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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.

Recently Australian developer Geoffrey Huntley announced they'd created a 20-terabyte archive of all NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. But one NFT startup company now says they tried downloading the archive — and discovered most of it was zeroes.Many of the articles are careful to point out "we have not verified the contents of the torrent," because of course they couldn't. A 20TB torrent would take several days to download, necessitating a pretty beefy internet connection and more disk space to store than most people have at their disposal. We at ClubNFT fired up a massive AWS instance with 40TB of EBS disk space to attempt to download this, with a cost estimate of $10k-20k over the next month, as we saw this torrent as potentially an easy way to pre-seed our NFT storage efforts — not many people have these resources to devote to a single news story. Fortunately, we can save you the trouble of downloading the entire torrent — all you need is about 10GB. Download the first 10GB of the torrent, plus the last block, and you can fill in all the rest with zeroes. In other words, it's empty; and no, Geoff did not actually download all the NFTs. Ironically, Geoff has archived all of the media articles about this and linked them on TheNFTBay's site, presumably to preserve an immutable record of the spread and success of his campaign — kinda like an NFT... We were hoping this was real... [I]t is actually rather complicated to correctly download and secure the media for even a single NFT, nevermind trying to do it for every NFT ever made. This is why we were initially skeptical of Geoff's statements. But even if he had actually downloaded all the NFT media and made it available as a torrent, this would not have solved the problem... a torrent containing all the NFTs does nothing to actually make those NFTs available via IPFS, which is the network they must be present on in order for the NFTs to be visible on marketplaces and galleries.... [A]nd this is a bit in the weeds: in order to reupload an NFT's media to IPFS, you need more than just the media itself. In order to restore a file to IPFS so it can continue to be located by the original link embedded in the NFT, you must know exactly the settings used when that file was originally uploaded, and potentially even the exact version of the IPFS software used for the upload. For these reasons and more, ClubNFT is working hard on an actual solution to ensure that everybody's NFTs can be safely secured by the collectors themselves. We look forward to providing more educational resources on these and other topics, and welcome the attention that others, like Geoff, bring to these important issues. Their article was shared by Slashdot reader long-time Slashdot reader GradiusCVK (who is one of ClubNFT's three founders). I'd wondered suspiciously if ClubNFT was a hoax, but if this PR Newswire press release is legit, they've raised $3 million in seed funding. (And that does include an investment from Drapen Dragon, co-founded by Tim Draper which shows up on CrunchBase). The International Business Times has also covered ClubNFT, identifying it as a startup whose mission statement is "to build the next generation of NFT solutions to help collectors discover, protect, and share digital assets."Co-founder and CEO Jason Bailey said these next-generation tools are in their "discovery" phase, and one of the first set of tools that is designed to provide a backup solution for NFTs will roll out early next year. Speaking to International Business Times, Bailey said, "We are looking at early 2022 to roll out the backup solution. But between now and then we should be feeding (1,500 beta testers) valuable information about their wallets." Bailey says while doing the beta testing, he realized that there are loopholes in the NFT storage systems and only 40% of the NFTs were actually pointing to the IPFS, while 40% of them were at risk — pointing to private servers. Here is the problem explained: NFTs are basically a collection of metadata, that define the underlying property that is owned. Just like in the world of internet documents, links point to the art and any details about it that are being stored. But links can break, or die. Many NFTs use a system called InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, which let you find a piece of content as long as it is hosted somewhere on the IPFS network. Unlike in the world of internet domains, you don't need to own the domain to really make sure the data is safe. Explaining the problem which the backup tool will address, Bailey said, "When you upload an image to IPFS, it creates a cryptographic hash. And if someone ever stops paying to store that image on IPFS, as long as you have the original image, you can always restore it. That's why we're giving people the right to download the image.... [W]e're going to start with this protection tool solution that will allow people to click a button and download all the assets associated with their NFT collection and their wallet in the exact format that they would need it in to restore it back up to IPFS, should it ever disappear. And we're not going to charge any money for that." The idea, he said, is that collectors should not have to trust any company; rather they can use ClubNFT's tool, whenever it becomes available, to download the files locally... "One of the things that we're doing early around that discovery process, we're building out a tool that looks in your wallet and can see who you collect, and then go a level deeper and see who they collect," Bailey said. Bailey said that the rest of the tools will process after gathering lessons based on user feedback on the first set of solutions. He, however, seemed positive that the talks of the next set of tools will begin in the Spring of next year as the company has laid a "general roadmap."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An Australian company is part of an international effort to recycle dangerous space junk into rocket fuel — in space," reports the Guardian. Slashdot reader votsalo shared their report (which also looks at some of the other companies working on the problem of space debris).South Australian company Neumann Space has developed an "in-space electric propulsion system" that can be used in low Earth orbit to extend the missions of spacecraft, move satellites, or de-orbit them. Now Neumann is working on a plan with three other companies to turn space junk into fuel for that propulsion system... Another U.S. company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods. And Neumann Space's propulsion system can use those metal rods as fuel — their system ionises the metal which then creates thrust to move objects around orbit. Chief executive officer Herve Astier said when Neumann was approached to be part of a supply chain to melt metal in space, he thought it was a futuristic plan, and would not be "as easy as it looks". "But they got a grant from NASA so we built a prototype and it works," he said... Astier says it is still futuristic, but now he can see that it's possible. "A lot of people are putting money into debris. Often it's to take it down into the atmosphere and burn it up. But if it's there and you can capture it and reuse it, it makes sense from a business perspective, because you're not shipping it up there," he said. "It's like developing a gas station in space."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"E-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020 compared to the prior year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data," reports Politico — and this year "online sales are on track to outpace that record..." "Now, cities, climate scientists and companies are trying to figure out the consequences for the planet."The most recent research is starting to incorporate more of the complexities of retail. In January, MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab published a study that simulated hundreds of thousands of those kinds of scenarios and found online shopping to be more sustainable than traditional retail 75 percent of the time... Most research suggests that ordering goods for delivery is more beneficial for the environment because it means people are making fewer individual shopping trips. The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year. If they drove there, it was likely in a gas-powered vehicle. Plus, there tends to be higher energy demands at storefronts compared to warehouses. But that scale "could easily tip in the other direction," according to a study of the U.S. market published last spring by the sustainable investment firm Generation. The firm's researchers found that e-commerce is 17 percent more carbon efficient than traditional retail, but could change with a few tweaks to their assumptions, such as the number of items purchased in a single visit, the amount of packaging and the efficiency of last-mile delivery... In an email, Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila pointed to findings by company scientists that suggest online shopping produces fewer emissions than driving to shop at a store; for instance, the company estimates that a single delivery van trip can take 100 round-trip car journeys off the road, on average. During the pandemic, customers made fewer trips to Whole Foods Market stores and other brick-and-mortar Amazon locations and shifted to home delivery, which also lowered emissions. But take a step back, and a bigger, more complex picture emerges. From 2019 to 2020, Amazon's U.S. sales jumped 36 percent to $263.5 billion. By the company's own account, its overall emissions spiked 19 percent, equivalent to running 15 coal plants for one year. More fossil fuel use and investments in buildings, data servers and transportation were key drivers. That figure reflects its response to consumer demand during Covid-19, but doesn't capture progress Amazon made, Davila said. He said the company tracks the amount of carbon per dollar of gross merchandise sales — a concept known as carbon intensity — and by that measure, Amazon decreased the amount of carbon per purchase last year by 16 percent. In a blog post in June, a company scientist argued that this metric allows high-growth companies like Amazon to identify efficiencies. Amazon also reduced emissions from the electricity it bought by 4 percent due to new investments in clean energy, despite expanding its buildings' square footage. The company is about two-thirds of the way toward 100 percent renewable energy — a key pillar of the company's plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. Emissions from deliveries are expected to decrease as Amazon deploys 100,000 electric vans in the coming decade. Davila did not disclose what portion of the company's fleet that accounts for today. The director of MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab also warns that cardboard boxes are some of the largest carbon pollutants in the system regardless of the method of delivery. (Politico points out most packaging ultimately "ends up in a landfill or is burned to produce energy, generating 105.