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An anonymous reader shares a report: "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." That's Netflix executive Ted Sarandos in 2013, shortly before his company made its jump into original content with House of Cards. And not just original content -- glossy big-budget content made by a famous director, featuring (at the time) a famous actor. HBO-style content. Even if you don't follow the media business closely, you probably know what happened after that: With House of Cards, Netflix proved, quite quickly, that it could make shows as good as the stuff the fabled pay TV network makes. And then Netflix started making a lot more stuff, and consumers liked that, too. And now Netflix is the company that every other media company wants to emulate -- and it's the chief reason every big media company is trying to decide whether it needs to buy or sell to every other big media company. But it didn't have to go that way. In 2005, two years before Netflix got into the streaming business, some HBO executives were pushing the company to do the same thing. They wanted HBO to use the internet to sell subscriptions directly to consumers instead of wholesaling their product to the big cable TV distributors. A year later, after passing on that idea, HBO considered another move that would have rewritten media history: Some of its executives wanted HBO to buy Netflix, which at the time was a DVD rent-by-mail business worth around $1 billion. Netflix is now worth some $300 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The artificial intelligence research company OpenAI will eliminate the waiting list for access to the API of its natural language processing program (NLP) GPT-3. From a report: The move will accelerate access to the world's best-known reading and writing AI model, and is a sign that OpenAI believes the program is safe enough -- and can be monitored sufficiently -- to be disseminated more widely. Developers from supported countries will be able to sign up to access GPT-3's API and begin experimenting immediately, OpenAI said in an announcement Thursday morning. Previously developers had to sit on a waiting list as OpenAI reviewed them before they could even get experimental access. "We've added a lot of improvements across our API and added a number of safety features," says Peter Welinder, VP of products and partnerships at OpenAI. "We think a lot of value can come from getting more developers to build solutions to problems that they see in their environments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Buy now, pay later services aren't just popular among consumers. They're also proving to be a hit with criminals. From a report: Fraudulent activity is on the rise at some of the largest buy now, pay later (BNPL) platforms in the industry, which include Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm, according to fraud experts who spoke with CNBC. BNPL products let shoppers split the cost of their purchases over three or four months, often interest-free. They've become massively popular in the U.S. and Europe, and generated almost $100 billion in transactions globally in 2020 alone. "Criminals love buy now, pay later," Martin Rehak, CEO and co-founder of Czech fraud detection start-up Resistant AI, told CNBC. "You can already see crime on multiple levels." Criminal gangs are exploiting weaknesses in the application process for BNPL loans, experts say, using clever tactics to slip through undetected and steal items ranging from pizza and booze to video game consoles. One of the vulnerabilities, Rehak says, is BNPL firms' reliance on data for approving new clients. Many companies in the industry don' conduct formal credit checks, instead using internal algorithms to determine creditworthiness based on the information they have available to them. Retailers working with BNPL platforms "categorize things differently," Rehak said, adding that this can lead to inconsistency. "There is always a way to exploit this and basically steal from you using someone else's mistake." For example, a partner merchant may run a special promotion event for alcohol but assign a vague category like "special event." This runs the risk of fraud falling through the cracks if an artificial intelligence system doesn't recognize the category and gives it a more generic label with low default risk. Rehak said many scammers are stealing people's identities or taking over their accounts to evade detection, making unsuspecting victims foot the bill. He declined to name any specific companies being targeted, however, saying Resistant AI counts a number of BNPL businesses as clients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The battle between the appetites of European Union Member States' governments to retain their citizens' data -- for fuzzy, catch-all 'security' purposes -- and the region's top court, the CJEU, which continues to defend fundamental rights by reiterating that indiscriminate mass surveillance is incompatible with general principles of EU law (such as proportionality and respect for privacy) -- has led to another pointed legal critique of national law on bulk data retention. From a report: This time it's a German data retention law that's earned the slap-down -- via a CJEU referral which joins a couple of cases, involving ISPs SpaceNet and Telekom Deutschland which are challenging the obligation to store their customers' telecommunications traffic data. The court's judgement is still pending but an influential opinion put out today by an advisor to the CJEU takes the view that general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data can only be permitted exceptionally -- in relation to a threat to national security -- and nor can data be retained permanently. In a press release announcing the opinion of advocate general Manuel Campos Sanchez-Bordona, the court writes that the AG "considers that the answers to all the questions referred are already in the Court's case-law or can be inferred from them without difficulty"; going on to set out his view that the German law's "general and indiscriminate storage obligation" -- which covers "a very wide range of traffic and location data" -- cannot be reconciled with EU law by a time limit imposed on storage as data is being sucked up in bulk, not in a targeted fashion (i.e. for a specific national security purpose).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook advertisers promoted false and misleading claims about climate change on the platform in recent weeks, just as the COP26 conference was getting under way. From a report: Days after Facebook's vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company's efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a "hoax." The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views. In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, "apparently we're just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government" on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how "modern doomsayers" had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens's page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet's Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto has gone Hollywood, and vice versa, as the two industries are deepening their financial and strategic ties. From a report: For crypto, these partnerships are about building brand awareness. For entertainers and entertainment companies, it's about fear of missing out on the next big thing.The Staples Center in Los Angeles said Wednesday that it will be renamed Crypto.com Arena, via a 20-year naming rights deal valued north of $700 million. Expect there to be in-stadium synergies, including around NFTs. This comes after a slew of actors, athletes, musicians and influencers have invested in crypto companies, often becoming official or de facto spokespeople. Others are peddling NFTs. Some want to get in early on an emerging technology that could revolutionize their industries, unlike the original social media revolution in which most of the profit stayed in Silicon Valley. Or, as one crypto insider told Axios: "Ashton Kutcher made a ton of money by getting in early on Twitter, but he was kind of alone ... Lots of people in Hollywood want to make sure they don't make that mistake again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Founded by Bill Gates, TerraPower, a company that plans to use nuclear energy to deliver power in a sustainable manner, has selected Kremmer, Wyoming as a suitable site to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, Natrium. The decision was made after extensive evaluation of the site and consultations with the local community, the company said in a press release. Last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) had awarded TerraPower a grant of $80 million to demonstrate its technology. The advanced nuclear reactor that is being developed by the company in association with General Electric-Hitachi, uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor that works with a molten salt-based energy storage system. Earlier in June, the company had decided to set up its demonstration plant in Wyoming and has recently sealed the decision by selecting the site of a coal-fired power plant that is scheduled for a shut down by 2025, the press release said. The demonstration plant where the company plans to set up a 345 MW reactor will be used to validate the design, construction, and operation of TerraPower's technology. Natrium