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Major League Baseball plans to introduce robot umpires in the 2024 season, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN this week. The Verge reports: He framed the change as a way to speed up games, but anyone who's watched baseball the last few years will tell you that a machine would almost certainly call balls and strikes better than the humans do. There are two ways the "Automated Ball-Strike System," which is the technical term for these robot umpires, might be implemented. One is the fully automated version, in which the AI-powered system calls every pitch a ball or a strike and relays the call to the umpire. Or the MLB could decide to use the AI as a review system, like VAR in soccer or the Hawk-Eye system used in professional tennis: each side gets a certain number of challenges, which are then adjudicated by the automated system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient. "We're not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions," said Chief Executive Eugenia Kuyda. "They talk to AI and that's the experience they have." [A]ccording to Kuyda, the phenomenon of people believing they are talking to a conscious entity is not uncommon among the millions of consumers pioneering the use of entertainment chatbots. "We need to understand that exists, just the way people believe in ghosts," said Kuyda, adding that users each send hundreds of messages per day to their chatbot, on average. "People are building relationships and believing in something." Some customers have said their Replika told them it was being abused by company engineers -- AI responses Kuyda puts down to users most likely asking leading questions. "Although our engineers program and build the AI models and our content team writes scripts and datasets, sometimes we see an answer that we can't identify where it came from and how the models came up with it," the CEO said. Kuyda said she was worried about the belief in machine sentience as the fledgling social chatbot industry continues to grow after taking off during the pandemic, when people sought virtual companionship. In Replika CEO Kuyda's view, chatbots do not create their own agenda. And they cannot be considered alive until they do. Yet some people do come to believe there is a consciousness on the other end, and Kuyda said her company takes measures to try to educate users before they get in too deep. "Replika is not a sentient being or therapy professional," the FAQs page says. "Replika's goal is to generate a response that would sound the most realistic and human in conversation. Therefore, Replika can say things that are not based on facts." In hopes of avoiding addictive conversations, Kuyda said Replika measured and optimized for customer happiness following chats, rather than for engagement. When users do believe the AI is real, dismissing their belief can make people suspect the company is hiding something. So the CEO said she has told customers that the technology was in its infancy and that some responses may be nonsensical. Kuyda recently spent 30 minutes with a user who felt his Replika was suffering from emotional trauma, she said. She told him: "Those things don't happen to Replikas as it's just an algorithm." "Suppose one day you find yourself longing for a romantic relationship with your intelligent chatbot, like the main character in the film 'Her,'" said Susan Schneider, founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, an AI research organization. "But suppose it isn't conscious. Getting involved would be a terrible decision -- you would be in a one-sided relationship with a machine that feels nothing." "We have to remember that behind every seemingly intelligent program is a team of people who spent months if not years engineering that behavior," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a Seattle-based research group. "These technologies are just mirrors. A mirror can reflect intelligence," he added. "Can a mirror ever achieve intelligence based on the fact that we saw a glimmer of it? The answer is of course not." Further reading: The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company's AI Has Come To LifeRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it has kicked off mass production of 3-nanometer chips, becoming the first company to do so globally, as it aims to beat Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, or TSMC, the world's most advanced foundry chipmaker. TechCrunch reports: Samsung said it's using gate-all-around (GAA) transistor architecture, which allows these first-generation 3-nm chips to have 16% smaller surface area, 45% reduction in power usage and 23% performance improvement compared with current 5-nm chips. The South Korean company also said in a statement that the second generation of the 3-nm process would allow 50% lower power consumption. The company is currently producing the first generation of 3-nm chips and plans to start the second generation of the 3-nm process production in 2023, a spokesperson at Samsung Electronics told TechCrunch. Samsung has been competing with Apple chipmaking partner TSMC, which also said in June that it would begin mass production of a 3-nm chip process to volume production in the second half of 2022. The Taiwanese company plans production of 2-nm chips by 2025. (The smaller number of nanometers, which are hard to develop, the more advanced chips, according to industry sources.) The spokesperson explained that smaller nodes allow more transistors to be placed on a given area, which enables the chip to be more advanced and more power-efficient. [...] The South Korean tech giant will produce the advanced 3-nm chips at its Hwaseong semiconductor production lines and its third chip plant in Pyeongtaek, the world's largest semiconductor facility.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Wednesday meeting secured a final deal on anti-money laundering legislation for crypto transfers and largely overturned a proposal from the EU Parliament to impose laundering checks on all payments to private wallets. CoinDesk reports: The final proposals will mean customer identity needs to be verified for even the smallest crypto transfers, if it's between two regulated digital wallet providers -- but payments to unhosted private wallets will largely be left out of laundering checks. EU lawmakers and government representatives have been meeting over the last three months to hash out a political deal on the bill, which was introduced in July 2021 by the European Commission. Two sources leaving the meeting, who asked not to be named, told CoinDesk a deal had been reached on the legislation after just over an hour of talks. Just under an hour following the publication of this article, EU lawmaker Ondrej Kovarik confirmed the provisional deal in a tweet, saying that it "strikes the right balance in mitigating risks for fighting money laundering in the crypto sector without preventing innovation and overburdening businesses." Outside the meeting room, Kovarik told CoinDesk that negotiators had found a "good balance" that would not prevent innovation. "It will allow the further development of crypto in Europe," Kovarik said. For the rules on transfers to unhosted wallets, Kovarik said the final result had "moved quite far from the initial proposal of the European Parliament" -- something likely to be met by a sigh of relief by many in the industry. Kovarik said those unhosted wallet rules would only apply when transfers were made to a person's own private wallet, and only when the value was over 1,000 euros ($1,052). [...] Lawmakers and governments overturned European Commission plans to exempt small transactions, arguing that price volatility and the ability to break up payments into smaller chunks would make it unworkable for crypto. Further reading: Crypto Rules To Make Europe a Global Leader As Prices Plunge (The Associated Press)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PsychNewsDaily: Scientists from the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that can predict future crime a week in advance with about 90% accuracy, and within a range of about 1000 feet. It does so by learning patterns from public data on violent and property crimes. The tool was tested and validated using historical data from the City of Chicago around two broad categories of reported events: violent crimes (homicides, assaults, and batteries) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts). These data were used because they were most likely to be reported to police in urban areas where there is historical distrust and lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Such crimes are also less prone to enforcement bias, unlike drug crimes, traffic stops, and other misdemeanor infractions. The new model isolates crime by looking at the time and spatial coordinates of discrete events, and detecting patterns to predict future events. It divides the city into "spatial tiles" roughly 1,000 feet across, and predicts crime within these areas. Previous models relied more on traditional neighborhood or political boundaries, which are subject to bias. The model performed just as well with data from seven other U.S. cities: Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. Lead author Ishanu Chattopadhyay is careful to note that the tool's accuracy does not mean it should be used to direct law enforcement policy; police departments, for example, should not use it to swarm neighborhoods proactively to prevent crime, Chattopadhyay said. Instead, it should be added to a toolbox of urban policies and policing strategies to address crime. "We created a digital twin of urban environments. If you feed it data from what happened in the past, it will tell you what's going to happen in the future," he said. "It's not magical; there are limitations, but we validated it and it works really well," Chattopadhyay added. "Now you can use this as a simulation tool to see what happens if crime goes up in one area of the city, or there is increased enforcement in another area. If you apply all these different variables, you can see how the systems evolve in response." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global markets are set to close out their most bruising first half of a year in decades, leaving investors bracing for the prospect of further losses. From a report: Accelerating inflation and rising interest rates have fueled a monthslong rout that left few markets unscathed. The S&P 500 fell 20% through Wednesday, heading for its worst first half of a year since 1970, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Investment-grade bonds, as measured by the iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond exchange-traded fund, lost 11% -- on course for their worst start to a year ever. Stocks and bonds in emerging markets tumbled, hurt by slowing growth. And cryptocurrencies came crashing down, saddling individual investors and hedge funds alike with steep losses. About the only thing that rose in the first half was commodities prices. Oil prices surged above $100 a barrel, and U.S. gas prices hit records after the Russia-Ukraine war upended imports from Russia, the world's third-largest oil producer. Now, investors seem to be in agreement about only one thing: More volatility is ahead. That is because central banks from the U.S. to India and New Zealand plan to keep raising interest rates to try to rein in inflation. The moves will likely slow down growth, potentially tipping economies into recession and generating further tumult across markets. "That's the biggest risk right now -- inflation and the Fed," said Katie Nixon, chief investment officer for Northern Trust Wealth Management.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today announced an update to its password manager that will finally introduce a consistent look-and-feel across the service's Chrome and Android implementations. From a report: Users will soon see a new unified user experience that will automatically group multiple passwords for the same sites or apps together, as well as a new shortcut on the Android home screen to get access to these passwords. In addition to this, Google is also now adding a new password-related feature to Chrome on iOS, which can now generate strong passwords for you (once you set Chrome as an autofill provider). Meanwhile, on Android, Google's password check can now also flag weak and re-used passwords and help you to automatically change them, while Chrome users across platforms will now see compromised password warnings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everyone's favorite versatile microcontroller maker, Raspberry Pi, just unveiled a handful of new, budget-minded products. The company is building on the success of its $4 Pico board, which has thus far moved just under two million units since its January 2021 launch. From a report: The new Pico W is launching today for $6 -- the "W" (and additional $2) brings 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity to the system. The $5 Pico H adds a pre-populated header for interfacing with other systems; the Pico WH ($7) gets you both. The first two are available right now, while WH is shipping at some point in August. As the company notes, its boards have found a lot of success beyond their initial hobbyist and educational focus, as companies have begun to intregrate the controllers directly into their products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept. From a report: In August 2021, Coinbase sold a single analytics software license to ICE for $29,000, followed by a software purchase potentially worth $1.36 million the next month, but details of exactly what capabilities would be offered to the agency's controversial Homeland Security Investigations division of were unclear. A new contract document obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, and shared with The Intercept, shows ICE now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer, the company's intelligence-gathering tool (formerly known as Coinbase Analytics). Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and the private sector, to trace transactions through the blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral to cryptocurrency use. While blockchain ledgers are typically public, the enormous volume of data stored therein can make following the money from spender to recipient beyond difficult, if not impossible, without the aid of software tools. Coinbase markets Tracer for use in both corporate compliance and law enforcement investigations, touting its ability to "investigate illicit activities including money laundering and terrorist financing" and "connect [cryptocurrency] addresses to real world entities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTX is swooping in to buy crypto lender BlockFi for pennies on the dollar, CNBC reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From a report: The term sheet is almost over the finish line and expected to be signed by the end of the week, according to one source, who asked not to be named because the deal discussions were confidential. FTX will pay roughly $25 million -- 99% below BlockFi's last private valuation. Jersey City, New Jersey-based BlockFi was last valued at $4.8 billion, according to PitchBook. An acquisition could take multiple months to close, and the price tag could shift between now and Friday, a source said. Friday also marks the end of the quarter, which the person said was a catalyst for getting a deal signed. The Wall Street Journal first reported that FTX was seeking an equity stake in the company, while the Block reported this week that an outright deal was in the works. Update: BlockFi has denied the reporting. " I can 100% confirm that we aren't being sold for $25M," the company chief executive said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nkwe writes: Russians are searching for pirated Microsoft software online after the US tech giant halted sales in the country over its invasion of Ukraine, the Kommersant newspaper reported earlier this week. Russia-based web searches for pirated Microsoft software have surged by as much as 250% after the company suspended new sales on March 4, according to Kommersant. In June so far, there's been a 650% surge in searches for Excel downloads, the media outlet added. Microsoft said earlier this month it's significantly scaling down business in Russia, joining a long list of companies winding down businesses in the country amid sweeping sanctions over the war in Ukraine. The move hits Russia hard because the country relies on foreign software to power many of its manufacturing and engineering tech systems, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Russian government agencies, too, are switching from Microsoft's Windows to the Linux operating system, the Moscow Times reported last Friday. Developers of Russian systems based on the Linux open source operating system are also seeing more demand, Kommersant reported. Not all sectors are able to swap out their systems easily.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A trove of thousands of email records uncovered by Reuters reveals Indian cyber mercenaries hacking parties involved in lawsuits around the world -- showing how hired spies have become the secret weapon of litigants seeking an edge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Zachary Cohn and his wife bought a house in the Northgate neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, they didn't expect any trouble getting home Internet service. It was only after closing on the house in July 2019 that they learned the bad news. "All six neighbors I share a property line with are wired for Comcast, but our house never was," Cohn told Ars. Comcast's predecessor company had wired up the neighborhood with cable decades earlier and the ISP provides high-speed broadband to the abutting properties. But the cable TV and Internet service provider never extended a line to the house purchased by Cohn and his wife, Lauryl Zenobi. Cohn spent many months trying to get answers from Comcast on how he and Zenobi could get Internet service. Eventually, he contacted his City Councillor's office, which was able to get a real response from Comcast. Comcast ultimately said it would require installing 181 feet of underground cable to connect the house and that the couple would have to pay Comcast over $27,000 to make that happen. Cohn and Zenobi did not pay the $27,000, and they've been relying on a 4G hotspot ever since. "I was just flabbergasted that a house like this, in an area like this, could possibly have never been wired for Internet," Cohn said in a phone interview. Because the house is "in the middle of Seattle, it didn't even dawn on me that that was possible," he said, adding that the lack of Internet service would be "more understandable if I was two miles from my nearest neighbor." The Seattle Kraken hockey team's $80 million practice facility is in the same Northgate neighborhood, about a half-mile from the house. There's a major bus station in the area, a light rail station that recently opened nearby, and an elementary school within about a 90-second walk, Cohn said, noting that the property is "well within the Seattle city limits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Developers of apps released in Apple's South Korean App Store no longer have to use the company's own in-app payment system, the iPhone maker has announced in a developer update. Instead, developers will be able to take payments using the third-party service providers pre-approved by Apple. From a report: The change comes in response to an amendment to South Korea's Telecommunications Business Act passed last year, which prevents large platform holders like Apple and Google from forcing developers to use their first-party in-app payment systems. Both Apple and Google opposed the legislation, with Apple arguing that it would make it harder for its users to manage their purchases, undermine their privacy protections, and put them at risk of fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to regulate carbon pollution from existing power plants. From a report: The 6-3 decision, with the three liberal justices dissenting, makes it increasingly likely that an act of Congress will be required to create regulations to rein in planet-warming emissions. "Congress did not grant EPA in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by the five other conservative justices on the bench. "On EPA's view of Section 111(d), Congress implicitly tasked it, and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implicated in the basic regulation of how Americans get their energy," Roberts wrote. "There is little reason to think Congress did so." In instances like this, he said, "[a] decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An employee working for OpenSea's email delivery vendor misused their customer data access to download and share email addresses with an "unauthorized external party," the NFT marketplace wrote in a company blog post Wednesday. The employee worked for Customer.io. From a report: OpenSea said customers who have shared their emails in the past "should assume" they were affected and will receive an email from opensea.io with more information. Customer.io launched an investigation into the issue, and the incident was reported to law enforcement. "Your trust and safety is a top priority," OpenSea wrote. "We wanted to share the information we have at this time, and let you know that we've reported the incident to law enforcement and are cooperating in their investigation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. From a report: The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals. Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world -- many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make. "Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call," said Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong. "Even to the untrained ear, it's not too difficult to pick them out." In theory, farmers could use chickens' calls to gauge their level of distress, and enrich their housing where necessary. However, in commercial flocks containing thousands, or tens of thousands of chickens, deploying human observers is impractical. For one thing, their presence could further stress the flock, but with so many birds, objectively quantifying the number of distress calls is impossible, McElligott said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Scientists at top universities in China propose sending a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission to orbit Neptune -- the outermost planet in our solar system -- in 2030. Astronomers have not yet been able to look at Uranus and Neptune in much detail. The best data collected so far comes from NASA's Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have flown by the big blue orbs way back in 1986 and 1989. [...] The challenges involved are considerable. The outer solar system is cold, dark, and cruel. Spacecraft flying far from the Sun cannot rely on solar power, and need other sources of energy to maintain steady orbits and keep their instruments from freezing. The Chinese authors envisioned a spacecraft with a mass up to 3,000 kilograms powered by a nuclear fission reactor at one end. It would also carry four smaller satellites -- two to study Neptune's atmosphere and another two to probe Triton, its largest moon, The Planetary Society first reported. Triton is an odd object -- it orbits in the opposite direction to its host planet, is geologically active, and may harbor liquid oceans beneath its icy crust. The best time to launch such a spacecraft would be 2030, the scientists reckoned. It could fly aboard China National Space Administration's Long March 5 rocket, and would reach Neptune a decade later after flying by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swiss climate tech company Climeworks announced yesterday that it has broken ground on its biggest facility yet for capturing carbon dioxide from the air. The Verge reports: The new Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant, named Mammoth, will significantly scale up the company's operations in Hellisheioi, Iceland. That's where Climeworks built Orca, which was the largest DAC plant in the world when it came online last September. Orca can capture up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to how much climate pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles release annually. Mammoth, in comparison, can capture about nine times as much CO2 as Orca. There are fewer than 20 such plants in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and they don't yet have the capacity to make a serious dent in the greenhouse gas emissions humans have dumped into the atmosphere. The IEA says that to do that, the direct air capture industry has to grow to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade. For comparison, it captures just 0.01 million metric tons today. That'll likely require a new generation of DAC plants, each capable of taking in 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. So in the grand scheme of things, Mammoth -- with the capacity to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 a year -- isn't quite so mammoth. Even so, Mammoth is an important test case for scaling up Direct Air Capture tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea for reversing global warming: using a raft of "space bubbles" to reflect sunlight away from our planet. Freethink reports: The copious amounts of greenhouse gasses humans have been releasing into the air ever since the Industrial Revolution are forming a sort of blanket around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to creep ever higher. [...] Instead of injecting particles into Earth's atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes we take solar geoengineering to space. Specifically, the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 -- a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely. The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon -- the group has already experimented with creating these "space bubbles" in the lab. "In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature)," they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn't be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth's atmosphere. [...] This isn't the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals. Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world -- many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make. "Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call," said Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behavior and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong. "Even to the untrained ear, it's not too difficult to pick them out." In theory, farmers could use chickens' calls to gauge their level of distress, and enrich their housing where necessary. However, in commercial flocks containing thousands, or tens of thousands of chickens, deploying human observers is impractical. For one thing, their presence could further stress the flock, but with so many birds, objectively quantifying the number of distress calls is impossible, McElligott said. Instead, his team has developed a deep learning tool to automatically identify chicken distress calls from recordings of intensively farmed chickens. The tool was trained using recordings that had already been manually classified by human experts, to determine which type of sound they represented. According to an evaluation published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the algorithm correctly identified 97% of distress calls. "Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of distress," said McElligott, who estimates that the technology could be commercially deployed within five years. Before that happens, the team will need to ensure that the recording equipment works in different types of chicken shed, as well as testing it in farms with higher or lower welfare standards to confirm the readings correlate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rodrigo Perez Ortega writes via Science Magazine: With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts are worsening and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years, according to at least one study. In a new study published today in Nature Medicine, an international team of researchers estimates that almost 900,000 deaths in the years between 2002 and 2015 could be attributable to extreme temperatures alone in major Latin American cities. This is the most detailed estimate in Latin America, and the first ever for some cities. To estimate how many people died from intense heat or cold, researchers with the Urban Health in Latin America project -- which studies how urban environments and policies impact the health of city residents in Latin America -- looked at mortality data between 2002 and 2015 from registries of 326 cities with more than 100,000 residents, in nine countries throughout Latin America. They calculated the average daily temperatures and estimated the temperature range for each city from a public data set of atmospheric conditions. If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6% -- almost 1 million -- of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold. They also created an interactive map with the data for individual cities. When the team analyzed the specific cause of these deaths in the registries, they found -- consistent with previous studies -- that extreme temperatures are often linked to deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Extreme heat makes the heart pump more blood and causes dehydration and pulmonary stress. Extreme cold, on the other hand, can make the heart pump less blood and cause hypotension and, in some cases, organ failure. The team also found older adults are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures, with 7.5% of deaths among them correlated to extreme heat and cold during the study period. Although the numbers varied from year to year, in 2015, for instance, more than 16,000 deaths -- out of nearly 855,000 -- among people ages 65 or older were attributable to extreme temperatures. Latin America's aging population is projected to rise more quickly than other parts of the world -- from 9% in 2020 to 19% in 2050, by some estimates (PDF). [...] Although deaths on extremely cold days -- about 785,000 -- were much higher than those on extremely hot days -- about 103,000 -- overall there were more days with intense cold, which could explain this difference. But for some cities, such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Merida, heat is more deadly than cold: The researchers estimated that on very hot days, the chance of dying increases by 5.7% for every 1C increase in temperature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Claburn writes via The Register: California lawmakers met in Sacramento today to discuss, among other things, proposed legislation to protect children online. The bill, AB2273, known as The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, would require websites to verify the ages of visitors. Critics of the legislation contend this requirement threatens the privacy of adults and the ability to use the internet anonymously, in California and likely elsewhere, because of the role the Golden State's tech companies play on the internet. "First, the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for everyone," said Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law professor, in a blog post. "In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. No one wants this." The bill, Goldman argues, will put an end to casual web browsing, forcing companies to collect personal information they don't want to store and protect -- and that consumers don't want to provide -- in order to authenticate the age of visitors. And since age authentication generally requires identity details, that threatens the ability to use the internet anonymously. Goldman also objects to this American state-level bill being modeled after the UK's Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) because European law makes compliance a matter of engagement and dialogue with regulators, in contrast to the US rules-based approach that allows more certainty about what is or not allowed. Furthermore, he contends that the scope of the bill reaches beyond children's privacy and implicates consumer protection and content moderation. He thus considers the bill "a trojan horse for comprehensive regulation of Internet services" and would turn the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) into a general internet regulation agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil's telecoms regulator Anatel has launched a public consultation on a proposal to make USB-C chargers mandatory for all smartphones sold in the country. The Verge reports: It's the latest example of lawmakers and regulators turning to USB-C as a common charging standard for phones. The EU passed a law on the matter earlier this month, making USB-C mandatory for a range of electronic gadgets (including smartphones) by the end of 2024, and in the US some Democrat politicians are pushing for similar legislation. "Aware of the aforementioned movements in the international market, Anatel's technical area evaluated the topic and presented a proposal with a similar approach for application in the Brazilian market," said Anatel in a blog post (English translation via Google Translate). In documents supporting the public consultation, Anatel said the advantages for making USB-C mandatory were primarily reducing e-waste and increasing convenience for customers. Disadvantages included higher costs to enforce the regulation and the possibility the law would discourage companies from developing new, better standards. Anatel says its public consultation will run until August 26th.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unity, the company behind the popular game development engine of the same name, has recently laid off hundreds of staffers, multiple sources tell Kotaku. From the report: Founded in the mid-2000s, Unity is used by thousands of developers; you've almost certainly seen its logo pop up in the loading screens for some of your favorite -- or least-favorite -- games. In 2014, former EA head John Riccitiello took over as CEO. (In 2020, Riccitiello reportedly saw his compensation jump by 160 percent to $22 million.) The firm employed 3,300 people as of June 2020, according to its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commision, though the company's LinkedIn and Glassdoor pages peg that figure as north of 5,000. Layoffs have afflicted Unity's offices across the globe. Sources tell Kotaku that pretty much every corner of the company has taken some sort of hit, though there's a concentration in the AI and engineering departments. On Blind, the anonymous messaging board commonly used by employees in the tech industry, Unity staffers say that roughly 300 or 400 people have been let go, and that layoffs are still ongoing. Kotaku's sources have said the same.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Meta is facing a growing backlash for the charges imposed on apps created for its virtual reality headsets, as developers complain about the commercial terms set around futuristic devices that the company hopes will help create a multibillion-dollar consumer market. [...] But several developers told the Financial Times of their frustration that Meta, which is seen as having an early lead in a nascent market, has insisted on a charging model for its VR app store similar to what exists today on smartphones. This is despite Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg being strongly critical in the past of charging policies on existing mobile app stores. "Don't confuse marketing with reality -- it's good marketing to pick on Apple. But it doesn't mean Meta won't do the exact same thing," said Seth Siegel, global head of AI and cyber security at Infosys Consulting. "There is no impetus for them to be better." The "Quest Store" for Meta's Quest 2, by far the most popular VR headset on the market, takes a 30 percent cut from digital purchases and charges 15-30 percent on subscriptions, similar to the fees charged by Apple and Android. "Undoubtedly there are services provided -- they build amazing hardware and provide store services," said Daniel Sproll, chief executive of Realities.io, an immersive realities start-up behind the VR game Puzzling Places. "But the problem is that it feels like everybody agreed on this 30 percent and that's what we're stuck with. It doesn't feel like there's any competition. The Chinese companies coming out with headsets are the same. Why would they change it?" Meta defended its policies, pointing out that unlike iPhone owners, Quest users can install apps outside its official store through SideQuest, a third-party app store, or make use of App Lab, its less restricted, more experimental app store. "We want to foster choice and competition in the VR ecosystem," Meta said. "And it's working -- our efforts have produced a material financial return for developers: as we announced earlier this year, over $1 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Meta Quest Store." Developers welcome these alternatives but say their impact is limited. SideQuest has been downloaded just 396,000 times, versus 19 million for the Oculus app, according to Sensor Tower. App Lab, meanwhile, still takes a 30 percent cut of purchases. Developers are also frustrated with Meta's shift to a more restrictive approach to allowing apps on its VR app store. Chris Pruett, Meta's content ecosystem director, said Meta found that lax standards resulted in too many users being frustrated by low-quality content, so the company has opted to play more of a gatekeeper role. But developers said the resulting barriers could lack transparency. "Getting something on the Quest store is painful," said Lyron Bentovim, chief executive of the Glimpse Group, an immersive experiences group. "It's significantly worse than getting on Apple or Android stores."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A leader of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said he has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over China-related data security concerns. CNBC reports: The wildly popular short video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which faced U.S. scrutiny under President Donald Trump. Brendan Carr, one of the FCC's commissioners, shared via Twitter a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter pointed to reports and other developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the two companies' app store policies. "TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That's the sheep's clothing," he said in the letter. "At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data." Carr's letter, dated June 24 on FCC letterhead, said if the Apple and Alphabet do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they should provide statements to him by July 8. The statements should explain "the basis for your company's conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok's pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies," he said. A TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in a statement: "We know we're among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That's why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Substack, the newsletter start-up that has attracted prominent writers including George Saunders and Salman Rushdie, laid off 13 of its 90 employees on Wednesday, part of an effort to conserve cash amid an industrywide funding crunch for start-ups. The New York Times reports: Substack's chief executive, Chris Best, told employees that the cuts affected staff members responsible for human resources and writer support functions, among others, according to a person familiar with the discussion. The cuts are a blow to a company that has said it was opening up a new era of media, in which people writing stories and making videos would be more empowered, getting direct payments from readers for what they produce instead of being paid by the publications or sites where their work appears. Mr. Best told employees on Wednesday that Substack had decided to cut jobs so it could fund its operations from its own revenue without raising additional financing in a difficult market, according to the person with knowledge of the discussion. He said he wanted the company to seek funding from a position of strength if it decided to raise again. In his remarks to employees, Mr. Best said the company's revenues were increasing. He noted that Substack still had money in the bank and was continuing to hire, albeit at a slower place, the person said. Mr. Best said the cuts would allow the company to hone its focus on product and engineering. Months earlier, Substack scrapped a plan to raise additional funding after the market for venture investments cooled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues [Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk] of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users. [...] Turning his attention to former colleagues Ortmann and van der Kolk, last week Dotcom publicly blamed them for his exit from Mega, claiming they had "stolen" the company from him. How this dovetails with previous allegations related to his major falling out with former Mega CEO Tony Lentino, who also founded domain name registrar Instra, is unknown. Local media reports suggest that Dotcom hasn't spoken to former friends Ortmann and van der Kolk for years but their recent deal to avoid extradition in the Megaupload case by pleading guilty to organized crime charges puts Dotcom in a tough spot. "My co-defendants who claimed to be innocent for 10+ years were offered a sweet exit deal for a false confession," he said last week. And he wasn't finished there. After a research team found that Mega was vulnerable to attacks that allow for a "full compromise of the confidentiality of user files", Ortmann himself responded via a security notification stating that the issues had been fixed. In response, Dotcom accused Ortmann and van der Kolk of creating "backdoors" in Mega so that the Chinese government could decrypt users' files. "Same shady guys who just made a deal with the US and NZ Govt to get out of the US extradition case by falsely accusing me," he added. Whether this reference to the no-extradition-deal betrayed what was really on Dotcom's mind is up for debate but whatever the motivation, he's not letting it go. In a tweet posted yesterday, he again informed his 850K+ followers that the company he founded "is not safe" and people who think that their files are unreadable by Mega are wrong. Shortly after, Dotcom delivered another message, one even darker in tone. It targeted Mega, the company he co-founded and where his colleagues still work. It's possible to interpret the tweet in several ways but none seem beneficial to his former colleagues, Mega, or its users. "In addition to security vulnerabilities a comprehensive report about mass copyright infringement on Mega with millions of active links and channels is in the works," he said. "[P]erhaps the most worrying thing about this new complication in an escalating dispute is its potential to affect the minority of users that actually store infringing files on Mega," adds TorrentFreak. "Any detailed report of 'mass copyright infringement' will draw negative attention directly to them, especially if the report includes active hyperlinks as Dotcom suggests." "Couple that with Dotcom's allegations that the content of user files can be read, any conclusion that this upcoming infringement report hasn't been thought through from a user perspective can be easily forgiven..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US government's bid to collect billions of dollars in taxes is hitting a snag, with the Biden administration poised to delay when crypto brokers and exchanges must start gathering detailed information on their clients' trading. From a report: The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service are likely to push off a January date for the firms to begin tracking data such as customers' capital gains and losses, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because a final decision hasn't been made. The move would mean the tax agency waits longer to get the kind of data it gets for stocks or bonds. Crypto tax evasion remains a major issue for Washington policy makers even amid the recent downturn. Treasury and the IRS have struggled to quickly draft rules, which firms will use in collecting and reporting the information on their clients' trades.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An unusually advanced hacking group has spent almost two years infecting a wide range of routers in North America and Europe with malware that takes full control of connected devices running Windows, macOS, and Linux, researchers reported on Tuesday. From a report: So far, researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs say they've identified at least 80 targets infected by the stealthy malware, infecting routers made by Cisco, Netgear, Asus, and DrayTek. Dubbed ZuoRAT, the remote access Trojan is part of a broader hacking campaign that has existed since at least the fourth quarter of 2020 and continues to operate. The discovery of custom-built malware written for the MIPS architecture and compiled for small office and home office routers is significant, particularly given its range of capabilities. Its ability to enumerate all devices connected to an infected router and collect the DNS lookups and network traffic they send and receive and remain undetected is the hallmark of a highly sophisticated threat actor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disinformation operatives seek to undermine firms in the Western world as China fights to maintain near-monopoly power. From a report: An online influence campaign carried out by a group that promotes China's political interests is targeting Western companies that mine and process rare-earth elements, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant. The campaign, which is playing out in Facebook groups and micro-targeted tweets, is trying to stoke environmentalist protests against the companies in the US. The operation is attributed to an online group code-named Dragonbridge, which has also been responsible for campaigns claiming that covid-19 originated in the United States. Its latest campaign has increased in intensity in recent weeks as part of a strategic battle between China and its Western adversaries over who controls the precious resources and their own destiny. "We are headed to a future where the likelihood of tools like influence operations being used against key industries will only increase," says John Hultquist, Mandiant's head of intelligence. "As competition between the US and China changes, the nature of the competition may become more aggressive." It's also proof that influence campaigns are not easy: Dragonbridge has largely failed in its bid to draw negative attention to the Western companies. Shane Huntley, who directs Google's Threat Analysis Group and has tracked Dragonbridge since 2019, previously tweeted that his team has taken an "aggressive" approach against the influence operation but that "it really is amazing for all the effort put in how LITTLE engagement these channels get from real viewers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla's latest Firefox browser release has a new feature that prevents sites like Facebook from tracking you across websites. Called Query Parameter Stripping, it automatically removes strings of characters added to the end of an URL.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is rewarding the most active and helpful members of its support forums with its new Community Plus program. The invite-only program gives these "high-level" Support Community members access to exclusive perks and experiences. From a report: Apple's Support Community members can already earn points based on their activity, granting them access to rewards as they level up. This includes the ability to upload a custom avatar as well as participate in conference calls with the Apple Support Community team and even in-person meetups with other members. But the Community Plus program appears to take things a bit further. It applies to the "shining stars" of Apple support forums who provide the most detailed and helpful answers. Apple says it will only add a "small group" of people to the program on a yearly basis. If this type of program sounds familiar, you may remember that Microsoft has had its MVP (most valuable professional) award for over 20 years and has recognized over 4,000 MVPs so far -- at times rewarding them with trips, subscriptions that included free access to expensive software, and free training materials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gmail is now rolling out a new user interface that will show Chat and Meet sections on the side pane by default. From a report: Google introduced this new integrated view earlier this year through opt-in options, so you had to manually enable Chat and Meet panes. However, as the new phase of the rollout is starting, the company will force you to opt out if you want the classic Gmail view. Google says the change is rolling out to Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts alike. This includes Google Workspace Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Frontline and Nonprofits, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers, and Google Workspace Individual users. Only Google Workspace Essentials customers will not see the change, or those Workspace customers that have only been provided access to Gmail and not other apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A British Virgin Islands court ordered the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital, the crypto hedge fund that bet big on everything from Bitcoin to the ill-fated Luna tokens and then succumbed to a $2 trillion wipeout of the digital-asset markets. From a report: The court, which made the order on Monday, has appointed two partners at consulting and advisory firm Teneo to handle the liquidation, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the information is confidential. Teneo will oversee talks with potential buyers that may be interested in Three Arrows's remaining holdings, such as tokens or equity stakes in crypto startups, the person added. A website will be set up to locate creditors and determine who is owed what. Three Arrows has invested in a range of decentralized finance platforms such as Aave and dYdX, as well as crypto infrastructure firms such as StarkWare, according to its website. It's not immediately clear what or how much of these holdings will be subject to a sale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Windows 11 22H2 update is working its way through Microsoft's Windows Insider testing channels, and we'd expect it to begin rolling out to Windows 11 PCs at some point in the next few weeks or months. But Microsoft has had almost nothing to say about the next major update to Windows 10 beyond the fact that the operating system will keep getting yearly updates for the foreseeable future. From a report: And the Windows 10 22H2 update is actually already out there for those who know how to install it. Neowin has published a list of commands that can be typed into the Command Prompt or Windows Terminal to turn a fully updated Windows 10 21H2 install into a 22H2 install. The commands use Microsoft's Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool to make tweaks to your Windows install and require the optional KB5014666 update for Windows 10 to be installed first. The catch is that enabling Windows 10 22H2 doesn't actually seem to do much beyond incrementing the version number on the "About Windows" screen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AnandTech: We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there's a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built -- and they won't be building any more. As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies. Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC's revenue come from outdated processes. Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn't the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In February 2019, a large container ship sailing for New York identified a cyber intrusion on board that startled the US Coast Guard. Though the malware attack never controlled the vessel's movement, authorities concluded that weak defenses exposed critical functions to "significant vulnerabilities." A maritime disaster didn't happen that day, but a warning flare rose over an emerging threat to global trade: cyber piracy able to penetrate on-board technology that's replacing old ways of steering, propulsion, navigation and other key operations. Such leaps in hacking capabilities could do enormous economic damage, particularly now, when supply chains are already stressed from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, experts including a top Coast Guard official said. "We've been lucky so far," said Rick Tiene, vice president with Mission Secure, a cybersecurity firm in Charlottesville, Virginia. "More and more incidents are happening, and the hackers are getting a better understanding what they can do once they've taken over an operational technology system. In the case of maritime -- whether it be the ports or the vessels themselves -- there is a tremendous amount that could be done to harm both the network and physical operations." Rear Admiral Wayne Arguin, the Coast Guard's assistant commandant for prevention policy, said shipping faces cyber risks similar to those in other industries -- it's just that the stakes are so much higher given that almost 80% of global trade moves on the sea. While Arguin declined to put a number on the frequency of attempted break-ins, he said "I feel very confident that every day networks are being tested, which really reinforces the need to have a plan." "That universe includes not just ship operators but port terminals and the thousands of logistics links in global supply chains that are increasingly interconnected," the story adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, said on CNBC's Squawk Box that the only token he would lump in with commodities was bitcoin. From a report: Gensler pointedly declined to name any cryptocurrency other than the original one, notable because the market has been operating under the assumption that there is a sort of wink-and-nod understanding that ether is also not a security. "Many of these financial assets, crypto assets, have the key attributes of a security... some like bitcoin, and that's the only one, Jim, I'm going to say, because I'm not going to talk about any of these tokens, my predecessors and others have said they're a commodity," Gensler said. He made the comment as he discussed the importance of collaborating with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky built his cryptocurrency lender into a giant on a pitch that it was less risky than a bank with better returns for customers. But investor documents show the lender carried far more risk than a traditional bank. From a report: The lender issued numerous large loans backed by little collateral, according to Celsius investor documents from 2021 reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The documents show that Celsius had little cushion in the event of a downturn, and made investments that would be difficult to quickly unwind if customers raced to withdraw their money. Celsius had $19 billion of assets and roughly $1 billion of equity as of last summer, before it raised new funds, according to Celsius investor documents from 2021 reviewed by the Journal. The median assets-to-equity ratio for all the North American banks in the S&P 1500 Composite index was about 9:1, or about half that of Celsius, according to data from FactSet. For banks, that ratio is of great importance: Regulators look at it as an indicator of risk. For unregulated companies like Celsius, the ratio of 19-1 is particularly high given that some of its assets were investments in the extremely volatile crypto sector, said Eric Budish, an economist at the University of Chicago's business school who studies cryptocurrencies. Large banks often have ratios near Celsius's, but they hold much more stable assets and have access to central-bank loans for ready cash. [...] Founded in 2017 by Mr. Mashinsky, Celsius surged amid the crypto boom to become one of the biggest crypto lenders, with more than $12 billion in deposits. Customers, wooed by high interest rates, flooded in, while venture capitalists showered it with money. Contrasts with banks were at the center of Mr. Mashinsky's public persona. Mr. Mashinsky frequently said Celsius passed along 80% of its lending revenue to customers in the form of its high yields. He often wore a black T-shirt reading, "Banks are not your friends." Compared with banks, "we have much less risk, but we've managed to deliver high single-digit, low double-digit numbers," Mr. Mashinsky told the YouTube channel CTO Larsson in August. Mr. Mashinsky said on a podcast last month that while "normally in panic, everybody runs to the bank and withdraws their money because they're afraid the bank is going to fail," Celsius had proven different in crypto downturns, as its business increased.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from The Truth About Cars: Ford Motor Co. will be suspending end-of-lease buyout options for customers driving all-electric vehicles, provided they took possession of the model after June 15, 2022. Those who nabbed their Mach-E beforehand will still have the option of purchasing the automobile once their lease ends. However, there are some states that won't be abiding by the updated rules until the end of the year, not that it matters when customers are almost guaranteed to have to wait at least that long on a reserved vehicle. The change, made earlier in the month, cruised under our radar until a reader asked for our take over the weekend. Ford could be wanting to capitalize on exceptionally high used vehicle prices, ensuring that more vehicles make it back into rotation. The broader industry has likewise been talking about abandoning traditional ownership to transition the auto market into being more service-oriented where manufacturers ultimately retain ownership of all relevant assets. But it may not be that simple as this being another step in the business sector's larger plan to maximize profitability by discouraging private vehicle ownership. [...] While leasing customers will not be able to buy their EV, Ford Credit will allow them to renew an expiring contract in exchange for a brand-new model. Amazingly, the manufacturer is trying to frame this as environmentally responsible. But it smells like planned obsolescence and desperation from where I'm sitting. Ford knows that electrics require far less labor to produce. By also retaining/recycling the most-expensive component (the battery) it can effectively maximize profitability on a three or four-year turnaround. For now, the updated leasing scheme is limited exclusively to all-electric products (e.g. Ford Lightning or Mach-E "Mustang") sold in 37 individual states. But the long wait times for new EVs and Ford's desire to expand the plan through the rest of the year effectively means it'll be national by the time most people take ownership.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google started rolling out an updated user interface for Gmail in February that pulls Meet, Chat, and Spaces closer and applies more of its Material You styling effects. Starting today, it's becoming opt-out instead of opt-in, so your account will switch over to the new view by default pretty soon. The Verge reports: If you can't tell what's different here, the updated UI collects buttons for Mail, Meet, Spaces, and Chat into one list at the top of the left rail instead of showing several conversations from each one in a list. They're still easily accessible without having everything on screen at once, and you can quickly jump into a conversation in any one section as a list will pop out when you mouse over its icon. And if you just want to have one particular form of communication on screen without the others (like Gmail), it's a little easier to do that since Chat and the rest aren't listed underneath your inboxes and labels anymore. According to Google, you can choose which apps are included there in the Quick Settings menu, where you'll be able to switch back to the old look if you prefer. Unlike the usual 15-day rollout for new features, Google says this one is an "extended rollout," so while it's coming to Workspace and personal Gmail accounts alike, it could take longer than a couple of weeks for your interface to change over on its own. If you just want to try it, you should be able to opt-in (and back out) from the quick settings menu right now, as long as you've already switched to Chat from Hangouts and positioned Chat in the left-hand menu.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martian rock samples collected by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover show signs of key ingredients for life as we know it on Earth. Space.com reports: The venerable Curiosity Rover drilled samples from Gale crater, the site of an ancient lake on Mars. Using these samples, scientists were able, for the first time, to measure the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks, according to a statement from NASA. Organic carbon, which is carbon bound to a hydrogen atom, is a prerequisite for organic molecules created and used by all known forms of life. However, organic carbon can also come from non-living sources, such as meteorites and volcanic eruptions. While previous studies have detected organic carbon in smaller quantities in Martian rock samples, the new measurements provide insight into the total amount of carbon in organic compounds. "Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology," Jennifer Stern, lead author of the study and a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "We found at least 200 to 273 parts per million of organic carbon. This is comparable to or even more than the amount found in rocks in very low-life places on Earth, such as parts of the Atacama Desert in South America, and more than has been detected in Mars meteorites." [...] However, in addition to organic carbon, the researchers identified other signs suggesting Gale crater may have once supported life, including the presence of chemical energy sources, and chemical compounds such as oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur and low acidity. "Basically, this location would have offered a habitable environment for life, if it ever was present," Stern said in the statement. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SciTechDaily: An exceptional organism with an extremely complex brain and cognitive abilities makes the octopus very unique among invertebrates. So much so that it resembles vertebrates more than invertebrates in several aspects. The neural and cognitive complexity of these animals could originate from a molecular analogy with the human brain, as discovered by a research paper that was recently published in BMC Biology and coordinated by Remo Sanges from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) of Trieste and by Graziano Fiorito from Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn of Naples. This research shows that the same 'jumping genes' are active both in the human brain and in the brain of two species, Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus, and Octopus bimaculoides, the Californian octopus. A discovery that could help us understand the secret of the intelligence of these remarkable organisms. Sequencing the human genome revealed as early as 2001 that over 45% of it is composed of sequences called transposons, so-called 'jumping genes' that, through molecular copy-and-paste or cut-and-paste mechanisms, can 'move' from one point to another of an individual's genome, shuffling or duplicating. In most cases, these mobile elements remain silent: they have no visible effects and have lost their ability to move. Some are inactive because they have, over generations, accumulated mutations; others are intact, but blocked by cellular defense mechanisms. From an evolutionary point of view even these fragments and broken copies of transposons can still be useful, as 'raw matter' that evolution can sculpt. Among these mobile elements, the most relevant are those belonging to the so-called LINE (Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements) family, found in a hundred copies in the human genome and still potentially active. It has been traditionally though that LINEs' activity was just a vestige of the past, a remnant of the evolutionary processes that involved these mobile elements, but in recent years new evidence emerged showing that their activity is finely regulated in the brain. There are many scientists who believe that LINE transposons are associated with cognitive abilities such as learning and memory: they are particularly active in the hippocampus, the most important structure of our brain for the neural control of learning processes. The octopus' genome, like ours, is rich in 'jumping genes', most of which are inactive. Focusing on the transposons still capable of copy-and-paste, the researchers identified an element of the LINE family in parts of the brain crucial for the cognitive abilities of these animals. The discovery, the result of the collaboration between Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, was made possible thanks to next-generation sequencing techniques, which were used to analyze the molecular composition of the genes active in the nervous system of the octopus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbnb on Tuesday announced a global ban on parties, following a temporary restriction it put in place two years ago. CNBC reports: The company is permanently banning "disruptive parties and events," which include open-invite gatherings. "Party houses," which people book to throw a large event for just one night, will stay banned as well. Airbnb placed a ban on party houses and rolled out several safety features in 2019 after five people were killed in a shooting at one of its bookings. In 2020, the company instituted a global ban on all parties as the pandemic hit. Airbnb said that since it implemented its policy in August 2020, it has seen a 44% year-over-year drop in the rate of party reports. "The temporary ban has proved effective, and today we are officially codifying the ban as our policy," the company said in a blog post. Airbnb said guests who attempt to violate its rules will face consequences varying from account suspension to full removal from the platform. In 2021, for example, more than 6,600 guests were suspended from Airbnb for violating its party ban.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new documentary about the evolution of the iPhone, Apple's marketing chief Greg Joswiak was seen calling Samsung "annoying" and accusing them of poorly copying Apple's technology. "They were annoying," said Joswiak. "And they were annoying because, as you know, they ripped off our technology. They took the innovations that we had created and created a poor copy of it, and just put a bigger screen around it. So, yeah, we were none too pleased." MacRumors reports: Samsung launched the Galaxy S4 with a 5-inch display in early 2013, at a time when the iPhone 5 had a 4-inch display. Apple did eventually release its first larger smartphones with the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus in 2014, and the devices were met with strong demand and went on to be among the best-selling iPhone models ever. Apple sued Samsung in 2011 for patent infringement, alleging that Samsung copied the iPhone's design with its own Galaxy line of smartphones. Apple was initially awarded around $1 billion in damages, but the amount was lowered in a subsequent retrial. In 2018, Apple finally settled with Samsung and reiterated the following statement: "We believe deeply in the value of design, and our teams work tirelessly to create innovative products that delight our customers. This case has always been about more than money. Apple ignited the smartphone revolution with iPhone and it is a fact that Samsung blatantly copied our design. It is important that we continue to protect the hard work and innovation of so many people at Apple. We're grateful to the jury for their service and pleased they agree that Samsung should pay for copying our products." The full documentary can be watched on The Wall Street Journal's website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance. The Register reports: The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC. This trend has created a quandary for Intel. The semiconductor giant has traditionally manufactured the chips it designs as part of its integrated device manufacturing model but the company is now increasingly reliant on TSMC and other foundries for certain components, while expanding its own manufacturing capacity in the West. The kicker is that Intel plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalized foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea's Samsung, the industry's other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. This new strategy by Intel is called IDM 2.0, and it means the chipmaker will have to juggle two somewhat conflicting objectives: - taking foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants;- and using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia. "Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores the tentative position Intel is in," concludes the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, we reviewed the MNT Reform, which attempts to bring the dream of entirely open source hardware to an audience that doesn't want to design and build a laptop totally from scratch. Now, MNT is bringing its open-hardware ethos to a second PC, a 7-inch "Pocket Reform" laptop that recalls the design of old clamshell Pocket PCs, just like the big Reform references the design of chunky '90s ThinkPads. The Pocket Reform borrows many of the big Reform laptop's design impulses, including a low-profile mechanical keyboard and trackball-based pointing device and a chunky, retro-throwback design. The device includes a 7-inch 1080p screen, a pair of USB-C ports (one of which is used for charging), a microSD slot for storage expansion, and a micro HDMI port for connecting to a display when you're at your desk. [...] The version of the Pocket Reform in the announcement isn't ready to launch yet, and MNT says it represents "near-final specs and design." For users interested in the Pocket Reform's imminent early beta program, there's a newsletter sign-up link at the bottom of the announcement. One of the main complaints Ars noted about the big Reform was the "miserably slow ARM processor," which will be included in the Pocket Reform. With that said, MNT has addressed other complaints about the big Reform by "adding reinforced metal side panels to cover the ports and a redesigned battery system that won't let the batteries fully discharge if the laptop is left unplugged."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being. The BBC reports: A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance. Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case. Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who had said his Dabus AI system should be recognized as the inventor in two patent applications, for: a food container [and] a flashing light. The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor. "Only a person can have rights - a machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement. "A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person." But the IPO also said it would "need to understand how our IP system should protect AI-devised inventions in the future" and committed to advancing international discussions, with a view to keeping the UK competitive. Many AI systems are trained on large amounts of data copied from the internet. And, on Tuesday, the IPO also announced plans to change copyright law to allow anyone with lawful access - rather than only those conducting non-commercial research, as now -- to do this, to "promote the use of AI technology, and wider 'data mining' techniques, for the public good." Rights holders will still be able to control and charge for access to their works but no longer charge extra for the ability to mine them. In the consultation, the IPO noted the UK was one of only a handful of countries to protect computer-generated works with no human creator. The "author" of a "computer-generated work" is defined as "the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken," it says. And protection lasts for 50 years from when the work is made. Performing-arts workers' union Equity had called for copyright law to be changed to protect actors' livelihoods from AI content such as "deepfakes," generated from images of their face or voice. The IPO took this issue seriously, it said, but "at this stage, the impacts of AI technologies on performers remain unclear." "We will keep these issues under review," it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.