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IEEE Spectrum reports that a new study finds that many key algorithms designed to control "congestion" delays on computer networks "may prove deeply unfair, letting some users hog all the bandwidth while others get essentially nothing."[A]lthough hundreds of congestion control algorithms have been proposed in the last roughly 40 years, "there is no clear winner," says study lead author Venkat Arun, a computer scientist at MIT. "I was frustrated by how little we knew about where these algorithms would and would not work. This motivated me to create a mathematical model that could make more systematic predictions...." Their new study finds that given the real-world complexity of network paths, there will always be a scenario where a problem known as "starvation" cannot be avoided — where at least one sender on a network receives almost no bandwidth compared to other users.... Congestion control algorithms rely on packet losses and delays as details to infer congestion and decide how fast to send data. However, packets can get lost and delayed for reasons other than network congestion. For example, data may be held up and then released in a burst with other packets, or a receiver's acknowledgement that it received packets might get delayed. The researchers called delays that do not result from congestion "jitter." Congestion control algorithms cannot distinguish the difference between delays caused by congestion and jitter. This can lead to problems, as delays caused by jitter are unpredictable. This ambiguity confuses senders, which can make them each estimate delay differently and send packets at unequal rates. The researchers found this eventually leads to situations where starvation occurs and some users get shut out completely. In the new study, the researchers analyzed whether every congestion control algorithm of which they were aware, as well as some new ones they devised, could avoid starvation. The scientists were surprised to find there were always scenarios with each algorithm where some people got all the bandwidth, and at least one person got basically nothing.... "Extreme unfairness happens even when everybody cooperates, and it is nobody's fault." Although existing approaches toward congestion control may not be able to avoid starvation, the aim now is to develop a new strategy that does, Arun says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In June a YouTube channel called "Tesla Owners Silicon Valley" ran an hour-long interview with Elon Musk. (Musk begins by sharing an example of the "comedically long" list of things that can disrupt a supply chain, remembering an incident where a drug gang shoot out led to the mistaken impounding of a nearby truck that was delivering parts for a Tesla Model S factory -- ultimately shutting down Model S production for three days.) There's some candid discussions about the technology of electric cars - but also some surprisingly personal insights. Musk also reveals he's been thinking about electric cars since high school, as "the way cars should be, if you could just solve range... People will look back on the internal combustion car era as a strange time. Quaint." And then he remembers the moment in 1995 when he put his graduate studies at Stanford "on hold" to pursue a business career, reassuring Stanford professor William Nix that "I will probably fail" and predicting an eventual return to Stanford. Nix had responded that he did not think Musk would fail. It turns out that 27 years later, now-emeritus professor William Nix heard the interview, and typed up a fond letter to Elon Musk at SpaceX's headquarters in Texas. Nix complimented Musk on the interview, noting Musk's remarks on the challenges in using silicon for the anodes of electric batteries. "About 10 years ago we at Stanford did research on the very issues you described. Indeed, it almost seemed like you had read all the papers." Musk's hour-long interview with the group was followed by two more hour-long interviews, and since then the group has been sharing short excerpts that give candid glimpses of Musk's thinking. (The overwhelming focus is solving full self-driving," Musk says in one clip. "That's essential. That's really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting statistic spotted by Fortune. "Eight out of the 10 largest private employers in the U.S. are tracking productivity metrics for their employees, according to an examination from The New York Times." "Some of this software measures active time, watches for keyboard pauses, and even silently counts keystrokes."J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, The Times reported, seeing everything from how long it takes to write an email to keyboard activity. There are repercussions if workers aren't meeting expectations: a prodding note, a skipped bonus, or a work-from-home day taken away, to name a few. For employers surrendering in the fight to return to the office, such surveillance is a way to maintain a sense of control. As Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitor systems, told The Times, "If we're going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we're not going to give up on managing productivity.... But tracking these remote workers' every move doesn't seem to be telling employers much. "We're in this era of measurement but we don't know what we should be measuring," Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told the Times. From the New York Times' article. (Alternate URLs here, here, and here.)In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others.... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs. Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their "inactivity" time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'.... Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring. Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control — and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as "demoralizing," "humiliating" and "toxic." Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.... But many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable — and perhaps inevitable. Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight. Derelict workers can be rooted out. Industrious ones can be rewarded. "It's a way to really just focus on the results," rather than impressions, said Marisa Goldenberg, [who] said she used the tools in moderation... [I]n-person workplaces have embraced the tools as well. Tommy Weir, whose company, Enaible, provides group productivity scores to Fortune 500 companies, aims to eventually use individual scores to calibrate pay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digital Trends reports:Working with the Wikimedia Foundation, Meta AI (that's the AI research and development research lab for the social media giant) has developed what it claims is the first machine learning model able to automatically scan hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check if they support the corresponding claims.... "I think we were driven by curiosity at the end of the day," Fabio Petroni, research tech lead manager for the FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team of Meta AI, told Digital Trends. "We wanted to see what was the limit of this technology. We were absolutely not sure if [this AI] could do anything meaningful in this context. No one had ever tried to do something similar [before]." Trained using a dataset consisting of 4 million Wikipedia citations, Meta's new tool is able to effectively analyze the information linked to a citation and then cross-reference it with the supporting evidence.... Just as impressive as the ability to spot fraudulent citations, however, is the tool's potential for suggesting better references. Deployed as a production model, this tool could helpfully suggest references that would best illustrate a certain point. While Petroni balks at it being likened to a factual spellcheck, flagging errors and suggesting improvements, that's an easy way to think about what it might do.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The nurse said to send photos so the doctor could review them in advance," the New York Times reports, decribing how an ordeal began in February of 2021 for a software engineer named Mark who had a sick son:Mark's wife grabbed her husband's phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son's groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider's messaging system. In one, Mark's hand was visible, helping to better display the swelling. Mark and his wife gave no thought to the tech giants that made this quick capture and exchange of digital data possible, or what those giants might think of the images. With help from the photos, the doctor diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics, which quickly cleared it up.... Two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark's phone made a blooping notification noise: His account had been disabled because of "harmful content" that was "a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal." A "learn more" link led to a list of possible reasons, including "child sexual abuse & exploitation...." He filled out a form requesting a review of Google's decision, explaining his son's infection. At the same time, he discovered the domino effect of Google's rejection. Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son's first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn't get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.... A few days after Mark filed the appeal, Google responded that it would not reinstate the account, with no further explanation. Mark didn't know it, but Google's review team had also flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had already started to investigate him.... In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark's Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he'd stored with the company. The search, related to "child exploitation videos," had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son. Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn't worked.... Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail.... A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions... "The day after Mark's troubles started, the same scenario was playing out in Texas," the Times notes, quoting a technologist at the EFF who speculates other people experiencing the same thing may not want to publicize it. "There could be tens, hundreds, thousands more of these." Reached for a comment on the incident, Google told the newspaper that "Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we're committed to preventing the spread of it on our platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a one year, randomized, placebo-controlled study on whether Ivermectin (or the drugs metformin and fluvoxamine) helped patients when administered at the beginning of a COVID-19 infection. Here's how MarketWatch summarized the results: Ivermectin "failed to prevent the kind of severe COVID-19 that leads to an emergency-room visit or hospitalization.""None of the medications showed any impact on the primary outcome, which included experiencing low oxygen as measured on an home oxygen monitor," said Dr. Carolyn Bramonte, principal investigator of the study and an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Having low blood oxygen levels, or hypoxemia, is a common reason why COVID-19 patients end up seeking care in an ER, being hospitalized, or dying.... Each of the three generic medications has been held up as a possible COVID-19 drug, particularly ivermectin, which gained a cult following over the course of the pandemic despite well-documented issues with the flawed science that in some cases fraudulently touted the drug's benefits. Yet none so far have demonstrated in robust clinical trials that they actually help treat people with COVID-19. A long-awaited double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study conducted by Duke University School of Medicine and funded by the U.S. concluded in June that ivermectin did not improve symptom duration among COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate forms of the disease. The same research found that the drug did not reduce hospitalizations or death.