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Updated 2024-11-28 20:00
Senate Introduces Bill To Allow Farmers To Fix Their Own Equipment
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate could help make it easier for farmers [...] to repair their tractors independently. The legislation would require agriculture equipment manufacturers to make spare parts, instruction manuals and software codes publicly available, allowing farmers to fix devices by themselves or hire third-party mechanics of their own choosing. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said in an interview that he has heard from many farmers who reported that difficulties repairing equipment hurt their businesses. "We've got to figure out ways to empower farmers to make sure they can stay on the land. This is one of the ways to do it," Tester said. "I think that the more we can empower farmers to be able to control their own destiny, which is what this bill does, the safer food chains are going to be." Tester said farmers often reported that company-authorized repairs were costly and could be handled only by licensed technicians who may take days, or even weeks, to show up. That type of delay can have serious impacts on the delicate harvest cycle for planting and reaping crops. [...] The rules about farming equipment could help boost the wider "right to repair" movement, which has gained steam across the country in recent years. Consumer rights groups like U.S. PIRG, a federation of nonprofit public interest research groups, or PIRGs, say people have a fundamental right to control devices they already own, especially when they need to be fixed. Over the last few decades, they say, companies have made third-party repairs nearly impossible by locking software, writing prohibitive warranties or restricting spare parts. The Senate bill is the latest effort to tackle the issue in Congress, following similar legislation sponsored in the House last year by Rep. Joseph Morelle, D-N.Y. But unlike some of the other proposed laws, the Senate bill narrowly targets farmers, who have become one of the most vocal groups advocating for more repair regulations. Tester said: "I think when you get into other areas like cellphones and TVs and all that kind of stuff, it brings in all sorts of other issues that I am personally not as familiar with as agriculture. That's not to say that those other issues aren't really, really important. What it is to say is that I know this issue reasonably well, and I thought this is an issue that we need to deal with, and the sooner the better."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Says Windows May Need Up To 8 Hours of Online Time To Update
According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully. Tom's Hardware reports: Another revelation in the post is that Microsoft tracks how long PCs are connected to Windows Update, calling the statistics "Update Connectivity." The data is available to IT managers in the InTune app, a component of the Endpoint management suite. The post details Microsoft's attempts to figure out why some Windows devices aren't getting the latest quality and feature updates, and discovered that two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably. Microsoft's figures show that 50 percent of Windows devices left behind by Windows Update and running a build of Windows 10 that's no longer serviced do not spend enough time connected to have the patches downloaded and installed in the background. This figure drops to 25 percent for customers using a serviced build of the operating system that lags behind in security updates by 60 days or more. The goods news, as noted by Tom's Hardware, is that "Windows 11 updates are smaller than their Windows 10 counterparts due to improved compression [and] new Microsoft Graph APIs," which should help speed up the update process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Backblaze Uncovers the Most Reliable Hard Drives
Backblaze, a cloud storage service that's been running hundreds of thousands of storage drives to keep an eye on reliability, has issued its latest report. ZDNet summarizes the major findings: Over 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its pool of drives, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of thee, 3,760 are boot drives and 203,168 are data drives. There's a lot of information in the report to look at, but there are two standout parts from the report: - The oldest drive is the most reliable: 6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years) yet incredibly these also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11 percent.- Newer drives are also doing really well: 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91 percent, respectively. Backblaze had also been experiencing problems with the 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that following a firmware update the reliability of these drives has improved dramatically. Further reading: Seagate HDDs Top and Bottom Backblaze's 2021 Failure Rates Data (Tom's Hardware)Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Startup Investors Cut Valuations Amid Tech Stock Rout, Dismal IPOs
The recent stock rout is rattling the multitrillion-dollar market for startups after a long run of record investments, nosebleed valuations and rapid-fire deal-making. From a report: Venture capitalists say a significant reset in investment behavior is beginning to take hold that is poised to reduce initial public offerings, leave some companies short of funding and crimp valuations. Investors say several large startup backers are cutting back their investments, curtailing a flow that sprayed at full blast for most of the pandemic, particularly for older, more mature startups. And venture firms say they are advising their companies to prepare to conserve cash in a tougher funding environment. Tiger Global Management, one of the most prolific startup investors of the last two years, in recent weeks has been renegotiating investments that had been under discussion for numerous companies, reducing the valuations, people familiar with the deals said. Venture capitalists say other investors are doing the same. Dbt Labs, a fast-expanding business-software company, recently scaled back its fundraising plans. It struck a deal with investors for a funding round that values the Philadelphia-based company around $4 billion, down from the more than $6 billion it initially negotiated, according to people familiar with the deal. Jared Carmel, managing partner at Manhattan Venture Partners, a startup investor and adviser to venture-backed companies and their shareholders, said he watched prices for certain stock purchases of some private companies fall 10% in the past month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Israel Speeds Roll-Out of Laser Defense System
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Israel is accelerating the roll-out of laser-based interceptors as part of a plan to surround itself with such technologies and reduce the high costs currently incurred when shooting down aerial threats, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday. Lifting the veil on prototype interceptors that would use lasers to super-heat incoming drones or the kinds of rockets favored by Iran-backed guerrillas, Israeli defense officials predicted last June such systems would be ready for action in 2025. But Bennett announced a dramatically shortened timeline. "Within a year already the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will bring into action a laser-based interception system, first experimentally, and later operationally, first in the south, then in other places," he said in a speech. "And this will enable us, as the years advance, to surround Israel with a wall of lasers which will protect us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats," he told Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. The laser system would be an addition to Israel's current air defenses based on Iron Dome, David's Sling and Arrow -- systems that launch interceptor missiles costing tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars each. "The equation will be overturned -- they will invest much, and we little," Bennett said. "If we can intercept a missile or rocket with an electrical pulse that costs a few dollars, we will essentially neutralize the ring of fire that Iran has set up ... This new generation of air defense can also serve our friends in the region, who are also exposed to grave threats from Iran and its proxies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
VR to the ER: Metaverse Early Adopters Prove Accident Prone
Tally includes broken vases, dislocated shoulders, injured girlfriends; "Why don't you go to the gym like a normal person?" WSJ: A few hours after Toby Robicelli first strapped on the $300 virtual-reality headset he got for Christmas, the Baltimore teenager, who was playing a shooter game called "Superhot VR," lost his balance and fractured his kneecap. "We set it up around 2:00," said Toby's mother, Allison Robicelli, of the tech gadget, "and by 8:00 we were on our way to the ER." She fainted when she saw his leg, she said, and Toby, 14, is now using crutches. Sales of VR headsets rose more than 70% last year from 2020, according to International Data Corp., to 7.9 million units. Demand is driven in part by rising hype around the metaverse, a term proponents use to describe a future 3-D version of the internet, comprising virtual worlds where people will get together to work, learn and play. With interest in the devices growing, so is their reputation for being a source of pain and embarrassment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dorsey Says Zuckerberg Should Have Focused on Bitcoin, Not Diem
