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The National Meteorological Service predicted a severe storm over the weekend, prompting the government to postpone fireworks planned for a national holiday. The weather ended up being calm. The New York Times: Meteorology is sometimes referred to as the only field where the experts can be consistently wrong and still keep their jobs. But that did not seem to apply in Hungary on Monday, when the country's top two weather officials were fired after an inaccurate forecast. Their predictions of extreme weather conditions in Budapest had prompted the government to postpone fireworks for its national holiday, St. Stephen's Day, seven hours before they were scheduled to begin on Saturday. The night turned out to be calm. On Sunday, Hungary's national meteorological service, the Orszagos Meteorologiai Szolgalat, issued an apology, saying that the weather on Saturday had been the least likely scenario based on its models. "Unfortunately, this uncertainty factor is part of our profession, we have tried to communicate this as well," the agency said on its Facebook page. By Monday, the head of the weather service and her deputy had been fired by Hungary's innovation minister, Laszlo Palkovics, a top official under Prime Minister Viktor Orban. On Tuesday, the service issued another statement on Facebook, saying it was a professional institution and not a political one. The agency said it did the best it could to prepare the forecasts, based on the date and time of the planned fireworks, using the available information to its experts. St. Stephen's Day celebrates the role of Stephen I, who became king in 1000 A.D., in the founding of the Hungarian state. "Our firm position is that despite significant decision-making pressure, the colleagues of the O.M.S.Z. performed the best of their knowledge and are not responsible for any alleged or real damage," the agency said, using an acronym for the agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Streaming media platform Plex sent out an email to its customers earlier today notifying them of a security breach that may have compromised account information, including usernames, email addresses, and passwords. Although there is no sign that the encrypted passwords were exposed, Plex nevertheless is advising all users to change their passwords immediately. From a report: Plex is one of the largest media server apps available, used by around 20 million people to stream video, audio, and photos they upload themselves in addition to an increasing variety of content the service provides to paid subscribers. The email states, "yesterday, we discovered suspicious activity on one of our databases. We immediately began an investigation and it does appear that a third-party was able to access a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords." There is no confirmation that other personal account information has been compromised, and there's no mention of private media libraries (which may or may not include pirated content, private nudes, and other sensitive content) having been accessed in the breach.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A study found losing just one hour of rest could kill people's desire to help others, even relatives and close friends. The team noted that a bad night appeared to dampen activity in the part of the brain that encouraged social behavior. "We discovered that sleep loss acts as a trigger of asocial behavior, reducing the innate desire of humans to help one another," said Prof Matthew Walker, co-author of the study at the University of California, Berkeley. "In a way, the less sleep you get, the less social and more selfish you become." Writing in the PLoS Biology journal, the team suggest that a chronic sleep deficit could harm social bonds and compromise the altruistic instincts that shape society. "Considering the essentiality of humans helping in maintaining cooperative, civilized societies, together with the robust erosion of sleep time over the last 50 years, the ramifications of these discoveries are highly relevant to how we shape the societies we wish to live in," said Walker. The team examined the willingness of 160 participants to help others with a "self-reported altruism questionnaire", which they completed after a night's sleep. Participants responded to different social scenarios on a scale from "I would stop to help" to "I would ignore them." In one experiment involving 24 participants, the researchers compared answers from the same person after a restful night and after 24 hours without sleep. The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness to help others when tired. The team then performed brain scans of those participants and found a short night was associated with reduced activity in the social cognitive brain network, a region involved in social behavior. Participants were as reluctant to assist friends and family as strangers, the researchers said. "A lack of sleep impaired the drive to help others regardless of whether they were asked to help strangers or close relatives. That is, sleep loss triggers asocial, anti-helping behavior of a broad and indiscriminate impact," said Walker. To determine whether altruism takes a hit in the real world, the team then tracked more than 3m charitable donations in the US before and after clocks were shifted an hour forward to daylight saving time, suggesting a shorter period of sleep. They found a 10% drop in donations after the transition. "Our study adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that inadequate sleep not only harms the mental and physical wellbeing of an individual but also compromises the bonds between individuals, and even the altruistic sentiment of an entire nation," said Walker. Luckily, we can catch up on sleep. Walker said: "The positive note emerging from all our studies is that once sleep is adequate and sufficient the desire to help others is restored. But it's important to note that it is not only sleep duration that is relevant to helping. We found that the factor that was most relevant was actually sleep quality, above and beyond sleep quantity," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset is coming in "early 2023," according to posts the company made on Twitter and Instagram. The Verge reports: While the company released details of the headset's design earlier this year, it still hasn't announced a price. It is, however, promising a lot for the PlayStation VR2 -- it'll feature displays that add up to 4K resolution and can run at 90 or 120Hz, have a 110-degree field of view, and use foveated rendering, which renders certain parts of the image as sharper than others to make things easier for the computer (or, in this case, the PlayStation 5). The company also says the headset connects to your console with a single USB C cable. Sony has already announced it will have a lineup of about 20 "major" games available when it launches. The titles include games set in the Horizon and Walking Dead universes, as well as VR versions of No Man's Sky and Resident Evil Village. Unlike the original PlayStation VR headset, the PS VR2 won't use a camera connected to your console to track your movements. Instead, it'll use inside-out tracking, similar to the Quest 2, where cameras on the headset itself are in charge of the motion tracking. This means that the PS VR2 will also be able to let you see your surroundings while you're wearing the headset. Sony also says that the PlayStation 5 will let you broadcast yourself playing VR games, though you will have to have a PlayStation HD camera connected. Sony has also shown off the orb-shaped controllers, which will have adaptive triggers and haptic feedback like what's offered with Sony's DualSense controller for the PS5. They'll also have finger-touch detection, which can sense where you rest your thumb, index, or middle fingers without having to press anything.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn't believe all UFOs are "man-made." Motherboard reports: Buried deep in a report that's an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America's clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that "cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially." The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not: "Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena," the document states. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. The standard line is typically that, if UFOs exist, then they're likely advanced -- although human-made -- vehicles. Obama refused to confirm the existence of aliens but did say that people have seen a lot of strange stuff in the sky lately when asked directly on The Late Show with James Corden, for example. But now Congress seems to want to specifically distinguish between objects that are "man-made" and those that are not. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. A large question, of course, is why Congress is seemingly admitting this now, in public. After all, lawmakers are privy to classified information that the general public isn't. "It strains credulity to believe that lawmakers would include such extraordinary language in public legislation without compelling evidence," Marik von Rennenkampff, an Obama-era DoD official, said in an op-ed in The Hill about the budget. According to the op-ed, the comments were first noticed by UFO researcher Douglas Johnson. "This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins," von Rennenkampff continued. "After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?" "Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A recent report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than 80 percent of urine samples from children and adults in the U.S. contained the herbicide glyphosate. A study by Florida Atlantic University and Nova Southeastern University takes this research one step further and is the first to link the use of the herbicide Roundup, a widely used weed killer, to convulsions in animals. Glyphosate, the weed killer component in Roundup, is the world's most commonly used herbicide by volume and by land-area treated. Glyphosate-resistant crops account for almost 80 percent of transgenic crop cultivated land, which has resulted in an estimated 6.1 billion kilos of glyphosate sprayed across the world from 2005 to 2014. Roundup is used at both industrial and consumer levels, and its use is projected to dramatically increase over the coming years.A major question, yet to be fully understood, is the potential impact of glyphosate on the nervous system. Results, published in Scientific Reports, showed that glyphosate and Roundup increased seizure-like behavior in soil-dwelling roundworms and provides significant evidence that glyphosate targets GABA-A receptors. These communication points are essential for locomotion and are heavily involved in regulating sleep and mood in humans. What truly sets this research apart is that it was done atsignificantly lesslevels than recommended by the EPA and those used in past studies. "The concentration listed for best results on the Roundup Super Concentrate label is 0.98 percent glyphosate, which is about 5 tablespoons of Roundup in 1 gallon of water," said [project lead Akshay S. Naraine]. "A significant finding from our study reveals that just 0.002 percent glyphosate, a difference of about 300 times less herbicide than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer use, had concerning effects on the nervous system." Using C. elegans, a soil-dwelling roundworm, researchers first tested glyphosate alone and then both the U.S. and United Kingdom formulations of Roundup from two distinct time periods -- before and after the U.K.'s 2016 ban on polyethoxylated tallowamine (POEAs). These conditions were selected to pinpoint which effects are specific to the active ingredient glyphosate, Roundup formulations in general, the POEAs surfactants, or any combination of these. The study found that the active ingredient glyphosate exacerbated convulsions in C. elegans and suggest the GABA-A receptor as a neurological target for the observed physiological changes. The data also indicate that there is an important distinction between exposure to glyphosate and Roundup, with Roundup exposure increasing the percentage of C. elegans that did not recover from seizure activity. The non-recovery phenotype and prolonged convulsions in C. elegans from this study have helped to set a foundation for understanding nuanced physiological effects of herbicide that occur at concentrations exponentially below neurotoxic levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The end-to-end encryption email service, Tutanota, says they are receiving reports that Crunchyroll is not allowing the use of their email addresses when signing up for their service. After contacting their team requiring that their domains be unblocked, they received the following response: "The ban of your domains is because we encountered a lot of hackers that used your domains emails to hack our accounts." From a report: In other words, Crunchyroll believes that many hackers used Tutanota domain emails to hack their accounts, which is why they banned Tutanota from their list. Moreover, they recommend users to use email accounts powered by "Big Tech" companies for hassle-free sign up to their services. This is not entirely a new phenomenon, notes It's FOSS. "DeviantArt actively blocked Proton Mail in the past because spammers used the platform to create accounts. Now, they have unblocked them." Tutanota recently called out Microsoft for blocking Tutanota users from registering an account with its cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese authorities have punished 27 people over the publication of a maths textbook that went viral over its "tragically ugly" illustrations. The Guardian reports: A months-long investigation by a ministry of education working group found the books were "not beautiful," and some illustrations were "quite ugly" and did not "properly reflect the sunny image of China's children." The mathematics books were published by the People's Education Press almost 10 years ago, and were reportedly used in elementary schools across the country. But they went viral in May after a teacher published photos of the illustrations inside, including people with distorted faces and bulging pants, boys pictures grabbing girls' skirts and at least one child with an apparent leg tattoo. Social media users were largely amused by the illustrations, but many also criticized them as bringing disrepute and "cultural annihilation" to China, speculating they were the deliberate work of western infiltrators in the education sector. Related hashtags were viewed billions of times, embarrassing the Communist party and education authorities who announced a review of all textbooks "to ensure that the textbooks adhere to the correct political direction and value orientation." In a lengthy statement released on Monday, the education authorities said 27 individuals were found to have "neglected their duties and responsibilities" and were punished, including the president of the publishing house, who was given formal demerits, which can affect a party member's standing and future employment. The editor-in-chief and the head of the maths department editing office were also given demerits and dismissed from their roles. The statement said the illustrators and designers were "dealt with accordingly" but did not give details. They and their studios would no longer be engaged to work on textbook design or related work, it said. The highly critical statement found a litany of issues with the books, including critiquing the size, quantity and quality of illustrations, some of which had "scientific and normative problems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta will now allow users of its Quest VR headsets to log in with a new Meta account instead of a Facebook account, the company announced on Tuesday. The Verge reports: The company had said in July that this change would be rolling out in August, and it marks a shift from an unpopular policy announced in 2020 that required users to log in to their headsets with a Facebook account instead of a separate Oculus account. Users can create Meta accounts through the Meta mobile app using an email address, Facebook account, or Instagram account. Once you create a Meta account, you'll need to set up a linked Meta Horizon social profile that will be used in VR. As with Facebook accounts before, you'll need one of these accounts to use a Quest headset. "Our new Meta account structure gives you more flexibility and control, letting you choose how you do and don't show up -- and whether Facebook and / or Instagram is part of your experience in VR and other surfaces where you use your Meta Horizon profile," Meta says in its blog post. If you want to set up a Meta account, the company has instructions in the blog post and in a video. If you are still using an Oculus account, you'll be able to do so until January 1st, 2023. After that date, you'll need to make a Meta account. The company says the option to make a Meta account and a Meta Horizon profile is rolling out now, so if you aren't able to just yet, you should be given the option soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Skirting the official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on old, unsupported Macs has a rich history. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help old PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern era by dosdude1's patchers for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina. For Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to get new macOS versions running on old Macs. It's an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it's updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for newer macOS versions. The OCLP developers have admitted that macOS Ventura support will be tough, but they've made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs kicking for a little bit longer. [...] First, while macOS doesn't technically include system files for pre-AVX2 Intel CPUs, Apple's Rosetta 2 software does still include those files, since Rosetta 2 emulates the capabilities of a pre-AVX2 x86 CPU. By extracting and installing those files in Ventura, you can re-enable support on Ivy Bridge and older CPUs without AVX2 instructions. And this week, Grymalyuk showed off another breakthrough: working graphics support on old Metal-capable Macs, including machines as old as the 2014 5K iMac, the 2012 Mac mini, and even the 2008 cheese grater-style Mac Pro tower. The OCLP team still has other challenges to surmount, not least of which will involve automating all of these hacks so that users without a deep technical understanding of macOS's underpinnings can continue to set up and use the bootloader. Grymalyuk still won't speculate about a timeframe for official Ventura support in OCLP. But given the progress that has been made so far, it seems likely that people with 2012-and-newer Macs should still be able to run Ventura on their Macs without giving up graphics acceleration or other important features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Research has released an open source project it calls MultiNerf that does an "out of this world" job at removing digital noise from pictures, according to TechCrunch. "The algorithms run on raw image data and adds AI magic to figure out what footage 'should have' looked like without the distinct video noise generated by imaging sensors." "I can write a million words about how awesome this is," writes TechCrunch's Haje Jan Kamps. You can see how Nerf performs in the dark in this YouTube video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xiaolang Zhang, a former Apple employee who was accused of stealing computer files with trade secrets about Apple's secretive car division, pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose on Monday. CNBC reports: Zhang's plea agreement with the U.S. government is under seal, according to court filings on Monday. Zhang