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Africa's most-populous nation showed more interest in cryptocurrencies than any other country since the digital assets began to decline in April, according to a study by price tracker CoinGecko. From a report: Nigeria scored 371 in the study that looked at Google Trends data for six searches such as "buy crypto" or "invest in crypto" that were then combined to give each English-speaking nation a total search ranking. The West African country was followed by the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. "This study provides interesting insight into which countries remain most interested in cryptocurrency in spite of market pullbacks," CoinGecko's co-founder Bobby Ong said in an emailed statement. "The countries at the top of this list appear to be keenest to buy the dip, and highlight their long-term outlook for cryptocurrencies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Fiber plans to bring its high-speed internet service to multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska and Nevada over the next several years in its first big expansion since it spun out as an independent Alphabet unit in 2015. From a report: In his first media interview since becoming chief executive of Google Fiber in February 2018, Dinni Jain told Reuters on Wednesday that his team was finally prepared to "add a little bit more build velocity" after over four years of sharpening operations. The anticipated expansion to 22 metro areas across the United States from 17 today includes previously announced projects to launch in Mesa, Arizona and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The choices were based the company's findings of where speeds lag. "There was an impression 10 years ago that Google Fiber was trying to build the entire country," Jain said. "What we are gesturing here is, 'No, we are not trying to build the entire country.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

True 5G wireless data, with its ultrafast speeds and enhanced security protections, has been slow to roll out around the world. As the mobile technology proliferates -- combining expanded speed and bandwidth with low-latency connections -- one of its most touted features is starting to come in to focus. But the upgrade comes with its own raft of potential security exposures. From a report: A massive new population of 5G-capable devices, from smart-city sensors to agriculture robots and beyond, are gaining the ability to connect to the internet in places where Wi-Fi isn't practical or available. Individuals may even elect to trade their fiber-optic internet connection for a home 5G receiver. But the interfaces that carriers have set up to manage internet-of-things data are riddled with security vulnerabilities, according to research that will be presented on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. And those vulnerabilities could dog the industry long-term. After years of examining potential security and privacy issues in mobile-data radio frequency standards, Technical University of Berlin researcher Altaf Shaik says he was curious to investigate the application programming interfaces (APIs) that carriers are offering to make IoT data accessible to developers. These are the conduits that applications can use to pull, say, real-time bus-tracking data or information about stock in a warehouse. Such APIs are ubiquitous in web services, but Shaik points out that they haven't been widely used in core telecommunications offerings. Looking at the 5G IoT APIs of 10 mobile carriers around the world, Shaik and his colleague Shinjo Park found common, but serious API vulnerabilities in all of them, and some could be exploited to gain authorized access to data or even direct access to IoT devices on the network. "There's a big knowledge gap. This is the beginning of a new type of attack in telecom," Shaik told WIRED ahead of his presentation. "There's a whole platform where you get access to the APIs, there's documentation, everything, and it's called something like 'IoT service platform.' Every operator in every country is going to be selling them if they're not already, and there are virtual operators and subcontracts, too, so there will be a ton of companies offering this kind of platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have begun tracking a newly identified virus in China, with dozens of cases recorded so far. From a report: The novel Langya henipavirus (LayV) was first detected in the north-eastern provinces of Shandong and Henan in late 2018 but was only formally identified by scientists last week. The virus was likely transmitted from animals to humans, scientists said, and Taiwan's health authority is now monitoring the spread. The researchers tested wild animals and found LayV viral RNA in more than a quarter of 262 shrews, "a finding that suggests that the shrew may be a natural reservoir." The virus was also detected in 2% of domestic goats and 5% of dogs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ruins of a sprawling ancient Roman villa discovered in the United Kingdom have been reburied, just one year after their discovery was announced. From a report: Historic England, a government preservation organization, hopes the move will safeguard the "first-of-its-kind" archeological site for future generations, reports BBC News. The discovery last year delighted experts, who underscored its historical significance. "These archaeological remains are a fantastic find and are far more than we ever dreamed of discovering at this site," said Keith Emerick, inspector of ancient monuments at Historic England, in a statement last year. "They are already giving us a better knowledge and understanding of Roman Britain." Archaeologists unearthed the ruins in Scarborough, England, in 2021 when investigating land slated for a housing development. The structures found are likely from a "high status" property, such as a luxury dwelling or religious site. The compound, which included a luxury bathhouse, could even have been a "stately home-cum-gentleman's club," reported the Guardian's Alexandra Topping last year. Roughly the size of two tennis courts, the villa had a circular center that was probably a tower, per the BBC, with hallways leading to several rooms and outbuildings. Regardless of how the villa was used, archeologists agree it was "designed by the highest-quality architects in northern Europe in the era and constructed by the finest craftsmen," said Karl Battersby, who works for the North Yorkshire county council, to the Guardian.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and avid crypto enthusiast, is not sold on the metaverse. "The worst part is that people are buying real estate in these places. That's just the dumbest shit ever," he told the crypto-themed YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this past weekend. From a report: Cuban's comments come as the hype surrounding the metaverse -- a term that loosely describes an emerging virtual world where people can hang out, play, and shop -- seems to be cooling. Last November, Facebook changed its name to Meta, spurring a flurry of excitement about the potential of the metaverse, which fueled a land grab for digital plots in so-called metaverse platforms created by the likes of the Sandbox and Decentraland. These platforms enable investors to buy land as an NFT, which can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets like NFT exchange OpenSea. Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung, and Adidas have all bought digital land -- a move that Cuban, based on his latest comments, appears unlikely to follow. Cuban also isn't buying the central claim of metaverse land speculators that scarcity will make these digital plots valuable. "It's not even as good as a URL or an ENS [Ethereum naming service], because there's unlimited volumes that you can create," he said during the YouTube interview. Despite being an investor in Yuga Labs, the owner of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he was not a fan of the company's land sale, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April. "I still thought it was dumb to do the real estate. That was great money for them, you know, but that wasn't based off a utility," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it has released almost all of its emoji designs to GitHub and Figma, allowing anyone to tweak and design their own. From a report: Microsoft isn't saying that you'll be able to use your own emoji designs inside Windows, and the company isn't saying that absolutely all of the company's emoji are being released into open source, either. Specifically, Microsoft is excluding the Clippy emoji (boo!) and a few that includes the Microsoft logo. Naturally, Microsoft can't release its own copyrighted trademarks into the public domain, Jon Friedman, a corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. It's no small task to open-source each of Microsoft's 1,538 emoji, Friedman wrote. "Similar to how typeface sets include bold, italic, and regular styles, emoji must exist as a SVG, PNG, and JPG file to allow for true versatility. And for each of those, a vector, flat, and monochrome version should be created for scale and flexibility."