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Ahead of its Connect conference in October, Cloudflare this week announced an ambitious new project called Turnstile, which seeks to do away with the CAPTCHAs used throughout the web to verify people are who they say they are. From a report: Available to site owners at no charge, Cloudflare customers or no, Turnstile chooses from a rotating suite of "browser challenges" to check that visitors to a webpage aren't, in fact, bots. CAPTCHAs, the challenge-response tests most of us have encountered when filling out forms, have been around for decades, and they've been relatively successfully at keeping bot traffic at bay. But the rise of cheap labor, bugs in various CAPTCHA flavors and automated solvers have begun to poke holes in the system. Several websites offer human- and AI-backed CAPTCHA-solving services for as low as $0.50 per thousand solved CAPTCHAs, and some researchers claim AI-based attacks can successfully solve CAPTCHAs used by the world's most popular websites. Cloudflare itself was once a CAPTCHA user. But according to CTO John Graham-Cumming, the company was never quite satisfied with it -- if Cloudflare's public rallying cries hadn't made that clear. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Graham-Cumming listed what he sees as the many downsides of CAPTCHA technology, including poor accessibility (visual disabilities can make it impossible to solve a CAPTCHA), cultural bias (CAPTCHAs assume familiarity with objects like U.S. taxis) and the strains that CAPTCHAs place on mobile data plans. [...] Turnstile automatically chooses a browser challenge based on "telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session," Cloudflare says, rather than factors like login cookies. After running non-interactive JavaScript challenges to gather signals about the visitor and browser environment and using AI models to detect features and visitors who've passed a challenge before, Turnstile fine-tunes the difficulty of the challenge to the specific request -- avoiding having users solve a puzzle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More pay transparency is coming to California. The Golden State is joining New York City, Colorado, and Washington in requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job ads. From a report: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1162 into law on Tuesday, according to statements from the California Legislative Women's Caucus and the TechEquity Collaborative. Under the law, employers with 15 or more workers will be required to include pay ranges in job postings, and those with 100 or more employees or contractors will have to report median and mean hourly pay rates by job category and "each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex." "This is a big moment for California workers, especially women and people of color who have long been impacted by systemic inequities that have left them earning far less than their colleagues," said state Sen. Monique Limon (D-Santa Barbara) in a statement. Limon introduced the bill in February. The TechEquity Collaborative's chief programs officer, Samantha Gordon, praised the law in a statement as "an important step in equalizing the playing field for the 1.9 million contractors, temps, vendors, and contingent workers" in California. Companies will have to comply by January 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unnecessary meetings are a $100 million mistake at big companies, according to a new survey that shows workers probably don't need to be in nearly a third of the appointments they attend. From a report: The survey, conducted over the summer by Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asked 632 employees across 20 industries to study their weekly calendars and gauge how much time they actually spent in meetings, what they got out of them and how they responded to invitations. Employees spend about 18 hours a week on average in meetings, and they only decline 14% of invites even though they'd prefer to back out of 31% of them. Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $25,000 per employee annually, and projects out to $101 million a year for any organization with more than 5,000 employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Since the research lab OpenAI debuted the latest version of DALL-E in April, the AI has dazzled the public, attracting digital artists, graphic designers, early adopters, and anyone in search of online distraction. The ability to create original, sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired images from any spur-of-the-moment phrase, like a conversational Photoshop, has startled even jaded internet users with how quickly AI has progressed. Five months later, 1.5 million users are generating 2 million images a day. On Wednesday, OpenAI said it will remove its waitlist for DALL-E, giving anyone immediate access. The introduction of DALL-E has triggered an explosion of text-to-image generators. Google and Meta quickly revealed that they had each been developing similar systems, but said their models weren't ready for the public. Rival start-ups soon went public, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which created the image that sparked controversy in August when it won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down. "These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government," Dema said in a statement. "In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai said this week that a drug they are developing for Alzheimer's disease had slowed the rate of cognitive decline in a large late-stage clinical trial. From a report: The strong results boost the drug's chances of winning approval and offer renewed hope for a class of Alzheimer's drugs that have repeatedly failed or generated mixed results. The positive data also offer Biogen a second chance after the company's disastrous rollout of another Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. That medication won regulatory approval last year despite little evidence that it could slow cognitive decline, received only sharply limited coverage by Medicare and has proved to be a commercial failure. The results appear stronger for the new medication, lecanemab. Cognitive decline in the group of volunteers who received lecanemab was reduced by 27 percent compared with the group who received a placebo in the clinical trial, which enrolled nearly 1,800 participants with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer's disease, the companies said. The trial of lecanemab, which is administered via intravenous infusion, was the largest to date to test whether clearing the brain of plaques formed by the accumulation of a protein called amyloid could slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Aduhelm is designed to work in a similar way.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Buhlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats. Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying millions of images pulled from the Internet. During the training process, the model makes statistical associations between images and related words, making a much smaller representation of key information about each image and storing them as "weights," which are mathematical values that represent what the AI image model knows, so to speak. When Stable Diffusion analyzes and "compresses" images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call "latent space," which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they're decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images. While most people use Stable Diffusion with text prompts, Buhlmann cut out the text encoder and instead forced his images through Stable Diffusion's image encoder process, which takes a low-precision 512x512 image and turns it into a higher-precision 64x64 latent space representation. At this point, the image exists at a much smaller data size than the original, but it can still be expanded (decoded) back into a 512x512 image with fairly good results. While running tests, Buhlmann found that images compressed with Stable Diffusion looked subjectively better at higher compression ratios (smaller file size) than JPEG or WebP. In one example, he shows a photo of a candy shop that is compressed down to 5.68KB using JPEG, 5.71KB using WebP, and 4.98KB using Stable Diffusion. The Stable Diffusion image appears to have more resolved details and fewer obvious compression artifacts than those compressed in the other formats. Buhlmann's method currently comes with significant limitations, however: It's not good with faces or text, and in some cases, it can actually hallucinate detailed features in the decoded image that were not present in the source image. (You probably don't want your image compressor inventing details in an image that don't exist.) Also, decoding requires the 4GB Stable Diffusion weights file and extra decoding time. Buhlmann's code and technical details about his findings can be found on Google Colab and Towards AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader root_42 writes: Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One "problem" with retro computing is that we replace those disks with compact flash, SD cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances, which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It's called the HDD Clicker and it's a very unique little gadget. "An ATtiny and a few support components ride on a small PCB along with a piezoelectric speaker," describes Hackaday. "The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of clicks from the speaker that sound remarkably like a hard drive heading seeking tracks." A demo of the device can be viewed at 7:09, with a full defragmentation at 13:11.