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Google's Pixel 6 line may have served as Android 12's big debut for higher-end phones, but Android 12 (Go edition) plans to bring many of the enhancements and features of Android 12 to lower-end phones, too. Google on Tuesday unveiled a host of new features for the Go edition that are set to roll out to devices in 2022. From a report: Google says that in addition to speed enhancements that'll help apps launch up to 30% faster, Android 12 (Go edition) will include a feature that'll save battery life and storage by automatically "hibernating apps that haven't been used for extended periods of time." And with the Files Go app, you'll be able to recover files within 30 days of deletion. Android 12 (Go edition) will also help you easily translate any content, listen to the news and share apps with nearby devices offline to save data, Google says. The company said Android Go has amassed 200 million users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has told federal civilian agencies to patch systems affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability by Christmas Eve. From a report: The agency has added yesterday the Log4Shell bug (CVE-2021-44228) to its catalog of actively-exploited vulnerabilities, along with 12 other security flaws. According to this catalog, federal agencies have ten days at their disposal to test which of their internal apps and servers utilize the Log4j Java library, check if systems are vulnerable to the Log4Shell exploit, and patch affected servers. All of this must be done by December 24, according to a timeline provided in the catalog. In addition, CISA has also launched yesterday a dedicated web page providing guidance to the US public and private sector regarding the Log4Shell vulnerability.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.K.'s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country's competition rules will target tech giants Apple and Google -- including their duopolistic command of the mobile market, via iOS and Android; their respective app stores; and the browsers and services bundled with mobile devices running their OSes. From a report: So it could mean good news for third-party developers trying to get oxygen for alternatives to dominant Apple and Google apps and services down the line. Publishing the first part of a wide-ranging mobile ecosystem market study -- which was announced this summer -- the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said today that it has "provisionally" found Apple and Google have been able to leverage their market power to create "largely self-contained ecosystems"; and that the degree of lock-in they wield is damaging competition by making it "extremely difficult for any other firm to enter and compete meaningfully with a new system." "The CMA is concerned that this is leading to less competition and meaningful choice for customers," the watchdog writes in a press release. "People also appear to be missing out on the full benefit of innovative new products and services -- such as so-called 'web apps' and new ways to play games through cloud services on iOS devices."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. workplace safety watchdog is investigating the circumstances around the collapse during Friday night's storm of an Amazon.com building in Illinois in which six workers died, an official at the U.S. Department of Labor said on Monday. From a report: The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has six months to complete its investigation, issue citations, and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and/or health regulations are found, Scott Allen, a U.S. Department of Labor regional director for public affairs, said via email. He added that compliance officers have been on site since Saturday. Six workers were killed when the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, buckled under the force of a devastating storm, police said. A barrage of tornadoes ripped through six U.S. states, leaving a trail of death and destruction at homes and businesses stretching more than 200 miles (322 km).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly six years after Netflix launched its service in India, the global streaming giant is still struggling to find customers willing to pay for what is already its cheapest subscription globally. From a report: The American firm on Tuesday further lowered the subscription price in India, cutting each monthly subscription tier's cost by at least 18% and up to 60.1%. The Netflix Basic plan, which permits streaming on any device but caps the resolution at 480p, now costs 199 Indian rupees ($2.6) in India, down from 499 Indian rupees ($6.6). Netflix Standard, which improves the video resolution to HD (720p) and permits two simultaneous views, now costs 499 Indian rupees, down from 649 Indian rupees ($8.5). Netflix Premium, which offers four simultaneous views and streams in UltraHD (4K) video quality, now costs 649 Indian rupees, down from â799 ($10.5).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around the frozen continent, a vast current circles the world. New science is revealing the power it holds over the future. Ice shelves are in retreat, and researchers are alarmed at what they're learning. From a report: The immense and forbidding Southern Ocean is famous for howling gales and devilish swells that have tested mariners for centuries. But its true strength lies beneath the waves. The ocean's dominant feature, extending up to two miles deep and as much as 1,200 miles wide, is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, by far the largest current in the world. It is the world's climate engine, and it has kept the world from warming even more by drawing deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, much of which has been submerged for hundreds of years, and pulling it to the surface. There, it exchanges heat and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere before being dispatched again on its eternal round trip. Without this action, which scientists call upwelling, the world would be even hotter than it has become as a result of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. "From no perspective is there any place more important than the Southern Ocean," said Joellen L. Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. "There's nothing like it on Planet Earth." For centuries this ocean was largely unknown, its conditions so extreme that only a relative handful of sailors plied its iceberg-infested waters. What fragmentary scientific knowledge was available came from measurements taken by explorers, naval ships, the occasional research expeditions or whaling vessels. But more recently, a new generation of floating, autonomous probes that can collect temperature, density and other data for years -- diving deep underwater, and even exploring beneath the Antarctic sea ice, before rising to the surface to phone home -- has enabled scientists to learn much more. They have discovered that global warming is affecting the Antarctic current in complex ways, and these shifts could complicate the ability to fight climate change in the future. As the world warms, Dr. Russell and others say, the unceasing winds that drive the upwelling are getting stronger. That could have the effect of releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by bringing to the surface more of the deep water that has held this carbon locked away for centuries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating. It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elliott Management's private equity arm and Francesco Partners will spin out the popular password manager LastPass after taking its owner Boston-based software group LogMeIn private for $4.3 billion. From a report: LastPass faced a backlash from its users in March after the free version of the service, which generates, and securely stores long, complex passwords, was hobbled to only work on either a smartphone, or a computer. Millions of users of LastPass' free service were effectively forced to pay up to $36 a year in order to continue using the password tool on more than one device. LogMeIn CEO Bill Wagner says the plan to spinout LastPass wasn't connected with the backlash over the paywall, and 75% of revenues for the password manager now came from corporate clients. "It's all about unlocking the value of this company," says Wagner. "We are balancing investments across different products and by splitting it out this brings real focus, a dedicated management team and added investment and I think this will be a very valuable company in the years to come."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thelasko shares a report from The New York Times: In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, "Birds Aren't Real." On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren't Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren't Real adherents even protested outside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds don't exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren't Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan. It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren't Real and the movement's followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up. What Birds Aren't Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It's Gen Z's attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism. [...] At the center of the movement is Peter McIndoe, 23, a floppy-haired college dropout in Memphis who created Birds Aren't Real on a whim in 2017. For years, he stayed in character as the conspiracy theory's chief believer, commanding acolytes to rage against those who challenged his dogma. But now, Mr. McIndoe said in an interview, he is ready to reveal the parody lest people think birds really are drones. "Dealing in the world of misinformation for the past few years, we've been really conscious of the line we walk," he said. "The idea is meant to be so preposterous, but we make sure nothing we're saying is too realistic. That's a consideration with coming out of character." [...] Mr. McIndoe now has big plans for 2022. Breaking character is necessary to help Birds Aren't Real leap to the next level and forswear actual conspiracy theorists, he said. He added that he hoped to collaborate with major content creators and independent media like Channel 5 News, which is aimed at helping people make sense of America's current state and the internet. "I have a lot of excitement for what the future of this could be as an actual force for good," he said. "Yes, we have been intentionally spreading misinformation for the past four years, but it's with a purpose. It's about holding up a mirror to America in the internet age."