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, according to federal data.") That data also shows only 9% of plastic gets recycled, "because flexible plastic films and pouches and many take out containers still aren't recyclable. Neither are plastic bags, unless consumers bring them to the grocery store." One recycler tells the site that many companies are now promising to use more recycled materials in their packaging, including Amazon, PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Target — but urges "extended producer responsibility," in which companies (not taxpayers) cover the costs of cleaning up their packaging.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub's annual report on its user community "combined telemetry data from over four million repositories with direct survey from over 12,000 developers to identify current trends among software development companies and open-source projects," reports InfoQ. ZDNet notes the data shows that remote developers "aren't planning to go back to the office."Before the pandemic, only 41% of developers worked at an office either full-time or part-time, but of the 12,000 surveyed in GitHub's 2021 State of the Octoverse report, just 10.7% expect to go back to the office after the pandemic ends... Pre-pandemic, 28.1% of developers had hybrid arrangements but after the pandemic, 47.8% expect some hybrid arrangements. Before the pandemic, 26.5% worked in places where all workers were remote. Now, 38.8% expect to be fully remote. ZDNet also highlighted some other general statistics:GitHub says it now has 73 million developer users and that it gained 16 million new users in 2021. Users created 61 million new repositories and there were 170 million pull requests that got merged into projects... One of the biggest projects on GitHub is the container software Docker, which has a whopping 632,000 contributors from 215 countries and consists of 49,593 packages. That's more than a magnitude larger than the estimated number of Linux contributors — and implies that for every 117 developers now on GitHub, there was one who contributed to Docker. Meanwhile, 2021's most popular language rankings for GitHub are the same as 2020, with one exception: Shell has risen one position to become the 8th most popular language, edging out C (which now ranks as the 9th most popular language). And InfoQ summarized some other interesting statistics from GitHub's report:Good, reliable, and up-to-date documentation can boost productivity by 50%.Documentation is often under-invested. The number of pull requests merged within the workday goes down by 17% with each additional reviewer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) looked back nearly 30 years to the glory days of the world's first true 32-bit CD based home console — Commodore's Amiga32. In the final three months of 1993, the company had sold 100,000 in just three months in Europe, outselling Sega four to one, "and claiming 38% market share of all CD ROM drives sold in the U.K. (according to the Gallup Weekly Report)." But the next year all over, Mike Bouma writes, summarizing reports from both Amiga Report and Wikipedia:Operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable, but Commodore was not able to meet demand for new units because of component supply problems — and could not release the (already made) Amiga CD32 stock in the United States due to a legal patent issue! Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, causing the CD32 to be discontinued only eight months after its debut. This look back was apparently inspired by a report from retro gaming vlogger Lady Decade about what then happened to the Amiga CD32 after Commodore's demise — and about the system that would've been its successor: the lost Amiga64. Earlier this week Mike shared the news that attempts to make a 'Doom' clone for the Amiga 500 have already led to a demo map (for both Amiga 500s with one megabyte of RAM and Atari STs with two megabytes of RAM). And for more vintage retro-gaming goodness, Mike adds that "In my opinion the most impressive game released for the system was Super Stardust by Bloodhouse, published by Team17."It was the sequel to Stardust for the Amiga 500 and Atari STE. Bloodhouse merged with Terramarque (famous for their impressive Amiga 500 game Elfmania) to form Housemarque, which is still making games as of today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One way to help eliminate carbon emissions and thereby fight global warming may be to exploit fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars..." argues a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (shared by Slashdot reader DanDrollette). Though fusion energy would involve controllng a "plasma" gas of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, progress is being made — and the upside could be tremendous:One major advantage of using fusion as an energy source is that its underlying physics precludes either a fuel meltdown — such as what happened at Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daichi — or a runaway reaction, such as at Chernobyl. Furthermore, the amount of radioactive material that could be released in an accident in a fusion power plant system is much less than in a fission reactor. Consequently, a fusion system has much less capability to damage itself, and any damage would have much less dangerous consequences. As a result, current concepts for fusion systems may not necessitate an evacuation plan beyond the site boundary. Another advantage of fusion is that neither the fuel nor its products create the very long-lived radioactive waste that fission does, which means that fusion does not require long-term, geological storage... When and how can fusion contribute to mitigating climate change? Private companies are in a hurry to develop fusion, and many say that they will be able to put commercial fusion power on the US electric grid in the early 2030s. The total private financing in this sector is impressive, at about $2 billion... After looking over the state of publicly and privately funded fusion research, the National Academies recommended that the United States embark upon a program to develop multiple preliminary designs for a fusion pilot plant by 2028, with the goal of putting a modest amount of net electricity on the U.S. electrical grid from a pilot plant starting sometime in the years between 2035 and 2040, use the pilot plant to study and develop technologies for fusion, and have a first-of-a-kind commercial fusion power plant operational by 2050. The United Kingdom has recently announced a plan to build a prototype fusion power plant by 2040. China has a plan to begin operation of a fusion engineering test reactor in the 2030s, while the European Union foresees operation of a demonstration fusion power plant in the 2050s... We must look beyond the 2035 timeframe to see how fusion can make a major contribution, and how it can complement renewables... [P]roviding low-carbon electricity in the world market, including later in the century, is of great importance for holding climate change at bay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Although Oumuamua probably isn't some probe looking for humpbacked whales," writes Slashdot reader alaskana98, "it does continue to deliver plenty of intrigue — and controversy — for those astronomy buffs out there. "In the latest move in the war on who gets to define what exactly OuMuaMua is, Harvard astrophysicists Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb have countered the prevailing hypothesis that it is a frozen chunk of nitrogen with their own — that it is simply not possible." LiveScience reports:According to Siraj and his co-author, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Jackson and Desch's conclusion that 'Oumuamua is a nitrogen iceberg is flawed because there isn't enough nitrogen in the universe to make an object like 'Oumuamua, which is somewhere between 1,300 and 2,600 feet (400 and 800 meters) long and between 115 and 548 feet (35 and 167 m) wide. Pure nitrogen is rare, Siraj said, and has been found only on Pluto, where it makes up about 0.5% of the total mass. Even if all of the nitrogen ice in the universe was scraped off every Pluto-like planet that's predicted to exist, there still wouldn't be enough nitrogen to make 'Oumuamua.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Texas, already home to the most vulnerable power grid in the U.S., is about to be hit by a surge in demand for electricity that's twice the size of Austin's. An army of cryptocurrency miners heading to the state for its cheap power and laissez-faire regulation is forecast to send demand soaring by as much as 5,000 megawatts over the next two years. The crypto migration to Texas has been building for months, but the sheer volume of power those miners will need -- two times more than the capital city of almost 1 million people consumed in all of 2020 -- is only now becoming clear. The boom comes as the electrical system is already under strain from an expanding population and robust economy. Even before the new demand comes online, the state's grid has proven to be lethally unreliable. Catastrophic blackouts in February plunged millions into darkness for days, and, ultimately, led to at least 210 deaths. Proponents like Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott, both Republicans, say crypto miners are ultimately good for the grid, since they say the miners can soak up excess clean power and, when needed, can voluntarily throttle back in seconds to help avert blackouts. But it raises the question of what these miners will do when the state's electricity demand inevitably outstrips supply: Will they adhere to an honor system of curtailing their power use, especially when the Bitcoin price is itself so high, or will it mean even more pressure on an overwhelmed grid? Miners setting up shop in the Lone Star State can often count on a 10-year tax abatement, sales tax credits and