Block Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey criticized Meta Platforms' failed cryptocurrency project, Diem, saying the company's time would have been better spent focused on advancing Bitcoin. From a report: Dorsey said Tuesday that Meta's approach to Diem, a proposed cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra that came to an unceremonious end this week, wasn't open enough. Instead, Dorsey says Meta was too focused on driving people to its own suite of products, like WhatsApp and Instagram. "They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook -- probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons -- but there were also some reasons that would indicate trying to get more and more people onto the Facebook ecosystem," Dorsey said Tuesday at the MicroStrategy World conference. "They did that instead of using an open protocol and standard like Bitcoin. Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time," he added. "Those two years or three years, or however long it's been, could have been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world, which would also benefit their Messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How the Fossil Fuel Industry is Pushing Plastics on the World
We're in the midst of an energy transition. Renewable power and electric vehicles are getting cheaper, the grid is getting greener, and oil and gas companies are getting nervous. That's why the fossil fuel giants are looking towards petrochemicals, and plastics in particular, as their next major growth market. From a report: "Plastics is the Plan B for the fossil fuel industry," said Judith Enck, Founder and President of the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics. Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, are set to drive nearly half of oil demand growth by midcentury, according to the International Energy Agency. That outpaces even hard-to-decarbonize sectors like aviation and shipping. "Every company who is currently engaged in producing plastic, if you look at their capital budgets for the next two to three years, they're all talking about expansion plans," said Ramesh Ramachandran, CEO of No Plastic Waste, an initiative from the Mindaroo Foundation that's working to create a market-based approach to a circular plastics economy. Yet much of the developed world is already awash in plastics. So fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are relying on emerging economies in Asia and Africa to drive growth. Alan Gelder of Wood Mackenzie forecasts that every year through 2050, there will be 10 million metric tons of growth in the market for petrochemicals, which are used to make plastics and other products. He says much of that will be shipped overseas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NSO Offered US Mobile Security Firm 'Bags of Cash', Whistleblower Claims
A whistleblower has alleged that an executive at NSO Group offered a US-based mobile security company "bags of cash" in exchange for access to a global signalling network used to track individuals through their mobile phone, according to a complaint that was made to the US Department of Justice. The Guardian: The allegation, which dates back to 2017 and was made by a former mobile security executive named Gary Miller, was disclosed to federal authorities and to the US congressman Ted Lieu, who said he conducted his own due diligence on the claim and found it "highly disturbing." Details of the allegation by Miller were then sent in a letter by Lieu to the Department of Justice. "The privacy implications to Americans and national security implications to America of NSO Group accessing mobile operator signalling networks are vast and alarming," Lieu wrote in his letter. The letter was shared with the Guardian and other media partners on the Pegasus project, a media consortium led by the Paris-based Forbidden Stories that has investigated NSO and published a series of stories about how governments around the world have used the company's spyware to target activists, journalists, and lawyers, among others.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gmail's Next Big Redesign Starts Rolling Out Next Week
Google will finally start rolling out the Gmail redesign it first showed off last year. The company is calling the interface in the update the "integrated view" because the goal is to integrate Google's latest messaging service, Google Chat (a Slack competitor and the successor to Hangouts) and Google Meet (a Zoom competitor) into Gmail. From a report: The main section will remain mostly the same, but there are plenty of changes coming to Gmail's navigation sidebar. Currently, the Gmail sidebar houses the sections you would expect, like the Inbox, Drafts, Trash, and your list of labels. The redesign will add a second, new higher-level navigation panel to the left side of the page, letting users jump between Gmail, Google Chat, Spaces (Google Chat group chats), and Google Meet. Besides the four app-navigation options, the new sidebar also has a stack of icons at the bottom, and it's not entirely clear what they are. They look like chat profile pictures, so they could be either active chats or starred contacts. Since no one has tried this interface yet, we don't know many details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Covid-Infected HIV Patient Developed Mutations, Study Shows
A South African woman suffering from inadequately treated HIV, and who harbored Covid-19 for nine months saw the respiratory virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, according to a study. From a report: Once the 22-year-old adhered to the anti-retroviral medication used to treat HIV and her immune system strengthened she was able to overcome the Covid-19 infection within six to nine weeks, the study, led by scientists from Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal showed. The research has not been peer reviewed. The study adds to evidence that Covid-19 may mutate rapidly when harbored by immunosuppressed individuals, such as those not taking medication to treat HIV, and this may lead to the development of new variants. The beta variant, which the patient in the study was infected with, was discovered in South Africa, as was omicron. "This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants," the scientists said, stressing that it was still a hypothesis. "Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mozilla Rolls Out New Privacy Features To Its Mobile and Desktop VPN
Mozilla is rolling out new updates to its mobile and desktop VPN offerings, the company announced on Tuesday. From a report: With the launch of Mozilla VPN 2.7, the company is bringing one of Firefox's popular add-ons, Multi-Account Containers, to the desktop platform and also introducing a multi-hop feature to the Android and iOS version of the VPN service. Firefox's Multi-Account Containers allow users to separate different parts of their online activities, such as work, shopping and banking. Instead of having to open a new window or different browser to check your work email, you can isolate that activity in a container tab, which prevents other sites from tracking your activity across the web. The company says combining the add-on with Mozilla's VPN adds an extra layer of protection to users' compartmentalized browsing activity and also adds extra protection to their locational information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The UN is Testing Technology That Processes Data Confidentially
How to analyse data without revealing their secrets? From a report: Data are valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be. Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable. A lot of commercial data are similarly sequestered. For example, firms have more granular and timely information on the economy than governments can obtain from surveys. But such intelligence would be useful to rivals. If companies could be certain it would remain secret, they might be more willing to make it available to officialdom. A range of novel data-processing techniques might make such sharing possible. These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development. But they are about to get a boost from a project launched by the United Nations' statistics division. The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome. The first such effort, which actually began last summer, before the PETs Lab's formal inauguration, analysed import and export data from national statistical offices in America, Britain, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, to look for anomalies. Those could be a result of fraud, of faulty record keeping or of innocuous re-exporting. For the pilot scheme, the researchers used categories already in the public domain -- in this case international trade in things such as wood pulp and clocks. They thus hoped to show that the system would work, before applying it to information where confidentiality matters. They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data. That is mathematically complex, but possible. The findings are then sent back to the original inquirer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Global Count Estimates Earth Has 73,000 Tree Species, 14% More Than Reported
There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species. From a report: Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38 million trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them. The study found there are about 14% more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis. "It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests," said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US. "Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece." Despite being among the largest and most widespread organisms, there are still thousands of trees to be discovered, with 40% of unknown species believed to be in South America, according to the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Some of these undocumented species would probably have been known to indigenous communities but some, in the most inaccessible regions, may have never been found before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FTC To Review Microsoft's $68.7B Deal To Buy Activision Blizzard