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Creators aren't getting paid," says Cory Doctorow. "That's because powerful corporations have figured out how to create chokepoints — that let them snatch up more of the value generated by creative work before it reaches creative workers." But he's doing something about it. Doctorow's teamed up with Melbourne-based law professor Rebecca Giblin, the director of Australia's Intellectual Property Research Institute, for a new book that first "pulls aside the veil on the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use..." But more importantly, it also presents specific ideas for "how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable." Their announcement describes the book as "A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual," saying it's "built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences — technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor." Or, as they explain later, "Our main focus is action." Lawrence Lessig says the authors "offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back." Anil Dash described it as "a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due." And Douglas Rushkoff called the book "an infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action." The book is titled "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back." And at one point their Kickstarter page lays down a thought-provoking central question about ownership. "For 40 years, every question about creators rights had the same answer: moar copyright. How's that worked out for artists?" And then it features a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "Copyright can't unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity." A Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 has already raised $72,171 — in its first five days — from over 1,800 backers. That's partly because, underscoring one of the book's points, their Kickstarter campaign is offering "an audiobook Amazon won't sell." While Amazon will sell you a hardcover or Kindle edition of the book....Audible has a hard and fast rule: if you're a publisher or writer who wants to sell your audiobook on Audible, you have to let it be wrapped in "Digital Rights Management," aka DRM: digital locks that permanently bind your work to the Audible platform. If a reader decides to leave Audible, DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them.... Every time Audible sells a book, DRM gives it a little bit more power to shake down authors and publishers. Amazon uses that stolen margin to eliminate competition and lock-in more users, ultimately giving it even more power over the people who actually make and produce books. The announcement says their book "is about traps like the one Audible lays for writers and readers. We show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labour. No way are we going to let Audible put its locks on our audiobook. "So we're kickstarting it instead." The announcement notes that Cory Doctorow himself has written dozens of books, "and he won't allow digital locks on any of them." And then in 2020, "Cory had an idea: what if he used Kickstarter to pre-sell his next audiobook? It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history." So now Cory's working instead with independent audiobook studio Skyboat Media "to make great editions, which are sold everywhere except Audible (and Apple, which only carries Audible books): Libro.fm, Downpour, Google Play and his own storefront.Cory's first kickstarter didn't just smash all audiobook crowdfunding records — it showed publishers and other writers that there were tons of people who cared enough about writers getting paid fairly that they were willing to walk away from Amazon's golden cage. Now we want to send that message again — this time with a book that takes you behind the curtain to unveil the Machiavellian tactics Amazon and the other big tech and content powerhouses use to lock in users, creators and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extract more than their fair share.... Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a rollicking read, and a delightful listen: it also does good. Your willingness to break out of the one-click default of buying from the Audible monopoly in support of projects like this sends a clear message to writers, publishers, and policymakers that you have had enough of the unfair treatment of creative workers, and you are demanding change. Rewards include ebooks, audiobooks, hardcover copies, and even the donation of a copy to your local library. You can also pledge money without claiming a reward, or pledge $1 as a show of support for "a cryptographically signed email thanking you for backing the project. Think of it as a grift-free NFT." Craig Newmark says the book documents "the extent to which competition's been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There is still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget reports that the annual "Monterey Car Week "has been a hotbed of EV debuts this year with unveilings from Dodge, Acura, DeLorean and a host of other automakers." But then on Thursday, Lincoln unveiled its Model L100, paying homage to the opulence of Lincoln's original 1922 luxury car by "redefining" vehicle controls. A video on CNN explains that "the fully autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals," emphasizing that it's a "concept car" — a show piece. ("It's not set for production and won't be sold to customers.") But yes, it's an electric car that replaces the steering wheel with what Lincoln is calling a "chess piece controller," a hand-held, car-shaped piece of crystal that sits on a table in the center of the car. Drivers "grab it and move it around and move the actual vehicle," Kemal Curic, Global Design Director for Lincoln Motor Company, tells the Drive. (The table-top surface apparently functions like a kind of map, with the hand-held piece acting as an avatar.) Or as the Drive puts it, "Remember being a kid and pushing a toy car around on a city rug? Lincoln designers do." The site ultimately concludes that the designs "really speak to one's natural instinct of movement. As humans, whenever we want to move something we just pick it up and move it; so why should our cars be any different...? [C]oncept cars don't have to make sense. They just need to be a cool representation of our wildest ideas." In addition, CNN explains, "Because the car drives itself, the front row seats can be turned to face the rear passengers." There's other futuristic features. CNN's video shows what Lincoln is calling "smart wheel covers" which fully encase the tires while offering a decorative electric light show (which doubles as a battery indicator). Even the floor is a massive digital screen, and there's also a full-length hinged glass roof — an upper canopy which according to Engadget "can project realistic animated scenes onto the floor and ceiling." "Unfortunately many of the ideas presented here will inevitably be cut, going the way of Mercedes' awesome, Avatar-inspired trunk hatch wigglers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader tedlistens writes that "Nuclear is booming again. And with a serious pile of private and public funding behind them—and physics (see the recent breakthrough at Livermore National Lab) — these companies say they're getting closer to fusion." The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power."Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs. Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion.... Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025.... One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels. Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article: Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron's venture capital arm). TAE "says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by 'broader commercialization' during the next decade."General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, "including its wild Central Solenoid — the world's most powerful magnet."Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle — holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device. Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of "enabling humanity's access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment."Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Distributed denial-of-service (or DDoS) attacks "are increasing in frequency and growing in size exponentially," reports Google Cloud's blog. Recently an attacker tried to hit one of their customers with 46 million requests per second. The blog post describes it as the largest attack of its kind reported to date, "at least 76% larger than the previously reported record. To give a sense of the scale of the attack, that is like receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds."Starting around 9:45 a.m. PT on June 1, 2022, an attack of more than 10,000 requests per second (rps) began targeting our customer's HTTP/S Load Balancer. Eight minutes later, the attack grew to 100,000 requests per second. Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection detected the attack and generated an alert containing the attack signature by assessing the traffic across several dozen features and attributes. The alert included a recommended rule to block on the malicious signature.... Our customer's network security team deployed the Cloud Armor-recommended rule into their security policy, and it immediately started blocking the attack traffic. In the two minutes that followed, the attack began to ramp up, growing from 100,000 rps to a peak of 46 million rps. Since Cloud Armor was already blocking the attack traffic, the target workload continued to operate normally. Over the next few minutes, the attack started to decrease in size, ultimately ending 69 minutes later at 10:54 a.m. Presumably the attacker likely determined they were not having the desired impact while incurring significant expenses to execute the attack.... The attack leveraged encrypted requests (HTTPS) which would have taken added computing resources to generate. Although terminating the encryption was necessary to inspect the traffic and effectively mitigate the attack, the use of HTTP Pipelining required Google to complete relatively few TLS handshakes.... The attack was stopped at the edge of Google's network, with the malicious requests blocked upstream from the customer's application. While 22% of the source IPs corresponded to Tor exit nodes, the actual traffic coming from Tor nodes represented just 3% of attack traffic, the blog post points out. And ultimately despite the attack, "the customer's service stayed online and continued serving their end-users."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: You may remember it — at the end of Return of the Jedi: Special Edition, a rare glimpse of Coruscant — the seat of the galactic empire — is shown in a celebratory state as news of the empire's defeat at Endor reverberated throughout the patchwork of worlds that make up the Star Wars universe. One might imagine that most viewers at that time might have thought — "Oh, cool, so that's what Coruscant looks like" — then went on with their lives rarely to think about that scene ever again. In a recent ScreenRant article ,they take a deeper dive into what happened on Coruscant... Yes, it turns out that both the later movies and licensed books revealed that Darth Vader's Galactic Empire survived:[C]itizens who set off fireworks, toppled statues of the Empire, and attacked stormtroopers were met with violent retaliation from Imperial forces, resulting in numerous extrajudicial killings and executions of civilians. Coruscant continued to serve as an Imperial stronghold until its liberation by the New Republic, which happened a year later in canon and two years later in Legends.... [T]he X-Wing novels mention that the Empire brutally quelled this initial uprising, and the Star Wars: Mara Jade — By the Emperor's Hand comic series showed Stormtroopers executing civilians via firing squad. Aftermath similarly describes civilians fighting against Imperial security forces after toppling a statue of Palpatine....