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Veronique Greenwood writes via The New York Times: Your skin is home to a thousand kinds of bacteria, and the ways they contribute to healthy skin are still largely mysterious. This mystery may be getting even more complex: In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, researchers studying the many varieties of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria on 16 human volunteers found that each pore was a world unto itself. Every pore contained just a single type of C. acnes. C. acnes is naturally occurring, and the most abundant bacteria on skin. Its link to acne, the skin disease, is not clear, said Tami Lieberman, a professor at M.I.T. and an author of the new paper. If biologists want to unpack the relationship between your face's inhabitants and its health, it will be an important step to understand whether varying strains of C. acnes have their own talents or niches, and how the strains are distributed across your skin. Each person's skin had a unique combination of strains, but what surprised the researchers most was that each pore housed a single variety of C. acnes. The pores were different from their neighbors, too -- there was no clear pattern uniting the pores of the left cheek or forehead across the volunteers, for instance. What's more, judging from the sequencing data, the bacteria within each pore were essentially identical. "There's a huge amount of diversity over one square centimeter of your face," said Arolyn Conwill, a postdoctoral researcher who is the study's lead author. "But within a single one of your pores, there's a total lack of diversity." What the scientists think is happening is that each pore contains descendants of a single individual. Pores are deep, narrow crannies with oil-secreting glands at the bottom, Dr. Lieberman said. If a C. acnes cell manages to get down there, it may proliferate until it fills the pore with copies of itself. This would also explain why strains that don't grow very quickly manage to avoid being outcompeted by speedier strains on the same person. They're not competing with each other; they're living side by side in their own walled gardens. Intriguingly, these gardens are not very old, the scientists think. They estimate that the founding cells in the pores they studied took up residence only about one year before. What happened to the bacteria that previously lived there? The researchers don't know -- perhaps they were destroyed by the immune system, fell prey to viruses or were unceremoniously yanked out by a nose strip, clearing the way for new founders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year saw the hottest ocean temperatures in recorded history, the sixth consecutive year that this record has been broken, according to new research. The Guardian reports: The heating up of our oceans is being primarily driven by the human-caused climate crisis, scientists say, and represents a starkly simple indicator of global heating. While the atmosphere's temperature is also trending sharply upwards, individual years are less likely to be record-breakers compared with the warming of the oceans. Last year saw a heat record for the top 2,000 meters of all oceans around the world, despite an ongoing La Nina event, a periodic climatic feature that cools waters in the Pacific. The 2021 record tops a stretch of modern record-keeping that goes back to 1955. The second hottest year for oceans was 2020, while the third hottest was 2019. Warmer ocean waters are helping supercharge storms, hurricanes and extreme rainfall, the paper states, which is escalating the risks of severe flooding. Heated ocean water expands and eats away at the vast Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are collectively shedding around 1tn tons of ice a year, with both of these processes fueling sea level rise. Oceans take up about a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity, causing them to acidify. This degrades coral reefs, home to a quarter of the world's marine life and the provider of food for more than 500m people, and can prove harmful to individual species of fish. As the world warms from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other activities, the oceans have taken the brunt of the extra heat. More than 90% of the heat generated over the past 50 years has been absorbed by the oceans, temporarily helping spare humanity, and other land-based species, from temperatures that would already be catastrophic. The amount of heat soaked up by the oceans is enormous. Last year, the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean, where most of the warming occurs, absorbed 14 more zettajoules (a unit of electrical energy equal to one sextillion joules) than it did in 2020. This amount of extra energy is 145 times greater than the world's entire electricity generation which, by comparison, is about half of a zettajoule. Long-term ocean warming is strongest in the Atlantic and Southern oceans, the new research states, although the north Pacific has had a "dramatic" increase in heat since 1990 and the Mediterranean Sea posted a clear high temperature record last year. The research has been published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers on Tuesday that a rapidly healing economy no longer needed as much help from the central bank and that keeping inflation in check -- including by raising interest rates -- would be critical for enabling a stable expansion that benefits workers. From a report: Mr. Powell, whom President Biden recently nominated for a second term as chair, is confronting a complicated economic moment as he moves toward another four-year stint as head of the world's most powerful central bank. He provided his latest thoughts on the Fed's challenge during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. The economy is growing swiftly, but it has been buffeted by repeated waves of the coronavirus and by a surge in inflation that has proved stronger and longer lasting than economists had expected. Workers are finding jobs and winning wage increases, but the rising costs of housing, gas, food and furniture are pinching shoppers and tanking consumer confidence. The Fed is charged with maintaining price stability, and its officials have recently signaled that they could raise interest rates several times this year to try to cool the economy and prevent rapidly rising prices from becoming permanent. Mr. Powell -- who is widely expected to win confirmation -- reiterated that commitment on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bernalillo County filed an emergency notice in federal court last week because a ransomware attack made the Metropolitan Detention Center unable to comply with terms of a settlement agreement in a years-running lawsuit over jail conditions. From a report: The county last Wednesday announced its offices and systems were the victims of a cyberattack, affecting a wide variety of county government operations. Most county buildings were closed until further notice. As a result, the county-operated MDC has been unable to access its cameras since the attack, which is one of the reasons it has fallen out of compliance in the McClendon v. City of Albuquerque lawsuit, which centers on jail conditions. The attack has limited how much time inmates can spend out of their cells, and also reduced their access to telephones and tablets, according to the filing. The county also has been unable to gather data required as a condition of the settlement agreement. No visitors have been allowed. The county said in the filing that its inability to access cameras is one of the more concerning aspects of the cyberattack, which has caused the facility to be on "lockdown" since Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Dawn Ostroff wants to find more hits. The chief content officer of Spotify is upset that her company isn't producing enough new popular podcasts, and has been putting pressure on her in-house studios to deliver. I've now heard the same message from every corner of the Spotify universe, though no one wanted to talk about it on the record. It's hard for new shows to find an audience. Every new show has a smaller audience than its predecessors. This is not specific to Spotify. Executives at studios large and small echoed the sentiment. While the overall audience for podcasting expands, the audience for individual new shows is shrinking across the board. None of the 10 most popular podcasts in the U.S. last year debuted in the last couple years, according to Edison Research. They are an average of more than 7 years old, and three of the top five are more than a decade old. ("The Joe Rogan Experience," "This American Life" and "Stuff You Should Know.") Only a few podcasts in the top 50 ("SmartLess," "The Michelle Obama Podcast," "Frenemies") are less than two years old. And none of them are in the top 25. This trend vexes executives and producers across the podcasting industry, who worry they are wasting a lot of money on new shows. Spotify, Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and outside investors have plowed billions of dollars into production companies. Spotify has spent more than anyone, paying about $500 million for three studios. Where is all this money going if these companies aren't producing new hits?