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany's government plans to keep two of the country's three remaining nuclear power plants running until mid-April to help prevent a potential winter energy shortage, the economy and energy minister said Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: The announcement by Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck means the government has officially, albeit temporarily, reversed Germany's long-held plan to shut shut down its nuclear plants by the end of the year. Habeck said the decision to keep operating the two plants in southern Germany -- Isar 2 in Bavaria and Neckarwestheim north of Stuttgart -- into next year a "necessary" step to avoid potential power grid shortages in the region. Officials still plan to close down Germany's third remaining nuclear plant, Emsland in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, at the end of the year as planned. Habeck said officials announced the decision Tuesday in light of stress test data from France's nuclear providers that indicated grid shortages could be more severe than expected this winter. Like other European countries, Germany is scrambling to ensure the lights stay on and homes stay warm this winter despite the reduction in natural gas flows from Russia amid the war in Ukraine. "The situation in France is not good and has developed much worse than was actually forecasted in the last few weeks," Habeck said. "As the minister responsible for energy security I have to say: Unless this development is reversed, we will leave Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim on the grid in the first quarter of 2023."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday the material would lead to variants that would enable lossless electricity grids and inexpensive magnets for MRI machines, maglev railways, atom smashers, and fusion reactors. Faith in the result is now evaporating. On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data issues other scientists have raised over the past 2 years that have undermined confidence in one of two key signs of superconductivity Dias's team had claimed. "There have been a lot of questions about this result for a while," says James Hamlin, an experimental condensed matter physicist at the University of Florida. But Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and longtime critic of the study, says the retraction does not go far enough. He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct. "I think this is a real problem," he says. "You cannot leave it as, 'Oh, it's a difference of opinion.'" The retraction was unusual in that Nature editors took the step over the objection of all nine authors of the paper. "We stand by our work, and it's been verified experimentally and theoretically," Dias says. Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and another senior member of the collaboration, points out the retraction does not question the drop in electric resistance -- the most important part of any superconductivity claim. He adds, "We're confused and disappointed in the decision-making by the Nature editorial board." The retraction comes even as excitement builds for the class of superconducting materials called hydrides, which includes the carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) developed by Dias's team. Under pressures greater than at the center of the Earth, hydrogen is thought to behave like a superconducting metal. Adding other elements to the hydrogen -- creating a hydride structure -- can increase the "chemical pressure," reducing the need for external pressure and making superconductivity reachable in small laboratory vises called diamond anvil cells. As Lilia Boeri, a theoretical physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome, puts it, "These hydrides are a sort of realization of metallic hydrogen at slightly lower pressure." In 2015, Mikhail Eremets, an experimental physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, and colleagues reported the first superconducting hydride: a mix of hydrogen and sulfur that, under enormous pressures, exhibited a sharp drop in electrical resistance at a critical temperature (Tc) of 203 K (-70C). That was nowhere near room temperature, but warmer than the Tc for most superconducting materials. Some theorists thought adding a third element to the mix would give researchers a new variable to play with, enabling them to get closer to ambient pressures -- or room temperatures. For the 2020 Nature paper, Dias and colleagues added carbon, crushed the mix in a diamond anvil cell, and heated it with a laser to create a new substance. They reported that tests showed a sharp drop in resistance at a Tc of 288 K (15C) -- roughly room temperature -- and a pressure of 267 gigapascals, about 75% of the pressure at the center of the Earth. But in a field that has seen many superconducting claims come and go, a drop in resistance alone is not considered sufficient. The gold standard is to provide evidence of another key attribute of superconductors: their ability to expel an applied magnetic field when they cross Tc and become superconducting. Measuring that effect in a diamond anvil cell is impractical, so experimentalists working with hydrides often measure a related quantity called "magnetic susceptibility." Even then they must contend with tiny wires and samples, immense pressures, and a background magnetic signal from metallic gaskets and other experimental components. "It's like you're trying to see a star when the Sun is out," Hamlin says. "The study's magnetic susceptibility data were what led to the retraction," reports Science. "The team members reported that a susceptibility signal emerged after they had subtracted a background signal, but they did not include raw data. The omission frustrated critics, who also complained that the team relied on a 'user-defined' background -- an assumed background rather than a measured one. But Salamat says relying on a user-defined background is customary in high-pressure physics because the background is so hard to measure experimentally." Dias and Salamat posted a paper to arXiv in 2021 containing the raw susceptibility data and purported to explain how the background was subtracted, but it "raised more questions than it answered," says Brad Ramshaw, a quantum materials physicist at Cornell University. "The process of going from the raw data to the published data was incredibly opaque." Hirsch accused the data of being "fabricated," noting suspicious similarities to data in a 2009 paper on superconductivity in europium under high pressures. It too was later retracted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Transportation Department on Tuesday said it approved electric vehicle charging station plans for all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico covering roughly 75,000 miles of highways. CNBC reports: Earlier this year, the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years along interstate highways as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. Under the plan, entitled the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, states provided their EV infrastructure deployment proposals to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. States are now approved to construct a network of EV charging stations along designated alternative fuel corridors on the national highway system and have access to more than $1.5 billion to help build the chargers. It's unclear how many charging stations the funds will support, and states have not yet shared specific charger locations. Transportation Department officials have said that states should install stations every 50 miles and ensure each station is located within one mile of an interstate highway. "We have approved plans for all 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to help ensure that Americans in every part of the country -- from the largest cities to the most rural communities -- can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still "not enough women at the table" at the world's tech firms -- including his own. He said there were "no good excuses" for the lack of women in the sector. Apple has just launched its founders' development program for female founders and app creators in the UK. "I think the the essence of technology and its effect on humanity depends upon women being at the table," Mr Cook says. "Technology's a great thing that will accomplish many things, but unless you have diverse views at the table that are working on it, you don't wind up with great solutions." Apple had 35% female staff in the US in 2021, according to its own diversity figures. It launched its original Apple Health Kit in 2014 without a period tracker -- which led to accusations that this was an oversight due to male bias among its developers. One challenge facing the sector is the lack of girls choosing to pursue science, tech, engineering and maths subjects at school. "Businesses can't cop out and say 'there's not enough women taking computer science -- therefore I can't hire enough,'" says Mr Cook. "We have to fundamentally change the number of people that are taking computer science and programming." His view is that everybody should be required to take some sort of coding course by the time they finish school, in order to have a "working knowledge" of how coding works and how apps are created. According to Deloitte Global, large global tech firms will reach nearly 33% overall female representation in their workforces in 2022 on average -- with 25% occupying technical roles. In the interview with the BBC, Cook also commented on the future of augmented reality, saying: "in the future, people will wonder how we lived without AR." He added: "we're investing a ton in that space." Earlier this year, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple could announced its long-rumored mixed-reality headset as soon as January 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is bringing Stage Manager, a new multitasking system exclusive to iPads with the M1 chip, to a number of older devices. Engadget reports: Probably the biggest change Apple announced with iPadOS 16 earlier this year is Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad. That feature also works on an external display, the first time that iPads could do anything besides mirror their screen on a monitor. Unfortunately, the feature was limited to iPads with the M1 chip -- that includes the 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro released in May of 2021 as well as the M1-powered iPad Air which Apple released earlier this year. All other older iPads were left out. That changes with the latest iPadOS 16 developer beta, which was just released. Now, Apple is making Stage Manager work with a number of older devices: it'll work on the 11-inch iPad Pro (first generation and later) and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (third generation and later). Specifically, it'll be available on the 2018 and 2020 models that use the A12X and A12Z chips rather than just the M1. However, there is one notable missing feature for the older iPad Pro models -- Stage Manager will only work on the iPad's build-in display. You won't be able to extend your display to an external monitor. Apple also says that developer beta 5 of iPadOS 16. is removing external display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads, something that has been present since the first iPadOS 16 beta was released a few months ago. It'll be re-introduced in a software update coming later this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Cloudflare, the security, performance and reliability company that went public three years ago, said this morning that it will help connect startups that use its serverless computing platform to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds. It's a smart, splashy incentive to entice more startups to use the now five-year-old product, which, according to Cloudflare, enables developers to build or augment apps without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Cloudflare notes in a related press release that startups can scale so fast using the platform that Cloudflare acquired one last year: Zaraz, a startup that promises to speed up website performance with a single line of code. (Cloudflare isn't promising to acquire other startups, but the suggestion is in the air.) Indeed, this funding program, as far as we can tell, is really about Cloudflare taking aim at hugely lucrative products like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Toward that end, we asked Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince over the weekend why Cloudflare thinks it can steal market share from these much bigger companies. "I wouldn't characterize it as 'stealing' market share from anyone," he said. "It's a matter of earning market share, and the way you earn market share is by providing a better product at a more affordable price." Asked how much more affordable, he said merely that it's "significantly less expensive than the legacy public clouds" because of how it's built. As Prince explains it, modern browsers "encounter new, untrusted code with nearly every page they open online today. They need a way to quickly and safely execute that code [and use a] technology called isolates to achieve that." Cloudflare Workers, which is the name of the platform, "takes the isolates technology inspired by the browser and makes it available as a developer platform." Prince said the idea to connect startups on its platform with venture funding came out of existing relationships it has with VCs who'd begun noticing that more of their portfolio companies are using Cloudflare Workers as their developer platform. "When they did due diligence," said Prince, the VCs would "push [founders] on 'why Cloudflare and not a platform like AWS,' [and] the answer that startup after startup gave was that Cloudflare Workers scaled better, had better performance, and was less expensive to operate." "If you're a VC and you hear an answer like that multiple times from the most promising startups it causes you to take notice," he added. Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, it makes clear. All funding decisions will be made by the participating firms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle has paid $23 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to settle corruption charges that subsidiaries in Turkey, United Arab Emirates and India used "slush funds" to bribe foreign officials to win business. The Register reports: The SEC said on Tuesday that Big Red violated provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) during a three-year period between 2016 and 2019. The cash that was apparently surreptitiously set aside was also spent on paying for foreign officials to attend technology conferences, which breaks Oracle's own internal policies and procedures. And the SEC said that in some instances, it found Oracle staff at the Turkish subsidiary had spent the funds on taking officials' families with them on International conferences or side trips to California. "The creation of off-books slush funds inherently gives rise to the risk those funds will be used improperly, which is exactly what happened here at Oracle's Turkey, UAE, and India subsidiaries," said Charles Cain, FCPA unit chief at the SEC. "This matter highlights the critical need for effective internal accounting controls throughout the entirety of a company's operations," he added. Oracle, without admitting or denying the findings of the SEC's investigation, has agreed to "cease and desist from committing violations" of the anti-bribery, books and records, and internal accounting controls of the FCPA, said the Commission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During Intel's Innovation keynote today, Samsung Display showed off a prototype PC that slides from a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch display. Intel also announced that it's been experimenting with slidable PC form factors. The Verge reports: The prototype device that Samsung Display and Intel have shown off today essentially turns a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch monitor with a flexible display and a sliding mechanism. Intel was quick to demonstrate its new Unison software on this display, which aims to connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- including iPhones. The slidable PC itself is just a concept for now, and there's no word from Intel or Samsung Display on when it will become a reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Senior House Democrats are poised to introduce long-promised legislation to restrict stock ownership and trading by members of Congress, senior government officials and Supreme Court justices. The bill would apply to the spouses and dependent children of those officials, according to an outline sent to lawmaker offices last week by House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren. The restrictions also cover "commodities, futures, cryptocurrency, and other similar investments," according to the outline. The legislation would require public officials to either divest current holdings or put them in a blind trust. Investments in mutual funds or other widely held investment funds and government bonds would be allowed. The bill may be released as soon as Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter. It hasn't been scheduled for a vote, though House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has said it's possible it could come to the floor this week in the middle of an already jam-packed schedule before lawmakers go on break ahead of the November midterm election. While conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats alike have been clamoring for restrictions on stock trades by members of Congress to avoid conflicts of interest, legislation has been hung up by questions about how broad to make the ban and whether to include family members. A group of senators is working on their own version of the legislation and there's little chance of Congress taking any final action before the midterms. [...] Another potential point of contention is applying the requirements to the Supreme Court. The Congressional Research Service in an April report said that Congress imposing a code of conduct on the judiciary would "raise an array of legal questions," including whether it would violate the constitutional separation of powers. Justices and lower court judges already file annual financial disclosures and are barred from participating in cases where there's a direct conflict of interest. Despite that, the CRS report says that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed "whether Congress may subject Supreme Court Justices to financial reporting requirements or limitations upon the receipt of gifts." "The current law doesn't prohibit lawmakers from owning or trading individual securities, but it bans members of Congress from using nonpublic information available to them for personal benefit," notes the report. "It requires any transaction be disclosed within 45 days." Further reading: TikTokers Are Trading Stocks By Copying What Members of Congress DoRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is about to eliminate a method for logging into its Exchange Online email service that is widely considered vulnerable and outdated, but that some businesses still rely upon. From a report: The company has said that as of Oct. 1, it will begin to disable what's known as "basic authentication" for customers that continue to use the system. Basic authentication typically requires only a username and password for login; the system does not play well with multifactor authentication and is prone to a host of other heightened security risks. Microsoft has said that for several types of common password-based threats, attackers almost exclusively target accounts that use basic authentication. At identity platform Okta, which manages logins for a large number of Microsoft Office 365 accounts, "we've seen these problems for years," said Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of Okta. "When we block a threat, nine times out of 10 it's against a Microsoft account that has basic authentication. So we think this is a great thing." Microsoft has been seeking to prod businesses to move off basic authentication for the past three years, but "unfortunately usage isn't yet at zero," it said in a post earlier this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robinhood