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Netflix already lost 1.2 million subscribers in the first two quarters of 2022. While the company hopes to add one million new users with its new ad-supported tier, a survey shows that 1 in 4 Netflix users are planning to cancel their subscriptions this year. From a report: Here's what this could mean to other streaming services, such as Apple TV+. Reviews surveyed 1,000 Americans to gauge their streaming habits in 2022. According to the report, the average American is subscribed to four streaming platforms. Netflix is still the most popular streaming service with nearly 4 out of 5 (77%) Americans currently subscribed to the platform. In addition, 70% say they use Netflix the most, followed by: HBO Max: 9.91%; Disney+: 6.18%; Peacock: 4.25%; Hulu: 3.86%; Apple TV+: 2.70%; Paramount+: 2.70%. That said, of all the Netflix subscribers, 25% are planning to cancel their subscriptions. Of those who plan to leave the streaming service, two-thirds say increasing costs is one of the reasons. According to the survey, Netflix has the highest average plan cost among the eight more popular streaming services in the US. The other big complaint from Netflix users is two-fold: 1 in 3 respondents said Netflix no longer has the shows they want to watch; 30% said that they use other streaming services more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DocuSign shares rose almost 5% in extended trading after the electronic signature software maker announced it has hired an Alphabet executive, Allan Thygesen, to be its next CEO. CNBC reports: The announcement comes three month after DocuSign said its CEO for the past five years, Dan Springer, was stepping down. Like other cloud software companies, DocuSign enjoyed a wave of greater interest among investors during the Covid pandemic as consumers and corporate workers became more reliant on digital ways to sign documents. But the interest has died down. Notwithstanding the after-hours move, DocuSign shares have fallen 64% so far this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As antitrust regulators around the world dial up scrutiny of platform power, Mozilla has published a piece of research digging into the at times subtle yet always insidious ways operating systems exert influence to keep consumers locked to using their own-brand browsers rather than seeking out and switching to independent options -- while simultaneously warning that competition in the browser market is vital to ensure innovation and choice for consumers and, more broadly, protect the vitality of the open web against the commercial giants trying to wall it up. TechCrunch: "Billions of people across the globe are dependent on operating systems from the largest technology companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta each provide their own browser on their operating systems and each of them uses their gatekeeper position provider to preference their own browsers over independent rivals. Whether it is Microsoft pushing Firefox users to switch their default on Windows computers, Apple restricting the functionality of rival browsers on iOS smartphones or Google failing to apply default browser settings across Android, there are countless examples of independent browsers being inhibited by the operating systems on which they are dependent," Mozilla writes in a summary of its findings. "This matters because American consumers and society as a whole suffer. Not only do people lose the ability to determine their own online experiences but they also receive less innovative and lower quality products. In addition, they can be forced to accept poorer privacy outcomes and even unfair contracts. By contrast, competition from independent browsers can help to drive new features, as well as innovation in areas like privacy and security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jamie Dimon didn't mince words when a US lawmaker mentioned the executive's history of criticizing cryptocurrencies. From a report: "I'm a major skeptic on crypto tokens, which you call currency, like Bitcoin," the JPMorgan Chase chief executive officer said in congressional testimony Wednesday. "They are decentralized Ponzi schemes." Stablecoins -- digital assets tied to the value of the US dollar or other currencies -- wouldn't be problematic with the proper regulation, and JPMorgan is active in blockchain, Dimon said. The comments represent the latest criticism leveled against digital currencies by Dimon, who once called Bitcoin "a fraud" before eventually saying he regretted the comments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning people not to abuse nonprescription drugs as part of social-media challenges, including cooking chicken in NyQuil. From a report: The regulator issued a warning cautioning the public that social-media challenges where people misuse nonprescription medications can be dangerous or even fatal. It pointed to a recent challenge where people cook chicken in NyQuil or similar medications. The agency says that boiling a medication can make the drug more concentrated and that inhaling a medicine's vapors while cooking with it could cause a person to ingest a high amount of the drug. In the case of the NyQuil-chicken challenge, the FDA says a person could hurt their lungs. "The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing -- and it is," the FDA said. "But it could also be very unsafe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 70 companies in Britain are undergoing a six-month experiment in which their employees get a paid day off each week. So far, most companies say it's going well. SpzToid shares a report: Most of the companies participating in a four-day workweek pilot program in Britain said they had seen no loss of productivity during the experiment, and in some cases had seen a significant improvement, according to a survey of participants published on Wednesday. Nearly halfway into the six-month trial, in which employees at 73 companies get a paid day off weekly, 35 of the 41 companies that responded to a survey said they were "likely" or "extremely likely" to consider continuing the four-day workweek beyond the end of the trial in late November. All but two of the 41 companies said productivity was either the same or had improved. Remarkably, six companies said productivity had significantly improved. Talk of a four-day workweek has been around for decades. In 1956, then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon said he foresaw it in the "not too distant future," though it has not materialized on any large scale. But changes in the workplace over the coronavirus pandemic around remote and hybrid work have given momentum to questions about other aspects of work. Are we working five days a week just because we have done it that way for more than a century, or is it really the best way? Some leaders of companies in the trial said the four-day week had given employees more time to exercise, cook, spend time with their families and take up hobbies, boosting their well-being and making them more energized and productive when they were on the clock. Critics, however, worried about added costs and reduced competitiveness, especially when many European companies are already lagging rivals in other regions. More than 3,300 workers in banks, marketing, health care, financial services, retail, hospitality and other industries in Britain are taking part in the pilot, which is one of the largest studies to date, according to Jack Kellam, a researcher at Autonomy, a think tank that is one of the organizers of the trial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said he's confident the company can gain regulatory approval for its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard even in the face of an in-depth regulatory probe in the UK. From a report: "Of course, any acquisition of this size will go through scrutiny, but we feel very, very confident that we'll come out," he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Nadella's prediction puts him at odds with investors' skepticism about the deal. While Activision rose Thursday, outperforming a slump in tech stocks, Wednesday's close of $75.32 still left the company more than 20% below the offer price -- a signal of massive doubt that Microsoft will ever be able to consummate the transaction. Microsoft is either the No. 4 or No. 5 competitor in the video game industry, depending on how you count, Nadella said. And the No. 1 player, Sony Group, has made several recent acquisitions. "So if this is about competition, let us have competition," he said. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority said earlier this month that it decided to kick-start a longer review, a move that was expected after the CMA flagged concerns that the deal could lessen competition in the markets for consoles, subscriptions and cloud gaming. The combination with Activision -- which owns franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero -- will make Microsoft the world's third-largest gaming company. Nadella also expressed optimism that Microsoft can cope with a weaker economy and rising inflation -- and help its customers endure as well. "The constraints are real -- inflation is definitely all around us," he said. "I always go back to the point that in an uncertain time, in an inflationary time, software is the deflationary force."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A cache of nearly 160,000 files from Russia's powerful internet regulator provides a rare glimpse inside Vladimir V. Putin's digital crackdown. The New York Times: Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia's expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work. Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia's 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest. Then they compiled their findings. One report about the "destabilization of Russian society" pointed to an editorial from a news site deemed "oppositional" to the government that said President Vladimir V. Putin was pursuing his own self-interest by invading Ukraine. A dossier elsewhere on file detailed who owned the site and where they lived. Another Feb. 28 dispatch, titled "Presence of Protest Moods," warned that some had expressed support for demonstrators and "spoke about the need to stop the war." The report was among nearly 160,000 records from the Bashkortostan office of Russia's powerful internet regulator, Roskomnadzor. Together the documents detail the inner workings of a critical facet of Mr. Putin's surveillance and censorship system, which his government uses to find and track opponents, squash dissent and suppress independent information even in the country's furthest reaches. The leak of the agency's documents "is just like a small keyhole look into the actual scale of the censorship and internet surveillance in Russia," said Leonid Volkov, who is named in the records and is the chief of staff for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. "It's much bigger," he said. Roskomnadzor's activities have catapulted Russia, along with authoritarian countries like China and Iran, to the forefront of nations that aggressively use technology as a tool of repression. Since the agency was established in 2008, Mr. Putin has turned it into an essential lever to tighten his grip on power as he has transformed Russia into an even more authoritarian state. The internet regulator is part of a larger tech apparatus that Mr. Putin has built over the years, which also includes a domestic spying system that intercepts phone calls and internet traffic, online disinformation campaigns and the hacking of other nations' government systems. The agency's role in this digital dragnet is more extensive than previously known, according to the records. It has morphed over the years from a sleepy telecom regulator into a full-blown intelligence agency, closely monitoring websites, social media and news outlets, and labeling them as "pro-government," "anti-government" or "apolitical." Roskomnadzor has also worked to unmask and surveil people behind anti-government accounts and provided detailed information on critics' online activities to security agencies, according to the documents. That has supplemented real-world actions, with those surveilled coming under attack for speaking out online. Some have then been arrested by the police and held for months. Others have fled Russia for fear of prosecution. The files reveal a particular obsession with Mr. Navalny and show what happens when the weight of Russia's security state is placed on one target. The system is built to control outbursts like the one this week, when protesters across Russia rallied against a new policy that would press roughly 300,000 people into military service for the war in Ukraine. At least 1,200 people have already been detained for demonstrating. More than 700 gigabytes of records from Roskomnadzor's Bashkortostan branch were made publicly available online in March by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weeks after Twitter's ex-security chief accused the company of cybersecurity mismanagement, Twitter has now informed its users of a bug that didn't close all of a user's active logged-in sessions on Android and iOS after an account's password was reset. From a report: This issue could have implications for those who had reset their password because they believed their Twitter account could be at risk, perhaps because of a lost or stolen device, for instance. Assuming whoever had possession of the device could access its apps, they would have had full access to the impacted user's Twitter account. In a blog post, Twitter explains that it had learned of the bug that had allowed "some" accounts to stay logged in on multiple devices after a user reset their password voluntarily. Typically, when a password reset occurs, the session token that keeps a user logged into the app is also revoked -- but that didn't take place on mobile devices, Twitter says. Web sessions, however, were not impacted and were closed appropriately, it noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase Global has been searching for new ways to make money. One business it flirted with was controversial: using its own money to speculate on cryptocurrencies. WSJ: Last year, Coinbase -- which operates a large cryptocurrency exchange that handles bitcoin and other digital coins -- hired at least four senior Wall Street traders and launched a group to generate profit, in part, by using the company's cash to trade and "stake," or lock up, cryptocurrencies, according to people close to the matter. The activity was described as "proprietary" trading by the people at the company. Earlier this year, the team completed a $100 million transaction that the group viewed as a test trade of the new effort, according to the people. The transaction came after Coinbase executives testified to members of Congress last year that the company didn't buy and sell digital currencies for its own account. The monthslong effort to launch the Coinbase Risk Solutions group underscores how Coinbase, which has seen its shares tumble about 70% over the past year, has entertained more aggressive strategies as it tries to develop new businesses. Coinbase says some at the company examined pursuing proprietary trading but decided against it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former President Donald Trump could be allowed back on Facebook once a suspension of his account expires in 2023, Nick Clegg of parent company Meta Platforms, said Thursday at an exclusive Semafor Exchange event in Washington, DC. From the report: As the company makes its decision, it will talk to experts, weigh the risk of real world harm and act proportionally, he said. It's the first time Clegg, who, as president of global affairs is charged with deciding whether to lift the limit, has publicly discussed his thinking. Trump was prohibited from posting on several online platforms after the January 2021 riots at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with Facebook, sister app Instagram, Twitter and Google's YouTube citing his role in inciting the violence. "When you make a decision that affects the public realm, you need to act with great caution," Clegg told Semafor editor-at-large Steve Clemons. "You shouldn't throw your weight about."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites' parent company Meta. From a report: "Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred," says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication. Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company's censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring. Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain. Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta's delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the "first quarter" of the year. While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames "a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced a new Chromecast with HD streaming support today that costs just $30 and has a remote control with it. From a report: The company is launching the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) -- yes, that's the official name -- in 19 countries including the U.S. This comes two years after Google launched a $49 Chromecast with 4K HDR streaming support and the introduction of a remote. The new Chromecast supports 1080p streaming, and more than 10,000 apps that are on the Google TV platform including Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Prime video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile has partnered with the startup Pano AI to spot wildfires before they get out of control. CNET reports: The startup Pano AI uses a series of cameras that survey the wilderness and AI algorithms that watch for telltale smoke -- an indicator of small blazes that could grow into raging wildfires. That footage is sent to the startup's headquarters for human confirmation, and if a fire is burning, evidence is sent to clients who could be affected. While Pano AI had been sending evidence photos over 4G LTE networks at slow rates of around 20 to 30 6-megapixel images per minute, its new partnership with T-Mobile has it using the carrier's 5G network to send video at 30 frames per second, which is around 90 times more data. Ultimately, getting evidence to Pano AI's clients, which include utility companies, much quicker on 5G means a faster response from firefighters and potentially squashing big fires before they get dangerous. Pano AI works with a number of utilities, governments, fire authorities, forestry companies and private landlords who in turn work with local emergency responders. Its newest client and the first with a system using T-Mobile's 5G network is Portland General Electric (PGE), a utility supplying gas and electricity to 16 million customers around Portland, Oregon. Pano AI has 20 cameras set up in the forests surrounding the city that give 10-mile panoramic views, which include powerlines. This lets PGE know if fires are headed toward its infrastructure. T-Mobile recruited Pano AI to be part of its Innovation Lab alongside other companies harnessing 5G to improve their services, such as Mixhalo, which is using the carrier's 5G network to pipe in concert audio directly to audience members' phones. But Pano AI's partnership goes deeper, as it's mounting its cameras on T-Mobile's cell towers, saving months of time and paperwork needed to request and install its equipment on other signal towers or similar vantage points.