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whether its Pokemon cards, swords, or gift cards, the USPS Mail Recovery Center can accommodate all your shopping needs. From a report: Every year, the United States Postal Service auctions millions of dollars worth of undeliverable mail, an amount that could likely be far more if the USPS had any idea what it was selling, according to postal service documents. In 2020, as part of our special project on the USPS, Motherboard filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the USPS for a list of items auctioned by the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the USPS's "lost and found," a facility where some 67 million pieces of undeliverable mail annually are sent to. If the items are deemed to have a value of greater than $25, sentimental value, or otherwise possess "some material value," the items are stored in case the USPS receives an inquiry from the person who was supposed to get it. After a period ranging from 30 days to "indefinitely," the USPS either recycles, destroys, or auctions the item. But the USPS doesn't auction the items individually. It contracts with GovDeals, a government surplus auction website, to sell them off in lots. Currently, the Atlanta Surplus Center has 645 lots on auction, with items ranging from gift cards to cell phones to laptops. But mostly the lots contain "general merchandise." Ironically, the lots must be picked up at the Atlanta facility, as the mail will not mail the lost mail to the winner of an auction. In response to Motherboard's request, the USPS said it doesn't keep much of any information about the auctions at all. "As information, the Postal Service does not have a record of the actual number of items auctioned, the sale prices of those items, nor the sale prices of the individual lots," the USPS said. The only information it included in the response was an annual breakdown of 2015 through 2019 of the number of lots auctioned and the total revenue from those auctions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The omicron-driven surge has sent COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocketing across the U.S., reaching a new pandemic high this week with 145,982 patients hospitalized. From a report: This exceeds the previous high recorded in January last year, according to data tracked by the Department of Health and Human Services, from more than 5,400 hospitals in the country. Patients with COVID now fill about 30% of ICU beds in the nation and pediatric COVID hospitalizations are also at the highest rate of the pandemic. The record-breaking numbers are a sign of just how quickly the omicron variant has swept across the country. Overall, infections are also at record levels, with the U.S. averaging more than 700,000 new cases a day. And researchers and health workers warn that the crowded conditions could be leading to a rise in avoidable deaths, as clinicians struggle to provide the level of care they would normally. "Things are looking grim and substantially worse in many ways than even just a year ago," says Dr. Doug White, a critical care physician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser. From a report: Firefox 96.0 has "significantly" reduced the amount of load placed on the browser's main thread and there is also "significant" improvements in noise suppression and auto-gain-control and improvements in echo cancellation. In addition to that performance work, there are also WebRTC improvements, an improved cookie policy to reduce the likelihood of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, video quality degradation fixes, and other fixes. Over on developer.mozilla.org are some of the web developer changes with Firefox 96 including CSS color value function hwb() support for specifying the hue/whiteness/blackness, support for the CSS color-scheme property, the Web Locks API is enabled by default, image encoder support for WebP for exporting HTML5 canvas elements, and other additions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union (EU), has been ordered to delete its massive database of information on EU citizens that it collected in recent years if the agency did not link subjects to any ongoing criminal activity. From a report: The decision was announced today by the European Data Protection Supervisor, an EU-independent supervisory authority whose primary objective is to monitor and ensure that European institutions and bodies respect the right to privacy and data protection. The EDPS said that Europol has one year to comply with its decision, during which time the law enforcement agency must filter its database and delete any information on EU citizens that are not part of criminal investigations. Europol will be allowed to process personal information as part of investigations, but the data on those not linked to crimes must be erased after six months. "This means that Europol will no longer be permitted to retain data about people who have not been linked to a crime or a criminal activity for long periods with no set deadline," the EDPS said in a press release on Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vodafone Idea said on Tuesday it is giving the Indian government a 35.8% stake in the company after its board approved conversion of dues and spectrum auction instalments into equity to save the third-largest telecom operator in the country from collapsing. From a report: The operator, a joint venture between the British telecoms group Vodafone and local billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla's conglomerate, has been attempting to avoid a collapse for several years after the arrival of Reliance Jio, which undercut the competitors with cheap data and free calls offering. Vodafone Idea, additionally, owed New Delhi dues of roughly $6.76 billion. Following the conversion into equity, Vodafone Group's shareholding will be diluted to 28.5% while Aditya Birla Group's will shrink to 17.8%. The Indian government will become the largest shareholder in the wireless telecom operator. [...] Tuesday's announcement comes months after the Indian government gave operators more time to pay dues on a two-decade dispute last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea's telecommunications regulator said on Tuesday Apple had submitted plans to allow third-party payment systems on its App Store to comply with a law banning major app store operators from forcing software developers to use their payments systems. From a report: The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) had requested Apple and Alphabet's Google to submit compliance plans after the bill was passed in August last year and went into effect in September. Google announced its plans to allow alternative payment systems in South Korea in November to comply with the amended Telecommunication Business Act, dubbed the "anti-Google law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two LAPD officers who were fired from their jobs in 2017 for playing Pokemon Go while on duty have had their appeal for reinstatement denied by a California judge. From a report: The officers' squad car video camera showed the two officers, Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell, ignored a request for backup to play the game, according to court documents. The pair were stationed near a robbery in progress, and after the responding officers put out a call for backup, Lozano and Mitchell seemingly ignored the call and left the area. When asked later why they hadn't responded to the call, the two officers said they were in a loud area and couldn't hear their radio. Lozano and Mitchell's supervisor was skeptical of their explanation and checked the in-car recording system (commonly known as a dashcam), which revealed the two had heard the call and chose to go elsewhere as they didn't want to help. The supervisor reported the incident, which opened a formal investigation. According to court filings, an extensive review of the in-car video system revealed that shortly after leaving the scene of the robbery, the two officers could be heard discussing Pokemon Go, including a Snorlax that had appeared and the best route to intercept and catch it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs. It is the first successful transplant of a pig's heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center. "It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart," said Dr. Bartley Griffith, the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation. "It's working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don't know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before." The heart transplant comes just months after surgeons in New York successfully attached the kidney of a genetically engineered pig to a brain-dead person. Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs. "This is a watershed event," said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. "Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure." But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night, Netflix's "The Power of the Dog" became the streamer's first-ever movie to take home a Golden Globe for best motion picture (drama). The movie also won for best director (Jane Campion) and best supporting actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee). As TechCrunch points out, "NBC announced in May 2021 it wouldn't broadcast the awards show this year after an investigation by The L.A. Times revealed the lack of diversity within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that hosts the annual event, as well as evidence of some members receiving gifts that amounted to bribes. [...] Instead, the event's winners were live-tweeted in an often bizarre fashion." From the report: In addition to being an overall quieter year as the HFPA tries to reform its organization following the controversies, the winning networks also aren't touting their victories as they would normally, despite some seeing some notable firsts and upsets. In prior years, HBO would be happily promoting its sweep over rivals. The network led the night with six wins, including four for HBO and two for HBO Max. Several of these were for its TV series "Succession," which won for best TV drama, TV drama actor (Jeremy Strong) and supporting actress (Sarah Snook.) HBO Max's comedy "Hacks" also notably beat out Emmy winner "Ted Lasso" (Apple TV+) as best comedy, and saw its lead, Jean Smart, win for best actress in a comedy. And Kate Winslet won best TV actress in a limited series for HBO's "Mare of Easttown." Meanwhile, though Netflix led the year by nominations -- including for best dramatic film "The Power of the Dog" and drama series "Squid Game" -- it had said it wouldn't participate in the event until the HFPA institutes changes. That decision means it's also now not bragging about a couple of notable firsts that resulted from last night's awards. [...] In addition, Netflix's runaway hit TV series "Squid Game" received three nominations this year, leading to the first-ever win for South Korea, as South Korean actor O Yeong-su won for his role in the series, beating out "Succession's" Kieran Culkin (HBO) and "The Morning Show's" Billy Crudup (Apple TV+). Netflix also won for "tick, tick... BOOM!" when Andrew Garfield took the trophy for best actor in a motion picture (musical or comedy), though the tweet had forgotten to credit the project by name. Apple TV+ took home one win last night, as "Ted Lasso's" Jason Sudeikis won best actor in a TV series (comedy). Hulu also got one Globe, as "Dopesick's" Michael Keaton won best actor in a TV limited series or motion picture made for television, while Amazon Prime Video's "The Underground Railroad" won the category. Amazon Prime Video's "Being the Ricardos" was highlighted with Nicole Kidman's win as best actress in a motion picture. In another milestone, the first trans actress to win a Golden Globe, FX's "Pose" star Michaela Jae Rodriguez, took home the trophy for best actress in a drama. 