workforce training from the state, depending on where they are located and how many jobs they add. Even without formal incentives, the cheap power prices and the state's hands-off policy toward business is often enough of a lure. The pitch is working: The grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, will account for about 20% of the Bitcoin network globally by the end of 2022, up from 8% to 10% today, according to Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain council. Right now, Ercot has somewhere between 500 and 1,000 megawatts of mining capacity, out of about 2,000 nationwide. The state grid will add another 3,000 to 5,000 megawatts of mining demand by the end of 2023, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: NASA and the nation's top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system. NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade. If successful in supporting a sustained human presence on the moon, the next objective would be Mars. NASA says fission surface power could provide sustained, abundant power no matter the environmental conditions on the moon or Mars. The reactor would be built on Earth and then sent to the moon. Submitted plans for the fission surface power system should include a uranium-fueled reactor core, a system to convert the nuclear power into usable energy, a thermal management system to keep the reactor cool, and a distribution system providing no less than 40 kilowatts of continuous electric power for 10 years in the lunar environment. Some other requirements include that it be capable of turning itself off and on without human help, that it be able to operate from the deck of a lunar lander, and that it can be removed from the lander and run on a mobile system and be transported to a different lunar site for operation. Additionally, when launched from Earth to the moon, it should fit inside a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter cylinder that's 18 feet (6 meters) long. It should not weigh more than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms). The proposal requests are for an initial system design and must be submitted by Feb. 19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Satellite trackers have been working overtime to figure out just how much dangerous debris Russia created when it destroyed one of its own satellites early Monday -- and the picture they've painted looks bleak. Multiple visual simulations of Russia's anti-satellite, or ASAT, test show a widespread cloud of debris that will likely menace other objects in orbit for years. The Verge reports: It's going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup. The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there's one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn't going anywhere anytime soon. "There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades," LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US, wrote in a blog post. Two visualizations created by the European Union's Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) network and space software company AGI reveal what likely happened in the first moment of impact when Russia's missile intercepted Kosmos 1408. They both show how the debris cloud grew instantly and spread throughout space. AGI's simulation also shows just how close the cloud comes to intersecting with the International Space Station, validating NASA's concerns and the agency's decision to have the astronauts shelter in place. Another visualization created by Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southampton specializing in space debris, shows just how widely the debris from Kosmos 1408 has spread out in space. Lewis explains that when Russia's missile hit the satellite, each of the fragments that were created got a little kick, sending them to higher and lower altitudes. Each piece is moving at a different speed depending on the height of its orbit. Lewis says that the cloud will continue to morph over time. The debris fragments in the lower orbits will fall to Earth and out of orbit more quickly, while the ones in higher orbits will stay in space much longer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has now released the most detailed footage yet of Ingenuity in flight. Gizmodo reports: The two videos were taken during the rotorcraft's 13th flight, which took place on September 4. The 16-second flight saw Ingenuity travel nearly 700 feet horizontally, at an altitude of 26 feet. The Perseverance rover recorded the rotorcraft's maneuvers using its two-camera Mastcam-Z, from a distance of about 1,000 feet away. "The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips," Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA press release. "Even at 300 meters [984 feet] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z's âright eye.' And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the 'left eye,' it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring." Recently, the scientists at NASA had to program Ingenuity to move a little faster, to compensate for the thinner atmosphere on Mars as the planet's seasons change. The helicopter's navigation system is automated and uses artificial intelligence to constantly measure and correct for environmental variables like wind speed and the level of the ground below it. "It's awesome to actually get to see this [automatic correction] occur," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot, in the same release. "It reinforces the accuracy of our modeling and our understanding of how to best operate Ingenuity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: [R]esearchers have created a hi-tech option for canines left home alone: a ball that allows them to call their owners on the old dog and bone. The device -- nicknamed the DogPhone -- is a soft ball that, when moved, sends a signal to a laptop that launches a video call, and the sound of a ringing telephone. The owner can choose whether to take the call, and when to hang up, while they can also place a call to their pet -- although the dog has to move the ball to pick up. The research, which is published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Computer-Human interaction and is being presented at the 2021 ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces Conference in Lodz, Poland, reveals how [Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, of the University of Glasgow, and first author of the research] and researchers from Aalto University in Finland settled on a soft ball to create the device. The DogPhone underwent a number of iterations to ensure it had the right level of sensitivity towards movement -- these were tested over 16 days by Hirskyj-Douglas and her nine-year-old black labrador, Zack. A diary detailing the calls between owner and pet suggests the latter did not always seem to know what he was doing -- despite having been shown five times how the system worked. "Dog rang me but was not interested in our call instead was checking for things in his bed," Hirskyj-Douglas noted during the testing of one iteration. Another entry reveals the potential pitfalls of the DogPhone. "Dog walking around wagging and then laying down. I was in a meeting so had to hang up quickly," one record reveals. The team say that many of the calls made by Zack -- who was left alone for about eight hours during testing days -- appear to have been accidents although they caution that may simply be the human perspective. "For example, when the dog triggered the system with their butt, this could have been deliberate and the dog's unique way of triggering an interaction," they write.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. TechXplore reports: By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres (about eight miles) away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, shown off to the media on Friday, will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fueled by polluting diesel. The 80-meter, 3,200-deadweight tonne ship will soon begin two years of working trials during which it will be fine-tuned to learn to maneuver on its own. The wheelhouse could disappear altogether in "three, four or five years", said Holsether, once the vessel makes its 7.5-nautical-mile trips on its own with the aid of sensors. "Quite a lot of the incidents happening on vessels are due to human error, because of fatigue for instance," project manager Jostein Braaten said from the possibly doomed bridge. "Autonomous operating can enable a safe journey," he said. On board the Yara Birkeland, the traditional machine room has been replaced by eight battery compartments, giving the vessel a capacity of 6.8 MWh -- sourced from renewable hydroelectricity. "That's the equivalent of 100 Teslas," says Braaten. The maritime sector, which is responsible for almost three percent of all man-made emissions, aims to reduce its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. Despite that, the sector has seen a rise in recent years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford CEO Jim Farley announced that the automaker is planning to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year by the end of 2023, "which will double the number of EVs it originally intended to manufacture," notes Engadget. From the report: According to Automotive News, production will be spread across the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit. Ford's current EV lineup is wildly popular, Farley said, and the demand is "so much higher" than the company expected. The Mustang Mach-E is selling on three continents, while the Ford F-150 Lightning has been popular from the time it was announced. Ford received 100,000 reservations within three weeks after it was unveiled, and that number's now up to 160,000 -- all placed with a $100 refundable deposit. Due to the high demand for the F-150, Ford previously decided to invest $250 million to boost its production, creating 450 new jobs to help it make 80,000 trucks a year. It's unclear how much that target would change now that the company is doubling its manufacturing goal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project -- a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating "a general-purpose learning robot" -- has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google's Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks. The Verge reports: "We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices," said Everyday Robot's chief robot officer Hans Peter Brondmo in a blog post. "The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors." These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There's a "head" on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation. As Brondmo indicates, these bots were first seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Everyday Robot team in 2019. The big promise that's being made by the company (as well as by many other startups and rivals) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in "unstructured" environments like homes and offices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: While one group of physicians has complained that the FDA is slow-walking the release of vaccine-approval documents, Snopes.com points out you can also see this story from a different perspective:A scheduling dispute related to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more than than 329,000 pages of COVID-19 vaccine data led to misleading social media posts in November 2021. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a schedule to process and release 500 pages every month, arguing that this is the standard rate to process FOIA requests as "reviewing and redacting records for exempt information is a time-consuming process." The FDA would start releasing this data immediately, but the full set of pages would not be processed until 2076. The FDA argued that the amount of time required to fulfill this request is due to the broad FOIA request that involves hundreds of thousands of pages. Snopes emphasizes that the FDA "did not request a delay in the release of its COVID-19 data until 2076," and notes they were responding to a request for the 329,000 pages in just 108 days with a very small number of qualified respondents."Courts do not waiver from the standard 500 page per month processing rate even when a FOIA request would take years to process..." [reads the FDA's response]. "FDA has invited Plaintiff to narrow its request by specifying records it no longer wants FDA to process and release, and Plaintiff has declined to do so. If Plaintiff decides to request fewer records, then FDA will be able to complete its processing at an earlier date." Snopes adds that the scheduling issue will be settled by a U.S. district judge next month. Slashdot reader schwit1 had shared this report from Substack, written by Aaron Siri. He is the Managing Partner of Siri & Glimstad, a law firm representing the plaintiffs in the case. From the report: The FDA has asked (PDF) a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. That is not a typo. It wants 55 years to produce this information to the public. As explained in a prior article, the FDA repeatedly promised "full transparency" with regard to Covid-19 vaccines, including reaffirming "the FDA's commitment to transparency" when licensing Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. With that promise in mind, in August and immediately following approval of the vaccine, more than 30 academics, professors, and scientists from this country's most prestigious universities requested the data and information submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA's response? It produced nothing. So, in September, my firm filed a lawsuit against the FDA on behalf of this group to demand this information. To date, almost three months after it licensed Pfizer's vaccine, the FDA still has not released a single page. Not one. Instead, two days ago, the FDA asked a federal judge to give it until 2076 to fully produce this information. The FDA asked the judge to let it produce the 329,000+ pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license its vaccine at the rate of 500 pages per month, which means its production would not be completed earlier than 2076. Further reading: FDA Wants 55 Years To Process FOIA Request Over Vaccine Data (Paywalled Reuters story)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In what's being referred to as the largest-ever cryptocurrency theft involving one person, police in Canada say they recently arrested a teen who allegedly stole $36.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from a single individual in the U.S. Engadget reports: The owner of the currency was the victim of a SIM swap attack. Their cellphone number was hijacked and used to intercept two-factor authentication requests, thereby allowing access to their protected accounts. Some of the stolen money was used to purchase a "rare" online gaming username, which eventually allowed the Hamilton Police Service, as well as FBI and US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force, to identify the account holder. Police seized approximately $7 million CAD ($5.5 million) in stolen cryptocurrency when they arrested the teen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last December, academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit demanding that Indian ISPs block access to Sci-Hub and Libgen for copyright infringement. The ongoing case now includes an intervention application from a group of social science researchers who say that blocking the platforms would result in a great societal loss to the country. TorrentFreak reports: Assisted and represented by the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a group of social science researchers affiliated with universities across Delhi has now filed an intervention application that aims to educate the High Court on the negative implications of ordering local ISPs to block the platforms. "In the application, they have demonstrated the importance of the LibGen and Sci-Hub in enabling them to continue with research and discharge professional obligations," IFF explains. "They have submitted that they cannot access countless essays/books/articles because of the exorbitant rates the publishers charge for them and that these publishers own more than 50% of the total output in social science research. The only way in which they can access these resources is by relying upon LibGen and Sci-Hub. Moreover, LibGen and Sci-Hub offer access to up-to-date research which is unavailable elsewhere." The social science researchers also draw attention to the publishers' "prohibitive pricing" models that place a serious burden on the publicly-funded academic institutions where they conduct their research. They further note that, to the best of their knowledge, individual users who rely on Sci-Hub and Libgen have not dented the profits of the publishers. "The profit margins of the [publishers] are much higher than those of enterprises in other industries such as oil, medicines and technology. Thus, the Plaintiffs' plea of blocking [Sci-Hub and Libgen] only serves their self-interest of increasing their coffers without benefitting society," their application reads. "In fact, granting the Plaintiffs' reliefs will have a detrimental impact on the social science research undertaken in India and the careers of the Applicants and those they represent before this Hon'ble Court. The unavailability of the Defendant Websites will also stunt the academic growth of the nation." After highlighting the risks to society should the Court authorize blocking, the researchers turn to the legality of doing so. They believe that while the publishers own the copyrights to the articles, the use of those articles is allowed under India's Copyright Act, at least under certain conditions. [...] Finally, the researchers say they are contesting any blocking injunction on the basis that it would be overbroad. They note that the publishers are not seeking the removal of specific infringing content but the blocking of entire websites in perpetuity. They argue that there are less restrictive measures available and these should have been sought first, rather than going directly for complete blocking of Sci-Hub and Libgen. Before issuing any blocking order, they also ask the court to consider Article 19(1) that recognizes the fundamental right to access information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockstar has issued an apology for the "unexpected technical issues" that marred the release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition last week and led to the quick removal of the PC version from Rockstar's online store. From a report: Last week, Rockstar said that the PC version of the game was being taken down "as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions." That led to reports that the package included copies of original soundtrack songs that had not been re-licensed for the new release. Other reports suggested that the original package accidentally included uncompiled source code and revealed some interesting programmer comments, including references to the infamous "hot coffee" scene that caused the game so much controversy back in 2005. Today, though, the developer admitted in a blog post that "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 noted some of the remaster's many issues in our initial impressions, which recommended that you skip the bundle for now. Since then, players have chronicled countless bugs and questionable "remastering" decisions. Those range from disturbing textures to eye-searing rainfall to hilariously broken cutscenes to car-inflating wiggles to odd-looking character models and plain old typos that weren't in the original game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The CDC's independent panel of vaccine scientists unanimously endorsed Pfizer and Moderna's boosters for all adults, one of the final regulatory steps before the U.S. can officially start distributing the doses. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend the shots. The Food and Drug Administration authorized both company's vaccine boosters for everyone 18 and over earlier on Friday, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is expected to clear the doses soon after. The panel's recommendation would open up eligibility to everyone 18 and over in the U.S., but the group more strongly endorsed shots for older Americans by saying everyone 50 and over should get a booster. It previously said people over 65 and some other high-risk people should get a third shot. Once Walensky signs off, tens of millions of Americans who've received their two initial shots at least six months ago will be eligible to get a third shot as soon as early as this weekend. "Pfizer said its booster dose was 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infection in people who had no evidence of prior infection in a clinical trial of 10,000 participants 16 years and older," notes CNBC. "Moderna didn't submit its efficacy data for its booster, telling the panel it was still gathering the data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chicago hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin said he won a $43.2 million first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby' s auction on Thursday -- and now he intends to lend it to a free Arkansas art museum. From a report: The 53-year old founder and chief executive of Citadel caused a stir Thursday when he outbid a large group of cryptocurrency investors who had crowdfunded more than $40 million earlier in the week in a frenzied attempt to win the document, the last surviving first edition in private hands. The group, organized as ConstitutionDAO, pooled funds from more than 17,000 people over a 72-hour period, with the median donation hovering around $206. ConstitutionDAO said it sought to take the Constitution copy and make it accessible to the public. "The U.S. Constitution is a sacred document that enshrines the rights of every American and all those who aspire to be," Mr. Griffin said in a statement issued by Sotheby's. "That is why I intend to ensure that this copy of our Constitution will be available for all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate." Mr. Griffin said he intends to lend the 1787 folio to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., a museum with free admission founded a decade ago by Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The museum is known for owning Charles Willson Peale's portrait of George Washington and other examples by Thomas Eakins and Marsden Hartley. [...] The hedge-fund manager is known for looking askance at cryptocurrency. Last month in a recorded talk at the Economic Club of Chicago, he told the audience that he doesn't trade in cryptocurrency because of its "regulatory uncertainty," adding that he "wished all this passion and energy that went into crypto was directed toward making the United States stronger."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Haven't seen discussion on movie and TV shows recommendations on Slashdot of late. Could the fellow readers share some movies and TV shows and documentaries from this year that they really liked watching?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Softening the blow of a monthly price hike, Disney is offering subscribers to Hulu's live TV service access to Disney+ and ESPN+ at no extra charge. From a report: Beginning on December 21, the Hulu + Live TV package will cost $5 more each month. It will go up to $70 with the ad-supported tier of Hulu's on-demand service and $76 with the ad-free Hulu. Notifications to subscribers have just gone out this morning. The new bundle builds on success the company has had with its combined offering of Disney+, ESPN+ and on-demand Hulu. That trio was announced in mid-2019, just before the record-setting launch of Disney+ and has helped ESPN+ and Hulu to continue consistent growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook has written to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), demanding that it stop setting up fake profiles to conduct surveillance on users. From a report: This comes after the Guardian revealed that the US police department had been working with a tech firm, analysing user data to help solve crimes. Facebook expressly prohibits the creation and use of fake accounts. The intent, it said, was to "create a safe environment where people can trust and hold one another accountable". "Not only do LAPD instructional documents use Facebook as an explicit example in advising officers to set up fake social media accounts, but documents also indicate that LAPD policies simply allow officers to create fake accounts for 'online investigative activity'," wrote Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel for civil rights Roy Austin in a letter outlining Facebook's policies. "While the legitimacy of such policies may be up to the LAPD, officers must abide by Facebook's policies when creating accounts on our services. The Police Department should cease all activities on Facebook that involve the use of fake accounts, impersonation of others, and collection of data for surveillance purposes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. General Services Administration said Friday that the Defense Department has solicited bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle for cloud contracts. From a report: The outreach comes after the Pentagon set aside a highly contested $10 billion contract that Microsoft had won and Amazon had challenged. The value of the new contracts is not known, but the Defense Department estimates it could run into the multiple billions of dollars. The new effort, known as Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, appears like it will bolster the top global cloud infrastructure providers, Amazon and Microsoft, although it could also provide more credibility to two smaller entities. "The Government anticipates awarding two IDIQ contracts -- one to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and one to Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) -- but intends to award to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD's requirements," the GSA said in its announcement. An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contract includes an indefinite amount of services for a specific period of time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper published on Nature: The use of psychedelic substances at sub-sensorium 'microdoses,' has gained popular academic interest for reported positive effects on wellness and cognition. The present study describes microdosing practices, motivations and mental health among a sample of self-selected microdosers (n = 4050) and non-microdosers (n = 4653) via a mobile application. Psilocybin was the most commonly used microdose substances in our sample (85%) and we identified diverse microdose practices with regard to dosage, frequency, and the practice of stacking which involves combining psilocybin with non-psychedelic substances such as Lion's Mane mushrooms, chocolate, and niacin. Microdosers were generally similar to non-microdosing controls with regard to demographics, but were more likely to report a history of mental health concerns. Among individuals reporting mental health concerns, microdosers exhibited lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress across gender. Health and wellness-related motives were the most prominent motives across microdosers in general, and were more prominent among females and among individuals who reported mental health concerns. Our results indicate health and wellness motives and perceived mental health benefits among microdosers, and highlight the need for further research into the mental health consequences of microdosing including studies with rigorous longitudinal designs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In recent years, Amazon has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers. From a report: Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry's collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had "little, if any" impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document. The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing. One 2018 document reviewing executives' goals for the prior year listed privacy regulation as a primary target for Carney. One objective: "Change or block US and EU regulation/legislation that would impede growth for Alexa-powered devices," referring to Amazon's popular voice-assistant technology. The mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers. The document listed Carney as the goal's "primary owner" and celebrated killing or amending privacy bills in "over 20 states." This story is based on a Reuters review of hundreds of internal Amazon documents and interviews with more than 70 lobbyists, advocates, policymakers and their staffers involved in legislation Amazon targeted, along with 10 former Amazon public-policy and legal employees. It is the third in a series of reports revealing how the company has pursued business practices that harm small businesses or put its own interests above those of consumers. The previous articles showed how Amazon has circumvented e-commerce regulations meant to protect Indian retailers, and how it copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands over those of other vendors on its India platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many local governments see a silver lining in the shortage of semiconductor chips that has contributed to a slowdown in the global economy. From a report: The shortage of computer chips has zapped energy from the global economy, punishing industries as varied as automakers and medical device manufacturers and contributing to fears about high inflation. But many states and cities in America are starting to see a silver lining: the possibility that efforts to sharply increase chip production in the United States will lead to a busy chip factory in their backyard. And they are racing to get a piece of the potential boom. One of those towns is Taylor, a Texas city of about 17,000 about a 40-minute drive northeast of Austin. Leaders here are pulling out all the stops to get a $17 billion Samsung plant that the company plans to build in the United States starting early next year. The city, its school district and the county plan to offer Samsung hundreds of millions of dollars in financial incentives, including tax rebates. The community also has arranged for water to be piped in from an adjacent county to be used by the plant. But Taylor is not alone. Officials in Arizona and in Genesee County in upstate New York are also trying to woo the company. So, too, are politicians in nearby Travis County, home to Austin, where Samsung already has a plant. Locations in all three states "offered robust property tax abatement" and funds to build out infrastructure for the plant, Samsung said in a filing. Congress is considering whether to offer its own subsidies to chip makers that build in the United States. Where Samsung's plant will land remains anyone's guess. The company says it is still weighing where to put it. A decision is expected to be announced any day. The federal government has urged companies like Samsung, one of the world's largest makers of the high-tech components, to build new plants in the United States, calling it an economic and national security imperative. Intel broke ground on two plants in Arizona in September and could announce the location for a planned manufacturing campus by the end of the year. This could just be a warm-up act. The Senate passed a bill to provide chip makers $52 billion in