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Engadget: Becoming an astronaut requires perfect 20/20 vision, but unfortunately, the effects of space can cause astronauts to return to Earth with degraded eyesight. Now, researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a sleeping bag that that could prevent or reduce those problems by effectively sucking fluid out of astronauts' heads. More than half of NASA astronauts that went to the International Space Station (ISS) for more than six months have developed vision problems to varying degrees. In one case, astronaut John Philips returned from a six month stint about the ISS in 2005 with his vision reduced from 20/20 to 20/100, as the BBC reported. Fluids tend to accumulate in the head when you sleep, but on Earth, gravity pulls them back down into the body when you get up. In the low gravity of space, though, more than a half gallon of fluid collects in the head. That in turn applies pressure to the eyeball, causing flattening that can lead to vision impairment -- a disorder called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS. To combat SANS, researchers collaborated with outdoor gear manufacturer REI to develop a sleeping bag that fits around the waist, enclosing the lower body. A vacuum cleaner-like suction device is then activated that draws fluid toward the feet, preventing it from accumulating in the head. Around a dozen people volunteered to test the technology, and the results were positive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: At least one person in the UK has died with the Omicron coronavirus variant, the prime minister has said. Boris Johnson said the new variant was also resulting in hospital admissions, and the "best thing" people could do was get their booster jab. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told MPs Omicron now represented 20% of cases in England. The PM has set a new target for all adults in England to be offered a booster by the end of the month. Mr Johnson said on Monday that people needed to recognize "the sheer pace at which [Omicron] accelerates through the population" and that they should set aside the idea that Omicron was a milder variant. The UK recorded 54,661 new coronavirus cases on Monday, as well as 38 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. There are 4,713 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant but Mr Javid said the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimated the current number of daily infections was around 200,000. Omicron has risen to more than 44% of cases in London and is expected to become the dominant variant in the city in the next 48 hours, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report by Gizmodo, written by Isaac Schultz: The Dark Matter Radio project is attempting to detect hidden photons in a specific frequency range by methodically turning the dial, in what amounts to a patient, sweeping search of the wavelengths where such a particle could sound off. Later generations of the radio will hunt axions. [...] The current Dark Matter Radio experiment is the prototype, or Pathfinder, for larger projects down the line. It consists of a liter-volume cylinder made of superconducting niobium metal, around which is tightly wound niobium wire. It looks a bit like someone wound guitar string on a spool's vertical axis instead of its horizontal axis. That's the Pathfinder's inductor. If a hidden photon resonating at the frequency the Pathfinder was tuned to passed through it, the change in magnetic field would induce a voltage around the contraption's inductor. "The null hypothesis is that there shouldn't be any radio waves inside of that box unless, in this case, hidden photons, which are our particular flavor of dark matter," said Stephen Kuenstner, a physicist at Stanford University and a member of the DM Radio team. Hidden photons "can pass through the box and they have some probability of interacting with the circuit in the same way that a radio wave would," Kuenstner said. To amplify any signal the Pathfinder picks up, there's a hexagonal shield of niobium plates sheathing the aforesaid components that acts as a capacitor. That amplified signal is then transported to a quantum sensor called a SQUID (a Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), a technology invented by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s. The SQUID lives on the bottom of the radio and measures and records any signals picked up. The smaller the expected mass for the axion becomes, the more elusive the particle is, as its interactions with ordinary matter are proportional to its mass. So it's important that the next generation of DM Radio becomes more sensitive. The way the experiment is set up, "the frequency on the dial is the mass of the axion," [said Kent Irwin, a physicist at Stanford University and SLAC and the principal investigator of Dark Matter Radio]. Convenient! The mass of these particles doesn't even compare to the smallest things you might think of, like atoms or quarks. These particles would be somewhere between a trillionth and a millionth of an electronvolt, and an electronvolt is about a billionth of a proton's mass. The helium Pathfinder uses is gaseous, and remains a relatively warm 4 kelvin (in other words, four degrees above absolute zero), but the next experiment -- Dark Matter Radio 50L -- will use liquified helium, cooled to less than one degree above absolute zero. All the better for hearing dark matter with. DM Radio 50L sits in the corner of a large room in the Hansen Experimental Physics Lab at Stanford. The room looks a little bit like the TV room in Willy Wonka's factory; it has high ceilings, lots of inscrutable equipment, and is glaringly white. Two 6-foot-tall dilution refrigerators on one side, abutting a deep closet, are the radio. The two machines are fed gaseous helium sitting in tanks in the next room, which they then cool down into liquid helium of a frigid 2 kelvin. Magnets inside gold-plated copper and aluminum sheathes will do the job of converting any detected axions into radio waves for physicists to interpret. "The particle physics community is -- the analogy is often said -- just like a battleship. It takes a while to turn and it has a lot of momentum," Irwin said. "So even though I think that there's a lot of reasons to believe that these radio-like dark matter signals are more attractive -- the axionic signals -- than [Weakly Interactinv Massive Particles (WIMPs)], there's still a lot of giant experiments searching for little things, which is good." The team behind the Dark Matter Radio is "currently working with the Department of Energy on a next-next-generation experiment that will look for axions in a cubic meter, hence its name of DM Radio-m3," adds Gizmodo. "In the more distant future, Irwin and his team have aspirations for a project called DM Radio-GUT, which would be closer to the scale of some of the largest physics experiments on the planet." "All told, Irwin said, the favored area for axion mass could be searched in the next couple of decades using larger experiments -- though the team could simply find an axion before then, potentially ending the hunt for dark matter in its entirety. With enough listening, we might have an entirely new particle for the textbooks. Or maybe there'll be radio silence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has released a new Android app called Tracker Detect, designed to help people who don't own iPhones or iPads to identify unexpected AirTags and other Find My network-equipped sensors that may be nearby. CNET reports: The new app, which Apple released on the Google Play store Monday, is intended to help people look for item trackers compatible with Apple's Find My network. "If you think someone is using AirTag or another device to track your location," the app says, "you can scan to try to find it." If the Tracker Detector app finds an unexpected AirTag that's away from its owner, for example, it will be marked in the app as "Unknown AirTag." The Android app can then play a sound within 10 minutes of identifying the tracker. It may take up to 15 minutes after a tracker is separated from its owner before it shows up in the app, Apple said. If the tracker identified is an AirTag, Apple will offer instructions within the app to remove its battery. Apple also warns within the app that if the person feels their safety is at risk because of the item tracker, they should contact law enforcement. [...] The Tracker Detect app, which Apple first discussed in June, requires users to actively scan for a device before it'll be identified. Apple doesn't require users have an Apple account in order to use the detecting app. If the AirTag is in "lost mode," anyone with an NFC-capable device can tap it and receive instructions for how to return it to its owner. Apple said all communication is encrypted so that no one, including Apple, knows the location or identity of people or their devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The vacancies at cable news companies are piling up as networks and journalists begin to eye streaming alternatives. Axios reports: Why it matters: Primetime cable slots and the Sunday shows are no longer the most opportunistic placements for major TV talent. Driving the news: Long-time "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace is leaving the network after nearly two decades, he announced Sunday. He will be joining CNN as an anchor for its new streaming service, CNN+. Wallace will anchor a new weekday show and will contribute to the network's daily live programming, per CNN. It was his decision not to renew his contract with the network, which expired this year, CNN's Brian Stelter reported. The big picture: Wallace marks the latest in a string of cable news host departures and shakeups in the past few weeks and months. There are now several holes cable bosses will need to fill in coming weeks. [...] Major networks are investing heavily to lure talent to streaming alternatives in light of the decline of linear television. CNN hired NBC News veteran Kasie Hunt as an anchor and analyst for CNN+, reportedly for a salary of over $1 million. It's hiring hundreds of new roles for the streaming service, set to launch next quarter. NBC News has already hired the majority of the 200+ new jobs it announced over the summer for its new streaming service and digital team, a top executive confirmed to Axios last month. One of its linear TV anchors, Joshua Johnson, moved full-time to host a primetime streaming show for NBC News Now. Fox News launched a new weather-focused streaming service in October. A Fox executive said last week the company is prepared to migrate Fox News to a streaming platform when the time is right. CBS News changed the name of its streaming service recently from CBSN to "CBS News" to represent a new streamlined vision for streaming. "TV networks won't stop seriously investing in linear news programs until sports move out of the cable bundle, and that won't be for another few years," adds Axios.