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the clearest view of Neptune's rings in more than 30 years. From the report: Most striking in Webb's new image is the crisp view of the planet's rings -- some of which have not been detected since NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune's fainter dust bands. "It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we've seen them in the infrared," notes Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb. Webb's extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune. Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, have recorded these rapidly evolving cloud features over the years. More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet's equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune's winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases. Neptune's 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb's view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it. Webb also captured seven of Neptune's 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb's images, but this is not a star. Rather, this is Neptune's large and unusual moon, Triton.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Motherboard, written by Joseph Cox: Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world's internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people's email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard. Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that's part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden's office with Motherboard. The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service. In the private industry, cybersecurity analysts use it for following hackers' activity or attributing cyberattacks. In the government world, analysts can do the same, but agencies that deal with criminal investigations have also purchased the capability. The military agencies did not describe their use cases for the tool. However, the sale of the tool still highlights how Team Cymru obtains this controversial data and then sells it as a business, something that has alarmed multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry. "The network data includes data from over 550 collection points worldwide, to include collection points in Europe, the Middle East, North/South America, Africa and Asia, and is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day," a description of the Augury platform in a U.S. government procurement record reviewed by Motherboard reads. It adds that Augury provides access to "petabytes" of current and historical data. Motherboard has found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Augury. This allows the military to track internet usage using an incredible amount of sensitive information. Motherboard has extensively covered how U.S. agencies gain access to data that in some cases would require a warrant or other legal mechanism by simply purchasing data that is available commercially from private companies. Most often, the sales center around location data harvested from smartphones. The Augury purchases show that this approach of buying access to data also extends to information more directly related to internet usage. "The Augury platform is not designed to target specific users or user activity. The platform specifically does not possess subscriber information necessary to tie records back to any users," said Team Cymru in a statement to Motherboard. "Our platform does not provide user or subscriber information, and it doesn't provide results that show any pattern of life, preventing its ability to be used to target individuals. Our platform only captures a limited sampling of the available data, and is further restricted by only allowing queries against restricted sampled and limited data, which all originates from malware, malicious activity, honeypots, scans, and third parties who provide feeds of the same. Results are then further limited in the scope and volume of what's returned," Team Cymru said in another email. Charles E. Spirtos from the Navy Office of Information told Motherboard in an email that NCIS specifically "conducts investigations and operations in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The use of net flow data by NCIS does not require a warrant." He added that NCIS has not used netflow during any criminal investigation, but that "NCIS uses net flow data for various counterintelligence purposes." Meanwhile, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, which the whistleblower alleges referred their complaint to the Navy, told Motherboard it had received Wyden's letter and was reviewing it. The Office of the Naval Inspector General declined to comment and directed Motherboard back to its Department of Defense counterpart. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency also deferred to the Department of Defense.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company won't label social media posts that appear to be false in order to avoid the appearance that the company is trying to censor speech online. From the report: "I don't think that people want governments to tell them what's true or false," Smith said when asked about Microsoft's role in defining disinformation. "And I don't think they're really interested in having tech companies tell them either." The comments are Smith's strongest indication yet that Microsoft is taking a unique path to tracking and disrupting digital propaganda efforts. Smith said Microsoft wanted to provide the public with more information about who is speaking, what they are saying and allow them to come to their own judgment about whether content was true. "We have to be very thoughtful and careful because -- and this is also true of every democratic government -- fundamentally, people quite rightly want to make up their own mind and they should," he said. "Our whole approach needs to be to provide people with more information, not less and we cannot trip over and use what others might consider censorship as a tactic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A listing on a popular hacker forum offers 350 million Ask.FM user records for sale in what might be one of the biggest breaches of all time. Cybernews reports: The listing allegedly includes 350 million Ask.FM user records, with the threat actor also offering 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, and Confluence databases. Ask.FM is a question and answer network launched in June 2010, with over 215 million registered users. The posting also includes a list of repositories, sample git, and sample user data, as well as mentions of the fields in the database: user_id, username, mail, hash, salt, fbid, twitterid, vkid, fbuid, iguid. It appears that Ask.FM is using the weak hashing algorithm SHA1 for passwords, putting them at risk of being cracked and exposed to threat actors. In response to DataBreaches, the user who posted the database -- Data -- explained that initial access was gained via a vulnerability in Safety Center. The server was first accessed in 2019, and the database was obtained on 2020-03-14. Data also suggested that Ask.FM knew about the breach as early as back in 2020. While the breach has not been confirmed, the seller called "Data" says he will "vouch all day and night for" listed user data from Ask.FM (ASKfm), the social networking site. "I'm selling the users database of Ask.fm and ask.com," Data wrote. "For connoisseurs, you can also get 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, Confluence databases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the Mozilla Foundation: YouTube's user controls -- buttons like "Dislike " and "Not interested" -- largely fail to help users avoid unwanted recommendations like misinformation and violent content, according to new research by Mozilla. An accompanying survey also found that YouTube's controls routinely frustrate and confuse users. Indeed, Mozilla's research found that people who are experiencing unwanted recommendations and turn to the platform's user controls for assistance prevent less than half of unwanted recommendations. This is especially troubling because Mozilla's past research shows that YouTube recommends videos that violate its very own community guidelines, like misinformation, violent content, hate speech, and spam. For example, one user in this most recent research asked YouTube to stop recommending war footage from Ukraine -- but shortly after was recommended even more grisly content from the region. The study, titled "Does This Button Work? Investigating YouTube's ineffective user controls" is the culmination of months of rigorous qualitative and quantitative research. The study was made possible by the data of more than 20,000 participants who used Mozilla's RegretsReporter browser extension, and by data about more than 500 million YouTube videos. These are the top findings, as highlighted in the report: People don't trust YouTube's user controls. More than a third (39.3%) of people surveyed felt YouTube's user controls did not impact their recommendations at all, and 23% felt the controls had a mixed response. Said one interviewee: "Nothing changed. Sometimes I would report things as misleading and spam and the next day it was back in [...] Even when you block certain sources they eventually return." People take matters into their own hands. Our study found that people did not always understand how YouTube's controls affect their recommendations, and so took a jury rigged approach instead. People will log out, create new accounts, or use privacy tools just to manage their YouTube recommendations. Said one user: "When the Superbowl came around ... if someone recommended a particular commercial, I used to log out of YouTube, watch the commercial, and then log back in." The data confirms people are right. The most "effective" user control was "Don't recommend channel," but compared to users who do not make use of YouTube's user controls, only 43% of unwanted recommendations are prevented -- and recommendations from the unwanted channel sometimes persist. Other controls were even less effective: The "Not Interested" tool prevented only 11% of unwanted recommendations. YouTube can fix this problem. YouTube has the power to confront this issue and do a better job at enabling people to control their recommendations. Our research outlines several concrete suggestions to put people back into the driver's seat, like making YouTube's controls more proactive, allowing users to shape their own experience; and giving researchers increased access to YouTube's API and other tools. Further reading: YouTube Targets TikTok With Revenue Sharing For Shorts, Partner Program ExpansionRead more of this story at Slashdot.