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is reportedly laying off its team focused on winning back consumers. From a report: In 2018 the software giant originally detailed its efforts to win back the non-enterprise customers it let down, forming a Modern Life Experiences team to focus on professional consumers (prosumers). Business Insider now reports that Microsoft is laying off that team, and telling the roughly 200 affected employees to find another position at the company or take severance pay. While Microsoft isn't officially commenting on the end of its Modern Life initiative, a Microsoft senior designer revealed there was "hard news" for the Modern Life Experiences team this week in a LinkedIn post. The news comes weeks after Microsoft cut less than 1 percent of its 180,000-person workforce, with job cuts in consulting, and customer and partner solutions. Microsoft has also been cutting open job roles as it slows hiring amid a weakening economy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home Internet provider because he couldn't get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. From a report: When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes including his own with his ISP, Washtenaw Fiber Properties. Mauch now has about 70 customers and will extend his network to nearly 600 more properties with money from the American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, he told Ars in a phone interview in mid-July. The US government allocated Washtenaw County $71 million for a variety of infrastructure projects, and the county devoted a portion to broadband. The county conducted a broadband study before the pandemic to identify unserved locations, Mauch said. When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said. "They had this gap-filling RFP, and in my own wild stupidity or brilliance, I'm not sure which yet, I bid on the whole project [in my area] and managed to win through that competitive bidding process," he said. Mauch's ISP is one of four selected by Washtenaw County to wire up different areas. Mauch's network currently has about 14 miles of fiber, and he'll build another 38 miles to complete the government-funded project, he said. In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served." The contract between Mauch and the county was signed in May 2022 and requires him to extend his network to an estimated 417 addresses in Freedom, Lima, Lodi, and Scio townships. Mauch lives in Scio, which is next to Ann Arbor. Although the contract just requires service to those 417 locations, Mauch explained that his new fiber routes would pass 596 potential customers. "I'm building past some addresses that are covered by other [grant] programs, but I'll very likely be the first mover in building in those areas," he said. Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DNSFilter, a Washington, D.C.-based provider of DNS-based web content filtering and threat protection, has announced it's acquiring Guardian, a privacy-protecting firewall for iOS. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. From a report: Guardian was founded in 2013 by Will Strafach, a security researcher and former iPhone jailbreaker who in 2017 discovered that AccuWeather was secretly sending precise location data to a third-party company without a user's permission. The company's "smart firewall" iPhone app blocks apps from sharing users' personal information with third-parties, such as IP addresses and location data, by funneling data through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN). The startup, which claims to have so far blocked more than 5 billion data trackers and 1 billion location trackers, recently joined forces with Brave to integrate its firewall and VPN functionality into its eponymous non-tracking browser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Researchers are seeking thousands of volunteers in the U.S. and Europe to test the first potential vaccine against Lyme disease in 20 years -- in hopes of better fighting the tick-borne threat. Lyme is a growing problem, with cases rising and warming weather helping ticks expand their habitat. While a vaccine for dogs has long been available, the only Lyme vaccine for humans was pulled off the U.S. market in 2002 from lack of demand, leaving people to rely on bug spray and tick checks. Now Pfizer and French biotech Valneva are aiming to avoid previous pitfalls in developing a new vaccine to protect both adults and kids as young as 5 from the most common Lyme strains on two continents. Most vaccines against other diseases work after people are exposed to a germ. The Lyme vaccine offers a different strategy -- working a step earlier to block a tick bite from transmitting the infection, said Dr. Gary Wormser, a Lyme expert at New York Medical College who isn't involved with the new research. How? It targets an "outer surface protein" of the Lyme bacterium called OspA that's present in the tick's gut. It's estimated a tick must feed on someone for about 36 hours before the bacteria spreads to its victim. That delay gives time for antibodies the tick ingests from a vaccinated person's blood to attack the germs right at the source. In small, early-stage studies, Pfizer and Valneva reported no safety problems and a good immune response. The newest study will test if the vaccine, called VLA15, really protects and is safe. The companies aim to recruit at least 6,000 people in Lyme-prone areas including the Northeast U.S. plus Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. They'll receive three shots, either the vaccine or a placebo, between now and next spring's tick season. A year later, they'll get a single booster dose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have discovered that by microwaving fish waste, they can quickly and efficiently create carbon nano-onions (CNOs) -- a unique nanoform of carbon that has applications in energy storage and medicine. This method could be used to make cheaper and more sustainable LEDs in the future. The researchers from Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan published their findings in Green Chemistry. Smithsonian Magazine reports: CNOs are nanostructures with spherical carbon shells in a concentric layered structure similar to an onion. They have "drawn extensive attention worldwide in terms of energy storage and conversion" because of their "exceptionally high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as large external surface area," per the paper. They've been used in electronics and for biomedical applications, such as bio-imaging and sensing and drug delivery, write the authors in the study. Though CNOs were first reported in the 1980s, conventional methods of manufacturing them have required high temperatures, a vacuum and a lot of time and energy. Other techniques are expensive and call for complex catalysts or dangerous acidic or basic conditions. This "greatly limits the potential of CNOs," per a statement from Nagoya Institute of Technology. The newly discovered method requires only one step -- microwave pyrolysis of fish scales extracted from fish waste -- and can be done within ten seconds, per the authors. How exactly the fish scales are converted into CNOs is unclear, though the team thinks it has to do with how collagen in the fish scales can absorb enough microwave radiation to quickly increase in temperature. This leads to pyrolysis, or thermal decomposition, which causes the collagen to break down into gasses. These gasses then support the creation of CNOs. This method is a "straightforward way to convert fish waste into infinitely more useful materials," and the resulting CNOs have a high crystallinity, which gives them "exceptional optical properties," per the statement. They also have high functionalization, which means they're "bonded to other small molecules on their surface," writes Ellen Phiddian for Cosmos. This combination of attributes means the CNOs can glow bright blue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Ars Technica: While Punch-Out!! has been one of Nintendo's most beloved "fighting" series since its 1984 debut in arcades, it has rarely featured something common in the genre: a two-player mode. On Monday, however, that changed. The resulting discovery has been hiding in plain sight on the series' Super Nintendo edition for nearly 30 years. Should you own 1994's Super Punch-Out!! in any capacity -- an original SNES cartridge, a dumped ROM parsed by an emulator, on the Super Nintendo Classic Edition, or even as part of the paid Nintendo Switch Online collection of retro games -- you can immediately access the feature, no hacking or ROM editing required. All you need is a pair of gamepads. [T]oday's Super Punch-Out!! discovery revolves around a simple series of button combinations, which require nothing more than a second controller. The two-player mode is hidden behind an additional, previously undiscovered menu, which lets solo players skip directly to any of the game's boxing combatants. It's essentially a "level select" menu, which many classic games featured for internal testing, and speedrunners could arguably use it to practice against specific opponents more quickly. This menu can be accessed by holding the R and Y buttons on player two's controller at the "press start" screen, then pressing Start or A with player one's controller. Do this, and a new menu appears, displaying all 16 boxers' profile icons. Pick any of these icons to engage in a one-off fight; once it's over, you're dumped back to the same boxer-select menu. In this menu, friends can access a two-player fight if player two holds their B and Y buttons down until the match starts. You won't hear a sound effect or any other indication that it worked. Instead, the match will begin with the second player controlling the "boss" boxer at the top of the screen. Combine the "ABXY" array of buttons with "up" and "down" on the D-pad to pull off every single basic