faces as much as 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to a felony charge of theft of trade secrets. Sentencing is scheduled for November. Zhang was accused of downloading internal Apple files about the company's car project -- specifically, a 25-page document including engineering schematics of a circuit board for an autonomous vehicle. Zhang was also accused of taking reference manuals and PDFs describing Apple's prototypes and prototype requirements. Zhang was arrested by federal agents in July 2018 at the San Jose airport, where he planned to fly to China. He had previously worked for Apple since 2015, most recently as a hardware engineer on Apple's autonomous vehicle team, according to charging documents from the FBI and U.S. attorney's office. The charges gave a peek into a secretive side of Apple that the company even years later still doesn't often acknowledge: its division developing autonomous electric vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Twitter has major security problems that pose a threat to its own users' personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy, according to an explosive whistleblower disclosure obtained exclusively by CNN and The Washington Post. The disclosure, sent last month to Congress and federal agencies, paints a picture of a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform's central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight. It also alleges that some of the company's senior-most executives have been trying to cover up Twitter's serious vulnerabilities, and that one or more current employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service. The whistleblower, who has agreed to be publicly identified, is Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, who was previously the company's head of security, reporting directly to the CEO. Zatko further alleges that Twitter's leadership has misled its own board and government regulators about its security vulnerabilities, including some that could allegedly open the door to foreign spying or manipulation, hacking and disinformation campaigns. The whistleblower also alleges Twitter does not reliably delete users' data after they cancel their accounts, in some cases because the company has lost track of the information, and that it has misled regulators about whether it deletes the data as it is required to do. The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to. Bots have recently become central to Elon Musk's attempts to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company (although Twitter denies Musk's claims). Zatko was fired by Twitter in January for what the company claims was poor performance. According to Zatko, his public whistleblowing comes after he attempted to flag the security lapses to Twitter's board and to help Twitter fix years of technical shortcomings and alleged non-compliance with an earlier privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Zatko is being represented by Whistleblower Aid, the same group that represented Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. John Tye, founder of Whistleblower Aid and Zatko's lawyer, told CNN that Zatko has not been in contact with Musk, and said Zatko began the whistleblower process before there was any indication of Musk's involvement with Twitter. After this article was initially published, Alex Spiro, an attorney for Musk, told CNN, "We have already issued a subpoena for Mr. Zatko, and we found his exit and that of other key employees curious in light of what we have been finding." "Mr. Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance," the Twitter spokesperson said. "What we've seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context. Mr. Zatko's allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders. Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and will continue to be." Zatko also alleges that the Indian government forced Twitter to put a government agent on the payroll, giving them access to sensitive user data. "Twitter is engaged in a legal challenge against the Indian government after it asked a local court in July to overturn some government orders to remove content from the social media platform, and alleged abuse of power by officials," adds Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft could be preparing to name its next big OS update the "Windows 11 2022 Update." A report adds: References to this naming have appeared in near-final versions of the next big Windows 11 release, currently named 22H2. Twitter user XenoPanther spotted the Windows 11 2022 Update naming in the Get Started app that appears when you set up a new PC. The naming could simply be a placeholder, or it could indicate Microsoft is finally simplifying its often confusing update names for Windows. We've seen a variety of names over the years, including the Creators Update naming for a big Windows 10 update, more mundane naming like the Windows 10 May 2021 Update, and more recently, the Windows 10 21H2 moniker. Microsoft had considered naming its updates after animals or people but transitioned to the more safe monthly naming instead of point releases like Apple does with iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and many other software updates. A move to just the yearly naming for Windows 11 updates would make sense if Microsoft is planning fewer big drops of features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If your canine companion ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time, it may be because they are brimming with emotion. From a report: Researchers in Japan say they have found that dogs produce tears when reuniting with their owners. What's more, the blubbing appears to be linked to levels of the "bonding hormone" oxytocin. "This is the first report demonstrating that positive emotion stimulates tear secretion in a non-human animal, and that oxytocin functions in tear secretion," the team said. Writing in the journal Current Biology, they describe how eye contact between humans and dogs encourages the former to care for the latter, while the gaze of a dog can cause a release of oxytocin in its owner. Dogs have also evolved the ability to raise their inner eyebrows, a trait that scientists say induces humans to nurture them. Now researchers in Japan have found tears might have a similar effect. "I have two standard poodles and I had one female pregnant six years ago," Prof Takefumi Kikusui, a co-author of the research at Azabu University, told the Guardian. Noticing her face was more tender than usual when nursing her puppies, Kikusui realised her eyes were teary. "That gave me the idea that oxytocin might increase tears," he said. "We previously observed that oxytocin is released both in dogs and owners when interacting. So we conducted a reunion experiment." In the first step, the team measured the volume of tears produced by 18 dogs when in their normal home environment with their owner, using Schirmer's test. This involves placing a special strip of paper inside the lower eyelid and measuring how far along the strip the moisture travels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

That person who looks just like you is not your twin, but if scientists compared your genomes, they might find a lot in common. From a report: Charlie Chasen and Michael Malone met in Atlanta in 1997, when Mr. Malone served as a guest singer in Mr. Chasen's band. They quickly became friends, but they didn't notice what other people around them did: The two men could pass for twins. Mr. Malone and Mr. Chasen are doppelgangers. They look strikingly similar, but they are not related. Their immediate ancestors aren't even from the same parts of the world; Mr. Chasen's forebears hailed from Lithuania and Scotland, while Mr. Malone's parents are from the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas. The two friends, along with hundreds of other unrelated look-alikes, participated in a photography project by Francois Brunelle, a Canadian artist. The picture series, "I'm not a look-alike!," was inspired by Mr. Brunelle's discovery of his own look-alike, the English actor Rowan Atkinson. The project has been a hit on social media and other parts of the internet, but it's also drawn the attention of scientists who study genetic relationships. Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, had previously studied the physical differences between identical twins, and he wanted to examine the reverse: people who look alike but aren't related. "What's the explanation for these people?" he wondered. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, Dr. Esteller and his team recruited 32 pairs of look-alikes from Mr. Brunelle's photographs to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lifestyles. The researchers used facial recognition software to quantify the similarities between the participants' faces. Sixteen of those 32 pairs achieved similar overall scores to identical twins analyzed by the same software. The researchers then compared the DNA of these 16 pairs of doppelgangers to see if their DNA was as similar as their faces. Dr. Esteller found that the 16 pairs who were "true" look-alikes shared significantly more of their genes than the other 16 pairs that the software deemed less similar. "These people really look alike because they share important parts of the genome, or the DNA sequence," he said. That people who look more alike have more genes in common "would seem like common sense, but never had been shown," he added. However, DNA alone doesn't tell the whole story of our makeup. Our lived experiences, and those of our ancestors, influence which of our genes are switched on or off -- what scientists call our epigenomes. And our microbiome, our microscopic co-pilot made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses, is further influenced by our environment. Dr. Esteller found that while the doppelgangers' genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. "Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BitChute and Odysee serve up conspiracies, racism and graphic violence to millions of viewers. Taking advantage of Big Tech disinformation crackdowns and the rise of Trump, the sites reflect a new media universe -- one where COVID-19 is fake, Russia fights Nazis in Ukraine, and mass shootings are 'false flag' operations. From a report: A day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, the video-sharing website BitChute was amplifying a far-right conspiracy theory that the massacre was a so-called false flag operation, meant to discredit gun-loving Americans. Three of the top 15 videos on the site that day blamed U.S. federal agents instead of the true culprit: a white-supremacist teenager who had vowed to "kill as many blacks as possible" before shooting 13 people, killing 10. Other popular videos uploaded by BitChute users falsely claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused cancers that "literally eat you" and spread the debunked claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates caused a global baby-formula shortage. BitChute has boomed as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook tighten rules to combat misinformation and hate speech. An upstart BitChute rival, Odysee, has also taken off. Both promote themselves as free-speech havens, and they're at the forefront of a fast-growing alternative media system that delivers once-fringe ideas to millions of people worldwide. Searching the two sites on major news topics plunges viewers into a labyrinth of outlandish conspiracy theories, racist abuse and graphic violence. As their viewership has surged since 2019, they have cultivated a devoted audience of mostly younger men, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IPO market is on pace for its worst year in decades, leaving fledgling companies with few options but to burn through cash while they wait for the stock market to calm. From a report: Late last year, hundreds of companies were in the final stages of preparing to go public, encouraged by the best 18 months ever for U.S. initial public offerings. Then a combination of factors -- sky-high inflation, rising interest rates and Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- sent shock waves through the stock market. The IPO pipeline froze. So far this year, traditional IPOs have raised only $5.1 billion all told, Dealogic data show. Typically at this point in the year, traditional IPOs have raised around $33 billion, according to Dealogic data that goes back to 1995. Last year at this point, these offerings raised more than $100 billion. The last time levels were this low was 2009, when the U.S. was recovering from the depths of the financial crisis and the IPO market reopened near the end of the year. IPO advisers say they don't expect 2022 to follow that pattern, meaning it could end up being the worst year for raising money in IPOs since Dealogic, a research firm, started tracking it in 1995.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Co-creator of core Unix utility, now 80, just needs to run a few more tests. From a report: A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977. "I have tested this a fair amount but clearly more tests are needed," Kernighan wrote in the email, posted as a kind of pseduo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. "Once I figure out how ... I will try to submit a pull request. I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while." Kernighan is the "K" in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix's pipeline features and interoperability between systems. A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are countless variants of awk, but "One True AWK," sometimes known as nawk, is the version based on Kernighan's 1985 book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent input. Kernighan is also the "K" in "K&R C," the foundational 1978 book The C Programming Language he cowrote with Dennis Ritchie that sticks with programmers, mentally and in dog-eared paper form. C's roots go much deeper. Kernighan had been teaching C to workers at Bell Labs and convinced its creator, Dennis Ritchie, to collaborate on a book to spread the knowledge. That book gave birth to "the one true brace style," the endless debate that goes with it, and the structure underpinning every modern programming language. Kernighan also named Unix and first demonstrated the "Hello, world" code example.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: Microsoft has found a bug in ChromeOS and given it a high vulnerability 9.8 out of 10. The bug was promptly fixed and, about a month later, merged in ChromeOS code then released on June 15, 2022. This is a reversal in that Google usually finds security bugs in software from Microsoft and other vendors after typically 90 days -- even if a patch had not been released -- in the interest of forcing companies to respond to security flaws more quickly. [...] The ChromeOS memory corruption vulnerability -- CVE-2022-2587 -- was particularly severe. As Jonathan Bar Or, a member of the Microsoft 365 Defender research team, explains in his post, the problem follows from the use of D-Bus, an Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) mechanism used in Linux. A D-Bus service called org.chromium.cras (for ChromiumOS Audio Server) provides a way to route audio to newly added peripherals like USB speakers and Bluetooth headsets. The service includes a function called SetPlayerIdentity, which accepts a string argument called identity as its input. And the function's C code calls out to strcpy in the standard library. Yes, strcpy, which is a dangerous function.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Ohio judge has ruled that a Cleveland State University's virtual scan of a student's room prior to an online test was unconstitutional. The ruling marks a victory for digital privacy advocates around the country, who have spoken loudly against the practices of online test proctoring for many years. From a report: Chemistry student Aaron Ogletree sat for an online test in the spring 2021 semester. Ogletree was asked to show the virtual proctor his bedroom through his webcam prior to the beginning of the test. A recording of the room scan as well as the testing process that followed was retained by Honorlock, the university's third-party vendor. Ogletree sued the university on the grounds that the practice violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment, which protects US citizens against "unreasonable searches and seizures." The university, in defense, argues that "room scans are 'standard industry wide practice,'" and that "students frequently acquiesce in their use." Federal Judge J. Philip Calabrese sided with Ogletree yesterday, determining that the university's room scan did constitute an unreasonable search. "Mr. Ogletree's subjective expectation of privacy at issue is one that society views as reasonable and that lies at the core of the Fourth Amendment's protections against governmental intrusion," Calabrese wrote in the decision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adani Group said Tuesday it will buy a majority stake in NDTV, a high-profile Indian news house, in an apparent hostile takeover as the billionaire Gautam Adani expands his media ambitions. From a report: AMG Media Networks, Adani's unit, will indirectly purchase a 29.18% stake in New Delhi Television and launch an open offer to buy another 26% stake, the Indian conglomerate said. The open offer is expected to be worth $61.77 million, some 30% below the current market price. Founded three decades ago, NDTV is one of India's most popular news organizations and a rare property that has consistently taken a critical view of the ruling government's efforts. The New Delhi-headquartered business, which operates three TV news channels and maintains a large presence on the web, said Tuesday that neither the firm nor its founders held any conversation, gave consent or input for the majority stake acquisition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has struck an unusual $30 billion funding partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to help finance its massive factory expansion ambitions, signaling some big investors are upbeat about the long-term demand for semiconductors. From a report: The agreement with the publicly traded Canadian asset-management firm is the first of what could be a series of such arrangements Intel pursues to underpin Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger's push to make the company a leading contract chip maker and regain its manufacturing advantage over competitors in Taiwan and South Korea. Under the deal, which company executives described as a first of its kind for the industry, Intel would fund 51% of the cost of building new chip-making facilities in Chandler, Ariz., and will have a controlling stake in the financing vehicle that would own the new factories, Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said. Brookfield will own the remainder of the equity and the companies will split the revenue that comes out of the factories, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of hackers managed to impersonate Binance chief communications officer (CCO) Patrick Hillmann in a series of video calls with several representatives of cryptocurrency projects. The attackers used what Hillman described as an AI hologram, a deepfake of his image for this objective, and managed to fool some representatives of these projects, making them think Hillmann was helping them get listed on the exchange. From a report: Hackers and scammers are refining their methods by including more technological tools in their schemes. Binance chief communications officer (CCO), Patrick Hillmann, reported last week about a new and sophisticated way in which attackers have used his image to perform a listing scam operation. Hillmann stated that hackers managed to program an AI (artificial intelligence) hologram of him, a kind of deepfake that was used to scam representatives of several cryptocurrency projects in Zoom calls. The