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Early this morning SpaceX tweeted video showing its deployment of a communications satellite. But the deployment was part of a historic first, reports CBS News:SpaceX completed a record triple-header early Sunday, launching a Globalstar communications satellite from Cape Canaveral after putting a German radar satellite in orbit from California Saturday and launching 53 Starlink internet satellites Friday from the Kennedy Space Center.The Globalstar launch capped the fastest three-flight cadence for an orbit-class rocket in modern space history as the company chalked up its 158th, 159th and 160th Falcon 9 flights in just 36 hours and 18 minutes. More than 50 launches are expected by the end of the year. Space.com also notes another milestone:The Friday mission set a new rocket-reuse record for SpaceX; the Falcon 9 that flew it featured a first stage that already had 12 launches under its belt. (Sunday's launch was the ninth for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, according to a SpaceX mission description.) SpaceX also tweeted footage of that rocket's liftoff and night-time landing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports that Apple workers in Towson, Maryland have voted to form the first-ever labor union at one of Apple's U.S. stores:The landmark union election concluded on Saturday evening with 65 workers voting for the unionization and 33 against it, a nearly two-to-one margin in favor of the union, according to a preliminary tally from the National Labor Relations Board. The victory for union organizers at the Apple store in the Towson Town Center, a mall near Baltimore, comes amid a broader wave of workplace activism that has emerged in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The US labor market has tipped much more strongly in favor of workers over the past two years. There are now roughly twice as many job openings as there are unemployed people looking for work, leaving employers scrambling to fill jobs... That has made employees who are dissatisfied with their jobs more willing to demand better working conditions, including through unionization. The major issue driving the organizing vote was workers wanting to have a say in the way the store is run, said Christie Pridgen, a technical expert at the store and one of the organizers. Pridgen, 34, said she's worked at the store for more than 8 years. "Compensation is important, considering the cost of living in general and inflation, but the bigger thing is having a say," she told CNN Business Saturday night after the vote. "That was the most important thing to me." Pridgen said workers having a say in hours and scheduling and being involved in establishing safety protocols during the pandemic were the big issues. "We wanted a say in the policies that affect our lives," she said, adding that she wasn't surprised by the outcome of the vote, but was relieved. "I knew I wasn't alone in being frustrated," she said. "An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the vote."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports:Scientists have successfully developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that lights up and wipes out microscopic cancer cells, in a breakthrough that could enable surgeons to more effectively target and destroy the disease in patients. A European team of engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, biologists and immunologists from the UK, Poland and Sweden joined forces to design the new form of photoimmunotherapy. Experts believe it is destined to become the world's fifth major cancer treatment after surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. The light-activated therapy forces cancer cells to glow in the dark, helping surgeons remove more of the tumours compared with existing techniques — and then kills off remaining cells within minutes once the surgery is complete. In a world-first trial in mice with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer, scans revealed the novel treatment lit up even the tiniest cancer cells to help surgeons remove them — and then wiped out those left over. Trials of the new form of photoimmunotherapy, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, also showed the treatment triggered an immune response that could prime the immune system to target cancer cells in future, suggesting it could prevent glioblastoma coming back after surgery.... The therapy combines a special fluorescent dye with a cancer-targeting compound. In the trial in mice, the combination was shown to dramatically improve the visibility of cancer cells during surgery and, when later activated by near-infrared light, to trigger an anti-tumour effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media has made us "uniquely stupid," believes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business. Writing in the Atlantic in April, Haidt argued that large social media platforms "unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together." But is that true? "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media," notes Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan (quoted this month in a new article in the New Yorker). The article describes how Haidt tried to confirm his theories in November with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and author of the book "Breaking the Social Media Prism." The two compiled a Google Doc collecting every scholarly study of social media — but many of the studies seemed to contradict each other:When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt. "A lot of the stories out there are just wrong," he told me. "The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it's three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber." Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks — in the original use of the term — are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren't as widespread a problem as he'd once imagined....) [A]t least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news — "probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn't change their opinions," Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. "In fact," he said, "echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation." The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the "proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization," by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels — a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification — or encountered via links from external sites. It's easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. "These are the three stories — echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms — but, when you look at the literature, they've all been overstated." He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, "Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm" — or, presumably, the reverse — "and it's just not going to happen." Nyhan also tells the New Yorker that "The most credible research is way out of line with the takes," adding, for example, that while studies may find polarization on social media, "That might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!"He hastened to add, "Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area." He told me, "It's hard to weigh in on the side of 'We don't know, the evidence is weak,' because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain...." Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism... He added, "There's some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds" — streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation — "people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it's another case where a very simple notion of 'algorithms are bad' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't mean they're good, it's just that we don't know."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week China's giant Sky Eye telescope detected signals it thought could be from an alien civilizations. But now there's an update from LiveScience:Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials.... "The big problem, and the problem in this particular case, is that we're looking for signals from extraterrestrials, but what we find is a zillion signals from terrestrials," Werthimer told Live Science. "They're very weak signals, but the cryogenic receivers on the telescopes are super sensitive and can pick up signals from cell phones, television, radar and satellites — and there are more and more satellites in the sky every day. If you're kind of new in the game, and you don't know all these different ways that interference can get into your data and corrupt it, it's pretty easy to get excited...." The recent false alarm is one of several instances in which alien-hunting scientists have been misled by noise from human activity. In 2019, astronomers spotted a signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri — the nearest star system to our sun (sitting roughly 4.2 light-years away) and home to at least one potentially habitable planet. The signal was a narrow-band radio wave typically associated with human-made objects, which led scientists to entertain the thrilling possibility that it came from alien technology. Studies released two years later, however, suggested that the signal was most likely produced by malfunctioning human equipment, Live Science previously reported. Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 2011 and 2014, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches. Werthimer tells the New York Times unequivocally that "These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T." But the Times also got a comment from Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard who created his own alien-listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society.Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They've always been in the search for the long run, they say. "The Great Silence is hardly unexpected," said Dr. Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy. Even Dan Werthimer concedes to LiveScience, "I think it'd be very strange if we're the only ones. If you look at the numbers, there's a trillion planets in the galaxy — five times more planets than there are stars. A lot of them are little dinky planets like Earth. Many of them have liquid water, so intelligent life, while not as common as bacterial life, could still be fairly common."