technology uses uranium enriched to up to 20 percent, far higher than what is used by other nuclear reactors. However, nuclear energy supporters say that the technology creates lesser nuclear waste, Reuters reported. The energy storage system to be used in the plant is also designed to work with renewable sources of energy. TerraPower plans to utilize this capability and boost its output to up to 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes, the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a follow-up to Monday's story, "a crowdfunded effort to buy a rare 1787 copy of the U.S. constitution at auction claims to have received more than [$31 million] worth of cryptocurrency donations," reports the BBC. And this figure is only going to increase as there's more than 24 hours to go. From the report: The group, ConstitutionDAO, says it plans "to put the constitution in the hands of the people," and hopes to raise at least $20 million. But it is not clear how ownership will be arranged if the bid succeeds. There are 13 known copies to have survived from a run of 500 originally printed after the text was settled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The copy for sale is one of only two not held in the collection of an institution, Sotheby's says. The group wants to put the document on public display. DAO stands for "decentralized autonomous organization." The idea is to enable individuals to come together to make purchases and share ownership, with their transactions and operating rules recorded on the blockchain - the same underlying technology on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum run. ConstitutionDAO launched just a week before the auction, and is soliciting money with which to buy the constitution document in Ethereum. On its website, the group says it is "pooling together money to win this auction." At first, the website told contributors they were buying "fractional ownership and governance. You will own a piece of the constitution based on how much you contribute." That has since been changed to say those who contribute will not get a share in owning the constitution. The question "Am I receiving ownership of the constitution in exchange for my donation?" is answered: "No, you are receiving a governance token, not fractionalized ownership." The "governance token," the website says, could be used to "advise" on "where the constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, future generations "will visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park." Gizmodo reports: The remarks came last week at an event held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others talking about space policy. Bezos sat down for a one-on-one chat with Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. He brought up themes we've heard before, including his vision that all polluting industries will exist in space one day and that we'll all live on space colonies that could, in his estimation, support 1 trillion people. But he expanded on his vision in greater detail about what, exactly, will happen to the planet we'll all leave behind for Blue Origin-branded space colonies. "This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives," Bezos said. "We need to conserve what we have, restore what we've lost," he said. "This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. ... This place is special. You can't ruin it." To do that will require us all to live in space colonies. That would leave Earth to eventually be, in Bezos' vision, a place for future folks to visit but not live. "They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park," Bezos said. Ignatius asked a follow-up about who gets to live on Earth in this vision, which Bezos did not answer. "It's extremely telling that Bezos' vision for the future of Earth is Yellowstone National Park," comments Gizmodo's Brian Kahn, a former park ranger. "Bezos' big idea of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the fact that humans are as much a part of this planet as they were part of Yellowstone before Americans showed up. He's pitching a very Western solution to the very Western problem of climate change and environmental degradation, problems that Bezos' very own businesses have played a major role in while enriching him to the point where he now has a huge sway on humanity's next step."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios. Emulation allows modern hardware to simulate the functions of older hardware and run game files, or executables. "My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he wrote in a direct message. Microsoft's newer consoles -- the Xbox Series and Xbox One -- run huge libraries of older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games using this technique. Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates. They run games from the original Nintendo era to more recent PlayStations, but there is no consistent use of them by the industry. [...] An official industry emulation approach would require long-term online support to offer game files and to possibly check if the user has the right to access them. Spencer, whose own platform has some of these issues, still sees a path forward. "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Drinking coffee or tea may be linked with a lower risk of stroke and dementia, according to the largest study of its kind. The Guardian reports: Strokes cause 10% of deaths globally, while dementia is one of the world's biggest health challenges -- 130 million are expected to be living with it by 2050. In the research, 365,000 people aged between 50 and 74 were followed for more than a decade. At the start the participants, who were involved in the UK Biobank study, self-reported how much coffee and tea they drank. Over the research period, 5,079 of them developed dementia and 10,053 went on to have at least one stroke. Researchers found that people who drank two to three cups of coffee or three to five cups of tea a day, or a combination of four to six cups of coffee and tea, had the lowest risk of stroke or dementia. Those who drank two to three cups of coffee and two to three cups of tea daily had a 32% lower risk of stroke. These people had a 28% lower risk of dementia compared with those who did not drink tea or coffee. The research, by Yuan Zhang and colleagues from Tianjin Medical University, China, suggests drinking coffee alone or in combination with tea is also linked with lower risk of post-stroke dementia. "[W]hat generally happened is that the risk of stroke or dementia was lower in people who drank reasonably small amounts of coffee or tea compared to those who drank none at all, but that after a certain level of consumption, the risk started to increase again until it became higher than the risk to people who drank none," said professor Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University who was not involved in the study. "Once the coffee consumption got up to seven or eight cups a day, the stroke risk was greater than for people who drank no coffee, and quite a lot higher than for those who drank two or three cups a day." The study has been published in the journal PLOS Medicine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following a limited test in September, Microsoft has begun rolling out cloud gaming support to additional Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles. Engadget reports: While the feature is still in beta, it's now available to select Xbox console owners in 25 markets. Over the coming weeks, the company plans to scale the service to all Xbox systems in those regions. As before, you'll need a Game Pass Ultimate subscription to use the service, but it's no longer necessary to take part in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha Insider programs. Microsoft envisions a handful of scenarios where the ability to stream a game will be helpful. To start, it's a way for people to try a Game Pass title without downloading it first. In much the same way, it also allows you to jump into a multiplayer game with your friends, even if you don't have that title installed. Lastly, for Xbox One owners, it's a chance to play Xbox Series X/S titles like The Medium and The Riftbreaker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report from Nikkei Asia (paywalled), "The Japanese-made Fugaku captured its fourth consecutive title as the world's fastest supercomputer on Tuesday, although a rival from the U.S. or China is poised to steal the crown as soon as next year." From a report: But while Fugaku is the world's most powerful public supercomputer, at 442 petaflops, China is believed to secretly operate two exascale (1,000 petaflops) supercomputers, which were launched earlier this year. The top 10 list did not change much since the last report six months ago, with only one new addition -- a Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2. Voyager, featuring AMD Epyc CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs, achieved 30.05 petaflops, making it the tenth most powerful supercomputer in the world. The other systems remained in the same position - after Japan's Arm-based Fugaku comes the US Summit system, an IBM Power and Nvidia GPU supercomputer capable of 148 petaflops. The similarly-architected 94 petaflops US Sierra system is next. Then comes what is officially China's most powerful supercomputer, the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, which features Sunway chips. The Biden administration sanctioned