hologram was able to fool these projects into believing that they were being considered for listing on Binance and that Hillmann was part of this operation. The listing scheme was discovered when these members contacted Hillmann to thank him for his help in the alleged listing opportunities. However, he had no knowledge of these meetings because he is not part of the listing process at Binance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has indirectly hit the country's oligarchs through sanctions, as well as the country's top tech company Yandex, which saw its stock nosedive and whose deputy chief executive officer stepped down because of sanctions imposed by the European Union. But the war is also affecting employees of another Russian tech giant, and one of the most well known and respected antivirus makers: Kaspersky. From a report: In the wake of the invasion, at least two employees told Motherboard they asked to be relocated outside of Russia. A third source who still works at the company also told Motherboard that some Kaspersky employees were asked to resign after those employees asked to live and work somewhere else. Instead of accommodating them, the company asked them to resign, as the company's founder Eugene Kaspersky emphasized the importance of standing next to him during tough times, according to the two former employees, who did end up resigning. Kaspersky has several employees in different countries, working from one of the 35 offices in 31 countries that the company claims to have. In a regularly scheduled all hands meeting a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, employees asked whether the company would consider relocation requests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: France's government increased the size of the subsidy it offers to people who trade in their gas-powered cars for electric bikes to as much as 4,000 euros (approx. $3,976) per person, according to The Times. The money is meant to incentivize people to ditch their polluting modes of transportation in favor of cleaner, more environmentally friendly alternatives. People who live in low-income households in low-emission urban zones that trade in their cars are eligible for the full 4,000-euro subsidy to put toward the purchase of an e-bike. (Traditional, non-motorized bikes also qualify for the incentive.) French citizens from higher income brackets can claim smaller subsidies. The subsidy, which was first introduced last year, was recently increased after officials determined that more needed to be done to catch up to bike-loving rivals like the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The French government has said it wants 9 percent of the country to switch to bicycles by 2024, compared with only 3 percent now. The Netherlands boasts a huge 27 percent in this area. [...] But France isn't just spending money on individual incentives. Emmanuel Macron's government also said it would invest 250 million euros to make the city of Paris entirely bikeable. And the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, won reelection last year on a promise to add another 130 kilometers (over 80 miles) of bike-safe pathways over the next five years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Space can be downright noisy in the right conditions, such as the hot gas surrounding the immense black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, according to NASA. Motherboard reports: The agency recently tweeted an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in this cluster, which is 250 million light years from Earth. "The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel," the agency tweeted. "A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole!" Though the acoustic signals generated by the black hole were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear -- until now. "In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before... because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," NASA said in a statement. "In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time." "As it turns out, the sound waves in their natural environment are a whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone," adds Motherboard. "To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a pair of near-infrared photos showing Jupiter's polar auroras. "You can also see the planet's extremely faint rings and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea (the bright spot to the far left) and Adrastea (the dot at the left edge of the central ring)," notes Engadget. From the report: The pictures were taken using NIRCam's widefield view on July 27th. As for the trippy visuals? Astronomers created composites using several images produced with filters mapped to multiple colors (particularly visible in the image below). The Great Red Spot and other cloud formations are white as they reflect large amounts of sunlight. The observations should provide more insights into Jupiter's "inner life," according to the European Space Agency. That, in turn, could help scientists understand the behavior of gas giants beyond the Solar System.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Parkinson's disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose as it relies primarily on the appearance of motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and slowness, but these symptoms often appear several years after the disease onset. Now, Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and principal investigator at MIT Jameel Clinic, and her team have developed an artificial intelligence model that can detect Parkinson's just from reading a person's breathing patterns. The tool in question is a neural network, a series of connected algorithms that mimic the way a human brain works, capable of assessing whether someone has Parkinson's from their nocturnal breathing -- i.e., breathing patterns that occur while sleeping. The neural network, which was trained by MIT PhD student Yuzhe Yang and postdoc Yuan Yuan, is also able to discern the severity of someone's Parkinson's disease and track the progression of their disease over time. The MIT researchers demonstrated that the artificial intelligence assessment of Parkinson's can be done every night at home while the person is asleep and without touching their body. To do so, the team developed a device with the appearance of a home Wi-Fi router, but instead of providing internet access, the device emits radio signals, analyzes their reflections off the surrounding environment, and extracts the subject's breathing patterns without any bodily contact. The breathing signal is then fed to the neural network to assess Parkinson's in a passive manner, and there is zero effort needed from the patient and caregiver. "A relationship between Parkinson's and breathing was noted as early as 1817, in the work of Dr. James Parkinson. This motivated us to consider the potential of detecting the disease from one's breathing without looking at movements," Katabi says. "Some medical studies have shown that respiratory symptoms manifest years before motor symptoms, meaning that breathing attributes could be promising for risk assessment prior to Parkinson's diagnosis." The research has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Hyundai predictably fails in attempting to secure their car infotainment system with a default key lifted from programming examples," writes Slashdot reader sinij. "This level of security is unfortunately expected from auto manufacturers, who also would like to sell you always-connected Car2Car self-driving automobiles." Cryptographer and security experience Bruce Schneier writes: "Turns out the [AES] encryption key in that script is the first AES 128-bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A [PDF]," writes an unidentified developer under the name "greenluigi1." Luck held out, in a way. "Greenluigi1" found within the firmware image the RSA public key used by the updater, and searched online for a portion of that key. The search results pointed to a common public key that shows up in online tutorials like "RSA Encryption & Decryption Example with OpenSSL in C." Two questions remain:1.) How did the test key get left behind? 2) Was it by accident or design?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new privacy class action claim (PDF) in the U.S. alleges Oracle's "worldwide surveillance machine" has amassed detailed dossiers on some five billion people, "accusing the company and its adtech and advertising subsidiaries of violating the privacy of the majority of the people on Earth," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The suit has three class representatives: Dr Johnny Ryan, senior fellow of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL); Michael Katz-Lacabe, director of research at The Center for Human Rights and Privacy; and Dr Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland -- who say they are "acting on behalf of worldwide Internet users who have been subject to Oracle's privacy violations." The litigants are represented by the San Francisco-headquartered law firm, Lieff Cabraser, which they note has run significant privacy cases against Big Tech. The key point here is there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the U.S. -- so the litigation is certainly facing a hostile environment to make a privacy case -- hence the complaint references multiple federal, constitutional, tort and state laws, alleging violations of the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, as well as competition law, and the common law. It remains to be seen whether this "patchwork" approach to a tricky legal environment will prevail -- for an expert snap analysis of the complaint and some key challenges this whole thread is highly recommended. But the substance of the complaint hinges on allegations that Oracle collects vast amounts of data from unwitting Internet users, i.e. without their consent, and uses this surveillance intelligence to profile individuals, further enriching profiles via its data marketplace and threatening people's privacy on a vast scale -- including, per the allegations, by the use of proxies for sensitive data to circumvent privacy controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first fruit of YouTube's new podcast strategy has taken shape with a new "Explore" page "Podcasts." 