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader atcclears quotes the Wall Street Journal:Hailed as the Saudi Arabia of lithium, this California-sized chunk of terrain [in Salar de Atacama, Chile] accounts for some 55% of the world's known deposits of the metal, a key component in electric-vehicle batteries. As the Chinese EV giant BYD Co. recently learned, tapping into that resource can be a challenge. Earlier this year, after BYD won a government contract to mine lithium, indigenous residents took to the streets, demanding the tender be canceled over concerns about the impact on local water supplies. In June, the Chilean Supreme Court threw out the award, saying the government failed to consult with indigenous people first.... Similar setbacks are occurring around the so-called Lithium Triangle, which overlaps parts of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Production has suffered at the hands of leftist governments angling for greater control over the mineral and a bigger share of profits, as well as from environmental concerns and greater activism by local Andean communities who fear being left out while outsiders get rich. At a time of exploding demand that has sent lithium prices up 750% since the start of 2021, industry analysts worry that South America could become a major bottleneck for growth in electric vehicles. "All the major car makers are completely on board with electric vehicles now," said Brian Jaskula, a lithium expert at the U.S. Geological Survey. "But the lithium may just not be enough." Meanwhile, a chemical engineering professor at Indiana's Purdue University has spent years looking for an alternative to lithium batteries, and their researchers are now testing sodium carbonate and the possibility of sodium ion batteries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here...)When the Green Bay Packers walked onto the practice field this week, they were greeted by an unusual new teammate: a robot. In videos on Twitter, a 6-foot tall white robotic machine simulates a punter, kicking balls at a rapid pace to players downfield. The robot, which holds six balls in a revolving cartridge, could also imitate a quarterback's style including the speed, arc and timing of a throw. The Seeker is a robotic quarterback, kicker and punter rolled into one. It's a modern day version of a piece of football equipment, called a JUGS machine, that's been used to simulate throws and kicks to football players for decades. The Seeker, company officials say however, is a more accurate thrower and runs software to let players practice more advanced gameplay scenarios. he robot, created by Dallas-based Monarc Sport, is starting to gain adoption. Top college football programs, such as Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Iowa, all count the Seeker as part of their training strategy. The Green Bay Packers are the first team in the National Football League to try the technology. The Seeker's software allows players to customize how they practice with it. Athletes can catch balls from close to the machine to improve hand-eye coordination. They can also program the robot to throw a ball to a spot on the field, or simulate more-lifelike conditions by over or underthrowing a ball. Players wear a pager-like tag which allows the robot to track their location on the field, and throw a ball accurately within inches. "It gives so much opportunity for our guys to get reps without the need of having a quarterback there," said Ben Hansen, the director of football administration at Iowa, where the technology was first tested. "That's a huge plus...." One of the most helpful parts of the technology, he said, is being able to program it to throw passes that simulate game day conditions. Unlike the JUGS machine, he said, which doesn't have software to pass in random patterns, the Seeker can purposefully throw passes that aren't perfect.... A case study published in April by Microsoft, which provides the software ecosystem for the robot, noted that West Virginia University's dropped passes rate fell to four percent in 2021, down from 53 percent the past season after introducing the robot into training. The university's senior athletic director said the robot deserved a "share of the credit" for that outcome.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Even if all nuclear power plants were shut down today, there's a mountain of radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of," reports Ars Technica. "Yet only Finland has an approved solution for nuclear waste disposal, while projects in the US, UK, and Germany have failed for decades, and progress is also slow in other countries." So how did Finland construct a safe nuclear waste repository? Ars Technica asked Antti Mustonen, who's a research manager with Posiva, the organization in charge of the Finnish repository:Finland has a lot of hard crystalline bedrock and many places that are potentially suitable for a repository. The country eventually chose an island on the Baltic coast for its Onkalo repository, and it hopes to seal off the first tunnel of nuclear waste sometime around 2025.... Even after it has cooled in ponds for decades, spent nuclear fuel gives out heat by radioactive decay, raising the temperature near the waste canisters. This heat could potentially corrode the canisters, compromise the bentonite, or even crack the rock face. Therefore, the Finnish and Swedish designs separate individual waste canisters in their own disposal shafts to avoid excessive heat buildup.... Posiva is currently conducting a long-term, full-sized demonstration using heaters in dummy canisters surrounded by bentonite and temperature probes. After three years, the temperature at the canister boundary is about 70Â C, Mustonen said. A similar test in Switzerland lasted 18 years and found that bentonite "remains suitable as a sealing material" up to at least 100 degrees C.... But to project how the rock and groundwater will affect humans living near the site in future millennia, the scientists must model that numerically using the tests and data as the starting point. "We have modeled to that million years... with different scenarios and what the likely releases [are], and it seems that the releases are acceptable," Mustonen told me.... Scientists then project what will happen to the waste over the next million years, assuming everything works as planned. They also model for several "what if" scenarios. This projection includes looking at the stresses and groundwater pressures caused by possibilities like being buried deep under a future ice sheet and then having that ice sheet melt away, sea level changes, changes in groundwater chemistry, and failures of canisters. At Onkalo, even in the worst case, scientists calculate that the maximum dose released to humans would be one-tenth of the regulatory limit, which itself is about a hundredth of the normal dose that Finns receive every year. But the article also asks what Finland's experience can teach other countries. One person who worked on America's unsuccessful Yucca Mountain project was Dr. Jane Long, former associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Long tells the site that "They should have set requirements for an inherently safe site and then investigated whether the site met the requirements instead of choosing the site for political reasons and then trying to show the site was suitable." And they seem to agree in Finland:"More than the geology, I think it's socio-economic aspects" that determine if a project can go ahead, Mustonen told me. A key lesson is that the top-down designation of sites for nuclear waste disposal has generally failed. The UK failed in 1987, 1997, and 2013. In the US, politicians campaigned against the Yucca Mountain project, characterizing its authorization as the "Screw Nevada Bill...." Yucca Mountain's wasted $15 billion pales in comparison to the roughly $50 billion in damages that American taxpayers have had to pay to nuclear utilities because the government was unable to honor its commitment to receive nuclear waste by 1998. Meanwhile, more waste is piling up. Thanks to Slashdot reader atcclears for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users of Google "must recalibrate their thinking on what Google is and how information is returned to them," warns an Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. In a new book titled The Propagandists' Playbook, they're warning that simple link-filled search results have been transformed by "Google's latest desire to answer our questions for us, rather than requiring us to click on the returns." The trouble starts when Google returns inaccurate answers "that often disrupt democratic participation, confirm unsubstantiated claims, and are easily manipulatable by people looking to spread falsehoods."By adding all of these features, Google — as well as competitors such as DuckDuckGo and Bing, which also summarize content — has effectively changed the experience from an explorative search environment to a platform designed around verification, replacing a process that enables learning and investigation with one that is more like a fact-checking service.... The problem is, many rely on search engines to seek out information about more convoluted topics. And, as my research reveals, this shift can lead to incorrect returns... Worse yet, when errors like this happen, there is no mechanism whereby users who notice discrepancies can flag it for informational review.... The trouble is, many users still rely on Google to fact-check information, and doing so might strengthen their belief in false claims. This is not only because Google sometimes delivers misleading or incorrect information, but also because people I spoke with for my research believed that Google's top search returns were "more important," "more relevant," and "more accurate," and they trusted Google more than the news — they considered it to be a more objective source.... This leads to what I refer to in my book, The Propagandists' Playbook, as the "IKEA effect of misinformation." Business scholars have found that when consumers build their own merchandise, they value the product more than an already assembled item of similar quality — they feel more competent and therefore happier with their purchase. Conspiracy theorists and propagandists are drawing on the same strategy, providing a tangible, do-it-yourself quality to the information they provide. Independently conducting a search on a given topic makes audiences feel like they are engaging in an act of self-discovery when they are actually participating in a scavenger-hunt engineered by those spreading the lies.... Rather than assume that returns validate truth, we must apply the same scrutiny we've learned to have toward information on social media. Another problem the article points out: "Googling the exact same phrase that you see on Twitter will likely return the same information you saw on Twitter. "Just because it's from a search engine doesn't make it more reliable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior White House officials say even more action is coming on climate change. They're telling the New York Times that U.S. President Joe Biden plans "a series of executive actions to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help keep the planet from warming to dangerous temperatures." Biden is on track to deploy a series of measures, including new regulations on emissions from vehicle tailpipes, power plants and oil and gas wells, the officials said. In pushing more executive action, Mr. Biden is trying to make up for the compromises his party made on climate measures to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest single American investment to slow global warming. Democrats had to scale back some of their loftiest ambitions, including by agreeing to fossil fuel and drilling provisions, as concessions to Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a holdout from a conservative state that is heavily dependent on coal and gas. Gina McCarthy, the White House climate adviser, said that regulatory moves, combined with the new legislation and action from states, could help Mr. Biden meet his promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, compared to 2005 levels, by the end of the decade. The climate bill, she said, was "a starting point." "The president has not chosen to just look at Congress, he's chosen to recognize that he has presidential authorities and responsibilities