is finally rolling out a beta version of its non-custodial crypto wallet to 10,000 customers on its waitlist after announcing the product in May, its CTO and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, told TechCrunch. The product is called Robinhood Wallet and will be the company's first internationally-available app, Kerbrat said. From a report: The company revealed new details about the offering in conjunction with the beta launch, most notably that it will launch exclusively with Polygon, a popular layer-two blockchain that plugs into Ethereum and makes the network faster and cheaper to use. This means beta users will be able to purchase the Polygon MATIC token on Robinhood's main exchange app and transfer it to their Robinhood Wallet. They will also be able to access dApps directly on the Polygon network, including DeFi apps such as Uniswap, Balancer and Kyberswap, and metaverse games such as Decentraland, a spokesperson for Polygon said in an email to TechCrunch. Over time, the Robinhood team plans to build out multi-chain support for the wallet beyond the Polygon ecosystem, Robinhood crypto product manager Seong Seog Lee told TechCrunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Civil rights lawyers and Democratic senators are pushing for legislation that would limit U.S. law enforcement agencies' ability to buy cellphone tracking tools to follow people's whereabouts, including back years in time, and sometimes without a search warrant. From a report: Concerns about police use of the tool known as "Fog Reveal" raised in an investigation by The Associated Press published earlier this month also surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission hearing three weeks ago. Police agencies have been using the platform to search hundreds of billions of records gathered from 250 million mobile devices, and hoover up people's geolocation data to assemble so-called "patterns of life," according to thousands of pages of records about the company. Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used. Panelists and members of the public who took part in the FTC hearing also raised concerns about how data generated by popular apps is used for surveillance purposes, or "in some cases, being used to infer identity and cause direct harm to people in the real world, in the physical world and being repurposed for, as was mentioned earlier, law enforcement and national security purposes," said Stacey Gray, a senior director for U.S. programs for the Future of Privacy Forum.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Holiday bargain shopping is starting extra early this year. And that could be good news for shoppers, even if it signals slightly worrisome things for the economy. From a report: E-commerce giant Amazon announced plans Monday for "a new two-day global shopping event" exclusive to members of its Prime loyalty program. Dubbed Prime Early Access Sale, the promotion is similar to Prime Day, the annual sale held in July to generate a bonanza of orders and new subscribers. Rival retail giants Walmart and Target have already signaled plans to kick off holiday sales earlier than ever, setting the stage for a long holiday shopping season with significant discounts. With warehouses and store shelves suddenly full of inventory after two years of supply chain disruptions, deals will be easier to come by than since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, say retail experts. Amazon's bonus sales event may be a sign that retailers are concerned that Americans will keep a tight grip on their wallets this holiday season because of fears over inflation, rising interest rates and predictions of an oncoming recession. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company -- with annual sales of more than $470 billion last year -- added the second online sale to help overcome such worries. "In light of inflation and economic head winds, we want to help members save throughout the season," said Amazon spokesperson Deanna Zawilinski. [...] Helping fuel the sales competition is an oversupply of merchandise -- including clothes, toys, electronics, furniture and other popular consumer goods -- that retailers ordered to meet expected consumer demand but that were delayed for months because of supply chain problems. The items are now taking up valuable space in warehouses and store shelves. With a recent surge in inflation and rising gasoline prices, Americans haven't been spending on such items as much as retailers anticipated. Store owners and retail operators now need to move those items off the shelves to make way for new holiday merchandise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The PC beta for Modern Warfare 2 was only online for just over a weekend, but cheat developers quickly managed to create wallhacks anyway, according to videos created by multiple cheat developers. From a report: The news highlights the constant cat and mouse game between cheat developers and the companies that make competitive video games, and shows that Modern Warfare 2 will be no different. Warzone, the massively popular free-to-play battle royale game built on top of Call of Duty's mainline games, was notoriously overrun by cheaters before publisher Activision and the development studios working on the game introduced a new anti-cheat mechanism called Ricochet. "I started developing a MW2 beta cheat right away. I was done the same day, the first day of the beta. My users got access once the cheat was complete & tested," Zebleer, the pseudonymous administrator of Phantom Overlay, a cheat provider that has a long history of selling cheats for Warzone, told Motherboard in an email. [...] EngineOwning, another cheat developer, published a video to their Twitter account over the weekend appearing to show their own product in action, although it didn't seem to be ready for the beta. "Our MW2 cheat is now done and we're currently in close testing," the tweet read. "This means our cheat will be ready when the game launches, with all the features you'd expect." The Anti-Cheat Police Department, a researcher who has tracked the cheating ecosystem and who reports offending players, claimed in their own tweet that "Ricochet has this shitty cheat detected they are just a scam operation at this point."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is suing former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the former CEO of MoviePass' parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), alleging they mislead investors that the company could make a profit at its $10-a-month plan. From a report: A complaint filed late Monday, reviewed by Insider, said the duo made "false or misleading statements" in financial filings and in the press. "Faced with debilitating negative cash flows -- rather than tell the public the truth -- Farnsworth and Lowe devised fraudulent tactics to prevent MoviePass's heavy users from using the service, and falsely and misleadingly informed the public that usage had declined naturally or due to measures the company had employed to combat subscribers' purported violations of MoviePass's terms and conditions of service," the complaint said. The lawsuit also named former MoviePass Vice President Khalid Itum as a defendant. The complaint accused Itum of submitting false invoices and receiving more than $310,000 from both MoviePass and HMNY.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has announced an intriguing new app called Unison, which aims to "seamlessly" connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- not just Android phones but iOS devices as well. From a report: Following what Intel says is a "simple pairing process," the Unison app will allow PCs to replicate four key features of the connected phone. They can answer and make calls; they can share photos and files (pictures taken with the phone will show up in a specific Unison gallery on the PC); they can send and receive texts; and they can receive (and, in some cases, respond to) notifications that the phone receives -- though if Unison is closed, they'll go to the Windows notification center. "The advantage we can bring to a PC user that's got a well-designed Windows PC is not having to choose their device based on the PC they have. They have an iPhone, they have an Android phone, any device they want to use will be able to connect with this capability," Josh Newman, Intel's VP of mobile innovation, told The Verge. "When you're ... on your laptop, and you get notifications or texts on your phone, you can keep it in your bag and get right back into the flow of your work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel says it has made some improvements to the CPU architecture and the Intel 7 manufacturing process, but the strategy for improving their performance is both time-tested and easy to understand: add more cores, and make them run at higher clock speeds. From a report: Intel is announcing three new CPUs today, each with and without integrated graphics (per usual, the models with no GPUs have an "F" at the end): the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K will launch on October 20 alongside new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work in all current-generation 600-series motherboards as long as your motherboard maker has provided a BIOS update, and will continue to support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. Raptor Lake uses the hybrid architecture that Intel introduced in its 12th-generation Alder Lake chips last year -- a combination of large performance cores (P-cores) that keep games and other performance-sensitive applications running quickly, plus clusters of smaller efficiency cores (E-cores) that use less power -- though in our testing across laptops and desktops, it's clear that "efficiency" is more about the number of cores can be fit into a given area on a CPU die, and less about lower overall system power consumption. There have been a handful of other additions as well. The amount of L2 cache per core has been nearly doubled, going from 1.25MB to 2MB per P-core and from 2MB to 4MB per E-core cluster (E-cores always