subsidies this year, a plan supported by the Biden administration that would be Washington's biggest investment in industrial policy in decades. The House has yet to consider it. Nine governors said in a letter to congressional leaders that the funding would "provide a new, powerful tool in our states' economic development toolboxes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the "smart nation," robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis are just over the horizon. The reality is very different. From a report: Singapore is often rendered as an aspiring techno-utopia. In World Economic Forum videos, in-flight magazines and its own pliant state-backed media, it offers a soft-focus science fiction backdrop where driverless buses ply routes between beach clubs and tech hubs, where robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis flit between glass-fronted public housing overflowing with lush "sky gardens." It's a place where pilot projects hint at a future -- just over the horizon -- where the intractable problems of today are automated out of existence. Where vertical farms and "NEWater" made from treated sewage cut the island's reliance on neighbouring Malaysia for food and water. Where robots care for the elderly and drones service freighters. Where warehouses and construction sites are staffed by machines, obviating the need for the migrant workers who make Singapore function, but make Singaporeans uncomfortable. Technology keeps them safe, fed and independent; secure in a scary world, but connected to it through telecoms and air travel. That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets, and by the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn't unique -- it's used in many countries. But Singapore's ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people's lives. "What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life," Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. "But ... the surveillance is what is here, now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tor Project said this week that it has seen a drop in the number of Tor relays and bridge servers and is now offering various rewards to users who help bring the number back up. From a report: Rewards include the likes of hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers and are meant to provide some sort of meaningful gift to those who help keep the Tor anonymity network alive and resilient to censorship. More specifically, the rewards will be provided to those who run "Tor bridges," which serve as entry points into the Tor network for users located in countries that block access to Tor servers. "We currently have approximately 1,200 bridges, 900 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol," said Gustavo Gus, Community Team Lead for the Tor Project. "Unfortunately, these numbers have been decreasing since the beginning of this year. It's not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren't blocked anywhere yet," the Tor Project member said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The art market wasn't ready for revolution. A rare, first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution sold for $43.2 million at Sotheby's Thursday, but it appears the winner is a private collector rather than an online group of cryptocurrency investors. From a report: The group, called ConstitutionDAO, caused a stir in art and crypto circles this week by pooling more than $40 million to bid, but an anonymous phone bidder pledged even more and will take home one of the 13 surviving official copies of the Constitution. Sotheby's sale on Thursday transforms the governing document into the priciest six pages in auction history, surpassing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's $30.8 million copy of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific notebook known as the Codex Leicester. The Constitution also exceeded the $21.3 million paid for a copy of the 1297 Magna Carta by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein in 2007. The winner remains anonymous, but the group pledging the second-highest price was ConstitutionDAO, an online organization that its founders say was formed as a lark last week and wound up pooling donations from 17,437 people to try to win the historic artifact. "What we tried to do was make the Constitution more accessible to the public," said core organizer Anisha Sunkerneni of San Francisco. "Although we might have not completely accomplished doing just that, I think we've raised enough awareness to illustrate that a DAO is another option."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A service's guts, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and Netflix has spent the last 10 years building out an expansive server network called Open Connect in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches. From a report: It's the thing that's allowed Netflix to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors and not falter when some 111 million users tuned in to Squid Game during its earliest weeks on the service. "One of the reasons why Netflix is the leader in this market and has the number of subs they do [...] is something that pretty much everybody outside of the technical part of this industry underestimates, and that is Open Connect," Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert and principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan, tells The Verge. "How many times has Netflix had a problem with their streaming service over the last 10 years?" Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself. Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Winamp is getting closer to release with a redesigned website, logo, and a new beta signup allowing users to soon test the upcoming version of the media player. Before we streamed our music, users would rip their albums or download MP3s to listen on their computer using media players. One of the most popular media players to play MP3s was Winamp, with its retro skins and animated visualizers that moved along with the music you were playing. However, Winamp had not seen any further development after its version 5.5 release in 2007. In October 2018, after Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, the developers decided to publish the leaked version on their website Winamp.com to allow everyone to use it in all its nostalgic glory. Unfortunately, while Radionomy, the owners of Winamp, said they had big plans for Winamp, no further versions have been released since then. The only new Winamp development we have seen has been by the Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) who released Preview version 1.0.20.7236 with bug fixes and improvements. You can sign up for a Winamp beta test here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Substack, written by Aaron Siri. He is the Managing Partner of Siri & Glimstad, a law firm representing the plaintiffs in the case. From the report: The FDA has asked (PDF) a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. That is not a typo. It wants 55 years to produce this information to the public. As explained in a prior article, the FDA repeatedly promised "full transparency" with regard to Covid-19 vaccines, including reaffirming "the FDA's commitment to transparency" when licensing Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. With that promise in mind, in August and immediately following approval of the vaccine, more than 30 academics, professors, and scientists from this country's most prestigious universities requested the data and information submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA's response? It produced nothing. So, in September, my firm filed a lawsuit against the FDA on behalf of this group to demand this information. To date, almost three months after it licensed Pfizer's vaccine, the FDA still has not released a single page. Not one. Instead, two days ago, the FDA asked a federal judge to give it until 2076 to fully produce this information. The FDA asked the judge to let it produce the 329,000+ pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license its vaccine at the rate of 500 pages per month, which means its production would not be completed earlier than 2076. The FDA's promise of transparency is, to put it mildly, a pile of illusions. It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021). Further reading: FDA Wants 55 Years To Process FOIA Request Over Vaccine Data (Reuters)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's startup Privateer aims to help humanity get the goods on space junk before it's too late. Space.com reports: The Hawaii-based company, whose existence Wozniak and co-founder Alex Fielding announced in September, wants to characterize the ever-expanding space debris population like never before. Privateer will do this by incorporating a variety of data, including crowdsourced information and observations made by its own sizable satellite fleet. "I think we're looking at several hundred satellites," Privateer Chief Scientific Adviser Moriba Jah told Space.com. "We won't launch all several hundred at once; we'll just slowly build it up." Orbital debris is already tracked by a number of organizations, including the U.S. military and private companies such as LeoLabs. Privateer wants to contribute to these efforts and help ramp them up, eventually creating the "Google Maps of space," as Fielding told TechCrunch last month. To make this happen, Privateer, which is still in "stealth mode" at the moment, plans to build and analyze a huge debris dataset that incorporates information from a variety of sources. "We want to basically be a company that's focused on decision intelligence by aggregating massive quantities of disparate and heterogeneous information, because there's something to be gained in the numbers," said Jah, a space debris expert who's also an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Privateer will purchase some of this information, crowdsource some of it and gather still more using its own satellites, Jah said. The first of those satellites is on track to launch this coming February, he added. This information will lead to much more than a census of space junk, if all goes according to plan. The company intends also to characterize debris objects, nailing down their size, shape and spin rate, among other features. "The catalogs of objects out there all treat things like they're spheres," Jah said. "We're going to take it beyond the sphere, to what the thing more realistically looks like and is." Such information