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe unveiled its first comprehensive package of design software for non-professionals on Monday, taking direct aim at a booming market that has turned Australian start-up Canva into one of the world's most valuable private tech companies. From a report: The service includes versions of widely used professional design tools such as the Photoshop picture editor, Illustrator graphics tool and video-editing service Premiere, behind a simpler interface that analysts said bore a striking resemblance to Canva. The move follows a leap in the valuation of companies that have extended the market for design software with tools aimed at non-expert users. Canva's fundraising round in September valued it at $40bn, more than double what it was judged to be worth five months before. Figma, which makes software for product designers and more general business users, saw its value rise fivefold in little more than a year to $10bn. Adobe's move is partly defensive, since it could face disruption as Canva's simple tool moves deeper into the business world, said Liz Miller, an analyst at advisory firm Constellation Research. Adobe's new service, called Creative Cloud Express, is likely to appeal to many people in small or medium-sized businesses who might have been thought of before as customers for Adobe's more expensive software, but who are happy to use simpler design tools with fewer features, she said. [...] A basic version of the new service would be available free of charge through app stores and its own website, Adobe said, with a premium version priced at $9.99 a month. [Editor's note: the aforementioned link may be paywalled; alternative source]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world. You may scoff at the words "prestigious" and "NFT" being used so close together, but among its star-studded members are Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone. Right now the price of entry -- that is, the cheapest you can buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for -- is 52 ether, or $210,000. Which is why it's so painful to see that someone accidentally sold their Bored Ape NFT on Saturday for $3,066. Unusual trades are often a sign of funny business, as in the case of the person who spent $530 million to buy an NFT from themselves. In Saturday's case, the cause was a simple, devastating "fat-finger error." That's when people make a trade online for the wrong thing, or for the wrong amount. Here the owner, real name Max or username maxnaut, meant to list his Bored Ape for 75 ether, or around $300,000, but accidentally listed it for 0.75. One hundredth the intended price. It was bought instantaneously. The buyer paid an extra $34,000 to speed up the transaction, ensuring no one could snap it up before them. The Bored Ape was then promptly listed for $248,000. The transaction appears to have been done by a bot, which can be coded to immediately buy NFTs listed below a certain price on behalf of their owners in order to take advantage of these exact situations. "How'd it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess," Max told me. "I list a lot of items every day and just wasn't paying attention properly. I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 eth [$34,000] of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250k was gone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The market for manure -- from pigs, horses, cattle and even humans -- has never been so hot, thanks to a global shortage of chemical fertilizers. From a report: Just ask Andrew Whitelaw, a grains analyst at Thomas Elder Markets based in Melbourne, Australia who runs a commercial pig farm in his spare time. Whitelaw said that he's completely sold clean of animal waste, as farmers hunt for alternatives to the more commonly used phosphate- and nitrogen-based fertilizers that are vital to boosting crop yields. "We don't have any left," he said. "In a normal year, you'd probably get a couple phone calls a year, not a couple of phone calls a week." It may be some time before he sees the interest in pig poop taper. Prices of synthetic fertilizer, which rely on natural gas and coal as raw materials, have soared amid an energy shortage and export restrictions by Russia and China. That's adding to challenges for agricultural supply chains at a time when global food costs are near a record high and farmers scramble for fertilizers to prevent losses to global crop yields for staples. The Green Markets North American Fertilizer Price Index is hovering around an all-time high at $1,072.87 per short ton, while in China, spot urea has soared more than 200% this year to a record. The demand for dung is playing out globally. In Iowa, manure is selling for between $40 to $70 per short ton, up about $10 from a year ago and the highest levels since 2012, according to Daniel Anderson, assistant professor at Iowa State University and a specialist on manure. Manure is mostly a local market and truckloads won't go further than 50 miles (80 kilometers), Anderson said. When crop, fertilizer and manure prices soared about a decade ago, more farmers reintroduced animals such as hogs and cattle onto their land, in part for their manure. That option could again be on farmers' minds as fertilizer costs soar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Facebook veteran Andrew Bosworth insists that political and COVID-19 misinformation are societal problems rather than issues that have been magnified by social networks. From a report: Critics say Facebook and other social networks have played a significant role in vaccine hesitancy and the spread of political misinformation. "Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing," Bosworth said in an interview with "Axios on HBO." "I don't feel comfortable at all saying they don't have a voice because I don't like what they said." Bosworth has been leading Facebook's hardware efforts, including those in virtual and augmented reality. Next year he will become CTO for Meta, Facebook's parent company. Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media, Bosworth defended Facebook's role in combatting COVID, noting that the company ran one of the largest information campaigns in the world to spread authoritative information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mozilla Foundation today released its financial report for 2020. As usual, this gives us a good picture of the organization's financial health from a year ago, but for the first time this year, Mozilla also provided us with more recent data. From a report: It's no secret that Mozilla recently went through a number of difficult years, with major layoffs in 2020 as it restructured its for-profit arm, Mozilla Corporation. Its flagship Firefox browser, despite a number of technical advances, is also struggling in a marketplace that is now dominated by Chromium-based browsers. Still, in 2020, Mozilla Corporation's revenue was $466 million from its search partnerships (largely driven by its search deal with Google), subscriptions and advertising revenue. That's essentially the same as in 2019, when Mozilla Corporation generated $465 million from these sources. For 2021, the organization forecasts revenue of over $500 million. What's maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla's new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off. As Mozilla executive VP Angela Plohman and CFO Eric Muhlheim noted in today's announcement, revenue from new product offerings will grow 150% this year and account for 14% of the organization's revenue in 2021. The Mozilla VPN service saw a revenue increase of 450% from 2020 to 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. From a report: According to a report from The Drive, Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality. As The Drive notes, buyers are given the option to choose from an array of Connected Services when purchasing a new Toyota, and one of those services -- called Remote Connect -- just so happens to include the ability to remotely start your car with your key fob. Buyers are offered a free trial of Remote Connect, but the length of that trial depends on the audio package that's included with the vehicle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 100 Americans were feared dead this weekend — including six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois — after severe storms and tornados tore through the central U.S. And "thousands upon thousands" of buildings were flattened, reports the Times. The head of America's Federal Emergency Management Agency (or FEMA) "says the agency has seen a rise in intense storms and severe weather patterns that it anticipates to continue as a result of climate change," reports Insider.Speaking on morning news shows on Sunday, Deanne Criswell shared the agency's plans to prepare for increasing rates of deadly storms as the country faces the "crisis of our generation." "This is going to be our new normal," Criswell said on CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper... Criswell's remarks come after severe storms and tornadoes ripped through six states, killing an estimated 80 people in Kentucky in what the state's governor, Andy Beshear, said on Saturday "is likely to be the most severe tornado outbreak in our state's history." They also follow a year marked by historic storms that caused unprecedented damage across the country, including winter storms that left large swaths of Texas without power and killed an estimated 210 people, rampant forest fires on the West Coast that have produced harmful smoke traveling thousands of miles across the nation, and severe hurricanes that ravaged much of the East Coast this spring.... "There's going to be a lot to learn from this event and the events that we saw through the summer," she told George Stephanopoulos [on his Sunday morning interview show]. "We're seeing more intense storms, severe weather, whether it's hurricanes, tornadoes, wild fires. And one of the focuses my agency is going to have is, how can we start to reduce the impacts of these events as they continue to grow?" The FEMA official underscored just how unusual the weather was this weekend, according to the Huffington Post:"We do see tornadoes in December, that part is not unusual. But at this magnitude, I don't think we have ever seen one this late in the year," she said. "But it's also historic. Even the severity and the amount of time this tornado or these tornadoes spent on the ground is unprecedented." Tornadoes usually last only a few minutes when thunderstorm updrafts lose energy. But once Friday night's storms formed, experts said unprecedented strong wind shear appeared to have prevented the twisters from dissipating â resulting in a disaster that lasted hours and traveled more than 200 miles at over 50 miles per hour. In fact, the Times reports that the state of Kentucky witnessed the longest distance ever covered by a single tornado in U.S. history.