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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.

President Warren Harding's blue silk pajamas. Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves. The Star Spangled Banner, stitched by Betsy Ross. Scripts from the television show "M*A*S*H." Nearly two million irreplaceable artifacts that tell the American story are housed in the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, the biggest museum complex in the world. Now, because of climate change, the Smithsonian stands out for another reason: Its cherished buildings are extremely vulnerable to flooding, and some could eventually be underwater. From a report: Eleven palatial Smithsonian museums and galleries form a ring around the National Mall, the grand two-mile park lined with elms that stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol. But that land was once marsh. And as the planet warms, the buildings face two threats. Rising seas will eventually push in water from the tidal Potomac River and submerge parts of the Mall, scientists say. More immediately, increasingly heavy rainstorms threaten the museums and their priceless holdings, particularly since many are stored in basements. At the American History Museum, water is already intruding. It gurgles up through the floor in the basement. It finds the gaps between ground-level windows, puddling around exhibits. It sneaks into the ductwork, then meanders the building and drips onto display cases. It creeps through the ceiling in locked collection rooms, thief-like, and pools on the floor. Staff have been experimenting with defenses: Candy-red flood barriers lined up outside windows. Sensors that resemble electronic mouse traps, deployed throughout the building, that trigger alarms when wet. Plastic bins on wheels, filled with a version of cat litter, to be rushed back and forth to soak up the water. So far, the museum's holdings have escaped damage. But "We're kind of in trial and error," said Ryan Doyle, a facilities manager at the Smithsonian. "It's about managing water." An assessment of the Smithsonian's vulnerabilities, released last month, reveals the scale of the challenge: Not only are artifacts stored in basements in danger, but floods could knock out electrical and ventilation systems in the basements that keep the humidity at the right level to protect priceless art, textiles, documents and specimens on display. Of all its facilities, the Smithsonian ranks American History as the most vulnerable, followed by its next door neighbor, the National Museum of Natural History.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's first AR headset will be released in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to a research note from analyst Ming-chi Kuo. The Verge: Kuo predicted back in March that the headset would be released sometime next year, and is now also providing more technical information on the device. The headset will have two processors, according to Kuo, one with "the same level of computing power as M1" and one lower-end chip to handle input from the various sensors. For example, Kuo says that the headset has "at least 6-8 optical modules to simultaneously provide continuous video see-through AR services." The headset is also said to have two 4K OLED microdisplays from Sony. Kuo cites the headset's "Mac-level (PC-level) computing power," its ability to be operated untethered, and its wide range of applications as factors that will differentiate it from competitors. Various reports on the device have disagreed as to whether it will be wholly independent or rely on an iPhone or a separate processor box to stream content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're on alert overload. Stray comments and offhand requests once shouted across the office now blink and buzz at us from Microsoft Teams and Slack. Our communication has grown fragmented, spread across myriad apps we have to learn, conform to, remember to check. From a report: Meanwhile, personal texts and social-media mentions have bled into the workday after all this time at home, adding another layer of distraction to our time on the clock. Why put your phone on silent if the boss isn't hovering over you? Our culture has evolved to accommodate rapid communication, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and it can be mentally taxing. Many of us struggle to conjure up that brilliant thought that hit right before the notification burst in. "Your memory is just overflowing with information," she says. It doesn't make for great circumstances for getting work done, but there are ways individuals, managers and organizations can contend with the onslaught. Dr. Mark's research finds people switch screens an average of 566 times a day. Half the time we're interrupted; the other half we pull ourselves away. Breaks -- even mindless ones like scrolling Facebook -- can be positive, replenishing our cognitive resources, Dr. Mark says. But when something external diverts our focus, it takes us an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to get back to our original task, she has found. (Folks often switch to different projects in between.) And it stresses us out. Research using heart monitors shows that the interval between people's heart beats becomes more regular when they're interrupted, a sign they're in fight-or-flight mode. The onus is on teams and organizations to create new norms, Dr. Mark says. If individuals just up and turn off their notifications they'll likely be penalized for missing information. Instead, managers should create quiet hours where people aren't expected to respond. "It's a matter of relearning how to work," she says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Africa's government is considering new public-health restrictions to contain a fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus that scientists say has a high number of mutations that may make it more transmissible and allow it to evade some of the immune responses triggered by previous infection or vaccination. From a report: The warning from the South African scientists and the Health Ministry, issued in a hastily called news briefing Thursday, prompted the World Health Organization to call a meeting of experts for Friday to discuss whether to declare the new strain a "variant of concern." The WHO uses this label for virus strains that have been proven to be more contagious, lead to more serious illness or decrease the effectiveness of public-health measures, tests, treatments or vaccines. Other variants of concern include the Delta variant that is now dominant world-wide and the Alpha variant that drove a deadly wave of infections across Europe and the U.S. last winter and spring. While the scientists said they were still studying the exact combination of mutations of the new variant -- currently dubbed B.1.1.529 -- and how they affect the virus, its discovery underlines how changes to the virus's genome continue to pose a risk to the world's emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quit a day job to do TikTok full-time? Why not, say some Europeans. From a report: About one in 10 are considering leaving their main job in the next six months and instead earning money from social media, e-commerce or trading platforms, according to a Morgan Stanley poll of 12,500 people. "The received wisdom is that as Covid subsides, and with modest extra flexibility from employers, the majority of people will re-embrace their prior routines," a team of Morgan Stanley economists and equity analysts wrote in a note. "Our data suggest otherwise." With labor shortages already weighing on Europe's economic rebound, wage inflation will persist for longer if the Great Resignation -- the post-pandemic trend of people leaving the workforce -- carries on, the bank said. "It reveals a far greater potential risk of structurally higher wages," Morgan Stanley wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new digital currency backed by bank deposits is set for a test run in Japan as early as this year, an effort that will involve the nation's top banks and about 70 other companies. From a report: The test run will focus on the digital currency's feasibility for business transactions, such as large payments between companies. The group aims to bring the currency into circulation as soon as the latter half of 2022. The Digital Currency Forum announced the trial on Wednesday. The Forum includes MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., Mizuho Bank, Japan Post Bank and the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone group. East Japan Railway, which operates Tokyo's busy Yamanote Line, top trading house Mitsubishi Corp., Kansai Electric Power and retail giant Seven & i Holdings are also involved. Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange service provider Decurret, a subsidiary of Internet Initiative Japan, and others will lead the trial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Tor anonymity network has gone through a major change as the Tor software team has released a new version of its software that updated how .onion domains look and work. More specifically, the Tor Project has done away with 16-character-long .onion domains, also known as v2 addresses, and replaced them with 56-character-long domains, known as v3. The move, driven by a need to improve the Tor network's privacy, security, and resilience to deanonymization attacks, was announced years in advance, and the entire process took more than a year to complete. But despite the Tor team's best efforts to announce the move in advance, new numbers compiled and released by dark web monitoring company DarkOwl show that the Tor network is still made up in large part of servers running older v2 domains. "In the last six weeks, DarkOwl's Vision platform has observed an average of 104,095 active .onion services across both address schemes of which: 62% are v2 addresses and 38% are v3 addresses," the company said last week. DarkOwl says it detected a spike in new v3 domains in July 2021, which coincided with the Tor team adding a fullscreen warning before accessing v2 domains in preparation for the browser's v11 release this fall. This resulted in more than 2,900 v3 domains being registered in the last two weeks of July alone. However, as the Tor team noted in its own v2-to-v3 analysis in September, the number of v3 domains is trending up. The report adds that v2 sites are expected to go extinct in the coming year. "The reason is that as most Tor node operators will update their servers to versions that will not support v2 domains, there will be no Tor relays capable of routing the traffic to these old-gen domains," report The Record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden will require essential, nonresident travelers crossing U.S. land borders, such as truck drivers, government and emergency response officials, to be fully vaccinated beginning on Jan. 22, the administration planned to announce Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: A senior administration official said the requirement, which the White House previewed in October, brings the rules for essential travelers in line with those that took effect earlier this month for leisure travelers, when the U.S. reopened its borders to fully vaccinated individuals. Essential travelers entering by ferry will also be required to be fully vaccinated by the same date, the official said. The rules pertain to non-U.S. nationals. American citizens and permanent residents may still enter the U.S. regardless of their vaccination status, but face additional testing hurdles because officials believe they more easily contract and spread COVID-19 and in order to encourage them to get a shot. [...] About 47 million adults in the U.S. remain unvaccinated, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later. After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away. Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes returned to the witness stand Tuesday, confirming key aspects of the prosecutor's allegations behind the 11 counts of fraud she faces, but asserting that there was nothing wrong in what she did. The prosecution has repeatedly shown jurors lab reports emblazoned with logos of the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Schering-Plough. Witnesses from those companies who worked with Theranos testified that the use of the logos was unauthorized and they were unaware of it at the time. Holmes admitted that she was the one who had added the logos to Theranos lab reports and sent them to Walgreens as she pursued a deal to put her blood-testing startup's diagnostic machines in the pharmacy's retail stores. "This work was done in partnership with those companies and I was trying to convey that," she said by way of explanation. "I wish I had done it differently," she added. Addressing another key point made by the prosecution, Holmes said that when Theranos switched from using on-site analyzers to process samples to a centralized lab approach, it used third-party devices rather than its own equipment as an "invention" because there were too many samples to handle. Witnesses have testified that Theranos' signature blood-testing machine repeatedly failed quality assurance tests and delivered erroneous results. Holmes said the company didn't tell its business partners about this arrangement because it was a trade secret. She rebutted the prosecution's arguments about some of the alleged misrepresentations she made to investors, the media and business partners, affirming that she had received specific positive reports from employees and outside experts and believed their statements to be true. When presented with company emails and PowerPoint presentations, defense attorney Kevin Downey asked Holmes about specific instances brought up by the prosecution. Jurors saw an email sent to Holmes by then-chief company scientist, biochemist Ian Gibbons, about the development of Theranos' fourth-generation device. "Our immunoassays match the best that can be done in clinical labs and work with small blood samples. Generally our assays are faster by a factor of three to 10 than kits," Gibbons wrote. Downey asked Holmes what she took that email to mean. "I understood that the 4 series could do any blood test," she replied. If Holmes is convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison. She may also face "a $250,000 fine and full or partial restitution to investors, totaling nearly $155 million," adds NBC News.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California is in the process of approving new guidelines for math education in public schools that "pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons," writes Joe Hong via the San Francisco Standard. The new approach would have been approved earlier this month but has been delayed due to the attention and controversy it has received. Here's an excerpt from the report: When Rebecca Pariso agreed to join a team of educators tasked in late 2019 with California's new mathematics framework, she said she expected some controversy. But she didn't expect her work would be in the national spotlight. [...] Every eight years (PDF), a group of educators comes together to update the state's math curriculum framework. This particular update has attracted extra attention, and controversy, because of perceived changes it makes to how "gifted" students progress -- and because it pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons. San Francisco pioneered key aspects of the new approach, opting in 2014 to delay algebra instruction until 9th grade and to push advanced mathematics courses until at least after 10th grade as a means of promoting equity. San Francisco Unified School District touted the effort as a success, asserting that algebra failure rates fell and the number of students taking advanced math rose as a result of the change. The California Department of Education cited those results in drafting the statewide framework. But critics have accused the district of using cherry-picked and misleading assertions to bolster the case for the changes. The intent of the state mathematics framework, its designers say, is to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California's achievement gaps for Black, Latino and low-income students, which remain some of the largest in the nation. At the heart of the wrangling lies a broad agreement about at least one thing: The way California public schools teach math isn't working. On national standardized tests, California ranks in the bottom quartile among all states and U.S. territories for 8th grade math scores. Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages long, is little more than a set of suggestions. Its designers are revising it now and will subject it to 60 more days of public review. Once it's approved in July, districts may adopt as much or as little of the framework as they choose -- and can disregard it completely without any penalty. "It's not mandated that you use the framework," said framework team member Dianne Wilson, a program specialist at Elk Grove Unified. "There's a concern that it will be implemented unequally."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla announced last week via a support article that its Firefox Lockwise password manager app will reach end-of-life on December 13th. The final release versions are 1.8.1 (iOS) and 4.0.3 (Android) and will no longer be available to download or reinstall after that date. The Verge reports: What started in 2018 as a small experimental mobile app called Lockbox ended up bringing a way to access saved passwords and perform autofills on iOS, Android, and desktop devices to a small but enthusiastic following of Firefox fans. The app was also later adapted as a Firefox extension. It seemed like it was apt to stick around for the long run. The support article recommends that users continue accessing passwords using the native Firefox browsers on desktop and mobile. In an added note on the support site, Mozilla suggests that later in December, the Firefox iOS app will gain the ability to manage Firefox passwords systemwide. The note alludes to Mozilla adopting the features of Lockwise and eventually integrating them into the Firefox browser apps natively on all platforms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A security researcher has publicly disclosed an exploit for a new Windows zero-day local privilege elevation vulnerability that gives admin privileges in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server. BleepingComputer reports: As part of the November 2021 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft fixed a 'Windows Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability' vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-41379. This vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri, who found a bypass to the patch and a more powerful new zero-day privilege elevation vulnerability after examining Microsoft's fix. Yesterday, Naceri published a working proof-of-concept exploit for the new zero-day on GitHub, explaining that it works on all supported versions of Windows. "This variant was discovered during the analysis of CVE-2021-41379 patch. the bug was not fixed correctly, however, instead of dropping the bypass," explains Naceri in his writeup. "I have chosen to actually drop this variant as it is more powerful than the original one." Furthermore, Naceri explained that while it is possible to configure group policies to prevent 'Standard' users from performing MSI installer operations, his zero-day bypasses this policy and will work anyway. BleepingComputer tested Naceri's 'InstallerFileTakeOver' exploit, and it only took a few seconds to gain SYSTEM privileges from a test account with 'Standard' privileges, as demonstrated in [this video]. When BleepingComputer asked Naceri why he publicly disclosed the zero-day vulnerability, we were told he did it out of frustration over Microsoft's decreasing payouts in their bug bounty program. A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement: "We are aware of the disclosure and will do what is necessary to keep our customers safe and protected. An attacker using the methods described must already have access and the ability to run code on a target victim's machine." Naceri recommends users wait for Microsoft to release a security patch, as attempting to patch the binary will likely break the installer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Component shortages have been wreaking havoc on the tech industry since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and smartphones are no outlier. Decelerated production schedules have given way to smaller stock and delayed launches. All of this has resulted in a decline in smartphone sales in Q3 of 2021 compared to Q3 2020, Gartner reported today. According to numbers the research firm shared today, sales to consumers dropped 6.8 percent. A deficit in parts like integrated circuits for power management and radio frequency has hurt smartphone production worldwide. "Despite strong consumer demand, smartphone sales declined due to delayed product launches, longer delivery schedule, and insufficient inventory at the channel," Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner, said in a statement accompanying the announcement. The analyst added that the production schedules of "basic and utility" phones were more affected by supply constraints than "premium" ones. As a result, premium smartphone sales actually increased during this time period, even though smartphone sales overall declined. Still, shoppers were left with limited options, Gartner noted. Samsung ended up winning the greatest market share (20.2 percent), thanks to its foldable smartphones. Apple's quarterly market share (14.2 percent) was aided by new features in its iPhones, namely the A15 processor and improvements to battery life and the camera sensor. Gartner also pointed to interest in 5G.