At Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced the preview of "AWS Private 5G," which is a new service that aims to make it easy to deploy and manage your own private global network. From a report: The launch is meant to address the challenges companies are facing with leveraging 5G. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said that with AWS Private 5G, you can set up and scale a private mobile network in days instead of months. "You get all the goodness of mobile technology without the pain of long planning cycles, complex integrations and the high upfront costs," Selipsky stated during the company's keynote. "You tell us where you want to build your network and specify the network capacity. We ship you all the required hardware, the software and the SIM cards."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
David Marcus, one of the top executives at Meta Platforms and the co-creator of the yet-to-be-launched Diem digital currency, is leaving the company after seven years to pursue other projects. From a report: Marcus, who joined the Facebook parent company in 2014 from PayPal Holdings, ran the Messenger service for years before moving over to form the company's blockchain division in 2018. He spent the last few years building Novi, the company's digital wallet that launched in October, and co-founded Diem, a digital currency formerly known as Libra that was intended as a way for people to send money cross-border. Getting Diem off the ground has proven to be a struggle for Meta and Marcus. Since the project was unveiled in 2019 -- with great fanfare and dozens of partners -- the currency's debut has been delayed and its original ambitions have been scaled back. Diem faced pushback from lawmakers and regulators when it was announced, and while Meta is still a partner on the effort, Diem is now run independently. Marcus's departure adds more uncertainty to Meta's digital payment push, but the longtime entrepreneur and angel investor says he has an itch to create something outside the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter updated its private information safety policy this morning to ban sharing images or videos of private individuals without their consent. From a report: The platform already banned users from sharing others' personal information without permission, like their address or location, identity documents, non-public contact information, financial information or medical data. But this update makes these anti-harassment and anti-doxxing policies more robust. This doesn't mean that Twitter will require consent from all individuals in a photo or video before its posted. But if a person depicted wants the media taken down, Twitter will take it down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The head of drugmaker Moderna said COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to be as effective against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus as they have been previously, sparking fresh worry in financial markets about the trajectory of the pandemic. From a report: "There is no world, I think, where (the effectiveness) is the same level... we had with Delta," Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview. "I think it's going to be a material drop. I just don't know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I've talked to are like 'this is not going to be good.'" Vaccine resistance could lead to more sickness and hospitalisations and prolong the pandemic, and his comments triggered selling in growth-exposed assets like oil, stocks and the Australian dollar. Bancel added that the high number of mutations on the protein spike the virus uses to infect human cells meant it was likely the current crop of vaccines would need to be modified. He had earlier said on CNBC that it could take months to begin shipping a vaccine that does work against Omicron.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Qualcomm appears to be collaborating with Razer on a new gaming handheld developer kit built around its upcoming Snapdragon G3X processor. From a report: Leaked slides published by VideoCardz call the device a "Snapdragon G3X Handheld Developer Kit," suggesting it will primarily be aimed at software developers and manufacturers to help them build their own software and hardware powered by Qualcomm's mobile gaming technology. Alongside it, VideoCardz has also obtained slides detailing Qualcomm's next flagship smartphone processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The name shows off Qualcomm's new branding for its mobile chips announced last month. The processor will reportedly be manufactured using a 4nm process, with a CPU that's 20 percent faster and 30 percent more power efficient, and a GPU that's 30 percent faster and 25 percent more power efficient than previous generation models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Regulators in the U.K. on Tuesday said they have directed Facebook parent company Meta to sell Giphy after finding "the takeover could reduce competition between social media platforms and increase Facebook's already significant market power." From a report: Facebook agreed to buy Giphy in May of last year for an estimated price of $400 million. The deal almost immediately invited antitrust scrutiny, given the increased attention to Facebook's growing market power. In a statement, the U.K.'s competition and markets authority concluded that the deal would be anticompetitive because Facebook could theoretically increase market power by "denying or limiting other platforms' access to Giphy GIFs," or "changing the terms of access," to its GIFs for competitive sites. Regulators also determined that the deal was uncompetitive because it shut down Giphy's advertising business, therefore eliminating Giphy's competition to Facebook's ad business. As a result, regulators said Facebook "will also be required to reinstate the innovative advertising services that Giphy offered before the merger."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finland's first quantum computer was commissioned at a research center near the capital Helsinki, where scientists will use it to study next-generation computing power. From a report: The 5 quantum-bit computer was developed "to learn how to build a quantum computer, how to program one and how to operate one in the future," Pekka Pursula, research manager at the VTT Technical Research Centre, said by phone on Tuesday. The machine was the joint work of VTT and quantum computing hardware company IQM Finland Oy. "This 5-qubit computer has relatively low computational power, and it's not enough to solve practical problems," Pursula said. The researchers plan to build a 50-qubit machine by 2024 that could be used for applications such as modeling viruses and drugs, and designing materials that today's technology is ill-equipped to handle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finland is working to stop a flood of text messages of an unknown origin that are spreading malware. From a report: The messages with malicious links to malware called FluBot number in the millions, according to Aino-Maria Vayrynen, information security specialist at the National Cyber Security Centre. Telia Co AB, the country's second-biggest telecommunications operator, has intercepted some hundreds of thousands of messages. "The malware attack is extremely exceptional and very worrying," Teemu Makela, chief information security officer at Elisa Oyj, the largest telecoms operator, said by phone. "Considerable numbers of text messages are flying around."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Rights groups petitioned Israel's top court on Monday to repeal new COVID-19 measures that authorize the country's domestic intelligence service to use counter-terrorism phone tracking technology to contain the spread of the Omicron virus variant. Announcing the emergency measures on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the phone tracking would be used to locate carriers of the new and potentially more contagious variant in order to curb its transmission to others. Israeli rights groups say the emergency measures violate previous Supreme Court rulings over such surveillance, used on-and-off by the country's Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency since March, 2020. A senior health ministry official said on Sunday that use of phone tracking would be "surgical" in nature, only to be utilized on confirmed or suspected carriers of the variant. The surveillance technology matches virus carriers' locations against other mobile phones nearby to determine with whom they have come into contact. Israel's Supreme Court this year limited the scope of its use after civil rights groups mounted challenges over privacy concerns. Further reading: Omicron Covid Variant Poses Very High Global Risk, Says WHORead more of this story at Slashdot.