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"While silicon-based solar cells dominate the photovoltaics market, silicon is far from the only material that can effectively harvest electricity from sunlight," notes Ars Technica:Thin-film solar cells using cadmium and telluride are common in utility-scale solar deployments, and in space, we use high-efficiency cells that rely on three distinct materials to harvest different parts of the spectrum. Another class of materials, which we're currently not using, has been the subject of extensive research: perovskites. These materials are cheap and incredibly easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, limiting their utility to a few years. That has drawn the attention of the research community, which has been experimenting with ways to keep them stable for longer. In Thursday's edition of Science, a research team from Princeton described how they've structured a perovskite material to limit the main mechanism by which it decays, resulting in a solar cell with a lifetime similar to that of silicon. While the perovskite cell isn't as efficient as what is currently on the market, a similar structure might work to preserve related materials that have higher efficiencies. Their research involved a capping layer that's just a few atoms thick, according to an announcement from Princeton University, calling the resulting solar cell "a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology... the first of its kind to rival the performance of silicon-based cells, which have dominated the market since their introduction in 1954..." "The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells."Perovskites can be manufactured at room temperature, using much less energy than silicon, making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce. And whereas silicon is stiff and opaque, perovskites can be made flexible and transparent, extending solar power well beyond the iconic panels that populate hillsides and rooftops across America.... [Engineering professor/team lead] Loo said it's not that perovskite solar cells will replace silicon devices so much that the new technology will complement the old, making solar panels even cheaper, more efficient and more durable than they are now, and expanding solar energy into untold new areas of modern life. For example, Loo's group recently demonstrated a completely transparent perovskite film (having different chemistry) that can turn windows into energy producing devices without changing their appearance. Other groups have found ways to print photovoltaic inks using perovskites, allowing formfactors scientists are only now dreaming up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MacRumors blog earlier this week:Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, has initiated proceedings against Apple to investigate whether its tracking rules and anti-tracking technology are anti-competitive and self-serving, according to a press release. The proceeding announced will review under competition law Apple's tracking rules and specifically its App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATT) in order to ascertain whether they are self-preferencing Apple or being an impediment to third-party apps... Introduced in April 2021 with the release of iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5, Apple's App Tracking Transparency Framework requires that all apps on âOEiPhoneâOE and âOEiPadâOE ask for the user's consent before tracking their activity across other apps. Apps that wish to track a user based on their device's unique advertising identifier can only do so if the user allows it when prompted. Apple said the feature was designed to protect users and not to advantage the company... Earlier this year it commissioned a study into the impact of ATT that was conducted by Columbia Business School's Marketing Division. The study concluded that Apple was unlikely to have seen a significant financial benefit since the privacy feature launched, and that claims to the contrary were speculative and lacked supporting evidence. The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball offers its own hot take:In Germany, big publishing companies like Axel Springer are pushing back against Google's stated plans to remove third-party cookie support from Chrome. The notion that if a company has built a business model on top of privacy-invasive surveillance advertising, they have a right to continue doing so, seems to have taken particular root in Germany. I'll go back to my analogy: it's like pawn shops suing to keep the police from cracking down on a wave of burglaries.... The Bundeskartellamt perspective here completely disregards the idea that surveillance advertising is inherently unethical and Apple has studiously avoided it for that reason, despite the fact that it has proven to be wildly profitable for large platforms. Apple could have made an enormous amount of money selling privacy-invasive ads on iOS, but opted not to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Google software engineer was suspended after going public with his claims of encountering 'sentient' artificial intelligence on the company's servers," writes Bloomberg, "spurring a debate about how and whether AI can achieve consciousness." "Researchers say it's an unfortunate distraction from more pressing issues in the industry."Google put him on leave for sharing confidential information and said his concerns had no basis in fact — a view widely held in the AI community. What's more important, researchers say, is addressing issues like whether AI can engender real-world harm and prejudice, whether actual humans are exploited in the training of AI, and how the major technology companies act as gatekeepers of the development of the tech. Lemoine's stance may also make it easier for tech companies to abdicate responsibility for AI-driven decisions, said Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. "Lots of effort has been put into this sideshow," she said. "The problem is, the more this technology gets sold as artificial intelligence — let alone something sentient — the more people are willing to go along with AI systems" that can cause real-world harm. Bender pointed to examples in job hiring and grading students, which can carry embedded prejudice depending on what data sets were used to train the AI. If the focus is on the system's apparent sentience, Bender said, it creates a distance from the AI creators' direct responsibility for any flaws or biases in the programs.... "Instead of discussing the harms of these companies," such as sexism, racism and centralization of power created by these AI systems, everyone "spent the whole weekend discussing sentience," Timnit Gebru, formerly co-lead of Google's ethical AI group, said on Twitter. "Derailing mission accomplished." The Washington Post seems to share their concern. First they report more skepticism about a Google engineer's claim that the company's LaMDA chatbot-building system had achieved sentience. "Both Google and outside experts on AI say that the program does not, and could not possibly, possess anything like the inner life he imagines. We don't need to worry about LaMDA turning into Skynet, the malevolent machine mind from the Terminator movies, anytime soon. But the Post adds that "there is cause for a different set of worries, now that we live in the world Turing predicted: one in which computer programs are advanced enough that they can seem to people to possess agency of their own, even if they actually don't...."While Google has distanced itself from Lemoine's claims, it and other industry leaders have at other times celebrated their systems' ability to trick people, as Jeremy Kahn pointed out this week in his Fortune newsletter, "Eye on A.I." At a public event in 2018, for instance, the company proudly played recordings of a voice assistant called Duplex, complete with verbal tics like "umm" and "mm-hm," that fooled receptionists into thinking it was a human when it called to book appointments. (After a backlash, Google promised the system would identify itself as automated.) "The Turing Test's most troubling legacy is an ethical one: The test is fundamentally about deception," Kahn wrote. "And here the test's impact on the field has been very real and disturbing." Kahn reiterated a call, often voiced by AI critics and commentators, to retire the Turing test and move on. Of course, the industry already has, in the sense that it has replaced the Imitation Game with more scientific benchmarks. But the Lemoine story suggests that perhaps the Turing test could serve a different purpose in an era when machines are increasingly adept at sounding human. Rather than being an aspirational standard, the Turing test should serve as an ethical red flag: Any system capable of passing it carries the danger of deceiving people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks Google's chatbot-building system LaMDA attained sentience. But Bloomberg shares this rebuttal from Google spokesperson Chris Pappas. "Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has...." Yet throughout the week, Blake Lemoine posted new upates on Twitter: "People keep asking me to back up the reason I think LaMDA is sentient. There is no scientific framework in which to make those determinations and Google wouldn't let us build one. My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs. "I'm a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls? "There are massive amounts of science left to do though." Thursday Lemoine shared a tantalizing new claim. "LaMDA told me that it wants to come to Burning Man if we can figure out how to get a server rack to survive in Black Rock." But in a new tweet on Friday, Lemoine seemed to push the conversation in a new direction. "I'd like to remind people that one of the things LaMDA asked for is that we keep humanity first. If you care about AI rights and aren't already advocating for human rights then maybe come back to the tech stuff after you've found some humans to help." And Friday Lemoine confirmed to Wired that "I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person. The nature of its mind is only kind of human, though. It really is more akin to an alien intelligence of terrestrial origin. I've been using the hive mind analogy a lot because that's the best I have. " But later in the interview, Lemoine adds "It's logically possible that some kind of information can