and advanced attack. All credit goes to the coder responsible for the new @new_cheats_news account on Twitter, notes Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Barred from her lab by pandemic restrictions, behavioral ecologist Daniela C. Robler caught local jumping spiders and kept them in clear plastic boxes on her windowsill, planning to test their reactions to 3-D-printed models of predatory spiders. When she came home from dinner one night, though, she noticed something strange. "They were all hanging from the lids of their boxes," says Robler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She had never seen jumping spiders suspended motionless on silk lines like this before. "I had no idea what happened," Robler says. "I thought they were dead." It turns out the jumping spiders were simply asleep -- and that Robler had discovered an alternate sleeping habit of the species Evarcha arcuata, which had been known to build silk sleeping dens in curled-up dead leaves. But the real surprise came when she decided to spy on them all night. [...] Mostly the spider just hung there. But then her legs started to twitch, and her abdomen and even her silk-producing spinnerets did so as well. Sometimes her legs curled in toward her sternum. With every spider Robler recorded, these odd movements only appeared during distinct bouts that lasted a little more than a minute and occurred periodically throughout the night. "They were just uncontrollably twitching in a way that really looked a lot like when dogs or cats dream and have their little REM phases," she says. [...] Robler and her colleagues wondered if the twitching spiders could be experiencing something like an REM phase of sleep and possibly even having dreams. "We were like, 'Okay, that would be insane,'" she says. Then she thought, "Let's figure it out," and immediately changed her research plans for the spiders. [...] When Robler recorded 34 sleeping spiderlings, she found that their twitches were accompanied by unmistakable eye-tube movements that did not happen during other phases of sleep. [...] But it is too soon to say for sure that the spiders are experiencing something akin to REM sleep in humans. The researchers first need to confirm the spiders are actually asleep during this phase by showing that they are less responsive to their environment. Robler and her "dream team" of co-authors have already started those tests. And she points out that the leg curling is a particularly striking aspect of the spiders' REM-like phase because that pose is typically only seen in dead spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure maintained by muscles to keep their legs extended, and the curling could result from the muscle paralysis that typifies REM sleep. The team's initial findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Groupon confirmed to TechCrunch that it's laid off more than 500 of its employees -- 15% of its 3,416-person headcount. It's also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." From the report: "Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we are taking decisive actions to improve our trajectory," CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. The chief executive says that the layoffs, as well as a reinvestment in marketing and initiatives that drive customer purchase frequency, will set the company up to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2022. In a letter to staff, Deshpande said that Groupon is reducing its North America sales teams to focus on "self-service merchant acquisition capabilities." It is also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." "In addition, we are proposing to reduce cloud infrastructure and support functions as we wrap up cloud migrations." Groupon is also closing its Australia Goods business, more than a decade after launching there in the first place. Finally, Groupon said that it will "rationalize" its real estate footprint to be more in line with hybrid work. "Over the past few years, the number of Groupon shoppers has fallen sharply," adds TechCrunch. "According to Statista, 22.2 million visitors to the company's site purchased at least one offer in Q1 2022, down from nearly 54 million in Q4 2014." The report notes that these cuts aren't as large as the ones made in 2020 when Groupon said it would lay off or furlough 2,800 employees following the COVID-19 pandemic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, the Department of Justice is preparing to sue Google as soon as next month, "capping years of work to build a case that the Alphabet unit illegally dominates the digital advertising market." From the report: Lawyers with the DOJ's antitrust division are questioning publishers in another round of interviews to refresh facts and glean additional details for the complaint [...]. Some of the interviews have already taken place and others are scheduled in the coming weeks [...]. They build on previous interrogations conducted during an earlier stage of the long-running investigation [...]. An ad tech complaint, which Bloomberg had reported was in the works last year, would mark the DOJ's second case against Google following the government's 2020 lawsuit alleging the tech titan dominates the online search market in violation of antitrust laws. Still undecided is whether prosecutors will file the case in federal court in Washington, where the search case is pending, or in New York, where state attorneys general have their own antitrust case related to Google's ad tech business [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: To NVIDIA's Open-GPU-Docs portal they have posted the 73k lines worth of 3D class header files covering RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs back through the decade-old GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors. These header files define the classes used to program the 3D engine of the GPU, the texture header and texture sampler layout are documented, and other 3D-related programming bits. Having all of these header files will be useful to the open-source Nouveau driver developers to save on their reverse-engineering and guessing/uncertainty over certain bits. NVIDIA's Open GPU Kernel Driver is for only GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" series and newer, so it's great seeing NVIDIA now posting this documentation going back to Fermi which is squarely to help the open-source community / Nouveau. [...] The timing of NVIDIA opening these 3D classes back to Fermi is interesting and potentially tied to SIGGRAPH 2022 happening this week. Those wanting to grab NVIDIA's latest open-source GPU documentation can find it via this GitHub repository.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A dozen US midwestern research colleges and universities have signed up to a project intended to bolster the semiconductor and microelectronics industries with combined research and education to ensure work for their students in high-tech industries. The "Midwest Regional Network to Address National Needs in Semiconductor and Microelectronics" consists of a dozen institutions, made up of eight from Ohio, two from Michigan, and two from Indiana. Their stated aim is to support the onshoring efforts of the US semiconductor industry by addressing the need for research and a skilled workforce. According to Wright State University, the network was formed in response to Intel's announcement that it planned to build two chip factories near Columbus, Ohio, and followed a two-day workshop in April hosted by the state. [...] However, the university network was also formed to help address the broader national effort to regain American leadership in semiconductors and microelectronics, or at least bring some of it back onshore and make the US less reliant on supplies of chips manufactured abroad. The president of each institution has signed a memorandum of understanding to form the network, and the expectation is that the group will expand to include more than these dozen initial members. The intention is that the institutions taking part will be able to make use of each other's existing research, learning programs, capabilities, and expertise in order to boost their collective ability to support the semiconductor and microelectronics industry ecosystems. Challenges for the network include developing mechanisms to connect existing research, and training assets across the region, and developing a common information sharing platform to make it easier to identify opportunities for joint programming and research across the network. The institutions involved in the network include: Wright State University, Columbus State Community College, Lorain County Community College, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Sinclair Community College, University of Cincinnati, University of Dayton, University of Michigan, and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Further reading: Biden Signs China Competition Bill To Boost US ChipmakersRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Burger King has just emailed thousands of customers with a blank order email receipt. The Verge reports: The blank emails started appearing at around 12:15AM ET, leaving Burger King customers confused whether the company has been breached by a hungry hacker attempting a midnight feast, or if the emails are simply a giant whopper of a mistake. Twitter users were quick to turn to the social network in a state of confusion over the blank emails, with some even receiving two Burger King emails in an apparent double whopper of a mistake. The order emails are totally blank, and were sent by Burger King's main promotional marketing email address. After this story was published, an email from "BK PR Team" responded to our request for more information, claiming the issue was "the result of an internal processing error." We have asked for a specific individual to attribute the information to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to researcher samczsun at Paradigm, Curve Finance has had its front end compromised, with over $500K stolen within a matter of minutes. The automated market maker is warning users to exercise caution when interacting with the site. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also shared the news and is monitoring the situation. CoinTelegraph reports: Curve stated via Twitter that its exchange -- which is a separate product -- appeared to be unaffected by the attack, as it uses a different DNS provider. Twitter user LefterisJP speculated that the alleged attacker had likely utilized DNS spoofing to execute the exploit on the service: "It's DNS spoofing. Cloned the site, made the DNS point to their ip where the cloned site is deployed and added approval requests to a malicious contract." Other participants in the DeFi space quickly took to Twitter to spread the warning to their own followers, with some noting that the alleged thief appears to have stolen more than $573K USD at time of publication: "Alert to all @CurveFinance users, their frontend has been compromised! Do not interact with it until further notice! It appears around $570k stolen so far."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has published a knowledge base article acknowledging a problem with encryption acceleration in the newest versions of Windows that could result in data corruption. The company recommends installing the June 2022 security updates for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 "to prevent further damage," though there are no suggested solutions for anyone who has already lost data because of the bug. The problems only affect relatively recent PCs and servers that support Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES) instructions for accelerating cryptographic operations. Microsoft says affected systems use AES-XTS or AES-GCM instructions "on new hardware." Part of the AVX-512 instruction set, VAES instructions are supported by Intel's Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, and Alder Lake architectures -- these power some 10th-generation Core CPUs for laptops, as well as all 11th- and 12th-gen Core CPUs. AMD's upcoming Zen 4 architecture also supports VAES, though by the time these chips are released in the fall, the patches will have had plenty of time to proliferate. Microsoft says that the problem was caused when it added "new code paths" to support the updated encryption instructions in SymCrypt, Windows' cryptographic function library. These code paths were added in the initial release of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, so the problem shouldn't affect older versions like Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019. The initial fix for the problem, provided in Windows' June 2022 security update package (Windows 11 build 22000.778), will prevent further damage at the cost of reduced performance, suggesting that the initial fix was to disable encryption acceleration on these processors entirely. Using Bitlocker-encrypted disks or the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol or accessing encrypted storage on servers will all be slower with the first patch installed, though installing the July 2022 security updates (Windows 11 build 22000.795) should restore performance to its previous level.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart has held discussions with major media companies about including streaming entertainment in its membership service, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people with knowledge of the conversations, part of an effort to extend its relationship with customers beyond its brick-and-mortar stores. From a report: In recent weeks, executives from Paramount, Disney and Comcast have spoken with Walmart, the people said, as the retailer ponders which movies and TV shows would add the most value to its membership bundle, called Walmart+. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. It is unclear whether any of the streaming companies are inclined to reach a deal with Walmart. Disney operates the Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu streaming services; Comcast owns the Peacock streaming service; and Paramount runs the Paramount+ and Showtime services. A Walmart+ membership, which costs $12.95 per month, includes free shipping on orders and discounts on fuel. It also includes a free six-month subscription to the Spotify Premium music service. As the streaming field gets more crowded, the biggest media companies have turned to giants in other industries to find new subscribers. Wireless providers like Verizon and T-Mobile have struck deals to offer their customers free or discounted subscriptions to streaming services like Disney+ or Paramount+ as an extra incentive to sign up. Media companies, in turn, receive an influx of new customers whose subscriptions are subsidized by their wireless partner.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford Motor on Tuesday became the latest automaker to raise the price of electric vehicles when it significantly increased prices of its popular F-150 Lightning because of rising materials costs. From a report: The company began making the Lightning in April and had sold more than 4,400 through the end of July. Ford has taken reservations for more than 200,000, and the higher prices will go into effect for the 2023 model year. Ford said it was increasing the starting prices of the truck by $6,000 to $8,500 for newly ordered vehicles. After the increase, the truck will cost from $46,974 for a base model to $96,874 for a Platinum version with an extended-range battery pack. The increases do not affect customers who have already placed orders and are waiting for their trucks. Reservations give customers a spot in line to place an order to buy a truck. Ford stopped taking orders because of strong demand but said it would resume doing so on Thursday, when the new prices go into effect. "We've announced pricing ahead of reopening order banks so our reservation holders can make an informed decision around ordering a Lightning," said Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer for Ford's electric vehicle division, known as Model e, in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Domino's Pizza's footprint in the home of Pizza proved to be short lived with Italians favoring local restaurants over the American version. From a report: The last of Domino's 29 branches have closed after the company started operations in the country seven years ago. It borrowed heavily for plans to open 880 stores, but faced tough competition from local restaurants expanding delivery services during the pandemic and sought protection from creditors after running out of cash and falling behind on its debt obligations. The US chain entered Italy in 2015 through a franchising agreement with ePizza SpA and planned to distinguish itself by providing a structured national delivery service along with American-style toppings including pineapple. Its ambitious expansion ran into trouble as traditional pizza makers scaled up deliveries or signed deals with third-party services such as Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway.com NV or Glovo to bring their products to customers' homes while restrictions prevented dining out.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A US agency dealing with national security said Far East Cable violated American export-control rules by signing contracts with Chinese networking giant ZTE and Iranian businesses to sell US-origin equipment to Iran. From a report: From September 2014 to January 2016, Far East Cable "served as a cutout" between ZTE -- which was under investigation by the US for export-rule violations at the time -- and Iranian telecommunications companies, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement Monday. Far East Cable's actions are "part of an effort to conceal and obfuscate ZTE's Iranian business from US investigators," the BIS said in a July 29 letter to the company made available Monday. The agency is charging the cable maker with 18 violations of its export administration regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's latest generation of CPUs contains a vulnerability that allows attackers to obtain encryption keys and other confidential information protected by the company's software guard extensions, the advanced feature that acts as a digital vault for security users' most sensitive secrets. From a report: Abbreviated as SGX, the protection is designed to provide a fortress of sorts for the safekeeping of encryption keys and other sensitive data, even when the operating system or a virtual machine running on top is maliciously compromised. SGX works by creating trusted execution environments that protect sensitive code and the data it works with from monitoring or tampering by anything else on the system. SGX is a cornerstone of the security assurances many companies provide to users. Servers used to handle contact discovery for the Signal Messenger, for instance, rely on SGX to ensure the process is anonymous. Signal says running its advanced hashing scheme provides a "general recipe for doing private contact discovery in SGX without leaking any information to parties that have control over the machine, even if they were to attach physical hardware to the memory bus." The example is purely hypothetical. Signal spokesperson Jun Harada wrote in an email: "Intel alerted us to this paper... and we were able to verify that the CPUs that Signal uses are not impacted by the findings of this paper and therefore are not vulnerable to the stated attack." Key to the security and authenticity assurances of SGX is its creation of what are called "enclaves," or blocks of secure memory. Enclave contents are encrypted before they leave the processor and are written in RAM. They are decrypted only after they return. The job of SGX is to safeguard the enclave memory and block access to its contents by anything other than the trusted part of the CPU.