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan is allocating about $5.2 billion of its fiscal 2021 supplementary budget to support advanced semiconductor manufacturers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The government plans to invest about 400 billion yen in a new factory set up by the world's largest contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Kumamoto prefecture, southwest Japan. The remaining 200 billion yen will go toward setting up other new factories, with projects under consideration including by U.S. memory chipmaker Micron Technology and Japan's Kioxia Holdings. The Japanese government is considering making semiconductors a new area of focus under a law targeting companies developing high-speed 5G technologies, meaning it would approve investment plans for their factories under the revised law. [...] The 600 billion yen fund would cover subsidies over several years. Companies would receive support under the condition that they would increase production when there is supply shortage, as the Japanese government hopes to ensure a stable domestic chip supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. banking agencies provided more insight into their plans for regulating cryptocurrencies on Tuesday, issuing a to-do list of their priorities for next year and announcing a new policy that would require banks to seek permission before offering digital currency products. From a report: The Federal Reserve and other banking agencies released an agenda outlining areas of focus, including how they plan to weigh custody, crypto-backed loans and the possibility of capital standards, according to a joint statement. Separately, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that banks must get an additional sign-off from the regulator before engaging with digital coins. "Throughout 2022, the agencies plan to provide greater clarity on whether certain activities related to crypto-assets conducted by banking organizations are legally permissible," the Fed, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance said in the statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While China's sweeping new data privacy laws have left tech companies confused about how to comply, they also put the U.S. even further behind in the global race to set digital standards. From a report: China enacted its Personal Information Privacy Law earlier this month, following Europe as the second major international player to have its own sweeping data privacy regulations. The law, regarded as China's version of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, is a set of rules for how businesses can collect, use, process, share and transfer personal information. Another Chinese data regulation, the Data Security Law, went into effect Sept. 1. The laws aim to protect Chinese citizens from the private sector, while the Chinese government still has easy access to personal data. In May, influential U.S. business groups sent comments, viewed by Axios, to the National Peopleâ(TM)s Congress protesting that the draft lawâ(TM)s vague language, monetary penalties and criminal liabilities were harsh. They also said it would hurt innovation by being overly prescriptive and burdensome. The U.S. still does not have a federal data privacy law, and China's move could allow it to set future global norms on its terms. Meanwhile, tech companies doing business in China will have to navigate the vague new rules, and that could be expensive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has demanded that 13 foreign and mostly U.S. technology companies be officially represented on Russian soil by the end of 2021 or face possible restrictions or outright bans. From a report: The demand, from state communications regulator Roskomnadzor late on Monday, gave few details of what exactly the companies were required to do and targeted some firms that already have Russian offices. Foreign social media giants with more than 500,000 daily usershave been obliged to open offices in Russia since a new law took effect on July 1. The list published on Monday names the companies for the first time. It lists Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and messaging app Telegram, all of which Russia has fined this year for failing to delete content it deems illegal. Apple, which Russia has targeted for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the mobile applications market, was also on the list. None of those companies responded to requests for comment. Roskomnadzor said firms that violate the legislation could face advertising, data collection and money transfer restrictions, or outright bans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple sued the NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, in federal court on Tuesday, another setback for the beleaguered firm and the unregulated spyware industry. From a report: The lawsuit is the second of its kind -- Facebook sued the NSO Group in 2019 for targeting its WhatsApp users -- and represents another consequential move by a private company to curb invasive spyware by governments and the companies that provide their spy tools. Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company's Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give NSO's government clients full access to a target's iPhone or Android smartphone. Apple is also asking for unspecified damages for the time and cost to deal with what the company argues is NSO's abuse of its products. Apple said it would donate the proceeds from those damages to organizations that expose spyware. Since NSO's founding in 2010, its executives have said that they sell spyware to governments only for lawful interception, but a series of revelations by journalists and private researchers have shown the extent to which governments have deployed NSO's Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists and dissidents. Apple executives described the lawsuit as a warning shot to NSO and other spyware makers. "This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter," Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview on Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Electronics has decided to build an advanced U.S. chip plant in Texas, a win for the Biden administration as it prioritizes supply chain security and greater semiconductor capacity on American soil. From a report: South Korea's largest company has decided on the city of Taylor, roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) from its giant manufacturing hub in Austin, a person familiar with the matter said. Samsung and Texas officials will announce the decision Tuesday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because the news hasn't been made public. A Samsung representative said it hadn't made a final decision and declined further comment. Samsung is hoping to win more American clients and narrow the gap with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Its decision, which came months after de facto leader Jay Y. Lee was released from prison on parole, follows plans by TSMC and Intel Corp. to spend billions on cutting-edge facilities globally. The industry triumvirate is racing to meet a post-pandemic surge in demand that has stretched global capacity to the max, while anticipating more and more connected devices from cars to homes will require chips in future. The plant will cost Samsung $17 billion to set up, according to WSJ.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is preparing a bill to regulate cryptocurrencies, which will be presented to parliament in the session starting Nov. 29. From a report: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government proposes to help the central bank create an official digital currency, according to a description of the bill, posted on parliament's website Tuesday. "The bill also seeks to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India, however, it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and its uses," the text reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A short update on the projected launch date of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope came out of NASA on Monday, and it wasn't exactly a heart-warming missive. From a report: The large, space-based telescope's "no earlier than" launch date will slip from December 18 to at least December 22 after an "incident" occurred during processing operations at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. That is where the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency. "Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket," NASA said in a blog post. "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm reportedly has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on Arm licenses. From a report: The pair launched Windows on Arm laptops in 2016, and so far we haven't seen any devices launch without a Qualcomm chip. XDA-Developers reports that Qualcomm has had an exclusivity deal on Windows on Arm, but that it's set to expire soon. The report comes days after MediaTek held its executive summit with members of the media last week, where it shared its ambitions to build its own chip for Windows on Arm PCs. If Microsoft's exclusivity deal is about to end with Qualcomm, this could open the door for many more vendors supporting Windows on Arm. Samsung, MediaTek, and even Apple's M1 chips could eventually support Windows on Arm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Italy's antitrust watchdog has fined Apple and Amazon a total of more than 200 million euros ($225 million) for cooperating to restrict competition in the sale of Apple and Beats branded products in violation of European Union rules. From a report: An investigation found that provisions in a 2018 agreement between the U.S. tech giants limited access to Italy's Amazon marketplace to selected resellers, the Italian Competition Authority said Tuesday. The watchdog slapped Apple with a 134.5 million euro ($151.32 million) fine and Amazon with a 68.7 million euro ($77.29 million) penalty. It also ordered them to end the restrictions and give resellers access in a "non-discriminatory manner." Both Apple and Amazon said they would appeal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The lead committee in the European Parliament writing new tech rules passed measures Tuesday that could impact major U.S. and European tech companies. Lawmakers voted to approve measures in the draft Digital Markets Act that could mean:1. A company's messaging or social media app is interoperable, to prevent users feeling forced to use one or the other because that's where their friends are2. A ban on behavioral targeting of ads to minors3. Fines of as much as 20% of a company's global annual sales for breaches for the law Companies identified as "gatekeepers" and therefore set to be accountable under the DMA include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Booking.com, and could later hit online marketplaces Zalando and Alibaba.