come in clusters of four). The CPUs will officially support DDR5-5600 RAM, up from a current maximum of DDR5-4800, though that DDR5-4800 maximum can easily be surpassed with XMP memory kits in 12th-generation motherboards. The maximum officially supported DDR4 RAM speed remains DDR4-3200, though the caveat about XMP applies there as well. As far as core counts and frequencies go, the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs each pick up one extra E-core cluster, going from four E-cores to eight. The Core i9 gets two new E-core clusters, boosting the core count from eight all the way up to 16. All E-cores have maximum boost clocks that are 400MHz higher than they were before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of more than a dozen companies launched an organization to advocate for less-restrictive software licensing rules, targeting cloud providers like Microsoft, whose contract policies have been under fire from rivals, customers and lawmakers. From a report: The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing argues that software agreements need to be more flexible and predictable for customers, including allowing the use of cloud services and programs from different providers. "Cloud customers around the world have long been subjected to repeated financial harm as a result of legacy providers' restrictive software licensing practices," said Ryan Triplette, executive director of the new association, which was announced on Tuesday. The group's member companies, coming from industries including health care, financial services and technology, are remaining anonymous for now due to fear of retaliation, she said in an interview. Microsoft, Oracle and other software giants have been criticized by competitors and clients for limiting the interoperability of products and services, sometimes making it more expensive to use them with rival offerings or prohibiting it entirely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should investigate how data brokers including Equifax and Experian have amassed payroll records about most Americans, a small rival urged in a letter to the agency on Monday that was seen by Reuters. From the report: For decades, companies such as Equifax have acquired employee work histories and compensation data from employers to help lenders, landlords, hiring managers and other customers perform background checks of individuals. But these big databases are vulnerable to theft and error, and workers are sometimes surprised their records are included, according to privacy activists. Equifax said it follows all laws and welcomes additional voices in the industry. In the letter to the FTC, San Mateo, California-based startup Certree said that Equifax and Experian are providing financial incentives like a slice of their revenue to employers to gain exclusive access to payroll data. Equifax also has deals with payroll software vendors that help employers process paychecks. The letter describes the agreements as anticompetitive and potentially unlawful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex Mashinsky -- chief executive and cofounder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network -- is stepping down. From a report: Mr. Mashinsky submitted his letter of resignation to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors on Tuesday, according to Mr. Mashinsky's law firm "I regret that my continued role as CEO has become an increasing distraction, and I am very sorry about the difficult financial circumstances members of our community are facing," Mr. Mashinsky said in his resignation letter. Mr. Mashinsky launched Celsius in 2017 with two partners, often pitching it as a safer and better alternative than traditional banks. Celsius had the same basic model as a consumer bank -- such as taking deposits and making loans -- though it paid far more on deposits than a federally regulated bank. In less than five years, Celsius grew into one of the biggest crypto lenders, with more than $20 billion in assets at its peak, the company said last year. That all changed when cryptocurrency started plunging this year. In June, Celsius paused all withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in July, saying that it owed customers nearly $4.7 billion in crypto.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ramped up his criticism of decentralized finance on Tuesday, saying the monetary policy normalization worldwide has "revealed significant structural issues in the DeFi ecosystem" and exposed "conflict of interest," as he called for more appropriate regulation. From a report: "Within the DeFi ecosystem, there are these very significant transparency, lack of transparency [issues]," he said at a conference hosted by the Banque of France. From the financial stability standpoint, Powell said, "the interaction between the DeFi ecosystem and traditional banking system and traditional financial system is not that large at this point. So we were able to witness the DeFi winter that did not have significant impacts on the banking system and broader financial stability. That's a good thing. I think it demonstrates the weaknesses in, and the work that needs to do be done around regulation carefully and thoughtfully. It gives us a little bit of time, but that situation will not persist indefinitely. Ultimately that's not a stable equilibrium and we need to be very careful about how crypto activities are taken within regulatory parameter. In any case, wherever they take place, there is a real need for more appropriate regulation so that as DeFi expands and starts to touch more retail customers, more appropriate regulation is in place."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world's first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. From a report: Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched. The livestream showed images taken by DART's camera as the cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. The $330 million mission, some seven years in development, was devised to determine if a spacecraft is capable of changing the trajectory of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force, nudging it off course just enough to keep Earth out of harm's way. Whether the experiment succeeded beyond accomplishing its intended impact will not be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials hailed the immediate outcome of Monday's test, saying the spacecraft achieved its purpose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Ukrainian government on Monday warned that the Kremlin is planning to carry out "massive cyberattacks" targeting power grids and other critical infrastructure in Ukraine and in the territories of its allies. "By the cyberattacks, the enemy will try to increase the effect of missile strikes on electricity supply facilities, primarily in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine," an advisory warned. "The occupying command is convinced that this will slow down the offensive operations of the Ukrainian Defence Forces." Monday's advisory alluded to two cyberattacks the Russian government carried out -- first in 2015 and then almost exactly one year later -- that deliberately left Ukrainians without power during one of the coldest months of the year. The attacks were seen as a proof-of-concept and test ground of sorts for disrupting Ukraine's power supply. "The experience of cyberattacks on Ukraine's energy systems in 2015 and 2016 will be used when conducting operations," the Ukrainian government said on Monday. It's hard to assess the chances of a successful hacking campaign against Ukraine's power grids. Earlier this year, Ukraine's CERT-UA said it successfully detected a new strain of Industroyer inside the network of a regional Ukrainian energy firm. Industroyer2 reportedly was able to temporarily switch off power to nine electrical substations but was stopped before a major blackout could be triggered. [...] But researchers from Mandiant and elsewhere also note that Sandworm, the name for the Kremlin-backed group behind the power grid hacks, is among the most elite hacking groups in the world. They are known for stealth, persistence, and remaining hidden inside targeted organizations for months or even years before surfacing. Besides an attack on electrical grids, Monday's advisory also warned of other forms of disruptions the country expected Russia to ramp up. "The Kremlin also intends to increase the intensity of DDoS attacks on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine's closest allies, primarily Poland and the Baltic states," the advisory stated. "We don't have any direct knowledge or data to make an assessment on Ukraine's capability to defend its grid, but we do know that CERT-UA stopped the deployment of INDUSTROYER.V2 malware that targeted Ukraine's electric substations earlier this year," Chris Sistrunk, technical manager of Mandiant Industrial Control Systems Consulting, wrote in an email. "Based on that, and what we know about the Ukrainian people's overall resolve, it's increasingly clear that one of the reasons cyberattacks in Ukraine have been dampened is because its defenders are very aggressive and very good at confronting Russian actors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix is forming an in-house game studio in Helsinki, Finland to create "world-class" original games without ads or in-app purchases. Engadget reports: While it's too soon for details of the games themselves, Zynga and EA alumnus Marko Lastikka will serve as director. Helsinki is a good fit as the home to some of the "best game talent" on the planet, according to Netflix. This includes The Walking Dead mobile developer Next Games (which Netflix bought in March). Netflix has purchased multiple developers, including Boss Fight and Oxenfree creator Night School Studio, but hasn't built a developer from scratch until now. You won't see the first fruits of this internal studio for "years," Netflix says. Still, this and recent acquisitions show how the company's gaming strategy is evolving. Where Netflix initially depended on outsiders' games, including slightly tweaked versions of existing titles, it's increasingly focused on truly unique projects you won't find elsewhere. In theory, more people will subscribe to Netflix with the game library in mind.