The US Federal Trade Commission will undertake an antitrust review of Microsoft's proposed acquisition of scandal-plagued video game giant Activision Blizzard, reported Bloomberg on Monday. CNET: Microsoft last month announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal valued at $68.7 billion. The deal, expected to close within the next 18 months, would make Microsoft the world's third-largest video game maker and give it control of popular franchises including the war simulation series Call of Duty and the fantasy behemoth World of Warcraft. The FTC will reportedly oversee the review instead of the Justice Department, which also has authority over antitrust enforcement. It review will look at whether combining Microsoft, which makes Xbox consoles, and Activision Blizzard could harm competition by limiting rivals' access to major games, according to Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Germany To Bolster Chip Sector After Scuppering Siltronic Sale
Germany is planning to bolster its semiconductor industry after the government thwarted the takeover of a local supplier, raising questions about the country's technology strategy. From a report: Chancellor Olaf Scholz's administration is working on programs to invest in the chip sector, which the government considers central to Germany's energy shift, according to a government official. With the approval process in its final days, Economy Minister Robert Habeck met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels last week to ensure that plans to invest billions of euros in cleaner technologies would pass state-aid scrutiny, said the official, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Germany's new government derailed GlobalWafers Co's $5 billion takeover of Munich-based Siltronic AG by allowing a Monday deadline to grant approval to lapse without a decision, despite reviewing the deal for more than a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Android Messages Beta Starts Properly Displaying iOS Message Reactions
Google is widely rolling out a new Google Messages feature to beta users that allows the Android messaging app to correctly interpret emoji reactions sent from the iOS Messages app, 9to5Google reports. From a report: The feature appears to be live in version 20220121_02_RC00 of the app, according to Droid-Life, but not for every user. Although it didn't work on every phone we tried, we were able to get it working on an Oppo Find X3 Pro, which is more than can be said for when the feature initially started appearing last November. The feature fixes a long-standing issue that can affect SMS chats between iPhone and Android users. When an iPhone user reacts to an Android message with emoji, the Android user typically sees this reaction sent as an entirely separate text message, resulting in confusion and lots of unnecessary clutter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
India Proposes a 30% Tax on Crypto and NFTs Income
India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: Income from the the transfer of any virtual assets will be taxed at 30%, the nation's finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Tuesday. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, she also proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. "No deduction in respect of any expenditure or allowance shall be allowed while computing such income except cost of acquisition. Further, loss from transfer of digital asset cannot be set off against any other income," she said in one of New Delhi's most remarkable tech and business-focused federal budgets. "Gift of virtual digital asset is also proposed to be taxed at the hand of the recipient."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DARPA's ROCKn Program Aims To Make Optical Atomic Clocks Portable
DARPA has announced a new initiative called the Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which will look to develop a practical, super-accurate optical atomic clock that is robust and small enough to fit inside a military aircraft, warship, or field vehicle. New Atlas reports: Ignoring a lot of technical details, a conventional atomic clock works by using a beam of microwaves to measure the frequency of the target atoms, but by replacing the microwaves with light, the accuracy is boosted by a factor of 100. In fact, such optical clocks are so accurate that the most advanced wouldn't gain or lose a second through the entire lifespan of the universe. Such optical atomic clocks have been built, but they're still huge, delicate, room-filling machines that aren't practical for military application. The goal of DARPA's ROCKn program is to study the basic physics of the principle behind the optical clock and find a way to make optical atomic clocks with low size, weight, and power (SWaP). Not only that, they will be more precise and accurate than current state-of-the-art atomic clocks. To do this, ROCKn will first look to produce a robust, high-precision small portable optical clock that can maintain picosecond accuracy for 100 seconds at a time. This clock would be small enough to install in a fighter jet or satellite and tough enough to withstand the temperatures, acceleration, and vibrational noise of such an environment. The second stage will aim to create a larger transportable version that can be used in a Navy ship or field unit that is accurate to a nanosecond for up to 30 days without an outside GPS signal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Academic Journal Claims It Fingerprints PDFs For 'Ransomware,' Not Surveillance
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: One of the world's largest publishers of academic papers said it adds a unique fingerprint to every PDF users download in an attempt to prevent ransomware, not to prevent piracy. Elsevier defended the practice after an independent researcher discovered the existence of the unique fingerprints and shared their findings on Twitter last week. "The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers -- there is no metadata, PII [Personal Identifying Information] or personal data captured by these," an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. "Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry." When asked what risks he was referring to, the spokesperson sent a list of links to news articles about ransomware. However, Elsevier has a long history of pursuing people who pirate or share its paywalled academic articles. [...] It's unclear exactly how fingerprinting every PDF downloaded could actually prevent ransomware. Jonny Saunders, a neuroscience PhD candidate at University of Oregon, who discovered the practice, said he believes Elsevier is trying to surveil its users and prevent people from sharing research without paying the company. "The subtext there is pretty loud to me," Saunders told Motherboard in an online chat. "Those breaches/ransoms are really a pretext for saying 'universities need to lock down accounts so people can't skim PDFs. When you have stuff that you don't want other people to give away for free, you want some way of finding out who is giving it away, right?" "Saying that the unique identifiers *themselves* don't contain PII is a semantic dodge: the way identifiers like these work is to be able to match them later with other identifying information stored at the time of download like browser fingerprint, institutional credentials, etc," Saunders added. "Justifying them as a tool to protect against ransomware is a straightforward admission that these codes are intended to identify the downloader: how would they help if not by identifying the compromised account or system?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
World's Fastest Gaming Monitor Hits 500 Hz Refresh Rate
According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world's first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom's Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company's 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which "only" top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE's monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Website Fined By German Court For Leaking Visitor's IP Address Via Google Fonts
Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website $110 for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font. The Register reports: The decision, by Landgericht Munchen's third civil chamber in Munich, found that the website, by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, passed the unidentified plaintiff's IP address to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason for doing so. And that violates Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That is to say, when the plaintiff visited the website, the page made the user's browser fetch a font from Google Fonts to use for some text, and this disclosed the netizen's IP address to the US internet giant. This kind of hot-linking is normal with Google Fonts; the issue here is that the visitor apparently didn't give permission for their IP address to be shared. The website could have avoided this drama by self-hosting the font, if possible. The decision says IP addresses represent personal data because it's theoretically possible to identify the person associated with an IP address, and that it's irrelevant whether the website or Google has actually done so. The ruling directs the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of 250,000 euros for each violation, or up to six months in prison, for continued improper use of Google Fonts. Google Fonts is widely deployed -- the Google Fonts API is used by about 50m websites. The API allows websites to style text with Google Fonts stored on remote servers -- Google's or a CDN's -- that get fetched as the page loads. Google Fonts can be self-hosted to avoid running afoul of EU rules and the ruling explicitly cites this possibility to assert that relying on Google-hosted Google Fonts is not defensible under the law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts
A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter's Algorithm Favors the Political Right, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter's algorithm amplifies their opponents' voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS. The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their experiences. It wouldn't have been possible to study such a large number of users that way. Instead, a computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. [...] The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources. Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176%). In acknowledgement of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum. To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets. Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum. This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets. The authors of the study point out that the algorithms "might be influenced by the way different political groups operate," notes The Conversation. "So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