the company earlier this year. You can read a summary of the systems in the Top10 here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: BlockFi is being scrutinized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its popular product that pays customers high interest rates for lending out their digital tokens, a development that significantly ratchets up the fast-growing crypto firm's legal woes. The SEC review focuses on whether the BlockFi accounts are akin to securities that should be registered with the regulator, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The Jersey City, New Jersey-based firm touts annual yields as high as 9.5% on its website -- a figure that dwarfs the 0.06% average interest rate for bank savings accounts. States including New Jersey and Texas have already taken action against BlockFi, questioning whether it's marketing illicit financial products that lack bedrock consumer protections. BlockFi and other firms are able to pay high interest rates because they can charge institutional investors that want access to coins even more. The market is one of the hottest corners of crypto, with companies saying they've collected more than $40 billion in deposits. [...] A key concern is that unlike bank deposits, the crypto accounts aren't insured by the federal government. If a firm goes bust, customers could lose their funds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, YouTube announced a controversial decision to make the "dislike" count on videos private across its platform. Not only did the move upset many Slashdotters, but it upset the third co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, too. According to The Verge, Karim suggests that the move "will lead to YouTube's decline." From the report: "Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed," writes Karim. "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good." Karim has been getting his own message out in an unusual way: by editing the description to the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a banal clip titled "Me at the zoo" which stars the 25-year-old Karim himself. Karim originally edited the description of the video a few days ago to read: "When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube [face palm emoji]." But this morning he changed this description once again to give a more detailed condemnation: "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform," writes Karim. "Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's OK. [...] The process works, and there's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?" In his statement today, Karim compares the video in which Matt Koval, YouTube's "creator liason," announced the removal of dislikes to infamous footage of US soldier Jeremiah Denton, who was captured during the Vietnam War. In 1966, Denton was forced to give a television interview by his captors, during which he blinked in Morse code to spell out the word "torture." You can read Karim's full statement in the description of this video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's some unusual activity brewing on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, where hackers appear to be reaching out to Chinese counterparts for collaboration. BleepingComputer reports: These attempts to enlist Chinese threat actors are mainly seen on the RAMP hacking forum, which is encouraging Mandarin-speaking actors to participate in conversations, share tips, and collaborate on attacks. The forum has reportedly had at least thirty new user registrations that appear to come from China, so this could be the beginning of something notable. The researchers suggest that the most probable cause is that Russian ransomware gangs seek to build alliances with Chinese actors to launch cyber-attacks against U.S. targets, trade vulnerabilities, or even recruit new talent for their Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operations. A threat analyst told BleepingComputer earlier this month that this initiative was started by a RAMP admin known as Kajit, who claims to have recently spent some time in China and can speak the language. In the prior version of RAMP, he had intimated that he would be inviting Chinese threat actors to the forum, which appears to now be taking place. However, Russian hackers attempting to collaborate with Chinese threat actors is not limited to the RAMP hacking forum as Flashpoint has also seen similar collaboration on the XSS hacking forum. [...] RAMP was set up last summer by a core member of the original Babuk ransomware gang, aiming to serve as a new place to leak valuable data stolen from cyberattacks and recruit ransomware affiliates. Further reading: US Says Iran-backed Hackers Are Now Targeting Organizations With RansomwareRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The South Korean Ministry of Justice has provided more than 100 million photos of foreign nationals who travelled through the country's airports to facial recognition companies without their consent, according to attorneys with the non-governmental organization Lawyers for a Democratic Society. While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a "human rights disaster" that is relatively unprecedented. "It's unheard-of for state organizations -- whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology -- to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology," six civic groups said during a press conference last week. The revelation, first reported in the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, came to light after National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested and received documents from the Ministry of Justice related to a April 2019 project titled Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction Project. The documents show private companies secretly used biometric data to research and develop an advanced immigration screening system that would utilize artificial intelligence to automatically identify airport users' identities through CCTV surveillance cameras and detect dangerous situations in real time. Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit. "We, the NGOs, urge the government to immediately stop the establishment of a biometric monitoring system that is not only illegal but also significantly violates international human rights norms," wrote Advocates for Public Interest Law, MINBYUN -- Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the Institute for Digital Rights, the Joint Committee with Migrants in Korea, and the Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet, in a press release that was translated and provided to Motherboard. Attorneys claim the project directly violates South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act, a law that strictly limits the processing of personal information in the country. Still, the Ministry has yet to announce plans to halt the program, which was scheduled to be completed in 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discord has been quietly building its own app platform based on bots over the past few years. More than 30 percent of Discord servers now use bots, and 430,000 of them are used every week across Discord by its 150 million monthly active users. Now that bots are an important part of Discord, the company is embracing them even further with the ability to search and browse for bots on Discord. From a report: A new app discovery feature will start showing up in Discord in spring 2022. Verified apps and bots (which total around 12,000 right now) will be discoverable through this feature. Developers will be able to opt into discoverability, once they're fully prepared for a new influx of users that can easily find their bots. Bots are powerful on Discord, offering a range of customizations for servers. Discord server owners install bots on servers to help moderate them or offer mini-games or features to their communities. There are popular bots that will spit out memes on a daily basis, bots that help you even create your own bot, or music bots that let Discord users listen to tunes together.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is the ocular product EyeDetect a leap ahead of the polygraph? Or just the same dubiousness in a more high-tech box? From a report: In 2018, John Rael, a volunteer track coach in Taos, N.M., was on trial for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl when his lawyer made an unusual request. He wanted the judge to admit evidence from "EyeDetect," a lie-detection test based on eye movements that Rael had passed. The judge agreed, and five of the 12 jurors wound up voting not to convict. A mistrial was declared. EyeDetect is the product of the Utah company Converus. "Imagine if you could exonerate the innocent and identify the liars ... just by looking into their eyes," the company's YouTube channel promises. "Well, now you can!" Its chief executive, Todd Mickelsen, says they've built a better truth-detection mousetrap; he believes eye movements reflect their bearer far better than the much older and mostly discredited polygraph. Its popularity may be growing: the company says EyeDetect has gone from 500 customers in 2019 to 600 now. Its critics, however, say the EyeDetect is just the polygraph in more algorithmic clothing. The machine is fundamentally unable to deliver on its claims, they argue, because human truth-telling is too subtle for any data set. And they worry that relying on it can lead to tragic outcomes, like punishing the innocent or providing a cloak for the guilty. EyeDetect raises a question that draws all the way back to the Garden of Eden: Are humans so wired to tell the truth we'll give ourselves away when we don't? And, to a more 21st-century query: Can modern technology come up with the tools to detect those tells?An EyeDetect test has a subject placed in front of a monitor with a digital camera and, as with the polygraph, lobbed generically true-false queries like "have you ever hurt anybody" to establish a baseline. Then come specific questions. If the subject's physical responses are more demonstrative there, they are presumed to be lying; less demonstrative, they're telling the truth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Z00L00K writes: From Schneier on Security I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it's too late.Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this is real, can some reporter write about it?(Not that "user error" is a good justification. Any system where making a simple mistake means that you've forever lost your privacy isn't a good one. We see this same situation with sharing contact lists with apps on smartphones. Apps will repeatedly ask, and only need you to accidentally click "okay" once.)EDITED TO ADD: It's actually worse than I thought. Edge urges users to store passwords, ID numbers, and even passport numbers, all of which get uploaded to Microsoft by default when synch is enabled.Also from one comment:Ted November 17, 2021 8:29 AMIt looks like Microsoft released some documentation on "Microsoft Edge -- Policies" for Enterprise on 11-9-21. It is only a 472 minute read, but there is some info on Forced Synching, for example:ForceSyncForce synchronization of browser data and do not show the sync consent prompthttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller broke with a report from regulators earlier this month and said he disagrees with the idea that stablecoins should only be issued by banks because it would limit payment-system innovation and competition. From a report: Earlier this month, the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and other regulators urged lawmakers to let them police stablecoin issuers like banks with robust capital requirements and constant supervision, and said their issuance should be limited to banks. "I disagree with the notion that stablecoin issuance can or should only be conducted by banks, simply because of the nature of the liability," Waller said in remarks prepared for delivery at the Cleveland Fed and Office of Financial Research's conference on financial stability Wednesday. "It serves as a viable competitor to banking organizations in their role as payment providers." Waller raised numerous risks and benefits with stablecoins, in particular the lack of a regulatory framework to ensure that they aren't subject to runs and that their systems remain sound. "Strong oversight, combined with deposit insurance and other public support that comes with it, is what makes bank deposits an acceptable and accepted form of money," he said. "Today stablecoins lack that oversight, and its absence does create risks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

shoor writes: As much as 38 percent of the Internet's domain name lookup servers are vulnerable to a new attack that allows hackers to send victims to maliciously spoofed addresses masquerading as legitimate domains, like bankofamerica.com or gmail.com. The exploit, unveiled in research presented today, revives the DNS cache-poisoning attack that researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed in 2008. He showed that, by masquerading as an authoritative DNS server and using it to flood a DNS resolver with fake lookup results for a trusted domain, an attacker could poison the resolver cache with the spoofed IP address. From then on, anyone relying on the same resolver would be diverted to the same imposter site. The sleight of hand worked because DNS at the time relied on a transaction ID to prove the IP number returned came from an authoritative server rather than an imposter server attempting to send people to a malicious site. The transaction number had only 16 bits, which meant that there were only 65,536 possible transaction IDs. Kaminsky realized that hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off-path responses that included each possible ID. Once the resolver received a response with the correct ID, the server would accept the malicious IP and store the result in cache so that everyone else using the same resolver -- which typically belongs to a corporation, organization, or ISP -- would also be sent to the same malicious server.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government, along with counterparts in Australia and the U.K, have warned that Iranian state-backed hackers are targeting U.S. organizations in critical infrastructure sectors -- in some cases with ransomware. From a report: The rare warning linking Iran with ransomware landed in a joint advisory Wednesday, issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), and the U.K's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The advisory said that Iran-backed attackers have been exploiting Fortinet vulnerabilities since at least March and a Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell vulnerability since October to gain access to U.S. critical infrastructure organizations in the transport and public health sectors, as well as organizations in Australia. The aim of the hackers is ultimately to leverage this access for follow-on operations such as data exfiltration, extortion and ransomware deployment. In May this year, for example, the hackers abused Fortigate gear to access a web server hosting the domain for a U.S. municipal government. The following month, CISA and the FBI observed the hackers exploiting Fortinet vulnerabilities to access the networks of a U.S.-based hospital specializing in healthcare for children. The joint advisory has been released alongside a separate report from Microsoft on the evolution of Iranian APTs, which are "increasingly utilizing ransomware to either collect funds or disrupt their targets." In the report, Microsoft said it has been tracking six Iranian threat groups that have been deploying ransomware and exfiltrating data in attacks that started in September 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from "an annoyance" and "ridiculous" to "shady" and "oppressive." Publishers tend to think of this as "retention." A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently made it clear that it sees the practice as 1) one of several "dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscriptions" and 2) straight-up illegal. The FTC vowed to ramp up enforcement on companies that fail to provide an "easy and simple" cancellation process, including an option that's "at least as easy" as the one to subscribe. Translation? If you can subscribe online, you should be able to cancel your subscription online.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is accelerating plans to replace American and foreign technology, quietly empowering a secretive government-backed organization to vet and approve local suppliers in sensitive areas from cloud to semiconductors, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From a report: Formed in 2016 to advise the government, the Information Technology Application Innovation Working Committee has now been entrusted by Beijing to help set industry standards and train personnel to operate trusted software. The quasi-government body will devise and execute the so-called "IT Application Innovation" plan, better known as Xinchuang in Chinese. It will choose from a basket of suppliers vetted under the plan to provide technology for sensitive sectors from banking to data centers storing government data, a market that could be worth $125 billion by 2025. So far, 1,800 Chinese suppliers of PCs, chips, networking and software have been invited to join the committee, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. The organization has so far certified hundreds of local companies this year as committee members, the fastest pace in years, one of the people said. The existence of the Xinchuang white-list, whose members and over-arching goals haven't been previously reported, is likely to inflame tensions just as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping wrapped up their first face-to-face virtual summit. It gives Beijing more leverage to replace foreign tech firms in sensitive sectors and quickens a push to help local champions achieve tech self-sufficiency and overcome sanctions first imposed by the Trump administration in fields like networking and chips.