements. As a 2019 eMarketer report suggests, the value of video games as a medium for advertising is not just in access to large-scale audience data (such as the Unity ad network's claim to billions of users), but through ad formats such as playable and rewarded advertisements -- that is, access to audiences more likely to pay attention to an ad.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Markus Reinisch, Vice President of Public Policy Europe at Meta, writing on company's blog: There has been reporting in the press that we are "threatening" to leave Europe because of the uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms. This is not true. Like all publicly-traded companies, we are legally required to disclose material risks to our investors. Last week, as we have done in our previous four financial quarters, we disclosed that continuing uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms poses a threat to our ability to serve European consumers and operate our business in Europe. We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe; of course we don't. But the simple reality is that Meta, like many other businesses, organisations and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate our global services. Further reading: We're Fine Without Facebook, German and French Ministers Say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday morning it seized more than $3.6 billion in allegedly stolen cryptocurrency linked to the 2016 hack of Bitfinex. As part of the operation, authorities detained a New York couple on allegations they planned to launder the digital goods. From a report: It marks the agency's largest financial seizure ever, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Officials said they arrested Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31 and who also goes by the alias "razzlekhan". The couple is scheduled to make their initial appearances in federal court later in the day. Authorities accuse the pair of trying to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex's platform after a hacker breached Bitfinex's systems and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. Prosecutors allege that the transactions sent the stolen bitcoin to Lichtenstein's digital wallet. Officials said they were able to seize more than 94,000 bitcoin, which was valued around $3.6 billion at the time of seizure. In all, the total stolen bitcoin is presently valued at approximately $4.5 billion, according to the agency. A 2019 rap video by Morgan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Dutch antitrust watchdog has fined Apple 5 million euros ($5.72 million) for a third time for failing to allow software application makers in the Netherlands to use non-Apple payment methods for dating apps listed in the company's App Store. From a report: The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has been levying weekly fines of 5 million euros on Apple since the company missed a Jan. 15 deadline to make changes ordered by the watchdog. Apple, which could not immediately be reached for comment, has twice published information on its own blog about changes it is making to comply with the Dutch order. However, the ACM said on Monday it was not receiving enough information from the U.S. company to assess whether Apple was actually complying. "ACM is disappointed in Apple's behaviour and actions," it said in a statement. It noted that Dutch courts have upheld its decision, which found that Apple's behaviour violated competition law. Further reading: Going Dutch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Chrome is rolling out Journeys, a feature that lets you revisit your old browsing sessions based on the subject matter you were searching for. From a report: If you type a word in the address bar that's related to some convoluted rabbit hole you've been down in the past, you'll see a "Resume your research" option that links you to the related sites you've visited before. So far, it sounds like it could be a much more viable solution than digging through your search history for that one site you kind of remember visiting three weeks ago. If you were knee-deep in research about axolotls, you should see all the related pages you accessed in Journeys whenever you type in the creature's name at a later date. The Journeys page will prominently display the sites you've spent more time on and will also provide suggestions based on what you've searched for.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine for a moment that the millions of computer chips inside the servers that power the largest data centers in the world had rare, almost undetectable flaws. And the only way to find the flaws was to throw those chips at giant computing problems that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. As the tiny switches in computer chips have shrunk to the width of a few atoms, the reliability of chips has become another worry for the people who run the biggest networks in the world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and many other sites have experienced surprising outages over the last year. The outages have had several causes, like programming mistakes and congestion on the networks. But there is growing anxiety that as cloud-computing networks have become larger and more complex, they are still dependent, at the most basic level, on computer chips that are now less reliable and, in some cases, less predictable. In the past year, researchers at both Facebook and Google have published studies describing computer hardware failures whose causes have not been easy to identify. The problem, they argued, was not in the software -- it was somewhere in the computer hardware made by various companies. Google declined to comment on its study, while Facebook did not return requests for comment on its study. "They're seeing these silent errors, essentially coming from the underlying hardware," said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineer who specializes in testing computer hardware. Increasingly, Dr. Mitra said, people believe that manufacturing defects are tied to these so-called silent errors that cannot be easily caught. Researchers worry that they are finding rare defects because they are trying to solve bigger and bigger computing problems, which stresses their systems in unexpected ways. Companies that run large data centers began reporting systematic problems more than a decade ago. In 2015, in the engineering publication IEEE Spectrum, a group of computer scientists who study hardware reliability at the University of Toronto reported that each year as many as 4 percent of Google's millions of computers had encountered errors that couldn't be detected and that caused them to shut down unexpectedly. In a microprocessor that has billions of transistors -- or a computer memory board composed of trillions of the tiny switches that can each store a 1 or 0 -- even the smallest error can disrupt systems that now routinely perform billions of calculations each second.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has announced plans to introduce a new Tap to Pay feature for iPhone that turns the device into a contactless payment terminal. From a report: The company says that later this year, U.S. merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments, such as credit cards and debit cards, by using an iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app. Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available for payment platforms and app developers to integrate into their iOS apps and offer as a payment option to their customers. Stripe will be the first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to customers. Apple says additional payment platforms and apps will follow later this year. Once Tap to Pay on iPhone launches, merchants will be able to unlock contactless payment acceptance through a supporting iOS app. At checkout, the merchant will ask the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch near the merchant's iPhone and the payment will then be securely completed using NFC technology. No additional hardware is required to accept contactless payments. Apple also says that with Tap to Pay on iPhone, customers' payment data is protected and that all transactions that are made through the feature are encrypted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Polish government has announced today the creation of a new cyber component inside its Army Forces that will be tasked with carrying out operations in cyber-space. From a report: Named the Cyberspace Defense Forces (Wojska Obrony Cyberprzestrzeni), the new branch will operate as a command center inside the Polish Army and will have the authority to carry out reconnaissance, defensive, and offensive operations, the Polish Ministry of National Defense said today. Work on establishing this unit began in 2019 and was formalized earlier today in a ceremony at the Club of the Military University of Technology in Warsaw, where Minister of National Defense Mariusz Blaszczak appointed Brig. Gen. Karol Molenda as the unit's inaugural commander. [...] With today's announcement, Poland becomes one of the very few countries in the world to formally create a cyber component for their armed forces after NATO officially declared cyberspace a formal warfare battleground and domain of operations at the 2016 NATO Summit, held in Warsaw, Poland.Read more of this story at Slashdot.