Lawmakers including Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to crack down on "cyber Grinches" using bots to quickly snap up entire inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them at higher prices. Bloomberg reports: "This bill seeks to stop Cyber Grinch greed from ruining kids' holidays," Blumenthal says in a statement. "New tools are needed to block cyber scammers who snap up supplies of popular toys and resell them at astronomic prices. Price gouging hot toys by Grinch bots should have zero tolerance." The legislation, also introduced in the House of Representatives, would apply to e-commerce sites to ban bots from bypassing security measures on online retail portals. However, with Congress facing urgent deadlines to avoid a federal government shutdown and a debt limit default, it's unclear the bill will move in time to save Christmas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMC and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 NFTs to Stubs Premiere, A-List and Investor Connect members who buy or reserve tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home showings on December 16th. Engadget reports: Redeem a code through a special website and you'll get one of 100 designs available through the more eco-friendly Wax blockchain. You'll need to order your tickets through the AMC Theatres website or mobile app when pre-orders launch on November 29th. If you qualify, you'll get your code on December 22nd and will have until March 1st, 2022 to claim the NFT.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from India Today: For the first time in history, a commercial Airbus plane made a successful landing on the white continent of Antarctica. One of the company's A340 planes touched down on an ice runway earlier this month, paving the way for more tourism on the frozen landmass. The A340 took off on the morning of November 2 from Cape Town, South Africa before flying 2,500 nautical miles (4,630 km) to Antarctica. It then achieved an aviation first by successfully landing on a runway made of "blue glacial ice," according to the aircraft's pilot, Captain Carlos Mirpuri. CNN reported that the historic flight was operated by Hi Fly, a boutique aviation company, and was chartered by Wolf's Gang luxury adventure camp. The aircraft will be used this season to fly a small number of tourists, alongside scientists and cargo to the icy continent. There was "attention and anxiety" in the cockpit as the 190-tonne plane approached the runway in Antarctica. Captain Mirpuri detailed how the runway had to have special grooves carved into it to allow for more friction as the aircraft landed, which would have otherwise slipped down the icy course due to its heavy supply cargo. The pilots also had to wear special eye gear due to the glare coming off the polar ice. Thankfully, Mirpuri and the rest of the A340's crew managed to land safely and they took less than three hours to deliver all of the cargo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals. CNN reports: Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal. Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science. [T]hey found that the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms [...]. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots. The xenobots are very early technology -- think of a 1940s computer -- and don't yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and the environment, according to the researchers. This may include things like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems and regenerative medicine. While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology could spark concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable and regulated by ethics experts. "Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell." "The AI didn't program these machines in the way we usually think about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape," Bongard said. "The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
James Rundle writes via the Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, executives at Intel began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn't have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws. [...] Intel's answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret -- Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is. The lab brings commercial value to Intel, [said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel's product assurance and security unit.], citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products. [...] The lab has changed Intel's product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said. "Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) is pushing for the implementation of conditional driver's licenses for the elderly by 2025, Yonhap News reports. How they'll determine who gets to keep their licenses will be via virtual reality. The Next Web reports: As of Monday, a three-year research project has been introduced, which will employ VR tech to assess whether drivers aged 65 years and older can remain behind the wheel. The program's total budget is expected to reach approximately $3 million (3.6 billion won). Contrary to other countries around the word, South Korea has no strict regulations regarding the driving license of seniors, unless they test positive for dementia. Currently, two measures apply: the three-year license renewal period for those aged 75 years and older, and the voluntary return of the driver's license for people over 65 years-old. However, the KNPA is still raising concerns over the number of accidents attributed to senior drivers, as well as the continuous aging of the country's population. The VR test will asses driving, cognitive, and memory skills using a VR headset, close to how virtual reality technology is used in dementia clinics to check the brain functions of older people. While the specifics are yet to be disclosed, a similar academic research by independent scientists has run an experiment, testing driving performance evaluation based on virtual reality tech. The researchers conducted driving simulator experiments to measure various driving behaviors under many different driving conditions, in order to examine the participants' visual acuity. The virtual simulations included two scenarios: daytime and nighttime highway driving. In both cases, three unexpected incidents were created to test the drivers' performance [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive. Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As wafer costs increase, so are the costs of GPUs. According to a post on the Board Forums, AMD says it's increasing the price of its RX 6000 series GPUs by 10 percent across the board. ExtremeTech reports: This pricing change will apparently occur in the next shipment of GPUs to its partners, which will apparently drive up the price of these GPUs by $20 to $40 USD. This news arrives just in time for the holiday shopping season, when demand for GPUs is expected to increase even more, as if that is even possible. According to a translation of the board posting, AMD is citing TSMC wafer costs as the reason for the change, and as we reported earlier, sub-16nm prices, including 12nm, 7nm, and 5nm, are said to have increased roughly 10 percent, while TSMC's older nodes have gone up by as much as 20 percent. AMD seems to be passing this price increase along to its partners, who in turn are passing it along to us, the customer, or the scalper, as it were. Then the scalper passes it along to us, the gamers. Although, as Videocardz points out AMD also produces its CPUs at TSMC and there hasn't been a similar across-the-board increase, which is curious.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Three former Google employees who were fired by the company in 2019 sued Google on Monday, claiming that the company violated the part of its code of conduct that says "Don't Be Evil." "Don't Be Evil" was, famously, Google's motto for years. The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet in 2015, but "Don't Be Evil" is still part of the company's official employee code of conduct: "Remember don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right -- speak up!," the final line of Google's code of conduct states. Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their employment at Google. The new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google, comes as part of drawn out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25, 2019. Google claimed to fire the workers for leaking "confidential" information to the press, and because they engaged in "systematic searches" for information "outside the scope of their job." But the software engineers say they were fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which at the time was caging migrants and separating parents from children. They circulated a company-wide petition requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP or ICE. The three workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman, are now suing Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California public policy. California sued Trump in 2019 over the indefinite detention of migrant children. "The new complaint alleges that all three of the fired employees saw Google's collaboration with CBP under the Trump administration as 'evil' and had followed Google's mandate to call out unethical conduct by protesting the company's actions," the report adds. "It claims that Google never informed the fired employees that they had in any way violated the company's 'data security policy,' and that none of the employees had engaged in 'systematic searches.' They had only accessed documents that any full-time Google employee could have found on their own, court documents say."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Online retail giant has nearly doubled its fulfillment capacity since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. From a report: In the past two years, Amazon.com has added workers at an unprecedented clip to keep up with a pandemic-induced surge in demand. As it has done so, an even bigger expansion drew less attention: The company is close to doubling the size of its fulfillment network. Amazon blanketed the country with more than 450 new facilities used to store, sort and ship items, according to logistics consultant MWPVL International, doubling down on a logistics empire that aims to deliver items in one day or less, and increasingly to do so without the help of third-party shippers. Many of the new buildings are concentrated near big cities, putting more items for sale on the website closer to large population centers. The facilities also include more than two dozen smaller outposts stocked mostly with bestselling items, allowing the company to prepare for supply disruptions while also expanding fast-shipping capabilities, according to MWPVL. During the pandemic, Amazon put on hold its promise to deliver many items to customers in one day. Nevertheless, the company continued to build out a network capable of such a feat. The work prepared Amazon for an unusual holiday shopping season in which a national labor shortage and global supply-chain challenges have constrained the ability of many companies to obtain and deliver certain products in as timely a manner as they did in the past. Amazon has encouraged customers to shop early this year due to the supply-chain issues, and company executives have said they are "ready to deliver" and have been preparing for the holidays since the start of the year. As of mid-November, more than 98% of parcels that arrived at Amazon's delivery centers, which typically are in close proximity to packages' final destinations, were being delivered the next day, according to estimates from research firm ShipMatrix. At the same time, some items like household products and sporting goods were showing delivery windows of a few days, ShipMatrix said, emphasizing Amazon's message to shop early. Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, said the company's inventory increased in preparation for the busy period. For the first time in a while, he said, the company is not capacity-constrained.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Seeking to leverage a boom in food-delivery apps, Reef and competitors build restaurant kitchens in warehouses or trailers, which are meant to be cheaper and nimbler than traditional storefronts. From a report: Business models vary, but Reef generally acts as a franchisee, preparing and selling food with its own workers and paying a restaurant brand a percentage of each order. The concept has become particularly popular during the pandemic, as food delivery became clutch for many consumers and restaurants looked for cheaper places to prepare food they were delivering, not serving. Investors have poured more than $3.5 billion into ghost-kitchen startups in the past three years, according to data tracker PitchBook Data, a large slug of funding for a fledgling sector. Much of that funding has come from tech-focused investors who want the rapid growth often seen in software companies -- and delivery apps, such as DoorDash. Reef's operational strains illustrate the challenges of meeting investors' high expectations in the food business, a sector typically defined by low profit margins and modest growth and one that depends on executing daily in the nondigital economy with workers, supplies and logistics. Reef, backed by investors including SoftBank Group, has said it plans to add thousands of mobile kitchens in parking lots around the world. The company says it currently has about 350. Big brands have begun to warm to the concept. Chick-fil-A and Yum Brands' KFC have been experimenting with their own versions of ghost kitchens, seeing them as a potential area for growth. Wendy's has joined with Reef in a deal that calls for Reef to open and operate up to 700 locations in North America, and the U.K. Reef's rivals include CloudKitchens, founded by Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber Technologies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A group of Democrats wants to stop the Grinch from stealing Christmas. Except this time around the spoilsport they're targeting is not a furry green creature, but a robot. From a report: Lawmakers including Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to crack down on "cyber Grinches" using bots to quickly snap up entire inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them at higher prices. Their actions could make some of the items almost impossible to buy, the politicians say, exacerbating shortages sparked by supply chain woes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