20th Century Studio/Disney's "West Side Story" won best picture (musical or comedy) and its stars, Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose, won best actress and supporting actress, respectively. Disney's "Encanto," which streamed on Disney+ just a month after hitting theaters, won best animated picture. Warner Bros.' "Dune" got the trophy for best score (Hans Zimmer), and Will Smith was named best actor in a motion picture (drama) for "King Richard." The best non-English language picture award went to the Japanese film "Drive My Car." You can view the full list of winners here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's a rock. A small rock," writes Slashdot reader BeerFartMoron. CBS News reports: China has discovered the explanation for the mysterious "hut" its Yutu 2 rover spotted on the moon late last year. As the lunar rover made a closer approach, a log of its activities revealed the object was actually just a rock on a crater rim. The revelation came as the lunar rover drove closer to the formation that was once believed to be as tall as Paris' Arc de Triomphe, according to a post published Friday on "Our Space," a Chinese media channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration. Instead, it was much smaller and had a peculiar shape. Upon a closer view, the rock looked like a "jade rabbit" holding carrots, the post said. "The Moon's surface is 38 million square kilometres of rocks, so it would have been astronomically exceptional for it to be anything else," Space News journalist Andrew Jones wrote on Twitter. "But while small, the jade rabbit/ rock will also be a monumental disappointment to some."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The gorse bushes that have invaded many Scottish landscapes could produce enough protein to feed millions of people, according to the leader of a Scottish government research program. The surprising suggestion by Prof Wendy Russell, at the University of Aberdeen, comes from research on the protein content of invasive plants that have to be doused with herbicides or burned back to keep them under control. Gorse contains 17% protein and broom has 21% protein, she said, adding: "Gorse and broom were fed to cattle at times when crops failed in the past, so we think protein from these types of plants could be used as animal food. If protein isolates are produced in the correct way, so to be safe, they could be considered as human food in the future." "The whole point about gorse is it is actively being removed from marginal lands -- it's something we can gain protein from at no extra cost," she said. "We have a huge amount of gorse all over Scotland and when we did the calculations, just by active removal from marginal land, there's enough gorse protein to easily feed [Scotland's] population." [...] Scotland has little arable land, which is why Russell examined invasive plants on marginal land. "When you make a protein isolate from gorse, 57% of the total leaf protein can be recovered at up to 95% purity," she said. "We're using about 4.5 to 6kg of CO2 to produce [a kilogram of] isolate, compared to an average for meat of 102kg of CO2."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter X2b5Ysb8 shares a report from The Drive, written by Peter Holderith: Driving a 2022 GMC Hummer EV prototype back in Oct. 2021 was an eye-opening experience. [...] I did a fair amount of driving and some riding along with the vehicle's chief engineer, Al Oppenheiser. During one of our chats, Oppenheiser shared with me some of the trials and tribulations his engineering team went through while developing the vehicle. This included one unexpected capability that had to be tuned out before the massive truck was delivered to customers: wheelies. After a launch in WTF mode on the steeply banked test track at GM's Milford Proving Grounds, I told Oppenheiser that I was impressed how the truck could spin all four of its tires as it fired off the line like a shot. He went on to explain that was actually a preferred scenario as far as launches go. They used to be even more interesting when the tires came off the ground. "In the early days when we were just trying to balance the front and rear torque, I got the front end to lift," he told me. As it turns out, so much of the car was developed digitally that, when it came time to do real-world testing, there were a few unexpected quirks. "We had to back off the torque on the front end," he added, just as he prepared the Hummer for another launch. After our final sprint to highway speeds in WTF mode, I clarified with him that the Hummer would indeed do a wheelstand if it was tuned correctly. He reiterated his point, saying "originally" that was the case, and you could theoretically still make it do so "to prove that you can." However, when it comes to the production versions of the hefty 4x4, he made it clear that for "functional safety reasons," that wouldn't be in the Hummer's big bag of tricks. Talking about feeling cheated. So yes, the Hummer EV can do wheelies, just not in stock form.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boomy is a new AI startup that helps users create their own songs using artificial intelligence software that does most of the heavy lifting. The BBC reports: You choose from a number of genres, click on "create song", and the AI will compose one for you in less than 30 seconds. It swiftly picks the track's key, chords and melody. And from there you can then finesse your song. You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals. California-based, Boomy, was launched at the end of 2018, and claims its users around the world have now created almost five million songs. The Boomy website and app even allows people to submit their tracks to be listed on Spotify and other music streaming sites, and to earn money every time they get played. While Boomy owns the copyright to each recording, and receives the funds in the first instance, the company says it passes on 80% of the streaming royalties to the person who created the song. [CEO Alex Mitchell] adds that more than 10,000 of its users have published over 100,000 songs in total on various streaming services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security professionals will be dealing with the fallout from the Log4j bug for a long time to come, top officials for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday. CNET reports: If left unpatched or otherwise unfixed, the major security flaw discovered a month ago in the Java-logging library Apache Log4j poses risks for huge swaths of the internet. The vulnerability in the widely used software could be exploited by cyberattackers to take over computer servers, potentially putting everything from consumer electronics to government and corporate systems at risk of a cyberattack. No US federal agencies have been compromised as a result of the vulnerability, CISA Director Jen Easterly told reporters on a call Monday. In addition, no major cyberattacks involving the bug have been reported in the US, though many attacks go unreported, she said. Easterly said the sheer scope of the vulnerability, which affects tens of millions of internet-connected devices, makes it the worst she has seen in her career. It's possible, she said, that attackers are biding their time, waiting for companies and others to lower their defenses before they attack. "We do expect Log4Shell to be used in intrusions well into the future," Easterly said, using the name for the bug in the Log4j software. She noted the Equifax data breach in 2017, which compromised the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans, stemmed from a vulnerability in open-source software. Most of the attempts to exploit the bug, so far, have been focused on low-level crypto mining or attempts to draw devices into botnets, she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to "convince [employees] that unions suck." The campaign was called Project Vivian, and ran at Google between late 2018 and early 2020 to combat employee activism and union organizing efforts at the company, according to court documents. Google's director of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described Project Vivian as an initiative "to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck." In his January 7 ruling, a NLRB judge wrote that Google must "immediately" produce 180 internal documents that he reviewed related to Google's Project Vivian campaign, including the document with Pfyl's description. Google has so far refused to hand over these documents to an attorney representing aggrieved former Google employees, citing attorney client privilege. The fired employees filed a subpoena for these documents as part of an ongoing NLRB lawsuit against the company. Google fired the workers in 2019 after they organized against the company's contracts with immigration detention agencies. In late 2020, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers. Google claimed at the time and maintains that it fired them for breaching security protocols. In 2019, Google employees discovered that Google had hired a union avoidance firm called IRI Consultants. IRI Consultants is known for assisting employers in anti-union campaigns by collecting information on workers' personalities, finances, work ethic, motivations, and ethnicity in order to defeat union drives. At the time, Google was facing an unprecedented wave of employee protests and activism for issues related to sexual harassment, contracts with Department of Defense and Customers and Border Protection. In his ruling on the documents related to Project Vivian, the NLRB judge describes evidence he reviewed of a situation