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Niantic, the augmented reality platform that's developing games like Pokemon GO, raised $300 million from Coatue, valuing the company at $9 billion. The San Fransisco-based startup, which initially spun out of Google, will use this money to build what it calls the "real-world metaverse." As early as August, Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke has referred to the metaverse -- at least, the one that renders us bound to VR headsets, like in "Ready Player One" -- as a "dystopian nightmare." Unlike Facebook, which changed its company name to Meta to signal its investment in VR technology, Niantic wants to develop technology that brings people closer to the outside world. Earlier this month, Niantic unveiled its Lightship AR Developer Kit (ARDK), which makes tools to develop AR games publicly available for free to anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Unity game engine. "At Niantic, we believe humans are the happiest when their virtual world leads them to a physical one," Hanke said at the time. "Unlike a sci-fi metaverse, a real-world metaverse will use technology to improve our experience of the world as we've known it for thousands of years." The funding will help expand the ARDK, which has already been used by companies like Coachella, Historic Royal Palaces, Universal Pictures, SoftBank, Warner Music Group and the PGA of America to create augmented reality experiences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader tlhIngan writes: We know Spotify has many complaints about Apple, specifically how Apple Music competes with Spotify. This has resulted in many complaints about unfair competition from Spotify, enough to bring about the scrutiny of European regulators. However, it appears Spotify might be the architect of their own complaints, from not supporting AirPlay 2 (which they rapidly backtracked on due to customer complaints), to now, not supporting the HomePod natively. Apple introduced third-party support for the HomePod, which allows the speaker to natively play audio from streaming services without requiring an iOS device. Most notably, when the list of providers supporting the feature was announced by Apple, Spotify was conspicuously absent. Now Apple users are demanding Spotify add support for HomePod or they are switching to Apple Music.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from SciTechDaily: Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and MIT used the power of nanotechnology to discover a new way that cancer can disarm its would-be cellular attackers by extending out nanoscale tentacles that can reach into an immune cell and pull out its powerpack. Slurping out the immune cell's mitochondria powers up the cancer cell and depletes the immune cell. The new findings, published in Nature Nanotechnology, could lead to new targets for developing the next generation of immunotherapy against cancer. To investigate how cancer cells and immune cells interact at the nanoscale level, [corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, and co-director of the Brigham's Center for Engineered Therapeutics] and colleagues set up experiments in which they co-cultured breast cancer cells and immune cells, such as T cells. Using field-emission scanning electron microscopy, they caught a glimpse of something unusual: Cancer cells and immune cells appeared to be physically connected by tiny tendrils, with widths mostly in the 100-1000 nanometer range. (For comparison, a human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers). In some cases, the nanotubes came together to form thicker tubes. The team then stained mitochondria -- which provide energy for cells -- from the T cells with a fluorescent dye and watched as bright green mitochondria were pulled out of the immune cells, through the nanotubes, and into the cancer cells. "By carefully preserving the cell culture condition and observing intracellular structures, we saw these delicate nanotubes and they were stealing the immune cells' energy source," said co-corresponding author Hae Lin Jang, PhD, a principal investigator in the Center for Engineered Therapeutics. "It was very exciting because this kind of behavior had never been observed before in cancer cells. This was a tough project as the nanotubes are fragile and we had to handle the cells very gently to not break them." The researchers then looked to see what would happen if they prevented the cancer cells from hijacking mitochondria. When they injected an inhibitor of nanotube formation into mouse models used for studying lung cancer and breast cancer, they saw a significant reduction in tumor growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports on the progress being made to develop a "smart artificial pancreas" that senses blood glucose and administers insulin accordingly. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be compared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the temperature of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still "hybrid," meaning that users are required to estimate the carbohydrates in a meal they're about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose control. Nevertheless, the artificial pancreas is a triumph of biotechnology. It is a triumph of hope, as well. We well remember a morning in late December of 2005, when experts in diabetes technology and bioengineering gathered in the Lister Hill Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. By that point, existing technology enabled people with diabetes to track their blood glucose levels and use those readings to estimate the amount of insulin they needed. The problem was how to remove human intervention from the equation. A distinguished scientist took the podium and explained that biology's glucose-regulation mechanism was far too complex to be artificially replicated. [Boris Kovatchev, a scientist at the University of Virginia, director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology, and a principal investigator of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project] and his colleagues disagreed, and after 14 years of work they were able to prove the scientist wrong. It was yet another confirmation of Arthur Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." [...] Progress toward better automatic control will be gradual; we anticipate a smooth transition from hybrid to full autonomy, when the patient never intervenes. Work is underway on using faster-acting insulins that are now in clinical trials. Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action. What comes next? Well, what else seems impossible today?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A rare manuscript by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein goes under the hammer in Paris on Tuesday, with auctioneers aiming for a stratospheric price tag. Phys.Org reports: The manuscript, containing preparatory work for Einstein's key achievement the theory of relativity, is estimated at between two and three million euros (2.3-3.4 million), according to Christie's which is hosting the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house. "This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction," Christie's said in a statement. The 54-page document was handwritten in 1913 and 1914 in Zurich, Switzerland, by Einstein and his colleague and confidant, Swiss engineer Michele Besso. Christie's said it was thanks to Besso that the manuscript was preserved for posterity. This was "almost like a miracle" since the German-born genius himself would have been unlikely to hold on to what he considered to be a simple working document, Christie's said. Today, the paper offers "a fascinating plunge into the the mind of the 20th century's greatest scientist," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Australia on Sunday became the first gigawatt scale grid in the world to reach zero demand when the combined output of rooftop solar and other small non-scheduled generators exceeded all the local customer load requirements. Renew Economy reports: The landmark event was observed by several energy analysts, including at Watt Clarity and NEMLog, where Geoff Eldridge noted that a number of measures for South Australia demand notched up record minimums for system normal conditions. It was later confirmed by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which noted that "scheduled" demand -- local demand minus the output of rooftop solar and small unscheduled generators such as small solar farms and bio-energy -- fell to minus 38MW in a five minute period at 1235pm (grid time, or AEST). Minimum demand is now possibly the biggest challenge for market operators like AEMO, because under current market settings it needs to have a certain amount of synchronous generation to maintain system strength and grid stability. It does this by running a minimum amount of gas generation, and through the recent commissioning of spinning machines called synchronous condensers that do not burn fuel. It also needs a link to a neighboring grid, in this case Victoria, so it can export surplus