People who experience frequent bad dreams in middle age may experience a faster rate of cognitive decline and be at higher risk of dementia as they get older, data suggests. If confirmed, the research could eventually lead to new ways of screening for dementia and intervention to slow the rate of decline. From a report: Most people experience bad dreams from time to time, but approximately 5% of adults experience nightmares -- dreams distressing enough to wake them up -- at least once a week. Stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation are all potential triggers, but previous research in people with Parkinson's disease has also linked frequent distressing dreams to faster rates of cognitive decline, and an increased risk of developing dementia in the future. To investigate whether the same might be true of healthy adults, Dr Abidemi Otaiku at the University of Birmingham turned to data from three previous studies that have examined people's sleep quality and then followed them over many years, assessing their brain health as well as other outcomes. This included more than 600 middle-aged adults (aged 35 to 64), and 2,600 people aged 79 and older. Their data was analysed using statistical software to find out whether those who experienced a higher frequency of distressing dreams were more likely to go on to experience cognitive decline and be diagnosed with dementia. The research, published in eClinicalMedicine, found that middle-aged people who experienced bad dreams at least once a week were four times more likely to experience cognitive decline over the following decade than those who rarely had nightmares. Among elderly participants, those who frequently reported distressing dreams were twice as likely to be diagnosed with dementia in subsequent years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Deepfakes, AI generated porn, and a thousand more innocent uses -- there's been a lot of news about neural network-generated images. It makes sense that people started getting curious; were my photos used to train the robots? Are photos of me in the image-generating training sets? A brand new site tries to give you an answer. Spawning AI creates image generation tools for artists, and the company just launched Have I Been Trained? which you can use to search a set of 5.8 billion images that have been used to train popular AI art models. When you search the site, you can search through the images that are the closest match, based on the LAION-5B training data, which is widely used for training AI search terms. It's a fun tool to play with, and may help give a glimpse into the data that the AI is using as the basis for its own.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nvidia is gearing up to deliver Drive Thor, its next-generation automotive-grade chip that the company claims will be able to unify a wide range of in-car technology from automated driving features and driver monitoring systems to streaming Netflix in the back for the kiddos. Thor, which goes into production in 2025, is notable not just because it's a step up from Nvidia's Drive Orin chip. It's also taking Drive Atlan's spot in the lineup. Nvidia is scrapping the Drive Atlan system on chip ahead of schedule for Thor, founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday at the company's GTC event. Ever in a race to develop bigger and badder chips, Nvidia is opting for Thor, which, at 2,000 teraflops of performance, will deliver twice the compute and throughput, according to the company. "If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle," said Nvidia's vice president of automotive, Danny Shapiro, at a press briefing Monday. "In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost." One chip to rule them all. One chip to help automakers build software-defined autonomous vehicles. One chip to continuously upgrade over-the-air. Further reading: Nvidia Announces Next-Gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

In an in-depth teardown of the iPhone 14 Pro Max, iFixit provides a closer look at the device's internals. "Notably, the teardown includes a photo of the plastic spacer that replaced the SIM card tray on the U.S. model," reports MacRumors. From the report: All four iPhone 14 models sold in the U.S. no longer have a physical SIM card tray and rely entirely on digital eSIMs. The teardown confirms that Apple is not using the internal space freed up by the tray's removal for any other component or added functionality, and instead filled in the gap with a square piece of plastic. Outside of the U.S., all iPhone 14 models are still equipped with a SIM card tray in this space. As seen in previous teardowns, iFixit provided close-up images of the iPhone 14 Pro Max's logic board, which is equipped with a faster A16 Bionic chip and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X65 modem that provides both 5G and satellite connectivity. While the standard iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus can be opened from the back side, and feature a more repairable design with an easily removable display and back glass panel, these design changes do not extend to the Pro models. The teardown shows that the iPhone 14 Pro Max continues to open from the front and does not have removable back glass. The internal design of the device is largely unchanged from the iPhone 13 Pro Max.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesse Powell, co-founder of crypto exchange Kraken, is planning to step down as CEO, Kraken confirmed with CoinDesk. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the news. From the report: Kraken's current chief operating officer, Dave Ripley, will take over as CEO once someone is hired to fill Ripley's position. According to a press release issued by the company, Powell plans to remain involved with Kraken. He will become chairman of Kraken's board and will continue working on product development and crypto industry advocacy. The outspoken Powell, an early advocate of bitcoin (BTC) who founded Kraken in 2011, has been at the center of several company-related controversies this year. In June, Powell criticized a contingent of "woke activists" inside the company and told unhappy employees to quit, sparking a social-political debate that roiled the crypto industry and beyond. In July, reports emerged that Kraken was being investigated by the U.S. Treasury Department for allegedly allowing Iranian users to use the platform -- a violation of international sanctions against the Iranian regime. Powell has denied that these controversies spurred his decision to step down as CEO, telling Bloomberg that he informed Kraken's board of his impending departure over a year ago. Instead, he chalked up the decision to something much more banal -- boredom. "As the company has gotten bigger, it's just gotten to be more draining on me, less fun," Powell told Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Kitty Hawk, informed employees on Wednesday the company was laying them off, according to a news report. The company also posted the news on its LinkedIn page. From the report: Sources inside the company told Insider that Kitty Hawk had recently wound down work on its most recent flying-car project, Heaviside, and reverted to research-and-development mode with Google co-founder Larry Page more closely involved with the work. However, it appears the company couldn't see a way forward. Laid-off staff have been given four months of severance pay, an employee said. Thrun, a self-driving car pioneer and a Google veteran, founded Kitty Hawk in 2010, and Page financially propped it up. Insiders said Page remained the sole bankroller of Kitty Hawk throughout its lifetime. He became increasingly hands-off over the years, though he would involve himself in newer projects as they sprung up, including an internal initiative to make flying cars run more quietly. The company produced several prototype models of its flying cars, including Flyer, which the company shuttered in 2020. Heaviside, its most recent model, was designed to be quieter for flying in densely populated environments. In 2019 the company also spun up Wisk, a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, which will continue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday recommended that all new vehicles be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can stop people from driving while drunk. The NTSB can't issue such a regulation on its own but urged the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to do so. The NTSB said it "is recommending measures leveraging new in-vehicle technologies that can limit or prohibit impaired drivers from operating their vehicles as well as technologies to prevent speeding." If adopted, this would require "passive vehicle-integrated alcohol impairment detection systems, advanced driver monitoring systems or a combination of the two that would be capable of preventing or limiting vehicle operation if it detects driver impairment by alcohol," the NTSB said. The agency urged the NHTSA to "require all new vehicles to be equipped with such systems." Under a US law enacted last year, the NHTSA is already required to examine whether it can issue this type of rule. While drunk driving is a longstanding problem that has caused many deaths, the NTSB said its recommendation was spurred by its investigation into one crash that killed nine people -- including seven children -- in January 2021 on State Route 33 near Avenal, California. On that two-lane highway with a speed limit of 55 mph, an SUV driver leaving a New Year's Day gathering "was driving at a speed between 88 and 98 mph," the NTSB report said. [...] Section 24220 of the Bipartisan Infrastructure LawSection 30111 of Title 49 in US law, it can delay issuing a rule for three years and submit annual reports to Congress describing the reasons for not issuing the rule. Each annual report would also have to contain an update on "the deployment of advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology in vehicles." In writing the law, Congress noted that "in 2019, there were 10,142 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities in the United States involving drivers with a blood alcohol concentration level of .08 or higher, and 68 percent of the crashes that resulted in those fatalities involved a driver with a blood alcohol concentration level of .15 or higher." Congress also cited a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimating that "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology can prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities annually."