where a Google attorney proposed to find a "respected voice to publish an OpEd outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like, and counseling employees of FB (Facebook), MSFT(Microsoft), Amazon, and google (sic) not to do it." Kara Silverstein, Google's human resources director said that she "like[d] the idea" of the op-ed, but that it should be executed so that "there would be no fingerprints and not Google specific." IRI Consultants eventually provided a proposed draft of the op-ed to a Google attorney, according to the judge's report. The secret documents pertaining to Google's Project Vivian also reveal that "the decision to hire IRI was not made by lawyers but by a group composed primarily of non-attorneys" including Silverstein, Google's human resources director and Danielle Brown, Google's vice president of employee engagement. Project Vivian also included discussions of Google employees' "opposition to mandatory arbitration," the judge's report says. Ending forced arbitration at Google has previously been a crucial rallying point for employee activists at Google. The company agreed to end mandatory arbitration in February 2019, following employee protests. "The underlying case here has nothing to do with unionization, it's about employees breaching clear security protocols to access confidential information and systems inappropriately," a Google spokesperson said. "We disagree with the characterization of the legally privileged materials referred to by the complainants. As we've stated, our teams engage with dozens of outside consultants and law firms to provide us with advice on a wide range of topics, including employer obligations and employee engagement. This included IRI Consultants for a short period. However, we made a decision in 2019 not to use the materials or ideas explored during this engagement, and we still feel that was the right decision."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple said that developers have generated more than $260 billion in revenue since the App Store launched in 2008, up about $60 billion from the figure it reported a year ago. From a report: The iPhone maker made the announcement Monday as part of a summary of the performance of its digital services across 2021. The company said the App Store generated a "new yearly record for App Store developer earnings last year" and that App Store sales between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve rose in the double digits from the same period a year ago. Apple didn't say how much it generated during that week in 2021 but previously said it made $1.8 billion during that period of 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, security researcher Brian Krebs reported that Norton 360, one of the most popular antivirus products on the market, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers' computers. Well, it appears that Avira antivirus, which has built a base of 500 million users worldwide, is doing the same. Krebs on Security reports: Like Norton 360, Avira comes with a cryptominer already installed, but customers have to opt in to using the service that powers it. Avira's FAQ on its cryptomining service is somewhat sparse. For example, it doesn't specify how much NortonLifeLock gets out of the deal (NortonLifeLock keeps 15 percent of any cryptocurrency mined by Norton Crypto). "Avira Crypto allows you to use your computer's idle time to mine the cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH)," the FAQ explains. "Since cryptomining requires a high level of processing power, it is not suitable for users with an average computer. Even with compatible hardware, mining cryptocurrencies on your own can be less rewarding. Your best option is to join a mining pool that shares their computer power to improve their chance of mining cryptocurrency. The rewards are then distributed evenly to all members in the pool."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some European carriers, including T-Mobile/Sprint in the United States, are blocking iCloud Private Relay access when connected to cellular data. As 9to5Mac reports, "This feature is designed to give users an additional layer of privacy by ensuring that no one can view the websites that they visit." From the report: Apple says that Private Relay is a feature designed to give users another layer of privacy when browsing the web. The first relay is sent through a server maintained by Apple, and the second is a third-party operator. The feature was announced at WWDC last June and initially slated for inclusion in iOS 15. Apple ultimately shipped the feature as a "public beta," meaning that it is disabled by default in the newest iOS 15 and macOS Monterey releases. You can manually enable it by going to Settings on your iPhone, tapping your name at the top, choosing iCloud, and choosing "Private Relay." T-Mobile was among the carriers in Europe that signed an open letter expressing concern about the impact of Private Relay. The carriers wrote that the feature cuts off networks and servers from accessing "vital network data and metadata and could impact "operator's ability to efficiently manage telecommunication networks." In the UK, carriers including T-Mobile, EE, and others have already started blocking Private Relay usage when connected to cellular data. 9to5Mac has also now confirmed that T-Mobile is extending this policy to the United States. This means that T-Mobile and Sprint users in the United States can no longer use the privacy-preserving iCloud Private Relay feature when connected to cellular data. The report notes that T-Mobile appears to be "in the process of rolling it out," so some users might still be able to use the feature -- at least for now. "The situation could also could vary based on your location or plan," the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike is stepping down as CEO of the company, he announced in a blog post on Monday. Executive chairman Brian Acton will serve as acting CEO until a replacement is found. From a report: "Every day, I'm struck by how boundless Signal's potential looks, and I want to bring in someone with fresh energy and commitment to make the most of that," Marlinspike wrote. "I now feel very comfortable replacing myself as CEO based on the team we have." The company has met with several CEO candidates "over the last few months," Marlinspike wrote, but the search remains ongoing. Founded in 2014, Signal has grown into one of the most trusted and robust apps for encrypted messaging. The service has more than 40 million monthly users and is regularly recommended in security guides. Established as a nonprofit, the company is not supported by advertising or app sales, instead relying on donations and a recently launched sustainer program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, printers have been encumbered with digital rights management systems that prevent users from buying third-party ink and toner cartridges. Printer companies have claimed that their chip-enabled cartridges can "enhance the quality and performance" of their equipment, provide the "best consumer experience," and "protect [the printers] from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges." Left unsaid is the fact that requiring first-party cartridges also ensures a recurring revenue stream. It's an old business model -- Gillette sold its razor handles cheaply to sell more razors, for example -- and it's one that printer companies have enthusiastically embraced. Lexmark, HP, Canon, Brother, and others all effectively require users to purchase first-party ink and toner. To enforce the use of first-party cartridges, manufacturers typically embed chips inside the consumables for the printers to "authenticate." But when chips are in short supply, like today, manufacturers can find themselves in a bind. So Canon is now telling German customers how to defeat its printers' warnings about third-party cartridges. "Due to the worldwide continuing shortage of semiconductor components, Canon is currently facing challenges in procuring certain electronic components that are used in our consumables for our multifunction printers (MFP)," a Canon support website says in German. "In order to ensure a continuous and reliable supply of consumables, we have decided to supply consumables without a semiconductor component until the normal supply takes place again." [...] The software on these printers comes with a relatively simple way to defeat the chip checks. Depending on the model, when an error message occurs after inserting toner, users can press either "I Agree," "Close," or "OK." When users press that button, the world does not end. Rather, Canon says users may find that their toner cartridge doesn't give them a low-toner warning before running empty. "Although there are no negative effects on print quality when consumables are used without electronic components, certain additional functions, such as the detection of the toner level, may be impaired," Canon's support site says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher.The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...)The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults.Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sixteen major U.S. universities, including Yale University, Georgetown University and Northwestern University, are being sued for alleged antitrust violations because of the way they work together to determine financial-aid awards for students. From a report: According to a lawsuit filed in Illinois federal court late Sunday by law firms representing five former students who attended some of the schools, the universities engaged in price fixing and unfairly limited aid by using a shared methodologyÂto calculate applicants' financial need. Schools are allowed under federal law to collaborate on their formulas, but only if they don't consider applicants' financial need in admissions decisions. The suit alleges these schools do weigh candidates' ability to pay in certain circumstances, and therefore shouldn't be eligible for the antitrust exemption. The suit seeks damages and a permanent end to the schools' collaboration in calculating financial need and awarding aid. College admissions practices are being challenged more broadly and pillars of the decades-old admissions system are crumbling. The Supreme Court is expected to decide as soon as this week whether to take up two cases centered on affirmative action, involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The live, Clubhouse-like audio feature LinkedIn confirmed it was working on last year will debut later this month in beta as part of the company's new events platform, according to a company blog post. From a report: Microsoft-owned LinkedIn said last March that it was doing "early tests to create a unique audio experience connected to your professional identity," which was confirmed in the blog post by Jake Poses, LinkedIn lead for video, creators and events. "This month, we're taking a big step forward and building on the success of LinkedIn Live broadcasts by launching an entirely new interactive events experience that allows our members to more actively participate in the conversation," Poses writes in the post. Users cam participate in live conversations, join speakers "on stage" as part of the discussion, and, will be able to make connections with others at an event to network after the event ends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The value of bitcoin fell under the $40,000 mark in early morning trading today. From a report: The popular cryptocurrency sold off sharply this morning, while rival tokens like ether also lost value. Currently worth $39,831 per coin, bitcoin is off 4.3% and ether 5.1%, according to Coinbase data. While it is always risky to cover price changes in the crypto world, the fall in the value of bitcoin has crossed the threshold from notable to material. Yahoo Finance indicates that bitcoin's recent all-time high saw the cryptocurrency trade as high as $68,789.62 per coin. Today's price puts bitcoin's current drawdown at just over 42%. That's twice the swing required for bitcoin to have entered a technical bear market, and four times what it would need to meet the requirements of a correction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has announced plans to offer a four-day workweek to employees in Japan in an effort to improve productivity and attract better workers, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia. From a report: The move comes after the Japanese government made official recommendations to private employers in 2021 that included a shorter workweek. The four-day workweek has been floated around the world in various forms from Finland to New Zealand. Sometimes, the shorter weeks just mean that employers make the four days of work longer, while maintaining something close to 40 hours. Other times the companies will actually be offering a shorter week with fewer total hours, so that people can pursue more leisure time or more education.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video game giant Take-Two is acquiring mobile gaming company Zynga, it said Monday. The deal is valued at around $12.7 billion, or $9.86 per Zynga share. From a report: Zynga publishes major social games like FarmVille and Words With Friends. Take-Two already owns game publishers Rockstar, which is behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, and 2K, known for BioShock, Borderlands, Civilization and NBA 2K.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenders are again welcoming borrowers with less-than-pristine credit, a vote of confidence in the health of the U.S. economy and Americans' finances. From a report: An estimated 29.2 million general-purpose credit cards were issued to people with credit scores of 660 and below last year, according to projections from credit-reporting firm TransUnion, up from 20.4 million in 2020 and 26.3 million in 2019. That is generally the threshold where lenders view consumers as having fair, rather than good, credit. Even subprime borrowers, a group shunned during the pandemic, are finding it easier to get credit. Lenders issued roughly 11.6 million general-purpose credit cards to people with credit scores below 620 during the first nine months of 2021, according to the latest data by Equifax, up 43.5% from a year earlier and the highest for the period on record. (Equifax's data goes back to 2010.) The aggregate spending limit on the cards rose 45% over the same period. In the early months of the pandemic, lenders preparing for a tidal wave of missed payments tightened loan-approval standards, locking riskier borrowers out of the market for new credit. But government stimulus and expanded unemployment payments helped push down credit-card balances and kept defaults at bay. Some 33% of banks reported somewhat easing their credit standards for card approvals during the three months through early October, according to the latest Federal Reserve senior loan officer survey, compared with about 4% a year earlier. "The credit market is now more reminiscent of 2019 -- not the early stages of the pandemic," said Paul Siegfried, credit-card and payments business leader at TransUnion. "Despite the increase in new accounts to subprime borrowers, we have observed that balances for subprime borrowers have remained relatively stable -- a sign that consumers are not taking on too much risk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Oriental Education and Technology Group fired tens of thousands of employees, the biggest layoffs disclosed since China embarked on a wide-ranging crackdown on private enterprises more than a year ago. From a report: Yu Minhong, founder and chairman of the Chinese tutoring giant, revealed in a WeChat post over the weekend that the company dismissed 60,000 workers in 2021 and saw revenue fall 80% after ending all K-9 tutoring services following Beijing's overhaul of the the $100 billion after-school education sector last July. Even after the cuts, the company still has about 50,000 employees and teachers, Yu said in a separate post Monday. The revelation underscores the widespread disruption wrought by Beijing's unprecedented decision last summer to outlaw profits in swathes of the after-school education industry -- upending a market estimated at $100 billion at its peak. The three biggest operators in the space -- including New Oriental and TAL Education Group -- together once employed more than 170,000 but total numbers are estimated in the millions given the hundreds of private firms that vied for students in a fragmented and under-regulated arena.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix draws princes, movie stars and world-famous athletes every year to party on Yas Island, the entertainment hub about 30 minutes from the center of downtown. Mingling among them last month was a figure charting an unlikely ascent: a former McDonald's burger-flipper and software developer who, practically overnight, has vaulted into the ranks of the world's wealthiest people -- cryptocurrency pioneer Changpeng Zhao. CZ, as he's known to cryptophiles, is quickly becoming a fixture in the United Arab Emirates, meeting with royalty in Abu Dhabi who are eager to bring his Binance exchange to the country, according to people with knowledge of the situation. He has scooped up an apartment in Dubai and hosted dinners near the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and on the city's Palm Jumeirah island -- making him the most prominent personality in the nation's booming crypto scene. In a region known for dizzying wealth, Zhao, 44, fits right in: His net worth is $96 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It's the first time Bloomberg has estimated his fortune, which exceeds Asia's richest person, Mukesh Ambani, and rivals tech titans including Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Zhao's fortune could be significantly larger, as the wealth estimate doesn't take into account his personal crypto holdings, which include Bitcoin and his firm's own token. Binance Coin, now called BNB, surged roughly 1,300% last year. Binance's success underscores the vast riches being created in the unshackled cryptoverse, even with recent declines, but controversy has swirled around the firm. Banished from China -- where it was founded -- the company faces regulatory probes globally. The U.S. Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service are investigating whether one entity Zhao controls, Binance Holdings, is a conduit for money laundering and tax evasion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Who needs Terminators when you have precision clickbait and ultra-deepfakes?" asks IEEE Spectrum: Hollywood's worst-case scenario involving artificial intelligence (AI) is familiar as a blockbuster sci-fi film: Machines acquire humanlike intelligence, achieving sentience, and inevitably turn into evil overlords that attempt to destroy the human race. This narrative capitalizes on our innate fear of technology, a reflection of the profound change that often accompanies new technological developments. However, as Malcolm Murdock, machine-learning engineer and author of the 2019 novel The Quantum Price, puts it, "AI doesn't have to be sentient to kill us all. There are plenty of other scenarios that will wipe us out before sentient AI becomes a problem." Their article presents six real-world AI worst-case scenarios that "could simply happen by default, unfolding organically — that is, if nothing is done to stop them." It includes the possibility of deepfakes and large-scale disinformation, as well as AI-enabled "predictive control" that ultimately robs us of our free will. But it also presents an alternative worst-case scenario: that "we become so scared of the power of this tremendous technology that we resist harnessing it for the actual good it can do in the world." Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship." "And, if so, are there circumstances under which such censorship is justified?" The first person cited is Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.Fighting over whether a given speech restriction is or isn't censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. "There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be [free speech] absolutists but then basically be fine with censoring sexuality," she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there's broad consensus that censorship of Holocaust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. "I'm very wary of censorship," York says. "But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It's not that all speech is totally equal and valid." In other words, the problem York sees isn't social platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It's their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they're censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means. David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants' power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term "censorship" to content moderation decisions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States... We're better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term "censorship" for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which "the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet," as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere... "If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what platforms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they're doing it," Kaye said. The Post ultimately cites three experts who agree on one point: that it's worth scrutinizing the decisions of social media platforms because of their growing influence — whether or not you end up calling it censorship. But they also cite a follow-up observation from Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project. Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren't just passive conduits of information: Their recommendation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fueling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there's no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A technical question occurred to Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen when filling out forms online. "Are the programmers responsible for them stupid, incompetent, lazy, or all rolled into one?" They provided two real-world examples that inspired the question: - "I made up a company name that happened to contain a digit. When I submitted the information I got a big fat error diagnostic about this box, to the effect that numerals are not allowed in a company name. So you know, people â" no digits allowed in your company's name, or else!" - "In a free text box limited to 1,000 characters (already stupid, arguably) the caption explicitly banned the following characters in the "free text" because they can interfere with the correct processing of input..." ~!@#$%^&*()|' This prompted a response from UnknownSoldier (Slashdot reader #67,820), who shared the humorous "Murphy's Computer Law" aphorisms from 1984, calling them "sadly still appropriate" and referring to one in particular: "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."In general Web programmers tend to be extremely lazy (undisciplined.) They don't value correctness because that would take "work". I'm not just singling out web programmers here, look at how many programmers fuck up the TRIVIAL example of FizzBuzz. For example, here are two examples where incompetent programmers make tons of assumptions. * Falsehoods programmers believe about names * Falsehoods programmers believe about time As they say the devil is in the details, or edge case, as it may be. Programming is littered with edge cases so bad programmers "stick their head in the sand and ignore the problem hoping it will go away." Doing it right costs time, money, and skill. Management is partially to blame. Bad programmers are to blame. Schools are to blame. There are many factors why we end up with shit software like the use case you just described. And now you know why old programmers become grumpy. Modern software is slow, bloated, with layers of abstraction piled upon abstraction, library upon library. You spend more time "decoding" code and reverse engineering what was done because no one ever took the time to comment it properly for the next guy. Use these examples of "stupid shit" to be a better programmer. Agree? Disagree? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Why do programmers make so many mistakes?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid quotes a report from Apple Insider: Apple's color-coding of SMS communications in green in iMessage plays a role alongside other feature in getting teenagers to switch from Android to iPhone, a report claims, with a pressure to fit in with their peers promoting moves to turn their messages blue. The use of green and blue to show whether a message to a user is made through iMessage or via other devices has become more than a simple convenience indicator for users. It's also a form of status indicator, showing the user not only owns an iPhone, but can also make use of features on the platform that others cannot. In a profile of the color-indication system by the Wall Street Journal, teenagers and students explain how not having an iPhone and seeing green messages are seemingly a negative to them. New York masters student Jocelyn Maher said she was mocked by her friends and younger sister when dating, if the potential suitor used Android. 'I was like, Oh my gosh, his texts are green,' and my sister literally went Ew, that's gross,'' said Maher. Apple is apparently well aware that iMessage is a serious draw to its users, with it surfacing in the Epic-Apple trial as part of a series of claims it was used to lock users into its ecosystem. Epic pointed to statements by senior Apple management that the company had blocked the creation of an Android version of iMessage. The Wall Street Journal headlined its piece, "Why Appleâ(TM)s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking.." reports BleepingComputer. "The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on 'colors and 'faker'."The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone, and has almost 19,000 projects depending on it. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents.... Yesterday, users of popular open-source projects, such as Amazon's Cloud Development Kit were left stunned on seeing their applications print gibberish messages on their console. These messages included the text 'LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY' followed by a sequence of non-ASCII characters... The developer, named Marak Squires added a "new American flag module" to colors.js library yesterday in version v1.4.44-liberty-2 that he then pushed to GitHub and npm. The infinite loop introduced in the code will keep running indefinitely; printing the gibberish non-ASCII character sequence endlessly on the console for any applications that use 'colors.' Likewise, a sabotaged version '6.6.6' of faker was published to GitHub and npm.... The reason behind this mischief on the developer's part appears to be retaliation — against mega-corporations and commercial consumers of open-source projects who extensively rely on cost-free and community-powered software but do not, according to the developer, give back to the community. In November 2020, Marak had warned that he will no longer be supporting the big corporations with his "free work" and that commercial entities should consider either forking the projects or compensating the dev with a yearly "six figure" salary.... Some dubbed this an instance of "yet another OSS developer going rogue," whereas InfoSec expert VessOnSecurity called the action "irresponsible," stating: "If you have problems with business using your free code for free, don't publish free code. By sabotaging your own widely used stuff, you hurt not only big business but anyone using it. This trains people not to update, 'coz stuff might break." GitHub has reportedly suspended the developer's account. And, that too, has caused mixed reactions... "Removing your own code from [GitHub] is a violation of their Terms of Service? WTF? This is a kidnapping. We need to start decentralizing the hosting of free software source code," responded software engineer Sergio Gómez. "While it looks like color.js has been updated to a working version, faker.js still appears to be affected, but the issue can be worked around by downgrading to a previous version (5.5.3)," reports the Verge:Even more curiously, the faker.js Readme file has also been changed to "What really happened with Aaron Swartz...?" Squires' bold move draws attention to the moral — and financial — dilemma of open-source development, which was likely the goal of his actions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a mathematical model to understand why popular baby names keep on changing, and it "points to a tug-of-war between the need to stand out in the crowd and the need to fit in with the pack," reports Phys.Org. "The motives to conform and to be unique interact to produce complex dynamics when people observe each other in a social network." The research has been published in the journal Psychological Review. From the report: Mathematically speaking, the desire to fit in would drive behavior toward the mean, or average, in the group while the desire to stand out would drive behavior away from the mode, or most common occurrence, in the group. "Put them together and they still lead to equilibrium," [said Russell Golman, associate professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at CMU]. To break out of the equilibrium conundrum, Golman and his team added social networks to the mix. According to Golman, that means communities, neighbors, colleagues, clubs, or other social groups, not necessarily social media. "It was surprising that social networks could make such a big difference," said Golman. "We modeled the dynamics with a lot of different networks, and not converging to equilibrium is actually pretty typical." To test their new model, CMU Ph.D. student Erin Bugbee turned to the large database of baby names managed by the Social Security Administration for the last century. If baby names settled into an equilibrium, the most popular name would always be the most popular. That is not what happened. As the popularity of one name, say Emily, peaks, parents may decide to forgo that name and pick a similar one, like Emma. By following this strategy, they are instilling in their new daughter a name that is socially acceptable by its similarity to the popular name but will allow her to stand out in the crowd by putting a unique twist on her identity. Many parents may be thinking the same thing and the number of little girls named Emily will decline while those named Emma will increase. The study concludes that understanding