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noam Izenberg, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's applied physics laboratory, is making a case for sending a crewed mission to examine Venus en route to Mars. "Venus gets a bad rap because it's got such a difficult surface environment," said Izenberg in a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last week. "The current Nasa paradigm is moon-to-Mars. We're trying to make the case for Venus as an additional target on that pathway." The Guardian reports: There are notable downsides. Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission. In its favor, however, Venus is significantly closer, making a return mission doable in a year, compared with a potentially three-year roundtrip to Mars. A flyby would be scientifically valuable and could provide crucial experience of a lengthy deep-space mission as a precursor to visiting Mars, according to a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris last week. Izenberg said there were practical arguments for incorporating a Venus flyby into the crewed Mars landing that Nasa hopes to achieve by the late 2030s. Although the planet is in the "wrong" direction, performing a slingshot around Venus -- known as a gravity assist - could reduce the travel time and the fuel required to get to the red planet. That would make a crewed flyby trip to Venus a natural stepping stone towards Nasa's ultimate goal. "You'd be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission," he said. "And it's not just going out into the middle of nowhere -- it would have a bit of cachet as you'd be visiting another planet for the first time." "We need to understand how we can get out of the cradle and move into the universe," he added. There is also renewed scientific interest in Venus. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets raises the question of how many might be habitable, and scientists want to understand how and why Venus, a planet so similar to our own in size, mass and distance from the sun, ended up with infernal surface conditions. Izenberg said a Venus flyby "doesn't yet have traction" in the broader space travel community, although there are advocates within Nasa, including its chief economist, Alexander Macdonald, who led the IAC session. Of course, there are those who push back against such an idea. "It's really not a nice place to go. It's a hellish environment and the thermal challenges for a human mission would be quite considerable," said Prof Andrew Coates, a space scientist at UCL's Mullard space science laboratory. He said Venus was rightly a focus of scientific exploration, but that "a human flyby really wouldn't add very much."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Passenger rail service Amtrak is aiming to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 to reduce its impact on the environment. Amtrak on Thursday announced efforts to hit that mark will involve reducing the use of diesel fuel and phasing in renewable fuels in its network over the next decades. The rail service said it plans to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 by investing in new fuel-cell, hydrogen and battery technologies. Funds from President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law will be used to help Amtrak develop a more sustainable fleet, expand service and revamp part of the rail's aging infrastructure. The legislation includes $66 billion in rail funding, the largest federal investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Amtrak executives said setting clear goals to reduce emissions is particularly important for attracting "a new generation of travelers who are conscious of their environmental impact." Amtrak last year announced a $7.3 billion investment to procure 83 new trains that will operate mostly along the Northeast Corridor, which include some of the first hybrid-electric powered trains. The trains will start replacing older trains, some of which are nearly 50 years old, in 2024. The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 27 percent of total emissions in 2020. Rail makes up just 2 percent of transportation emissions, while cars and trucks make up more than 80 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. lawmakers and TikTok are hammering out a plan, under which the short-form video app would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its parent firm, China's ByteDance to sell it, the New York Times reported on Monday. Reuters reports: TikTok and the Biden administration have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns but are still deciding on a potential agreement, the Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the report but said the app was confident about being able to "fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns." TikTok's parent company ByteDance was ordered to divest the company more than two years ago over fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's communist government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems. Phoronix reports: Last week was a patch posted for the ACPI processor idle code to avoid an old chipset workaround on modern AMD Zen systems. Since ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002, there has been a "dummy wait op" to deal with some chipsets where STPCLK# doesn't get asserted in time. The dummy I/O read delays further instruction processing until the CPU is fully stopped. This was a problem with at least some AMD Athlon era systems with a VIA chipset... But not a problem with newer chipsets of roughly the past two decades. With this workaround still being applied to even modern AMD systems, K Prateek Nayak discovered: "Sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases. One such workload is tbench where a massive performance degradation can be observed during certain runs." At least for Tbench, this long-time, unconditional workaround in the Linux kernel has been hurting AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC performance in select workloads. This workaround hasn't affected modern Intel systems since those newer Intel platforms use the alternative MWAIT-based intel_idle driver code path instead. The AMD patch evolved into this patch by Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen. That patch to limit the "dummy wait" workaround to old systems is already queued into TIP's x86/urgent branch. With it going the route of "x86/urgent" and for fixing a overzealous workaround that isn't needed on modern hardware, it's likely this patch will be submitted this week still for the Linux 6.0 kernel rather than needing to wait until the next (v6.1) merge window.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ever since American manufacturing entered a long stretch of automation and outsourcing in the late 1970s, every recession has led to the loss of factory jobs that never returned. But the recovery from the pandemic recession has been different: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed -- and then some. The resurgence has not been driven by companies bringing back factory jobs that had moved overseas, nor by the brawny industrial sectors and regions often evoked by President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump and other champions of manufacturing. Instead, the engines in this recovery include pharmaceutical plants, craft breweries and ice-cream makers. The newly created jobs are more likely to be located in the Mountain West and the Southeast than in the classic industrial strongholds of the Great Lakes. American manufacturers cut roughly 1.36 million jobs from February to April of 2020, as Covid-19 shut down much of the economy. As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above pre pandemic levels. Data suggest that the rebound is largely a product of the unique circumstances of the pandemic recession and recovery. Covid-19 crimped global supply chains, making domestic manufacturing more attractive to some companies. Federal stimulus spending helped to power a shift in Americans' buying habits away from services like travel and restaurants and toward goods like cars and sofas, helping domestic factory production -- and with it, job growth -- to bounce back much faster than it did in the previous two recessions. In recessions over the last half century, factories have typically laid off a greater share of workers than other employers in the economy, and they have been slower to add jobs back in recoveries. Often, companies have used those economic inflection points to accelerate their pace of outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, where wages are significantly lower, and to invest in technology that replaces human workers. [...] This time was different. Factory layoffs roughly matched those in the services sector in the depth of the pandemic recession. Economists attribute that break in the trend to many U.S. manufacturers being deemed "essential" during pandemic lockdowns, and the ensuing surge in demand for their products by Americans. Manufacturing jobs quickly rebounded in the spring of 2020, then began to climb at a much faster pace than has been typical for factory job creation in recent decades. Since June 2020, under both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, factories have added more than 30,000 jobs a month."Sectors that hemorrhaged employment in recent recessions have fared much better in this recovery," reports the NYT. They include furniture makers, textile mills, paper products companies and computer equipment makers. "Mr. Biden has pushed a variety of legislative initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing, including direct spending on infrastructure, tax credits and other subsidies for companies like battery makers and semiconductor factories, and new federal procurement requirements that benefit manufacturers located in the United States," adds the report -- all