production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rolls-Royce has announced that its all-electric plane, dubbed the "Spirit of Innovation," is the fastest of its kind in the world after it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 k/h) in recent flight tests. Gizmodo reports: In a recent news release, the company, not to be mistaken for the car company owned by BMW, claimed that the Spirit of Innovation set three new world records earlier this week. On flight tests carried out on Nov. 16, Rolls-Royce said its aircraft reached a top speed of 345.4 mph (555.9 km/h) over 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), exceeding the current record by 132 mph (213 k/h). It broke another record in a subsequent 9.3-mile (15 kilometer) flight, during which it reached 330 mph (532.1 km/h), surpassing the current record by 182 mph (292.8 km/h). The Spirit of Innovation didn't stop there, though. Rolls-Royce affirms that it smashed another record when it reached 9,842.5 feet (3,000 meters) in 202 seconds, beating the current record by 60 seconds. In the company's view, it also took the title of the world's fastest all-electric vehicle when it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during its flight tests. The company's aircraft is powered by a 400kW electric powertrain and "the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace." "Following the world's focus on the need for action at COP26, this is another milestone that will help make 'jet zero' a reality and supports our ambitions to deliver the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonize transport across air, land and sea," CEO Warren East said in the news release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Seattle Times reports:The litany of manufacturing defects on the 787 Dreamliner is expanding as Boeing engineers take apart planes and discover new or more widespread issues, a Federal Aviation Administration internal memo indicates. The FAA memo, which was circulated internally Monday and reviewed by The Seattle Times, points to new concerns about a previously unreported defect caused by contamination of the carbon fiber composite material during fabrication of the large structures that make up the 787's wing, fuselage and tail. The memo also adds detail about the small out-of-tolerance gaps that have been discovered throughout the airplane structure: at the joins of the large fuselage sections, at a forward pressure bulkhead and in the structure surrounding the passenger and cargo doors. The FAA memo, which lists safety conditions affecting airplanes currently in service worldwide, states that these tiny gap defects are thought to be present in more than 1,000 Dreamliners. These are not considered an immediate safety concern but could cause premature aging of the airframe. Bloomberg reports these delays may hamper Boeing's efforts to pay down its $62 billion debt:Boeing is working to find and repair tiny structural imperfections about the width of a piece of paper in the carbon-fiber aircraft while addressing quality lapses among suppliers and their subcontractors. Both issues came to light as the Chicago-based planemaker did a deep dive in its factories and production system in the wake of two fatal crashes of its 737 Max... A Boeing spokesman wouldn't confirm a Wall Street Journal report Friday that deliveries aren't likely to restart until February or March... For each manufacturing glitch that strays from its design specifications, Boeing has to file a so-called notice of escapement with the FAA that evaluates the problem, recommends a fix and provides an engineering analysis to back up its finding. The company is still working through those notices, along with a broader inspection regimen for the 787, according to people familiar with the situation. There are about 20 locations on Dreamliners where potential quality breaches have been identified, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. At a Boeing fabrication plant in South Carolina, for example, mechanics are inspecting the area surrounding doors at the rear of the aircraft for tiny gaps, one of the people said. Dreamliners continue to roll off the line in North Charleston at a slow rate of two planes a month, the person said. Conducting the inspections can be time consuming and costly since, in some areas of the plane, workers have to tear out passenger cabins to gain access... The planemaker had initially requested permission to inspect a handful of planes and, if they passed, use its regimen for the rest of the undelivered aircraft, the people said. The FAA rejected that plan, and company and the regulator haven't yet agreed on an appropriate level of inspections, said one of the people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three years ago Strella Biotechnology launched to "try to reduce waste in the U.S. food system — a problem that by some estimates creates as much emissions as 33 million passenger vehicles," reports the Washington Post. Alternate URL here and here.) And today the founder's warehouse-monitoring device — about half the size of a shoebox — watches over about 15% of all the apples grown in America:Already, agriculture contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than the total of all the cars, planes, trains and trucks in the world. The pressure to grow more food is leading to deforestation in the Amazon, the drying up of rivers and a greater demand for fossil fuel-based fertilizer. Anything that can be done to reduce waste and increase the productivity of existing agricultural land is a big win for the climate. [Strella CEO and founder] Sizov, 24, wants to eliminate food waste one fruit at a time... Sizov chanced upon a website that described the climate impact of food waste — up to 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to analyses from ReFed, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce food waste... The problem will only intensify as the global population grows, experts say. By 2050, the United Nations expects there will be another 2 billion mouths to feed around the world, an increase of more than 25% in just three decades. And as countries such as China and India grow richer, their populations are gradually changing their eating habits: more meat, more eggs — and a bigger carbon footprint tied to raising all of those animals and clearing off land to grow more food. "If you reduce food loss and waste by 50%, you can save a lot of production emissions, but you can also avoid a heck of a lot of deforestation," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University's Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment. Searchinger explained that after accounting for the fact that an acre of farmland could otherwise be an acre of forest, the carbon footprint of food skyrockets as trees soak up so much carbon dioxide. Eliminating waste also happens to be a way to help farmers and grocery stores earn more money, since the more efficiently food makes it to consumers, the more cash ends up with the people who've done the selling... [T]hat's where Strella's sensors come in. They monitor ethylene, a gas key to the ripening of fruits and vegetables. Apples accelerate their production of ethylene as they grow sweeter inside the storerooms. Once they're ready, the gas levels off, telling Strella's monitors that they're ready to be sent to supermarkets. Wait too long and the apples turn brown or grow mealy. If producers are lucky, they can try to break even by turning those apples into juice or applesauce. If they're unlucky, the overripe apples end up in compost or landfills. Ultimately one out of every five apples doesn't make it from the warehouse to the supermarket, the Post points out (while some others lose their crunch). So Sizov hopes their waste-reducing technology will catch on because it's also a way to reduce business losses. "There's a direct alignment of a sustainable goal with a profitability incentive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), " All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites. "In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources."[T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a "determining role" in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn't done enough "to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook's algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world. But there's a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn't just amplifying misinformation. The company is also funding it. An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world. Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook's app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher's own web site, reports Technology Review:Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform's design also didn't sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today... Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook.An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019... At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said... 75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook's content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds. Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It's a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem "is now happening on a global scale."Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook's payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale... Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it's AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation. Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they'd misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said "we've invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so." Google's spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding "We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This week Marvel released an epic three-minute trailer hyping December's releases of Spider-Man: No Way Home. "It comes after the initial trailer, which focused on the movie's multiversal villains, broke YouTube records over the summer," CNET reported Tuesday (racking up 355.5 million views in its first 24 hours). But then one more universe collided... Basically, some internet wise guys re-edited the trailer, splicing its audio over clips from the Fox Kids' 1994 cartoon series Spider-Man. (Opening credits here.) "This has no right being this good," argues CNET — especially since the actual movie's trailer arrived "amidst a ludicrous amount of fanfare and hype." But it's all oddly appropriate, since CNET notes the upcoming movie features five sinister villains from nearly 20 years of Spider-Man movies, reaching back to the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield era ("likely spurred on by the events of the Disney Plus Loki series.") So maybe it's fitting that it was also invaded by the television cartoon universe...