8 In 10 App Developers Back Measure To Rein In Google and Apple, Poll Finds
Eighty-four percent of app developers support an antitrust bill aimed at curtailing the market power of Apple's and Google's app stores, according to a poll (PDF) from the Coalition for App Fairness released Monday. The Hill reports: The industry group for app developers is pushing Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that would block app stores from favoring their own in-house apps in searches, requiring developers to use their payment systems and preventing users from downloading apps from third-party stores. Developers surveyed by the group complained about exorbitant fees charged by the largest app stores -- Apple charges a 30 percent commission on app store sales for large developers -- and expressed how they'd experienced difficulty getting their apps featured or accepted by app stores. Just 13 percent of app developers surveyed oppose the bill. [...] The poll, conducted by ClearPath Strategies, surveyed 190 app developers in 11 states between December 2021 and January 2022. The margin of error is plus or minus 7.11 percentage points. "The evidence is clear -- app developers want the Open App Markets Act to pass so that they can have the opportunity to compete in a fair digital marketplace," Meghan DiMuzio, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, said in a statement. "For too long, developers have been harmed by gatekeepers' monopolistic practices, and consumers have suffered from less choice and innovation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The New York Times Purchases Wordle
The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures." The newspaper says it'll remain "free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay." From the report: Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created the game as a gift for his partner. It was released to the public in October, and it exploded in popularity in a matter of months. Ninety people played the game on Nov. 1, Mr. Wardle said. Nearly two months later, 300,000 people played it. To play the game, people are required to guess a predetermined five-letter word in six tries. The yellow and green squares indicate that the Wordle player has guessed a correct letter, or a combined correct letter and placement. The buzz around the game can be attributed to the spoiler-free scoring grid that allows players to share their Wordle wins across social media, group chats and more. The game's creator, Josh Wardle, announced the sale in a tweet, writing: "If you've followed along with the story of Wordle, you'll know that NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me." He adds: "I've long admired the NYT's approach to their games and the respect with which they treat their players. Their values are aligned with mine on these matters and I'm thrilled that they will be stewards of the game moving forward."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BlackBerry Sells Mobile and Messaging Patents For $600 Million
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the downfall of its smartphone business. Today the company announced a sale of its prized patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is "Catapult IP Innovations Inc.," a new company BlackBerry describes as "a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the BlackBerry patent assets." BlackBerry says the patents are for "mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking." These are going to be the patents surrounding BlackBerry's phones, QWERTY keyboards, and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). BlackBerry most recently weaponized these patents against Facebook Messenger in 2018, which covered ideas like muting a message thread and displaying notifications as a numeric icon badge. BlackBerry -- back when it was called RIM -- was a veteran of the original smartphone patent wars, though, and went after companies like Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s. If the name "Catapult IP Innovations" didn't give it away, weaponizing BlackBerry's patents is the most obvious outcome of this deal. According to the press release, Catapult's funding for the $600 million deal is just a $450 million loan, which will immediately be given to BlackBerry in cash. The remaining $150 million is a promissory note with the first payment due in three years. That means Catapult is now a new company with a huge amount of debt, no products, and no cash flow. Assuming the plan isn't to instantly go bankrupt, Catapult needs to start monetizing BlackBerry's patents somehow, which presumably means suing everyone it believes is in violation of its newly acquired assets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sony Buys 'Destiny' Game Developer Bungie for $3.6 Billion
Sony Group is purchasing Bungie, the U.S. video game developer behind the popular Destiny franchise, for $3.6 billion to bolster its stable of game-making studios. From a report: The deal announced on Monday is the third significant video-game acquisition announced this month, following Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion two weeks ago and Take Two Interactive snagging mobile game leader Zynga on Jan. 10. Buying Bungie will give Sony one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with the massive Call of Duty series, which Sony's main rival now owns through Activision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Governors Asked To Sign Compact Committing To K-12 CS Expansion
theodp writes: At the 2022 Winter meeting of the National Governors Association (NGA), Arkansas Governor and NGA Chair ASA Hutchinson called on attendees to rally together to advance K-12 computer science education across the country. The pitch was part of Hutchinson's year-long CS evangelism initiative, which the NGA notes enjoys the support of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. In video from the event, Hutchinson gives kudos to tech-bankrolled Code.org for pushing the national expansion of K-12 CS, and calls on 35 of his fellow Governors to join their 15 peers who are already members of the Code.org-led advocacy group Govs for CS. In closing, Hutchinson informs the Governors they'll be asked to sign a compact committing to expanding access to CS education in their states (to be unveiled at NGA's Summer meeting), and plays a short video that challenges the audience with a question: "Will it be American students who learn to code," Hutchinson asks, "or will industry be required to go overseas to find the talent that we need here in the United States of America?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
XCKD's Randall Munroe Announces What If? 2
XKCD creator Randall Munroe has announced his latest science book: What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which will delve into new out-of-the-box questions that Munroe attempts to answer with hard scientific facts and research. From a report: What If? 2 follows 2014's original What If? book -- which itself was borne out of an XKCD spinoff blog -- that saw Munroe examine absurd questions (like whether you could build a jetpack that ran off downward-facing machine guns or if there's enough paint to cover the entire surface of the earth) with rigorous scientific accuracy, accompanied by Munroe's signature stick figure comics. The new volume will continue in What If?'s absurd scientific footsteps, attempting to answer new questions from readers like how you'd ride a fire pole from the moon to Earth, or what would happen if you tried to build a billion-story-high building or solve global warming by having everyone on earth open their freezer doors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Losses Mount for Startups Racing To Deliver Groceries Fast and Cheap
A venture capital-backed battle is raging in New York City in the burgeoning field of instant delivery. From a report: At least six startups, including Gorillas, Jokr SARL, Getir Perakende Lojistik and Buyk, are vying to win the chance to ferry groceries to customers within 10 to 20 minutes of their order placement on an app. Prices are similar to grocery stores, discounts are plentiful, and many services don't have a fee or minimum order, allowing consumers to request a single pint of Ben & Jerry's delivered to their doorstep. Food-delivery app DoorDash, based in San Francisco, also recently entered the fray in New York City. While these consumer-friendly offerings have brought surging sales, losses are heavy given the high cost of prolific advertising and paying couriers to hand-deliver potato chips, soap and eggs in a short time frame, industry investors and executives said. Some of the companies are averaging a loss of over $20 per order when factoring in costs like advertising, those people said. "The economics are brutal," said Damir Becirovic, a principal at venture-capital firm Index Ventures, which hasn't invested in any of the startups. He added that if any of the companies can build a giant business with efficiencies from scale, that picture could change, but the short-term challenges seem daunting. Take for example Fridge No More, a New York-based company that launched in 2020. As of September, its average order value was $33, according to a 2021 investor presentation viewed by The Wall Street Journal. After paying for the products, the people packaging them, delivery riders, waste and other expenses related to storage, it lost $3.30 on every order. That doesn't include marketing costs. Fridge No More spent $70 on advertising to win the average customer, an investment that resulted in a $78 loss for every customer that stayed in the 10 months through September, according to the presentation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Free Covid Tests Provide Latest Venue for Suspected Fraudsters