under the law to keep moving this forward," she said. "And he's going to continue to use those." [...] Ms. McCarthy noted the E.P.A. still has "broad authority" to regulate emissions from electricity generation. She also said the government is forging ahead with new regulations on soot and other traditional air pollutants, which will have the side benefit of cutting carbon emissions.... Mr. Biden has the executive authority to issue regulations through federal agencies, and under the Clean Air Act of 1970 can establish rules to address air pollution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you when people hate your $10 billion selfie? "Mark Zuckerberg, in response to a torrent of critical memes mocking the graphics of Meta's newest project, has heard his critics — and changed his selfie," reports CNN:Zuckerberg debuted Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social app, in France and Spain earlier this week, sharing a somewhat flat, goofy digital avatar in front of an animated Eiffel Tower and la Sagrada Família. The internet immediately jumped in, mocking what many users viewed as (hopefully) preliminary graphics for a venture that Meta has spent at least $10 billion in the last year. New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose compared the graphics to "worse than a 2008 Wii game" on Twitter. Slate used the term " buttcheeks." Twitter was less kind: "eye-gougingly ugly" and "an international laughing stock" popping up. Many compared it to early 90's graphics and pointed out how lifeless and childish the Zuckerberg selfie looked. It quickly won the designation "dead eyes." Well, Zuckerberg has apparently seen the memes, because on Friday he announced there are major updates coming — along with new avatar graphics. In a CNBC report on how Zuckerberg "is getting dragged on the internet for how ugly the graphics of this game are," they'd actually quoted a Forbes headline that asked, "Does Mark Zuckerberg not understand how bad his metaverse is?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you when people hate your $10 billion selfie? "Mark Zuckerberg, in response to a torrent of critical memes mocking the graphics of Meta's newest project, has heard his critics — and changed his selfie," reports CNN:Zuckerberg debuted Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social app, in France and Spain earlier this week, sharing a somewhat flat, goofy digital avatar in front of an animated Eiffel Tower and la Sagrada Família. The internet immediately jumped in, mocking what many users viewed as (hopefully) preliminary graphics for a venture that Meta has spent at least $10 billion in the last year. New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose compared the graphics to "worse than a 2008 Wii game" on Twitter. Slate used the term "buttcheeks." Twitter was less kind: "eye-gougingly ugly" and "an international laughing stock" popping up. Many compared it to early 90's graphics and pointed out how lifeless and childish the Zuckerberg selfie looked. It quickly won the designation "dead eyes." Well, Zuckerberg has apparently seen the memes, because on Friday he announced there are major updates coming — along with new avatar graphics. In a CNBC report on how Zuckerberg "is getting dragged on the internet for how ugly the graphics of this game are," they'd actually quoted a Forbes headline that asked, "Does Mark Zuckerberg not understand how bad his metaverse is?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang," reports Sky and Telescope. "If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking."Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London).... Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment." Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal." Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes:In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!" Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...." Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance..... Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory.... According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.... While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years.... Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Thanks to Slashdot reader magzteel for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a free and open-source, cross-platform FTP application that allows secure file transfering — and it's making an old-school protocol cool again, according to a recent blog post. Started about 21 years ago — and downloaded by millions each year — FileZilla remains "committed to their role in liberating technology, by making it accessible, open and also secure," according to the blog post. But it also explains how FileZilla has beefed up that security through a collaboration with the internet freedom nonprofit, the Open Technology Fund (or "OTF"):Over the past year, FileZilla has utilised support from OTF to undertake two activities that enhanced and ensured the security of their tools. The first was integrating FileZilla Server with Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open source certificate authority that ensures secure communication between the two end-points sending or receiving a file via FileZilla.... Secondly, FileZilla ran a penetration test, a service offered by OTF's Red Team Lab. A team of independent researchers attempted to force access to the FileZilla server to see if they could gain control. These researchers were highly skilled, and the testing was extensive. The team conducting the test only found very minor security vulnerabilities that FileZilla were able to fix immediately. As a result of this process, anyone wanting to use the FileZilla software can trust that it has been cross-scrutinised by a third party and found to be secure.... FileZilla respects users' confidentiality: they do not track your behaviour, nor sell your data to other companies. While they do have advertisements on their website, they are posted exactly as advertisements would be posted in a newspaper. Nobody knows that you are reading the advertisements, or that you decided to call or connect to the advertised website. The advertisement has simply been attached to the webpage, without any underlying tracking.... . "Our mission hasn't changed in over 20 years: design, develop, maintain and enhance free tools to securely transfer files with ease and reliability," said Tim Kosse, FileZilla Lead Developer. This decision was a political one taken by FileZilla, to always preserve the freedom of their tools, and of their users. "We aren't the typical commercial open-source venture that starts doing things for free, and over time, closes this and that to make money" said Roberto Galoppini, FileZilla Director of Strategy. "While you might not see FileZilla listed at the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] any time soon, the freedom of our tools will never be questioned...." [I]f you work in an industry that requires the secure transfer of sensitive files, or if you simply have personal photographs or videos you want to keep confidential, using proprietary platforms to share or store them can put your information at risk of being exposed.... FileZilla offers an alternative that is secure and private. Their tools are developed by a team that is deeply invested in protecting users' confidentiality, and liberating technology is central to their work and decision-making.... At the same time, projects like FileZilla remind us that there exists a global community of technologists, activists, coders, bloggers, journalists, software developers, and mindful internet users making internet freedom a lived reality and daily practice. Supporting, experimenting with and using free and open source tools, such as the FileZilla client and server, enables us to disinvest from the capitalist pursuit of corporate control of technology and unchecked surveillance of our data. Rather, we can step into alignment with an alternative, parallel narrative being created by a community of resistance that is grounded in principles of cooperation, solidarity, commons and openness.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A local news report called it "a futuristic dream, now a reality in Las Vegas: self-driving vehicles moving customers up and down the Las Vegas strip." Lyft's ride-hailing service now lets customers book Motional's all-electric (and autonomous driving) IONIQ 5. Not everyone's sold. "Love technology — love it, promote it — but we don't need to replace every human," said one person interviewed on the street. But "the digital wave continues to sweep Las Vegas," the newscast points out, with the car company's director of commercial fleet operations insisting it will ultimately make transportation more affordable, sustainable, and reliable. "We look at this as an opportunity to really show that robotaxis are the best way for people to get around," he says, noting Vegas drivers have to contend with lots of night-time driving, bright lights, unusually wide lanes and big intersections. The city once adopted the slogan "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," and some passengers might appreciate the extra privacy of a truly driverless vehicle. Passengers "for the time being, will be accompanied by two safety drivers in the event of an error," according to news reports, but that's expected to change soon:"Motional and Lyft have a clear path to widespread commercialization of Level 4 autonomous vehicles," said Karl Iagnemma, Motional's president and CEO. "We've led the industry in commercial operations for years, and today's launch signals we're on track to deliver a fully driverless service next year...." Upon arrival, riders who order the IONIQ 5 can unlock the doors to the vehicle using the Lyft mobile app. Once inside the vehicle, customers can start the ride or contact customer support by using the new in-car Lyft AV app [on a touchscreen for passengers]. By making these new features available now, despite the presence of the two safety drivers, Lyft hopes to solicit customer feedback and refine the new tools before the service goes fully driverless in 2023. Lyft and Motional have been piloting autonomous rides in other vehicles in Las Vegas since 2018, with more than 100,000 autonomous rides provided thus far, over 95% of which have received five-star ratings, according to the companies. Feedback gathered on the new IONIQ 5 autonomous vehicle over the coming months will help to inform Lyft's launch of fully driverless e-hail trips in Las Vegas sometime next year. After that, the company plans to expand the driverless, e-hail service to various other markets throughout the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: Hackers are stealing cookies from current or recent web sessions to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), according to an eSecurity Planet report. The attack method, reported by Sophos researchers, is already growing in use. The "cookie-stealing cybercrime spectrum" is broad, the researchers wrote, ranging from "entry-level criminals" to advanced adversaries, using various techniques. Cybercriminals collect cookies or buy stolen credentials "in bulk" on dark web forums. Ransomware groups also harvest cookies and "their activities may not be detected by simple anti-malware defenses because of their abuse of legitimate executables, both already present and brought along as tools," the researchers wrote. Browsers allow users to maintain authentication, remember passwords and autofill forms. That might seem convenient, but attackers can exploit this functionality to steal credentials and skip the login challenge. Behind the scenes, browsers use SQLite database files that contain cookies. These cookies are composed of key-value pairs, and the values often contain critical information such as tokens and expiration dates. Adversaries know the exact name and location of these files for all major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and even Brave, on various operating systems. That's why the attack can be scripted. It's not uncommon to find such scripts along with other modules in info-stealing and other malware. For example, the latest version of the Emotet botnet targets cookies and credentials stored by browsers, which include saved credit cards. According