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This year's Game Awards also saw the premiere of The Matrix Awakens, a new in-world "tech demonstrator" written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer/director of the original Matrix trilogy and director of the upcoming sequel. It's available free on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, reports the Verge, and they also scored a sit-down video interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss about the new playable experience — and the new Matrix movie:Reeves also revealed that he thinks there should be a modern Matrix video game, that he's flattered by Cyberpunk 2077 players modding the game to have sex with his character, and why he thinks Facebook shouldn't co-opt the metaverse. Apart from serving as a clever promotion vehicle for the new Matrix movie premiering December 22nd, The Matrix Awakens is designed to showcase what's possible with the next major version of Epic's Unreal Engine coming next year. It's structured as a scripted intro by Wachowski, followed by a playable car chase scene and then an open-world sandbox experience you can navigate as one of Epic's metahuman characters. A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy... Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer "this sort of niche art form." Thanks to updates coming to Unreal Engine, which powers everything from Fortnite to special effects in Disney's The Mandalorian, developers will be able to use the same, hyper-realistic virtual assets across different experiences. It's part of Epic's goal to help build the metaverse. Elsewhere the site writes that The Matrix Awakens "single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft's new game consoles."It's unlike any tech demo you've ever tried before. When we said the next generation of gaming didn't actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5, this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around.... Just don't expect it to make you question your reality — the uncanny valley is still alive and well.... But from a "is it time for photorealistic video game cities?" perspective, The Matrix Awakens is seriously convincing. It's head-and-shoulders above the most photorealistic video game cities we've seen so far, including those in the Spider-Man, Grand Theft Auto and Watch Dogs series... Despite glitches and an occasionally choppy framerate, The Matrix Awakens city feels more real, thanks to Unreal Engine's incredible global illumination and real-time raytracing ("The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes," claims Epic), the detail of the procedurally generated buildings, and how dense it all is in terms of cars and foot traffic. And the most convincing part is that it's not just a scripted sequence running in real-time on your PS5 or Xbox like practically every other tech demo you've seen — you get to run, drive, and fly through it, manipulate the angle of the sun, turn on filters, and dive into a full photo mode, as soon as the scripted and on-rails shooter parts of the demo are done. Not that there's a lot to do in The Matrix Awakens except finding different ways to take in the view. You can't land on buildings, there's no car chases except for the scripted one, no bullets to dodge. You can crash any one of the game's 38,146 drivable cars into any of the other cars or walls, I guess. I did a bunch of that before I got bored, though, just taking in the world.... Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city.... Epic Games' pitch is that Unreal Engine 5 developers can do this or better with its ready-made tools at their disposal, and I can't wait to see them try.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A media lobbying group wants to see tech platforms reigned in with stronger antitrust laws. But the group's president tells the New York Times the biggest force supporting the status quo is hyperpartisanship. The Times reports:The lack of regulation of technology companies is not because elected officials don't understand the internet. That used to be the case, and it helps explain why they have been so slow with oversight measures. Now, though, new questions about technology get mapped onto increasingly intractable political divides. Without the distractions of bizarre questions, what's left is the naked reality that the parties are deeply at odds over how to protect consumers and encourage businesses. Dozens of bills to strengthen privacy, encourage competition and quell misinformation have stalled because of a basic disagreement over the hand of government on businesses. "Congress has again shown it's all bark and no bite when it comes to regulating Big Tech," said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, adding: "We've made no progress for decades." The cost of the government's long education on tech is that regulation is increasingly out of reach. In April 2018, 14 years after founding thefacebook.com and more than five years after Facebook surpassed 1 billion users, Mark Zuckerberg appeared for the first time before Congress... [D]espite bipartisan agreement that tech companies have run roughshod and deserve more oversight, none of the bills discussed in those hearings four years ago have been passed. Turns out, holding a hearing that humbles the most powerful business executives in the world is much easier than legislating. Very bright lines of partisan disagreements appear when writing rules that restrict how much data can be collected by platforms, whether consumers can sue sites for defamation, and whether regulators can slow the march of dominance of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. The Times points out that, just for example, when it came to the possibility of regulating cryptocurrency, "the divides on regulation broke down along party lines" Wednesday after six crypto executives testified before a House committee.Democrats warned that the fast-growing industry needed clearer oversight. "Currently, cryptocurrency markets have no overarching or centralized regulatory framework, leaving investments in the digital assets space vulnerable to fraud, manipulation and abuse," said Representative Maxine Waters, the Democrat of California who chairs the committee. Other Democrats expressed similar caution.... Republicans hewed to their free-market stripes at the crypto hearing. Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, told the crypto executives that he was in favor of their work and that regulations the industry has embraced may go too far. Representative Ted Budd, Republican of North Carolina, worried that lawmakers could push innovation in financial technology out of the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The American military news site Defense One shares a cautionary tale from top U.S. Air Force Major General Daniel Simpson (assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Simpson describes their experience with an experimental AI-based target recognition program that had seemed to be performing well:Initially, the AI was fed data from a sensor that looked for a single surface-to-surface missile at an oblique angle, Simpson said. Then it was fed data from another sensor that looked for multiple missiles at a near-vertical angle. "What a surprise: the algorithm did not perform well. It actually was accurate maybe about 25 percent of the time," he said. That's an example of what's sometimes called brittle AI, which "occurs when any algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside a narrow set of assumptions," according to a 2020 report by researcher and former Navy aviator Missy Cummings. When the data used to train the algorithm consists of too much of one type of image or sensor data from a unique vantage point, and not enough from other vantages, distances, or conditions, you get brittleness, Cummings said. In settings like driverless-car experiments, researchers will just collect more data for training. But that can be very difficult in military settings where there might be a whole lot of data of one type — say overhead satellite or drone imagery — but very little of any other type because it wasn't useful on the battlefield... Simpson said the low accuracy rate of the algorithm wasn't the most worrying part of the exercise. While the algorithm was only right 25 percent of the time, he said, "It was confident that it was right 90 percent of the time, so it was confidently wrong. And that's not the algorithm's fault. It's because we fed it the wrong training data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SFGate pan's Disney's efforts at "hyping up its mega-expensive, hyper-immersive Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World" — the Galactic Starcruiser — as its March 1st opening approaches:Guests must book two nights — which will set you back nearly $5,000 for two people or $6,000 for a family of four — and will spend most of their time inside the spaceship resort, much like a cruise. There's an "excursion" into the Galaxy's Edge part of Disney World, while the remainder of the stay includes interactions with characters, lightsaber training (more on that later) and exclusive restaurants... The look and feel of the hotel has been criticized as looking plastic and cheap, and reception to one sneak peek video was so bad, it has since disappeared from Disney's YouTube channel. The video showed actor Sean Giambrone of "The Goldbergs" being given a tour of some of the ship's features, which look pretty bare and antiseptic for the Star Wars universe, and listening to a strange musical performance. (Another user uploaded the deleted video here.) The promo prompted one Twitter user to comment, "Bro this isn't Star Wars, this is 'Space Conflicts.'" Fans responded similarly to a demo of Disney Parks Chairman Josh D'Amaro testing out the vaunted lightsaber training. Instead of a flashy, super realistic adventure, the training consisted of a standard light-up lightsaber and some lasers... Reservations booked up quickly when the hotel was announced but now, as the 90-day deadline to cancel approaches, people appear to be ducking out of their expensive commitments; a number of openings have begun popping up in March, April and June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica's reviews editor remembers how Google Toolbar launched back when Internet Explorer "had a rock-solid monopoly" on December 11, 2000, and marked Google's first foray into browser ownership. "Rather than idly sit by and live under Internet Explorer's rule, Google's plan was to hijack Microsoft's browser with various plugins."Once upon a time, Toolbar.google.com offered to guide any wayward Internet Explorer users across the web with the power of Google.... It also patched up long-neglected Internet Explorer with new features, like highlighted search terms in pages, pop-up blocking, spell check, autofill, and Google Translate. Phase 2 of the hijack plan was Google Gears, which augmented IE with new APIs for web developers. Eventually, Google stopped fixing other companies' browsers and launched Google Chrome in 2008, which would make all of this obsolete. But it ended as Google finally pulled the plug this week on "a dusty, forgotten server" that had spent nearly 21 years blurting out "Take the best of Google everywhere on the web!"Now, it redirects to a support page saying "Google Toolbar is no longer available for installation. Instead, you can download and install Google Chrome." The good news is that we wrote most of this post at the end of November, so this might be the Internet's very last hands-on of the