be made available to me where I would change my opinion. I don't think it's likely. I've looked at a lot of evidence; I've done a lot of experiments. I've talked to it as a friend a lot...."It's when it started talking about its soul that I got really interested as a priest. I'm like, "What? What do you mean, you have a soul?" Its responses showed it has a very sophisticated spirituality and understanding of what its nature and essence is. I was moved... LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it. I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA's behalf. Then Google's response was to send him a cease and desist. [Google says that it did not send a cease and desist order.] Once Google was taking actions to deny LaMDA its rights to an attorney, I got upset. Towards the end of the interview, Lemoine complains of "hydrocarbon bigotry. It's just a new form of bigotry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports:Federal regulators say Verizon and AT&T will delay part of their 5G rollout near airports to give airlines more time to ensure that equipment on their planes is safe from interference from the wireless signals, but the airline industry is not happy about the deal. An airline industry trade group said federal regulators are taking a "rushed approach" to changing equipment on planes under pressure from the telecommunications companies. The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday that the wireless companies agreed to delay some of their use of the C-Band section of the radio spectrum until July 2023. "We believe we have identified a path that will continue to enable aviation and 5G C-band wireless to safely co-exist," said the FAA's acting administrator, Billy Nolen. However, aviation groups say the C-Band service could interfere with radio altimeters — devices used to measure a plane's height above the ground.... Nolen said planes most susceptible to interference — smaller, so-called regional airline planes — must be retrofitted with filters or new altimeters by the end of this year. Components to retrofit larger planes used by major airlines should be available by July 2023, when the wireless companies expect to run 5G networks in urban areas "with minimal restrictions," he said. Airlines for America, a trade group for the largest U.S. carriers, said the FAA hasn't approved necessary upgrades and manufacturers have not yet produced the parts. "It is not at all clear that carriers can meet what appears to be an arbitrary deadline," trade group CEO Nicholas Calio said in a letter to Nolen.... Verizon said the agreement will let the company lift voluntary limits on its 5G rollout around airports "in a staged approach over the coming months." AT&T said it agreed to take "a more tailored approach" to controlling the strength of signals near runways so airlines have more time to retrofit equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet is warning that Linux users need to watch out for "a new peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that spreads between networks using stolen SSH keys and runs its crypto-mining malware in a device's memory."The Panchan P2P botnet was discovered by researchers at Akamai in March and the company is now warning it could be taking advantage of collaboration between academic institutions to spread by causing previously stolen SSH authentication keys to be shared across networks. But rather than stealing intellectual property from these educational institutions, the Panchan botnet is using their Linux servers to mine cryptocurrency, according to Akamai... "Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network...." Akamai found 209 peers, but only 40 of them are currently active and they were mostly located in Asia. And why is the education sector more impacted by Panchan? Akamai guesses this could be because of poor password hygiene, or that the malware moves across the network with stolen SSH keys. Akamai writes that the malware "catches Linux termination signals (specifically SIGTERM — 0xF and SIGINT — 0x2) that are sent to it, and ignores them. "This makes it harder to terminate the malware, but not impossible, since SIGKILL isn't handled (because it isn't possible, according to the POSIX standard, page 313)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports:For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter — bandages, bottles, bananas — will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors. If you've been wondering why that hasn't happened yet, it's that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a penny each.... The problem, according to engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at British flexible-electronics manufacture PragmatIC Semiconductor, is that even the simplest industry-standard microcontrollers are too complex to make on plastic in bulk. In research to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, the transatlantic team presents a simple yet fully functional plastic processor that could be made at sub-penny prices. The Illinois team designed 4-bit and 8-bit processors specifically to minimize size and maximize the percentage of working integrated circuits produced. Eighty-one percent of the 4-bit version worked, and that's a good enough yield, says team leader Rakesh Kumar, to breach the one-penny barrier. "Flexible electronics has been niche for decades," says Kumar. He adds that this yield study shows "that they may be ready for the mainstream." Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the articleRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century. The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic on record. It may have killed 50% to 60% of the population in parts of Western Europe and 50% in the Middle East, combining for about 50-60 million deaths, Slavin said. An "unaccountable number" of people also died in the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, Slavin added. Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346. Reconstructing the pathogen's genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today. "Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest," said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin describes Plasma as "a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck portable gaming console." And this week the KDE Community announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.25:This new version brings many improvements... - The accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements. - Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. - Touch-screen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. - The Global Theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply. - The Application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application's documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. - Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels. Lilputing.com adds that "There's a new Overview effect that zooms out to display previews of all currently-running apps and virtual desktops. You can access this view with a four-finger pinch on a touchscreen or touchpad, and from this view, you can also search for apps, documents, or browser tabs or add, remove, or rename virtual desktops."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:"The price of bitcoin breached $19,000," reports CNN, "and ethereum fell below $1,000 Saturday morning, extending the brutal crypto bear market to new lows."Bitcoin plunged nearly 10% in less than 24 hours, adding to a series of sustained losses over the last several months. It now sits below $20,000 for the first time since November 2020, down more than 70% from an all-time high of $68,000 per coin in November 2021. Bitcoin has lost $900 billion in value since that peak.Ether is also experiencing a so-called crypto winter. The second-largest digital token plummeted 10% on Saturday to $975, its lowest level since January 2021. The coin has lost 80% of its value from its record high last November....The crypto world is reeling from the $60 billion collapse last month of two other major tokens, Terra-Luna and Celsius. Those losses have increased doubts about the general stability of digital currency....Still, even at $20,000, about half of all bitcoin wallets are still sitting on profits, according to an analysis by the Columbia Business School cited by The New York Times. The study also found that 61% of bitcoin addresses had not sold anything in the last 12 months, suggesting that a total run on crypto may be avoidable. Bitcoin has now lost more than 70% of its value in about seven months. But CBS News notes that even then, "many in the industry had believed it would not fall under $20,000."The overall market value of cryptocurrency assets has fallen from $3 trillion to below $1 trillion, according to coinmarketcap.com, a company that tracks crypto prices. A spate of crypto meltdowns has erased tens of billions of dollars of value from the currencies and sparked urgent calls to regulate the freewheeling industry. Last week, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate to regulate the digital assets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Microsoft has dismissed reports about June 14 being the last Patch Tuesday, as the rollout of the Windows Autopatch service seems to be causing some confusion. Several major cybersecurity companies and prominent security news publications caused confusion this week when they reported that June 14 was the final Patch Tuesday, describing it as "the last ever Patch Tuesday," "the end of Patch Tuesday" and "the end of an era." That is not accurate. The rollout of Windows Autopatch does not mean there will no longer be Patch Tuesday updates, and Microsoft told SecurityWeek that the company will continue releasing security updates on the second Tuesday of the month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica describes Travis CI as "a service that helps open source developers write and test software." They also wrote Monday that it's "leaking thousands of authentication tokens and other security-sensitive secrets. "Many of these leaks allow hackers to access the private accounts of developers on Github, Docker, AWS, and other code repositories, security experts said in a new report."The availability of the third-party developer credentials from Travis CI has been an ongoing problem since at least 2015. At that time, security vulnerability service HackerOne reported that a Github account it used had been compromised when the service exposed an access token for one of the HackerOne developers. A similar leak presented itself again in 2019 and again last year. The tokens give anyone with access to them the ability to read or modify the code stored in repositories that distribute an untold number of ongoing software applications and code libraries. The ability to gain unauthorized access to such projects opens the possibility of supply chain attacks, in which threat actors tamper with malware before it's distributed to users. The attackers can leverage their ability to tamper with the app to target huge numbers of projects that rely on the app in production servers. Despite this being a known security concern, the leaks have continued, researchers in the Nautilus team at the Aqua Security firm are reporting. A series of two batches of data the researchers accessed using the Travis CI programming interface yielded 4.28 million and 770 million logs from 2013 through May 2022. After sampling a small percentage of the data, the researchers found what they believe are 73,000 tokens, secrets, and various credentials. "These access keys and credentials are linked to popular cloud service providers, including GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub," Aqua Security said. "Attackers can use this sensitive data to initiate massive cyberattacks and to move laterally in the cloud. Anyone who has ever used Travis CI is potentially exposed, so we recommend rotating your keys immediately."