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida's attorney general on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to decide whether states have the right to regulate how social media companies moderate content on their services, a move that sends one of the most controversial debates of the internet age to the country's highest court. From a report: In its petition, the state asks the court to determine whether the First Amendment prohibits a state from requiring that platforms host certain communications and also whether the states can require companies to provide an explanation to users when they remove their posts. The petition sets up the most serious test to date of assertions that Silicon Valley companies are unlawfully censoring conservative viewpoints. The decision could have wide-ranging effects on the future of democracy and elections, as tech companies play an increasingly significant role in disseminating news and information about politics. Critics of the state social media laws and tech industry representatives also warn that if the Florida law were to take effect, it could lead to a torrent of hate speech, misinformation and other violent content that some major social media companies' policies currently prohibit. The petition is a response to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit earlier this year that major provisions of a Florida social media law violated the Constitution's First Amendment. The law would bar companies from banning politicians from their services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tlhIngan writes: The iPhone 14's "dynamic island" feature is where the pinhole used for the front facing camera is replaced by a pill shaped cutout that can be filled with "useful" snippets of information. It's basically used to help hide the black hole caused by the pinhole camera (as an alternative to the notch) or pill by multiple cameras. Apparently the feature is so innovative, Chinese cellphone company realme is asking its fans for ideas on how to copy, but not copy, the feature. They're asking for submissions in images, GIFs, text or other form on how a "realme Island" should work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Telegram's doxxing problem goes far beyond Myanmar. WIRED spoke to activists and experts in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe who said that the platform has ignored their warnings about an epidemic of politically motivated doxxing, allowing dangerous content to proliferate, leading to intimidation, violence, and deaths. Telegram, which now claims more than 700 million active users worldwide, has a publicly stated philosophy that private communications should be beyond the reach of governments. That has made it popular among people living under authoritarian regimes all over the world (and among conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and "sovereign citizens" in democratic countries). But the service's structure -- part encrypted messaging app, part social media platform -- and its almost complete lack of active moderation has made it "the perfect tool" for the kind of doxxing campaigns occurring in Myanmar, according to digital rights activist Victoire Rio. This structure makes it easy for users to crowdsource attacks, posting a target for doxxing and encouraging their followers to dig up or share private information, which they can then broadcast more widely. Misinformation or doxxing content can move seamlessly from anonymous individual accounts to channels with thousands of users. Cross-posting is straightforward, so that channels can feed off one another, creating a kind of virality without algorithms that actively promote harmful content. "Structurally, it's suited to this use case," Rio says. The first mass use of this tactic occurred during Hong Kong's massive 2019 democracy protests, when pro-Beijing Telegram channels identified demonstrators and sent their information to the authorities. Hundreds of protesters were sentenced to custodial sentences for their role in the demonstrations. But with the city split along "yellow" (pro-protests) and "blue" (pro-police) lines, channels were also set up to dox police officers and their families. In November 2020, a telecom company employee was jailed for two years after doxing police and government employees over Telegram. Since then, Telegram doxing appears to be spreading to new countries. In Iraq, militia groups and their supporters have become adept at using Telegram to source information about opponents, such as leaders of civil society groups, which they then broadcast on channels with tens of thousands of followers. Sometimes, bounties are offered for information, according to Hayder Hamzoz, founder of the Iraqi Network for Social Media, an organization that tracks social media use in the country. Often, these come with direct or implicit threats of violence. Targets have faced harassment and violence, and some have had to flee their homes, Hamzoz says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IT services giant Wipro has fired 300 employees in recent months who were found to be moonlighting for competitors, a top executive said Wednesday, weighing in on a practice that has gained momentum across the globe as firms incorporate work-from-home norms. From a report: Rishad Premji, the chairman of Wipro, which employs over 250,000 employees in over five dozen nations, said at a conference Wednesday that the company finds moonlighting for competitors an "act of integrity violation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple began assembling some of its devices in India and Vietnam a few years ago, slowly cutting its reliance on China. The Cupertino-giant is now gearing up to make the two nations key global manufacturing hubs, according to analysts at JP Morgan. From a report: In a report they sent to clients Wednesday, JP Morgan analysts said Apple will move 5% of global iPhone 14 production to India by late 2022, and expand its manufacturing capacity in the country to produce 25% of all iPhones by 2025. Vietnam, on the other hand, will contribute 20% of all iPad and Apple Watch productions, 5% of MacBook and 65% of AirPods by 2025, the report said, which was reviewed by TechCrunch. India has attracted investments from Foxconn and Wistron in recent years by offering lucrative subsidies as New Delhi moves to make the country a manufacturing hub. The presence of the foreign production giants, coupled with "ample labor resources and competitive labor costs," make India a desirable location, the analysts said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to stalling growth and intense competition, Meta Platforms executives have spoken of cost cuts, hiring freezes and "ruthless prioritization." One word the company hasn't used: layoffs. From a report: But Meta has begun quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers by reorganizing departments and giving affected employees a limited window to apply for other roles within the company, according to current and former managers familiar with the matter, in a move that achieves staffing cuts while forestalling the mass issuance of pink slips. The reductions are expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts, with Meta looking to trim its costs by at least 10% within the next few months, according to people informed of the company's plans. While some savings will come from cuts to overhead and consulting budgets, the people said, much of it is expected to come from reduced employment. In response to questions, Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton referred to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's July statement that the company would need to reallocate resources toward corporate priorities as pressures mount on the business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Framework and Google have announced the new Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. As the name implies, this is an upgradable, customizable Chromebook from the same company that put out the Framework laptop last year. From a report: User-upgradable laptops are rare enough already, but user-upgradable Chromebooks are nigh unheard of. While the size of the audience for such a device may remain to be seen, it's certainly a step in the right direction for repairability in the laptop space as a whole. Multiple parts of the Framework are user-customizable, though it's not clear whether every part that's adjustable on the Windows Framework can be adjusted on the Chromebook as well. Each part has a QR code on it which, if scanned, brings up the purchase page for the part's replacement. Most excitingly (to me), the Chromebook Edition includes the same expansion card system as the Windows edition, meaning you can choose the ports you want and where to put them. I don't know of any other laptop, Windows or Chrome OS, where you can do this, and it's easily my personal favorite part of Framework's model. You can choose between USB-C, USB-A, microSD, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, high-speed storage, "and more," per the press release. HDMI, in particular, is a convenient option to have on a Chromebook.