No one really knew why some patients with a white blood cell cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or C.L.L., relapsed after treatment and got a second cancer. Were some cancer cells just resistant? An unexpected answer to this mystery has been found using a new technique that researchers call bar coding: The treatment does not always target the right cells. From a report: Scientists discovered that the cancer does not always originate in the mature bone marrow cells where it is found and where textbooks say it originates. Instead, for some patients, the mother lode of the cancer can be primitive bone marrow cells, the stem cells, that give rise to all of the body's white and red blood cells. Those cells, not affected by the chemotherapy treatment, can spawn new cancer cells, causing a relapse. The discovery is one early fruit of the bar coding method, which is aiding the study of the origins of cancer and other diseases. The results are too new to have led to patient therapies. But they are leading to provocative discoveries that are expected to inspire novel methods for treating diseases. The method works by marking individual cells with a stamp that is passed on to all of a cell's progeny. Researchers can look at a cell, note its bar code and trace its lineage back to its parents, grandparents, great-grandparents -- all the way back to its origins -- because each cell that arose from the original bar coded cell has the same stamp. The idea for bar coding during embryonic development originated with Dr. Jay Shendure and his colleagues at the University of Washington, and this class of methods was anointed the breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2018. Now there is a variety of methods for bar coding ranging from embryo cells to cancer cells to mature cells. For example, Dr. Shendure and another group of colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are using bar codes in mice with pancreatic cancer to study the spread of cancer cells in their bodies. In the case of C.L.L. above, Dr. Vijay Sankaran at Boston Children's Hospital and his colleagues bar coded human cancer cells by taking advantage of innocuous, naturally occurring mutations that mark individual cells and are inherited by their progeny. Bar coding, Dr. Sankaran said, "starts to give us a view of cancer that we never had before."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iranians couldn't buy gas. Israelis found their intimate dating details posted online. The Iran-Israel shadow war is now hitting ordinary citizens. From a report: Millions of ordinary people in Iran and Israel recently found themselves caught in the crossfire of a cyberwar between their countries. In Tehran, a dentist drove around for hours in search of gasoline, waiting in long lines at four gas stations only to come away empty. In Tel Aviv, a well-known broadcaster panicked as the intimate details of his sex life, and those of hundreds of thousands of others stolen from an L.G.B.T.Q. dating site, were uploaded on social media. For years, Israel and Iran have engaged in a covert war, by land, sea, air and computer, but the targets have usually been military or government related. Now, the cyberwar has widened to target civilians on a large scale. In recent weeks, a cyberattack on Iran's nationwide fuel distribution system paralyzed the country's 4,300 gas stations, which took 12 days to have service fully restored. That attack was attributed to Israel by two U.S. defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. It was followed days later by cyberattacks in Israel against a major medical facility and a popular L.G.B.T.Q. dating site, attacks Israeli officials have attributed to Iran. The escalation comes as American authorities have warned of Iranian attempts to hack the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure in the United States. As hopes fade for a diplomatic resurrection of the Iranian nuclear agreement, such attacks are only likely to proliferate. Hacks have been seeping into civilian arenas for months. Iran's national railroad was attacked in July, but that relatively unsophisticated hack may not have been Israeli. And Iran is accused of making a failed attack on Israel's water system last year. The latest attacks are thought to be the first to do widespread harm to large numbers of civilians. Nondefense computer networks are generally less secure than those tied to state security assets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people," Reuters reported Monday, citing internal documents. From the report: A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government's procurement website -- reported in the media for the first time -- details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases. A 5 million yuan ($782,000) contract was awarded on Sept. 17 to Chinese tech company Neusoft (600718.SS), which was required to finish building the system within two months of signing the contract, separate documents published on the Henan government procurement website showed. Reuters was unable to establish if the system is currently operating. China is trying to build what some security experts describe as one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance technology networks, with millions of cameras in public places and increasing use of techniques such as smartphone monitoring and facial recognition. U.S.-based surveillance research firm IPVM, which has closely tracked the network's expansion and first identified the Henan document, said the tender was unique in specifying journalists as surveillance targets and providing a blueprint for public security authorities to quickly locate them and obstruct their work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes: People running Android phones may want to hold off upgrading to Android 12 if they also use apps purchased through the Amazon Appstore. The Appstore app itself is not compatible with Android 12, which prevents many, if not all, apps purchased and downloaded via Amazon from running. The Android OS update began to be rolled out to Pixel phones over a month ago, and more recently, newer Samsung Galaxy handsets, such as the S21. Amazon has acknowledged the problem in a 90-post support forum thread, as well as in the Appstore app itself, but has not provided a timeline for a fix to restore users' apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Omicron coronavirus variant is likely to spread internationally, posing a very high global risk of infection surges that could have severe consequences some areas, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. From a report: The UN agency urged its 194 member states to accelerate vaccination of high-priority groups and, in anticipation of increased case numbers, to "ensure mitigation plans are in place" to maintain essential health services. "Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic," the WHO said. "The overall global risk related to the new variant ... is assessed as very high." To date, no deaths linked to Omicron had been reported, though further research was needed to assess Omicron's potential to escape protection against immunity induced by vaccines and previous infections, it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has put forward a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that aims to tackle the network's gas fee problems by adding a limit on the total transaction calldata, which would, in turn, reduce transaction gas cost. From a report: Since Ethereum can only process 15 transactions per second, gas fees tend to spike at times of network congestion. On November 9, the average transaction network fee reached USD 62 per transaction. As of now, Ethereum transactions cost around USD 44, according to BitInfoCharts. After highlighting concerns regarding the transaction fees on the Ethereum network, Buterin suggested the new EIP-4488, saying that it would "decrease transaction calldata gas cost, and add a limit of how much total transaction calldata can be in a block." In other words, EIP-4488 would limit the total transaction calldata, where data from external calls to functions are stored, before reducing the calldata gas cost to remove the possibility of breaking the network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft's $300 Xbox Series S was the most popular console during Black Friday, it's been claimed. From a report: According to Adobe's Digital Economy Index data, the cheaper Series S outsold both PS5, Switch OLED Model and the more expensive Xbox Series X during the biggest holiday sale day of the year. Adobe claims its data comes from analysing 1 trillion visits to retail sites, in addition to surveying over 1,000 retailers on their most popular items. If accurate, a key element of Series S's popularity is likely that, unlike the highly sought-after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Series S has been widely available to purchase during Black Friday week. At the time of publishing, it's still in stock at many retailers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt? For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.)"Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM. Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation. One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..." The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community." And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader thisisnotreal writes: Long sought-after, and previously thought impossible — a McMaster University PhD student in Hamilton Canada demonstrates a cost-effective and simple laser in silicon. This could have dramatic consequences for the SiP (Silicon Photonics) — a hot topic for those working in the field of integrated optics. Integrated optics is a critical technology involved in advanced telecommunications networks, and showing increasing importance in quantum research and devices, such as QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) and in various entanglement type experiments (involved in Quantum Compute). "This is the holy grail of photonics," says Jonathan Bradley, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Physics (and the student's co-supervisor) in an announcement from McMaster University. "Fabricating a laser on silicon has been a longstanding challenge."Bradley notes that Miarabbas Kiani's achievement is remarkable not only for demonstrating a working laser on a silicon chip, but also for doing so in a simple, cost-effective way that's compatible with existing global manufacturing facilities. This compatibility is essential, as it allows for volume manufacturing at low cost. "If it costs too much, you can't mass produce it," says Bradley.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Los Angeles Times summarizes the results of a new medical study conducted by Northwestern University researchers on antibody levels protecting against Covid-19 in 974 people. "Those who were immunized against COVID-19 with two doses of an mRNA vaccine and received a booster shot about eight months later saw their levels of neutralizing antibodies skyrocket. "Among this group of 33 fully vaccinated and boosted people, the median level of these antibodies was 23 times higher one week after the booster shot than it had been just before the tune-up dose."What's more, their median post-booster antibody level was three times higher than was typical for another group of people whose antibodies were measured a few weeks after getting their second dose of vaccine, when they're close to their peak. And it was 53 times higher than that of a group of 76 unvaccinated people who had recovered from COVID-19 just two to six weeks earlier. Even compared to a group of 73 people who had weathered a bout with COVID-19 and went on to get two doses of an mRNA vaccine, the boosted group's median antibody level was 68% higher. Study leader Alexis Demonbreun, a cell biologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the data demonstrate that no matter how well protected a vaccinated person may think she is, getting a booster shot is likely to increase her neutralizing antibodies — and with it, her immunity — considerably. And because scientists expect large antibody responses to create more durable immunity, the protection afforded by the booster should last longer than the initial two-shot regimen did... Among their other findings: After receiving two doses of vaccine, people who'd already had an asymptomatic infection were typically no better protected than vaccinated people who had never been infected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes:Recently, Slashdot posted a story about a group trying to purchase one of the few copies of the U.S. Constitution in the public domain. The idea was to use pool donations by people via Ethereum to get the winning bid. Alas, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin outbid the group and took possession of the copy. Now the group, ConsitutionDAO, is in the process of refunding the donations, the BBC reports, and the people getting their money back are finding it can be quite expensive... The BBC writes:That is because the Ethereum network records its transactions on the blockchain, the same basic technology idea that powers other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And like Bitcoin mining, it requires computational power to run. "Gas" is the fee paid to those who run the computer systems to facilitate transactions. And it changes price based on supply and demand. That means that at times, it can be much more expensive to make any kind of transaction, depending on how busy the Ethereum network is. And the network has recently seen high usage — and high gas prices. On its official Discord — the chat app which allows anyone to create rooms and discussion channels for enthusiasts on almost any topic — the group said it had 17,437 donors with a median donation of $206.26. High gas fees mean that "small" donations could be severely hit by the transaction charge. One user on the Discord said that in order to get $400 refunded, they would have to pay $168 in gas. Others complained of the fees being higher than the relatively small amount of their refund.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There's a polluted 343-square-mile lake known as "the Salton Sea," about 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times calls it California's "largest and most troubled lake," after a recent visit with biogeochemist Timothy Lyons. But is it about to experience a change of fortune?"The big problem at the Salton Sea is intermingled with that organic brown layer on top — and to be honest, it's scary," said Lyons, 63. "It's loaded with pesticides and heavy metals — molybdenum, cadmium and selenium — that linger in greatest concentrations in deeper water... That should worry people, because the Salton Sea is shrinking and exposing more and more of this stuff to scouring winds that carry them far and wide," he added. "Our goals include mapping where these hazardous materials are located, and determining where they came from and what may become of them if trends continue." For Lyons' research team, filling blanks in existing data is an obsession, and it could have significant implications at a time when the air practically crackles with a volatile mix of environmental danger and economic opportunities promised by ongoing efforts to tap immense reserves of lithium, a key ingredient of rechargeable batteries.... Clouds of salty, alkaline toxic dust containing heavy metals, agricultural chemicals and powdery-fine particulates linked to asthma, respiratory diseases and cancer are rolling off newly exposed playa, threatening the health of thousands of nearby residents. Delays and costs are mounting for many projects that were designed to be showcases of restoration and dust mitigation. Scientists say it's because the projects were developed without consideration for heat waves, severe droughts and water cutbacks due to climate change, or for the constantly evolving underlying geology at the hyper-saline landlocked lake at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault, where shifting tectonic plates bring molten material and hot geothermal brine closer to Earth's surface. Now, large corporations investing in proposals to suck lithium out of the brine produced by local geothermal operations have revived hopes of jobs and revenue from land leases, with lithium recovery projects potentially supporting internships, education programs and environmental restoration projects for years to come. The Times got an interesting quote from Frank Ruiz, a program director at the nonprofit environmental group Audubon California — a man who is also a member of the Lithium Valley Commission (lawmakers and community leaders trying to help guide decisions). "If done correctly, it will elevate the region by creating jobs, benefit the state and the nation by making geothermal energy more affordable, and lay the groundwork for negotiations aimed at ensuring that some of the royalties from lithium production and related land leases are used to support dust reduction and environmental restoration projects." Ruiz also says that one way or another, "The lithium rush at the Salton Sea cannot be stopped."