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous user sent a slew of Tornado Cash transactions to high-profile Ethereum addresses on Tuesday in what appears to be a troll implicating them in a potential regulatory mess. From a report: Affected wallets include those controlled by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, TV host Jimmy Fallon, clothing brand Puma and a wallet created for donations to Ukraine, according to Etherscan. Prominent crypto figures such as artist Beeple and more mainstream celebrities such as comedian Dave Chappelle received ether (ETH).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is kicking off a new publicity campaign today to pressure Apple into adopting RCS, the cross-platform messaging protocol that's meant to be a successor to the aging SMS and MMS standards. From a report: The search giant has a new "Get The Message" website that lays out a familiar set of arguments for why Apple should support the standard, revolving around smoother messaging between iPhone and Android devices. Naturally, there's also a #GetTheMessage hashtag to really get those viral juices flowing. For most people, the problems Google describes are most familiar in the form of the green bubbles that signify messages to Android users in Apple's Messages app. While the iPhone app uses Apple's own iMessage service to send texts between iPhones (complete with modern features like encryption, support for group chats, and high-quality image and video transfers), they revert to old-fashioned SMS and MMS when texting an Android user. Not only are these messages shown in a color-clashing green bubble but also they break many of the modern messaging features people have come to rely on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of "forever chemicals," according to new research. saulgood shares a report: Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don't occur in nature. They are known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't break down in the environment. They have non-stick or stain repellent properties so can be found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware. But now researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet -- including Antarctica. There is no safe space to escape them. Safe guideline levels for some of these forever chemicals have dropped dramatically over the last two decades due to new insights into their toxicity. "There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years," says Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University. For one well-known substance, the "cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)," water guideline values have declined by 37.5 million times in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a bipartisan bill that aims to strengthen U.S. competitiveness with China by investing billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research. From a report: "Today is a day for builders. Today America is delivering," Biden said at the signing ceremony outside the White House. He was joined by a crowd of hundreds, including tech executives, union presidents and political leaders from both parties. The bill, dubbed the Chips and Science Act, includes more than $52 billion for U.S. companies producing computer chips, as well as billions more in tax credits to encourage investment in semiconductor manufacturing. It also provides tens of billions of dollars to fund scientific research and development, and to spur the innovation and development of other U.S. tech. The Biden administration also contended that the legislation will "unlock hundreds of billions more" in private spending in the industry. The White House said Tuesday that multiple companies, "spurred" by the chips bill, have announced more than $44 billion in new semiconductor manufacturing investments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mobile app marketing company AppLovin on Tuesday made a $17.54 billion all-stock offer to buy online gaming business Unity Software. From a report: Palo Alto-based AppLovin said the deal would have an enterprise value of about $20 billion, an 18% premium on San Francisco-based Unity's Monday closing price. AppLovin said in a news release that its offer would create a company with a combined market cap of about $35 billion. The non-binding offer appears to be aimed at warding off potential damage to AppLovin's business by a plan Unity announced about a month ago to buy Israel-based app monetization company ironSource for $4.4 billion. A number of Unity shareholders and game developers have reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with the IronSource deal, which may help AppLovin win support for its offer. While Unity investors would hold 55% of shares in the combined company, AppLovin's would have 51% of the voting power. Unity chief John Riccitiello would be CEO under the proposal and AppLovin chief Adam Foroughi would be chief operating officer. A Unity spokesperson acknowledged the offer in a neutral statement the company issued on Tuesday morning, saying, "We have received the offer from AppLovin and our board will thoroughly evaluate it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several weeks after taking over Ukraine's southern port city of Kherson, Russian soldiers arrived at the offices of local internet service providers and ordered them to give up control of their networks. From a report: "They came to them and put guns to their head and just said, 'Do this,'" said Maxim Smelyanets, who owns an internet provider that operates in the area and is based in Kyiv. "They did that step by step for each company." Russian authorities then rerouted mobile and internet data from Kherson through Russian networks, government and industry officials said. They blocked access to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as to Ukrainian news websites and other sources of independent information. Then they shut off Ukrainian cellular networks, forcing Kherson's residents to use Russian mobile service providers instead. What happened in Kherson is playing out in other parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine. After more than five months of war, Russia controls large sections of eastern and southern Ukraine. Bombings have leveled cities and villages; civilians have been detained, tortured and killed; and supplies of food and medicine are running low, according to witnesses interviewed by The New York Times and human rights groups. Ukrainians in those regions have access only to Russian state television and radio. To cap off that control, Russia has also begun occupying the cyberspace of parts of those areas. That has cleaved off Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Kherson, Melitopol and Mariupol from the rest of the country, limiting access to news about the war and communication with loved ones. In some territories, the internet and cellular networks have been shut down altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roman Semenov, one of the co-founders of Tornado Cash, has reported his account was suspended at the developer platform, GitHub, following the United States Treasury Department's sanctioning of the privacy protocol. From a report: In a Monday tweet, Semenov said that despite not being individually named as a Specially Designated National, or SDN, of Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control, he seemed to be facing repercussions from the Treasury alleging Tornado Cash had laundered more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency. As SDNs, identified firms and individuals have their assets blocked and "U.S. persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them." Being identified as an SDN would seemingly include any contact for business purposes, which could extend to associations on GitHub. According to a joint statement from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and Office of Foreign Asset Control, prohibited transactions could be interpreted to include "downloading a software patch from a sanctioned entity." Semenov called the move to suspend his account "a bit illogical." However, U.S. residents have been effectively barred from using the crypto mixer, given its alleged failure "to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks," according to Brian Nelson, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as "ESPN8: The Ocho," you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing. Or you might have seen "Excel Esports: All-Star Battle," a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. It's just the latest mainstream acknowledgment of Excel as a viable, if quirky, esport, complete with down-to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks. [...] Featured in this all-star battle was 2021 FMWC World Cup winner Diarmuid Early, an FMWC grandmaster from Ireland