As a new government website went live in January to offer free Covid-19 test kits, a rash of new domain names were registered. Some had remarkably similar URLs, or were nearly the same but slightly misspelled. From a report: Cybersecurity experts said the goal was likely the same for all of them: bogus domain names that can be used for phishing attacks and other scams. Suspected fraudsters have registered more than 600 suspicious domain registrations since Jan. 15, around the time Biden administration announced details about a program in which the U.S. Postal Service would deliver Covid-19 tests to Americans' homes, email security firm Proofpoint told Bloomberg News. The look-alike URLs are often meant to trick Covid-weary Americans into thinking they are signing up for a free nasal swab, when in fact they might be handing personal data over to a cybercrime syndicate, cybersecurity experts said. The government website for free Covid tests, covidtests.gov, opened for business on Jan. 18, along with a related site, special.usps.com, where users are directed to place an order with the Postal Service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LooksRare Has Reportedly Generated $8B in Ethereum NFT Wash Trading
LooksRare seemingly came out of nowhere to become the biggest rival yet to leading NFT marketplace OpenSea earlier this month, but there's a big asterisk on the astronomical trading figures coming out of the platform. From a report: It's marred by rampant wash trading, as users buy and sell NFTs between wallets they control in an effort to manipulate daily trading rewards. Now we have a sense of how severe the wash trading has become since LooksRare launched on January 10. NFT analytics firm CryptoSlam reported today that it has identified more than $8.3 billion worth of wash trading from LooksRare, making up the vast majority of trading volume on the marketplace to date. Most of the wash trading comes from royalty-free collections, which means that sellers don't have to pay the creators a secondary sale fee. Larva Labs' Meebits has seen the most wash trading at $4.4 billion, with Terraforms at $2.9 billion, Loot at $705 million, and CryptoPhunks (a CryptoPunks derivative project) at $251 million, plus $62 million from other projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Electric Wound Dressing Could Help Injuries Heal Faster
An electric wound dressing can help heal injuries faster than existing methods, according to tests in rats. From a report: Previous research has found that applying electric fields across a cut can speed up wound healing, but this usually requires large and specialised equipment. Because of this, Guang Yao at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and his colleagues wanted to develop an alternative that could be applied in a similar way to traditional wound dressings. "Non-invasive, efficient, cost-effective and convenient approaches are always desired for treating skin wounds," he says. The dressing is made up of four layers. The bottom layer is made from an electrically charged plastic that produces an electric field through static contact with the skin. Next is a layer of flexible silicone rubber gel that moulds to the skin's curvature, and then a layer of shape memory alloy that pushes the two sides of the wound together. A second layer of flexible gel completes the dressing, which is just 0.2 millimetres thick in total. The team tested the wound-healing properties of the dressing on around 50 rats. They anaesthetised the rats before giving each either a 1-centimetre-long linear wound or a 0.8-centimetre-diameter circular wound and then either applying the new dressing, applying a standard dressing or leaving them to heal by themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cloud Computing and Virtualization Company Citrix To Be Acquired for $16.5B
Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal is valued at $16.5 billion, representing a near 30 percent premium on Citrix's market capitalization before rumors of a possible deal first started to emerge last month. Founded in 1989, Citrix was originally known for its Windows-based remote access products, but over the past few decades the company has evolved endeavored to move with the times, and now offers myriad technologies spanning cloud computing, servers, networking, and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
KFC's Meatless 'Beyond Fried Chicken' Gets Limited-Time Rollout Across America
Gizmodo looks at "Beyond Fried Chicken," KFC's newest menu option from Beyond Meat, reporting that it's been available in limited U.S. test markets since 2019, until a few weeks ago when KFC announced a "limited-time national rollout" across America. "That began on January 10, with the company estimating supplies would last for around four weeks..."Beyond Fried Chicken has the exact same breading as KFC's real chicken, complete with the dash of the chain's secret ingredient white pepper (once you know what it is, you can't fail to notice it), along with the MSG and salt. It was somehow both crisp and super oily. The actual "Beyond" component of Beyond Fried Chicken tastes, well, like chicken. It's at the very least competitive with most other fast food nugget options, which may be saying a lot or a little depending on your view on nuggs.... I found the texture quite pleasant. I'm frankly not totally sure that I'd be able to tell the difference between them and one of KFC's discontinued nugget recipes in a blind taste test. Though "vegetarian" usually gets conflated with health, Beyond Fried Chicken is anything but. The company's guide indicates that a six-pack of the Beyond nuggets comes in at 480 calories, 27 grams of fat, and 1,440 milligrams of sodium. Mashed.com pointed out the closest comparable menu item, a kids' size Popcorn Chicken, comes in at 290 calories, 19 grams of fat, and 870 milligrams of sodium. But then, fast food is about indulging in something you know is a little bad for you.... Not that cats are a true measure of whether fake chicken can pass for the real thing, but I feel it's important to note in this review that my cats began swarming around the kitchen counter meowing from the second the bag was unwrapped. The article includes footage of the cat eating one of the meatless chicken nuggets. And finally...As for whether Beyond Fried Chicken is going to save the planet... that's the wrong question. Chicken is much better in terms of carbon footprint than beef. But eating something other than meat is better still. The peas it's made of are actually one of the most carbon-friendly, protein-rich foods.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Florida is So Cold Iguanas are Falling Out of Trees
"The U.S. National Weather Service Miami-South Florida warned the public on Sunday that immobilised iguanas could fall out of trees," reports Reuters, "due to unusual cold temperatures across the region."Iguanas are cold-blooded. They slow down or become immobile when temps drop into the 40s (4-9 Celsius). They may fall from trees, but they are not dead," the service said on Twitter. Temperatures in South Florida reached a low of 25 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service, and high temperatures on Sunday were expected to remain in the upper 50s to low 60s.... Although most of the reptiles will likely survive this period of immobilisation, zoologist Stacey Cohen, a reptile expert at Palm Beach Zoo in Florida, said freezing temperatures were a threat to their survival and pointed to a cold snap in 2010 that wiped out a large number of the population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ohio Lured Intel's Chip Plant with a $2 Billion Incentive Package
Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state's development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal in history. Intel's hoping it creates a powerful new technology hub in the Midwest, while also eventually addressing an ongoing chip shortage, according to the article. Unfortunately, the factory's production isn't expected to come online until 2025, though "The complex could grow much larger and more quickly, Intel executives said, if Congress approves a $52 billion bill that would invest in the chip sector and help ensure more production in the U.S."Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger said the total Ohio investment could top $100 billion over the decade, with six additional factories, making it one of the world's biggest chipmaking sites.... Ohio's offer includes $600 million to help Intel offset the cost of building the factories, which is more expensive than it would be in Asia, said Lydia Mihalik, the state's development director. The state also will pay nearly $700 million for roadwork and water infrastructure upgrades, including a system that will allow the plant to reuse wastewater. The state Legislature this summer approved a 30-year tax break that will allow Intel to save $650 million. The state's share will be money well spent because the Intel facility will not only create jobs, but also make Ohio more attractive to industries such as auto, aviation and defense that rely on chips, Mihalik said. "These investments will not only ensure that this project is successful here, but will also be supporting the region by increasing local infrastructure to support future growth," Mihalik said. The article also cites the Semiconductor Industry Association's estimate that America's share of the world's chip manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wikimedia Foundation Urged to Stop Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations
Software engineer Molly White has been a Wikipedia editor since 2006 (and also served several terms on the site's Arbitration Committee). White is now a Wikipedia administrator and functionary — and just published an Opinion piece opposing the continued acceptance of cryptocurrency donations for the Wikimedia Foundation. Here's an excerpt from White's remarks in The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors: When the Wikimedia Foundation first began accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2014, it was still fairly nascent technology. Cryptocurrencies resonated with many in free and open-source software communities and in the Wikimedia movement more specifically, and cryptocurrency projects tended to share similar ideals: privacy, anonymity, decentralization, freedom. In more recent history, cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies more generally have morphed into something very different from the ideals of their youth. Some proponents continue to speak about freedom and decentralization, but the space has overwhelmingly become an opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of others and the environment. Cryptomining operations set up shop in locations with low energy costs — until late 2021, most bitcoin mining happened in China, where it relied on coal so heavily that the resulting coal mining accidents from increased demand contributed to a crackdown on the practice. Some of those miners moved to Kazakhstan, where they were using the nation's supply of lignite (an extremely harmful form of coal) to produce 18% of the global computing power behind bitcoin in January. Bitcoin mining alone rivals the total energy use of countries like the Netherlands or Finland;456 emissions from other popular cryptocurrencies like ethereum only compound the problem. Furthermore, in recent years, more and more enthusiasts are being convinced that they too might strike it rich by buying in early to the next bitcoin or the next ethereum. But unfortunately, the playing field more often resembles a landscape with scammers and marks. Many are convinced that purchasing these currencies is an "investment", rather than risky speculation that would be more accurately described as gambling if not outright investment fraud. People are regularly scammed for enormous sums of money, and the anonymous, nominally decentralized, and largely unregulated nature of the space offers them little recourse. The purported benefits of cryptocurrencies have also been largely unrealized. Rather than empowering the unbanked and distributing wealth to those in need, as once described, money has been hoarded in incredible amounts by a few wealthy individuals — 0.01% of bitcoin holders collectively own 27% of bitcoin in circulation, equivalent to around $232 billion. Furthermore, the underlying technology is enormously slow and difficult to scale when compared to databases used in most modern computing, so many technologies built around blockchains have spawned new, centralized solutions to the problems the blockchains themselves have introduced. As a result, the decentralization of the web that was supposed to result from the adoption of blockchain technologies has only resulted in the centralization of power in a handful of companies and venture capital firms. The Wikimedia Foundation's acceptance of cryptocurrency donations has had minimal returns, and no longer accepting them is unlikely to have a major impact on the Foundation's ability to fundraise. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation only received about $130,000 in donations via cryptocurrency, making it one of their smallest revenue channels at only 0.08% of total donations. The benefits to donors are also minimal: the anonymity that might normally be offered to those who use cryptocurrencies is largely nullified by the WMF's cryptocurrency payment processor, BitPay, which requires prospective donors to disclose their identities. The most impactful result of the WMF's acceptance of cryptocurrencies has been to normalize their use. As the technology space around blockchains has evolved over the years, so too should we.Cryptocurrencies have been joined by a bubble of predatory, inherently harmful technologies that take advantage of individuals and contribute to the destruction of our environment. It is no longer ethical for the Wikimedia Foundation to tacitly endorse a technology that incentivizes the predatory behavior that has become rampant in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years. I have asked that they stop doing so in an Request for Comments on meta.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Secrets of 'Space Invaders' -- and One Very Tiny Homegrown Cabinet
IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders. It's about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens...The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. "The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked," he explained. "The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone." Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — "which roughly adds up to one game per earthling." But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. Hobbyist Nu Iotachi used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that's just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters). Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, "Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz," reports the project's site Hackster.io, "which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Not Just the IRS - 20 US Agencies Are Already Set Up For Selfie IDs
America's Internal Revenue Service created an uproar with early plans to require live-video-feed selfies to verify identities for online tax services (via an outside company called ID.me). But Wired points out that more than 20 U.S. federal agencies are already using a digital identification system (named Login.gov and built on services from LexisNexis) that "can use selfies for account verification." It's run by America's General Services Administration, or GSA....The GSA's director of technology transformation services Dave Zvenyach says facial recognition is being tested for fairness and accessibility and not yet used when people access government services through Login.gov. The GSA's administrator said last year that 30 million citizens have Login.gov accounts and that it expects the number to grow significantly as more agencies adopt the system. "ID.me is supplying something many governments ask for and require companies to do," says Elizabeth Goodman, who previously worked on Login.gov and is now senior director of design at federal contractor A1M Solutions. Countries including the UK, New Zealand, and Denmark use similar processes to ID.me's to establish digital identities used to access government services. Many international security standards are broadly in line with those of the U.S., written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Goodman says that such programs need to provide offline options such as visiting a post office for people unable or unwilling to use phone apps or internet services.... In fact, Wired argues that in many cases, a selfie or biometric data is virtually required by U.S. federal security guidelines from 2017:NIST's 2017 standard says that access to systems that can leak sensitive data or harm public programs should require verifying a person's identity by comparing them to a photo — either remotely or in person — or using biometrics such as a fingerprint scanner. It says that a remote check can be done either by video with a trained agent, or using software that checks for an ID's authenticity and the "liveness" of a person's photo or video.... California's Employment Development Department said that ID.me blocked more than 350,000 fraudulent claims in the last three months of 2020. But the state auditor said an estimated 20 percent of legitimate claimants were unable to verify their identities with ID.me. Caitlin Seeley George, director of campaigns and operations with nonprofit Fight for the Future, says ID.me uses the specter of fraud to sell technology that locks out vulnerable people and creates a stockpile of highly sensitive data that itself will be targeted by criminals. ...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Can AI Help Us Reimagine Chess?
Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to "explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level," according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also "allow us to reimagine the game as we know it...." "For example, the 'castling' move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?" AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different "variants" of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variations tested: - Castling is no longer allowed- Castling is only allowed after the 10th move- Pawns can only move one square- Stalemates are a win for the attacking side (rather than a draw)- Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn (and can also be captured en passant if they do)- Pawns have the option of moving two squares -- but only when they're in the second or third row of squares. (After which they can be captured en passant )- Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square). - Pawns can also move sideways by one square.- It's possible to capture your own pieces. "The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess." AlphaZero's ability to continually improve its understanding of the game, and reach superhuman playing strength in classical chess and Go, lends itself to the question of assessing chess variants and potential variants of other board games in the future. Provided only with the implementation of the rules, it is possible to effectively simulate decades of human experience in a day, opening a window into top-level play of each variant. In doing so, computer chess completes the circle, from the early days of pitting man vs. machine to a collaborative present of man with machine, where AI can empower players to explore what chess is and what it could become.... The combination of human curiosity and a powerful reinforcement learning system allowed us to reimagine what chess would have looked like if history had taken a slightly different course. When the statistical properties of top-level AlphaZero games are compared to classical chess, a number of more decisive variants appear, without impacting the diversity of plausible options available to a player.... Taken together, the statistical properties and aesthetics provide evidence that some variants would lead to games that are at least as engaging as classical chess."Chess's role in artificial intelligence research is far from over..." their article concludes, arguing that AI "can provide the evidence to take reimagining to reality."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Is a Harvard Astrophysicist Working With UFO Buffs?