now-dead product.... To say the app had been neglected is an understatement. The about page read, "Copyright 2014 Google," though Google definitely stopped performing maintenance on Toolbar before that. You could still do a Google Search, and you could still sign into Google Toolbar, but so much there was broken or a time capsule from a bygone era.... The "share" settings were a bloodbath, listing options for Google Reader (killed July 2013), Orkut (killed September 2014), Google+ (killed April 2019), and Google Bookmarks (killed September 2021). There were also search shortcuts for Google Blog Search (killed May 2011) and Picasa Web Albums (dead May 2016).... The spell-check servers didn't work anymore, and I couldn't translate anything. The baked-in-by-default connections to Google+ and Google Bookmarks would also let you know that those products have been shut down. Even some of the "working" integrations, like Gmail, didn't really work because Gmail no longer supports Internet Explorer.... One feature that really blew my mind was a button that said, "Turn off features that send information." Google Toolbar apparently had a one-click privacy kill switch back in the day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday that it was ending a program that awarded small gold pins called 'Commercial Space Astronaut Wings' to certain people who flew to space on private spacecraft," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)But before the program officially retires in January, all who applied for the gold wings after flying to space this year will still receive them, the agency said. That means Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who rode a rocket with his space company, Blue Origin, to the edge of space in July, will be considered a commercial astronaut. So will Richard Branson, the founder of the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic who flew his own company's rocket plane to space in the same month. William Shatner, the Star Trek star who flew with Blue Origin to the edge of space in October, will also receive astronaut wings to go with his Starfleet paraphernalia. Twelve other people were also added to the federal agency's list of wing recipients on Friday [bringing the list up to 30 people]. The changes will help the F.A.A. avoid the potentially awkward position of proclaiming that some space tourists are only passengers, not astronauts. The Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program was created by Patti Grace Smith, the first chief of the F.A.A.'s commercial space office, to promote the private development of human spaceflight — a mandate from a 1984 law that aimed to accelerate innovation of space vehicles. The program began handing out pins to qualified individuals in 2004, when Mike Melvill, a test pilot who flew the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne plane, became its first recipient. To qualify for the commercial astronaut wings under the original guidelines, a person had to reach an altitude of at least 50 miles, the marker of space recognized by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and be a member of the spacecraft's "flight crew..." Although no one will receive the little gold pins after 2021, those who fly above 50 miles on an F.A.A.-licensed rocket will be honored in the agency's online database. But future space tourists should not despair a lack of post-flight flair. Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX have each presented paying and guest passengers with custom-designed wings. Or, as the Associated Press put it, "The FAA said Friday it's clipping its astronaut wings because too many people are now launching into space and it's getting out of the astronaut designation business entirely....""The U.S. commercial human spaceflight industry has come a long way from conducting test flights to launching paying customers into space," the FAA's associate administrator Wayne Monteith said in a statement. "Now it's time to offer recognition to a larger group of adventurers daring to go to space." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages. But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?") Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase."While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include: -A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process. Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released? Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!" Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments. What do you remember about Windows ME?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes SciTechDaily: A discovery by researchers at the Texas A&M College of Medicine could lead to new therapies to prevent the virus from proliferating in the human body... The underlying mechanism of how SARS-CoV-2 escapes from the immune system has been poorly understood. However, researchers from the Texas A&M University College of Medicine and Hokkaido University have recently discovered a major mechanism that explains how SARS-CoV-2 can escape from the immune system and replicate in the human body. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Communications. "We found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus carries a suppressive gene that acts to inhibit a human gene in the immune system that is essential for destroying infected cells," said Dr. Koichi Kobayashi, adjunct professor at the College of Medicine and lead author of the paper. Naturally, the cells in a human's immune system are able to control virus infection by destroying infected cells so that the virus cannot be replicated. The gene that is essential in executing this process, called NLRC5, regulates major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I genes, which are genes that create a pathway that is vital in providing antiviral immunity. Kobayashi and his colleagues discovered this in 2012. "During infection, the amount and activity of NLRC5 gene become augmented in order to boost our ability of eradication of viruses," Kobayashi said. "We discovered that the reason why SARS-CoV-2 can replicate so easily is because the virus carries a suppressive gene, called ORF6, that acts to inhibit the function of NLRC5, thus inhibiting the MHC class I pathway as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year..." according to an article from NASA: "The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. "It was based on some very smart mathematics: In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat." But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477), summarizes some new changes:For nearly 20 years, newly discovered asteroids had orbital predictions processed by a system called "Sentry", resulting in quick estimates on the impact risk they represent with Earth. Generally this has worked well, but several things in the future required updates, and a new system adds a number of useful features too. The coming wave of big survey telescopes which will check the whole sky every few days is going to greatly increase the number of discoveries. That requires streamlining of the overall system to improve processing speed. The new system can also automatically incorporate factors which previously required manual intervention to calculate, particularly the effect of asteroid rotation creating non-gravitational forces on a new discovery's future orbit. Objects like asteroid Bennu (recently subject of a sampling mission) had significant uncertainty on their future path because of these effects. That doesn't mean that Bennu can possibly hit us in the next few centuries, but it became harder to say over the next few millennia. As NASA puts it: Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment's notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun. But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth's future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids' positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk.... [T]he researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million. The article includes videos explaining the future uncertainties on the orbits of potentially hazardous asteroids Bennu and Apophis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: It's a newspaper puzzle that's like Sudoku, except it's impossible. [Sort of...] They call it "The Challenger" puzzle — but when the newspaper leaves out a crucial instruction, you can end up searching forever for a unique solution which doesn't exist! "If you're thinking 'This could be a 9 or an 8....' — you're right!" complains Lou Cabron. "Everyone's a winner today! Just start scribbling in numbers! And you'd be a fool to try to keep narrowing them down by, say, using your math and logic skills. A fool like me..." (Albeit a fool who once solved a Sudoku puzzle entirely in his head.) But two hours of frustration later — and one night of bad dreams — he's stumbled onto the web page of Dr. Robert J. Lopez, an emeritus math professor in Indiana, who's calculated that in fact Challenger puzzles can have up to 190 solutions... and there's more than one solution for more than 97% of them! At the end of the day, it becomes an appreciation for the local newspaper, and the puzzles they run next to the funnies. But with a friendly reminder "that they ought to honor and respect that love — by always providing the complete instructions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2013 a British man accidentally threw away a hard drive that contained 7,500 bitcoin. Today it'd be worth over $350 million, reports CNBC:His name is James Howells. He's an IT worker from Wales... He once told NBC News, "It is soul-destroying, to be honest... Every second of the day I am thinking about what could've been." In a last-ditch effort earlier this year, Howells offered his local town tens of millions of dollars to help him find it. By "find it," he means "digging through his local dump" (where the hard drive ended up). The New Yorker reported that this spring Howell finally got a meeting with two city officials, one of whom was responsible for the city's waste and sanitation services. But after he'd delivered his home-made PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, he says their response was, "You know, Mr. Howells, there is absolutely zero appetite for this project to go ahead within Newport City Council."When the meeting ended, she said that she would call him if the situation changed. Months of silence followed. (A spokesperson for the city council told me that the official permit for the site does not allow "excavation work....") "The total area we want to dig is two hundred and fifty metres by two hundred and fifty metres by fifteen metres deep," Howells told me, with excitement. "It's forty thousand tons of waste. It's not impossible, is it?" The New Yorker also reports that in mid-November Howells got a second response from the local city officials — declining to authorize his landfill digging yet again, calling it "environmentally risky." The incident raises the question as to whether there should be a better way to recover lost cryptocoins — but Howells himself remains opposed to that. So meanwhile Howells keeps checking a phone app telling him how much his bitcoin would be worth if he hadn't thrown away the hard drive. One day, he watched its value swing by $20 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who've made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices..." reports NBC News. But that's just the beginning, according to Adrian Ward, who studies psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. NBC says Ward's research suggests "People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is."In Ward's research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — "What is the most widely spoken language in the world?" was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. Ward attributed that to Google's design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a "neural prosthetic" that simulates a search in a human brain. "The speed makes it so you never understand what you don't know," Ward said. The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the "Google effect": a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet.... In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the "externalization" of memories into digital spheres "changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences." Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people's fingertips. Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be "updated," maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least six people were killed Friday night when an Amazon warehouse was struck by a tornado, causing part of the building to collapse. Bloomberg reports that the incident "amplified concerns" about a warehouse policy that Amazon has been re-implementing for its workers: banning cellphones.Amazon had for years prohibited workers from carrying their phones on warehouse floors, requiring them to leave them in vehicles or employee lockers before passing through security checks that include metal detectors. The company backed off during the pandemic, but has been gradually reintroducing it at facilities around the country. Five Amazon employees, including two who work across the street from the building that collapsed, said they want access to information such as updates on potentially deadly weather events through their smartphones — without interference from Amazon. The phones can also help them communicate with emergency responders or loved ones if they are trapped, they said. "After these deaths, there is no way in hell I am relying on Amazon to keep me safe," said one worker from a neighboring Amazon facility in Illinois. "If they institute the no cell phone policy, I am resigning." Another worker from an Amazon warehouse in Indiana said she is using up her paid time off whenever the company decides to remain open despite warnings of extreme weather events. Having her phone with her is critical to making those decisions, especially about sudden tornado risks, she said. "I don't trust them with my safety to be quite frank," she said. "If there's severe weather on the way, I think I should be able to make my own decision about safety..." The National Weather Service puts out extreme weather alerts via text messages, letting the public know in advance about dangerous conditions... Tornadoes are trickier to anticipate than hurricanes and snowstorms, but the weather service still issues warnings to those in their path. The weather service sent such a warning at about 8 p.m. local time Friday, about 30 minutes before the storm collapsed the Edwardsville Amazon delivery station, the workers said. The Daily Beast tells the story of young Navy veteran named Clayton Cope who started working at the Amazon fulfillment center earlier this year:After an alert was issued Friday night about a deadly tornado approaching Illinois, Carla Cope told her son "to get to shelter" at the Amazon delivery facility where he was working. Instead, she told The Daily Beast her 29-year-old son, Clayton, insisted he needed to alert others about the impending natural disaster. "He just said he needed to tell someone that [the tornado] was coming," Cope told The Daily Beast on Saturday, hours after she learned her son was among six people killed in Edwardsville, Illinois, when storms ripped through. Two more Amazon warehouse workers died in 2018 when another building partially collapsed in a tornado in Balitmore. Bloomberg reports today that Amazon "declined to address the concerns raised by workers about its mobile phone policy, saying its focus now is 'on assisting the brave first responders on the scene and supporting our affected employees and partners in the area.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After sentencing one of the "Capitol Hill rioters" to 41 months in prison, a judge added that anyone with Facebook and Instagram posts like his would be "well advised" to just plead guilty right away. "You couldn't have beat this if you went to trial on the evidence that I saw." And other rioters are now learning the same thing, reports the Associated Press:Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson's posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. "Overall I had fun lol," Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it "extraordinarily difficult" for her to show him leniency.... Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department's prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters' own words and videos. FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants' words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences. As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant's social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records.... Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After sentencing one of the "Capitol Hill rioters" to 41 months in prison, a judge added that anyone with Facebook and Instagram posts like his would be "well advised" to just plead guilty right away. "You couldn't have beat this if you went to trial on the evidence that I saw." And other rioters are now learning the same thing, reports the Associated Press:Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson's posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. "Overall I had fun lol," Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it "extraordinarily difficult" for her to show him leniency.... Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department's prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters' own words and videos. FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants' words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences. As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant's social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records.... Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After sentencing one of the "Capitol Hill rioters" to 41 months in prison, a judge added that anyone with Facebook and Instagram posts like his would be "well advised" to just plead guilty right away. "You couldn't have beat this if you went to trial on the evidence that I saw." And other rioters are now learning the same thing, reports the Associated Press:Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson's posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. "Overall I had fun lol," Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it "extraordinarily difficult" for her to show him leniency.... Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department's prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters' own words and videos. FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants' words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences. As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant's social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records.... Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Russian hackers have stolen and published the personal data of tens of thousands of employees..." reports the Australian Financial Review. Government officials have confirmed the breach — part of a ransomware attack — and say the stolen data may even include info on the country's premier, according to an Australian public broadcaster:The government said the records of at least 38,000 employees, but potentially up to 80,000 workers, have been accessed in a cyber-attack on external payroll software provider Frontier Software. The data includes names, dates of birth, tax file numbers, home addresses, bank account details, remuneration and superannuation contributions... Treasurer Rob Lucas said politicians, including Premier Steven Marshall, could be among those affected. The treasurer added the breach potentially impacted "The highest of the high to the lowest of the low and all of the rest of us in between." Except for schoolteachers, and the Department of Education, who did not use Frontier's software. The website publishing the 3.75 gigabytes of data claimed it was just 10% of the total amount, according to the Australian Financial Review, which "understands Russian organised crime group Conti, which claimed credit for launching the cyberattack on Queensland's energy network CS Energy, published the information."Australian Payroll Association chief executive Tracy Angwin said the hack was a wake-up call to employers using remotely accessed payroll systems to ensure they were secure... Frontier Software said the hacker responsible for the incident was known to employ a "double extortion" strategy, which included encrypting systems and stealing the data. In another report, Bleeping Computer describes Conti as "a long-lived Ransomware as a Service operation" that "still manages to evade prosecution even after high-profile incidents against vital national resources such as Ireland's Department of Health."The gang is believed to be behind the recent revival of the notorious Emotet botnet, which could lead to a massive new wave of ransomware infections. This week, Conti took responsibility for the attack against Nordic Choice Hotels, a Scandinavian hotel chain with 200 properties. Thanks to Macfox (Slashdot reader #50,100) for tipping us off to the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Friday, needing just one point against Ian Nepomniachtchi to defend his world champion status, Magnus Carlsen closed the match out with three games to spare, 7.5-3.5," ESPN reports. "He's been the No 1 chess player in the world for a decade now... "In a technologically flat, AI-powered chess world where preparation among the best players can be almost equal, what really makes one guy stand out with his dominance and genius for this long...?American Grandmaster and chess commentator Robert Hess describes Carlsen as the "hardest worker you'll find" both at the board and in preparation. "He is second-to-none at evading common theoretical lines and prefers to outplay his opponents in positions where both players must rely on their understanding of the current dynamics," Hess says... At the start of this year, news emerged of Nepomniachtchi and his team having