who claims 10,000 hours in Excel. (He would be Lambda if he were a function, he said.) The winner of the first championship in 2020, Joseph Lau (28,600 hours, Isological), also competed, along with six other highly ranked function warriors. Diarmuid took a commanding lead in the first slot-like task, racking up more points more quickly in a first round than anyone has in an FMWC competition. Others faced the kinds of challenges that regular users see in less combative Excel work. Polish competitor Gabriela Stroj told the hosts that "one stupid error" -- leaving a formula linked to the wrong sheet -- likely cost her hundreds of points. David Brown from the US said that his major problem was pasting from his 32-bit Windows-based Excel to the official online Excel answer sheets, which left his formulas treated as text. The top four of the eight competitors moved on to round 2, simulating a yacht regatta in Excel. Diarmuid and third-ranked Andrew Ngai made it through. The two competed on creating a score-tracking mechanic for an entirely Excel-based retro-style 2D platformer, "Modelario." Ngai eked out the win, although with only 411 of a total 1,000 possible points. Ngai's reward for a more than two-hour cell-based marathon: a trip to Tucson, Arizona, for the FMWC finals. You can watch the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle, which ESPN edited down to 30 minutes, here. You can also try the Excel tasks used in last weekend's battle yourself, as the organizers (the Financial Modeling World Cup) made all three of them available to download.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A live-action film based on PAC-MAN is in the works from Bandai Namco Entertainment -- the company behind PAC-MAN -- and Wayfarer Studios, the production company founded by Justin Baldoni and Steve Sarowitz. The Hollywood Reporter reports: First introduced in the U.S. in 1980 -- and originally called Puck Man in Japan -- PAC-MAN became a coin-operated staple. The game is set in mazes where Pac-Man has to eat pellets while being pursued by colorful ghosts as the mazes get progressively more difficult. The game begat merchandise, several sequel games like Ms. PAC-MAN, as well as two television series, including a Hanna-Barbera produced ABC series and a Disney XD take. The project will be based on an original idea from Chuck Williams (Sonic the Hedgehog) of Lightbeam Entertainment. Baldoni, Manu Gargi and Andrew Calof will produce on behalf of Wayfarer Studios, with Tracy Ryerson developing; Williams and Tim Kwok will produce on behalf of Lightbeam.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's new rocket launched for the first time on Saturday night (Aug. 6) but failed to deliver its satellite payloads into their intended orbit due to a sensor issue. Space.com reports: The 112-foot-tall (34 meters) Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India's southeastern coast on Saturday at 11:48 p.m. EDT (0348 GMT and 9:18 a.m. India Standard Time on Sunday, Aug. 7) with two satellites onboard. The rocket's three solid-fueled stages performed well, but its fourth and final stage, a liquid-fueled "velocity trimming module" (VTM), hit a snag: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials reported a loss of data from the rocket and, just over five hours after liftoff, ISRO announced the mission had failed. "The entire vehicle performance was very good" at the start, but ultimately left the two satellites in the wrong orbit, ISRO Chairman S. Somanath said in a video statement after the launch. "The satellites were placed in an elliptical orbit in place of a circular orbit." Instead of placing the satellites in a circular orbit 221 miles (356 kilometers) above Earth, the rocket left them in an orbit that ranged from 221 miles to as close as 47 miles (76 km). That orbit was not stable, and the satellites have "already come down, and they are not usable," Somanath said. ISRO officials said on Twitter that a sensor failure that was not detected in time to switch to a "salvage action" caused the orbit issue. An investigation into the failure is planned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In July, a video of a robot dog with a submachine gun strapped to its back terrified the internet. Now a hacker who posts on Twitter as KF@d0tslash and GitHub as MAVProxyUser has discovered that the robot dog contains a kill switch, and it can be accessed through a tiny handheld hacking device. "Good news!" d0tslash said on Twitter. "Remember that robot dog you saw with a gun!? It was made by @UnitreeRobotic. Seems all you need to dump it in the dirt is @flipper_zero. The PDB has a 433mhz backdoor." In the video, d0tslash showed one of the Unitree robot dogs hooked up to a power supply. A hand comes into the frame holding a Flipper Zero, Tamagotchi-like multitool hacking device that can send and receive wireless signals across RFID, Bluetooth, NFC, and other bands. A button is pushed on the Flipper and the robot dog seizes up and falls to the ground. Motherboard reached out to d0tslash to find out how they hacked the robot dog. The power supply in the video is an external power source. "Literally a 24-volt external power supply, so I'm not constantly charging battery while doing dev," d0tslash said. d0tslash got their hands on one of the dogs and started going through the documentation when they discovered something interesting. Every dog ships with a remote cut-off switch attached to its power distribution board, the part of a machine that routes power from the battery to its various systems. The kill switch listens for a particular signal at 433mhz. If it hears the signal, it shuts down the robot. Some of the Unitree robot dogs even ship with the wireless remote that shuts the dog down instantly. d0tslash then used Flipper Zero to emulate the shutdown, copying the signal the robot dog's remote broadcasts over the 433MHz frequency. Anyone with a Flipper Zero or similar device can shut down these robot dogs, thanks to the work d0tslash has shared on Github.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Glowacki, an artist and computational molecular physicist, has created a VR experience called Isness-D that aims to recapture a transcendence experience he had when he fell in the mountains fifteen years ago. "[O]n four key indicators used in studies of psychedelics, the program showed the same effect as a medium dose of LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of 'magic' mushrooms)," reports MIT Technology Review. From the report: Isness-D is designed for groups of four to five people based anywhere in the world. Each participant is represented as a diffuse cloud of smoke with a ball of light right about where a person's heart would be. Participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience. [...] To create it, Glowacki took aesthetic inspiration from quantum mechanics -- as he puts it, "where the definition of what's matter and what's energy starts to become blurred." For their paper, Glowacki and his collaborators measured the emotional response Isness-D elicited in 75 participants. They based their measurements on four metrics used in psychedelics research -- the MEQ30 (a mystical experience questionnaire), the ego dissolution inventory scale, the "communitas" scale, and the "inclusion of community in self" scale. Communitas is defined as an experience of intense shared humanity that transcends social structure. Participants' responses were then compared with those given in published, double-blind psychedelics studies. For all four metrics, Isness-D elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics. On the mystical experience scale, Isness-D participants reported an experience as intense as that elicited by 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD, and stronger than that induced by microdoses of either substance. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ongoing worldwide semiconductor shortage will cause more than 100,000 vehicles to be cut from North American production schedules this week, Automotive News reported Sunday. Over 180,000 vehicles are expected to be dropped globally. CNET reports: The data, which comes from AutoForecast Solutions, says North American factories have been forced to cut nearly 1.06 million vehicles from production schedules this year due to the chip shortage. This puts North America as the most heavily impacted region so far. AFS' data shows nearly 3 million vehicles have been cut so far in 2022, and the agency expects that number to grow to more than 3.8 million by the end of the year. [...] The auto industry may not recover from the chip shortage until 2023 or beyond. Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AFS, affirmed this reasoning earlier this year: "This is not a quickly solvable issue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Polio is back, monkeypox isn't slowing down, COVID-19 is still around -- and now there's more not-so-good news on the infection front: over 200 human diseases could get worse because of climate change, according to a new study. From a report: Researchers have known for a long time that the changing climate affects disease. Warmer temperatures can make regions newly hospitable to disease-carrying mosquitoes, while floods from more frequent storms can carry bacteria in their surges of water. Most research, though, only focused on a handful of threats or one disease at a time. The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, built a comprehensive map of all of the ways various climate hazards could interact with 375 documented human infectious diseases. The authors reviewed over 77,000 scientific articles about those diseases and climate hazards. They found that, of those 375 diseases, 218 could be aggravated by things like heatwaves, rising sea levels, and wildfires. The study found four main ways climate change exacerbates diseases. First, problems happen when changes cause disease-carrying animals to move closer to people. For example, animal habitats are disrupted by things like wildfires that drive bats and rodents into new areas, increasing the likelihood they'll transmit diseases like Ebola to people. Other research shows that climate change makes viruses more likely to jump from animals to people, as happened with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. That phenomenon also likely contributed to the 2016 Zika outbreaks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In two lawsuits (PDF) filed today in California, Google alleges that Sonos' latest voice-assistant technology violates seven patents related to Google Assistant. CNET reports: Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said Sonos has "started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers." As a result, he said, the lawsuits have been filed to "defend our technology and challenge Sonos' clear, continued infringement of our patents." Sonos launched its own voice assistant in June, allowing customers to control their speakers using voice commands starting with the phrase "Hey Sonos." Google said in the lawsuits that it has made its technologies available to users across the globe, "even providing its Google Assistant software to Sonos for many years." The suits also said Google has for years worked with Sonos engineers on the "implementation of voice recognition and voice-activated device controls in Sonos' products." Google requests an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an injunction blocking Sonos' alleged infringement. Last year, the International Trade Commission ruled that Google infringed on five patents owned by Sonos, forcing Google to change the way its smart speakers are set up and controlled. "Google previously sued us all over the world and Sonos has prevailed in every decided case," Eddie Lazarus, Sonos' chief legal officer, told CNET, adding that the new lawsuits "are an intimidation tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google's monopolistic practices," which "will not succeed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As marketers, data brokers, and tech giants endlessly expand their access to individuals' data and movements across the web, tools like VPNs or cookie blockers can feel increasingly feeble and futile. Short of going totally off the grid forever, there are few options for the average person to meaningfully resist tracking online. Even after coming up with a technical solution last year for how phone carriers could stop automatically collecting users' locations, researchers Barath Raghavan and Paul Schmitt knew it would be challenging to convince telecoms to implement the change. So they decided to be the carrier they wanted to see in the world. The result is a new company, dubbed Invisv, that offers mobile data designed to separate users from specific identifiers so the company can't access or track customers' metadata, location information, or mobile browsing. Launching in beta today for Android, the company's Pretty Good Phone Privacy or PGPP service will replace the mechanism carriers normally use to turn cell phone tower connection data into a trove of information about users' movements. And it will also offer a Relay service that disassociates a user's IP address from their web browsing. PGPP's ability to mask your phone's identity from cell towers comes from a revelation about why cell towers collect the unique identifiers known as IMSI numbers, which can be tracked by both telecoms and other entities that deploy devices known as IMSI catchers, often called stringrays, which mimic a cell tower for surveillance purposes. Raghavan and Schmitt realized that at its core, the only reason carriers need to track IMSI numbers before allowing devices to connect to cell towers for service is so they can run billing checks and confirm that a given SIM card and device are paid up with their carrier. By acting as a carrier themselves, Invisv can implement their PGPP technology that simply generates a "yes" or "no" about whether a device should get service. On the PGPP "Mobile Pro" plan, which costs $90 per month, users get unlimited mobile data in the US and, at launch, unlimited international data in most European Union countries. Users also get 30 random IMSI number changes per month, and the changes can happen automatically (essentially one per day) or on demand whenever the customer wants them. The system is designed to be blinded so neither INVISV nor the cell towers you connect to know which IMSI is yours at any given time. There's also a "Mobile Core" plan for $40 per month that offers eight IMSI number changes per month and 9 GB of high-speed data per month. Both of these plans also include PGPP's Relay service. Similar to Apple's iCloud Private Relay, PGPP's Relay is a method for blocking everyone, from your internet provider or carrier to the websites you visit, from knowing both who you are and what you're looking at online at the same time. Such relays send your browsing data through two way stations that allow you to browse the web like normal while shielding your information from the world. When you navigate to a website, your IP address is visible to the first relay -- in this case, Invisv -- but the information about the page you're trying to load is encrypted. Then the second relay generates and connects an alternate IP address to your request, at which point it is able to decrypt and view the website you're trying to load. The content delivery network Fastly is working with Invisv to provide this second relay. Fastly is also one of the third-party providers for iCloud Private Relay. In this way, each relay knows some of the information about your browsing; the first simply knows that you are using the web, and the second sees the sites you connect to, but not who specifically is browsing there. In addition to being included in the two PGPP data plans, customers can also purchase the Relay service on its own for $5 per month and turn it on while connected to mobile data or Wi-Fi. The carrier is still working to bring its services to Apple's iOS. It's also worth noting that Invisv only offers mobile data; there are no voice calling services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

7-Eleven stores in Denmark shut down today after a cyberattack disrupted stores' payment and checkout systems throughout the country. Bleeping Computer reports: The attack occurred early this morning, August 8th, with the company posting on Facebook that they were likely "exposed to a hacker attack." The translated statement says that the company has closed all the stores in the country while investigating the security incident: ""Unfortunately, we suspect that we have been exposed to a hacker attack today, Monday 8 August 2022. This means that we cannot use checkouts and/or receive payment. We are therefore keeping the stores closed until we know the extent. We naturally hope that we can open the stores again soon." - 7-Eleven DK." At this time, there are no further details about the attack, including whether ransomware was involved, which has become the most common cyberattack causing wide-scale outages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In preliminary second-quarter financial results announced today, Nvidia's year-over-year growth is "down from a previously forecasted $8.1 billion, a miss of $1.4 billion," reports Ars Technica. "Nvidia blamed this shortfall on weaker-than-expected demand for its gaming products, including its GeForce graphics processors." The full results won't arrive until the end of the month. From the report: Nvidia pointed to "a reduction in channel partner sales," meaning that partners like Evga, MSI, Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, and others were selling fewer new GPUs than anticipated. This drop can be attributed partly to a crash in the value of mining-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum -- fewer miners are buying these cards, and miners looking to unload their GPUs on the secondhand market are also giving gamers a cheaper source for graphics cards. "As we expect the macroeconomic conditions affecting sell-through to continue, we took actions with our Gaming partners to adjust channel prices and inventory," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. That means we may see further price drops for existing GeForce GPUs, which have already been dropping in price throughout the year. Some cards still haven't reverted to their originally advertised prices, but they're getting closer all the time. In better news for Nvidia, the small overall increase in revenue [$6.7 billion] is driven almost exclusively by the company's data center business, including GPU-accelerated AI and machine learning applications and GPU acceleration for cloud-hosted virtual machines. Nvidia's data center revenue is projected to be up 61 percent from last year, from $2.37 billion to $3.81 billion. Nvidia will supposedly launch its next-generation RTX 4000 series GPUs later this year. Based on the new Lovelace architecture, these GPUs may appeal to some gamers who originally sat out the RTX 3000 series due to shortages and inflated prices and are now avoiding the GPUs because they know a replacement is around the corner.