9to5Google reports: youtube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it's not showing up for all users we checked with today. Available on desktop web and mobile, it's very rudimentary at this point. There are carousels, which can be expanded via "Show all," for "Popular episodes," "Popular podcast playlists," "Recommended," and "Popular podcast creators." The rest of this page links to various categories: Comedy, True Crime, Sports, Music, and TV & Film. You're just browsing through regular video thumbnails rather than anything more optimized. Meanwhile, tapping one just opens the regular player on Android, and doesn't even default to the "Listening controls" available for YouTube Premium subscribers. You get large buttons and shortcuts to like, save, and quickly adjust playback speed. The podcast experience for end users will presumably get more optimized over time, while it remains to be seen what the UI in YouTube Music is going to be.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Elon Musk's lawyers subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Monday as the billionaire continues to battle a lawsuit that could force him to complete a $44 billion purchase of the social media company. Both Twitter and Musk have issued subpoenas ahead of a five-day trial that's scheduled to take place in October. [...] Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder who stepped down as CEO of the company last year, has expressed support for Musk's attempt to take over Twitter. In April, he tweeted that he didn't believe anyone should own or run Twitter but taking it back from Wall Street is the "correct first step." "Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust," Dorsey tweeted. "I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness." Dorsey also had a discussion with Musk about social media's future and open social protocols in late March before Musk made a bid in April to purchase Twitter for $54.20 per share, a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission says. Twitter shareholders are expected to vote on the deal on Sept. 13.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The euro has dropped below parity with the U.S. dollar on Monday. According to Reuters, investors fear that "interest-rate hikes in the United States and Europe, aimed at curbing inflation, would weaken the global economy." From the report: Against a basket of currencies, the dollar rose 0.8% to a more than five-week high of 109.02 , not far from the two-decade peak of 109.29 touched in mid-July. The greenback has found support in recent sessions as several Federal Reserve officials reiterated an aggressive monetary tightening stance ahead of the Fed's Jackson Hole, Wyoming, symposium this week. The latest of these officials, Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin, on Friday said the "urge" among central bankers was toward faster, front-loaded rate increases. The euro fell following Russia's announcement late on Friday of a three-day halt to European gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline at the end of this month. Investors worry that the halt could exacerbate an energy crisis that has weighed on the common currency in recent months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A consumer rights advocacy group has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, claiming they are "ripping people off" by charging a 30 percent commission fee on all digital purchases made through the UK PlayStation Store. Kotaku reports: "Sony dominates the digital distribution of PlayStation games and in-game content," said one of the lawyers leading the lawsuit. "It has deployed an anti-competitive strategy which has resulted in excessive prices to customers that are out of all proportion to the costs of Sony providing its services." The argument here is that Sony has a "near-monopoly" on the sale of digital games, particularly PlayStation games, and so it shouldn't be using that power to enforce unreasonable prices on consumers. Sony is not the only platform that enforces a 30 percent take (most major storefronts do, with the notable exception of the Epic Games Store). We'll have to wait and see whether or not the courts uphold that the PlayStation ecosystem is a monopoly, and whether or not that will have an impact on other walled gardens like app stores or Steam. Kotaku reached out to the legal team about what it considers to be a reasonable commission fee, but did not get a comment by the time of publication. The plaintiffs point out that gaming is the biggest entertainment industry in the UK, and Sony is hurting consumers who can't afford their games. "We're in the midst of a cost of living crisis and the consumer purse is being squeezed like never before," said Alex Neill, a consumer rights advocate who filed the lawsuit. While I'm sympathetic to how inflation makes it difficult for players to afford more games, I'm not sure if I would lump gaming together with a cost of living crisis. Paying rent is a necessity. Playing God of War Ragnarok on launch is not.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software "useful for surveillance" as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China's surveillance state. Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can "classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features," according to research grant documents obtained via public records request. "These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance," the document read. Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor's research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha's lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha's research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha's research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha's team pledged to "work closely with Alibaba researchers" to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as "aggressive," "shy," "impulsive," and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software's "clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled," Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. "Given what we know now about China's architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it." It's not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor's expertise. In January 2019 -- back when the Alibaba grant was still active -- Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled "large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds." Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into "efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds." Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises "serious questions about ethics in machine learning research," Fedasiuk said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gary Gensler, the chair of SEC, writes in an op-ed: We can dispense with the idea that crypto lending isn't subject to regulation. On the contrary, the rules have been around for decades. The platforms aren't following them. Noncompliance isn't the inevitable result of the crypto business model or underlying crypto technology. Rather, it is as if these platforms are saying they have a choice -- or even worse, saying "Catch us if you can." As I said in a speech last year, "Make no mistake: If a lending platform is offering securities, it ... falls into SEC jurisdiction." On many occasions, the commission and state regulators have addressed how the relevant case law implicates crypto assets, including crypto lending. There are costs of complying with securities laws, just as there are costs to car makers of adding seat belts. Platforms that offer crypto lending need to comply anyway, not merely because that's the law, but also because it helps protect investors and increase trust in our markets. Fortunately, there is a path forward. I encourage platforms offering crypto lending to come in and talk to SEC staff. Getting these platforms into compliance with the securities laws will benefit investors and the crypto market. In the meantime, the SEC will serve as the cop on the beat. As with seat belts in cars, we need to ensure that investor protections come standard in the crypto market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ubiquitous device is becoming a shop window for the firm's services. From a report: As it dreams up more gadgets to sell to more people, however, Apple is employing another strategy in parallel. The company has so far put 1.8bn devices in the pockets and on the desks of some of the world's most affluent consumers. Now it is selling access to those customers to other companies, and persuading those who own its devices to sign up to its own subscription services. As Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, said on a recent earnings call, the Apple devices in circulation represent "a big engine for our services business." The strategy is picking up speed. Last year services brought in $68bn in revenue, or 19% of Apple's total. That is double the share in 2015. In the latest quarter services' share was even higher, at 24%. Apple doesn't break down where the money comes from, but the biggest chunk is reckoned to be fees from its app store, which amounted to perhaps $25bn last year, according to Sensor Tower, a data provider. The next-biggest part is probably the payment from Google for the right to be Apple devices' default search engine. This was $10bn in 2020; analysts believe the going rate now is nearer $20bn. Apple's fast-growing advertising business -- mainly selling search ads in its app store -- will bring in nearly $7bn this year, reckons eMarketer, another research firm. Most of the rest comes from a range of subscription services: iCloud storage, Apple Music and Apple Care insurance are probably the biggest, estimates Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. More recent ventures like Apple tv+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade and Apple Pay make up the rest. New services keep popping up. Last November Apple launched a subscription product for small companies called Apple Business Essentials, offering tech support, device management and so on. In June it announced a "buy now, pay later" service. The company claims a total of 860m active paid subscriptions, nearly a quarter more than it had a year ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israeli spyware firm NSO Group says its Chief Executive Shalev Hulio is stepping down with immediate effect, with Chief Operating Officer Yaron Shohat appointed to oversee a reorganisation of the company before a successor is named. From a report: A source in the company confirmed that around 100 employees will be let go as part of the firm's reorganisation, and that Shohat will lead the company until the board appoints a new CEO. The surveillance firm, which makes Pegasus software, has been contending with legal action after allegations that its tools were misused by governments and other agencies to hack mobile phones. NSO has said its technology is intended to help catch terrorists, paedophiles and hardened criminals and is sold to "vetted and legitimate" government clients, although it keeps its client list confidential. "The company's products remain in high demand with governments and law enforcement agencies because of its cutting-edge technology and proven ability to assist these customers in fighting crime and terror," Shohat said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MoviePass, a subscription service for movie theaters which shut down three years ago, is making a return. From a report: Remember the golden days of MoviePass, in early 2018, when $9.95 a month got you unlimited movies? And then, remember when right after, MoviePass reported a $40 million dollar loss in May 2018 and tried and failed over and over again to restructure, before finally calling it quits in 2019? Well, MoviePass is back! Starting on Aug. 25 at 9 am EDT, you can sign up for a waitlist at the MoviePass website for the beta version of the new model. But it's not the same MoviePass we once knew and loved, which, let's be real, was always too good to be true. Instead, this time there will be three subscription price tiers -- $10, $20, and $30 -- each with a different number of "credits" to use each month to see movies. MoviePass has not revealed how many credits each tier gets, nor how many credits are needed to reserve a ticket.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pulsing electrical currents through the brain for 20 minutes can boost memory for older adults for at least a month, according to a new study. From a report: Around 8 percent of people in the US get diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or dementia as they get older -- significantly impairing their memory -- and an even larger group of older adults has some degree of age-related memory loss. This new study is only a first look at a potential solution. But easy, quick treatments like this one could become even more important as the world's population rapidly ages -- especially if future research shows that it can help with more serious cognitive conditions. The brain stimulation done in this study, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, came from a swim cap-like device studded with electrodes positioned to deliver the electric current to specific areas of the brain. The research team was interested in two main areas: one that's linked with working memory (which holds information temporarily and overlaps with short-term memory) and another linked with long-term memory. The research team divided 60 participants between the ages of 65 and 88 into three groups: one group wore the device but didn't get any electrical stimulation; the second received stimulation in the region associated with working memory; and the third received stimulation in the area associated with long-term memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who played a critical role in steering humanity through the two pandemics of our time, AIDS and COVID-19, announced Monday he is stepping down from his role in the federal government. From a report: As of December, he will leave the position he's held for 38 years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as his job as chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and his role as Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. The straight-talking scientist and physician was the government's top infectious disease doctor for decades, and one of the few scientists that many Americans knew by name. Fauci, 81, served under seven U.S. presidents and helped lead the country through numerous health crises. He was instrumental in combatting the AIDS epidemic, starting as the youthful director of NIAID in the early 1980s. He also took center stage in a politically fraught response to the nation's COVID-19 pandemic, and he was both praised and assailed for his tell-it-like-it-is philosophy. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, who took leadership of the agency a year into the COVID pandemic, said he relied on Fauci's counsel and praised him for "his ability to break down complex science in simple terms to the American people to save lives." In a statement, President Biden lauded and thanked Fauci for his service to the American people and public health. He said: Because of Dr. Fauci's many contributions to public health, lives here in the United States and around the world have been saved. As he leaves his position in the US Government, I know the American people and the entire world will continue to benefit from Dr. Fauci's expertise in whatever he does next. Whether you've met him personally or not, he has touched all Americans' lives with his work. I extend my deepest thanks for his public service. The United States of America is stronger, more resilient, and healthier because of him.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, you could test a computer chip's mettle by how small and tightly packed its electronic circuitry was. Now Intel believes another dimension is as big a deal: how artfully a group of such chips can be packaged into a single, more powerful processor. From a report: At the Hot Chips conference Monday, Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger will shine a spotlight on the company's packaging prowess. It's a crucial element to two new processors: Meteor Lake, a next-generation Core processor family member that'll power PCs in 2023, and Ponte Vecchio, the brains of what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer, Aurora. "Meteor Lake will be a huge technical innovation," thanks to how it packages, said Real World Tech analyst David Kanter. For decades, staying on the cutting edge of chip progress meant miniaturizing chip circuitry. Chipmakers make that circuitry with a process called photolithography, using patterns of light to etch tiny on-off switches called transistors onto silicon wafers. The smaller the transistors, the more designers can add for new features like accelerators for graphics or artificial intelligence chores. Now Intel believes building these chiplets into a package will bring the same processing power boost as the traditional photolithography technique.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers have shared a report: The ads are everywhere -1 and so are the inflated claims: Special shampoos and treatments, sometimes costing thousands of dollars, will make hair grow. But many dermatologists who specialize in hair loss say that most of these products don't work. [...] But there is a cheap treatment, he and other dermatologists say, costing pennies a day, that restores hair in many patients. It is minoxidil, an old and well-known hair-loss treatment drug used in a very different way. Rather than being applied directly to the scalp, it is being prescribed in very low-dose pills. Although a growing group of dermatologists is offering low-dose minoxidil pills, the treatment remains relatively unknown to most patients and many doctors. It has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this purpose and so is prescribed off-label -- a common practice in dermatology. "I call us the off-label bandits -- a title I am proud to bear," said Dr. Adam Friedman, professor and chair of dermatology at George Washington University. He explained that dermatologists have been trained to understand how medicines work, which allows them to try drugs off-label.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford Motor plans to cut about 3,000 jobs, a move that will affect salaried and contract workers, according to an internal email sent to employees. From a report: Automotive News was the first to report the news after reviewing the email. TechCrunch, which has confirmed the layoffs, will update the story as more information becomes available. The job cuts, which many have anticipated since Ford launched its restructuring efforts, will affect employees throughout its global operations. However, most of the cuts will be in the U.S., Canada and India. CEO Jim Farley has spoken publicly about the potential for job cuts in recent months. During the company's second-quarter earnings call, Farley foreshadowed coming layoffs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook's parent company Meta is heading into another political battle over the planned introduction of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in its Messenger chat platform. From a report: The UK's home secretary, Priti Patel, makes this clear in an op-ed for Tory mouthpiece The Telegraph this week, saying it would be a "grotesque betrayal" if the company didn't consider issues of child safety while introducing E2EE. Similar arguments are likely to be raised in the US, too. Meta has been working on adding E2EE to Messenger for years, and recently confirmed that it aims to encrypt all chats and calls on the platform by default next year. (It currently only offers default E2EE on its other big chat platform, WhatsApp, though users can opt-in to E2EE on Messenger on a chat-by-chat basis.) The move is reigniting decades-old debates in politics and tech about the right way to balance user privacy and safety. In the US, these arguments have been heightened by the potential for police to issues search warrants for user chats in order to enforce new abortion laws after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. In the UK, arguments over encryption tend to focus on child safety and the dissemination of of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. "A great many child predators use social media platforms such as Facebook to discover, target and sexually abuse children," writes Patel in her op-ed. "It is vital that law enforcement have access to the information they need to identify the children in these images and safeguard them from vile predators."