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's push to manufacturer more products domestically gets an in-depth look from CNET — including a new Intel chip factory outside of Phoenix. CNET calls it a fork in the road "after squandering its lead because of a half decade of problems modernizing its manufacturing..."With "a decade of bad decisions, this doesn't get fixed overnight," says Pat Gelsinger, Intel's new chief executive, in an interview. "But the bottom is behind us and the slope is starting to feel increasingly strong...." More fabs are on the way, too. In an enormous empty patch of dirt at its existing Arizona site, Intel has just begun building fabs 52 and 62 at a total cost of $20 billion, set to make Intel's most advanced chips, starting in 2024. Later this year, it hopes to announce the U.S. location for its third major manufacturing complex, a 1,000-acre site costing about $100 billion. The spending commitment makes this year's $3.5 billion upgrade to its New Mexico fab look cheap. The goal is to restore the U.S. share of chip manufacturing, which has slid from 37% in 1990 to 12% today. "Over the decade in front of us, we should be striving to bring the U.S. to 30% of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing," Gelsinger says... But returning Intel to its glory days — and anchoring a resurgent U.S. electronics business in the process — is much easier said than done. Making chips profitably means running fabs at maximum capacity to pay off the gargantuan investments required to stay at the leading edge. A company that can't keep pace gets squeezed out, like IBM in 2014 or Global Foundries in 2018. To catch up after its delays, Intel now plans to upgrade its manufacturing five times in the next four years, a breakneck pace by industry standards. "This new roadmap that they announced is really aggressive," says Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap. "I don't have any idea how they are going to accomplish all of that...." Gelsinger has a tech-first recovery plan. He's pledged to accelerate manufacturing upgrades to match the technology of TSMC and Samsung by 2024 and surpass them in 2025. He's opening Intel's fabs to other companies that need chips built through its new Intel Foundry Services (IFS). And he's relying on other foundries, including TSMC, for about a quarter of Intel's near-term chipmaking needs to keep its chips more competitive during the upgrades. This three-pronged strategy is called IDM (integrated design and manufacturing) 2.0. That's a new take on Intel's philosophy of both designing and making chips. It's more ambitious than the future some had expected, in which Intel would sell its factories and join the ranks of "fabless" chip designers like Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm that rely on others for manufacturing... Shareholders may not like Gelsinger's spending-heavy strategy, but one community really does: Intel's engineers... Gelsigner told the board that Intel is done with stock buybacks, a financial move in which a company uses its cash to buy stock and thereby increase its price. "We're investing in factories," he told me. "That's going to be the use of our cash...." "We cannot recall the last time Intel put so many stakes in the ground," said BMO Capital Markets analyst Ambrish Srivastava in a July research report after Intel announced its schedule. Intel will even outpace Moore's law, Gelsinger tells CNET — more than doubling the transistor count on processors every two years. "I believe that you're going to see from 2025 to 2035 a very healthy period for Moore's Law-like behavior." Although that still brings some risk to Intel's investments if they have to pass the costs on to customer, a Linley Group analyst points out to CNET. "Moore's Law is not going to end when we can't build smaller transistors. It's going to end when somebody says I don't want to pay for smaller transistors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptographers are upset that "crypto" sometimes now refers to cryptocurrency, reports the Guardian:This lexical shift has weighed heavily on cryptographers, who, over the past few years, have repeated the rallying cry "Crypto means cryptography" on social media. T-shirts and hoodies trumpet the phrase and variations on it; there's a website dedicated solely to clarifying the issue. "'Crypto' for decades has been used as shorthand and as a prefix for things related to cryptography," said Amie Stepanovich, executive director of Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado Law School and creator of the pro-cryptography T-shirts, which have become a hit at conferences. "In fact, in the term cryptocurrency, the prefix crypto refers back to cryptography...." [T]here remains an internecine feud among the tech savvy about the word. As Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who has spent years involved in cryptography activism, pointed out, the cryptography crowd is by nature deeply invested in precision — after all, designing and cracking codes is an endeavor in which, if you get things "a little wrong, it can blow the whole thing up...." "Strong cryptography is a cornerstone of the way that people talk about privacy and security, and it has been under attack for decades" by governments, law enforcement, and "all sorts of bad actors", Higgins said. For its defenders, confusion over terminology creates yet another challenge. Stepanovich acknowledged the challenge of opposing the trend, but said the weight of history is on her side. "The study of crypto has been around for ever," she said. "The most famous code is known as the Caesar cipher, referring to Julius Caesar. This is not new." Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development, and she is not ready to concede to "a concept that may or may not survive government regulation".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zebra stripes are unique to each individual zebra, reports LiveScience, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. And even if you look at the three different zebra species, their skin is always the same color: black (according to Tim Caro, a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of California, Davis). But this still doesn't answer the question of whether their fur is black with white stripes or white with black stripes. For that, we have to look to the zebra's melanocytes, or the cells that produce pigment for their fur. Although zebras have black skin, different developmental processes determine their fur color, just like a light-skinned person can have dark hair, Caro said. In fact, zebras actually have more light-colored hair than dark — their bellies are usually light — so it may seem that zebras are white with black stripes. But that's not the case. Here's why: Every piece of hair — both light and dark — grows from a follicle filled with melanocyte cells, according to a 2005 review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. These cells produce a pigment that determines the color of hair and skin. This pigment is known as melanin; a lot of melanin leads to darker colors, like dark brown or black, while less melanin leads to lighter colors, such as hazel or blond, Live Science previously reported. Zebras' black fur is chock-full of melanin, but melanin is absent from white fur, in essence, because the follicles that make up the stripes of white hair have "turned off" melanocytes, meaning they don't churn out pigment. The production of melanin from melanocytes is "prevented during the development of a white hair, but not of a black hair," Caro told Live Science in an email. In other words, for zebras, the animals' default state is to produce black hair, making them black with white stripes, according to Brittanica....This unique pattern may keep away biting flies, according to research by Caro and his colleagues. In a study published in 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they found that African horseflies landed less frequently on horses wearing striped or checked rugs than they did on horses wearing solid-colored rugs. These biting flies can carry diseases that are fatal to zebras.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president emeritus of the Great Lakes College Association writes that "nearly all colleges have re-adopted in-person education this fall, in spite of delta variant risks... "As it turns out, student enthusiasm for remote learning is mixed at best, and in some cases students have sued their colleges for refunds. But it is not simply student opinion that has driven this reversion to face-to-face education."Indeed, students are far better off with in-person learning than with online approaches. Recent research indicates that the effects of remote learning have been negative. As the Brookings Institution Stephanie Riegg reports, "bachelor's degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures — including math, reading, writing, and English — relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs...." [R]esearch on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you — the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it...? Research tells us the most effective teachers — those who are most successful in having their students learn — are those who establish an emotional relationship with their students in an environment of care and trust. As former teacher and now neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang tells us, emotion is necessary for learning to occur: "Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about.... Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts...." Today we have the benefit of extensive research documenting the short-term and long-term importance of these social-educational practices. Research based on the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently finds that having meaningful outside-of-class relationships with faculty and advisors increases not only learning but graduation from college and employment after graduation. It is also worth noting that Gallup-Purdue University public opinion research affirms the idea that people believe these personal relationships in college matter. A study of 30,000 graduates reports that they believe "what students are doing in college and how they are experiencing it... has a profound relationship to life and career." Specifically, "if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being." Since empirical research documents the powerful impact of meaningful human relationships on learning while in college as well as on graduate's adult lives, and people believe it matters, do we dare replace it with technology?