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland," reports Phys.org. Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report:In a paper published Friday in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018. "Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider," said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. "This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe." He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information. "First, it verified that the position [480 meters] forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos," Feng said. "Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions...." "Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022," said co-author David Casper, FASER project co-leader and associate professor of physics & astronomy at UCI. "We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source." The article also points out that in future experiments the researchers hope to explore dark matter — and how it interacts with normal atoms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
While the Omicron mutation might "impact" the effectiveness of our current vaccines, they're "super unlikely" to render them useless, according to Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health. And USA Today reports that vaccine makers are already getting ready to fight the variant:Health experts have said it will likely be weeks before the world has good data about how omicron may reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines, but Moderna has already announced a three-point strategy to combat the new variant... Moderna's strategy involves three options for boosting COVID-19 vaccination, should omicron prove problematic for current vaccines. The three options, according to a Friday release from the company: A higher dose booster, shots currently being studied that are designed to "anticipate mutations such as those that have emerged in the Omicron variant" and an omicron-specific booster — which is already in the works. Andy Slavitt, who previously served as President Joe Biden's White House senior adviser for COVID response, said in a tweet that both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have estimated a vaccine to combat a new variant could be developed in about 3 months, with some regulatory and logistical hurtles to follow. "If we start in early December, new vaccines could be available by summer in much of the world," Slavitt tweeted. Multiple media organizations on Friday reported Pfizer-BioNTech is studying the new variant and expects data within weeks. If warranted, a targeted vaccine could be developed within 6 weeks and ship within 100 days, the reports say. Johnson & Johnson is also testing its current vaccine against omicron, according to CNBC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"The thought of combining a printer (the bane of office workers) with the bacterium E. coli (the scourge of romaine lettuce) may seem an odd, if not unpleasant, collaboration," writes the New York Times. "But scientists have recently melded the virtues of the infuriating tool and of the toxic microbe to produce an ink that is alive, made entirely from microbes."The microbial ink flows like toothpaste under pressure and can be 3D-printed into various tiny shapes — a circle, a square and a cone — all of which hold their form and glisten like Jell-O. The researchers describe their recipe for their programmable, microbial ink in a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The material is still being developed, but the authors suggest that the ink could be a crucial renewable building material, able to grow and heal itself and ideal for constructing sustainable homes on Earth and in space... [T]he new substance contains no additional polymers; it is produced entirely from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The researchers induce bacterial cultures to grow the ink, which is also made of living bacteria cells. When the ink is harvested from the liquid culture, it becomes firm like gelatin and can be plugged into 3D-printers and printed into living structures, which do not grow further and remain in their printed forms... Bacteria may seem an unconventional building block. But microbes are a crucial component of products such as perfumes and vitamins, and scientists have already engineered microbes to produce biodegradable plastics. A material like a microbial ink has more grandiose ambitions, according to Neel Joshi, a synthetic biologist at Northeastern University and an author on the new paper. Such inks are an expanding focus of the field of engineered living materials. Unlike structures cast from concrete or plastic, living systems would be autonomous, adaptive to environmental cues and able to regenerate — at least, that is the aspirational goal, Dr. Joshi said. "Imagine creating buildings that heal themselves," said Sujit Datta, a chemical and biological engineer at Princeton University who was not involved with the research.... Dr. Manjula-Basavanna is shooting for the moon, Earth's satellite, where there are no forests to harvest for wood and no easy way to send bulk building materials. There, he said, the ink might be used as a self-regenerating substance to help build habitats on other planets, as well as places on Earth. "There is a lot of work to be done to make it scalable and economic," Dr. Datta conceded. But, he noted, just five years ago creating robust structures out of microbes was unimaginable; conceivably, self-healing buildings could be a reality in our lifetime.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ZDNet reports:By and large, the public cloud runs on Linux. Most users, even Microsoft Azure customers, run Linux on the cloud. In the case of market giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider will let you run many Linux distros or their own homebrew Linux, Amazon Linux. Now, AWS has released an early version of its next distro, Amazon Linux 3, which is based on Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. AWS has long tried to incorporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatibility into Amazon Linux, but this latest release takes that to new heights. By using Fedora as its upstream, the new Amazon distro, also called AL2022, is a stable distribution. It's gone through extensive testing to offer package stability, and it also includes all available security updates.... TechRadar adds some more details:The distro has had two major releases till now; the first in 2010, and the second in 2017. However, with the third AL2022 release the service is committing to a two year release cycle, with each release supported for a period of five years... AWS argues that the two year major release cycle, with updates shipped quarterly via minor releases, will help keep the software current, while the five year support commitment for each major release will give customers the stability they need to manage long project