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple said on Monday it would offer customers tools and know-how to repair and service their MacBook laptops at home, months after launching the service for iPhones. From a report: Apple said genuine parts and service tools will be available starting Aug. 23. Customers can buy the repair kits or rent it for one-time use for $49. Self repairs are possible only on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models with the M1 chips. In April, Apple launched self-repair services for select iPhones models in the United States, with plans to expand the service to Europe this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some offers of high rates and low fees have strings attached. From a report: Digit is a trendy financial technology company in San Francisco that offers traditional banking services online, complete with a tool that can automatically allocate a portion of customers' deposits to a savings account to match their investing goals. The service comes with a "no overdraft guarantee." Sound too good to be true? According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, some of it is. Earlier this month the regulator hit Digit, now part of Oportun Financial, a lender in San Carlos, Calif., with a $2.7 million fine for falsely advertising the no-overdraft guarantee. Turns out, the algorithm Digit used to move funds around drained some customers' checking accounts, triggering the overdraft fees. Even after customers complained, Digit failed to reimburse them, despite saying it would, the CFPB found. "While we disagree with the CFPB on this matter, we are happy to have it settled," says an Oportun spokesperson. The company says fewer than 2,000 customers were overcharged. Digit isn't the only consumer finance company failing to meet the lofty expectations its own advertising sets. There are about 60 other such fintechs, known as "challenger banks" or "neobanks," in the US, offering a similar suite of products. They have about 23 million customers, a figure that's expected to more than double -- to 50 million -- by 2025, according to consumer finance website Bankrate.com. Despite the name, they aren't banks but technology companies that form partnerships with obscure, conventional banks to give customers digital access to their money. In doing so, neobanks can offer Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection to checking and savings accounts. In Digit's case, its banking-services partner is South Dakota-based MetaBank, which says it wasn't involved in the CFPB matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month an SFGate.com columnist explored plans for San Francisco's first NFT-based restaurant, an "ostentatious Japanese-themed restaurant and private club" featuring a members-only Sho Club Sky Lounge.What's more galling than the repeated use of the terms "immersive" and "experiential" to describe an actual restaurant is the fact that, as the group's website proudly proclaims, the astronomically expensive and exclusive eatery "is the only rooftop restaurant located on the Salesforce Transit Center's roof." As downtown San Francisco suffers through soaring homelessness, vacant storefronts and a deadly fentanyl epidemic, the idea of its newest public space only providing food for those willing to spend exorbitant sums is brazen. In a terrifying J.G. Ballard-like dystopian metaphor come to life, the private lounge, which will charge a top-tier membership fee of $300,000 a pop... will be situated 70 feet above surrounding homeless encampments. [The cheapest membership tier is available for a one-time fee of $7,500.] In maybe a projection of the venture's deficits, the most common word used in interviews and marketing blurbs surrounding the decidedly exclusionary club is "community." The word, adored in the crypto world, is used relentlessly in all of Sho marketing materials, as though if said enough times this ultra-bourgeois establishment under the bright lights of Salesforce Tower's beaming helmet will somehow magically help the working man under Sauron's gaze.... Outside of the private members lounge, the restaurant will be open to the public. Sho told SFGATE over email that the number of seats and tables available to the public is not available at this time.... It's a smug celebration of the widening chasm of wealth disparity, planted in a time and a city that needs just the opposite. Marketing materials note that paid memberships "will be minted on the Ethereum blockchain. As an NFT, the SHO Club membership will be an asset to the holder, publicly verifiable, and can later be sold or transferred on the secondary market." So Friday SFGate.com paid another visit to "the empty husk of the building that will, if all goes smoothly, soon sell NFT memberships between $7,500 and $300,000 to join a hospitality club at a yet-to-be-constructed Japanese fine-dining restaurant in the middle of Salesforce Park." (Predicted grand opening date: September/October 2023.)The public will have allocated reservations too, [CEO Joshua] Sigel said, without revealing numbers. "Then what's the selling point for a membership?" a reporter interjected. There will be special events, a monthly membership dinner for certain tiers, and concierge service, among other benefits, Sigel said... Sigel said there's "fantastic" interest in Sho Club memberships, that they've had thousands of sign-ups on their website, and they anticipate rolling out a private NFT sale next week, followed by a public sale in mid- to late September.... Inevitably came web3 talk. Once the 3,275 NFTs memberships are sold, that's it, no more. If you want to become a member after that, you'll have to obtain a Sho Group NFT on OpenSea, a secondary market for NFTs.... Sho Group will get a 10% kickback on any secondary market sales of NFTs. A reporter astutely asked how the restaurant will keep tabs on who its new members are, once the NFTs start exchanging hands. In other words: What happens when a genuine piece of s — t snags a secondary market membership? Sigel assured us the restaurant will have a terms and conditions agreement to deal with unruly forces.... Someone abruptly asked Sigel if he'll be helping the homeless, a non sequitur of epic proportions that does, in fairness, loom over everything related to this fancy restaurant located in an ostensibly public park. "Great question," he started, announcing that in the next few weeks, his group will be rolling out a foundation of some kind. "For those who know Sho and I well, giving back and supporting the community is a very big thing for us. You specifically asked about the homeless — I have a family member who's homeless. It's near and dear to my heart, in terms of serving not only the unhoused, but also those who are in need of food."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An aviation company at the cutting edge of electrified air travel has taken a significant step forward, completing a first-of-a-kind test flight using a retrofitted seaplane," reports New Atlas:Harbour Air's De Havilland Beaver completed a short hop from the Canadian mainland to Vancouver Island using its all-electric drivetrain, demonstrating the viability of its cleaner approach to short-haul flights. Harbour Air is the largest seaplane airline in North America and claims to transport around half a million passengers across 30,000 commercial flights each year. In 2019, it pledged to become the world's first all-electric airline, a bold vision that involves retrofitting its fleet of existing six-seater seaplanes with electric propulsion systems. These systems come via a partnership with electric motor company MagniX, which is making important advances with its high-power electric motors and has partnered with other ambitious companies in the aviation space. In December of 2019, the modified De Havilland Beaver took off to complete the first successful flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft, a brief jaunt above the Fraser River at Harbour Air's terminal in Richmond, British Columbia. The company has since continued this testing program with an eye to certifying and approving the aircraft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transport Canada. "The historic De Havilland Beaver has been completely retrofitted in 2019 to operate using 100% electricity flew 45 miles in 24 minutes," the company said in a statement. They're calling the flight "a major milestone in the advancement of all-electric commercial flights."More data from the ePlane's web site:Our ePlane project will ultimately turn our 40+ fleet of seaplanes from carbon-neutral to carbon-zero! We know that the electrification of our fleet is the next necessary step to truly make a difference in our environmental and economic goals. It is better for the communities we serve and it also to gives our passengers a better way to travel. It's a bold step in making a big difference for our planet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.