will allow satellite operators and others in the space community to better gauge the threat posed by debris objects and improve their predictions about how long pieces of junk will stay aloft, he added. Privateer will make some of its analyses and data freely available for the public good and sell others to customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesseractic shares a report from New Scientist, written by Chen Ly: A satellite has been successfully powered by iodine for the first time. Iodine performed better than the traditional propellant of choice, xenon -- highlighting iodine's potential utility for future space missions. Currently, xenon is the main propellant used in electric propulsion systems, but the chemical is rare and expensive to produce. As a gas, xenon must also be stored at very high pressures, which requires specialized equipment. Iodine has a similar atomic mass to xenon but is more abundant and much cheaper. It can also be stored as an unpressurised solid, meaning it has the potential to simplify satellite designs. Dmytro Rafalskyi at ThrustMe, a space technology company based in France, and his colleagues have developed an electric propulsion system that uses iodine. The propulsion system first heats up a solid block of iodine, turning it into a gas. The gas is bombarded with high-speed electrons, which turns it into a plasma of iodine ions and free electrons. Negatively charged hardware then accelerates the positively charged iodine ions from the plasma towards the system's exhaust and propels the spacecraft forwards. [...] The group found that the iodine system slightly outperformed xenon systems, with a higher overall energy efficiency, which showcases the viability of iodine as a propellant. "There are some difficulties with iodine that need to be addressed says Rafalskyi," the report adds. "For example, iodine reacts with most metals, so the team had to use ceramics and polymers to protect parts of the propulsion system. In addition, solid iodine takes about 10 minutes to turn into a plasma, which may not provide a propellant quickly enough for emergency maneuvers to avoid an in-orbit collisions." The research has been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of Firefox cookie databases containing sensitive data are available on request from GitHub repositories, data potentially usable for hijacking authenticated sessions. The Register reports: These cookies.sqlite databases normally reside in the Firefox profiles folder. They're used to store cookies between browsing sessions. And they're findable by searching GitHub with specific query parameters, what's known as a search "dork." Aidan Marlin, a security engineer at London-based rail travel service Trainline, alerted The Register to the public availability of these files after reporting his findings through HackerOne and being told by a GitHub representative that "credentials exposed by our users are not in scope for our Bug Bounty program." Marlin then asked whether he could make his findings public and was told he's free to do so. "I'm frustrated that GitHub isn't taking its users' security and privacy seriously," Marlin told The Register in an email. "The least it could do is prevent results coming up for this GitHub dork. If the individuals who uploaded these cookie databases were made aware of what they'd done, they'd s*** their pants." Marlin acknowledges that affected GitHub users deserve some blame for failing to prevent their cookies.sqlite databases from being included when they committed code and pushed it to their public repositories. "But there are nearly 4.5k hits for this dork, so I think GitHub has a duty of care as well," he said, adding that he's alerted the UK Information Commissioner's Office because personal information is at stake. Marlin speculates that the oversight is a consequence of committing code from one's Linux home directory. "I imagine in most of the cases, the individuals aren't aware that they've uploaded their cookie databases," he explained. "A common reason users do this is for a common environment across multiple machines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: YouTube's decision to hide dislike counts on videos has sparked anger and derision. One inventive programmer has attempted to restore the feature in a browser extension. The plugin currently uses the Google API to generate the dislike count. However, this functionality will be removed from December 13. "I'll try to scrape as much data as possible until then," the extension's creator said on Reddit. "After that -- total dislikes will be estimated using extension users as a sample." The alpha version isn't perfect. It currently only works on videos for which the Youtube API returns a valid dislike count. The calculations could also be skewed by the userbase, which is unlikely to represent the average YouTube viewer. The developer said they're exploring ways to mitigate this, such as comparing the downvotes collected through the public of extension users to a cache of real downvotes. The results should also improve as uptake grows. The plugin could provide a useful service, but its greatest value may be as a potent symbol of protest. You can try it out here -- but proceed at your own risk. If you want to check out the code, it's been published on GitHub. Further reading: YouTube Co-Founder Predicts 'Decline' of the Platform Following Removal of DislikesRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Starbucks has partnered with Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant's brick-and-mortar convenience store, to open its first ever cashierless cafe. "[C]ustomers can sit at a table with a latte or grab a sandwich from a shelf and walk out," reports Reuters. From the report: Hit by a U.S. labor crunch, Starbucks and other companies are expanding labor-saving technology like artificial intelligence, robotics and digital touch screens. [...] The pandemic pushed people to place more orders online for carry out, delivery and drive-thru. To keep up, Starbucks shifted its development strategy to new store formats, adding pickup-only locations in urban areas, as well as traditional cafes and suburban drive-thrus. Starbucks and Amazon plan to open at least two more U.S. locations together in 2022, said Kathryn Young, Starbucks' senior vice president of global growth and development. Starbucks baristas will make drinks and the rest of the chain's menu at the new location in New York City, which will have the same staffing level as any other Starbucks, she said. Customers can order through the Starbucks app and grab coffee to go from a counter near the door. Or they can use a credit card, Amazon app or Amazon One palm reader to enter the rest of the space, take snacks from shelves, or sit at tables.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk on Wednesday said SpaceX is "hoping" to launch the first orbital flight test of its mammoth Starship rocket in January, a schedule that depends on testing and regulatory approval. "We'll do a bunch of tests in December and hopefully launch in January," Musk said, speaking at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Space Studies Board. The company's next major step in developing Starship is launching to orbit. First, the company needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the mission, with the regulator expecting to complete a key environmental assessment by the end of this year. Musk noted that he wasn't sure if Starship would successfully reach orbit on the first try, but emphasized that he is "confident" that the rocket will get to space in 2022. "We intend to have a high flight rate next year," Musk said. SpaceX aims to launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights next year, he said, to complete the "test flight program" and move to launching "real payloads in 2023." He stressed that creating a mass production line for Starship is crucial to the program's long-term goals, noting that the current "biggest constraint" on rocket manufacturing is how fast the company can build the Raptor engines needed for Starship. "I think, in order for life to become multiplanetary, we'll need maybe 1,000 ships or something like that," Musk said. "The overarching goal of SpaceX has been to advance space technology such that humanity can become a multi-planet species and, ultimately, a spacefaring civilization." SpaceX received a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop Starship for delivering astronauts to the moon's surface, but Musk said the company is "not assuming any international collaboration" or external funding for the rocket program. "[Starship] is at least 90% internally funded thus far," Musk said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GoJays shares a report from Yahoo Finance: Nvidia's (NVDA) stock closed out the trading day Thursday with gusto, following its impressive Q3 earnings report on Wednesday. Shares of the chip maker ended the day up 8.25%, after jumping more than 10% at the open. The stock's performance comes after the company reported quarterly revenue jumped 50% year-over-year on the back of strong performances by its data center and gaming businesses in Q3. Nvidia's data center arm has been a boon for the firm, helping to power its stock price up 124% year-over-year at the close of trading on Wednesday. And the company's earnings report only buoyed investor confidence in the business, which saw record revenue of $2.94 billion in the prior quarter, a 55% year-over-year increase. Not to be out done, Nvidia's gaming business also brought in record revenue of $3.22 billion, a 42% year-over-year increase. Needham analysts said Nvidia could become the "first trillion dollar semiconductor company." As Bloomberg notes, $60 billion was added to the company's market capitalization on Thursday, which is near the $800 billion threshold. "Since early October, Nvidia has added nearly $300 billion in market value, about the equivalent of the market cap of Disney, Netflix or Pfizer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NFTs are unique blockchain entries through which people can prove that they own something. However, the underlying images can be copied with a single click. This point is illustrated by The NFT Bay which links to a 19.5 Terabyte collection of 'all NFTs' on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. And it comes with an important warning message too. TorrentFreak reports: "The Billion Dollar Torrent," as it's called, reportedly includes all the NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. These files are bundled