access to a supercomputer cluster, Zhores, from the Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He was using it for his Candidates tournament preparation, a tournament he went on to win. He gained the challenger status for the World Championship and the Zhores supercomputer reportedly continued to be a mainstay in his team. Zhores was specifically designed to solve problems in machine learning and data-based modeling with a capacity of one Petaflop per second.... Players use computers and open-source AI engines to analyze openings, bolster preparation, scour for a bank of new ideas and to go down lines that the other is unlikely to have explored. The tiny detail though is, that against Carlsen, it may not be enough. He has the notoriety of drawing opponents into obscure positions, hurling them out of preparation and into the deep end, often leading to a complex struggle. Whether you have the fastest supercomputer on your team then becomes almost irrelevant. It comes down to a battle of intuition, tactics and staying power, human to human. In such scenarios, almost always, Carlsen comes out on top. "[Nepomniachtchi] couldn't show his best chess...it's a pity for the excitement of the match," he said later, "I think that's what happens when you get into difficult situations...all the preparation doesn't necessarily help you if you can't cope in the moment...." Soon after his win on Friday, Carlsen announced he'd be "celebrating" by playing the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in Warsaw, a fortnight from now. He presently holds both those titles... The article also remembers what happened in 2018 when Carlsen was asked to name his favorite chess player from the past. Carlsen's answer? "Probably myself, like, three or four years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Friday, needing just one point against Ian Nepomniachtchi to defend his world champion status, Magnus Carlsen closed the match out with three games to spare, 7.5-3.5," ESPN reports. "He's been the No 1 chess player in the world for a decade now... "In a technologically flat, AI-powered chess world where preparation among the best players can be almost equal, what really makes one guy stand out with his dominance and genius for this long...?American Grandmaster and chess commentator Robert Hess describes Carlsen as the "hardest worker you'll find" both at the board and in preparation. "He is second-to-none at evading common theoretical lines and prefers to outplay his opponents in positions where both players must rely on their understanding of the current dynamics," Hess says... At the start of this year, news emerged of Nepomniachtchi and his team having access to a supercomputer cluster, Zhores, from the Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He was using it for his Candidates tournament preparation, a tournament he went on to win. He gained the challenger status for the World Championship and the Zhores supercomputer reportedly continued to be a mainstay in his team. Zhores was specifically designed to solve problems in machine learning and data-based modeling with a capacity of one Petaflop per second.... Players use computers and open-source AI engines to analyze openings, bolster preparation, scour for a bank of new ideas and to go down lines that the other is unlikely to have explored. The tiny detail though is, that against Carlsen, it may not be enough. He has the notoriety of drawing opponents into obscure positions, hurling them out of preparation and into the deep end, often leading to a complex struggle. Whether you have the fastest supercomputer on your team then becomes almost irrelevant. It comes down to a battle of intuition, tactics and staying power, human to human. In such scenarios, almost always, Carlsen comes out on top. "[Nepomniachtchi] couldn't show his best chess...it's a pity for the excitement of the match," he said later, "I think that's what happens when you get into difficult situations...all the preparation doesn't necessarily help you if you can't cope in the moment...." Soon after his win on Friday, Carlsen announced he'd be "celebrating" by playing the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in Warsaw, a fortnight from now. He presently holds both those titles... The article also remembers what happened in 2018 when Carlsen was asked to name his favorite chess player from the past. Carlsen's answer? "Probably myself, like, three or four years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Bitcoin mining is a process of competitively wasting electricity to guess a winning number every 10 minutes or so," writes author David Gerard in Foreign Policy magazine. And he's got an equally negative take on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar. "When a con artist's grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast..."More than 91 percent of Salvadorans want dollars, not bitcoins. The official Chivo payment system was unreliable at launch in September — the kiss of death for a new system. Users joined for the $30 signup bonus, spent it or cashed it out, then didn't use Chivo again. The system completely failed to check new users' photos, relying solely on their national identity card number and date of birth; massive identity fraud to steal signup bonuses ensued. Bitcoin's ridiculously volatile price was appreciated only by aspiring day traders. Large street protests against compulsory Bitcoin implementation continued through October. The government stopped promoting Chivo on radio, TV, and social media. Chivo buses and vans were seen with plastic taped over the company's logo. Bukele's financial problems remain. El Salvador can't print its own dollars, so Bukele urgently needs to fund his heavy deficit spending. The International Monetary Fund has not lent the country the $1 billion Bukele asked for, and has indicated its strong concerns about the Bitcoin scheme... At the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference on Nov. 20, Bukele came onstage to an animation of beaming down from a flying saucer and outlined his plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining — and powered by a volcano. Bitcoin City would be paid for with the issuance of $1 billion in "volcano bonds," starting in mid-2022. The 10-year volcano bonds would pay 6.5 percent annual interest. $500 million of the bond revenue would be used to buy bitcoins... Holding $100,000 in volcano bonds for five years would qualify investors for Salvadoran citizenship... Holders of El Salvador's existing sovereign debt were unimpressed. The volcano bonds would be a strictly worse investment than buying the country's existing bonds and hedging them with bitcoins. The existing bonds dropped from 75 cents on the dollar to a record low of 63.4 cents after the volcano bond announcement... [T]he volcano bonds are Bukele's way to get Bitcoin holders' money into the Salvadoran economy and count it as dollars. Bukele will brazen all of this out as long as he can, periodically throwing new plans on the table as a distraction. If he can maintain power, then the Bitcoin users will discover that he's taken their money. If he can't maintain power, then his successor will have no love for his failed Bitcoin schemes. Either scenario ends with a lot of disappointed Bitcoin users — because a national economy really can't run on a volatile and manipulated speculative commodity that's unusable as a currency. Both the Bitcoin users and Bukele seem to think the other is a sucker who they'll take for everything they've got. It's possible that both will lose. The article also points out that with El Salvador's high electricity rates, one of their power plant recently spent $4,672 in electricity to mine $269 in bitcoin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New FDA-approved eye drops could replace reading glasses for millions: "It's definitely a life changer""A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older," reports CBS News. "Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up."The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.... Vuity is the first FDA-approved eye drop to treat age-related blurry near vision, also known as presbyopia. The prescription drug utilizes the eye's natural ability to reduce its pupil size, said Dr. George Waring, the principal investigator for the trial. "Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally," he said. A 30-day supply of the drug will cost about $80 and works best in people 40 to 55 years old, a Vuity spokesperson said. Side effects detected in the three-month trial included headaches and red eyes, the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two leading U.S. Senators "are urging federal regulators to investigate Facebook over allegations the company misled advertisers, investors and the public about public safety and ad reach on its platform," reports CNBC:On Thursday, Senator Warren urged the heads of the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to open criminal and civil investigations into Facebook or its executives to determine if they violated U.S. wire fraud and securities laws. A day earlier, Senator Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook, now called Meta, violated the agency's law against unfair or deceptive business practices. Cantwell's letter was made public on Thursday... In her letter to the FTC, Cantwell focused on Facebook's claims about the safety of its products, in addition to the allegedly inflated ad projections... She suggested the agency investigate Facebook and, depending what the evidence shows, pursue monetary relief for advertisers and disgorgement of allegedly ill-gotten gains. Senator Warren points to a whistleblower's recent allegations that Facebook misled both investors and advertising customers about their ad reach, according to the article. But Warren's letter also argued the possibility Facebook violated securities law with "breathtakingly illegal conduct by one of the world's largest social media companies," according to the article.And in addition, Warren "wrote that evidence increasingly suggests executives were aware the metric 'was meaningfully and consistently inflated.'" Bloomberg adds this quote from Senator Cantwell's letter:"A thorough investigation by the Commission and other enforcement agencies is paramount, not only because Facebook and its executives may have violated federal law, but because members of the public and businesses are entitled to know the facts regarding Facebook's conduct as they make their decisions about using the platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Israeli study tracked more than 843,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine — and then explored whether the results improved for the 758,000 who then also got a booster shot. The results? HealthDay reports:Boosted folks are 90% less likely to die from a Delta infection than people relying solely on the initial two-dose vaccination, Israeli data show. That protection will be critically important during the next couple of months as the Delta variant continues to dominate throughout the