lifecycles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On Monday morning the moderation team for the Rust programming language "resigned effective immediately," reports The New Stack:The resignation was tendered via a pull request on GitHub, wherein team member Andrew Gallant wrote that the team resigned "in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves." According to the page describing Rust governance, the moderation team's purpose is to do just that — to help "uphold the code of conduct and community standards" — and according to the resignation letter, they are unable to do so, with the Core Team seemingly being outside of those bounds. "As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to," Gallant continues, before making four specific recommendations to the Rust community as to how to move forward. First, Gallant writes that the Rust community should "come to a consensus on a process for oversight over the Core Team," which he says is currently "answerable only to themselves." Next, the outgoing team recommends that the "replacement for the Mod Team be made by Rust Team Members not on the Core Team," and that this future team "with advice from Rust Team Members, proactively decide how best to handle and discover unhealthy conflict among Rust Team Members," with "professional mediation" also suggested. The final point, which they say is unrelated, is that the next team should "take special care to keep the team of a healthy size and diversity, to the extent possible," something they failed to do themselves. To that point, the outgoing team is just three members, Andre Bogus, Andrew Gallant, and Matthieu M... The former team concludes their resignation letter, writing that "we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability" because they are choosing "to maintain discretion and confidentiality" and that the Rust community and their replacements "exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation." "Our relationship with Core has been deteriorating for months," they add in a thread on Reddit (where the subReddit's moderators have since locked out comments "in light of the volatile nature of this thread.") There's just one more official update. Thursday former Rust moderation team member Andrew Gallant tweeted the URL to a new post which has now appeared on the "Inside Rust blog" — titled "In response to the moderation team resignation." The post reads:As top-level team leads, project directors to the Foundation, and core team members, we are actively collaborating to establish next steps after the statement from the Rust moderation team. While we are having ongoing conversations to share perspectives on the situation, we'd like to collectively state that we are all committed to the continuity and long term health of the project. Updates on next steps will be shared with the project and wider community over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are grateful to the interim moderators who have stepped up to provide moderation continuity to the project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming. From a report: The company's upcoming Steam Deck handheld runs atop Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer lets it -- and other computers -- play Windows games as well. Now, Valve has officially added support for Nvidia's DLSS machine learning temporal upscaling technique to Proton, potentially bringing big FPS boosts and less flicker in games that support the technology. Proton 6.3-8 is the first stable release to include support for DLSS, after the feature previously hit experimental builds in October, though it appears you'll still need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 and dxgi.nvapiHack = False to turn it on. DLSS won't come to the AMD-powered Steam Deck, of course, since it requires proprietary Nvidia machine learning silicon, but we recently learned the Steam Deck will support AMDâ(TM)s arguably much less capable FSR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Despite recent reports that congestion issues are easing on the water at California's major ports, drayage truckers claim this isn't the case for them -- as long wait times, a flawed appointment system and other efficiency issues continue to plague marine terminal operators in the state. From a report: As Port of Oakland officials are urging ocean carriers to add direct services to their port to help relieve supply chain bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, truckers whose livelihoods depend on how many containers they can turn in a day are bracing for possible extra capacity if steamship lines skip Southern California and head to Oakland. "All we hear in the news is the lack of congestion on the waterside and we can confirm that, but we are drowning on the landside by long lines and staffing issues at the terminals," Bill Aboudi, president of AB Trucking, told FreightWaves this week. An unreliable appointment system has drayage companies checking day and night to find open slots and vessel schedule changes -- which Aboudi compared to playing musical chairs -- have truckers concerned they won't be able to handle a container volume increase if some of these issues aren't addressed soon. A group of trucking company owners, each with about 30 years of drayage experience under their belts, are working with port officials in Oakland to create a task force to air their grievances and open the lines of communications with marine terminal operators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Illegal miners and mass relocations after a ban on crypto mining in China have overloaded energy grid. From a report: Matthew Heard, a software engineer from San Jose, is worried about his 33 bitcoin mining machines in Kazakhstan. In the past week, they kept getting shut off in an attempt by the national grid to limit the power being used by crypto miners. "It has been days since my machines have been online," he said. "During the last week, even if my machines do come on, they barely stay on." Kazakhstan has been struggling to cope with the huge popularity of crypto mining, driven this year partly by the steep rise in value of cryptocurrencies and partly by a mass migration of miners to its borders after China made mining illegal in May. After three major power plants in the north of the country went into emergency shutdown last month the state grid operator, Kegoc, warned that it would start rationing power to the 50 crypto miners that are registered with the government, and said they would be "isconnected first" if the grid suffers problems. Heard set up in Kazakhstan in August and his machines are managed by Enegix, a company that rents out space to run crypto mining machines. He said his income has dropped from an average of $1,200 worth of bitcoin per day to $800 in October, and in the past week his machines have only been on for 55 per cent of the time. Machine owners are not notified when shutdowns are going to happen or when they will go back online, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: 2021 marked a big year for the Galaxy Note series, but not in a good way. Rather, it was the beginning of the end as Samsung prioritized its foldables over the Galaxy Note line. Now, the death of the Note seems set in stone, as Samsung reportedly has no plans for a 2022 Galaxy Note, and is also planning to end production of the Galaxy Note 20. ET News reports that Samsung has pretty much confirmed the end of the Galaxy Note series through two actions. Firstly, Samsung apparently has no plans for a Galaxy Note device in its 2022 roadmap. Likely that means the only flagship-tier Galaxy smartphones coming next year will be the Galaxy S22 series and new foldables. On top of that, Samsung will also apparently end production on its Galaxy Note 20 series entirely by the end of 2021. Until now, production on the Galaxy Note 20 has continued as the device has still been selling. In 2021, the series reportedly sold around 3.2 million