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch is reducing how much money it shares with some of the biggest streamers on the platform. From a report: Right now, the majority of partnered streamers receive a 50 / 50 revenue share on subscriptions to their channel. That means 50 percent of net revenue goes to Twitch, while 50 percent goes to the streamer themselves. However, Twitch has negotiated premium subscription terms with some bigger streamers that give them a 70 / 30 revenue split, and that split is what's going to change. Under the new policy, streamers with premium terms will keep 70 percent of their subscription revenue on the first $100,000 earned. But after that, the share will go down to a 50 / 50 split. The changes kick into effect on June 1st, 2023, and even then only when a streamer's contract with Twitch is up for renewal, according to a blog post from Twitch president Dan Clancy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. From a report: It's the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about the legality of AI-generated content and a desire to protect the site's customers. "There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery," said Peters. Given these concerns, he said, selling AI artwork or illustrations could potentially put Getty Images users at legal risk. "We are being proactive to the benefit of our customers," he added. One of Getty Images' biggest competitors, Shutterstock, also seems to be limiting some searches for AI content but hasn't yet introduced specific policies banning the material.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. From a report: It's the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about the legality of AI-generated content and a desire to protect the site's customers. "There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery," said Peters. Given these concerns, he said, selling AI artwork or illustrations could potentially put Getty Images users at legal risk. "We are being proactive to the benefit of our customers," he added. One of Getty Images' biggest competitors, Shutterstock, also seems to be limiting some searches for AI content but hasn't yet introduced specific policies banning the material.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch has announced a ban on streaming unlicensed gambling sites, including slots, roulette and dice websites, starting next month. From a report: Sites that will be prohibited include Stake.com, Rollbit.com, Duelbits.com and Roobet.com. More websites may be banned later, Twitch said in a statement on Twitter. Websites focusing on sports betting, fantasy sports and poker will still be permitted. Some of Twitch's biggest streamers -- such as Imane "Pokimane" Anys, Matthew "Mizkif" Rinaudo and Devin Nash -- threatened a boycott of the platform during the week of Christmas, Kotaku reported. While gambling streams are not new to the platform, in recent years some on the platform have argued that "rich creators promoted potentially harmful content to young, impressionable fans," according to Kotaku. A number of creators have been pushing Twitch to do something about online gambling streams, citing potential dangers to younger users. Some have used the hashtag #twitchstopgambling on Twitter to raise awareness about the gambling streams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's well known that weightlifting can strengthen our biceps and quads. Now, there's accumulating evidence that strengthening the muscles we use to breathe is beneficial too. New research shows that a daily dose of muscle training for the diaphragm and other breathing muscles helps promote heart health and reduces high blood pressure. "The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older," explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine -- one of several on the market -- looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale. "We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers systolic blood pressure by about 9 millimeters of mercury," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise, he says -- such as walking, running or cycling. A normal blood pressure reading is less than about 120/80 mmHg, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These days, some health care professionals diagnose patients with high blood pressure if their average reading is consistently 130/80 mmHg or higher, the CDC notes. The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure (the first number in the ratio) is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. "That's the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug," Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medications lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple medications, but a 10 mmHg reduction correlates with a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease. So, how exactly does breath training lower blood pressure? Craighead points to the role of endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels and promote the production of nitric oxide -- a key compound that protects the heart. Nitric oxide helps widen our blood vessels, promoting good blood flow, which prevents the buildup of plaque in arteries. "What we found was that six weeks of IMST [inspiratory-muscle strength training] will increase endothelial function by about 45%," Craighead explains. [...] There may also be benefits for elite cyclists, runners and other endurance athletes, he says, citing data that six weeks of IMST increased aerobic exercise tolerance by 12% in middle-aged and older adults. "So we suspect that IMST consisting of only 30 breaths per day would be very helpful in endurance exercise events," Craighead says. It's a technique that athletes could add to their training regimens. Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast announced today that it has tested "the final technical component necessary to deliver multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds" and said it's on track to deliver multi-gigabit download and upload speeds to at least some cable customers "before the end of 2023." The test using Broadcom equipment delivered download speeds of 6Gbps and uploads of 4Gbps, Comcast said. Ars Technica reports: Cable broadband lags far behind fiber-to-the-home in upload speeds, a frustration for many Internet users who lack access to fiber. Comcast and other cable companies have been promising a major upgrade to uploads for years without ever saying exactly when the improvement would reach customers. Comcast is starting to get a bit more specific -- although that "end of 2023" promise doesn't specify what percentage of customers will get the upgrade when it first rolls out. Upgrading Comcast's entire cable territory is expected to be a multi-year process. "With this test completed, Comcast will launch live trials later this year, and will begin delivering 10G-powered multi-gig symmetrical services to customers before the end of 2023," Comcast said. (10G is a marketing term the cable industry uses to describe 10-gigabit-per-second speeds.) Comcast did not say what it will charge customers for multi-gigabit symmetrical service or whether the upgrade will be paired with any changes to the data cap imposed in most of Comcast's territory. Although the upgrade won't require replacing the cables going into customers' homes, getting all the right equipment in place throughout Comcast's network will take a few years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Countries should impose windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies and divert the money to vulnerable nations suffering worsening losses from the climate crisis, the United Nations secretary general has urged. The Guardian reports: Antonio Guterres said that "polluters must pay" for the escalating damage caused by heatwaves, floods, drought and other climate impacts, and demanded that it was "high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors and enablers on notice." "Today, I am calling on all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies," Guterres said in a speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday. "Those funds should be redirected in two ways -- to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices." Guterres's appeal came in his most urgent, and bleakest, speech to date on the state of the planet, and the will of governments to change course. His first words were: "Our world is in big trouble." "Let's have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon, a cost-of-living crisis is raging, trust is crumbling, inequalities are exploding and our planet is burning," he told the assembly. "We have a duty to act and yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction. The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age." [...] Under Guterres's proposal, revenue from the taxes would flow to predominantly developing countries suffering "loss and damage" from global heating, to be invested in early warning systems, mopping up from disasters and other initiatives to build resilience. Vulnerable countries are poised to leverage the UN general assembly week to ask rich nations for a "climate-related and