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Given the widespread understanding that sophisticated hackers are regularly using zero-day vulnerabilities to break into high-value systems, why is it that when I search for "zero day" on Australia's most popular job search engine only one "real" job comes up? Is the security of the Internet totally dependent on dedicated hobbyists, part-time showboats, and people willing to take meagre bug bounties (on average paying $3,650 for a critical vulnerability) instead of selling their findings (sometimes for millions of dollars) to dubious buyers? Are they all in-house security people hunting for zero-days as part of their regular responsibilities? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Where are all the jobs preventing zero-day exploits?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In a rock concert-like atmosphere, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced that his government will build an oceanside 'Bitcoin City' at the base of a volcano..." reports the Associated Press. "A bond offering would happen in 2022 entirely in Bitcoin, Bukele said, wearing his signature backwards baseball cap. And 60 days after financing was ready, construction would begin."The city will be built near the Conchagua volcano to take advantage of geothermal energy to power both the city and Bitcoin mining — the energy-intensive solving of complex mathematical calculations day and night to verify currency transactions. The government is already running a pilot Bitcoin mining venture at another geothermal power plant beside the Tecapa volcano... The government will provide land and infrastructure and work to attract investors. The only tax collected there will be the value-added tax, half of which will be used to pay the municipal bonds and the rest for municipal infrastructure and maintenance. Bukele said there would be no property, income or municipal taxes and the city would have zero carbon dioxide emissions. "Invest here and earn all the money you want," Bukele told the cheering crowd in English at the closing of the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference being held in El Salvador. CNN adds some interesting details:Likening his plan to cities founded by Alexander the Great, Bukele said Bitcoin City would be circular, with an airport, residential and commercial areas, and feature a central plaza designed to look like a bitcoin symbol from the air. "If you want bitcoin to spread over the world, we should build some Alexandrias," said Bukele, a tech savvy 40-year-old who in September proclaimed himself "dictator" of El Salvador on Twitter in an apparent joke. El Salvador plans to issue the initial bonds in 2022, Bukele said, suggesting it would be in 60 days time. Samson Mow, chief strategy officer of blockchain technology provider Blockstream, told the gathering the first 10-year issue, known as the "volcano bond", would be worth $1 billion, backed by bitcoin and carrying a coupon of 6.5% [the annual interest paid on a bond]. Half of the sum would go to buying bitcoin on the market, he said. Other bonds would follow. After a five year lock-up, El Salvador would start selling some of the bitcoin used to fund the bond to give investors an "additional coupon", Mow said, positing that the value of the cryptocurrency would continue to rise robustly. "This is going to make El Salvador the financial center of the world," he said... Once 10 such bonds were issued, $5 billion in bitcoin would be taken off the market for several years, Mow said. "And if you get 10 more countries to do these bonds, that's half of bitcoin's market cap right there." The "game theory" on the bonds gave first issuer El Salvador an advantage, Mow argued, saying: "If bitcoin at the five-year mark reaches $1 million, which I think it will, they will sell bitcoin in two quarters and recoup that $500 million."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

National Geographic reports:About a million years ago, an asteroid smacked into the normally tranquil surface of Mars. The impact released a fountain of debris, and some of the rocky fragments pierced the sky, escaping the planet's gravity to journey through the dark. Some of the rocks eventually found their way to Earth and survived the plunge through our planet's atmosphere to thud into the surface-including a hefty 15-pound shard that crashed into Morocco in 2011.... Determining what part of Mars these meteorites came from is a critical part of piecing together the planet's history — but it's proven to be a major scientific challenge. Now, with the assistance of a crater-counting machine learning program, a team of researchers studying the depleted shergottites may have finally cracked the case: They concluded that these geologic projectiles came from a single crater atop Tharsis, the largest volcanic feature in the solar system. This ancient volcanic behemoth on Mars is adorned with thousands of individual volcanoes and extends three times the area of the continental United States. It was built over billions of years by countless magma injections and lava flows. It is so heavy that, as it formed, it effectively tipped the planet over by 20 degrees. If these meteorites do come from Tharsis, as the analysis published in Nature Communications suggests, then scientists have their hands on meteorites that can help identify the infernal forces that fueled the construction of this world-tipping edifice. "This could really change the game about how we understand Mars," says Luke Daly, a meteorite expert at the University of Glasgow who was not involved with the study. Debris from meteor impacts tend to also form smaller craters — so the scientists trained their machine learning tools to scan orbital images of Mars to find appropriately-sized crazers (less than two thirds of a mile long). "It quickly found about 90 million, says Kosta Servis, a data scientist at Curtin University and co-author of the study..." But after sifting through the data, "the team identified 19 large craters in volcanic regions on Mars that were surrounded by multiple secondary craters — a sign that these planetary scars could be as young as the 1.1-million-year-old crater they sought..."Out of those 19 craters, just two were excavated from youthful volcanic deposits by an impact event 1.1 million years ago: crater 09-00015 and Tooting crater. The latter (named after a district in London) looks to have been formed by a powerful oblique impact — the kind of collision that would propel a lot of Martian meteorites into space..." Buoyed by their discovery, Lagain's team is hoping to identify the source craters of other Martian meteorites — including some of the very oldest, which could reveal more about Mars's waterlogged past.... Machine learning "is a really inventive way of trying to tackle this problem," says Lauren Jozwiak, a planetary volcanologist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory not involved with the study. "Boy, I hope this method works," she says, because if it does, "it would be really cool to take this and apply it to other planets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2020 Microsoft's GitHub acquired NPM (makers of the default package manager for Node.js). The company's web page boasts that npm "is a critical part of the JavaScript community and helps support one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world." But now BleepingComputer reports on two security flaws found (and remediated) in its software registry. Names of private npm packages on npmjs.com's 'replica' server (consumed by third-party services) were leaked — but in addition, a second flaw could've allowed attackers "to publish new versions of any existing npm package that they do not own or have rights to, due to improper authorization checks." In a blog post this week GitHub's chief security officer explained the details:During maintenance on the database that powers the public npm replica at replicate.npmjs.com, records were created that could expose the names of private packages. This briefly allowed consumers of replicate.npmjs.com to potentially identify the names of private packages due to records published in the public changes feed. No other information, including the content of these private packages, was accessible at any time. Package names in the format of @owner/package for private packages created prior to October 20 were exposed between October 21 13:12:10Z UTC and October 29 15:51:00Z UTC. Upon discovery of the issue, we immediately began work on implementing a fix and determining the scope of the exposure. On October 29, all records containing private package names were removed from the replication database. While these records were removed from the replicate.npmjs.com service on this date, the data on this service is consumed by third-parties who may have replicated the data elsewhere. To prevent this issue from occuring again, we have made changes to how we provision this public replication database to ensure records containing private package names are not generated during this process. Second, on November 2 we received a report to our security bug bounty program of a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to publish new versions of any npm package using an account without proper authorization. We quickly validated the report, began our incident response processes, and patched the vulnerability within six hours of receiving the report. We determined that this vulnerability was due to inconsistent authorization checks and validation of data across several microservices that handle requests to the npm registry. In this architecture, the authorization service was properly validating user authorization to packages based on data passed in request URL paths. However, the service that performs underlying updates to the registry data determined which package to publish based on the contents of the uploaded package file. This discrepancy provided an avenue by which requests to publish new versions of a package would be authorized for one package