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger's voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen. From a report: One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved. The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind. In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook's study revealed that it wasn't just Cambodians who favor voice messages -- though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp -- the most popular platform among the survey respondents -- along with Messenger and Telegram. One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miramax filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Quentin Tarantino of copyright infringement by selling NFTs based on the screenplay for "Pulp Fiction." From a report: Tarantino announced the sale at a recent crypto-art convention in New York. "I'm excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from 'Pulp Fiction' to fans," Tarantino said in a Nov. 2 press release. The plan is to auction off NFT -- non-fungible tokens -- based on excerpts from Tarantinoâ(TM)s original handwritten script for the film, accompanied by commentary. The NFT is pitched as "secret," meaning that its contents will be viewable exclusively by the owner. But according to the suit, Tarantino did not consult beforehand with Miramax -- which still owns the rights to the director's 1994 classic. Miramax's attorneys have sent a cease and desist letter seeking to block the sale, but that has not stopped Tarantino and his team from moving forward. Miramax alleges that Tarantino's actions have interfered with the studio's own plans to enter the market for "Pulp Fiction" NFTs. In a statement, Miramax attorney Bart Williams accused Tarantino's team of a "deliberate, pre-meditated, short-term money grab."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple just announced Self Service Repair, a new program designed to let users perform common repairs on devices at home. Through the program, users with damaged devices will be sent "Apple genuine" tools and components -- same as the ones they use at the Genius Bar. From a report: The company will also be offering up online repair manuals (text, not video), accessible through the new Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. The system is similar to the one the company rolled out for Independent Repair Providers (of which there are currently 2,800 in the U.S. plus 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers), beginning with the iPhone 12 and 13, focused on display, battery and camera fixes. A similar service for M1Macs will be launching "soon" after. "Creating greater access to Apple genuine parts gives our customers even more choice if a repair is needed," COO Jeff Williams said in a release tied to the announcement. "In the past three years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and training, and now we're providing an option for those who wish to complete their own repairs." Apple hasn't listed specific prices yet, but customers will get a credit toward the final fee if they mail in the damaged component for recycling. When it launches in the U.S. in early-2022, the store will offer some 200 parts and tools to consumers. Performing these tasks at home won't void the device's warranty, though you might if you manage to further damage the product in the process of repairing it -- so hew closely to those manuals. After reviewing that, you can purchase parts from the Apple Self Service Repair Online Store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon plans to stop accepting payments made via Visa credit cards issued in the U.K. starting next year. From a report: The e-commerce giant has told some customers that, from Jan. 19 onward, the company will no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in Britain "due to the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions." Visa earlier this year hiked the interchange fees it charges merchants for processing digital transactions between the U.K. and the European Union. After Brexit, an EU cap on interchange fees no longer applies in the U.K., allowing card networks to raise their charges. Mastercard has also increased its U.K.-EU interchange fees. Amazon customers were told they will still be able to use debit cards -- including those issued by Visa -- and non-Visa credit cards like Mastercard and American Express. Users are being encouraged to update their default payment method ahead of the changes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA is not properly estimating costs for the Artemis program and could spend $93 billion between fiscal years 2021 and 2025," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "NASA recently extended its target date for sending astronauts back to the moon to 2025 at the earliest." But, according to a new report (PDF) from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, it could be several years after 2024. The Verge reports: The recent prediction comes from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, which does periodic audits of the space agency's various programs. In its latest report, the OIG took a comprehensive look at NASA's Artemis program, the agency's ambitious initiative to send people back to the Moon, as well as land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface. [...] NASA's Artemis program relies on a suite of complicated vehicles all working together to get astronauts safely to the Moon, including a massive new rocket called the Space Launch System, or SLS, that will send people to deep space inside a new crew capsule called Orion. Meanwhile, SpaceX is developing its next-generation spacecraft, called Starship, to carry people to and from the lunar surface for NASA -- part of a $2.9 billion contract awarded to the company in April. However, Starship is still in very early stages of development and has yet to launch to orbit. SLS and Orion also have not flown on their first flight together. The OIG report, released Monday, highlights these issues and reveals just how much work is left to be done on Artemis, making a 2024 landing date unrealistic. "Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years," the report states. [...] Rival space company Blue Origin had also hoped to receive a contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander, but when the space agency gave the award to SpaceX, the company sued in federal court. The lawsuit prevented NASA and SpaceX from working together on the lander until the litigation was resolved. The OIG report notes that the lawsuit did have an impact on the overall schedule, but the office also argues that the development schedule for SpaceX's Starship is overly optimistic. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continues to make bold predictions for Starship's first major test launch, claiming multiple times it'd be ready to fly to orbit for the first time this year. However, the OIG report estimates the first orbital flight test of Starship will occur sometime in the second quarter of 2022. The document does argue that SpaceX may be able to shave off some time due to its speedy testing pace compared with earlier NASA spaceflight programs. But there is still quite a lot of work to be done after Starship's orbital flight test. [...] The OIG report predicts that the debut of NASA's SLS rocket and Orion combo will also be delayed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time tlhIngan writes: Tim Sweeney is at it again. The CEO of Epic Games blasts Apple and Google and calls for a universal app store that works across all platforms. Naturally, he's proposing that Epic Games manage the store across iOS, Android, Xbox, PC, Nintendo and Sony. Bloomberg (paywalled) has more details. "What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms," said Sweeney in an interview at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in Seoul, South Korea. "Right now software ownership is fragmented between the iOS App Store, the Android Google Play marketplace, different stores on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, and then Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store." Sweeney added that Epic Games is working with developers and service providers to create a system to allow users "to buy software in one place, knowing that they'd have it on all devices and all platforms." "There's a store market, there's a payments market, and there are many other related markets. And it's critical that antitrust enforcement not allow a monopolist in one market to use their control of that market to impose control over unrelated markets." He went on to accuse Apple of complying "with oppressive foreign laws" while "ignoring laws passed by Korea's democracy." "Apple must be stopped," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ben Curtis, the pitchman for Dell in the early 2000s who coined the phrase, "Dude, you're getting a Dell," has made a triumphant comeback. In the new ad, Curtis starts by saying, "Dude, a lot can happen in 20 years. Like, Dell got really into recycling..." He then proceeds to talk about their new recycling program that'll let you recycle "everything from desktops to batteries." All you have to do is print out a shipping label they provide you and send in your stuff. "Because... all great things can make a comeback." As Digg (yes, that Digg) notes, "Curtis famously portrayed the surfer dude Steve character between 2000 and 2003." However, his stint came to an abrupt end in 2003 "when he was busted for suspicion of buying marijuana." You can watch a compilation of the old "Dell dude" commercials here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Food and Drug Administration authorized a virtual reality system as a prescription treatment for chronic back pain, the agency announced today. The therapy, called EaseVRx, joins the short list of digital therapeutics cleared by the agency over the past few years. EaseVRx includes a VR headset and a device that amplifies the sound of the user's breath to assist in breathing exercises. It uses principles from cognitive behavior therapy, which aims to help people recognize and understand various thought patterns and emotions. The program addresses pain through relaxation, distraction, and improved awareness of internal signals, the FDA said in its statement. The FDA authorized EaseVRx based on data from an eight-week study in 179 people with low back pain that had lasted six months or longer. Half used the EaseVRx program and half participated in another, two-dimensional virtual reality program that did not use cognitive behavioral therapy methods. Around two-thirds of participants using EaseVRx said they had more than 30 percent reduction in pain, while only 41 percent of the control group had a similar reduction. The reduced pain lasted for up to three months after the study for people in the EaseVRx group but not for the control group. The VR system could be an alternative option to opioid medications for back pain, Christopher Loftus, acting director of the Office of Neurological and Physical Medicine Devices at the FDA, said in a statement. [...] EaseVRx was developed by the company AppliedVR, which is also testing its platform as a treatment for fibromyalgia pain, burn pains, or pain during childbirth. The clearance for EaseVRx comes around a month after the FDA approved a VR treatment for children with the visual disorder amblyopia, or lazy eye.