Slashdot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.