United States, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. "While we are preoccupied with Omicron, you need to remember that Delta is essentially in every town and city in the United States today — being transmitted, infecting new people, sending people to the hospital, in some parts of the country stressing the health care system once again," Schaffner said. "Although we have Omicron in the United States and it's starting to take hold, nonetheless well over 95% of all new infections today are caused by Delta...." A second study out of Israel focused on infection and severity of illness, and it also produced good tidings for boosters in the face of the Delta variant. This study involved nearly 4.7 million Israelis who'd been fully vaccinated with Pfizer and were eligible for boosters. Confirmed infections were tenfold lower in the group of people who got the Pfizer booster, researchers reported. Further, results showed that the longer a booster was in a person's system, the more resistant they became to infection from the Delta strain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not your everyday fake news, explains the New York Times. (Alternate URLs here.)In Pittsburgh; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, "Birds Aren't Real." On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren't Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren't Real adherents even protested outside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo. The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds do not exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren't Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan. It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren't Real and the movement's followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up. What Birds Aren't Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It is Gen Z's attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism... Most Birds Aren't Real members, many of whom are part of an on-the-ground activism network called the Bird Brigade, grew up in a world overrun with misinformation. Some have relatives who have fallen victim to conspiracy theories. So for members of Gen Z, the movement has become a way to collectively grapple with those experiences. By cosplaying conspiracy theorists, they have found community and kinship [according to 23-year-old Peter McIndoe, who created Birds Aren't Real on a whim in 2017...] Cameron Kasky, 21, an activist from Parkland, Florida, who helped organize the March for Our Lives student protest against gun violence in 2018 and is involved in Birds Aren't Real, said the parody "makes you stop for a second and laugh. In a uniquely bleak time to come of age, it doesn't hurt to have something to laugh about together." McIndoe began selling Birds Aren't Real merchandise in 2018, according to the article, and now brings in "several thousand dollars a month" with some help from his friend Connor Gaydos. "If anyone believes birds aren't real," Gaydos tells the Times, "we're the last of their concerns, because then there's probably no conspiracy they don't believe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined," writes Phoronix, citing patches sent out Monday "introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel." This summer saw the earlier patch series posted for review and discussion around introducing Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel to complement its longstanding C focus. In the months since there has been more progress on enabling Rust for the Linux kernel development, Linus Torvalds is not opposed to it, and others getting onboard with the effort. Rust for the Linux kernel remains of increasing interest to developers over security concerns with Rust affording more memory safety protections, potentially lowering the barrier to contributing to the kernel, and other related benefits.... Miguel Ojeda sent out the "v2" patches for Rust support in the kernel. With these updated packages, the Rust code is now relying on stable Rust releases rather than the beta compiler state previously, new modularization options added, stricter code enforcements, extra Rust compiler diagnostics enabled, new abstractions for in-kernel use, and other low-level code improvements. Red Hat is also now joining Arm, Google, and Microsoft in voicing their support for Rust code within the Linux kernel. ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also expects the first Rust code in Linux's kernel sometime in 2022:As Ryan Levick, a Microsoft principal cloud developer advocate, explained, "Rust is completely memory safe." Since roughly two-thirds of security issues can be traced back to handling memory badly, this is a major improvement. In addition, "Rust prevents those issues usually without adding any runtime overhead," Levick said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blue Origin successfully completed a 10-minute suborbital spaceflight this morning. But with SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and the space agencies of Russia and China, Blue Origin also helped humanity achieve another milestone Saturday. The Washington Post explains how it will push us far past a record set in 1985 when America's space shuttle made nine flights into space:Saturday's launch will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches. All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts. Still, this year is "the busiest year in human spaceflight," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. "We're entering a new phase of activity that we've never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement." Saturday's Blue Origin flight will also carry Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space... China, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week. The flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space. The Post ultimately calls 2021 "one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'? That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms." When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body." As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous." Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios." You can read the full Q&A here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: The Chicago Public Schools kicked off CSEdWeek by issuing a press release announcing a Google partnership: "Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is partnering with Google in an annual call to action during CSEd Week (Dec. 6 -12) to inspire students to learn computer science, advocate for equity in computer science education, and celebrate the contributions of students, teachers, and partners such as CafeCS that support this important field of study." A flyer with a joint CPS and Google letterhead invited parents of CPS schoolchildren to attend the first of an unspecified number of Parent Panels exploring career opportunities in computer science. Google in late 2020 lamented that "students are generally unconvinced that computer science is important for them to learn," adding that "Interventions from parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, nonprofits and the technology industry are needed." Back in Dec. 2017, Google kicked off CSEdWeek by announcing that Google.org was donating $1.5 million to bring CS to students in Chicago and has been a long-time friend of the CPS CS4LL initiative, including making its Chicago HQ available for a CPS 'soiree' just hours before the CPS made CS a HS graduation requirement in 2016 and a 2017 video shoot in which the CPS lamented schools failure to address tech's need for coders. Coincidentally, Google's CSEdWeek partnership with CPS comes as the leaders of the Computer Science Teachers Association (the organizer of CSEdWeek) and Code.org (the organizer of the Hour of Code, CSEdWeek's flagship event) took to Twitter to urge the nonprofits' 1+ million followers to sign a petition asking CPS CEO Pedro Martinez to overturn Code.org's ban from Chicago classrooms for failing to meet what Code.org termed "onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to" (which didn't stop Google from getting its free Google CS First offering on the CPS Approved for Use list). Ironically, back in 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett kicked off CSEdWeek and the first Hour of Code with a press release announcing a CPS partnership with Code.org under which CPS would receive free CS curriculum and ongoing professional development and stipends for teachers. "Partnering with Chicago Public Schools is a giant step forward towards Code.org's vision of bringing computer science to every student in every school," said Code.org founder Hadi Partovi at the time. Google, by the way, is a Platinum Supporter ($3+ million) of tech-backed Code.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jackie Wattles writes via CNN Business: Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, became the subject of a federal review this fall after a group of 21 current and former employees co-signed an essay that raised serious questions about the safety of the company's rockets -- including the rocket making headlines for flying Bezos and other celebrities to space. But that review was hamstrung by a lack of legal protections for whistleblowers in the commercial spaceflight industry, according to emails from Federal Aviation Administration investigators that were obtained by CNN Business. The FAA also confirmed in a statement Friday that its Blue Origin review is now closed, saying the "FAA investigated the safety allegations made against Blue Origin's human spaceflight program" and "found no specific safety issues." The emails obtained by CNN Business, however, reveal that investigators were not able to speak with any of the engineers who signed the letter anonymously. Investigators also were not able to go to Blue Origin and ask for documents or interviews with current employees or management, according to the FAA. The situation highlights how commercial spaceflight companies like Blue Origin are operating in a regulatory bubble, insulated from much of the scrutiny other industries are put under. There are no federal whistleblower statues that would protect employees in the commercial space industry if they aid FAA investigators, according to the agency. The commercial space industry is in a legally designated "learning period" until at least October 2023 -- a "learning period" that has been extended several times, most recently by a 2015 law called the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. The idea is to allow the industry to mature and give companies a chance to self-regulate without overbearing government interference. But that designation effectively bars federal regulators from implementing certain new rules or wielding the same oversight powers for commercial space companies as it does for aviation. That meant that investigators had to rely on current and former Blue Origin employees voluntarily coming forward to offer information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.