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has confirmed that x64 emulation will no longer be offered in future Windows 10 Insider Preview builds (or release builds). Paul Thurrott reports: "We have received questions about the status of x64 emulation in Windows 10," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "Microsoft wants to share an update that x64 emulation for Windows is only generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing x64 emulation, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Microsoft is committed to supporting customers on Windows 10 on Arm through October 14, 2025." Microsoft announced the availability of x64 emulation in Windows 10 on ARM in the Windows Insider Program last December, before Windows 11 existed, but the original post has now been updated to note that this support is only available in Windows 11 on ARM. "x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11," Microsoft says. "For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required." And let's get real here. Windows on ARM won't be viable until Qualcomm ships its next-generation Nuvia-based chipsets for PCs anyway. And today, the firm revealed that that won't happen until the end of 2023 at the very earliest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Along with the release of Windows 10's November 2021 update, Microsoft announced that it will no longer provide Windows 10 updates twice per year. Instead, it's switching to a once-per-year schedule. As Ars Technica notes, "This is meant to sync Windows 10's update schedule with Windows 11's, which is also going to receive major feature updates once per year." From the report: Microsoft hasn't committed to the number of yearly updates it will provide for Windows 10, but the company will support "at least one version" of the OS until update support ends in October of 2025. Microsoft is promising 18 months of support for Windows 10 21H2, so it seems safe to assume that we'll at least see 22H2 and 23H2 releases for Windows 10. For businesses using Windows 10 Enterprise, version 21H2 is also a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) update and will receive update support for five years instead of 18 months. While more Windows 10 updates will be welcome news for anyone who isn't ready to move to Windows 11 or whose hardware doesn't support the new OS, it's not clear what "feature updates" will entail for an operating system that has been replaced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave has updated its desktop browser with a built-in crypto wallet that lets you buy, sell and swap with "almost any" asset. Engadget reports: While this won't always be more convenient, Brave claims the included wallet should carry fewer security risks and performance penalties than the usual browser add-ons. This is a self-custody wallet that still allows use of other wallets (such as Brave's legacy Crypto Wallets) and ties into hardware wallets from the likes of Trezor and Ledger. You can track crypto market data, find the best price matches and control portfolios that include NFTs. It supports EVM-compatible blockchains and is both open sourced and open licensed. The wallet is available through the settings page in Brave 1.32. It's coming to Brave's mobile browsers "soon," the company said, and the Solana blockchain will become the default for decentralized app support in 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Bilibili has joined other Chinese technology powerhouses such as ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, and its rival Kuaishou, in joining the Open Invention Network (OIN). The OIN is the world's largest patent non-aggression consortium. It protects Linux and related open source software and the companies behind them from patent attacks and patent trolls. The OIN recently broadened its scope from core Linux programs and adjacent open source code by expanding its Linux System Definition to other patents such as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Extended File Allocation Table exFAT file system. The OIN does this by practicing patent non-aggression in core Linux and related open source technologies by cross-licensing Linux System patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. Patents owned by OIN are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. Any company can do this by simply signing the OIN license online. As Wang Hao, Bilibili's VP, explained, "We are committed to opening and sharing technologies and providing positive motivation in the innovation field of playback transmission, interactive entertainment, and cloud-native ecology through open source projects. Linux and open source are important software infrastructures that promote business developments. Our participation in the OIN community demonstrates our consistent and ongoing commitment to shared innovation. In the future, we will also firmly support Linux's open source innovation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The recent hack at app-based investment platform Robinhood also impacted thousands of phone numbers, Motherboard has learned. From the report: Originally, Robinhood said that the breach included the email addresses of 5 million customers, the full names of 2 million customers, and other data from a smaller group of users. Motherboard obtained a copy of the stolen phone numbers from a source who presented themselves as a proxy for the hackers. The file includes around 4,400 phone numbers. When asked if the numbers belonged to Robinhood customers, the company told Motherboard in a statement that "We've determined that several thousand entries in the list contain phone numbers, and the list also contains other text entries that we're continuing to analyze." "We continue to believe that the list did not contain Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers and that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident. We'll continue making appropriate disclosures to affected people," the statement added. Robinhood said it plans to update its blog post about the breach with the new information about the phone numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tokens from several celebrities have fallen in value in recent weeks, leaving buyers with losses. From a report: Celebrities like the musician Grimes have been quick to cash in on nonfungible tokens, making millions from minting collections of their own digital art. For buyers, however, the payoff has been far less rewarding. Consider "Earth" -- one of several NFTs issued by Grimes in February. Depicting a cherub spearing the globe, perhaps in a reference to her baby with SpaceX's Elon Musk, it was part of a collection that netted the artist (whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher) about $5.8 million after selling out in 20 minutes. While the cost to originally own one of the 303 limited editions was $7,500, one unit recently resold for just $1,200 in a stunning 84% drop. Likewise, a piece rapper A$AP Rocky sold for $2,000, showing him spinning around in space, in April just traded for about $900. The list goes on. After seeing artists like Beeple make tens of millions from selling nonfungible tokens, a slew of celebrities including singer Shawn Mendes, socialite Paris Hilton and wrestler John Cena have jumped on the bandwagon to create their own digital art tied to blockchains. However, the prices of many of these art pieces have declined precipitously since their release. The resale market outside of fans appears to be small, with long-time NFT investors shunning the category as a money grab. Certainly there are more profitable corners of the NFT market, which hit a record of more than $300 million in daily sales at the end of August, according to tracker NonFungible. CryptoPunk #561, which initially sold for about $8,000, recently fetched more than $2.4 million. Bored Ape Yacht Club #2224 also recently traded for more than $335,000, up from less than $10,000 five months ago, per NonFungible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google, Instagram, AWS, Twitter, Spotify, Discord, Etsy, Shopify, TikTok and dozens of other services are facing outages, according to several users report on DownDetector. It's unclear at this time what has caused the issue and how widespread it is.