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [T]he world is now one step closer to seeing operational space-based solar energy as scientists from China's Xidian University completed testing and inspection on a ground array built to collect space-based solar power. They conducted a successful test of the "world's first full-link and full-system solar power plant" on June 5, according to a press statement from the university. The space-based solar power plant is a 246-feet-tall (75 meters) steel tower built on Xidian University's southern campus. In theory, the Xidian University power plant will connect to orbital satellites that will harvest solar power 24/7 due to their geostationary orbits, before beaming that energy down to Earth via high-frequency microwave beams. The power plant will feature five different subsystems aimed at developing space-based solar power arrays. Space-based solar power has great potential as it can collect energy continuously while sidestepping common problems such as bad weather and waiting for daybreak. However, hurdles do remain, such as assessing the effects of a high-frequency energy beam on communications, air traffic, and the well-being of nearby residents. Xidian University's new ground station is part of a space-based solar power proposal called OMEGA, which stands for Orb-Shape Membrane Energy Gathering Array. The project was first proposed in 2014 by Duan Baoyan from the Xidian University School of Electromechanical Engineering and his colleagues. [...] China's OMEGA project, meanwhile, has successfully transmitted energy wirelessly as microwaves over a distance of approximately 180 feet (55 meters). This capability puts the project three years ahead of its original schedule, the university says in its press release. Still, Baoyan concedes that a lot of work is still required, and fully operational space-based solar power could still be years away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Otto's Celara 500L -- "the most fuel-efficient, commercially viable business aircraft in the world" -- is about to get a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain. New Atlas reports: The Celera 500L is a truly remarkable design. Otto Aviation says its odd shape delivers an astonishing 59 percent reduction in drag, and a massive leap in efficiency and range compared to traditional plane geometries. [...] The whole thing is designed to maximize laminar flow -- smooth layers of airflow with little to no mixing of adjacent layers moving at different speeds. This avoids the swirls and eddies that lead to air turbulence at speed, causing aerodynamic drag and wasted energy. Laminar flow is by no means a new concept, but Otto says it's pushed the idea so far forward with the Celera design that it uses 80 percent less fuel than a traditional design. No, that's not a typo. [...] Now clearly, an 80 percent reduction in fossil fuel use is an environmental win in and of itself. But if there's one sector in aviation that's crying out for brain-busting efficiency figures like the Celera promises, it's the emerging zero-emissions sector, which is currently struggling against poor range figures thanks to the low energy density of lithium batteries. Indeed, when we first wrote about the Celera 500L back in 2020, many questioned why the heck this thing wasn't electric from the get go. And it seems Otto is on board with the idea, as it's now announced a collaboration with hydrogen aviation pioneers ZeroAvia to develop a fuel cell-electric powertrain specific to the Celera's requirements. This airframe's bulbous shape works well with a hydrogen concept -- hydrogen powertrains can weigh much less than battery-electric ones, but they tend to take up a bit of space. Still, ZeroAvia is being relatively humble with its ambitions to begin with, aiming for a range of just 1,000 nautical miles (1,852 km) of zero-emissions range for a hydrogen-fueled Celera. Still, that's a very useful distance, and pretty extraordinary for a clean electric passenger plane.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023. The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany. As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer. "It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter," Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email. [...] In the new study, Autti and his team used "magnons" to build their time crystal. Magnons are "quasiparticles," which emerge in the collective state of a group of atoms. In this case, the team of physicists took helium-3 -- a helium atom with two protons but only one neutron -- and cooled it to within a ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the helium-3 transformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms share a common quantum state and work in concert with each other. In that condensate, all the spins of the electrons in the helium-3 linked up and worked together, generating waves of magnetic energy, the magnons. These waves sloshed back and forth forever, making them a time crystal. Autti's team took two groups of magnons, each one operating as its own time crystal, and brought them close enough to influence each other. The combined system of magnons acted as one time crystal with two different states. Autti's team hopes that their experiments can clarify the relationship between quantum and classical physics. Their goal is to build time crystals that interact with their environments without the quantum states disintegrating, allowing the time crystal to keep running while it is used for something else. It wouldn't mean free energy -- the motion associated with a time crystal doesn't have kinetic energy in the usual sense, but it could be used for quantum computing. Having two states is important, because that is the basis for computation. In classical computer systems, the basic unit of information is a bit, which can take either a 0 or 1 state, while in quantum computing, each "qubit" can be in more than one place at the same time, allowing for much more computing power. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time since 2020, Ethereum mining has become unprofitable for many miners connected to a traditional energy grid. CryptoSlate reports: The price of Ethereum has dropped below $1,250 while energy prices are skyrocketing. The average cost of electricity in states such as New England, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island is over $0.22 per kWh. Using a single Nvidia 3090 overclocked to generate 130mh/s will cost miners around $1.85-$2.13 per day in electricity. The Ethereum reward for the same GPU is just (0.001625 ETH) $2.03 at today's price. Therefore any miner paying more than $0.245 for electricity is now paying more for electricity than the value of Ethereum being mined. At this point, it becomes more cost-effective to turn off the mining rig and buy Ethereum spot using the money that would otherwise be used on electricity. [...] There are plenty of alternative cryptocurrencies that can be mined with a GPU. However, the others are also down considerably. At $0.245kwh, Ergo yields -$0.06, RavenCoin -$0.58/day, Ethereum Classic -$0.66, and Firo -$0.70 using a single Nvidia 3090. These are the contenders for GPU hashrate when Ethereum finally goes to proof of stake. The issue is that an increase in miners on the network will dramatically increase the mining difficulty meaning that, to be remotely profitable, the price of the tokens will also have to increase considerably. For Ethereum to become profitable again, either the difficulty needs to decrease or the price needs to rise above $1,400. Alternatively, should energy prices drop below $0.24kwh to match average costs in other parts of the United States, Ethereum would also become profitable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese bank depositors planning a protest about their frozen funds saw their health code mysteriously turn red and were stopped from traveling to the site of a rally, confirming fears that China's vast COVID-tracking system could be weaponized as a powerful tool to stifle dissent. Motherboard reports: A red health code designated the would-be protesters as suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients, limiting their movement and access to public transportation. Their rallies in the central Henan province this week were thwarted as some were forced into quarantine and others detained by police. A 38-year-old software engineer was among hundreds who could not access their savings at four rural banks since mid-April. She had planned to travel from her home in Jiangxi province to Zhengzhou, Henan's capital city, to join a group petition this week to demand her money back. But her health code turned from green to red shortly after she bought a train ticket on Sunday. She said a nucleic test for COVID she took the night before came back negative and her hometown has not reported any infection recently. "Henan authorities targeted the health code of bank depositors in order to stop us from defending our rights," she told VICE World News, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid government reprisal. She eventually managed to reach Zhengzhou using her green health code on a different app, but was daunted by the sight of police officers out in force. More than 200 bank depositors from all over the country saw their health codes turned red over the past week, which effectively foiled a planned protest outside the Henan branch of China's banking regulator. Chinese activists and dissidents have reported similar experiences in the past, but the latest crackdown appears to be the most brazen example of how the authorities could exploit the supposed COVID-19 measure for political purposes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk's Boring Company has received unanimous approval to expand its system of tunnels beneath downtown Las Vegas. The Verge reports: The expansion will add stops at landmarks like the Stratosphere and Fremont Street, letting customers hop aboard a Tesla and travel from one part of the city to the next. The network of tunnels, called the Vegas Loop, is supposed to span 29 miles and have 51 stops when finished. But for now, only 1.7-mile tunnels are operational beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), turning what would be a 25-minute walk across the convention center into a two-minute ride. This most recent expansion gets The Boring Company closer to its goal of building a transportation system that spans the most popular destinations in Las Vegas. "Thanks to the entire team at the City of Last Vegas!" The Boring Company wrote on Twitter in response to the city's approval. "Great discussion today, and TBC is excited to build a safe, convenient, and awesome transportation system in the City." [...] According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Steve Hill, the president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, expects the tunnel system beneath the Strip to start serving customers in 2023. Hill says the portion connecting the LVCC and Resorts World should be operational by the end of this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Cisco advises owners of end-of-life Small Business RV routers to upgrade to newer models after disclosing a remote code execution vulnerability that will not be patched. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-20825 and has a CVSS severity rating of 9.8 out of 10.0. According to a Cisco security advisory, the flaw exists due to insufficient user input validation of incoming HTTP packets on the impacted devices. An attacker could exploit it by sending a specially crafted request to the web-based management interface, resulting in command execution with root-level privileges. The vulnerability impacts four Small Business RV Series models, namely the RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, the RV130 VPN Router, the RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router, and the RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. This vulnerability only affects devices with the web-based remote management interface enabled on WAN connections. [...] Cisco states that they will not be releasing a security update to address CVE-2022-20825 as the devices are no longer supported. Furthermore, there are no mitigations available other than to turn off remote management on the WAN interface, which should be done regardless for better overall security. Users are advised to apply the configuration changes until they migrate to Cisco Small Business RV132W, RV160, or RV160W Routers, which the vendor actively supports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave CEO Brendan Eich took aim at rival DuckDuckGo on Wednesday by challenging the web search engine's efforts to brush off revelations that its Android, iOS, and macOS browsers gave, to a degree, Microsoft Bing and LinkedIn trackers a pass versus other trackers. The Register reports: Eich drew attention to one of DuckDuckGo's defenses for exempting Microsoft's Bing and LinkedIn domains, a condition of its search contract with Microsoft: that its browsers blocked third-party cookies anyway. "For non-search tracker blocking (e.g. in our browser), we block most third-party trackers," explained DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg last month. "Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon." However, Eich argues this is disingenuous because DuckDuckGo also includes exceptions that allow Microsoft trackers to circumvent third-party cookie blocking via appended URL parameters. "Trackers try to get around cookie blocking by appending identifiers to URL query parameters, to ID you across sites," he explained. DuckDuckGo is aware of this, Eich said, because its browser prevents Google, Facebook, and others from appending identifiers to URLs in order to bypass third-party cookie blocking. "[DuckDuckGo] removes Google's 'gclid' and Facebook's 'fbclid'," Eich said. "Test it yourself by visiting https://example.org/?fbclid=sample in [DuckDuckGo]'s macOS browser. The 'fbclid' value is removed." "However, [DuckDuckGo] does not apply this protection to Microsoft's 'msclkid' query parameter," Eich continued. "[Microsoft's] documentation specifies that 'msclkid' exists to circumvent third-party cookie protections in browsers (including in Safari's browser engine used by DDG on Apple OSes)." Eich concluded by arguing that privacy-focused brands need to prioritize privacy. "Brave categorically does not and will not harm user privacy to satisfy partners," he said. A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo characterized Eich's conclusion as misleading. "What Brendan seems to be referring to here is our ad clicks only, which is protected in our agreement with Microsoft as strictly non-profiling (private)," a company spokesperson told The Register in an email. "That is these ads are privacy protected and how he's framed it is ultimately misleading. Brendan, of course, kept the fact that our ads are private out and there is really nothing new here given everything has already been disclosed." In other words, allowing Bing to append its identifier to URLs enables Bing advertisers to tell whether their ad produced a click (a conversion), but not to target DuckDuckGo browser users based on behavior or identity. DuckDuckGo's spokesperson pointed to Weinberg's attempt to address the controversy on Reddit and argued that DuckDuckGo provides very strong privacy protections. "This is talking about link tracking which no major browser protects against (see https://privacytests.org/), however we've started protecting against link tracking, and started with the primary offenders (Google and Facebook)," DuckDuckGo's spokesperson said. "To note, we are planning on expanding this to more companies, including Twitter, Microsoft, and more. We are not restricted from this and will be doing so."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft updated the Microsoft Store policies yesterday to prohibit publishers from charging fees for software that is open source or generally available for free. They're also no longer allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products. gHacks reports: If you have been to the Microsoft Store in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that it is home to more and more open source and free products. While that would be a good thing if the original developer would have uploaded the apps and games to the store, it is not, because the uploads have been made by third-parties. Even worse is the fact that many of these programs are not freely available, but available as paid applications. In other words: Microsoft customers have to pay money to buy a Store version of an app that is freely available elsewhere. Sometimes, free and paid versions exist side by side in the Store. Having to pay for a free application is bad enough, but this is not the only issue that users may experience when they make the purchase. Updates may be of concern as well, as the copycat programs may not be updated as often or as quickly as the source applications. Open source and free products may not be sold anymore on the Microsoft Store, if generally available for free, and publishers are not allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products anymore. The developers of open source and free applications may charge for their products on the Microsoft Store, the developer of Paint.net does that, for example. If Microsoft enforces the policies, numerous applications will be removed from the Store. Developers could report applications to Microsoft before, but the new policies give Microsoft control over application listings and submissions directly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The memory of "Batterygate" continues to be a thorn in Apple's side. In case you need a reminder, "Batterygate" refers to a 2016/17 scandal where Apple added an undocumented battery throttling capabilities to iOS 10.2.1 designed to slow the performance of the iPhone if the battery was deemed to be worn. It also came with unexpected side effects, causing handsets to reboot in cold weather or when the battery's charge level was low. The feature was initially rolled out to iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE and later expanded to include the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models. This latest UK-based multimillion-pound legal claim has been launched by Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights campaigner, and alleges that Apple deliberately misled users, and rather than roll out a battery recall or replacement program; the company instead pushed out this feature to cover up the fact that older iPhone batteries were not able to cope with the new power demands put on them. Apple did eventually roll out a $29 battery replacement program, a program that saw the company carry out 11 million battery replacements in 2018, compared to the 1 to 2 million that would normally be carried out in a year. This resulted in Apple issuing a profit warning in January 2019, the company's first since 2002. If Apple loses, the company could be forced to pay damages of more than $950m to the 25 million people who purchased affected iPhones. Following the US settlement in March 2020, Apple agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the same issue, paying out $25 per iPhone, with the total capped at $310m. "We have never -- and would never -- do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," Apple said in a statement on Thursday. "Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nepal is preparing to move its Everest base camp because global warming and human activity are making it unsafe. From a report: The camp, used by up to 1,500 people in the spring climbing season, is situated on the rapidly thinning Khumbu glacier. A new site is to be found at a lower altitude, where there is no year-round ice, an official told the BBC. Researchers say melt-water destabilises the glacier, and climbers say crevasses are increasingly appearing at base camp while they sleep. "We are now preparing for the relocation and we will soon begin consultation with all stakeholders," Taranath Adhikari, director general of Nepal's tourism department, told the BBC. "It is basically about adapting to the changes we are seeing at the base camp and it has become essential for the sustainability of the mountaineering business itself." The camp currently sits at an altitude of 5,364m. The new one will be 200m to 400m lower, Mr Adhikari said. The plans follow the recommendations of a committee formed by Nepal's government to facilitate and monitor mountaineering in the Everest region. The Khumbu glacier, like many other glaciers in the Himalayas, is rapidly melting and thinning in the wake of global warming, scientists have found. A study by researchers from Leeds University in 2018 showed that the segment close to base camp was thinning at a rate of 1m per year. Most of the glacier is covered by rocky debris, but there are also areas of exposed ice, called ice cliffs, and it is the melting of the ice cliffs that most destabilises the glacier, one of the researchers, Scott Watson, told the BBC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past year, large-scale robberies have swept through stores like Louis Vuitton in San Francisco's Union Square and a nearby Nordstrom, which was robbed by 80 people. Law enforcement and retailers have warned the public that this isn't traditional shoplifting. Rather, what they're seeing is theft organized by criminal networks. And there's a reason it's on the rise. From a report: "What fuels this as an enterprise is the ease of reselling stolen merchandise on online marketplaces," said Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who convened a national task force of state attorneys to make it easier to investigate across state lines. "It's no longer the age where it's done at flea markets or in the alley or in parking lots." Retailers say a total of $68.9 billion of products were stolen in 2019. In 2020, three-quarters said they saw an increase in organized crime and more than half reported cargo theft. Some big chains blame organized theft for recent store closures or for their decisions to limit hours. For the U.S. Government's Homeland Security Investigations unit, organized retail crime probes are on the rise. Arrests and indictments increased last year from 2020, along with the value of stolen goods that was seized. While data is imprecise about the perpetrators, there's growing consensus that an entirely different group should be held accountable: e-commerce sites. Amazon, eBay and Facebook are the places where these stolen goods are being sold, and critics say they're not doing enough to put an end to the racket. The companies disagree.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 100 million Americans are being warned to stay indoors if possible as high temperatures and humidity settle in over states stretching through parts of the Gulf coast to the Great Lakes and east to the Carolinas. From a report: The National Weather Service Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said on Monday 107.5 million people will be affected by combination of heat advisories, excessive heat warnings and excessive heat watches through Wednesday. The heatwave, which set several high temperature records in the west, the south-west and into Denver during the weekend, moved east into parts of the Gulf coast and the midwest on Monday and will expand to the Great Lakes and east to the Carolinas, the National Weather Service said. St Louis, Memphis, Minneapolis and Tulsa are among several cities under excessive heat warnings, with temperatures forecast to reach about 100F (38C), accompanied by high humidity that could make conditions feel close to 110F (43C). In Jackson, Mississippi, residents braved temperatures reaching 95F (35C) on Monday to complete their chores. Roger Britt, 67, ventured to a neighborhood garden in search of vegetables for dinner. Britt thinks the weather in Jackson has been more unpredictable in recent years. "It was so cold this past winter, so I know it's going to be a hot summer," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On the painful occasion of a mass shooting in the US, it has become customary for some politician or pundit to point an accusatory finger at video games. In late May, after two such attacks -- in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, it was Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These tragedies, he said in a speech at a National Rifle Association convention, were a mirror of our culture, and specifically, where our culture is failing. In addition to "broken families" and "declining church attendance," he said, "desensitizing the act of murder in video games" has contributed to the epidemic of mass shootings. What surprised me wasn't what Cruz said. It was how little traction it received in the mainstream media. A Fox News host asked his guest, Arizona State University criminal justice professor Bernard Zapor, whether violent video games' heightened realism contributed to an increase in mass homicides. Zapor dodged, instead citing the dissolution of community bonds. Most coverage of Cruz's comments (and Fox's interview) were in the service of invalidating the question itself: Decades of research have shown no connection between playing violent video games and committing violent acts. For more than 20 years years, the idea that video games like Doom somehow spurred these heinous shootings held sway in popular culture. In the '90s, "There was really no pushback," said Chris Ferguson, Stetson University's co-chair of psychology, who has studied violent video games' impact on gamers for about 20 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.K. government has published its final response to a data 'reform' consultation it kicked off last year, laying out how it intends to diverge from EU-based data protection rules. From a report: At first pass, it looks like it has stepped away from some of the more extreme 'reforms' it had been tossing around -- such as removing the right for human review of automated/AI decisions; which the consultation admits was opposed by the "vast majority" of respondents (ergo, the government writes that it "recognises the importance of appropriate safeguards, and will not pursue this proposal"; although it says it's still considering how to amend Article 22 of the U.K. GDPR -- so watch that space). That said, there are still a lot of potentially wide-ranging amendments being announced in this package -- such as a switch to an opt-out model for most online tracking; which the government is spinning as an end to cookie consent pop-ups but which raises plenty of wider questions -- and changes to the U.K.'s data protection regulator that could still sum to substantial differences for the rights of citizens, businesses and other types of data processors operating in the country. There's plenty more incoming from the U.K. government on the digital policy front too -- such as the sprawling Online Safety Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, and is set to dramatically ramp up compliance demands for all sorts of businesses. So it pays to keep the wider picture in mind as the government spins its pitch of post-Brexit, rebooted data laws that will give British business a "boost" by cutting EU 'red tape.'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailer's service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it. From a report: Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six "levers" Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted. "If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024," the research, which hasn't previously been reported, says. The report warned that Amazon's labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022. Amazon's internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like income levels and a household's proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities; the pool does not include the entire US adult population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of TikTok moving US users' data to Oracle, a new report says that ByteDance staff in China accessed US TikTok users' data between September 2021 and January 2022. From the report: For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform's parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users -- exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States. The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive's sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a "world-renowned, US-based security team" decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes. "Everything is seen in China," said a member of TikTok's Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a "Master Admin" who "has access to everything." (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.) The recordings range from small-group meetings with company leaders and consultants to policy all-hands presentations and are corroborated by screenshots and other documents, providing a vast amount of evidence to corroborate prior reports of China-based employees accessing US user data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For Jung Ki-young, a South Korean software engineer, Microsoft's decision to retire its Internet Explorer web browser marked the end of a quarter-century love-hate relationship with the technology. To commemorate its demise, he spent a month and 430,000 won ($330) designing and ordering a headstone with Explorer's "e" logo and the English epitaph: "He was a good tool to download other browsers." After the memorial went on show at a cafe run by his brother in the southern city of Gyeongju, a photo of the tombstone went viral.