Science magazine checks in on the new "Galileo Project" from controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. It's searching for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, whether it's spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories or by their network of rooftop cameras "designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth's atmosphere." "After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project — as well as some notorious nonscientists — Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. 'Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,' Loeb says."Some researchers applaud Loeb's endeavor. "He has mounted a scientific attack on a problem that is frustratingly fuzzy," says Gregory Laughlin, an astrophysicist at Yale University. "A project like this would have been unthinkable 10 years ago." But others say Loeb is tarnishing astronomy and undermining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) just as that effort has started to acquire a veneer of respectability. In particular, they are bothered by the outspoken UFO zealots with no science background whom Loeb has welcomed into the project. "He's intermingled legitimate scientists with these fringe people," says Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University. "I think you lose far more by doing that...." One part of the project would design software to screen the data coming from telescopes like the Rubin observatory for interstellar objects. But the core of the project would be a worldwide network of sky monitors, hundreds in all. Each dome-shaped unit, roughly the size of an umbrella, will contain infrared and optical cameras arranged like a fly's eye to capture the full expanse of sky overhead. Audio sensors and radio antennas will listen at other frequencies. Running 24 hours a day, the monitors are meant to record everything that moves through the sky, day and night: from birds and balloons to insects, airliners, and drones. Artificial intelligence algorithms, trained to discard known objects like birds in favor of fast-moving spherical and lens-shaped objects, will sift through the data, says Richard Cloete, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, who is overseeing the system's software. "We're basically filtering out all the things that we expect to find in the sky," he says. "And all these things that are labeled other [by the AI] will be of interest." Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute who sits on the Galileo Project's advisory board, points out that networks of sky cameras are not new. Since 2010, one SETI Institute network has detected 2 million meteors, and in the past few years, the LaserSETI project has begun to watch the sky for pulses of light from alien technologies. What's novel about the Galileo Project, Shostak says, is its focus on hunting for aliens in Earth's atmosphere. Both the Galileo Project and the SETI Institute "are looking for indications of extraterrestrial intelligence," he adds. "But that's like saying that studying unknown fauna in the rainforest is similar to those who are hoping to find mermaids or unicorns." Loeb says a prototype sky monitor is being built now and will be affixed to the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in the spring. If the instruments work, he plans to make duplicates; if he can raise another $100 million from private donors, he will place them around the world. He says he won't utter the UFO word unless they see an object "that looks strange and moves in ways that human technology cannot enable." A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, who participates as an unpaid "research affiliate "for the project, points out that "One of the problems is that many of the areas we're seeing the greatest level of [UFO] activity are restricted military airspace. The Defense Department is not going to be real excited about bringing in a lot of instruments to record everything that's going on." Ed Turner, a Princeton University astrophysicist who is part of the project's core research team, tells the magazine that he's more excited by the interstellar component of the project — and doubts that the ground-based cameras will actually pick up any evidence of extraterrestrial visits. "If the aliens don't want us to know about them, they'll likely know about the Galileo Project," he says drily. "They can just avoid our high-resolution cameras." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the articleRead more of this story at Slashdot.
Intel Fails To Get Spectre, Meltdown Chip Flaw Class-action Suit Tossed Out
"Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register:On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders.... To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that still is not entirely solved... [L]awsuits have been consolidated into a multi-district proceeding known as "Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation" (3:18-md-02828-SI). And since 2018, Intel has been trying to get them to go away. Twice before the judge had dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend and refile their allegations. This third time, the judge only partially granted Intel's motion to toss the case. Judge Simon dismissed claims based on purchases up through August 2017 because Intel was unaware of the microarchitecture vulnerabilities up to that point. But he allowed seven claims, from September 2017 onward, to proceed, finding the plaintiffs' contention that Intel delayed disclosure of the flaws to maximize holiday season sales plausible enough to allow the case to move forward. "Based on plaintiffs' allegations, it is not clear that Intel had a countervailing business interest other than profit for delaying disclosure for as long as it did (through the holiday season), for downplaying the negative effects of the mitigation, for suppressing the effects of the mitigation, and for continuing to embargo further security exploits that affect only Intel processors," the judge wrote in his order. [PDF]Read more of this story at Slashdot.
O'Reilly Reports Increasing Interest in Cybersecurity, AI, Go, Rust, and C++
"Focus on the horse race and the flashy news and you'll miss the real stories," argues Mike Loukides, the content strategy VP at O'Reilly Media. So instead he shares trends observed on O'Reilly's learning platform in the first nine months of 2021:While new technologies may appear on the scene suddenly, the long, slow process of making things that work rarely attracts as much attention. We start with an explosion of fantastic achievements that seem like science fiction — imagine, GPT-3 can write stories! — but that burst of activity is followed by the process of putting that science fiction into production, of turning it into real products that work reliably, consistently, and fairly. AI is making that transition now; we can see it in our data. But what other transitions are in progress...? Important signals often appear in technologies that have been fairly stable. For example, interest in security, after being steady for a few years, has suddenly jumped up, partly due to some spectacular ransomware attacks. What's important for us isn't the newsworthy attacks but the concomitant surge of interest in security practices — in protecting personal and corporate assets against criminal attackers. That surge is belated but healthy.... Usage of content about ransomware has almost tripled (270% increase). Content about privacy is up 90%; threat modeling is up 58%; identity is up 50%; application security is up 45%; malware is up 34%; and zero trust is up 23%. Safety of the supply chain isn't yet appearing as a security topic, but usage of content about supply chain management has seen a healthy 30% increase.... Another important sign is that usage of content about compliance and governance was significantly up (30% and 35%, respectively). This kind of content is frequently a hard sell to a technical audience, but that may be changing.... This increase points to a growing sense that the technology industry has gotten a regulatory free ride and that free ride is coming to an end. Whether it's stockholders, users, or government agencies who demand accountability, enterprises will be held accountable. Our data shows that they're getting the message. According to a study by UC Berkeley's School of Information, cybersecurity salaries have crept slightly ahead of programmer salaries in most states, suggesting increased demand for security professionals. And an increase in demand suggests the need for training materials to prepare people to supply that demand. We saw that play out on our platform.... C++ has grown significantly (13%) in the past year, with usage that is roughly twice C's. (Usage of content about C is essentially flat, down 3%.) We know that C++ dominates game programming, but we suspect that it's also coming to dominate embedded systems, which is really just a more formal way to say "internet of things." We also suspect (but don't know) that C++ is becoming more widely used to develop microservices. On the other hand, while C has traditionally been the language of tool developers (all of the Unix and Linux utilities are written in C), that role may have moved on to newer languages like Go and Rust. Go and Rust continue to grow. Usage of content about Go is up 23% since last year, and Rust is up 31%. This growth continues a trend that we noticed last year, when Go was up 16% and Rust was up 94%.... Both Rust and Go are here to stay. Rust reflects significantly new ways of thinking about memory management and concurrency. And in addition to providing a clean and relatively simple model for concurrency, Go represents a turn from languages that have become increasingly complex with every new release. Other highlights from their report:"Quantum computing remains a topic of interest. Units viewed is still small, but year-over-year growth is 39%. That's not bad for a technology that, honestly, hasn't been invented yet....""Whether it's the future of finance or history's biggest Ponzi scheme, use of content about cryptocurrency is up 271%, with content about the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum (ether) up 166% and 185% respectively....""Use of JavaScript content on our platform is surprisingly low — though use of content on TypeScript (a version of JavaScript with optional static typing) is up.... Even with 19% growth, TypeScript has a ways to go before it catches up; TypeScript content usage is roughly a quarter of JavaScript's...""Python, Java, and JavaScript are still the leaders, with Java up 4%, Python down 6%, and JavaScript down 3%....""Finally, look at the units viewed for Linux: it's second only to Kubernetes. While down very slightly in 2021, we don't believe that's significant. Linux has long been the most widely used server operating system, and it's not ceding that top spot soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple's AirTags Catch a Moving Van Driver Lying About His Location