devices, around a third the number of Note devices sold in 2020. Of course, we know well at this point that the Galaxy S22 Ultra will act as a spiritual successor to the Galaxy Note series, with the device adopting a design closer to the Note 20 series as well as using the same built-in stylus. The Galaxy Fold series also inherits the S Pen, but still lacks a good place to store it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LG has appointed a new CEO to lead its electronics business. Starting December 1st, current Chief Strategy Officer William Cho will take over for Bong-seok Kwon as the CEO of LG Electronics. From a report: Meanwhile, according to The Korea Herald, Kwon will head up LG's main holding company. Cho has been with LG Electronics since 1987. Prior to his most recent role, he served as the president of LG Canada, and later had the same role at LG Australia and LG USA. Cho is about to take the reins of LG Electronics at an inflection point for the company. It recently shut down its mobile division in July after the unit failed to make a profit in 23 consecutive quarters. At this point, LG Electronics is probably best known for its TVs and monitors, but there too it faces tough competition from Samsung and a variety of Chinese competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to ban travel to the United States from South Africa and seven other countries, just hours after a new coronavirus variant was deemed a highly transmissible virus of concern. From a report: The travel restrictions will begin Monday, affecting South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi, according to a senior administration official. The administration's decision was in response to advice from Anthony Fauci, the president's chief medical adviser, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the official said. Roughly a dozen countries took similar action on Friday. President Joe Biden, who is in Nantucket for the holiday, was briefed on the new variant Friday. He urged fully vaccinated Americans to get booster shots and the unvaccinated to get the "life-saving protection." Biden also addressed the global community in his statement, saying the new variant shows the pandemic won't end until vaccines are readily available around the world. He said the U.S. has donated more vaccines than every country combined, calling on others to match "America's speed and generosity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google has pledged more restrictions on its use of data from its Chrome browser to address concerns raised by Britain's competition regulator about its plan to ban third-party cookies that advertisers use to track consumers. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating Google's plan to cut support for some cookies in Chrome - an initiative called the "Privacy Sandbox" -- because it is worried it will impede competition in digital advertising. Alphabet's Google has said its users want more privacy when they are browsing the web, including not being tracked across sites. Other players in the $250 billion global digital ad sector, however, have said the loss of cookies in the world's most popular browser will limit their ability to collect information for personalising ads and make them more reliant on Google's user databases. Google agreed earlier this year to not implement the plan without the CMA's sign-off, and said the changes agreed with the British regulator will apply globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Edge recently gained a feature that allows people to pay for online purchases in installments. It's known as buy now, pay later (BNPL), and it's currently in testing on Microsoft Edge Dev and Canary. The option drew criticism from fans and users of the browser that expressed frustration in the comments section of the post announcing the feature. From a report: The center of most complaints is the belief that Microsoft Edge is becoming bloated with shopping features rather than delivering a pure browsing experience. BNPL is optional, but its detractors are against the concept of Edge having shopping features built in. "It's impressive how quickly you can throw away years of hard work and good will with a ridiculous feature like this," said vyrotek. "The Edge teams need to pause and think how they possibly thought this was a good idea. Even the Bing features are getting too aggressive." Cameron_Bush states asks for Microsoft to reconsider the addition. "This sounds like an awful idea that will only be seen as a shameless cashgrab are/or bloat by media outlets. I beg you reconsider pushing this to live. The negative press this feature is going to receive isn't worth it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China is considering setting up a digital asset exchange in Beijing as officials push to promote usage of the digital yuan and crack down on cryptocurrencies. From a report: Beijing will explore the possibility of establishing a bourse for digital assets trading, as part of broader efforts to boost financial services in the capital, according to guidelines issued by the State Council. The cabinet called for faster trials of the digital yuan and urged big banks to set up e-CNY operation firms. The statement provided no further details on the planned digital asset exchange. China has been in process of creating a virtual version of its legal tender since 2014 in an effort to cope with an increasingly digitized economy as well as to fend off potential threats from virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. It banned crypto-exchanges in 2017 and stepped up scrutiny this year to ban crypto mining and all related transactions, in tandem with campaigns to promote the digital yuan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and likely the end-of-the year holiday shopping season all have a more prosaic tinge to them this year. Those lusting after electronic gadgets -- and even cars -- have learned to settle more for what they can get than what they want. The reason, of course: shortages of electronic components. From a report: Everyone has a story like my dentist, who told me that he'd given up trying to buy a new Audi after his car was totaled in an accident. The car he'd wanted to replace it with wasn't available, and even if it was, the dealers were adding $5,000 to the sticker price of new vehicles, he told me. He settled for a used model. Meanwhile at home, I'm several months into the wait for a docking station for my wife's work laptop. The consensus from the industry executives I speak to as a chip reporter is that at some point, most likely toward the middle of 2022, supply and demand will come into balance. Why has it taken so long? Building chip plants is very hard and very slow. Even if every chipmaker in the world started building a plant this time last year in response to rising demand, that effort would likely not have resulted in the manufacture of a single chip in time for Black Friday. It simply costs too much and takes too long to build manufacturing infrastructure, and then when you do, it takes three months for silicon to be made into the brains of your iPhone, or the sensor for your SUV that stops you from closing the tailgate on your head. Earlier this year Advanced Micro Devices Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su told Bloomberg's Emily Chang that the chip shortage wasn't a catastrophe and that the industry, which has seen boom and bust cycles before, would adjust output soon enough.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Einstein Foundation Berlin is honoring the American physicist Paul Ginsparg and the Center for Open Science with the inaugural Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. Paul Ginsparg is the founder of the preprint server arXiv.org, the first platform to exchange scientific discoveries among scientists immediately, openly and globally without review- and paywall restrictions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot