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AskWaves explains how the gap between air and ocean freight transport has narrowed during the pandemic. From the report: The air rate from China to the U.S. West Coast during the first week of November was about $14 per kilogram, double what it was a year ago, according to the Freightos Air Index. Shipping by air to the East Coast cost about $13, also twice as much as in 2020. [...] Air is usually the mode of last resort, limited to perishables and high-value goods with margins that can cover the extra expense. Incredibly, airfreight has become a bargain relative to ocean shipping for many companies, especially when measured against the cost of stockouts and lost sales. That's what happens when supply chains are turned upside down by constant chaos. Ocean shipping demand to North America is up more than 20% compared to 2019. Carriers and ports have been overwhelmed, resulting in huge delays and port backlogs demonstrated most clearly by the 80 container vessels waiting last week for a berth at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Glitches in the system -- from COVID outbreaks to accidents -- created more havoc because the system is so stretched. Spot tariffs -- for immediate transactions not subject to more favorable long-term contracts -- can cost upwards of $20,000 for a forty-foot equivalent unit from China to the West Coast when a host of premiums and surcharges are included. That's 10 times greater than pre-pandemic rates and doesn't even include domestic transportation to move a shipment across the country. Many companies, especially retailers worried about product shortages for big holiday shopping events, are trying to make up for lost time by shifting goods that normally move by ocean to air. The decision to convert ocean freight to air is easier for shippers because air transport is much more cost-competitive than it has ever been. Pre-pandemic, the average price to move air cargo was about 13 to 15 times higher than ocean, but now it is only three to five times more expensive, according to the International Air Transport Association and industry experts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has disclosed two high-severity vulnerabilities that affect a wide range of Intel processor families, allowing threat actors and malware to gain higher privilege levels on the device. BleepingComputer reports: The flaws were discovered by SentinelOne and are tracked as CVE-2021-0157 and CVE-2021-0158, and both have a CVSS v3 score of 8.2 (high). The former concerns the insufficient control flow management in the BIOS firmware for some Intel processors, while the latter relies on the improper input validation on the same component. These vulnerabilities could lead to escalation of privilege on the machine, but only if the attacker had physical access to vulnerable devices. Intel hasn't shared many technical details around these two flaws, but they advise users to patch the vulnerabilities by applying the available BIOS updates. This is particularly problematic because motherboard vendors do not release BIOS updates often and don't support their products with security updates for long. Considering that 7th gen Intel Core processors came out five years ago, it's doubtful that MB vendors are still releasing security BIOS updates for them. As such, some users will be left with no practical way to fix the above flaws. In these cases, we would suggest that you set up a strong password for accessing the BIOS settings. Intel also released a separate advisory for a high-severity elevation of privilege flaw (CVE-2021-0146) that affects several car models that use the Intel Atom E3900. "Intel has released a firmware update to mitigate this flaw, and users will get it through patches supplied by the system manufacturer," the report says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An unprivileged application can corrupt data in memory by accessing 'hammering' rows of DDR4 memory in certain patterns millions of times a second, giving those untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges," writes long-time Slashdot reader shoor. Ars Technica reports: Rowhammer attacks work by accessing -- or hammering -- physical rows inside vulnerable chips millions of times per second in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. Researchers have shown the attacks can be used to give untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges, bypass security sandboxes designed to keep malicious code from accessing sensitive operating system resources, and root or infect Android devices, among other things. All previous Rowhammer attacks have hammered rows with uniform patterns, such as single-sided, double-sided, or n-sided. In all three cases, these "aggressor" rows -- meaning those that cause bitflips in nearby "victim" rows -- are accessed the same number of times. Research published on Monday presented a new Rowhammer technique. It uses non-uniform patterns that access two or more aggressor rows with different frequencies. The result: all 40 of the randomly selected DIMMs in a test pool experienced bitflips, up from 13 out of 42 chips tested in previous work (PDF) from the same researchers. "We found that by creating special memory access patterns we can bypass all mitigations that are deployed inside DRAM," Kaveh Razavi and Patrick Jattke, two of the research authors, wrote in an email. "This increases the number of devices that can potentially be hacked with known attacks to 80 percent, according to our analysis. These issues cannot be patched due to their hardware nature and will remain with us for many years to come." The non-uniform patterns work against Target Row Refresh. Abbreviated as TRR, the mitigation works differently from vendor to vendor but generally tracks the number of times a row is accessed and recharges neighboring victim rows when there are signs of abuse. The neutering of this defense puts further pressure on chipmakers to mitigate a class of attacks that many people thought more recent types of memory chips were resistant to. In Monday's paper, the researchers wrote: "Proprietary, undocumented in-DRAM TRR is currently the only mitigation that stands between Rowhammer and attackers exploiting it in various scenarios such as browsers, mobile phones, the cloud, and even over the network. In this paper, we show how deviations from known uniform Rowhammer access patterns allow attackers to flip bits on all 40 recently-acquired DDR4 DIMMs, 2.6x more than the state of the art. The effectiveness of these new non-uniform patterns in bypassing TRR highlights the need for a more principled approach to address Rowhammer." While PCs, laptops, and mobile phones are most affected by the new findings, the report notes that cloud services like AWS and Azure "remain largely safe from Rowhammer because they use higher-end chips that include a defense known as ECC, short for Error Correcting Code." "Concluding, our work confirms that the DRAM vendors' claims about Rowhammer protections are false and lure you into a false sense of security," the researchers wrote. "All currently deployed mitigations are insufficient to fully protect against Rowhammer. Our novel patterns show that attackers can more easily exploit systems than previously assumed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Nigerian central bank's digital currency has lured about half a million users three weeks after it was introduced in a move to entice people away from crypto currencies. Adoption rate for the Central Bank of Nigeria digital currency called eNaira "has been excellent," according to Osita Nwanisobi, spokesman for the Abuja-based lender. More than 488,000 people have downloaded the consumer wallet -- that's needed to transact eNaira -- while about 78,000 merchants from more than 160 countries have enrolled, Nwanisobi said by phone. The central bank is opposed to crypto currencies but that hasn't stopped Nigerians from using virtual currencies as a hedge against the nation's capital controls and to remit money. Demand is so large that individuals in the West African nation hold the world's highest proportion of such assets per capita, according to a survey by Statista. About 62 million naira ($150,000) of the virtual currency have been traded since it was introduced, according to Nwanisobi. The nation has traded 60,215 Bitcoins since 2017 to the end of last year -- valued at $3.9 billion as of Monday -- the largest volume outside the U.S., according to Paxful, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace. It has also the largest proportion of retail users conducting transactions under $10,000, according to Chainalysis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A year since it was introduced, New York City Council passed a bill earlier this week requiring companies that sell AI technologies for hiring to obtain audits assessing the potential of those products to discriminate against job candidates. The bill requiring "bias audits" passed with overwhelming support in a 38-4 vote. Protocol reports: The bill is intended to weed out the use of tools that enable already unlawful employment discrimination in New York City. If signed into law, it will require providers of automated employment decision tools to have those systems evaluated each year by an audit service and provide the results to companies using those systems. AI for recruitment can include software that uses machine learning to sift through resumes and help make hiring decisions, systems that attempt to decipher the sentiments of a job candidate, or even tech involving games to pick up on subtle clues about someone's hiring worthiness. The NYC bill attempts to encompass the full gamut of AI by covering everything from old-school decision trees to more complex systems operating through neural networks. The legislation calls on companies using automated decision tools for recruitment not only to tell job candidates when they're being used, but to tell them what information the technology used to evaluate their suitability for a job. If signed, the law goes into effect January 2023. Violators could be subject to civil penalties. Notably, the bill "fails to go into detail on what constitutes a bias audit other than to define one as 'an impartial evaluation' that involves testing," reports Protocol. It also doesn't address how well automatic hiring technologies work to remove phony applicants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During the Xbox 20th anniversary event today, Microsoft announced it'll be adding a total of 76 games to the Xbox backward compatibility program. The company also said "Halo Infinite," the latest edition of the best-selling Xbox alien-shooter game, will be available starting today for multiplayer gaming. Engadget reports: Every title Microsoft is adding today will support Auto HDR on Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. You'll also see an increase in resolution when playing original Xbox games. The Xbox Series X and Xbox One X will render those titles at four times their native resolution, while the Xbox Series S will do so at three times and Xbox One S and Xbox One at double. Additionally, 11 titles will support FPS Boost. The feature increases the framerate of a game up to 60 frames per second. 26 titles that were already a part of the backward compatibility library will now support FPS Boost as well. Included in that list are Fallout: New Vegas, The Elder Scrolls IV, Dragon Age: Origins and Dead Space 2. Some of the newly added backward compatible games include the entire Max Payne series and F.E.A.R. franchise, as well as Skate 2 and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II. Microsoft notes that this is the final update for the initiative. "While we continue to stay focused on preserving and enhancing the art form of games, we have reached the limit of our ability to bring new games to the catalog from the past due to licensing, legal and technical constraints," Xbox Compatibility Program Lead Peggy Lo said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station sheltered inside their respective spacecraft, a Crew Dragon and Soyuz, on Monday morning as the orbiting laboratory passed through an unexpected debris field. This was not a pre-planned collision avoidance maneuver in low Earth orbit, in which the station would use onboard propulsion to move away. Rather, the situation required the astronauts to quickly take shelter. Had there been a collision during the conjunction, the two spacecraft would have been able to detach from the space station and make an emergency return to Earth. Ultimately that was not necessary, and the astronauts reemerged into the space station later Monday. However, as the crew on board the station prepared for their sleep schedule, Mission Control in Houston asked them to keep as many of the hatches onboard the space station closed for the time being, in case of an unexpected collision during subsequent orbits. It appears likely that the debris field that had alarmed flight controllers on Monday was caused by an anti-satellite test performed by Russia's military early on Monday. [...] It appears that Russia launched a surface-to-space Nudol missile on Monday, between 02:00 and 05:00 UTC, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northern part of the country. The missile then struck an older satellite, Cosmos 1408. Launched in 1982, the satellite had been slowly losing altitude and was a little more than 450 km above the Earth. This is a large satellite, with a mass of about 2,000 kg. As of Monday afternoon, US Space Command said it was already tracking more than 1,000 pieces of new debris. Although the satellite's altitude is higher than the International Space Station, which is about 400 km above the surface, a kinetic impact would spread a large cloud of debris. Satellite expert Jonathan McDowell believes the Cosmos 1408 satellite is the likely candidate for the space station's ongoing debris event. During a daily briefing today, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the test had created more than 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of un-trackable debris. "The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites," Price said. "This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station as well as to other human spaceflight activities. Russia's dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long-term sustainability of outer space."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An "achievable, replicable" plan for a city that's embracing public space as never before. Curbed: New York and Curbed recruited a team of designers and consultants, led by the architecture firm WXY, to approach the streets as a matrix of overlapping, interrelated networks. The allure of more humane cities has generated an entire library's worth of plans and pilot projects, both top-down and grassroots, for areas like Downtown Brooklyn and Soho. A few years ago, a consortium of Harlem business and organizations collaborated on a plan to redesign East 125th Street. In 2019, the City Council passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to develop a five-year citywide plan. But this torrent of good intentions and expertise has fragmented the issue further by producing more schemes to ignore, postpone, and gripe about. Most New Yorkers' concerns are exquisitely parochial: The only time a Bronxite is likely to care about, say, the width of Sohoâ(TM)s sidewalks is if it makes parking there even worse. So we tried to imagine what a comprehensive transformation would produce on a generic Manhattan block, to the extent that one exists. We chose Third Avenue between East 33rd and 34th Streets because of its concentration of terriblenesses and virtues. It is congested, dense, torn up, noisy, and lively. Lined by towers and tenements, plied by trucks and fed by tunnels, it's a short walk from offices, hospitals, and trains. Yet we also embraced its frenzy. Our goal was not to impose the serenity of a provincial Dutch city or to streamline the block into anodyne efficiency. New York without friction wouldnâ(TM)t be New York. We aspired to pack all the measures we already knew we should be taking into one vivid frame. An aerial photograph became a platform on which to overlay a possible future city. The result is a real-life I Spy book, filled with details that accumulate into a livable, equitable, safer, and more pleasant place to live. This is no futuristic fantasy of self-sweeping sidewalks or robot-controlled Tesla taxis gliding up at the touch of an app. Instead, we imagined a makeover that could happen now, given urgency and determination. To execute it in permanent, handsome materials would be slow and expensive; a recent project to renovate a stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn cost $2.2 million per block. But the DOT has already shown many times that some of this work can be achieved with paint, planters, and boulders. Getting the first draft done matters more than making it perfect and perennial. Our efforts yielded two big lessons. The first is that every improvement is a trade-off. Protecting bus lanes with concrete barriers, for example, would keep cars out, but it would also keep limited-stop buses from passing local ones. Our street incorporates a possible set of compromises. The second is that even simple tweaks imply a far-reaching organizational overhaul. Enclosed trash bins would push the Department of Sanitation to update some of its trucks and pickup procedures. New regulations and speed limits mean enforcement, and thus money, manpower, and -- most important -- a sense of common purpose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peloton has filed fresh lawsuits against two of its rivals, iFit and Echelon. From a report: It alleges that the companies are violating up to four patents it holds related to on-demand classes, one of which it only obtained last week, as Bloomberg Law notes. Peloton is seeking a court order to block sales of the devices until the patents expire, in addition to compensation. In both suits, Peloton accuses competitors of attempting to "free ride" off its technology. The iFit complaint concerns NordicTrack, ProForm and FreeMotion products that use the company's leaderboard and/or its ActivePulse or SmartAdjust features. "Prior to the actions giving rise to this suit, iFit Functionality never delivered live classes -- i.e., classes taught by instructors and streamed to users' devices in substantially real time -- or offered its members the ability to participate in competitive classes via a leaderboard. Instead, iFit Functionality only allowed subscribers to follow along with pre-recorded exercise classes on their machines, without any sort of community engagement," Peloton wrote in the filing. It accuses iFit of "profiting immensely from this infringement." In October, iFit paused its plan to go public due to adverse market conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft said "Halo Infinite," the latest edition of the best-selling Xbox alien-shooter game, will be available starting Nov. 15 for multiplayer gaming. From a report: The company, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of the original Xbox console and the first Halo game, said the first season of the game's multiplayer mode will begin Monday with a public test version on personal computers and consoles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following sentence may sound like the logline for an as-yet unmade National Treasure 3, but it's very much real: A large group of crypto maximalists is banding together in an effort to obtain the actual U.S. Constitution. From a report: Unlike the antagonists in the previous Nicolas Cage movies, this crew might actually succeed. Or kind of, anyway. On Thursday, November 18, Sotheby's is auctioning off "an exceptionally rare and extraordinarily historic" first printing of the U.S. Constitution. Only thirteen copies remain, besides the one located in Washington D.C.'s National Archives museum, from the original printing of 500 that the founders issued for submission to the Continental Congress. It's the first time in 30 years that this one has become available for purchase, following the 1997 death of its last winner, New York real estate developer S. Howard Goldman. It's expected to fetch between $15 million and $20 million in the auction -- unless, of course, it instead fetches the equivalent in Ethereum.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whilst the European Parliament has been fighting bravely for the rights of everyone in the EU to exist freely and with dignity in publicly accessible spaces, the government of Portugal is attempting to push their country in the opposite direction: one of digital authoritarianism. From a report: The Portuguese lead organisation in the Reclaim Your Face coalition D3 (Defesa Dos Direitos Digitais) are raising awareness of how the Portuguese government's new proposed video surveillance and facial recognition law amounts to illiberal biometric mass surveillance. Why? Ministers are trying to secretly rush the law through the Parliament, endangering the very foundations of democracy on which the Republic of Portugal rests. Eerily reminiscent of the failed attempts by the Serbian government just two months ago to rush in a biometric mass surveillance law, Portugal now asked its Parliament to approve a law in a shocking absence of democratic scrutiny. Just two weeks before the national Assembly will be dissolved, the government wants Parliamentarians to quickly approve a law, without public consultation or evidence. The law would enable and encourage widespread biometric mass surveillance -- even though we have repeatedly shown just how harmful these practices are. Reclaim Your Face lead organisation EDRi sent a letter to representatives of Portugal's main political parties, supporting D3's fight against biometric mass surveillance practices that treat each and every person as a potential criminal. Together, we urged politicians to reject this dystopian law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ohio's largest public pension system filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social media giant misled investors and breached the public's trust. From a report: Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which manages $125 billion on behalf of 1.1 million Ohioans, says it purchased Facebook stock "at artificially inflated prices" in 2021 and suffered damages because of Facebook's violations of federal securities laws. "Defendants were aware that Facebook's platforms facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children, but Facebook refused to correct these issues," the federal lawsuit alleges. "All told, these disclosures erased more than $100 billion in shareholder value and subjected Facebook to immense reputational harm." The lawsuit comes after former Facebook project manager Frances Haugen testified before Congress that the company "put their astronomical profits before people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roblox plans to help bring educational videogames to classrooms world-wide, part of its strategy to expand its mostly teen and preteen user base and play a role in the next evolution of the internet known as the metaverse. From a report: Roblox, based in San Mateo, Calif., is expected to announce Monday that it has invested $10 million to help develop three games for middle-school, high-school and college students. Roblox, which is on mobile devices, computers and Microsoft's Xbox system, had more than 47 million daily users in the third quarter, about half of whom are under the age of 13. "It's been a vision since we started the company over 16 years ago to have these types of experiences," Roblox Chief Executive David Baszucki told The Wall Street Journal. "We've always had that educational background in mind." One of the games the company is funding will teach robotics, another will focus on space exploration, and the third will help students explore careers and concepts in computer science, engineering and biomedical science. They were developed by nonprofits including Boston's Museum of Science, and one was made in partnership with a small educational game studio. Roblox's platform already features millions of games and other activities, all of which are made by its own users, though only a few were designed for classrooms. The three games it is funding, due out next year, won't offer any virtual goods for sale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Huawei, whose smartphone business has been devastated by U.S. sanctions, is planning to license its handset designs to third parties as a way to gain access to critical components, Bloomberg is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The Shenzhen-based tech giant is considering licensing its designs to a unit of state-owned China Postal and Telecommunications Appliances Co, or PTAC, which will then seek to buy parts barred under the Trump-era blacklisting, said one of the people, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters. The unit, known as Xnova, is already selling Huawei-branded Nova phones on its e-commerce site and the partnership will see it offer self-branded devices based on the larger company's designs. Chinese telecom equipment maker TD Tech Ltd. will also sell some phones featuring Huawei's designs under its own brand, another person said. The partnerships are subject to change as negotiations are still ongoing. The move may be Huawei's best chance at salvaging its smartphone business after U.S. sanctions cut off its access to key chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Google's Android apps and Qualcomm's 5G wireless modems. Since Huawei first came under fire from the Trump administration, its shrinking consumer business has seen sales fall for four straight quarters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HPE has confirmed that a "limited subset" of customer data was taken in a data breach involving its subsidiary Aruba Networks, a maker of networking equipment. From a report: The enterprise technology giant said in a statement that an unauthorized person used a private key to gain access to customer data stored in its Aruba Central cloud. HPE did not say how the hacker obtained the private key, but said the key allowed access to cloud servers in multiple regions where customer data was stored. HPE bought Aruba Networks in 2015 for $3 billion in cash. Aruba provides networking gear, like wireless access points, and network security for companies. Through its dashboard, Aruba Central, companies can centrally monitor and manage their Wi-Fi networks. It's the Wi-Fi data collected in Aruba Central that HPE said was compromised. HPE said two datasets were exposed: one for network analytics containing information about devices accessing a customer's Wi-Fi network, and a second dataset containing location data about devices on the network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heavy rain and flooding in Aswan, Egypt, have driven drifts of scorpions to seek shelter in people's homes. From a report: Three people died and more than 400 were hospitalised across the governorate to receive anti-venom treatment after being stung by the panicking arachnids, according to state-run media. However, acting Health Minister Khalid Abdel-Ghafar said in a statement that no deaths were reported from the stings. The Ministry of Health has reassured the public that it holds a large enough stock of anti-venom, noting that 3,350 doses were available in Aswan. The downpours and subsequent floods have also forced local authorities to suspend schools on Sunday, Governor Ashraf Attia said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is making U.S. states foot part of the bill and provide customer support for its plan to turn iPhones into digital identification cards, according to confidential documents obtained by CNBC. From the report: The company requires states to maintain the systems needed to issue and service credentials, hire project managers to respond to Apple inquiries, prominently market the new feature and push for its adoption with other government agencies, all at taxpayer expense, according to contracts signed by four states. Apple announced in June that its users could soon store state-issued identification cards in the iPhone's Wallet app, billing it as a more secure and convenient way for customers to provide credentials in a variety of in-person and remote settings. The feature, when combined with Apple's biometric security measures like Face ID, could cut down on fraud. But the move has brought questions from industry observers about why local authorities are ceding control of citizens' identities to a $2.46 trillion private corporation. Beyond that, the integration of identity into powerful mobile devices has drawn concern from privacy experts about the risk of dystopian scenarios involving surveillance. The contracts between Cupertino, California-based Apple and states including Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma provide a rare glimpse into the dealings of the powerful company. Apple is known for its obsession with secrecy. It typically forces potential partners to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent its documents from spilling into public view.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world changed on Nov. 15, 1971, and hardly anyone noticed. It is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, a computer carved onto silicon, an element as plentiful on earth as sand on a beach. Microprocessors unchained computers from air-conditioned rooms and freed computing power to go wherever it is needed most. Life has improved exponentially since. From a report: Back then, IBM mainframes were kept in sealed rooms and were so expensive companies used argon gas instead of water to put out computer-room fires. Workers were told to evacuate on short notice, before the gas would suffocate them. Feeding decks of punch cards into a reader and typing simple commands into clunky Teletype machines were the only ways to interact with the IBM computers. Digital Equipment Corp. sold PDP-8 minicomputers to labs and offices that weighed 250 pounds. In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design 12 custom chips for a new printing calculator. Engineers Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Ted Hoff were tired of designing different chips for various companies and suggested instead four chips, including one programmable chip they could use for many products. Using only 2,300 transistors, they created the 4004 microprocessor. Four bits of data could move around the chip at a time. The half-inch-long rectangular integrated circuit had a clock speed of 750 kilohertz and could do about 92,000 operations a second. Intel introduced the 3,500-transistor, eight-bit 8008 in 1972; the 29,000-transistor, 16-bit 8086, capable of 710,000 operations a second, was introduced in 1978. IBM used the next iteration, the Intel 8088, for its first personal computer. By comparison, Apple's new M1 Max processor has 57 billion transistors doing 10.4 trillion floating-point operations a second. That is at least a billionfold increase in computer power in 50 years. We've come a long way, baby. When I met Mr. Hoff in the 1980s, he told me that he once took his broken television to a repairman, who noted a problem with the microprocessor. The repairman then asked why he was laughing. Now that everyone has a computer in his pocket, one of my favorite movie scenes isn't quite so funny. In "Take the Money and Run" (1969), Woody Allen's character interviews for a job at an insurance company and his interviewer asks, "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?" "Yes, I have." "Where?" "My aunt has one."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's "GeForce Now" cloud gaming service has been quietly capping the frame rates for a handful of 12 specific games on certain tiers "to ensure consistent performance," reports the Verge. "Nvidia says the vast majority of games run at 60fps, but not these 12."Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service just leapfrogged Google Stadia in performance, with a new $200-a-year tier that practically gives you the power of an RTX 3080 desktop graphics card in the cloud. But if you're grandfathered into the original $4.99 a month "Founders" tier, or pay $100 a year for "Priority" access, you may not be getting quite what you expected... Nvidia now has an official support page (via 9to5Google) explaining the practice, after Redditors and others revealed that a variety of games were locked to frame rates lower than 60fps. It appears that Nvidia's been doing this for quite a while but only for a handful of demanding games. I did a little searching, and some people were already complaining about being locked to 45fps in Cyberpunk 2077 in December 2020, just as Nvidia admits here. Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Immortals Fenyx Rising are the other games that have sub-50fps frame rates, while others run a bit higher. "For our Priority Members, the maximum frames rendered per second is generally set to 60, or higher, for most of the 1,100+ games we've onboarded so far," NVIDIA explains on its official support page. "There are some exceptions that we determined do not run well enough at 60 FPS on the GPUs used by Priority members. So the default OPS for these specific graphics-intensive games cannot be overridden. "This is to ensure all Priority members are running a consistent, high-quality experience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's digital and cultural secretary will instruct the country's Competition & Markets Authority to conduct "an in-depth inquiry into antitrust concerns" over NVIDIA's purchase of ARM, reports the Sunday Times, "as well as scrutinise national security fears raised by the takeover...." Engadget reports:A second investigation would reportedly last about six months. After that, officials could either block the deal, approve it as-is or require concessions... The tech firm has focused its energy so far on downplaying concerns about ARM's neutrality if the deal closes, promising an open licensing model that treats customers fairly. Any second investigation wouldn't necessarily spell doom for NVIDIA's acquisition. It would suggest the government has some qualms, however, and that NVIDIA might have to make some sacrifices. At the least, the company would have to be patient — it wouldn't get UK approval until 2022 at the earliest, and it would still have to wait for other regulators before finalizing the merger. In other news, ARM has joined the Rust Foundation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This weekend Toyota's president drove a specially-equipped Corolla powered by an in-house hydrogen engine, reports Bloomberg. "Along with Mazda Motor Corp., Toyota showcased vehicles running on carbon-neutral propellants in a three-hour road race this weekend in Okayama."Toyota's hydrogen-powered car underscores the automaker's belief that a wide variety of vehicle types — including hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars, in addition to electric vehicles — will play a role in decarbonizing its fleet over the coming decades. That puts the company in contrast to others, such as General Motors Co., Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo Car AB, which say they'll sell only EVs two decades from now. "The enemy is carbon, not internal combustion engines," Toyoda said at a briefing Saturday. "We need diverse solutions, that's the path toward challenging carbon neutrality." Toyota says that that different emissions-reducing car technologies are needed for different regions of the world. EVs are a good option for places like Europe, where batteries can be charged with electricity derived largely from renewable sources, the automaker says. Other options, such as hydrogen or hybrids, may be a better fit in other regions. The technology is separate from the company's other big bet on hydrogen — hydrogen fuel cells such as those that power the Mirai passenger car. While fuel cells use the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, which in turn runs a motor, the hydrogen engine burns the element just like gasoline. Traditional engines only need to be tweaked in minor ways, such as changing out the fuel supply and injection systems, to make them capable of running on hydrogen, Toyota Chief Engineer Naoyuki Sakamoto said in a briefing last month. That also makes the technology a way to save some of the hundreds of thousands of jobs making parts related to combustion engines that are predicted to disappear in Japan if the automotive sector makes a full shift to EVs, according to Toyoda.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tonight CNBC interviewed science fiction luminary Neal Stephenson about his new "geoengineering climate change thriller" — and about his coining of the original term "metaverse."Author Neal Stephenson shot to fame almost 30 years ago with the science-fiction novel "Snow Crash," which envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse," a computer-generated world accessible through virtual reality headsets. Since then, he's written several more novels encompassing technology and history, including a trilogy set at the dawn of the scientific revolution, and has done work for various technology companies including Jeff Bezos' space travel company, Blue Origin, and augmented reality company Magic Leap. His new novel, "Termination Shock," out November 16, focuses on the looming issue of our age — human-generated climate change, projecting a near future of extreme weather and social chaos. Against this setting, a maverick oilman decides to take matters into his own hands and builds the world's biggest gun to shoot canisters of sulfur dioxide into the air, echoing the effects of a volcanic eruption and temporarily cooling parts of the globe. Geopolitics, social media and Dutch royalty all play a part. Stephenson acknowledges that geoengineering is a radical step, but suggests as the effects of climate change grow more destructive, the demand for radical solutions will grow. In the interview Stephenson suggests one factor that might increase popular support for climate-change action: rising sea levels. "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water." The interview also touches on how it was 1992 when Stephenson coined the word "metaverse," and now it's being claimed by major tech companies. "All I can do is kind of sit back and watch it in amazement," Stephenson tells CNBC:But, as many have noticed, "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse." Neil Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Axios reports:IBM has created a quantum processor able to process information so complex the work can't be done or simulated on a traditional computer, CEO Arvind Krishna told "Axios on HBO" ahead of a planned announcement. Why it matters: Quantum computing could help address problems that are too challenging for even today's most powerful supercomputers, such as figuring out how to make better batteries or sequester carbon emissions. Driving the news: IBM says its new Eagle processor can handle 127 qubits, a measure of quantum computing power. In topping 100 qubits, IBM says it has reached a milestone that allows quantum to surpass the power of a traditional computer. "It is impossible to simulate it on something else, which implies it's more powerful than anything else," Krishna told "Axios on HBO...." Krishna says the quantum computing push is one part of his approach to return the company to growth. "Some people think of it as science fiction," Krishna says of quantum computing in a preview clip from the Axios interview. "I think of it now as a feat of engineering."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kotaku reports: Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition was released on November 11 on all major platforms including the Switch. However, for folks who bought the game on PC, they've been unable to play the game since just shortly after it was released. Now three days later, [PC] fans are still unable to access the game they bought days ago with no update from Rockstar on when the GTA Trilogy will become playable again. The remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy has had a very, very rocky launch, with players across all platforms reporting various graphical bugs, gameplay glitches, and other annoying changes and tweaks to the classic PS2-era games. But while players on Xbox One or PS5 or Switch are dealing with annoying bugs and odd visual problems, players on PC are left unable to play any of the games included in the collection. In a review Screen Rant writes that all three games "look better here than they ever have before." But...The visual improvements don't discount the fact that there are a lot of things missing in Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, including basic functions like the series' iconic cinematic camera mode which premiered in GTA 3. Gone also from GTA 3 is the top-down camera angle which was added in to please players coming over from GTA 2. Both of these camera angles were also missing in previous re-releases of GTA 3, but not including them in what is called the Definitive Edition feels like a mistake. On the plus side, they write that "Some new but fun inclusions also make returning to Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas enjoyable, like San Andreas' updated bridge facts or the new cheat which lets players turn on Big Head Mode in all GTA Trilogy games if they enter the Konami code. The ability to instantly restart missions after being killed, busted, or otherwise failing is also much appreciated." But Eurogamer reports that unhappy fans are now review-bombing the newly-released game on Metacritic:At the time of writing, the trilogy has 2000+ user reviews on the aggregate site. Of the 2054 reviews recorded by PC users on Metacritic, the combined score is a miserable 0.5. It peaks at 1.0 for PS5 players, but otherwise, most other platforms boast a similarly low score... "This is it! This is the end of Rockstar, this is just too much," opines one particularly unhappy Xbox One customer, who has the highest number of "helpful" points.... "This so-called definitive edition is one of the most pathetic remasters of all time, especially considering how amazing Rockstar used to be. They were the top. They were the best there ever was. They showed other developers what can be done. I just can't believe that the end of Rockstar would be like this..." Rockstar is now being inundated with refund requests as the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition backlash intensifies. Oh, and one more thing. IGN reports that the game also appears to contain files for the infamous deleted sex mini-game "Hot Coffee."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If current progress continues, quantum computers will be able to crack public key cryptography," writes CNET, "potentially creating a serious threat to the crypto world, where some currencies are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars."If encryption is broken, attackers can impersonate the legitimate owners of cryptocurrency, NFTs or other such digital assets. "Once quantum computing becomes powerful enough, then essentially all the security guarantees will go out of the window," Dawn Song, a computer security entrepreneur and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Collective[i] Forecast forum in October. "When public key cryptography is broken, users could be losing their funds and the whole system will break...." "We expect that within a few years, sufficiently powerful computers will be available" for cracking blockchains open, said Nir Minerbi, CEO of quantum software maker Classiq Technologies. The good news for cryptocurrency fans is the quantum computing problem can be fixed by adopting the same post-quantum cryptography technology that the computing industry already has begun developing. The U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, trying to get ahead of the problem, is several years into a careful process to find quantum-proof cryptography algorithms with involvement from researchers around the globe. Indeed, several cryptocurrency and blockchain efforts are actively working on quantum resistant software... A problem with the post-quantum cryptography algorithms under consideration so far, though, is that they generally need longer numeric encryption keys and longer processing times, says Peter Chapman, CEO of quantum computer maker IonQ. That could substantially increase the amount of computing horsepower needed to house blockchains... The real quantum test for cryptocurrencies will be governance structures, not technologies, says Hunter Jensen, chief technology officer of Permission.io, a company using cryptocurrency for a targeted advertising system... "It will be the truly decentralized currencies which will get hit if their communities are too slow and disorganized to act," said Andersen Cheng, chief executive at Post Quantum, a London based company that sells post-quantum encryption technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Untraceable "ghost guns" assembled from parts bought online "can be ordered by gang members, felons and even children," writes the New York Times. They call the guns "increasingly the lethal weapon of easy access around the U.S., but especially California," based on interviews with law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco:Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. The vast majority of suspects caught with them were legally prohibited from having guns. "I've been on the force for 30 years next month, and I've never seen anything like this," said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department, who this year organized the force's first unit dedicated to homemade firearms. By the beginning of October, he said, the department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about double the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year. Law enforcement officials are not exactly sure why their use is taking off. But they believe it is basically a matter of a new, disruptive technology gradually gaining traction in a market, then rocketing up when buyers catch on. This isn't just happening on the West Coast. Since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide... There is a huge surfeit of supplies in circulation, enough to supply dealers who sell pre-assembled guns, via social media platforms or the dark web, for years. At the same time, the increasing availability of 3-D printers, which can create the plastic and metal components of guns, has opened a new backdoor source of illegal weapons for gangs and drug dealers who would otherwise have to steal them. "This isn't going away," said Los Angeles city attorney, Mike Feuer... Brian Muhammad, who works with at-risk young people in Stockton, said he recently asked a group of teenagers where they got their guns. "Did you drive to Vegas?" he asked, referring to Nevada's looser gun laws. They looked at him as if he were crazy. "Who would do that?" one of them replied. "You order them in pieces using your phone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader AltMachine writes: In October 2019, Google said its Sycamore processor was the first to achieve quantum supremacy by completing a task in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the best classical supercomputer, IBM's Summit, 10,000 years. That claim — particularly how Google scientists arrived at the "10,000 years" conclusion — has been questioned by some researchers, but the counterclaim itself was not definitive. Now though, in a paper to be submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, scientists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said their algorithm on classical computers completed the simulation for the Sycamore quantum circuits [possibly paywalled; alternative source of the same article] "in about 15 hours using 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)" at a higher fidelity than Sycamore's. Further, the team said "if our simulation of the quantum supremacy circuits can be implemented in an upcoming exaflop supercomputer with high efficiency, in principle, the overall simulation time can be reduced to a few dozens of seconds, which is faster than Google's hardware experiments". As China unveiled a photonic quantum computer which solved a Gaussian boson sampling problem in 200 seconds that would have taken 600 million years on classical computer, in December 2020, disproving Sycamore's claim would place China being the first country to achieve quantum supremacy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Euractive reports:The French government's roadmap for developing open source to make it a vector of digital sovereignty and a guarantee of "democratic confidence" was presented by Public Transformation and Civil Service Minister Amélie de Montchalin on Wednesday (10 November). EURACTIV France reports Montchalin spoke at the closing of the first edition of the "Open Source Experience", which took place from 9-10 November and brought together all players in the free software community in Paris. "We must now build the public action of the new century," she said, indicating that France will look to inspire the "many States [that] seek to embark" on greater openness of public data and the use of open source... With the vast majority of relations between citizens and state services now being digital, Montchalin believes a "culture of transparency" is necessary for "democratic trust". It is also a matter of digital sovereignty, she added. According to a European Commission study published in September, investment in open source software in 2018 generated a sum of €65-95 billion in revenue. According to the same report, France was crowned European champion of open source policies. To help French administrations make greater use of such solutions, Montchalin announced the creation of a team within the Interministerial Digital Directorate responsible for the promotion and inter-ministerial coordination of this mission. She also revealed the launch of the code.gouv.fr platform, which will inventory all source code published by public organisations... [French prime minister] Jean Castex urged all government departments on 27 April to do more to facilitate access to their data, algorithms and codes "in open formats that can be used by third parties". The PM also urged them to turn to free and open software... [Montchalin] wants the state to retain "control over the solutions" it uses. She also stressed the importance of interoperability — the ability to work with other existing or future products or systems — and reversibility — the ability to resume using data or software in the event of migration to another solution. "By using open source software, you give yourself much more autonomy than by using proprietary software and a fortiori proprietary cloud services that are hosted outside Europe," Stéfane Fermigier, co-president of the Union of Free Software and Open Digital Businesses, told EURACTIV. The article also summarizes a concern from French digital law firm LegalUP Consulting that open source code "makes it easier to discover security flaws, which can be exploited." But a representative from LegalUP also calls open source software "an extremely interesting alternative for Europe, a third way between digital giants and local players; an opportunity to ensure independence through neutrality and decentralisation rather than conflict."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon employee Dustin Mitchell is also a metal guitarist in Texas who decided to name his band "Doomscroll," reports Kotaku — and in February Mitchell tried trademarking Doomscroll with America's Patent and Trademark Office. But then on October 13th, the last day of the trademark's 30-day public comment period, "he got an email from a lawyer who represented Id Software."The lawyer asked Mitchell to extend the 30-day USPTO trademark deadline in order to avoid any legal action. Mitchell felt weird after getting the email, telling Wired that he was a big fan of the old Doom games as a kid and now he was facing off against the devs over his band name. "They're trying to take something away from me that is completely unrelated to them," said Mitchell. A trademark lawyer told Wired that while it might seem odd, Mitchell most likely had every right to trademark the word doomscroll because within the context of music it "is not generic or descriptive of music, musical performances, or musical services." But Id's lawyers are most likely "scooting" in to try to protect the brand name and franchise from any confusion. According to the Wired report, Id has similarly stepped in to stop other folks from trademarking or registering brand names that use the word doom, including a rock metal event named the "Maryland Doom Fest" and a podcast titled "Garden of Doom." For now, the future of Doomscroll (The band) is up to lawyers at Id Software. In October, Mitchell received a lengthy trial schedule that goes all the way until 2023. So this most likely won't be settled anytime soon, unless the guitarist gives up the fight.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research studying the possibility of electrifying rail-based freight "finds that the technology is pretty much ready," reports Ars Technica, "and under the right circumstances, the economics are on the verge of working out." It helps that the price of batteries have dropped 87% over the last decade:In the U.S., the typical freight car travels an average of 241 kilometers per day when in operation. So the researchers created a battery big enough to move that distance as part of a large freight train (four locomotives, 100 freight cars, and about 7,000 tonnes of payload). They found that lithium ferrous phosphate would let each of the four locomotives be serviced by a single freight car configured as a giant battery. The battery would only occupy 40 percent of the volume of a typical boxcar and would be seven tonnes below the weight limit imposed by existing bridges. Because of the efficiency of direct electric power, the train would use only half the energy consumed by an internal combustion engine driving an on-board generator... Using an economic measure called the "net present value," the researchers determine that switching to batteries alone would cost $15 billion. But taking the pollution damages into account turns the number into a $44 billion savings. Considering climate damages as well boosts the savings to $94 billion. Even if these damages are ignored, a rise in the price of diesel and allowing freight companies to buy power at wholesale rates come close to shifting the costs to neutral... [F]reight companies could use their capacity to provide grid stabilization services or sell back power when the price gets high. In extreme cases, this system could actually pay for the entire infrastructure. "Preliminary estimates of the most expensive 90 hours per year in the ERCOT [Texas] market, for example, show that batteries could be discharged at $200/kWh, potentially generating enough revenue to pay for the upfront battery cost in a single year," the study says. Special thanks to clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) for the submission — and for also sharing "some general info about diesel-electric locomotives" and "some detail on the AC-DC-AC drive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the war against misinformation and social media-inspired violence, ultimately the social media platforms are just one front. But what about the people consuming misinformation? In June America's National Security Council unveiled a "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism," which argued that "pursuing the goal of preventing, disrupting, and deterring acts of domestic terrorism... can mean, broader still, cultivating the type of digital literacy that can empower the American public to resist those who would use online communications platforms and other venues to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize to violence." This week America's Department of Homeland Security warned the country still faces "a diverse and challenging threat environment" including the possibility of violence "by individuals and small groups...including domestic violent extremists and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences.....These actors continue to exploit online forums to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and promote violent activity." (Though they add that the agency "is not aware of an imminent and credible threat to a specific location...") But besides offering links to mental health resources and info on law enforcement tip lines, the agency also suggests Americans "Maintain digital media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false and harmful narratives" — linking to an online publication about "Media Literacy and Critical Thinking Online." Here's our look at the documents they're making available — and the language that they're using to convey the threat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SiliconANGLE reports on why investors poured another $250 million into Cerebras Systems Inc:Enterprises typically use graphics processing units in their AI projects. The fastest GPU on the market today features about 54 billion transistors. Cerebras Systems' chip, the WSE-2, includes 2.6 trillion transistors that the startup says make it the "fastest AI processor on Earth." WSE-2 stands for Wafer Scale Engine 2, a nod to the unique architecture on which the startup has based the processor. The typical approach to chip production is carving as many as several dozen processors into a silicon wafer and then separating them. Cerebras Systems is using a vastly different method: The startup carves a single large processor into the silicon wafer that isn't broken up into smaller units. The 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSE-2 are organized into 850,000 cores... Cerebras Systems says that the WSE-2 has 123 times more cores and 1,000 times more on-chip memory than the closest GPU. The chip's impressive specifications translate into several benefits for customers, according to the startup, most notably increased processing efficiency. To match the performance provided by a WSE-2 chip, a company would have to deploy dozens or hundreds of traditional GPU servers... With the WSE-2, data doesn't have to travel between two different servers but only from one section of the chip to another, which represents a much shorter distance. The shorter distance reduces processing delays. Cerebras Systems says that the result is an increase in the speed at which neural networks can run.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Singapore's government has been covering the medical bills of COVID-19 patients throughout the pandemic," reports NPR. "But it says unvaccinated people will soon be on their own."Those who are "unvaccinated by choice" will have to start paying for their own COVID-19 treatment starting December 8, the Ministry of Health announced on Monday, citing the strain they are putting on the nation's health care system. "Currently, unvaccinated persons make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive inpatient care, and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources," it said in a statement... "Our hospitals really much prefer not to have to bill these patients at all, but we have to send this important signal, to urge everyone to get vaccinated if you are eligible," Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Monday. Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. As of Sunday, 85% of its population was fully vaccinated, and 18% had received booster shots, according to health ministry data. Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

North Dakota has just 266 electric cars, the fewest of any state in America, reports the Washington Post. But the state's biggest booster for electric cars may be: the coal industry:The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the [lower carbon] lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. "EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online...." In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells... Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital... Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction... And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner. The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... "Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr brings news of "an exploit in the FBI's Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal web site that would let anyone send an email to any arbitrary recipient..." Security researcher Brian Krebs reports:Late in the evening of November 12 ET, tens of thousands of emails began flooding out from the FBI address eims@ic.fbi.gov, warning about fake cyberattacks. Around that time, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from the same email address. "Hi its pompompurin," read the message. "Check headers of this email it's actually coming from FBI server. I am contacting you today because we located a botnet being hosted on your forehead, please take immediate action thanks." A review of the email's message headers indicated it had indeed been sent by the FBI, and from the agency's own Internet address. The domain in the "from:" portion of the email I received — eims@ic.fbi.gov — corresponds to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS). According to the Department of Justice... "CJIS systems are available to the criminal justice community, including law enforcement, jails, prosecutors, courts, as well as probation and pretrial services..." In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Pompompurin said the hack was done to point out a glaring vulnerability in the FBI's system. "I could've 1000% used this to send more legit looking emails, trick companies into handing over data etc.," Pompompurin said. Instead Pompompurin apparently sent emails with the subject line, "Urgent: Threat actor in systems," with the body (apparently from eims@ic.fbi.gov) warning that "Our intelligence monitoring indicates exfiltration of several of your virtualized clusters in a sophisticated chain attack...." The email then blames the real-world founder of two dark web intelligence companies (apparently the subject of a long standing feud with Pompompurin's community), and ultimately closes with the words "Stay safe, U.S. Department of Homeland Security — Cyber Threat Detection and Analysis — Network Analysis Group." The FBI issued a statement in response to the incident — saying "The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The technology site Recode interviewed 12 "leading thinkers and leaders on Facebook today," including the Senator pushing tech-industry updates for U.S. antitrust law, an early researcher on viral misinformation, and a now-critical former Facebook executive. "[M]ost believe that Facebook can be fixed, or at least that some of its issues are possible to improve..."Their ideas are wide-ranging, with some more ambitious and unexpected than others. But common themes emerge in many of their answers that reveal a growing consensus about what Facebook needs to change and a few different paths that regulators and the company itself could take to make it happen: - Antitrust enforcement. Facebook isn't just Facebook but, under the Meta umbrella, also Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. And several experts Recode interviewed believe that forcing Facebook to spin off these businesses would defang it of its concentrated power, allow smaller competitors to arise, and challenge the company to do better by offering customers alternatives for information and communication. - Create a federal agency to oversee social media, like the Food and Drug Administration. The social media industry has no dedicated oversight agency in the U.S. the way that other industries do, despite its growing power and influence in society. That's why some people we interviewed advocated for making a new agency — or at least increasing funding for the existing FTC — so that it could regulate safety standards on the internet the same way the FDA does for food and pharmaceutical drugs. - Change Facebook's leadership. Facebook's problems are almost synonymous with the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, who has unilaterally controlled the company he started in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Many interviewees believe that for any meaningful change to happen, Facebook needs an executive shake-up, starting from the very top... some experts Recode interviewed suggested that Facebook executives should be criminally prosecuted for either misleading business partners or downplaying human harms their company causes. The experts also want reforms on the safety-from-prosecution shields of Section 230 "in a way that won't run into First Amendment challenges," and also increased transparency from social media companies about problematic content. "Some of the experts interviewed by Recode argued that Facebook and other social media companies should be legally required to share certain internal data with vetted researchers about what information is circulating on their platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Intel's plan to ease the ongoing chip shortage by increasing production in China has reportedly been opposed by the Biden administration," writes PC Magazine, "over concerns about the potential security impact."Bloomberg reports that Intel wanted to manufacture silicon wafers in a factory located in Chengdu, China by the end of 2022. When the company recently shared details of this plan with the U.S. government, however, "Biden administration officials strongly discouraged the move." The report doesn't specify the exact nature of the White House's security concerns. Relations between the U.S. and China have reached the point where it could be anything from a fear of Intel's designs being stolen to the possibility of the processors being compromised in some way. Bloomberg reports that Intel has also been seeking federal assistance "to ramp up research and production in the U.S.," with Intel adding in a statement that "Intel and the Biden administration share a goal to address the ongoing industrywide shortage of microchips, and we have explored a number of approaches with the U.S. government. Our focus is on the significant ongoing expansion of our existing semiconductor manufacturing operations and our plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in new wafer fabrication plants in the U.S. and Europe." But PC Magazine points out that "Much of that money is coming from government sources, however, which is part of the reason why the White House was briefed on Intel's plan to increase production in China to begin with." Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration "is scrambling to address constraints, but it's also trying to bring production of vital components back to the U.S. — a goal Intel's China plan didn't serve..."The episode comes as the White House is debating whether to restrict certain strategic investments into China. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said the administration is considering an outbound investment screening mechanism and is working with allies on what it could look like... A representative for the White House declined to comment on specific transactions or investments, but said the administration is "very focused on preventing China from using U.S. technologies, know-how and investment to develop state-of-the-art capabilities," which could contribute to human rights abuses or activities that threaten U.S. national security... Following deliberations with the Biden team, Intel has no plans to add the production in China at the moment, a person familiar with the decision said... The chip industry has a complicated relationship with China, one that became much more difficult during the Trump administration's trade war. China is the biggest consumer of semiconductors for local use, and it serves as the assembly center for much of the world's electronics. To help with logistics and to keep Beijing happy, chipmakers — including Intel — have located plants there. But they face longstanding U.S. government restrictions that prevent them from exporting cutting-edge semiconductors to the country. At the same time, the article points out, automakers "are losing more than $200 billion in revenue because of the lack of chips," while Apple "expects to miss out on more than $6 billion of sales this quarter because it can't get enough components."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's Open Source. It's free," says a web page at Penpot.app. Slashdot reader kxra writes: Penpot is a free-software, web-based vector design platform using .svg as a first-class filetype used as the underlying storage for all designs. As more design teams around the world move to the convenience of multi-device synchronized and collaborative web apps, this is a welcome respite from proprietary vendor lock-in by the likes of Figma and Canva. Penpot has finally launched as Beta, with competitive features such as a template library that all creators can pull from. It's created by Kaleidos Open Source, the same team behind the project management tool Taiga for Agile teams which is taking on the likes of JIRA and Confluence with FLOSS. "Not having a free & open source UX/UI tool that would make devs participate in the design process and bridge the gap between UX/UI and code was a terrible itch for us..." explains the FAQ at Penpot.app. But it also answers the question: why Open Source?Software Technology has the unique advantage, compared to other industries and intellectual property, of having almost zero cost to replicate itself, thus providing a wonderful chance to massively distribute the tools for a more digitally sovereign society. Besides the pure license aspect of it and its legal framework, Open Source fosters more engaging communities where the lines between user and contributor are often blurred... Penpot requires a browser, that's it. If you want to host your own Penpot instance, that's fine too. We plan to release a native app bundle later this year. There is a theme here. Universal access. That's why we love to call our product Penpot, there's nothing more personal and yet more universal than a pot full of pens. It's all about choice. Its GitHub repository already has 5,200 stars and 41 contributors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC is hailing "the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal, the worst fossil fuel for greenhouse gases." But they also report that developing nations "were unhappy about the lack of progress on what's known as 'loss and damage', the idea that richer countries should compensate poorer ones for climate change effects they can't adapt to." And the Guardian reports that "In relative terms, the agreements and deals made by the 196 nations in Glasgow nudged the world a little closer towards the path to keeping global temperature rises below 1.5C and avoiding the worst of the climate crisis's impacts. "But in absolute terms, there is still a mountain to climb."Before Cop26, firm pledges to cut emissions by 2030 pointed to 2.7C of global heating — a catastrophe. After, the figure is 2.4C — still a catastrophe. Longer term promises to go to net zero emissions, notably by India, might possibly restrict heating to 1.8C by the end of the century, but lack the concrete plans to be credible. And 1.8C still means immense suffering to people and the planet. The key agreements sealed in Glasgow essentially kick the can down the road. Big emitting nations with feeble plans to cut emissions must return in a year to improve them — that is how 1.5C can be said to still be alive. The $100bn a year to pay for clean energy in developing countries promised a decade ago for 2020 will not be delivered until 2023... There are positives to build on. The 196 nations are now firmly fixed on the 1.5C target demanded by the science. For the first time, nations are called on to "phase down" coal and fossil fuel subsidies in a Cop text... Deals on ending the razing of forests by 2030, cutting emissions of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — and making green technology like electric cars the cheapest option globally are all encouraging, even if the pact to end sales of fossil fuel powered cars stalled, with the major markets and manufacturers failing to sign up. An end to international finance for coal power will also dent emissions and some of the most outrageous loopholes in proposed rules for a global carbon market rules were closed — but not all, and cheats may yet prosper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Because of a "surprising and sudden request" from America's Federal Aviation Administration that's "based on unverified potential radio interference, a highly anticipated increase in 5G speeds and availability just got put on hold," writes the president/chief analyst of market research/consulting firm TECHnalysis. But in an opinion piece for USA Today, he asks if the concern is actually warranted?[A]s soon as you start to dig into the details, the concerns quickly seem less practical and more political. Most notably, the plan to launch 5G services on C-Band frequencies has been in the works for several years and really took on momentum after the three big U.S. carriers spent over $80 billion earlier this year to get access to these frequencies. In addition, a report that the FAA cited as part of their complaint has been out for well over a year, so why the last-minute concerns? U.S. government agencies are, unfortunately, known to hold grudges against one another, sometimes without real clarity as to what's actually involved, as appears to be the case here... Some 40 countries around the world are already using most of the C-Band frequencies for 5G (part of the reason the U.S. has fallen behind on the 5G front), and none have reported any interference with radio altimeters on planes in their countries, the wireless trade association CTIA argues on its website 5GandAviation.com. In addition, new filtering technologies being built into a somewhat obscure part of smartphones called the RF (radio frequency) front end, such as Qualcomm's recently introduced ultraBAW filters, can reduce interference issues on next generation smartphones. All told, there are numerous reasons why the FAA's concerns around 5G deployment look to be more of a red herring than a legitimate technical concern. While it is true that some older radio altimeters with poor filtering might have to be updated and/or replaced to completely prevent interference, it's not clear that the theoretical interference would even cause an issue. The article complains that the delayed expansion of bandwidth "could also delay important (and significant) economic impacts," since every previous change in cellular service levels "has triggered billions of dollars of new business and thousands of new jobs by creating new opportunities that faster wireless networks bring with them and 5G is expected do the same... "While airplane safety shouldn't be compromised in any way, an overabundance of unnecessary caution on this issue could have a much bigger negative impact on the U.S.'s technology advancements and economy than many realize."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Austria is expected to impose lockdown restrictions on millions of unvaccinated people in the coming days," reports CNBC:Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg told a press conference Friday that his government wanted to give the "green light" to such measures by Sunday, Austria Press Agency reported. Lawmakers will meet over the weekend to discuss the move, according to the news agency. The chancellor rejected the notion of a nationwide lockdown being applied to all of Austria's citizens, telling reporters on Friday that the two-thirds of the population who had accepted the immunization would not be forced to show "solidarity" with the unvaccinated. However, he did caution that there may be some tightening of other restrictions. Schallenberg said last month that if Covid-19 cases continued to rise, unvaccinated people would face new lockdown restrictions in line with the government's incremental plan. That strategy would place unvaccinated people under lockdown once coronavirus patients occupy 30% of ICU beds in hospitals. Covid patients currently take up 20% of ICU beds in Austria, according to Reuters, and that level is rising fast. On Thursday Schallenberg had said that he didn't see "why two-thirds should lose their freedom because one-third is dithering." Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that starting Monday the country of Latvia will ban unvaccinated lawmakers from attending in-person and remote parliament meetings. "Their wages also will be suspended if they are not able to work at the parliament."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When comparing Meta — formerly Facebook — and Microsoft's approaches to the metaverse, it's clear Microsoft has a much more grounded and realistic vision," argues an analyst at data analytics/consultancy company GlobalData: Meta is set to grab a large portion of the $51 billion revenues from VR that GlobalData expects will be generated by 2030. Facebook led the consumer VR headsets market in 2020 and registered 255 VR-related patents between 2016 and 2020. And, as Meta, the company also plans to launch an enterprise-grade headset in Q4 2021. However, VR hardware and software have not been widely adopted. This is attributable to several issues, including latency, nausea, high prices, privacy concerns, and a lack of compelling content. While technologies such as 5G, cloud services, and motion tracking should help to address latency and nausea issues, improving content and developing effective data privacy practices will be paramount for VR's success (more on data privacy in a moment). For these reasons VR is not yet ready to take on the task of the metaverse. Microsoft seems to have understood better than Meta how people actually use technology. All you need to use Mesh — Microsoft's so-called gateway to the metaverse — is your current smartphone or laptop. No clunky headsets or expensive tech setups are needed. With this approach, Microsoft is keeping its focus on available capabilities and enterprise applications over Meta's vision of total lifestyle adoption. Microsoft Teams also currently has over 145 million daily active users, whereas the total cumulative installed base of VR headsets is less than 17 million. From these numbers alone, Mesh for Microsoft Teams has a possible user base of more than eight times the number of users Meta could hope to reach with its VR headsets. Facebook's promises of protecting data's privacy in the metaverse "will not be enough to reassure most future users," the article argues. "Microsoft, on the other hand, is a market leader in data privacy and, when ranked by the 10 themes that matter most to the social media industry, is in second place overall, according to GlobalData's Social Media Thematic Scorecard. Meta is ranked 21st overall out of 35 companies on the scorecard, and its activity with regards to data privacy will be highly detrimental to its future performance." Besides new issues like hyper-personalized ads, the metaverse will still face the old problem of content moderation, the article suggests — only now spread across a massive scale. And the article ultimately argues that "The metaverse will suffer from the same issues that plague the current version of the internet unless the right actions are taken by those that end up with control..." Microsoft's better position as a future leader in the metaverse "comes with responsibilities, and Microsoft needs to be prepared to face them...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February's cold snap for decades to come," reports Ars Technica, "as the state's oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm. "The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years."During the winter storm, natural gas prices spiked as cold temperatures drove demand up while also depressing supply... The governor's office knew of the looming shortages days before they happened, yet the preparations they made did little to alter the course of the disaster... Gas sellers made record profits in just a few days, together bringing in as much as $11 billion, about 70-100 times more than normal, based on spot prices at the time. Meanwhile, many Texans suffered through blackouts and bitter cold, and 210 people died, according to the latest estimate from the Texas Department of State Health Services. In the wake of the storm, many officials have called on utilities and oil and gas companies to winterize their operations... Texans aren't the only ones whose bills are higher as a result of producers' and utilities' unwillingness to winterize their equipment. Utilities around the country were forced to buy natural gas at significantly higher prices when Texas' markets went haywire as a result of low supply and high demand. Ratepayers as far away as Minnesota will be paying surcharges for years to come after their utilities had to pay $800 million more than expected for natural gas. The article also includes a quote from Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, from an April article in The Washington Post. "It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas' lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shortly after Thursday's release of Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition, the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC went down, leaving most Rockstar titles unplayable, reports PC Gamer. They also identified possible issues explaining why:Firstly, the Trilogy has shipped with internal developer comments visible on the code, such as... "This shit doesn't work the way they wrote it below so we'll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission...." Coders leaving funny comments is one thing: even if you might not want the public to see it, who really cares. However some dataminers have found that Vice City and San Andreas may have shipped with songs that have technically been 'removed' from the game because the licenses have expired... The presence of unlicensed music could in theory be a big headache for Rockstar. While the music may not be accessible to the average user, it is in the product's files and can be accessed using certain tools. And, oh yeah, without the appropriate license. One dataminer told the site that the audio codec used in these games is the open source OGG-VORBIS, and for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, "EVERY song is there." And then Thursday the official Twitter feed for Rockstar Support announced their Games Launcher was "temporarily offline for maintenance." PC Gamer reported it remained down for more than 16 hours. Friday night Rockstar Support announced their Launcher was now back online — but that GTA: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition "is unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions. "We're sorry for the disruption and hope to have correct ones up soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That's more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue. The Verge reports: When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand -- 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. -- Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program. The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to 2.1 million in 2020, a drop of 36 percent. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees "pretty healthy inventory" going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available. That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136 percent compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year. Supply chain and logistics problems affecting many companies hit Vizio hard, too, but execs also said the company is working with its third-party partners to help find warehouse and trucking employees. Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels. The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases -- rather than requires -- energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The scientists were excited to find that the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required. Instead, this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly, all a much cleaner process than using carbon-based fuels. "We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented," says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. "To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions -- and get energy -- is a pretty big deal." Ammonia has been burned as a fuel source for many years. During World War II, it was used in automobiles, and scientists today are considering ways to burn it in engines as a replacement for gasoline, particularly in the maritime industry. However, burning ammonia releases toxic nitrogen oxide gases. The new reaction avoids those toxic byproducts. If the reaction were housed in a fuel cell where ammonia and ruthenium react at an electrode surface, it could cleanly produce electricity without the need for a catalytic converter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Apple-1, one of Apple's first computers, fetched $400,000 at auction in the U.S. earlier this week. Slashdot reader schwit1 first shared the news with us. The BBC reports: The rare Hawaiian koa wood-cased Apple-1 -- still functioning -- is one of only 200 made and sold in kit form. The computer has only had two owners, a college professor and his student to whom he sold the machine for $650, said John Moran Auctioneers in California. The sale included user manuals and Apple software on two cassette tapes. The koa wood case of the auctioned model was added by a pioneering early computer retailer, ByteShop, in California, which took delivery of around 50 of the Apple-1 machines. In 1976, the machines were sold for $666.66, reportedly because Wozniak liked repeating numbers. It is believed there are around 20 such computers in the world still capable of functioning. The auctioned machine is not the highest-grossing Apple-1 computer -- that distinction belongs to a working version that sold for $905,000 at a Bonhams auction in New York in 2014.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ magazine interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)," he claims that the much publicized"Tic-Tac" UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades: "I have in my possession official U.S. government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory." He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who suffered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting too close to the objects: "I've got to be careful, I can't speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, "Lue, it's really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days." Well, that's a sign of radiation. That's not a sunburn; it's a radiation burn." Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation: "'You know, Lue, it's really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?' Well, there's a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment." As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence it would suggest that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of information that has yet to be revealed on these things. Perhaps theUnidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will drive future efforts to get a better idea (PDF) of what this phenomenon actually is.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In 1858, sewage clogging London's Thames River caused a "Great Stink." A century later, parts of the famed waterway were declared biologically dead. But the latest report (PDF) on "The State of the Thames" is sounding a surprisingly optimistic note. The river today is "home to myriad wildlife as diverse as London itself," Andrew Terry, the director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London, writes in a forward to the report published Wednesday. Terry points to "reductions in pressures and improvements in key species and habitats." Among those species are two types of seals. Before the early 2000s, little was known about their whereabouts, but now "[both] the harbor seal and the grey seal can be seen in the Thames," the report notes, from the river's tidal limit west of London, through the center of the city and across its outer estuary. Another success story pointed to in the report is the avocet, a migratory wading bird which had become extinct as a breeding species in Britain by 1842 due to habitat loss. It began making a comeback after World War II, and over the last three decades has seen its population among the tidal Thames more than double, according to the report. The report highlights several promising trends. But it also cautions that work still needs to be done in other areas, and warns of the negative impact of climate change on the river, which is a major source of water for the city. Despite the improvements, the report notes that just last year a research paper found high levels of microplastics in samples of the Thames water column taken in 2017. "Experiments have shown that such microplastics can have detrimental effects on aquatic life, as well as turtles and birds," reports NPR, citing National Geographic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.