in a massive torrent that points to roughly 15 terabytes of data. Unpacked, this adds up to almost 20 terabytes. Australian developer Geoff is the brains behind the platform, which he describes as an art project. Speaking with TorrentFreak, he says that The Pirate Bay was used as inspiration for nostalgic reasons, which needs further explanation. The NFT Bay is not just any random art project. It does come with a message, perhaps a wake-up call, for people who jump on the NFT bandwagon without fully realizing what they're spending their crypto profits on. "Purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image. The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on Web 2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value." The same warning is more sharply articulated in the torrent's release notes which are styled in true pirate fashion. "[T]his handy torrent contains all of the NFT's so that future generations can study this generation's tulip mania and collectively go..." it reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the past, Apple has taken an opposing stance on letting consumers repair their devices. Some of that is changing with Apple's new announcement," writes Slashdot reader wakeboarder. "Apple will sell components like batteries and screens to allow consumers to repair their own devices. This will help reduce e-waste, but will also allow Apple to control the market for parts -- not exactly what right-to-repair activists have fought for." With that said, Apple "didn't change its policy out of the goodness of its heart," writes The Verge's Maddie Stone. The timing of this announcement was "deliberate," considering Wednesday was a key deadline in the fight over a shareholder resolution environmental advocates filed with the company in September asking Apple to re-evaluate its stance on independent repair. The issue would've likely ended up at the Securities and Exchange Commission. From the report: Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy told The Verge that the program "has been in development for well over a year," describing it as "the next step in increasing customer access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals." Leahy declined to say whether the timing of the announcement was influenced by shareholder pressure. Activist shareholders believe that it was. "The timing is definitely no coincidence," says Annalisa Tarizzo, an advocate with Green Century, the mutual fund company that filed the right-to-repair resolution with Apple in September. As a result of today's announcement, Green Century is withdrawing its resolution, which asked Apple to "reverse its anti repair practices" and evaluate the benefits of making parts and tools more available to consumers. Apple's initial response to the Green Century resolution was less than conciliatory. Tarizzo says that on October 18 (30 days before the self service announcement), Apple submitted a "no action request" to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking the investor oversight body to block the proposal. According to Tarizzo, Apple's argument before the SEC was that the proposal -- that the company "prepare a report" on the environmental and social benefits of making its devices easier to fix -- ran afoul of shareholder proposal guidance by infringing on Apple's normal business operations. However, earlier this month, the SEC issued new guidance concerning no-action requests that includes a carve-out for proposals that raise "significant social policy issues." In other words, shareholders can bring resolutions that affect a company's day-to-day business operations if those proposals raise issues with significant societal impact. Tarizzo believes that this change made it much more likely the SEC would side with Green Century rather than Apple, particularly since the mutual fund company connected the dots between increased access to repair and the fight against climate change. (Using devices as long as possible through maintenance and repair is one of the best ways to reduce the climate impact of consumer technology since the majority of the emissions associated with our gadgets occur during the manufacturing stage.) "It wasn't a guarantee that the SEC would side with us, but the new guidance indicates it's very likely we would prevail," Tarizzo says. "It effectively took away a lot of Apple's leverage in the process." Now, Apple seems to have regained some leverage by announcing its new Self Service Repair program on the same day that Green Century was required to respond to the no-action request. Instead of arguing that the SEC should allow the shareholder resolution to move forward, Green Century is now withdrawing the resolution entirely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US government has seized $56 million worth of cryptocurrency from an admitted participant in the BitConnect scam and intends to sell the coins and use the proceeds to reimburse victims. The Department of Justice says that it's the largest recovery of cryptocurrency to date -- and that it was willingly given up by Los Angeles resident Glenn Arcaro, who has called himself BitConnect's "number one promoter." From a report: According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BitConnect convinced people to invest a total of $2 billion by telling them that it had a bot capable of generating incredibly high rates of return from crypto trading. In other words, BitConnect sold itself as a way for people to easily invest in cryptocurrency and to make a lot of money doing so, at a time when people were hearing a lot about crypto but didn't know much about it (around 2016 through 2018). In reality, the DOJ says it was all a scam -- BitConnect used money from new investors to pay old ones (otherwise known as a Ponzi scheme), and its advocates built pyramid schemes where they would get a cut for convincing others to invest by promising them the same deal. In September, Arcaro pleaded guilty to participating in both parts of the scam while allegedly posting videos online to make fun of BitConnect doubters. He said that he had earned what was then valued at $24 million by his participation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's head of Xbox said he's "evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making ongoing proactive adjustments," in light of the recent revelations at the video game publisher. From a report: In an email to staff seen by Bloomberg News, Phil Spencer said he and the gaming leadership team are "disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions" at Activision Blizzard. He referred to the Wall Street Journal story earlier this week that said Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick knew of sexual harassment at the company for years and that he mistreated women. "This type of behavior has no place in our industry," Spencer wrote. He joins a swell of outcry from employees to investors and shareholders in demanding a stronger response from the U.S.'s second-biggest gaming publisher. On Wednesday, Sony Group's PlayStation Chief Jim Ryan sent a similar note to staff, writing that he and his leadership were "disheartened and frankly stunned to read" that Activision "has not done enough to address a deep-seated culture of discrimination and harassment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. state attorneys general said on Thursday it has opened a probe into Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, for promoting its subsidiary Instagram to children despite potential harms. From a report: The investigation, which involves at least eight states, comes at a time when Facebook is under scrutiny over its approach to children and young adults. The attorneys general are investigating whether the company violated consumer protection laws and put young people at risk, they said in emailed statements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you are noticing less traffic to your website's AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won't happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content. We've heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter's documentation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple employees will return to offices starting February 1st as part of a hybrid work pilot and will be able to work remotely for four weeks a year. From a report: First reported by The Information, employees learned of the news Thursday via an internal memo from CEO Tim Cook. The company had previously offered two weeks of remote work per year but added two more weeks to give "more opportunity to travel, be closer to your loved ones, or simply shake up your routines," Cook's memo said. The pilot will start workers at one or two days in the office, then in March, workers will come to the office to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. They'll be able to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays. Some employees may be asked to come into the office four or five days a week if their roles require more time in the office.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is pushing to accelerate development of its electric car and is refocusing the project around full self-driving capabilities, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, aiming to solve a technical challenge that has bedeviled the auto industry. From the report: For the past several years, Apple's car team had explored two simultaneous paths: creating a model with limited self-driving capabilities focused on steering and acceleration -- similar to many current cars -- or a version with full self-driving ability that doesn't require human intervention. Under the effort's new leader -- Apple Watch software executive Kevin Lynch -- engineers are now concentrating on the second option. Lynch is pushing for a car with a full self-driving system in the first version, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. It's just the latest shift for the car effort, known as the Special Projects Group or "Project Titan," which has endured strategy changes and executive turnover since starting around 2014. In September, the former head of the team, Doug Field, left for a job at Ford Motor after three years in charge. In picking Lynch as his replacement, Apple went with an internal executive who isn't a car veteran. In trying to master self-driving cars, Apple is chasing a holy grail within the industry. Tech and auto giants have spent years on autonomous vehicles, but the capabilities have remained elusive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.