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon.com hasn't just bought a maker of robot vacuum cleaners. It's acquired a mapping company. To be more precise: a company that can make maps of your home. The company announced a $1.7 billion deal on Friday for iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And yes, Amazon will make money from selling those gadgets. But the real value resides in those robots' ability to map your house. As ever with Amazon, it's all about the data. A smart home, you see, isn't actually terribly smart. It only knows that your Philips Hue lightbulbs and connected television are in your sitting room because you've told it as much. It certainly doesn't know where exactly the devices are within that room. The more it knows about a given space, the more tightly it can choreograph the way they interact with you. The smart home is clearly a priority for Amazon. Its Echo smart speakers still outsell those from rivals Apple and Google, with an estimated 9.9 million units sold in the three months through March, according to the analysis firm Strategy Analytics. It's complemented that with a $1 billion deal for the video doorbell-maker Ring in 2018, and the wi-fi company Eero a year later. But you still can't readily buy the Astro, Amazon's household robot that was revealed with some fanfare last year, is still only available in limited quantities. That, too, seemed at least partly an effort to map the inside of your property, a task that will now fall to iRobot. The Bedford, Mass.-based company's most recent products include a technology it calls Smart Maps, though customers can opt out of sharing the data. Amazon said in a statement that protecting customer data is "incredibly important." Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Only days after being launched to the public, Meta Platforms' new AI chatbot has been claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, and repeating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. From a report: Chatbots -- artificial intelligence software that learns from interactions with the public -- have a history of taking reactionary turns. In 2016, Microsoft's Tay was taken offline within 48 hours after it started praising Adolf Hitler, amid other racist and misogynist comments it apparently picked up while interacting with Twitter users. Facebook parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3 on Friday to users in the US, who can provide feedback if they receive off-topic or unrealistic answers. A further feature of BlenderBot 3 is its ability to search the internet to talk about different topics. The company encourages adults to interact with the chatbot with "natural conversations about topics of interest" to allow it to learn to conduct naturalistic discussions on a wide range of subjects. Conversations shared on various social media accounts ranged from the humorous to the offensive. BlenderBot 3 told one user its favorite musical was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," and described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "too creepy and manipulative" to a reporter from Insider. Other conversations showed the chatbot repeating conspiracy theories.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How some people tricked Google into getting their own knowledge panels and fooled Amazon-owned IMDb into believing they are top stars in dozens of movies. From a report: I was casually browsing IMDb when I landed on the page for an upcoming Ranbir Kapoor starrer movie "Animal." I saw the cast details and I found a face and a name I didn't recognize. Finding out about this guy led me to a whole new world of how so many young Indian men from small towns are gaming the system to manufacture their own fake online clout. So who is this guy? I had not heard of him before and he is named in the "Top cast" category for this movie, alongside Indian actor Ranbir Kapoor. According to his IMDb page, he has acting credits in some big-budget productions. I am beginning to suspect that this could be a case of IMDb vandalism. IMDb allows anyone to add and edit pages. They don't allow you to see the edit history of a page though like Wikipedia and evidently, the edits are not reviewed effectively either. I googled this guy. Wow, so Google has a knowledge panel on him. There are also links to his music on various music platforms. Okay, so probably he is pretending to be an actor on IMDb but according to his google search results, he is actually a legit musician? Skimming through the search results, I found biographies written about him on a few websites of doubtful credibility. Like this one on a website called issuewire.com. I looked at his YouTube and other social media profiles and he doesn't have a lot of followers or any music content on there. I shazamed a couple of his songs and they're just copies of existing random music mashed together with some audio editing tool like Audacity. Possibly to avoid getting copyright notices. Hmm. I think I am now beginning to get a clearer picture of what's going on here. He set up a profile on a bunch of different music streaming platforms. Uploaded remixed mash-up of existing songs using some audio editing software. Published biographies and profiles about himself on sites that do not verify submissions. Set up an IMDb page with fake credits. All this to trick google into believing he is a person of eminence. [...] I went back to his IMDb and checked the cast details of some of the movies he is part of. And I found a few dozen profiles with the exact same modus operandi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler was dealt another blow in his battle for artificial intelligence machines to be recognized as inventors on patents, after the nation's top patent court found that inventors must be humans. The term "individual" in the Patent Act refers only to humans, meaning an AI doesn't count as an inventor on a patentable invention, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday. From a report: The decision lines up with courts in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Australia that have refused to accept Thaler's argument. His only currently existing win is from a South African court that said an AI can be a patent inventor. Unless the US Supreme Court steps in, the Federal Circuit is typically the final authority on US patent matters -- hearing all such appeals from federal district courts and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Thaler already plans to appeal to the high court, his attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP, said. The Federal Circuit adopted a "narrow and textualist approach" to the Patent Act, Abbott said. "It ignores the purpose of the Patent Act and the outcome that AI-generated inventions are now unpatentable in the United States," he said. "That is an outcome with real negative social consequences."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency lending platform Hodlnaut has frozen withdrawals, deposits and token swaps because of "difficult market conditions," the firm said on Monday. From a report: The Singapore-based firm, which was founded in 2019, said it wants to stabilize liquidity and preserve assets while it works on a long-term solution. Hodlnaut also withdrew its application to the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a license in the city-state, even though it received in-principle approval from the central bank in March. The company is the latest in a line of crypto lenders that have buckled under market pressure this year, with Celsius Network and Voyager Digital both filing for bankruptcy protection. The total crypto market cap has slumped to about $1 trillion from more than $3 trillion in November. One of the key components of the market downturn was the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which had billions of dollars of exposure to numerous companies in the crypto universe. Hodlnaut announced in June that it had "no exposure or loans" with Three Arrows Capital or Celsius.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the near future, "Top Gun" may get a reboot. Roughly one year from now, fighter pilots will begin flying with helmets outfitted with visors that can augment reality and place digital replicas of enemy fighter jets in their field of vision. For the first time, pilots will get to fly in the air and practice maneuvering against imitations of highly advanced aircraft made by countries like China and Russia. From a report: It is also part of the U.S. military's investment of billions into virtual reality, artificial intelligence and algorithms to modernize the way it fights wars. The pilot training solution, created by military technology company Red6, will be rolled out to the Air Force first as part of its $70 million contract with the branch. Company and former military officials say the technology will be a safe, cheap and realistic way to ensure American pilots are prepared to battle the best fighter planes in the world. "Better, faster, cheaper," said Daniel Robinson, founder and chief executive of Red6. "This is the way we'll train them in the future." The military wants new 'robot ships' to replace sailors during battle For decades, the way America trains its fighter pilots has changed little. Aviators from the Air Force and Navy often start their training flying on a Northrop T-38 jet, often using a similar syllabus to one that has been around since the 1960s. From there, they train on planes, such as F-22 or F-35 fighter jets, that they will fly during their career.Read more of this story at Slashdot.