to the Sophos researchers, "Google's Chrome browser uses the same encryption method to store both multi-factor authentication cookies and credit card data." To gain initial access, attackers can also perform phishing and spear-phishing campaigns to implant droppers that can deploy cookie-stealer malware stealthily. The cookies are then used for post-exploitation and lateral movements. Cybercriminals can use them to change passwords and emails associated with user accounts, or trick the victims into downloading additional malware, or even deploy other exploitation tools such as Cobalt Strike and Impacket kit. Users should not use built-in features to save passwords unless the browser encrypts them with, at least, a master password. It's recommended that users uncheck the setting called "remember passwords," and users should probably not allow persistent sessions as well. Developers can be part of the problem if they don't secure authentication cookies properly. Such cookies must have a short expiration date. Otherwise, the persistent authentication could turn into a persistent threat. You can have great security processes and still get hacked because the cookies do not have the necessary flags (e.g., HttpOnly, Secure attribute). For example, authentication cookies must be sent using SSL/TLS channels. Otherwise the data could be sent in plain text and attackers would only have to sniff traffic to intercept credentials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Monday, Apple told employees at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, that they would have to return to the office at least three days a week by September 5," according to a columnist for Inc.First reported by Bloomberg, Tim Cook told employees in an email that they would be expected to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with teams choosing a third day that works best for them... Apple SVP of software Craig Federighi followed up Cook's email with one of his own, saying that he "can't wait to experience the special energy of having all of us back in the office together again!" That's great, but I imagine a lot of the people who work in the software organization are wondering whether that "special energy" actually makes them more productive, or if it's just a thing managers feel as they watch employees be productive at their desks... [T]hat's not the same thing as actual collaboration. Here's the article's main point:[M]any companies — especially Apple — had their best two years ever when most of their employees were working from home. If anything, it seems as though the evidence pointing to the idea that it was better for the company.... Apple's market cap in March 2020 was $1.1 trillion. Today, it's just shy of three times that.... [I]t's as if Apple hasn't learned anything. Apple's memo did say that some employees — "depending on your role" — would have the option of working fully remotely "for up to four weeks a year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After a slight delay due to an installer issue, the first point release for Ubuntu 22.04 has been officially released," swrites Jack Wallen for TechRepublic. "Although point releases are often overlooked by users, because they aren't major upgrades, this time around you should certainly run the upgrade immediately."The biggest reason is that this point release combines all of the security fixes and improvements that have been added since the initial release of Jammy Jellyfish. So, if you haven't bothered to upgrade Ubuntu 22.04 since you first installed it, which you should have been doing all along, this point upgrade will add everything you've missed in one fell swoop. One of the biggest upgrades for end users will be the ability of 20.04 users to upgrade to the latest release without having to touch the command line. At some point, users of 20.04 will see an upgrade prompt on their desktops, allowing them to easily make the jump to 22.04.1. This is a big deal because previously such upgrades would have required running several commands. That means no more: sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get upgrade -ysudo apt-get dist-upgrade -ysudo do-release-upgrade -y Another point release found in 22.04.1 is GNOME 42, which features a new enhanced dark mode and switches to Wayland by default, with the inclusion of Xorg for unsupported hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IoT Times brings an update on "the race to create a new set of encryption standards."Last month, it was announced that a specialized security algorithm co-authored by security experts of NXP, IBM, and Arm had been selected by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to become part of an industry global standard designed to counter quantum threats. IoT Times interviews the cryptography expert who co-created the Crystals-Kyber lattice-based algorithm selected by NIST — Joppe W. Bos, a senior principal cryptographer at the Competence Center for Cryptography and Security at NXP Semiconductors. And what worries his colleagues at the semiconductor company isn't the "imminent threat of quantum computers," Bos says, but an even closer and more practical deadline: "the timeline for these post-quantum crypto standards.""Two weeks ago, NIST announced the winners of these new public standards, the post-quantum crypto standards, and their timeline is that in 2024, so in roughly two years, the winners will be converted into standards. And as soon as the standards are released, our customers will expect NXP Semiconductors, as one of the leaders in crypto and security, to already have support for these standards, because we are, of course, at the start of the chain for many end products. Our secure elements, our secure platforms, SOCs, are one of the first things that need to be integrated into larger platforms that go into end products. Think about industrial IoT. Think about automotive applications. So, our customers already expect us to support post-quantum crypto standards in 2024, and not only support but, for many companies, being able to compute the functional requirements of the standard. "It took over ten years to settle down on the best methods for RSA and ECC, and now we have a much shorter timeline to get ready for post-quantum crypto." "When you ask the experts, it ranges from one to five decades until we can see quantum computers big enough to break our current crypto," Bos says in the interview. So he stresses that they're not driven by a few of quantum computers. "The right question to ask, at least for us at NXP is, when is this new post-quantum crypto standard available? Because then, our customers will ask for post-quantum support, and we need to be ready. "The standard really drives our development and defines our roadmap." But speaking of the standard's "functional requirements", in the original story submission Slashdot reader dkatana raised an interesting point. There's already billions of low-powered IoT devices in the world. Will they all have the memory and processing power to use this new lattice-based encryption?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: An Apple AirTag led to the arrest of an airline subcontractor accused of stealing thousands of dollars' worth of items from luggage at a Florida airport. Giovanni De Luca, 19, was charged with two counts of grand theft after authorities recovered the stolen items from his home, the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office said in a news release last week. Authorities said a traveler reported last month that her luggage never made it to her destination. The items inside were worth about $1,600. She said an Apple AirTag, a tracking device that triggers alerts on iPhones, iPads and Apple computers, had been in her luggage and showed that it was on Kathy Court in Mary Esther, about 50 miles east of Pensacola. On Aug. 9, another traveler reported that more than $15,000 worth of jewelry and other items had been taken from his luggage. Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies investigating both suspected thefts cross-referenced Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport employees who lived near Kathy Court and found De Luca at his home. He was arrested Aug. 10. The items reported missing on Aug. 9 were recovered, and De Luca admitted to rummaging through someone else's luggage and removing an Apple AirTag, the sheriff's office said. The woman's luggage has not been found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The USB Rubber Ducky "has a new incarnation, released to coincide with the Def Con hacking conference this year," reports The Verge. From the report: To the human eye, the USB Rubber Ducky looks like an unremarkable USB flash drive. Plug it into a computer, though, and the machine sees it as a USB keyboard -- which means it accepts keystroke commands from the device just as if a person was typing them in. The original Rubber Ducky was released over 10 years ago and became a fan favorite among hackers (it was even featured in a Mr. Robot scene). There have been a number of incremental updates since then, but the newest Rubber Ducky makes a leap forward with a set of new features that make it far more flexible and powerful than before. With the right approach, the possibilities are almost endless. Already, previous versions of the Rubber Ducky could carry out attacks like creating a fake Windows pop-up box to harvest a user's login credentials or causing Chrome to send all saved passwords to an attacker's webserver. But these attacks had to be carefully crafted for specific operating systems and software versions and lacked the flexibility to work across platforms. The newest Rubber Ducky aims to overcome these limitations. It ships with a major upgrade to the DuckyScript programming language, which is used to create the commands that the Rubber Ducky will enter into a target machine. While previous versions were mostly limited to writing keystroke sequences, DuckyScript 3.0 is a feature-rich language, letting users write functions, store variables, and use logic flow controls (i.e., if this... then that). That means, for example, the new Ducky can run a test to see if it's plugged into a Windows or Mac machine and conditionally execute code appropriate to each one or disable itself if it has been connected to the wrong target. It also can generate pseudorandom numbers and use them to add variable delay between keystrokes for a more human effect. Perhaps most impressively, it can steal data from a target machine by encoding it in binary format and transmitting it through the signals meant to tell a keyboard when the CapsLock or NumLock LEDs should light up. With this method, an attacker could plug it in for a few seconds, tell someone, "Sorry, I guess that USB drive is broken," and take it back with all their passwords saved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Globally, nearly half of deaths due to cancer can be attributable to preventable risk factors, including the three leading risks of: smoking, drinking too much alcohol or having a high body mass index, a new paper suggests. CNN reports: The research, published Thursday in the journal The Lancet, finds that 44.4% of all cancer deaths and 42% of healthy years lost could be attributable to preventable risk factors in 2019. "To our knowledge, this study represents the largest effort to date to determine the global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, and it contributes to a growing body of evidence aimed at estimating the risk-attributable burden for specific cancers nationally, internationally, and globally," Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his colleagues wrote in the study. The paper, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, analyzed the relationship between risk factors and cancer, the second leading cause of death worldwide, using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease project. The project collects and analyzes global data on deaths and disability. Murray and his colleagues zeroed in on cancer deaths and disability from 2010 to 2019 across 204 countries, examining 23 cancer types and 34 risk factors. The leading cancers in terms of risk-attributable deaths globally in 2019 was tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer for both men and women, the