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare says it has blocked a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at just under 2 Tbps, making it one of the largest ever recorded. From a report: The internet company said in a blog post that the attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on exploited Internet of Things (IoT) devices and unpatched GitLab instances. The DDoS attack comes just two weeks after Rapid7 warned of a GitLab vulnerability -- rated a full 10.0 on the CVSS severity scale -- that could be exploited to allow an attacker to remotely run code, like botnet malware, on an affected server. Rapid7 found that at least half of the 60,000 internet-facing GitLab instances remain unpatched, and warned that it expected "exploitation to increase" as details of the bug became public. The company wasn't wrong; Cloudflare said it blocked the massive DDoS attack just one week later. From its analysis of the attack, Cloudflare believes that it was a multi-vector attack that combined both DNS amplification attacks along with UDP floods.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs" that would be able to go head to head with Apple's M-series processors. From a report: Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company's 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company's A-series chips. The company is making big promises, too: in addition to offering competition to Apple's stellar M-series chips (which power its latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and iMac and Mac Mini desktops), Qualcomm is aiming to lead the field for "sustained performance and battery life," too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's one of the most intriguing questions about the Solar System from the last five years: Is there a large planet, lurking out in the cold dark reaches, on an orbit so wide it could take 20,000 years to complete? The answer has proven elusive, but a new study reveals what could be traces of the mysterious hypothetical object's existence. From a report: Astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson of Imperial College London in the UK conducted an analysis of data collected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1983, and found a trio of point sources that just might be Planet Nine. This, Rowan-Robinson concludes in his preprint paper, is actually fairly unlikely to be a real detection, but the possibility does mean that it could be used to model where the planet might be now in order to conduct a more targeted search, in the quest to confirm or rule out its existence. "Given the poor quality of the IRAS detections, at the very limit of the survey, and in a very difficult part of the sky for far infrared detections, the probability of the candidate being real is not overwhelming," he wrote. "However, given the great interest of the Planet 9 hypothesis, it would be worthwhile to check whether an object with the proposed parameters and in the region of sky proposed, is inconsistent with the planetary ephemerides." Speculation about the existence of a hidden planet in the outer reaches of the Solar System has swirled for decades, but it reached a new pitch in 2016 with the publication of a paper proposing new evidence. Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech found that small objects in the outer Solar System's Kuiper Belt were orbiting oddly, as though pushed into a pattern under the gravitational influence of something large. But finding the dratted thing is a lot more complicated than it might sound. If it is out there, it could be five to 10 times the mass of Earth, orbiting at a distance somewhere between 400 and 800 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun; Pluto, for context, is around 40 astronomical units from the Sun). This object is very far away, and quite small and cold and probably not reflecting much sunlight at all; and, moreover, we don't know exactly where in the very large sky it is. So the jury is out on whether it is real or not, and the topic is one of pretty intense and interesting debate. IRAS operated for 10 months from January 1983, taking a far-infrared survey of 96 percent of the sky. In this wavelength, small, cool objects like Planet Nine might be detectable, so Rowan-Robinson decided to re-analyze the data using parameters consistent with Planet Nine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla launched Firefox Relay as a free product that gives you five email aliases you can use every time you need to sign up for a random account online. From a report: Now, the organization has introduced a paid Premium tier for the service that will give you access to even more aliases. You'll get your own subdomain (yourdomain.mozmail.com) when you subscribe, and you'll be able to create an unlimited number of emails. The tier will also give you access to a summary dashboard with the emails you make, the option to use your aliases when you reply to messages and a 150 kb attachment allowance. After you sign up for Relay, you'll have to install its Firefox extension to be able to take advantage of its features. Every time you visit a website that asks for an email address, the Relay icon will appear on your browser, and you can click it to generate a random address.The service will forward messages you get using your aliases to your primary email account, and you can block all messages from coming in or even delete the alias when it starts getting spam. Mozilla didn't say how much a Premium subscription will cost in the future, but it's offering the tier at an introductory price of $1/EUR1 per month for a limited time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's bid for British chipmaker Arm faces a national security review in the U.K., in another potential pitfall for a deal under intense scrutiny from antitrust regulators across the world. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority has been instructed to carry out the review alongside a closer look at whether there are competition concerns, Nadine Dorries, Secretary of State for Culture and Digital said in a statement Tuesday. The U.K. has been amping up oversight of deals that may affect defense and has weighed a potential veto of Nvidia's takeover bid. The minister's decision is separate to the nation's antitrust review of how the deal may affect rivals and customers. Companies can allay security and antitrust concerns by selling off units or making binding pledges. "Arm has a unique place in the global technology supply chain and we must make sure the implications of this transaction are fully considered," Dorries said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google was so worried about Epic Games sidestepping its app store with Fortnite that it created a task force to confront the issue, according to a legal filing by the game developer. From a report: The task force was created after Epic began offering an Android version of the hugely popular game through Samsung Electronics's Galaxy Store and directly through Epic's website in 2018, giving users a way to bypass the Google Play store, according to the filing. Epic's efforts to avoid paying commissions on app stores from Google and Apple reached a flashpoint last year when both companies removed Fortnite and the game's creator sued them. The legal showdown has help draw criticism and regulatory scrutiny to the app store policies of Alphabet's Google and Apple, which are seen as a dominant force in mobile software. In October, Google countersued, arguing that Epic pushed an "unapproved" version of Fortnite on Android phones that placed users at risk. Google has said that its app store isn't a monopoly since the company allows other stores to run on Android devices, unlike Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: The Emotet malware botnet is back up and running once again almost ten months after an international law enforcement operation took down its command and control servers earlier this year in January. The comeback is surprising because after taking over Emotet's server infrastructure, law enforcement officials also orchestrated a mass-uninstall of the malware from all infected computers on April 25, effectively wiping out the entire botnet across the internet. [O]ver the weekend, security researcher Luca Ebach said he spotted that another malware botnet named TrickBot was helping the Emotet gang get back on its feet by installing the Emotet malware on systems that had been previously infected with TrickBot. "We used to call this Operation ReachAround back when Emotet was dropped by Trickbot in the past," a spokesperson for Cryptolaemus, a group of security researchers who tracked Emotet in the past, told The Record today. [...] Cryptolaemus said that right now, the Emotet gang is not sending out any new email spam but relying on the TrickBot gang to help them create an initial footprint of their new botnet incarnation before ramping up spam operations again. But if Emotet's comeback will succeed remains to be seen. It would be very hard for Emotet to reach its previous size any time in the coming months; however, the malware strain itself remains a very sophisticated and capable threat that shouldn't be ignored.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software, the next big thing won't matter, argues Dan Moren in an opinion piece for Macworld. From the report: Uneven distribution: As sci-fi writer William Gibson famously said, "the future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." While Gibson's comment resonates mostly on a socio-economic level that is borne out by Apple's not inexpensive technology, it's also embodied geographically by the company's work: if you're interested, you can see which Apple features are available in which regions. Many of these, of course, are due to restrictions and laws in specific regions or places where, say, Apple has not prioritized language localization. But some of them are cases where features have been rolled out only slowly to certain places. [...] It's surely less exciting for Apple to think about rolling out these (in some cases years old) features, especially those which might require a large degree of legwork, to various places than it is for the company to demonstrate its latest shiny feature, but it also means that sometimes these features don't make it to many, if not most of the users of its devices. Uneven distribution, indeed. To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all. [...] Shooting trouble: Sometimes what we're dealing with in the aforementioned situations are what we call "edge cases." Apple engineers surely do their best to test their features with a variety of hardware, in different places, with different settings. [...] Nobody expects Apple to catch everything, but the question remains: when these problems do arise, what do we do about them? One thing Apple could improve is the ease for users to report issues they encounter. Too often, I see missives posted on Apple discussion boards that encourage people to get in touch with Apple support... which often means a lengthy reiteration of the old troubleshooting canards. While these can sometimes solve problems, if not actually explain them, it's not a process that most consumers are likely to go through. And when those steps don't resolve the issues, users are often left with a virtual shrug. Likewise, while Apple does provide a place to send feedback about products, it's explicitly not a way to report problems. Making it easier for users to report bugs and unexpected behavior would go a long way to helping owners of Apple products feel like they're not simply shouting their frustrations into a void (aka Twitter). If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software [...] it at least owes it to its users to create more robust resources for helping them help themselves. Because there's nothing more frustrating than not understanding why a miraculous device that can contact people around the world instantaneously, run incredibly powerful games, and crunch data faster than a supercomputer of yesteryear sometimes can't do something as simple as export a video of a vacation. While Moren focuses primarily on unfinished features to help make his case, "there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse," says HN reader makecheck. "When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones." An example of this would be the current UX of notifications. "A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it," writes noneeeed. "But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparently all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups." "Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app," adds another reader.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new national recycling strategy today, the agency's first ever such commitment, according to the Washington Post. The Verge reports: It's a roadmap for the US to achieve a goal of recycling at least half of its municipal waste by the end of the decade. That's a steep rise considering the US' recycling rate has actually declined since 2015, and was only at about 32 percent of all municipal waste in 2018 (the most recent year for which there's EPA data). The recycling plans the EPA announced today are just the first piece in "a series" of forthcoming documents the agency plans to release to work towards a "circular economy," or an economy where resources are recovered and reused to make new products rather than allowed to wind up in landfills. It's a sort of tacit acknowledgement that recycling alone doesn't make a huge dent in the world's trash problems. There are several key tactics the EPA plans to employ to meet its new recycling goal. For starters, the US will have to do a better job of collecting recyclable materials. The uptick in online shopping has changed where packaging waste winds up. There's less cardboard for instance, coming from shopping malls and grocery stores because of the popularity of home deliveries. That has posed problems for recycling companies because cardboard coming from peoples' homes tends to be dirtier than retailers' trash, experts tell The Verge. Often times, cardboard or plastic that's too contaminated with food or other items can't be recycled. So the EPA intends to do more public outreach and education to ensure more of the stuff people throw out actually gets recycled. The EPA also wants to develop new markets for recycled materials so that it's worth it for companies to recycle. That means there could be new policies or financial incentives on the way to boost demand for recycled materials. The strategy document mentions, for example, a "Demand Challenge partnership program" that would recognize companies for using more recycled materials in their products. Notably, the EPA says it might finally "explore" ratification of the Basel Convention, a 1989 international treaty aimed at reducing the flow of e-waste and other hazardous trash from wealthy to lower income nations. The new strategy also marks the first time, the EPA says, that the agency's recycling plans will connect the dots between waste, environmental injustice, and the climate crisis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg report: In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People [...] with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. According to Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, "the U.S. program looks like a dinosaur" in comparison. [The program called Novissi], which means "solidarity" in the local Ewe language, is the brainchild of Cina Lawson, who heads the Ministry of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation. [...] Togo had run some cash transfer programs in the past, but they were small-scale and typically involved registering households one at a time and distributing physical money by hand. According to [Shegun Bakari, a close adviser to the president], other cabinet members objected to the idea of using mobile technology, arguing that many in rural areas didn't have access to phones or identification, and even those who did might lack the wherewithal to navigate a digital system. Yet in fact, Togolese -- like people across Africa -- had for years been using "mobile money," stored on and transferred from their mobile phones. The president quickly embraced the proposal. [....] Covid pushed countries to move quickly beyond age-old debates over who is deserving of government aid and whether transfers should be unconditional. The sheer breadth of suffering undercut the paternalistic attitude that the poor brought their suffering upon themselves. Even with the president's support, Lawson's team faced big challenges. For starters they didn't know which Togolese were most in need: Tax rolls were no help in a country where four out of five working-age people toil in the informal economy. The last national census, conducted almost a decade earlier, hadn't gathered information about households' wealth or income. To ensure payments were made only to verified individuals, the team sought to build the platform off an existing database. Few Togolese possessed a driver's license or national ID card, but 3.6 million adults are registered to vote, according to the country's electoral commission, which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This electoral database was thought to represent somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population. Lawson and other members of the cabinet decided to focus the first round of support on anyone with an address in greater Lome who had listed an informal occupation, including shopkeepers, seamstresses, maids, hairdressers, and drivers. With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. Lawson insisted that the platform be able to offer an instantaneous payoff; otherwise, she warned, Togolese would doubt the promise of "free money" and fail to enroll. "You register, the platform determines you're eligible -- because once you enter your voter ID, the platform knows your profession and your geographic position -- and bam! You receive an SMS with the money," she says. The program wasn't without hiccups, however. When Novissi first began on April 8th, there were millions of registration attempts and tens of thousands of people calling for troubleshooting help, causing the platform to briefly buckle. But, as the report notes, it "largely worked," with more than 567,000 people receiving payments in the first round of disbursements. "In part because Novissi proved so successful, the ministry teamed up with GiveDirectly and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to fund a round of payments for the 200 poorest cantons," adds Bloomberg. "To find them, the researchers trained an algorithm to identify impoverished communities based on their urban layout and housing materials, using satellite images. The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users. Over the next few months, this round pushed funds out to 138,000 more beneficiaries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.