social psychology and social network structure are both critical to explain the emergence of complex, unpredictable cultural trends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For the first time, astronomers were able to observe the death throes of a red supergiant star in real time," writes Slashdot reader quonset from a report via CNN. "The fortuitous event came about when astronomers were first alerted in the summer of 2020 by a release of bright radiation detected by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui's Haleakal. Then, In the fall, astronomers witnessed a supernova form in the same spot." From the report: Before they go out in a blaze of glory, some stars experience violent eruptions or release glowing hot layers of gas. Until astronomers witnessed this event, they believed that red supergiants were relatively quiet before exploding into a supernova or collapsing into a dense neutron star. Instead, scientists watched the star self-destruct in dramatic fashion before collapsing in a type II supernova. This star death is the rapid collapse and violent explosion of a massive star after it has burned through the hydrogen, helium and other elements in its core. All that remains is the star's iron, but iron can't fuse so the star will run out of energy. When that happens, the iron collapses and causes the supernova. A study detailing these findings published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal. "It's like watching a ticking time bomb," said senior study author Raffaella Margutti, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Berkeley, in a statement. "We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now." Some of these massive stars likely experience consequential internal changes that cause the tumultuous release of gas before they die, the finding has shown.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: It takes a lot of science to stop a fire. To prevent homes and workplaces from going up in smoke, manufacturers have added flame retardants to plastic, wood, and steel building materials for decades. But such additives can be toxic, expensive, and sometimes ineffective. Now, researchers in Australia and China have come up with a new flame retardant that, when exposed to extreme heat, forms a ceramic layer akin to hardened lava, squelching the flames before they spread. "This is very good work," says David Schiraldi, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University, who has developed other flame retardants. He notes that the ceramic's starting materials aren't particularly expensive or toxic, making it more likely to see widespread use. "[This] could impact public safety in the long run." [The researchers] used three components. First, they created a mixture of several metal oxide powders -- including oxides of aluminum, silicon, calcium, and sodium. That mix begins to melt at about 350C (below the temperature of most flames), forming a glasslike sheet. Next, the researchers added tiny flakes of boron nitride, which flow easily and help fill any spaces between the metal oxides as the glass forms. Finally, they added a fire-retardant polymer, which they described in ACS Nano in 2021. The polymer acts as a binder to glue the rest of the mixture to whatever it's coating. That mix dissolved in water into a milky-white solution, which they then sprayed on a variety of surfaces, including rigid foam insulation, wood, and steel. After it dried, they blasted each coated material for 30 seconds with an 1100C butane torch. In each case, the coating melted into a viscous liquid, covering the material in a continuous glassy sheet. When heated by the torch, coating spewed out nonflammable gases, such as carbon dioxide. As it did, it became more dense and formed a uniform, noncombustible char layer, which blocked flames from spreading to the materials underneath. The novel flame retardant protected rigid polymer foam -- the kind used to insulate homes -- better than more than a dozen commonly used retardants, the researchers report today in Matter. The new coating also excelled at protecting wood and steel. If sprayed on building materials during construction, the new coating could prevent disasters like the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, where 72 people died, the researchers say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: In January of 2020, Sonos filed two lawsuits against Google, claiming that the latter stole its multiroom speaker technology and infringed on 100 patents. In September, Sonos then sued Google alleging that the company's entire line of Chromecast and Nest products violated five of Sonos' wireless audio patents. A judge (preliminarily) ruled in favor of Sonos. Now it's gone from bad to worse for Google, as the preliminary findings have been finalized by the U.S. International Trade Commission. As a result, Google is not allowed to import any products that violate patents owned by Sonos, which Sonos argues includes Google Pixel phones and computers, Chromecasts, and Google Home/Nest speakers. These products produced by Google are often made outside of the United States and imported, hence why this is a big deal for Google. In the ruling (PDF) (via The New York Times), Google was also served a cease & desist in order to stop violating Sonos' patents. It has been theorized that as a result of the lawsuit, Google had removed Cast volume controls in Android 12, though it was recently added back with the January 2022 security patch. Sonos has previously said that it had proposed a licensing deal to Google for patents the company was making use of, but that neither company was able to reach an agreement. [...] There are still two more lawsuits pending against Google filed by Sonos, meaning that it's unlikely this is the last we've heard of this spat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Entertainment Software Association is shifting the Electronic Entertainment Expo to an online-only event out of concerns around the pandemic. VentureBeat reports: "Due to the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees, E3 will not be held in person in 2022," the ESA said in a statement to GamesBeat. "We remain incredibly excited about the future of E3 and look forward to announcing more details soon." That means the show will likely take place online this summer for the second year in a row, as COVID-19 concerns pushed the June 2021 show into an online-only event and scuttled the 2020 event entirely. Asked to clarify if there will be an online event, the ESA said it is "excited about the possibilities of an online event."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Snap is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for rejecting its application to trademark the word "spectacles" for its digital eyewear camera device. But the USPTO has maintained that "spectacles" is a generic term for smart glasses and that Snap's version "has not acquired distinctiveness," as required for a trademark. The Verge reports: In its complaint filed Wednesday in US District Court in California, Snap claims that the Spectacles name "evokes an incongruity between an 18th century term for corrective eyewear and Snap's high-tech 21st century smart glasses. SPECTACLES also is suggestive of the camera's purpose, to capture and share unusual, notable, or entertaining scenes (i.e., "spectacles") and while also encouraging users to make 'spectacles' of themselves." Snap first introduced its camera-equipped Spectacles in 2016 ("a wearable digital video camera housed in a pair of fashionable sunglasses," according to its complaint), which can take photos and videos while the user wears them and connects with the Snap smartphone app. [...] Snap's new complaint posits that there's been enough media coverage of Spectacles, bolstered by some industry awards and its own marketing including social media, to support its claim that consumers associate the word "spectacles" with the Snap brand. Snap first filed a trademark application for Spectacles in September 2016, "for use in connection with wearable computer hardware" and other related uses "among consumer electronics devices and displays." During several rounds of back-and-forth with the company since then, the USPTO has maintained that the word "spectacles" appeared to be "generic in connection with the identified goods," i.e. the camera glasses. Snap continued to appeal the agency's decision. In a November 2021 opinion, the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (pdf) upheld the decision, reiterating that the word "spectacles" was a generic term that applied to all smart glasses, not just Snap's version. Despite the publicity Snap claimed its Spectacles had received from its marketing and social media, the board noted in its opinion that Spectacles' "social media accounts have an underwhelming number of followers, and the number of followers is surprisingly small," which didn't support the company's argument that there had been a high enough level of consumer exposure to Snap's Spectacles to claim that consumers associated the word with Snap's brand. In its Tuesday complaint, Snap's attorneys argued that "spectacles is an old-fashioned term popular in the 18th century," and that it "is not often used today in the United States," especially by Snapchat's young audience. "This indicates that modern-day usage of "spectacles" in the United States -- especially among a younger demographic of consumers who are the relevant consumers of Snap's SPECTACLES camera product -- is not commonly understood to mean eyeglasses, and certainly not a wireless-enabled video camera product." But the USPTO appeal board said in November that the evidence didn't support that argument, and that the word "spectacles" still retains its generic meaning and therefore can't be trademarked. The board noted that in its own marketing, Snap had demonstrated that its Spectacles "eyeglasses form is a feature, function and characteristic of the camera, not only functionally but aesthetically." Snap's lawsuit, which names acting USPTO director Drew Hirshfeld, seeks to have the appeal board's November decision reversed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On the eve of the new year, tragedy struck in Manhattan: Chelsea art gallery owner Todd Kramer had 615 ETH (about $2.3 million) worth of