researchers found. The data also showed that risk-attributable cancer deaths are on the rise, increasing worldwide by 20.4% from 2010 to 2019. Globally, in 2019, the leading five regions in terms of risk-attributable death rates were central Europe, east Asia, North America, southern Latin America and western Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: [R]esearchers say they have found the mechanism behind the insect's ability to home in on humans. Humans give off a fragrant cocktail of body odor, heat and carbon dioxide, which varies from person to person and mosquitoes use to locate their next meal. While most animals have a specific set of neurons that detect each type of odor, mosquitoes can pick up on smells via several different pathways, suggests the study, which is published in the science journal Cell. "We found that there's a real difference in the way mosquitoes encode the odors that they encounter compared to what we've learned from other animals," said Meg Younger, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University and one of the lead authors of the study. Researchers at the Rockefeller University, in New York, were baffled when mosquitoes were somehow still able to find people to bite after having an entire family of human odor-sensing proteins removed from their genome. The team then examined odor receptors in the antennae of mosquitoes, which bind to chemicals floating around in the environment and signal to the brain via neurons. "We assumed that mosquitoes would follow the central dogma of olfaction, which is that only one type of receptor is expressed in each neuron," said Younger. "Instead, what we've seen is that different receptors can respond to different odors in the same neuron." This means losing one or more receptors does not affect the ability of mosquitoes to pick up on human smells. This backup system could have evolved as a survival mechanism, the researchers say. "The mosquito Aedes aegypti is specialized to bite humans, and it is believed that they evolved to do that because humans are always close to fresh water and mosquitoes lay their eggs in fresh water. We are basically the perfect meal, so the drive to find humans is extremely strong," said Younger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT Technology Review obtained Prince's investor presentation for the "RedPill Phone," which promises more than it could possibly deliver. From the report: Erik Prince's pitch to investors was simple -- but certainly ambitious: pay just 5 million euros and cure the biggest cybersecurity and privacy plagues of our day. The American billionaire -- best known for founding the notorious private military firm Blackwater, which became globally infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and threatening US government investigators -- was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising "free speech, privacy, and security" untethered from dominant tech giants like Apple and Google. In June, Prince publicly revealed the new phone, priced at $850. But before that, beginning in 2021, he was privately hawking the device to investors -- using a previously unreported pitch deck that has been obtained by MIT Technology Review. It boldly claims that the phone and its operating system are "impenetrable" to surveillance, interception, and tampering, and its messenger service is marketed as "impossible to intercept or decrypt." Boasting falsely that Unplugged has built "the first operating system free of big tech monetization and analytics," Prince bragged that the device is protected by "government-grade encryption." Better yet, the pitch added, Unplugged is to be hosted on a global array of server farms so that it "can never be taken offline." One option is said to be a server farm "on a vessel" located in an "undisclosed location on international waters, connected via satellite to Elon Musk's StarLink." An Unplugged spokesperson explained that "they benefit in having servers not be subject to any governmental law." The Unplugged investor pitch deck is a messy mix of these impossible claims, meaningless buzzwords, and outright fiction. While none of the experts I spoke with had yet been able to test the phone or read its code, because the company hasn't provided access, the evidence available suggests Unplugged will fall wildly short of what's promised. [...] The UP Phone's operating system, called LibertOS, is a proprietary version of Google's Android, according to an Unplugged spokesperson. It's running on an unclear mix of hardware that a company spokesperson says they've designed on their own. Even just maintaining a unique Android "fork" -- a version of the operating system that departs from the original, like a fork in the road -- is a difficult endeavor that can cost massive money and resources, experts warn. For a small startup, that can be an insurmountable challenge. [...] Another key issue is life span. Apple's iPhones are considered the most secure consumer device on the market due in part to the fact that the company offers security updates to some of its older phones for six years, longer than virtually all competitors. When support for a phone ends, security vulnerabilities go unaddressed, and the phone is no longer secure. There is no information available on how long UP Phones will receive security support. "There are two things happening here," says Allan Liska, a cyberintelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. "There are the actual attempts to make real secure phones, and then there is the marketing BS. Distinguishing between those two can be really hard." "When I worked in US intelligence, we [penetrated] a number of phone companies overseas," says Liska. "We were inside those phone companies. We could easily track people based on where they connected to the towers. So when you talk about being impenetrable, that's wrong. This is a phone, and the way that phones work is they triangulate to cell towers, and there is always latitude and longitude for exactly where you're sitting," he adds. "Nothing you do to the phone is going to change that." The UP Phone is due out in November 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is advising iOS and iPadOS users to update to the latest software version to patch two security holes that could allow an application to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. They also issued a patch for WebKit, the browser that powers Safari and all third-party browsers on iOS. For this vulnerability, Apple says that "processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution." "With two major security fixes, we recommend all iPhone users update to iOS 15.6.1 immediately and all iPad users update to iPadOS 15.6.1," writes Chance Miller via 9to5Mac. "You can do so by heading to the Settings app, choosing General, then choosing Software Update."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications updated cybersecurity laws this week to mandate Big Tech and telecoms companies store user data locally, and control that data with local entities. The Register reports: The data affected goes beyond the basics of name, email, credit card information, phone number and IP address, and extends into social elements -- including groups of which users are members, or the friends with whom they digitally interact. "Data of all internet users ranging from financial records and biometric data to information on people's ethnicity and political views, or any data created by users while surfing the internet must be to stored domestically," read the decree (PDF) issued Wednesday, as translated by Reuters. The decree applies to a wide swath of businesses including those providing telecom services, storing and sharing data in cyberspace, providing national or international domain names for users in Vietnam, e-commerce, online payments, payment intermediaries, transport connection services operating in cyberspace, social media, online video games, messaging services, and voice or video calls. According to Article 26 of the government's Decree 53, the new rules go into effect October 1, 2022 -- around seven weeks from the date of its announcement. However, foreign companies have an entire 12 months in which to comply -- beginning when they receive instructions from the Minister of Public Security. The companies are then required to store the data in Vietnam for a minimum of 24 months. System logs will need to be stored for 12 months. After this grace period, authorities reserve the right to make sure affected companies are following the law through investigations and data collection requests, as well as content removal orders. Further reading: Vietnam To Make Apple Watch, MacBook For First Time EverRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A British judge has ruled that a case against the kingdom of Saudi Arabia brought by a dissident satirist who was targeted with spyware can proceed, a decision that has been hailed as precedent-setting and one that could allow other hacking victims in Britain to sue foreign governments who order such attacks. The case against Saudi Arabia was brought by Ghanem Almasarir, a prominent satirist granted asylum in the UK, who is a frequent critic of the Saudi royal family. At the centre of the case are allegations that Saudi Arabia ordered the hacking of Almasarir's phone, and that he was physically assaulted by agents of the kingdom in London in 2018. The targeting and hacking of Almasarir's phone by a network probably linked to Saudi Arabia was confirmed by researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who are considered among the world's leading experts in tracking digital surveillance of dissidents, journalists and other members of civil society. Saudi Arabia is known to be a former client of NSO Group, whose powerful Pegasus hacking software covertly penetrates and compromises smartphones. Saudi Arabia's attempt to have the case dismissed on the grounds that it had sovereign immunity protection under the State Immunity Act 1978 was dismissed by the high court judge. In the ruling, against which Saudi Arabia is likely to appeal, Justice Julian Knowles found that Almasarir's case could proceed under an exception to the sovereign immunity law that applies to any act by a foreign state that causes personal injury. He also found that Almasarir had provided enough evidence to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the alleged assault. Saudi Arabia's claim that the case was too weak or speculative to proceed was dismissed. [...] The decision could have profound implications for other individuals targeted or hacked by NSO's spyware within the UK. They include Lady Shackleton and Princess Haya, the former wife of Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Both were hacked by the sheikh using NSO spyware during lengthy court proceedings between Haya and her former husband in London. In a statement praising the decision, Almasarir said: "I no longer feel safe and I am constantly looking over my shoulder. I no longer feel able to speak up for the oppressed Saudi people, because I fear that any contact with people inside the kingdom could put them in danger. I look forward to presenting my full case to the court in the hope that I can finally hold the kingdom to account for the suffering I believe they have caused me."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenovo has taken issue with the design of the Framework Laptop and one of its power buttons. The Verge reports: In a tweet, the startup claims to have been contacted by Lenovo's legal team, who say the circular design of the power button on one of Framework's designs is too similar to the stylized "O" Lenovo uses in the wordmark for its "Legion" brand of gaming laptops. "Consumers could believe that Framework's Broken O Case or the motherboards they cover are produced by, sponsored, endorsed, licensed, or otherwise affiliated with Lenovo, when that is not the case," a screenshot of the legal letter from Lenovo posted by Framework reads. The offending power button design doesn't appear on any of Framework's laptops. Instead, the circle can be found in the 3D printer case schematics that Framework released back in April, which allow customers to build their own Raspberry Pi-style miniature PCs using just the laptop's motherboard (these can be bought separately, as well as harvested from a Framework laptop). This YouTube video gives a nice overview of how the 3D-printed enclosure is supposed to work (the power button gets pressed at the 9:35 minute mark). [...] Framework doesn't physically sell anything with the offending power button design on it, so fixing the problem is theoretically as simple as uploading a replacement set of CAD files to GitHub. So, rather than fighting Lenovo, Framework is holding a competition for its users to submit new designs for its power button. Entries are open until August 25th, and the winner gets a free i5-1135G7 Mainboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scammers are using invoices sent through PayPal.com to trick recipients into calling a number to dispute a pending charge. Krebs on Security reports: The missives -- which come from Paypal.com and include a link at Paypal.com that displays an invoice for the supposed transaction -- state that the user's account is about to be charged hundreds of dollars. Recipients who call the supplied toll-free number to contest the transaction are soon asked to download software that lets the scammers assume remote control over their computer. While the phishing message attached to the invoice is somewhat awkwardly worded, there are many convincing aspects of this hybrid scam. For starters, all of the links in the email lead to paypal.com. Hovering over the "View and Pay Invoice" button shows the button indeed wants to load a link at paypal.com, and clicking that link indeed brings up an active invoice at paypal.com. Also, the email headers in the phishing message (PDF) show that it passed all email validation checks as being sent by PayPal, and that it was sent through an Internet address assigned to PayPal. Both the email and the invoice state that "there is evidence that your PayPal account has been accessed unlawfully."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market -- and to do so, it's taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. Today, Godot claims some 1,500 contributors, and is considered one of the world's top open source projects by various metrics. Godot has been used in high-profile games such as the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster, published by Sega last year as the first major mainstream game powered by Godot. But Tesla, too, has apparently used Godot to power some of the more graphically intensive animations in its mobile app. Among Godot's founding creators is Juan Linietsky, who has served as head of development for the Godot project for the past 13 years, and who will now serve as CEO of W4 Games, a new venture that's setting out to take Godot to the next level. W4 quietly exited stealth last week, but today the Ireland-headquartered company has divulged more details about its goals to grow Godot and make it accessible for a wider array of commercial use cases. On top of that, the company told TechCrunch that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to make its mission a reality, with backers including OSS Capital, Lux Capital, Sisu Game Ventures and -- somewhat notably -- Bob Young, the co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat, an enterprise-focused open source company that IBM went on to acquire for $34 billion in 2019. [...] "Companies like Red Hat have proven that with the right commercial offerings on top, the appeal of using open source in enterprise environments is enormous," Linietsky said. "W4 intends to do this very same thing for the game industry." In truth, Godot is nowhere near having the kind of impact in gaming that Linux has had in the enterprise, but it's still early days -- and this is exactly where W4 could make a difference. [...] W4's core target market will be broad -- it's gunning for independent developers and small studios, as well as medium and large gaming companies. The problem that it's looking to solve, ultimately, is that while Godot is popular with hobbyists and indie developers, companies are hesitant to use the engine on commercial projects due to its inherent limitations -- currently, there is no easy way to garner technical support, discuss the product's development roadmap, or access any other kind of value-added service. [...] "W4 will offer console ports to developers under very accessible terms," Linietsky said. "Independent developers won't need to pay upfront to publish, while for larger companies there will be commercial packages that include support." Elsewhere, W4 is developing a range of products and services which it's currently keeping under wraps, with Linietsky noting that they will most likely be announced at Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next March. "The aim of W4 is to help developers overcome any problem developers may stumble upon while trying to use Godot commercially," Linietsky added. It's worth noting that there are a handful of commercial companies out there already, such as Lone Wolf Technology and Pineapple Works, that help developers get the most out of Godot -- including console porting. But Linietsky was keen to highlight one core difference between W4 and these incumbents: its expertise. "The main distinctive feature of W4 is that it has been created by the Godot project leadership, which are the individuals with the most understanding and insight about Godot and its community," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration will attempt to roll back China's chipmaking abilities by blocking tools that make a widely used type of transistor other chipmakers have employed for years. From a report: The Biden administration has for several months been working to tighten its grip on U.S. exports of technology that China needs to make advanced chips, with the goals of both hurting China's current manufacturing ability and also blocking its future access to next-generation capabilities. According to two people familiar with the administrations plans, President Joe Biden's approach is based around choking off access to the tools, software and support mechanisms necessary to manufacture a specific type of technology that is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern microchips: the transistor. To achieve its objectives, the administration has elected to work to block China's access to transistors that use a specific design called FinFET. The plans include blocking domestic exports of tools that are capable of printing chips with FinFET transistors, while also preventing the tool makers -- such as Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA -- from servicing or supporting equipment they have already sold to various Chinese companies, according to the sources. Big chip manufacturers achieved high-volume production of the transistor technology targeted by the Biden administration roughly eight years ago, but it is still widely used today to manufacture advanced chips designed for servers and iPhones alike. China's largest chipmaker, SMIC, disclosed in 2019 it recently began high-volume production of FinFET-based chips.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Carmack, a programmer who founded gaming firm id Software and served as chief technology officer of Oculus, has launched a new artificial general intelligence startup called Keen Technologies, and it has raised $20 million in a financing round co-led by former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman and Cue founder Daniel Gross, Carmack said Friday. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, Shopify co-founder Tobi Lutke, storied venture fund Sequoia and microprocessor engineer Jim Keller also invested in the round, a name of which as well as the startup's valuation Carmack did not disclose. In a Twitter thread, Carmack adds: This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination. I had talked about that as a possibility for a while, and I am glad Nat pushed me on it. I am continuing as a consultant with Meta on VR matters, devoting about 20% of my time there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins told managers earlier this month that the networking hardware pioneer would increase its operating expenses $1 billion over the next 12 months, in part to raise employee pay to stem a rise in departures, The Information reported Friday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the situation. From a report: Robbins made the surprising comment after the company's revenue growth flatlined in the quarter that ended in July and following a 12-month period in which Cisco shrank its operating expenses as its free cash flow fell. The company didn't discuss Robbins' plan in its quarterly earnings report or conference call on Wednesday. Cisco's move may seem unusual, given the belt-tightening happening almost everywhere else in the tech sector. Most major technology companies, including Google, Meta Platforms and Oracle, are freezing hiring, laying off employees or cutting contractors and extraneous projects as their growth slows. At the same time, these companies face enormous pressure to retain employees in a tight labor market after some workers have expressed concerns about their pay amid rising inflation. Earlier in the year, before macroeconomic conditions deteriorated further, managers' concerns about employee turnover prompted Microsoft and Amazon to announce broad pay increases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia's government said on Friday it plans to introduce new regulations targeting vehicle carbon emissions to boost the uptake of electric cars, as it looks to catch up with other developed economies. From a report: Just 2% of cars sold in Australia are electric compared with 15% in Britain and 17% in Europe, and the country risked becoming a dumping ground for vehicles that can't be sold elsewhere, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said. Apart from Russia, Australia is the only OECD country to either not have or be developing fuel efficiency standards, which encourage manufacturers to supply more electric and no-emission vehicles, he said. "To me, this is ultimately about choice. And policy settings are denying Australians real choice of good, affordable, no emissions cars," Bowen told an electric vehicle summit in Canberra. The government will release a discussion paper for consultation in September, with a focus on increasing EV uptake, improving affordability, and looking at options for fuel efficiency standards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Young adults in the UK are spending more time scrolling on social media site TikTok than watching broadcast television, according to an Ofcom report on Wednesday that highlights the growing generational divide in media habits. From a report: In its annual survey of consumption trends, the media regulator found that those aged 16 to 24 spent an average of 53 minutes a day viewing traditional broadcast TV, just a third of the level a decade ago. By contrast, people over the age of 65 spent seven times as long in front of channels such as BBC One or ITV, viewing almost six hours' worth of broadcast TV a day -- a figure that has risen since 2011. The faster take-up of streaming services and social media among young people poses an ever greater challenge to broadcasters as they try to cope with an economic slowdown, satisfy their most loyal older viewers and invest to keep pace with fast-changing consumption habits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: 'Beware in-app browsers' is a good rule of thumb for any privacy conscious mobile app user -- given the potential for an app to leverage its hold on user attention to snoop on what you're looking at via browser software it also controls. But eyebrows are being raised over the behavior of TikTok's in-app browser after independent privacy research by developer Felix Krause found the social network's iOS app injecting code that could enable it to monitor all keyboard inputs and taps. Aka, keylogging. "TikTok iOS subscribes to every keystroke (text inputs) happening on third party websites rendered inside the TikTok app. This can include passwords, credit card information and other sensitive user data," warns Krause in a blog post detailing the findings. "We can't know what TikTok uses the subscription for, but from a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of installing a keylogger on third party websites." [emphasis his] After publishing a report last week -- focused on the potential for Meta's Facebook and Instagram iOS apps to track users of their in-app browsers -- Krause followed up by launching a tool, called InAppBrowser.com, that lets mobile app users get details of code that's being injected by in-app browsers by listing JavaScript commands executed by the app as it renders the page. (NB: He warns the tool does not necessarily list all JavaScript commands executed nor can it pick up tracking an app might be doing using native code -- so at best it's offering a glimpse of potentially sketchy activities.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) published five cease-and-desist orders Friday, including one to crypto exchange FTX US, alleging they mislead investors by suggesting their accounts are insured through the government agency. From a report: The Cryptonews.com, Cryptosec.com, SmartAsset.com and FDICCrypto.com websites were also directed to cease these alleged misrepresentations. The FDIC said these "companies made false representations" that suggested their products might be insured by the agency. The FDIC covers federally regulated bank accounts, up to $250,000 per account. The FDIC previously ordered now-bankrupt Voyager Digital to cease making claims that implied its customers' funds might have been insured by the FDIC. It later issued a broader warning to the crypto industry at large, saying FDIC protections extend to banks but not to crypto companies that have bank accounts. Friday's letters said several other websites were making specific inaccurate claims about which crypto companies had FDIC insurance. "The Federal Deposit Insurance Act (FDI Act) prohibits any person from representing or implying that an uninsured product is FDIC-insured or from knowingly misrepresenting the extent and manner of deposit insurance. The FDI Act further prohibits companies from implying that their products are FDIC-insured by using 'FDIC' in the company's name, advertisements or other documents," the agency said. "The FDIC is authorized by the FDI Act to enforce this prohibition against any person."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba most likely killed a child who swam in a Nebraska river over the weekend, health officials said Thursday. It would be the first such death in the state's history and the second in the Midwest this summer. From a report: The child, whose name was not released by officials, most likely contracted the infection, known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis, while swimming with family in a shallow part of the Elkhorn River in eastern Nebraska on Sunday, according to the Douglas County Health Department. At a news conference on Thursday, health officials said the typically fatal infection is caused by Naegleria fowleri, also known as brain-eating amoeba, and most likely led to the child's death. Last month, a person in Missouri died because of the same amoeba infection, according to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. The person had been swimming at the beach at Lake of Three Fires State Park in Iowa. Out of precaution, the Iowa Department of Public Health closed the lake's beach for about three weeks. The brain-eating amoebas, which are single-cell organisms, usually thrive in warm freshwater lakes, rivers, canals and ponds, though they can also be present in soil. They enter the body through the nose and then move into the brain. People usually become infected while swimming in lakes and rivers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infections from brain-eating amoeba are extremely rare: From 2012 to 2021, only 31 cases were reported in the U.S., according to the C.D.C.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple: Shazam turns 20 today, and as of this week, it has officially surpassed 70 billion song recognitions. A mainstay in popular culture, the platform has changed the way people engage with music by making song identification accessible to everyone. For more than 225 million global monthly users, to "Shazam" is to discover something new. [...] With its continued commitment to innovation over the past two decades, Shazam is pioneering new ways to bring fans closer to the music and artists they love with new tools like the concert discovery feature, which spotlights concert information and tickets on sale for shows nearby, simply by Shazaming a song, or by searching for it in the Shazam app or website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After revealing just 23 named titles back in July, Friday morning Sega announced the full lineup of 60 games that will be included on the limited supply of US Sega Genesis Mini 2 units starting on October 27. From a report: Beyond the usual retro suspects, though, that list includes a couple of games that have never been released in any form, as well as several fresh arcade ports and Genesis titles sporting brand-new features for their plug-and-play re-release. Those unreleased retro games include Devi & Pii, a title designed by Sonic 3 developer Takashi Iizuka. The "paddle-style game" looks like something of a cross between Arkanoid and Twinkle Star Sprites, with one or two players shifting back and forth to juggle angels and avoid bouncing devils. The Genesis Mini 2 will also see the worldwide premier of Star Mobile, a game completed in 1992 by little-known journeyman developer Mindware but never actually released. The puzzle-heavy gameplay involves stacking stars on a carefully balanced mobile in a way that reminds us of the tabletop game Topple. Besides those two never-before-seen titles, the Genesis Mini 2 features a few Sega arcade games that are being "ported" to Genesis-level hardware for the first time. These include: Fantasy Zone: The cute-and-cuddly side-scrolling shooter gets ported to the Genesis by the same team that ported Darius on the first Genesis Mini, with a brand-new Easy Mode that wasn't in the arcades.Space Harrier and Space Harrier II: While the sequel was already technically native to the Genesis, these new ports use "modern technology" to provide a much smoother sprite scaling function than was previously possible on 16-bit hardware (it's unclear if these new ROMs could run on a standard Genesis).Spatter: A little-known 1984 maze game featuring a clown on a bouncing tricycle.Super Locomotive: A 1982 train game focused on switching tracks to avoid collisions.VS Puyo Puyo Sun: A competitive two-player-exclusive "demake" of the third game in the popular color-matching puzzle series, with "new rules not found in the original version."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has been challenged by an algorithm that could solve a problem faster than its Sycamore quantum computer, which it used in 2019 to claim the first example of "quantum supremacy" -- the point at which a quantum computer can complete a task that would be impossible for ordinary computers. Google concedes that its 2019 record won't stand, but says that quantum computers will win out in the end. From a report: Sycamore achieved quantum supremacy in a task that involves verifying that a sample of numbers output by a quantum circuit have a truly random distribution, which it was able to complete in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. The Google team said that even the world's most powerful supercomputer at the time, IBM's Summit, would take 10,000 years to achieve the same result. Now, Pan Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues have created an improved algorithm for a non-quantum computer that can solve the random sampling problem much faster, challenging Google's claim that a quantum computer is the only practical way to do it. The researchers found that they could skip some of the calculations without affecting the final output, which dramatically reduces the computational requirements compared with the previous best algorithms. The researchers ran their algorithm on a cluster of 512 GPUs, completing the task in around 15 hours. While this is significantly longer than Sycamore, they say it shows that a classical computer approach remains practical.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukraine warned Russia might be planning an imminent attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant Friday that it would seek to blame on Kyiv. From a report: Amid mounting fears of a disaster and with both sides alleging the other is planning "provocations," Ukraine's national energy company said that many staff members had been ordered to stay home and that Moscow wants to disconnect the plant from the power grid. The Russian-occupied plant is the largest in Europe, with the two countries trading blame over who is responsible for attacks on the site in recent weeks. Concerns for the safety of the nuclear reactor have sparked growing international alarm and calls for a demilitarized zone around the site, which Russia has rejected. Energoatom, the Ukrainian energy company, said early Friday that Russia is planning to switch off the power blocks at the Zaporizhzhia plant and disconnect them from Ukraine's power grid, which would deny the country a major energy source. It also said that the majority of staff members at the plant had been ordered to stay home, with only those who operate the power units allowed in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Automated transcription service Otter is making some big changes to its offerings for both free and paying customers. Mostly, the company is downgrading its features -- reducing the number of audio imports users can make; the length of audio they can transcribe each month, and so on -- though it is giving free users access to some new tools. From a report: One of the biggest changes, though, is that free users will no longer be able to access their full back catalogue of recordings. Instead, they'll only have access to the most recent 25. The rest will be "archived" -- that is, they'll still exist on Otter's servers, but users will have to either delete other conversations to access them, or pay to upgrade to Otter's "pro" plan. This and other changes to the service will kick in on September 27th, so any free users with more than 25 recordings may want to download their back catalogue before then. After September 27th, free users will still be able to access these recordings (by downloading then deleting audio files one at a time) but it'll be more of a hassle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the University of Michigan Library's most prized possessions, which appeared to be a Galileo manuscript, is now thought to be the work of a 20th-century forger. From a report: Galileo Galilei was peering through a new telescope in 1610 when he noticed something strange: several bright objects flickering around the planet Jupiter that seemed to change positions nightly. His discovery, of moons orbiting Jupiter, was a major crack in the notion, widely held since antiquity, that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth. The finding, which was condemned by the Catholic Church, helped prove the theory of a sun-centered solar system. For decades the University of Michigan Library has prized a manuscript related to the discovery, describing it as "one of the great treasures" in its collection. At the top is the draft of a letter signed by Galileo describing the new telescope, and on the bottom are sketches plotting the positions of the moons around Jupiter -- "the first observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth," the library described it. At least it would be if it were authentic. After Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University, uncovered evidence suggesting the manuscript was a fake, the library investigated and determined that he was right: The university said Wednesday it had concluded that its treasured manuscript "is in fact a 20th-century forgery." "It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo," Donna L. Hayward, the interim dean of the university's libraries, said in an interview. But since the purpose of any library is to expand knowledge, she said, the university had decided to be forthright about its findings and publicly announce the forgery. "To sweep it under the rug is counter to what we stand for."Read more of this story at Slashdot.