of which could help encourage factory job growth in the coming months and years. Furthermore, the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology could encourage more companies to leave China for the United States, particularly cutting-edge industries like clean energy and advanced computing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple said Monday it is assembling its flagship iPhone 14 in India as the U.S. technology giant looks to shift some production away from China. CNBC reports: "The new iPhone 14 lineup introduces groundbreaking new technologies and important safety capabilities. We're excited to be manufacturing iPhone 14 in India," the company said in a statement. Apple's main iPhone assembler, Foxconn, is manufacturing the devices at its Sriperumbudur factory on the outskirts of Chennai. The Cupertino, California, giant has been manufacturing iPhones in India since 2017 but these were usually older models. This time with the iPhone 14, Apple is producing its latest model in India for the first time, close to the device's launch. Apple introduced the iPhone 14 earlier this month. Apple will sell India-produced phones locally but also export them to other markets globally. Customers in India will begin receiving the locally manufactured devices in the next few days. Earlier this month, JPMorgan analysts said that Apple will move 5% of its global production for the iPhone 14 to India by late 2022. The company could also make 25% of all iPhones by 2025 in India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada has said it is dropping all remaining Covid border restrictions, including vaccine requirements for travelers. The BBC reports: As of 1 October, travelers will also no longer need to provide proof of Covid vaccination, to undergo any testing or to isolate and quarantine. The mask mandate on planes and trains will also be lifted. The ArriveCan app -- used to upload health documents when entering Canada -- will become optional. Federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos said in an announcement on Monday that Canada is "in a much better position" than it was earlier in the pandemic, in part due to availability of Covid-19 vaccines and treatment options. The country's high vaccination rate - with around 82% of the population having received two doses - and a falling death rate are also factors. The report notes that vaccine mandates for travelers entering the U.S. remain in place. Further reading: Japan To Allow Visa-Free Travel After 2 1/2 Years of Mostly Closed BordersRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In the heart of midtown Manhattan lies a multibillion-dollar problem for building owners, the city and thousands of workers. Blocks of decades-old office towers sit partially empty, in an awkward position: too outdated to attract tenants seeking the latest amenities, too new to be demolished or converted for another purpose. It's a situation playing out around the globe as employers adapt to flexible work after the Covid-19 pandemic and rethink how much space they need. Even as people are increasingly called back to offices for at least some of the week, vacancy rates have soared in cities from Hong Kong to London and Toronto. "There's no part of the world that is untouched by the growth of hybrid working," said Richard Barkham, global chief economist for commercial real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. In some cases, companies are simply cutting back on space to reduce their real estate costs. Others are relocating to shiny new towers with top-of-the-line amenities to attract talent and employees who may be reluctant to leave the comforts of working from home. Left behind are older buildings outside of prime locations. The US is likely to have a slower office-market recovery than Asia and Europe because it began the pandemic with a higher vacancy rate, and long-term demand is expected to drop around 10% or more, Barkham said. New York, America's biggest office real estate market, is at the center of the issue. A study this year by professors at Columbia University and New York University estimated that lower tenant demand because of remote work may cut 28%, or $456 billion, off the value of offices across the US. About 10% of that would be in New York City alone. The implications of obsolete buildings stretch across the local economy. Empty offices have led to a cascade of shuttered restaurants and other street-level businesses that depended on daytime worker traffic. And falling building values mean less property-tax revenue for city coffers. A strip on Manhattan's Third Avenue, from 42nd to 59th streets, shows the problem of older properties in stark terms. While New York leasing demand has bounced back toward pre-pandemic levels, the corridor has 29% of office space available for tenants, nearly double the amount four years ago and above the city's overall rate of 19%, according to research from brokerage firm Savills. "There's no easy fix for landlords, who rely on rental income to pay down debt," notes the report. "Some cities are exploring options to turn downtown offices to residential buildings: Calgary, for instance, has an incentive program for such redevelopments. While New York has had some conversions, the hefty costs and zoning and architectural restrictions make it a difficult proposition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I believe that Niemann has cheated more - and more recently - than he has publicly admitted," GM Magnus Carlsen wrote in a much-anticipated statement about GM Hans Niemann's alleged cheating. The world champion posted the statement on Twitter just moments ago. Chess.com reports: Carlsen starts by saying that he is "frustrated" about the situation like the whole chess community is. He then uses the word "cheating," finally becoming more concrete after the mysterious tweet that he sent on September 5, with a video in which Jose Mourinho can be seen saying: "I prefer really not to speak; if I speak I'm in big trouble." Carlsen then confirms what has been mentioned by GM Fabiano Caruana in a recent podcast: that the world champion already considered withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup before the first round, when he heard that Niemann was the last-minute replacement for GM Richard Rapport. The most important phrase in the statement reads: "I believe that Niemann has cheated more â" and more recently -- than that he has publicly admitted." Carlsen, however, doesn't specify if he is referring to online chess or over-the-board chess. Regarding online chess, Niemann has admitted to having cheated twice on Chess.com, when he was 12 and when he was 16 years old, and that he regrets that. In a statement posted on September 9, IM Danny Rensch wrote on behalf of Chess.com: "We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com." Carlsen, who lost his game to Niemann before leaving the Sinquefield Cup, reveals in his statement that he is suspicious about Niemann's play in that game as well. The big question, whether the world champion has hard evidence that shows Niemann has cheated, remains unclear from the statement. It seems Carlsen is restricted for legal reasons, as he writes: "Unfortunately, at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a long-delayed proposal to crack down on spam texts Friday night after Axios asked agency members why it hadn't moved on the issue. From a report: The number of spam text messages -- which can include links or other tricks designed to steal money or personal information -- has exploded, with the volume now exceeding that of robocalls.The proposal, which passed on a 4-0 vote, seeks comment on requiring cellphone companies to block texts from numbers known to be illegal or fraudulent. It had been awaiting a vote at the FCC for nearly a year. The FCC will review feedback on the proposal before writing final rules, a process that can take months. The measure also seeks comment on whether carriers should use third-party analytics providers to inform blocking efforts, and whether the agency should push the wireless industry to authenticate text messages like it does for phone calls to deter robocalls, a senior FCC official told Axios. "The American people are fed up with scam texts, and we need to use every tool we have to do something about it," chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, told Axios ahead of the agency's vote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Helium was touted as the best real-world use case of Web3 technology. But as it struggles to generate revenue, a Forbes investigation found that executives and their friends quietly hoarded the majority of wealth at the project's inception. From a report: A review of hundreds of leaked internal documents, transaction data and interviews with five former Helium employees suggest that as Helium insiders touted the democratized spirit of their "People's Network," they quietly amassed a majority of the tokens earned at the project's start, hoarding much of the wealth generated in its earliest and most lucrative days. Forbes identified 30 digital wallets that appear to be connected to Helium employees, their friends and family and early investors. This group of wallets mined 3.5 million HNT -- almost half of all Helium tokens mined within the first three months of the network's launch in August 2019, according to a Forbes analysis that was confirmed by blockchain forensics firm Certik. Within six months, more than a quarter of all HNT had been mined by insiders -- valued at roughly $250 million when the price of Helium peaked last year. Even after the crypto price crashed, the tokens are still worth $21 million today. Cryptocurrency companies typically compensate early investors and employees for building their offerings with an allotment of tokens, and disclose these rewards in blog posts or white papers. While Helium and its executives have publicly discussed their incentive plan -- a scheme called Helium Security Tokens, or HST, which guarantees about a third of all HNT for insiders -- they haven't previously disclosed the additional