justice-based" global tax to pay for loss and damage. But his speech on Tuesday was particularly pointed, delivered on the grand dais of the general assembly and following the secretary general's recent visit to Pakistan, where floods from what he called "a monsoon on steroids" have submerged a third of the country and displaced millions of people. [...] Governments must stage an "intervention" to break their addiction to fossil fuels, Guterres said, by targeting not only the extractive companies themselves but the entire infrastructure of businesses that support them. "That includes the banks, private equity, asset managers and other financial institutions that continue to invest and underwrite carbon pollution," said the secretary general. "And it includes the massive public relations machine raking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny. Just as they did for the tobacco industry decades before, lobbyists and spin doctors have spewed harmful misinformation. Fossil fuel interests need to spend less time averting a PR disaster -- and more time averting a planetary one." Guterres said it was "high time to move beyond endless discussions" and deliver finance for vulnerable countries and for wealthy nations to double adaption funding by 2025, as they promised to do at UN climate talks in Scotland last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has agreed to pay a $35 million fine to settle claims that it failed to protect the personal information of about 15 million customers, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement announcing the settlement, the S.E.C. described what it called Morgan Stanley's "extensive failures," over a five-year period beginning in 2015, to safeguard customer information, in part by not properly disposing of hard drives and servers that ended up for sale on an internet auction site. On several occasions, the commission said, Morgan Stanley hired a moving and storage company with no experience or expertise in data destruction services to decommission thousands of hard drives and servers containing the personal information of millions of its customers. The moving company then sold thousands of the devices to a third party, and the devices were then resold on an unnamed internet auction site, the commission said. An information technology consultant in Oklahoma who bought some of the hard drives on the internet chastised Morgan Stanley after he found that he could still access the firm's data on those devices. Morgan Stanley is "a major financial institution and should be following some very stringent guidelines on how to deal with retiring hardware," the consultant wrote in an email to Morgan Stanley in October 2017, according to the S.E.C. The firm should, at a minimum, get "some kind of verification of data destruction from the vendors you sell equipment to," the consultant wrote, according to the S.E.C. Morgan Stanley eventually bought the hard drives back from the consultant. Morgan Stanley also recovered some of the other devices that it had improperly discarded, but has not recovered the "vast majority" of them, the commission said. The settlement also notes that Morgan Stanley "had not properly disposed of consumer report information when it decommissioned servers from local offices and branches as part of a 'hardware refresh program' in 2019," reports the Times. "Morgan Stanley later learned that the devices had been equipped with encryption capability, but that it had failed to activate the encryption software for years, the commission said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, the world's longest immersed tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times between the two countries when it opens in 2029. CNN Travel reports: After more than a decade of planning, construction started on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel in 2020 and in the months since a temporary harbor has been completed on the Danish side. It will host the factory that will soon build the 89 massive concrete sections that will make up the tunnel. "The expectation is that the first production line will be ready around the end of the year, or beginning of next year," said Henrik Vincentsen, CEO of Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "By the beginning of 2024 we have to be ready to immerse the first tunnel element." The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros ($7.1 billion). [...] It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rodby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways -- separated by a service passageway -- and two electrified rail tracks. "Today, if you were to take a train trip from Copenhagen to Hamburg, it would take you around four and a half hours," says Jens Ole Kaslund, technical director at Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "When the tunnel will be completed, the same journey will take two and a half hours." "Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train," he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shutterstock appears to be removing images generated by AI systems like DALL-E and Midjourney. Motherboard reports: On Shutterstock, searches for images tagged "Midjourney" yielded several photos with the AI tool's unmistakable aesthetic, with many having high popularity scores and marked as "frequently used." But late Monday, the results for "Midjourney" seem to have been reduced, leaving mainly stock photos of the tool's logo. Other images use tags like "AI generated" -- one image, for example, is an illustration of a futuristic building with an image description reading "Ai generated illustration of futuristic Art Deco city, vintage image, retro poster." The image is part of a collection the artist titled "Midjourney," which has since been removed from the site. Other images marked "AI generated," like this burning medieval castle, seem to remain up on the site. As Ars Technica notes, neither Shutterstock nor Getty Images explicitly prohibits AI-generated images in their terms of service, and Shutterstock users typically make around 15 to 40 percent of what the company makes when it sells an image. Some creators have not taken kindly to this trend, pointing out that these systems use massive datasets of images scraped from the web. [...] In other words, the generated works are the result of an algorithmic process which mines original art from the internet without credit or compensation to the original artists. Others have worried about the impacts on independent artists who work for commissions, since the ability for anyone to create custom generated artwork potentially means lost revenue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charter Communications must pay over $1.1 billion to the estate and family of an 83-year-old woman murdered in her home by a Spectrum cable technician, a Dallas County Court judge ruled yesterday. Ars Technica reports: A jury in the same court previously ordered Charter to pay $7 billion in punitive damages and $337.5 million in compensatory damages. Judge Juan Renteria lowered the award in a ruling issued yesterday. The damages are split among the estate and four adult children of murder victim Betty Thomas. Renteria did not change the compensatory damages but lowered the punitive damages awarded to the family to $750 million. Pre-judgment interest on the damages pushes Charter's total liability to over $1.1 billion. It isn't surprising that the judge lowered the payout, in which the jury decided punitive damages should be over 20 times higher than what Charter is liable for in compensatory damages. A nine-to-one ratio is often used as a maximum because of a 2003 US Supreme Court ruling that said: "In practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process." Former Spectrum technician Roy Holden pleaded guilty to the 2019 murder of customer Betty Thomas and was sentenced to life in prison in April 2021. Charter was accused of hiring Holden without verifying his employment history and ignoring a series of red flags about his behavior, which included stealing credit cards and checks from elderly female customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Tuesday, 40 civil rights groups published an open letter calling on MGM Television executives to cancel the studio's upcoming reality show Ring Nation, which will feature former NSA employee and comedian Wanda Sykes presenting humorous surveillance footage captured from Ring doorbell cameras. The groups say the studio is "normalizing and promoting Amazon Ring's dangerous network of surveillance cameras," which, along with the Neighbors app, "violate basic privacy rights, fuel surveillance-based policing that disproportionately targets people of color and threatens abortion seekers, and enables vigilantes to surveil their neighbors and racially profile bystanders." There's just one potential problem with the well-intentioned campaign: Amazon owns Ring, producer Big Fish Entertainment, and distributor MGM, and it also owns the Prime Video streaming service should it need somewhere to air it. It also has specific partnerships with thousands of police departments around the country should they happen to prove useful. This tower of vertical integration means that Ring Nation is a show designed from the ground up to leverage Amazon's vast monopoly to push its own product on Americans, and it also means that it will probably (but not definitely) be impossible to kill. There's very little chance that MGM executives will push back on the project when it's probably exactly the type of thing Amazon imagined being able to do when it spent $8.5 billion on a merger with MGM this year. "Ring Nation is not a comedy but rather a propaganda strategy to normalize and further digitize racial profiling in our communities. Truthfully the cognitive dissonance about the dangers of these tools is a real concern. It's striking to see