NFTs, primarily Bored Apes and Mutant Apes, stolen by scammers and listed on the peer-to-peer NFT marketplace OpenSea. Kramer quickly took to Twitter and begged for help from OpenSea and the NFT community for help regaining his NFTs. Unsurprisingly, he was ripped to shreds by others in the community for not storing his valuable JPEGs in an offline wallet; however, OpenSea froze trading of the stolen NFTs on its platform. More than a few commentators pointed out that OpenSea's intervention here -- and especially Kramer's pleas for a centralized response -- seemed to go against a key tenet of the industry that often bumps up against usability: the idea that "code is law," and once your tokens are in someone else's digital wallet, that's the end of the game. While OpenSea did not actually reverse the transaction on the blockchain, it did block the stolen NFT's sale on its own platform, which is the most popular marketplace for NFTs. "We take theft seriously and have policies in place to meet our obligations to the community and deter theft on our platform. We do not have the power to freeze or delist NFTs that exist on these blockchains, however we do disable the ability to use OpenSea to buy or sell stolen items. We've prioritized building security tools and processes to combat theft on OpenSea, and we are actively expanding our efforts across customer support, trust and safety, and site integrity so we can move faster to protect and empower our users." OpenSea did not answer, however, why it had frozen the trading of these NFTs and not others stolen just weeks ago that were announced on Twitter by Bored Ape Yacht Club and Jungle Freak NFT owners. OpenSea's interventions, when they do happen, leave some users in the lurch. For example, another Twitter user recounted in a viral post how they unwittingly purchased a stolen NFT on OpenSea for 1.5 ETH (around $5000) only to have it frozen. OpenSea wasn't quick to help them out, they said -- although, it's unclear what the company could really do at that point -- and the NFT project Alien Frens reimbursed them 1 ETH. In these and other cases, "self-sovereignty" is offered up as an attempt to reframe what actually happened. Yes, the victims are ridiculed for falling prey to a hack or scam, expected to learn from their mistake by using cold storage, and in the best scenario able to buy the NFTs back at a discount because they're not sold on major marketplaces. But at least there was no centralized intervention. Kramer himself was able to buy at least two of his NFTs back with the help of users who had unwittingly bought them from the scammer. OpenSea's interventions in the cases of stolen NFTs show how centralized intermediaries often have an important role wherever the decentralized world of the blockchain meets the real world. It's also not the first time that similar moves have happened elsewhere in crypto, even though they break from the core dogma of immutability and self-sovereignty. "Scams have always been a part of the cryptocurrency industry, and so has the uncomfortable question of centralized interventions," writes Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr in closing. "It increasingly feels like the inconsistent application of rules in this space more often results in protecting wealth transfer schemes than protecting all users equally, and obscuring the deep centralization already present: less than one percent of users (institutional investors) account for 64 percent of Coinbase's trading volume (PDF), and 10 percent of traders account for 85 percent of NFT transactions and trade 97 percent of all NFTs at least once." "It's not clear how this contradiction will be resolved. Uncritically believing decentralization is a salve that immediately transforms something's politics endangers not only users but crypto's fever dream of disruption..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Honda and Acura owners around the world are reporting that their clocks and calendars are getting stuck at a certain time in the year 2002. "The spread is impressive, impacting Honda and Acura models as old as 2004 and as new as 2012," reports Jalopnik. "There is no fix for the current issue. Honda says it's investigating and if it does not find a fix, the clocks should correct themselves sometime in August." From the report: As a number of Honda and Acura owners have noted on these forums, their clocks read correctly until what appeared to have been the first time update of 2022. Then, their navigation systems turned into time machines, leaving them behind as they went back to 2002. I asked Honda about the cause of the issue and received this back: "American Honda is aware of a potential concern related to the clock display on certain older Acura and Honda models equipped with navigation systems. We are currently investigating this issue to determine possible countermeasures and have no additional details to share at this time." Owners have also reached out and received different responses. If you have experience coding or troubleshooting software, the possible cause of this time warp probably popped into your head early on. Drive Accord forum user Jacalar went into the navigation system's diagnostic menu on Sunday and discovered that the GPS date was set to May 19, 2002, or exactly 1024 weeks in the past. Global Positioning Systems measure time from an epoch, or a specific starting point used to calculate time. The date is broadcasted including a number representing the week, coded in 10 binary digits. These digits count from 0 to 1023 then roll over on week 1024. GPS weeks first started on January 6, 1980 before first zeroing out on midnight August 21, 1999. It happened again April 6, 2019. The next happens in 2038. If software isn't coded to account for the rollover, weird stuff can happen, like a calendar going back exactly 1024 weeks. It's impossible to know for sure without being able to look at Honda's programming, but these navigation systems might be programmed so that the start of their week counter is a date 19.6 years in the past, but not in-line with GPS epoch. Owners should be able to turn off the automatic update function and set the date and time manually, but they're finding that the functionality doesn't work right now. Likewise, the clock resets back to the incorrect time every time the car is started.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Silicon leader and T2 security processor developer Jeff Wilcox has left Apple to rejoin Intel and oversee architecture for all Intel System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. AppleInsider reports: As Apple heads to the end of its self-imposed two-year transition from Intel to its own Apple Silicon, the company has lost the leader of its M1 development team. Jeff Wilcox originally joined Apple from Intel in 2013, and is now returning to that company as it works on introducing new processors. "After an amazing eight years I have decided to leave Apple and pursue another opportunity," wrote Wilcox on his LinkedIn page. "It has been an incredible ride and I could not be prouder of all we accomplished during my time there, culminating in the Apple Silicon transition with the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs and systems. I will dearly miss all of my Apple colleagues and friends." "I'm pleased to share that I have started a new position as Intel Fellow, Design Engineering Group CTO, Client SoC Architecture at Intel Corporation," he continued. "I could not be more thrilled to be back working with the amazing teams there to help create groundbreaking SOCs. Great things are ahead!" Wilcox returned to Intel at the start of January 2022. It's not yet known who Apple intends to replace him with as Director, Mac System Architecture. Nor is it known whether Apple tried to keep Wilcox. Further reading: Apple Aims To Prevent Defections To Meta With Rare $180,000 Bonuses for Top TalentRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Accounts of more than three million users of the U.S.-based FlexBooker appointment scheduling service have been stolen in an attack before the holidays and are now being traded on hacker forums. The same intruders are offering databases claiming to be from two other entities: racing media organization Racing.com and Redbourne Group's rediCASE case management software, both from Australia. Among FlexBooker's customers are owners of any business that needs to schedule appointments, which is everything from accountants, barbers, doctors, mechanics, lawyers, dentists, gyms, salons, therapists, trainers, spas, and the list goes on. Claiming the attack seems to be a group calling themselves Uawrongteam, who shared links to archives and files with sensitive information, such as photos, driver's licenses, and other IDs. According to Uawrongteam, the database contains a table with 10 million lines of customer information that ranges from payment forms and charges to driver's license photos. The actor notes that some "juicy columns" in the database are names, emails, phone numbers, password salt, and hashed passwords. FlexBooker has sent a data breach notification to customers, confirming the attack and that the intruders "accessed and downloaded" data on the service's Amazon cloud storage system. "On December 23, 2021, starting at 4:05 PM EST our account on Amazon's AWS servers was compromised," reads the notification, adding that the intruders did not access "any credit card or other payment card information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mozilla Foundation is pausing accepting donations in cryptocurrency following a backlash from scores of people including a founder of the Mozilla Project. From a report: The foundation, which oversees the development of Firefox browser, on Thursday acknowledged conversations around the environment impact that cryptocurrency potentially pose and said it is reviewing whether its current policy on crypto donations "fits with our climate goals." The foundation started to face backlash following a tweet late last year that invited people to donate via using a variety of crypto tokens including Bitcoin. In response to it, Jamie Zawinski expressed dismay at the foundation's move. "Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters," he said, adding an expletive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.