windfall taken from Helium's public token supply, worth millions, that was identified by Forbes. This means that at a time when Helium rewards per hotspot were at their highest, insiders claimed a majority of tokens, while little more than 30% went to Helium's community. Each hotspot earned an average 33,000 HNT in August 2019, according to blockchain data; today, each hotspot only earns around 2 HNT per month. Some insiders exploited vulnerabilities known to the company to increase their hauls even more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A beautiful blue flaw in a gem-quality diamond from Botswana is actually a tiny fragment of Earth's deep interior -- and it suggests our planet's mantle contains oceans' worth of water. Scientific American: The flaw, technically called an inclusion, looks like a fish eye: a deep blue center surrounded by a white haze. But it's really a pocket of the mineral ringwoodite from 660 kilometers down, at the boundary between the upper and lower mantle. This is just the second time scientists have found this mineral in a chunk of crystal from this zone, and the sample is the only one of its kind currently known to science. The last example was destroyed during an attempt to analyze its chemistry. [...] The discovery indicates that this very deep zone of Earth is soggy, with vast amounts of water locked up tight within the minerals there. Though this water is chemically bound to the minerals' structure and doesn't flow around like an actual ocean, it does likely play an important role in how the mantle melts. This in turn affects big-picture geology, such as plate tectonics and volcanic activity. For example, water could contribute to the development of areas of mantle upwelling known as plumes, which are hotspots for volcanoes. The stunning bit of diamond-encased mantle was discovered by Tingting Gu, a mineral physicist now at Purdue University, who was at the time doing research at the Gemological Institute of America. Her job was to study rare inclusions found in diamonds. Inclusions are undesirable for jewelry because they cloud a diamond's sparkle. But they're often interesting to scientists because they trap bits of the environment where the diamond formed millennia earlier. The vast majority of diamonds form between about 150 to 200 km below Earth's surface. But a handful come from much deeper. It is often difficult to pinpoint exactly how deep, but the new sample was remarkably accommodating on that front, Gu and her colleagues reported on Monday in a study published in Nature Geoscience. Ringwoodite can only form at incredibly high pressures. It is not found in Earth's crust, but it is sometimes seen trapped in meteorites that underwent major cosmic trauma. In Earth's mantle, ringwoodite exists at the pressures present down to 660 km.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing's long-distance bus drivers have been told to wear electronic wristbands that use emotion-sensing technology to monitor their state of mind. From a report: The move was initiated by the state-run Beijing Public Transport Holding Group, which says it is aimed at protecting public safety. But legal experts have raised privacy concerns and say the wristbands could cause bus drivers undue distress and potentially lead to discrimination. Some 1,800 wristbands were distributed to bus drivers on cross-province and highway routes on Wednesday, the official Beijing Daily reported. It is unclear how many drivers will be required to wear the devices. The report said they would be used to monitor the drivers' vital signs and emotional state in real time to improve safety.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following one of the biggest data breaches in Australian history, the government of Australia is planning to get stricter on requirements for disclosure of cyber attacks. From a report: On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australian radio station 4BC that the government intended to overhaul privacy legislation so that any company suffering a data breach was required to share details with banks about customers who had potentially been affected in an effort to minimize fraud. Under current Australian privacy legislation, companies are prevented from sharing such details about their customers with third parties. The policy announcement was made in the wake of a huge data breach last week, which affected Australia's second-largest telecom company, Optus. Hackers managed to access a vast amount of potentially sensitive information on up to 9.8 million Optus customers -- close to 40 percent of the Australian population. Leaked data included name, date of birth, address, contact information, and in some cases, driver's license or passport ID numbers. Reporting from ABC News Australia suggested the breach may have resulted from an improperly secured API that Optus developed to comply with regulations around providing users multifactor authentication options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British pound on Monday briefly hit a record low against the dollar, extending losses after Britain's new government on Friday announced a sweeping economic overhaul centered around tax cuts and deregulation. Citibank called the move a "huge, unfunded gamble for the U.K. economy." From a report: The pound slumped as low at $1.035 on Monday, breaking the 1985 record, and although it bounced up from those depths it remains down about 19 percent this year. The pound has also fallen against the euro, although not by as much. In other markets, yields on British government bonds hit multiyear highs, meaning that borrowing costs are rising steeply as the government prepares to issue more debt to pay for subsidies on energy bills and other policies. What does the weaker pound mean for the British economy? The drop in the pound poses concerns, since a weaker currency makes imports more expensive. It also makes it more expensive for Britons to travel abroad, since their money doesn't go as far as it did before. British companies, many of which rely on materials imported from other countries, may raise prices to compensate for their higher costs -- putting pressure on inflation, which is already running near 40-year highs. [...] People and companies abroad buying goods and services from Britain could benefit from cheaper prices. And businesses in Britain that generate revenue elsewhere will earn more when that money is converted back into pounds. For Americans and others spending dollars or euros while traveling to Britain, their trips will be more affordable than they would have been even a few months ago. Further reading: Fed official warns UK tax cuts increase risk of global recession.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most mission scientists would wince at the thought of their spacecraft being smashed to smithereens. But for those behind Nasa's Dart probe, anything short of total destruction will be chalked up as a failure. From a report: The $330m spacecraft is due to slam head-on into an asteroid about 11m kilometres above the Indian Ocean soon after midnight on Monday. The impact, at nearly seven kilometres a second, will obliterate the half-tonne probe, all in the name of planetary defence. Not that Dimorphos, the asteroid in question, poses any threat to humanity. The Dart, or double asteroid redirection test, is an experiment, the first mission ever to assess whether asteroids can be deflected should one ever be found on a collision course with Earth. A well-placed nudge could avert Armageddon, or so the thinking goes, and spare humans the same fate as the dinosaurs. "It's a very complicated game of cosmic billiards," said Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer and member of the Nasa Dart investigation team at Queen's University Belfast. "What we want to do is use as much energy [as we can] from Dart to move the asteroid." With telescopes constantly scanning the skies, scientists hope to have some notice if an asteroid were ever to present a major threat. "If we are able to see far enough in advance and know that an asteroid might be a problem, pushing it out of the way will be much safer than the big Hollywood idea of blowing it up," said Catriona McDonald, a PhD student at Warwick University. The Dart mission launched from Vandenberg space force base in November last year. On Monday night, mission controllers will hand control to Dart's software and let the probe steer itself into oblivion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter nunya_bizns writes: President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked. U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and 13 other European telecoms providers on Monday made their strongest push for Big Tech to share network costs, citing the energy crisis and EU climate change goals. From a report: The call comes as the European Commission prepares to seek feedback from both sides before making a legislative proposal that could force tech companies to help pay for the roll-out of 5G and fibre cables across the 27-country European Union. The sector which invests some 50 billion euros ($48.5 billion) annually in infrastructure, needs more funding and urgently, the chief executives of the companies said in a statement. "Costs of planning and construction works are increasing. Prices for fibre optic cables, for example, have almost doubled in the first semester 2022. Similarly, the hikes in energy prices and in the prices of other inputs are also hitting the connectivity sector," they said. "Timely action is a must: Europe missed out on many of the opportunities offered by the consumer internet. It must now swiftly build strength for the age of the metaverses," the CEO's said. Europe's telecoms operators argue that U.S. tech firms such as Alphabet's Google, Meta and Netflix account for more than half of internet traffic and should bear some of the cost of upgrading infrastructure. Big Tech has rebuffed such requests, saying they are already investing in equipment and technologies to deliver content more efficiently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.