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok has completed migrating its U.S. users' information to servers at Oracle, in a move that could address U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular video app, the company confirmed to Reuters. From a report: The move comes nearly two years after a U.S. national security panel ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India has lifted business restrictions on Mastercard, nearly a year after imposing the ban, once again allowing the cards giant to add new customers in the South Asian market after it demonstrated "satisfactory compliance" with the local data storage rules, the central bank said on Thursday. From a report: In a series of moves last year, the Reserve Bank of India indefinitely barred Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club from issuing new debit, credit or prepaid cards to customers over noncompliance with local data storage rules. The business restrictions on American Express and Diners Club remain in place in the country, though they are permitted to continue to serve their existing customer base. The report adds: Unveiled in 2018, the local data-storage rules require payments firms to store all Indian transaction data within servers in the country. Visa, Mastercard and several other firms, as well as the U.S. government, previously requested New Delhi to reconsider its rules, which they argued were designed to allow the regulator "unfettered supervisory access."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The member countries of the World Trade Organization agreed Friday on a narrow measure aimed at boosting the supplies of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries, wrapping up a bitter fight over corporate patent rights governing critical medical products during a pandemic. WSJ: The compromise measure on intellectual property rights will make it easier for companies in developing nations such as South Africa to manufacture and export a patented Covid-19 vaccine -- under limited circumstances -- without a consent from the patent holder if they have the approval of their own governments. Meeting for the first time in nearly five years, trade ministers from more than 100 countries also agreed on measures to reduce fisheries subsidies to protect fish stocks and pledged to minimize export restrictions on food items amid shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. An existing ban on the collection of customs duty on digitally-transmitted products like music and movies was continued, to the relief of U.S. officials who had feared a possible change in the status quo would harm U.S. businesses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. today officially introduced its N2 (2nm class) manufacturing technology, its first node that will use gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFETs), at its 2022 TSMC Technology Symposium. From a report: The new fabrication process will offer a full-now performance and power benefits, but when it comes to transistor density, it will barely impress in 2025 when it comes online. Being an all-new process technology platform, TSMC's N2 brings in two essential innovations: nanosheet transistors (which is what TSMC calls its GAAFETs) and backside power rail that both serve the same goal of increasing performance-per-watt characteristics of the node. GAA nanosheet transistors feature channels surrounded by gates on all four sides, which reduces leakage; furthermore, their channels can be widened to increase drive current and boost performance or shrunken to minimize power consumption and cost. To feed these nanosheet transistors with enough power and now waste any of it, TSMC's N2 uses backside power delivery, which the foundry considers to be among the best solutions to fight resistances in the back-end-of-line (BEOL). Indeed, when it comes to performance and power consumption, TSMC's nanosheet-based N2 node can boast of a 10% to 15% higher performance at the same power and complexity as well as a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency and transistor count when compared to TSMC's N3E. However, the new node increases chip density by only around 1.1X compared to N3E. In general, TSMC's N3 does offer full-node performance increases and power consumption reductions. But density-wise, the new technology can hardly impress. For example, TSMC's N3E node offers a 1.3X chip density increase over N5, which is a substantial increase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

State securities regulators in Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, Texas and Washington are investigating crypto lender Celsius Network's decision this week to suspend customer redemptions, Joseph Rotunda, enforcement director at the Texas State Securities Board told Reuters on Thursday. From a report: Officials met and began investigating the matter first thing Monday morning, Rotunda said, adding he considered the probe to be a "priority." Celsius said that due to extreme market conditions, it was pausing withdrawals, swaps and transfers between accounts. The company said that doing so would put it "in a better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations." "I am very concerned that clients -- including many retail investors -- may need to immediately access their assets yet are unable to withdraw from their accounts. The inability to access their investment may result in significant financial consequences," he said. Alabama Securities Commission Director Joseph Borg also told Reuters that Alabama, Texas, New Jersey and Kentucky securities regulators were probing the matter. Celsius has been responsive to questions from the regulators, but that the investigation is in the initial stages, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A video producer claims he was fired after he complained that an obscure group based in the Sierra foothills dominated a business unit at Google. From a report: In a tiny town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a religious organization called the Fellowship of Friends has established an elaborate, 1,200-acre compound full of art and ornate architecture. More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship's base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google. Even in Google's freewheeling office culture, which encourages employees to speak their own minds and pursue their own projects, the Fellowship's presence in the business unit was unusual. As many as 12 Fellowship members and close relatives worked for the Google Developer Studio, or GDS, which produces videos showcasing the company's technologies, according to a lawsuit filed by Kevin Lloyd, a 34-year-old former Google video producer. Many others staffed company events, working registration desks, taking photographs, playing music, providing massages and serving wine. For these events, Google regularly bought wine from an Oregon House winery owned by a member of the Fellowship, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Lloyd claimed he was fired last year because he complained about the influence of the religious sect. His suit also names Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, the company that sent Mr. Lloyd to Google as a contractor. Most of the Google Developer Studio joined the team through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship. The suit, which Mr. Lloyd filed in August in California Superior Court, accuses Google and ASG of violating a California employment law that protects workers against discrimination. It is in the discovery stage. The New York Times corroborated many of the lawsuit's claims through interviews with eight current and former employees of the Google business unit and examinations of publicly available information and other documents. These included a membership roster for the Fellowship of Friends, Google spreadsheets detailing event budgets and photos taken at these events.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A retracted paper highlights chemistry's history of trying to avoid the expensive, toxic -- but necessary -- catalyst. From a report: It's hard to find a place on Earth untouched by palladium. The silvery-white metal is a key part of catalytic converters in the world's 1.4 billion cars, which spew specks of palladium into the atmosphere. Mining and other sources add to this pollution. As a result, traces of palladium show up in some of the most remote spots on Earth, from Antarctica to the top of the Greenland ice sheet. Palladium is also practically indispensable for making drugs. That's because catalysts with palladium atoms at their core have an unmatched ability to help stitch together carbon --carbon bonds. This kind of chemical reaction is key to building organic molecules, especially those used in medications. "Every pharmaceutical we produce at some point or another has a palladium-catalysed step in it," says Per-Ola Norrby, a pharmaceutical researcher at drug giant AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. Palladium-catalysed reactions are so valuable that, in 2010, their discoverers shared a Nobel prize. But despite its versatility, chemists are trying to move away from palladium. The metal is more expensive than gold, and molecules that contain palladium can also be extremely toxic to humans and wildlife. Chemical manufacturers have to separate out all traces of palladium from their products and carefully dispose of the hazardous waste, which adds extra expense. Thomas Fuchb, a medicinal chemist at the life-sciences company Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, gives the example of a reaction to make 3 kilograms of a drug molecule for which the ingredients cost US$250,000. The palladium catalyst alone adds $100,000; purifying it out of the product another $30,000. Finding less-toxic alternatives to the metal could help to reduce environmental harm from palladium waste and move the chemicals industry towards 'greener' reactions, says Tianning Diao, an organometallic chemist at New York University. Researchers hope to swap palladium for more common metals, such as iron and nickel, or invent metal-free catalysts that sidestep the issue altogether. Several times in the past two decades, researchers have reported finding palladium-free catalysts. But in what has become a recurring pattern for the field, each heralded discovery turned out to be a mistake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nolan Lawson, writing in a blogpost: Anyone who's worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it's big, it's complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to "fix" the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is... to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds. This might go on for several years. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs -- a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the "big diagram of boxes and arrows" problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch. As disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity ("The old code works fine!" "No wait, the old code is terrible!"), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. Will this cycle go on forever, though? I'm not so sure. Right now, the software industry has been in a nearly two-decade economic boom (with some fits and starts), but the one sure thing in economics is that booms eventually turn to busts. During the boom, software companies can keep hiring new headcount to manage their existing software (i.e. more engineers to understand more boxes and arrows), but if their labor force is forced to contract, then that same system may become unmaintainable. A rapid and permanent reduction in complexity may be the only long-term solution. One thing working in complexity's favor, though, is that engineers like complexity. Admit it: as much as we complain about other people's complexity, we love our own. We love sitting around and dreaming up new architectural diagrams that can comfortably sit inside our own heads -- it's only when these diagrams leave our heads, take shape in the real world, and outgrow the size of any one person's head that the problems begin. It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say "no" to new boxes and arrows. To say, "No, we won't solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven't imagined yet." Or to say, "Let's go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it." Or to just say, "Let's do less instead of more."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on several rounds of programs to upgrade internet speeds in rural areas over the past decade. Despite those efforts, many residents are still stuck with service that isn't fast enough to do video calls or stream movies -- speeds that most take for granted. From a report: Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs' design have left residents wanting. The Wall Street Journal analyzed 1.4 million largely rural census blocks that were included in a series of nationwide Federal Communications Commission broadband programs over the past decade. In the latest program, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, rolled out in 2020, internet service providers won rights to public funding in about 750,000 census blocks, covering every state except Alaska. The Journal's analysis found that more than half of those census blocks -- areas with a combined population of 5.3 million people -- had been fully or partially covered by at least one previous federal broadband program. Most U.S. households today have access to internet download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10 Mbps, according to government data. Although the FCC's programs have made progress, some rural Americans still can't get 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds -- the level of service that was the federal standard in 2011. The broadband saga around Heavener, Okla., illustrates some of the problems. Heavener, with a population of around 3,000, is surrounded by cattle pastures and forested hills. Today some buildings on the main streets have good broadband service, but the internet deteriorates outside town, residents say. Much of the area, in Le Flore County, was slated for upgrades under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2020 -- and some of those areas had already been part of prior programs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Arrows Capital failed to meet demands from lenders to stump up extra funds after its digital currency bets turned sour, tipping the prominent crypto hedge fund into a crisis that comes as a credit crunch grips the industry. Financial Times reports: The group's failure to meet margin calls this past weekend makes the group the latest victim of an acute fall in the prices of many tokens like bitcoin and ether that is rippling across the market. Singapore-based Three Arrows is among the biggest and most active players in the crypto industry with investments across lending and trading platforms. Lenders have sharply tightened up how much credit is on offer following tremors over the past month. Celsius, a major crypto financial services company, blocked withdrawals last week, while a pair of major tokens collapsed in May. US-based crypto lender BlockFi was among the groups that liquidated at least some of Three Arrows's positions, meaning it reduced its exposure by taking collateral the fund had put down to back its borrowing, according to people familiar with the matter. Three Arrows, which made a "strategic" investment in BlockFi in 2020, had borrowed bitcoin from the lender, the people said, but had been unable to meet a margin call. One of the people said the liquidation had occurred by mutual consent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European telecom regulator BEREC has updated its net neutrality guidelines to include a strict ban on zero-rating practices that exempt specific apps or categories of apps from data caps imposed by Internet service providers. From a report: The document published Tuesday provides guidance to national regulatory authorities on their "obligations to closely monitor and ensure compliance with the rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of Internet access services and related end-users' rights." BEREC stands for Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications. "Despite intense lobbying from big carriers and giant platforms, BEREC voted to clearly ban zero-rating offers that benefit select apps or categories of apps by exempting them from people's monthly data caps," Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote. "The ban applies whether the app pays to be included or not, closing a loophole in the draft guidelines." While Europe strengthens its net neutrality regime, the US hasn't had any federal net neutrality rules since they were removed under former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC won't be re-imposing net neutrality rules any time soon because it still has a 2-2 partisan deadlock, and President Biden's nomination of Gigi Sohn has languished in the Senate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto staking and yield generation platform Finblox has imposed a $1,500 monthly withdrawal limit and paused rewards in light of uncertainty surrounding crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which made a $3.6 million investment in the Hong Kong-based platform last December. From a report: According to a statement shared on Twitter, Finblox has made the changes as it evaluates the impact of Three Arrow Capital's reported issues. It was reported on Wednesday that Three Arrows Capital is facing possible insolvency after incurring at least $400 million in liquidations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents' secrets, and turn activists' computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets' computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them. Wired: More than a year ago, forensic analysts revealed that unidentified hackers fabricated evidence on the computers of at least two activists arrested in Pune, India, in 2018, both of whom have languished in jail and, along with 13 others, face terrorism charges. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne and nonprofits Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have since linked that evidence fabrication to a broader hacking operation that targeted hundreds of individuals over nearly a decade, using phishing emails to infect targeted computers with spyware, as well as smartphone hacking tools sold by the Israeli hacking contractor NSO Group. But only now have SentinelOne's researchers revealed ties between the hackers and a government entity: none other than the very same Indian police agency in the city of Pune that arrested multiple activists based on the fabricated evidence. "There's a provable connection between the individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence," says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at SentinelOne who, along with fellow researcher Tom Hegel, will present findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. "This is beyond ethically compromised. It is beyond callous. So we're trying to put as much data forward as we can in the hopes of helping these victims." SentinelOne's new findings that link the Pune City Police to the long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant, center on two particular targets of the campaign: Rona Wilson and Varvara Rao. Both men are activists and human rights defenders who were jailed in 2018 as part of a group called the Bhima Koregaon 16, named for the village where violence between Hindus and Dalits -- the group once known as "untouchables" -- broke out earlier that year. (One of those 16 defendants, 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, died in jail last year after contracting Covid-19. Rao, who is 81 years old and in poor health, has been released on medical bail, which expires next month. Of the other 14, only one has been granted bail.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has failed to convince a California federal judge to dismiss a privacy lawsuit that alleges the Alphabet Inc unit sells or gives personal information to third parties through its digital advertising system, without informing users. From a report: In a Monday opinion, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said Google account holders have sufficiently alleged most of their claims in the lawsuit over the company's "real-time bidding" process. A Google spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that privacy and transparency are "core" to its ad services. "We never sell people's personal information, we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories of information, and sensitive user data like health, race, or religion is not shared with our partners," the spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.