Moving halfway across America, from Colorado to New York, Austin and Valerie McNulty had a bad experience after hiring a moving company that subcontracted the work to another moving company. But they'd also included an Apple AirTag in one of their boxes, Newsweek reports:A moving guy reportedly told Austin that he "just picked up the stuff" and would take another day or two. Due to the AirTag, the couple knew the moving guy was not in Colorado but was just less than five hours away in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As for the family's possessions, which were supposed to be inventoried and in a safe location, GPS tracking showed that neither action allegedly occurred. "It turns out [the items] just stayed overnight in a sketchy part of New Jersey," Austin told Newsweek. According to Austin, that same driver who allegedly lied about his whereabouts told Austin in a phone call that he went to see "his lady" and that was part of the delay.... "I think we would have been waiting a lot longer for our home goods to arrive [if we didn't have the AirTag]," Valerie said.... "I would say that AirTags are fairly inexpensive and it's an easy way to hold the third parties accountable." "When we brought up the fact that we knew his exact location he hung up on us," Valerie McNulty said in a Facebook post (which has been shared more than 4,600 times) — although the driver did eventually call back a few minutes later and the items were delivered the next day. ABC News reports that the driver "was put on probation" according to his moving company — which also added that it "plans to use AirTags for tracking their drivers in the future." Valerie McNulty argued to ABC News that "I was never tracking the driver, that was never my intention. I was tracking my belongings." Yet the Washington Post notes the story "comes amid a robust debate about the small plastic-and-metal disks, which launched last spring: Are they creepy or helpful? The trackers have been found on expensive cars, presumably so they could be stolen. But they can also be attached to commonly lost valuables, like keys, to make finding them easier." Apple Insider reports a Pennsylvania state legislator is even proposing legislation making it a crime to track someone else's location or belongings without their consent, adding that if passed in Pennsylvania the law would "create a precedent for other states to follow suit if passed." ZDNet quotes a remark from the Director of Cyber-Security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the BBC, calling Apple's AirTags "a perfect tool for stalking." But ZDNet columnist Chris Matyszczyk adds "That's the problem with technology, isn't it? For every potential good use, there are at least several pain-inducing, criminal-pleasing, world-ending uses.Too often, the bad outweighs the good, especially in the public eyes and ears. Here, though, is a tale of a woman who's glad she used an AirTag for her own surveillance purposes.... This whole tale makes me wonder, though, what we've come to and where we're going.... If our default is that we can trust no one and fear everyone, how can we ever really get along?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
YouTube-DL Forks to Continue Supporting Older Versions of Python
Wikipedia defines youtube-dl as "a free and open source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites." It was created in 2006, and "According to libraries.io, 308 other packages and 1.43k repositories depend on it." The project now has over 106,000 stars on GitHub, and by one calculation it's their fourth-most starred project that's written in Python. A new issue today describes the project as "Under new management." I hope that we'll be able to make a new release soon and subsequently keep the program more up-to-date than has been the case for the last few months. The project has a fork https://github.com/yt-dlp that offers a lot of extra functions but demands an up-to-date Python version. This project will continue to target Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, at least until no-one complains about 2.6 compatibility. Pull Requests are very welcome, although there is a significant back-log to be handled. Back-ports of yt-dlp features are also welcome. Finally, I'd encourage anyone else who is interested in sharing maintenance duties to establish a track record and make themselves known. We want to keep this popular project alive with a community of future maintainers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
America Races to Salvage Its Sunken F-35 Warplane - Before China Does
"A race against time is under way for the U.S. Navy to reach one of its downed fighter jets — before the Chinese get there first," reports the BBC:The $100m (£74m) F-35C plane came down in the South China Sea after what the Navy describes as a "mishap" during take-off from the USS Carl Vinson. The jet is the Navy's newest, and crammed with classified equipment. As it is in international waters, it is technically fair game. Whoever gets there first, wins. The prize? All the secrets behind this very expensive, leading-edge fighting force.... A U.S. salvage vessel looks to be at least 10 days away from the crash site. That's too late, says defence consultant Abi Austen, because the black box battery will die before then, making it harder to locate the aircraft. "It's vitally important the U.S. gets this back," she says. "The F-35 is basically like a flying computer. It's designed to link up other assets — what the Air Force calls 'linking sensors to shooters'." The BBC describes the plane as the U.S. Navy's first "low observable" carrier-based aircraft, "which enables it to operate undetected in enemy airspace." And it's also "the most powerful fighter engine in the world," flying at speeds up to 1,200 mph, or Mach 1.6. After the $100 million warplane crash-landed onto the deck of an aircraft carrier — and then tumbled into the water — images of the crash appeared on social media, reports CNN. Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for submitting the story!Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your Web pages With Microsoft Edge?
`Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:If you're doing any web page programming for money, then I'm pretty sure you're paid to support Edge, too. Probably even required to test it. So this question is really directed to the relative amateur programmers among us. As I think about the topic from my overly philosophic perspective, I even considered asking "Do you feel pressured or even blackmailed to support MS Edge?" The original submission tells the story of a homegrown app involving "moderately complicated data structures embedded in JavaScript files that are loaded on the fly..." that might grow into an 800K re-write. "Since it's mostly for my own use, I don't care at all about Edge, but it got me to thinking and led to this question." So do others uses Edge to test their web pages? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K has already answered, "I don't. If I test I avoid the quite erratic variations that Javascript can create as much as possible and resort to HTML and CSS Validators." How about the rest of you? Use the comments to share your own thoughts, opinions, and experiences. Do you test your web pages with Microsoft Edge?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Space Force Wants to Fund 'Space Junk'-Cleaning Startups
America's Department of Defense "wants to clean up space...at least the increasingly polluted region in low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably," writes the Washington Post. They're reporting that America's Space Force has now launched a program to give companies seed money to develop space-cleaning technology to eventually demo in space (starting with awards of $250,000 that rise as high as $1.5 million). The name of the program: Orbital Prime. The issue also has gotten the attention of the White House. Its Office of Science and Technology Policy recently held a meeting asking for input from space industry leaders about what to do about the problem. Speaker after speaker said that governments around the world need to fund these efforts to help create a market for companies to operate. They also said that it had become an imperative for the governments largely responsible for the problem in the first place. "If the U.S. Navy had had a derelict ship sitting in sovereign waters, creating a safety hazard, the U.S. Navy would go out and grab that ship," said Doug Loverro, a former top Pentagon and NASA space official. "And I'm not sure why we don't see the same responsibility for government for their derelict ships and their derelict bodies that are in space today." Or as James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College in Michigan, put it: "Just as we rely on the government to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, we have to rely on the government to protect the resource and the global commons of low Earth orbit." Europe and Britain have also begun to work toward cleaning up debris — a move that's long overdue, space industry experts say. ClearSpace, a Swiss company, has a contract with the European Space Agency to remove a large piece of debris — a symbol that the issue is finally being addressed. It proposes using a spacecraft with large arms that would grapple the debris like a Venus' flytrap. "This is why we're here. Because we think change is possible," said Luc Piguet, ClearSpace's co-founder and CEO. "And we think we can build a space industry that operates with a different model, where maintenance is just a normal part of it." "This debris and associated congestion threaten the longer sustainability of the space domain," said Space Force's vice chief of space operations, in a video advertising the seed-money program, adding that America's Department of Defense tracks 40,000 objects in orbit the size of a fist or larger, with at least 10 times as many smaller objects the Pentagon can't reliably track.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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