a host who has been such a vocal supporter of racial justice protesters defend the very tech that was used to surveil activists during the uprisings in 2020," said Myaisha Hayes, campaign strategy director at Cancel Ring Nation co-organizer Media Justice, in a statement. "The Ring Nation reality-TV series is anything but funny. It weaponizes the joy of our daily lives in an attempt to manufacture a PR miracle for scandal-ridden Amazon," Evan Greer, director of co-organizer Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "By normalizing surveillance, it will teach our children to relinquish their privacy in exchange for a quick laugh. In the coming weeks, Fight for the Future, Media Justice, and our org partners will be mobilizing our supporters and forming a loud and fearless coalition of civil rights groups to cancel Ring Nation," Greer said. The show is set to launch on Sept. 26, though it hasn't been announced which networks will carry it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Document Foundation, the organization that tends the open source productivity suite LibreOffice, has decided to start charging for one version of the software. The Register reports: LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is offered under the free/open source Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. A Monday missive from the Document Foundation reveals the org will begin charging 8.99 euros for the software -- but only when sold via Apple's Mac App Store. That sum has been styled a "convenience fee ... which will be invested to support development of the LibreOffice project." The foundation suggests paying up in the Mac App Store is ideal for "end users who want to get all of their desktop software from Apple's proprietary sales channel." Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's site will remain available and arguably be superior to the App Store offering, because that version will include Java. The foundation argued that Apple does not permit dependencies in its store, so it cannot include Java in the 8.99 euro offering. The version now sold in the App Store supersedes a previous offering provided by open source support outfit Collabora, which charged $10 for a "Vanilla" version of the suite and threw in three years of support. The foundation's marketing officer Italo Vignoli said the change was part of a "new marketing strategy." "The Document Foundation is focused on the release of the Community version, while ecosystem companies are focused on a value-added long-term supported versions targeted at enterprises," Vignoli explained. "The distinction has the objective of educating organizations to support the FOSS project by choosing the LibreOffice version which has been optimized for deployments in production and is backed by professional services, and not the Community version generously supported by volunteers." "The objective is to fulfil the needs of individual and enterprise users in a better way," Vignoli added, before admitting "we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating enterprises about FOSS is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Document Foundation, the organization that tends the open source productivity suite LibreOffice, has decided to start charging for one version of the software. The Register reports: LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is offered under the free/open source Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. A Monday missive from the Document Foundation reveals the org will begin charging 8.99 euros for the software -- but only when sold via Apple's Mac App Store. That sum has been styled a "convenience fee ... which will be invested to support development of the LibreOffice project." The foundation suggests paying up in the Mac App Store is ideal for "end users who want to get all of their desktop software from Apple's proprietary sales channel." Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's site will remain available and arguably be superior to the App Store offering, because that version will include Java. The foundation argued that Apple does not permit dependencies in its store, so it cannot include Java in the 8.99 euro offering. The version now sold in the App Store supersedes a previous offering provided by open source support outfit Collabora, which charged $10 for a "Vanilla" version of the suite and threw in three years of support. The foundation's marketing officer Italo Vignoli said the change was part of a "new marketing strategy." "The Document Foundation is focused on the release of the Community version, while ecosystem companies are focused on a value-added long-term supported versions targeted at enterprises," Vignoli explained. "The distinction has the objective of educating organizations to support the FOSS project by choosing the LibreOffice version which has been optimized for deployments in production and is backed by professional services, and not the Community version generously supported by volunteers." "The objective is to fulfil the needs of individual and enterprise users in a better way," Vignoli added, before admitting "we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating enterprises about FOSS is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, YouTube announced major changes to its YouTube Partner Program, allowing creators to earn ad revenue on Shorts, its TikTok competitor. TechCrunch reports: Now, Shorts creators can qualify for the Partner Program, which allows creators to earn ad revenue from YouTube. The existing Partner Program requires YouTubers to have over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last year. Now, Shorts creators can join the Partner Program if they have at least 10 million views on the platform over the last 90 days. As members of the Partner Program, these creators will earn 45% of ad revenue from their videos. "I'm proud to say this is the first time real revenue sharing is being offered for short form video on any platform at scale," said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. He's right. TikTok has started experimenting with ad revenue sharing, but its efforts seem to focus more on the advertiser than the creator, as only the top 4% of all videos on TikTok can be monetized through its TikTok Pulse program. For the most part, creators have found it increasingly difficult to make money from TikTok's Creator Fund. [...] YouTube Shorts is poised to become TikTok's biggest competitor. If creators can make more money on Shorts than on TikTok, then they're incentivized to make original content for the YouTube platform. YouTube also shared that this update to the Partner Program will enable the platform to license more music for use in Shorts, which could help encourage creators to use Shorts more often. Creators in the program will be compensated the same, regardless of whether they use licensed music. YouTube also unveiled Creator Music, now in beta testing. Creators can browse a large catalog of songs to purchase for use in their content, with the terms of the music rights spelled out in simple terms. They'll also be able to opt for tracks with new revenue-sharing option where both creators and music rights holders earn money from their content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany's general data retention law violates EU law, Europe's top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security. The law may only be applied in circumstances where there is a serious threat to national security defined under very strict terms, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said. The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years. Governments argue that access to data, especially that collected by telecoms operators, can help prevent such incidents, while operators and civil rights activists oppose such access. The latest case was triggered after Deutsche Telekom unit Telekom Deutschland and internet service provider SpaceNet AG challenged Germany's data retention law arguing it breached EU rules. The German court subsequently sought the advice of the CJEU which said such data retention can only be allowed under very strict conditions. "The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security," the judges said. "However, in order to combat serious crime, the member states may, in strict compliance with the principle of proportionality, provide for, inter alia, the targeted or expedited retention of such data and the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses," they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A big group of U.S. states, led by New York, has argued to an appeals court that it should reinstate an antitrust lawsuit against Meta's Facebook because of ongoing harm from the company's actions and because the states had not waited too long to file their complaint. From a report: Barbara Underwood, solicitor general of New York which led the group that consists of 46 states, Guam and District of Columbia, said that it was wrong to treat states like a class action and put a limit on when they can sue. States not involved are Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota. She said the states' action was more akin to law enforcement so "laches," which forbids an unreasonable delay in filing, would not apply. She said that Facebook's actions harmed the economy and the marketplace. The states are asking the three-judge panel on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reinstate a lawsuit filed in 2020, the same time that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the company. Both the FTC and the states had asked the court to order Facebook to sell Instagram, which it bought for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp, which it bought for $19 billion in 2014. The FTC fight with Facebook is going forward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.