but would actually be performed for a different, and potentially unauthorized, package. We mitigated this issue by ensuring consistency across both the publishing service and authorization service to ensure that the same package is being used for both authorization and publishing. This vulnerability existed in the npm registry beyond the timeframe for which we have telemetry to determine whether it has ever been exploited maliciously. However, we can say with high confidence that this vulnerability has not been exploited maliciously during the timeframe for which we have available telemetry, which goes back to September 2020. BleepingComputer adds:Both announcements come not too long after popular npm libraries, 'ua-parser-js,' 'coa,' and 'rc' were hijacked in a series of attacks aimed at infecting open source software consumers with trojans and crypto-miners. These attacks were attributed to the compromise of npm accounts [1, 2] belonging to the maintainers behind these libraries. None of the maintainers of these popular libraries had two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled on their accounts, according to GitHub. Attackers who can manage to hijack npm accounts of maintainers can trivially publish new versions of these legitimate packages, after contaminating them with malware. As such, to minimize the possibility of such compromises from recurring in near future, GitHub will start requiring npm maintainers to enable 2FA, sometime in the first quarter of 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DevNull127 writes: Saturday afternoon, 91 geeks huddled around a Twitch stream to hear the winners announced for the 27th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. This year's competition attracted 71 entries, and $10,396 was raised for a cash-prize fund (which is divided among all the game authors whose entries ranked in the top two-thirds, with the first-place finisher receiving a prize in the hundreds of dollars and the last entry in the top two-thirds receiving $10). But there's also a long list of fun non-cash prizes available in a "prize pool," and starting with the author of the first-place game, authors take their turn choosing. (Prizes included everything from 0.055 in Ethereum cryptocurrency to the conversion of your text adventure into a professionally-produced audiobook.) After a six-week period where the general public played and voted on the 71 games, the first-place winner was chosen. It had a strange title — "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One." Its welcome screen jokingly promises "the latest in ASCII graphic technology to occasionally write high-res, text-based images directly onto a screen that is eighty characters wide or more..." In this text adventure game you play a teenager who starts out....playing a text adventure game (called "THE GLUTTONOUS ELF: Adventure #1"), with the game itself ultimately offering a kind of meta-commentary on the world of text adventures over the years. Perhaps not surprisingly, this game also won a second award — the contest's special prize for the entry most-liked by the other game author's who'd entered this year's competition. This year's runner-up was "Dr Horror's House of Terror". It's not to be confused with the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing movie with a similar name — except perhaps with some playful and intentional overlap which becomes apparent as the game progresses. And a splendid time was had by all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software..." reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice. "By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux." The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi. "We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments...No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. city of Carmel, Indiana (population: 102,000) has 140 roundabouts, "with over a dozen still to come," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) "No American city has more. The main reason is safety; compared with regular intersections, roundabouts significantly reduce injuries and deaths. "But there's also a climate benefit."Because modern roundabouts don't have red lights where cars sit and idle, they don't burn as much gasoline. While there are few studies, the former city engineer for Carmel, Mike McBride, estimates that each roundabout saves about 20,000 gallons of fuel annually, which means the cars of Carmel emit many fewer tons of planet-heating carbon emissions each year. And U.S. highway officials broadly agree that roundabouts reduce tailpipe emissions. They also don't need electricity, and, unlike stoplights, keep functioning after bad storms — a bonus in these meteorologically turbulent times. "Modern roundabouts are the most sustainable and resilient intersections around," said Ken Sides, chairman of the roundabout committee at the Institute of Transportation Engineers... A recent study of Carmel's roundabouts by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety found that injury crashes were reduced by nearly half at 64 roundabouts in Carmel, and even more at the more elaborate, dogbone-shaped interchanges... [V]ehicular fatalities in Carmel, according to a city study, are strikingly low; the city logged 1.9 traffic deaths per 100,000 people in 2020. In Columbus, Indiana, an hour or so south, it was 20.8. (In 2019, the national average was 11.) The Times points out other advantages — they can also be more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, and alleviate rush-hour backups. But Carmel's former city engineer just argues it's an improvement over an older roadway system which "doesn't put a lot of faith in the driver to make choices. "They're used to being told what to do at every turn."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday Rockstar Games issued an update in the Announcements section of the company's web site "regarding the unexpected technical issues that came to light as part of the launch of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition." (See Slashdot's earlier coverage here and here.) "Firstly, we want to sincerely apologize to everyone who has encountered issues playing these games..." the Rockstar Games Team wrote:The Grand Theft Auto series — and the games that make up this iconic trilogy — are as special to us as we know they are to fans around the world. The updated versions of these classic games did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality, or the standards our fans have come to expect. We have ongoing plans to address the technical issues and to improve each game going forward. With each planned update, the games will reach the level of quality that they deserve to be. A new Title Update is on the way in the coming days for all versions of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition that will address a number of issues. We will update everyone as soon as it is live. In the meantime, it pains us to mention that we are hearing reports of members of the development teams being harassed on social media. We would kindly ask our community to please maintain a respectful and civil discourse around this release as we work through these issues. While one of the goals of the Definitive Editions was to allow players to enjoy these games on modern platforms for many years to come, we also understand that some of you would still like to have the previous classic versions available for purchase. We will be adding the classic PC versions of Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas back to the Rockstar Store shortly as a bundle. Additionally, everyone who has purchased Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition for PC from the Rockstar Store through June 30, 2022, will receive these classic versions in their Rockstar Games Launcher library at no additional cost. We will update everyone as soon as these are back in the Rockstar Store. Once again, we'd like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding while we work through these updates to ensure these games meet everyone's justifiably high standards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports on researcher Michael Worobey, "who specializes in tracing the genetic evolution of viruses," who has now found "considerable evidence that the virus arose in an animal, and did not start circulating until the end of 2019." One case especially stood out — that of a 41-year-old accountant who allegedly got sick on December 8, 2019 and who had no connection to the market. The case has been cited as evidence the pandemic must not have started at the market. Worobey found records that showed the man didn't become ill with Covid-19 until later in December and that his December 8 problem was related to his teeth. "This is corroborated by hospital records and a scientific paper that reports his COVID-19 onset date as 16 December and date of hospitalization as 22 December," Worobey wrote in a commentary in the journal Science. That would make a seafood vendor who worked at the market and who got sick December 11, 2019, the earliest documented case, Worobey said. Other research helped Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote. "It tells us that there's a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place that the pandemic started," Worobey told CNN. "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market...." The journal Science subjected Worobey's research to outside scrutiny before publishing it. Interestingly, Science also published a letter in May in which Worobey had joined 17 other scientists to urge the investigation of both the "natural origin" and "lab leak" theories. But now while he still believes the Chinese government should've investigated the lab leak theory, "holy smokes — is there a lot of evidence against it, and in favor of natural origin," Worobey tells CNN. And he's now telling the Los Angeles Times that his new research "takes the lab-leak idea almost completely off the table.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there." Or, as he explained his research to the Washington Post, "It becomes almost impossible to explain that pattern if that epidemic didn't start there." A virologist at Texas A&M University who was one of the coronavirus experts giving SARS-CoV-2 its name called Worobey's research "detailed and compelling," while a virologist at Tulane University also tells the Post the new research "shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak."Read more of this story at Slashdot.