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A tracking tool installed on many hospitals' websites has been collecting patients' sensitive health information -- including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor's appointments -- and sending it to Facebook. From a report: The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor's appointment. The data is connected to an IP address -- an identifier that's like a computer's mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household -- "creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook. The Markup found 33 of Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in the country sending sensitive data to Facebook via the pixel. Data accurate as of June 15, 2022. On the website of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, for example, clicking the "Schedule Online" button on a doctor's page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor's name, and the search term we used to find her: "pregnancy termination." Clicking the "Schedule Online Now" button for a doctor on the website of Froedtert Hospital, in Wisconsin, prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor's name, and the condition we selected from a dropdown menu: "Alzheimer's."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, Reuters is reporting, citing five people familiar with the situation. From a report: The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) -- nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern -- and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said. VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology. Reuters spoke to executives at all three U.S. government-backed VPNs and two officials at a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing -- the Open Technology Fund (OTF) -- who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24. Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in U.S. funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Embedded and internet of things (IoT) devices are a growing category of computing, and with that growth has come expanded needs for security and manageability. One way to help secure embedded and IoT deployments is with a secured operating system, such as Canonical's Ubuntu Core. The Ubuntu Core provides an optimized version of the open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system for smaller device footprints, using an approach that puts applications into containers. On June 15, Ubuntu Core 22 became generally available, providing users with new capabilities to help accelerate performance and lock down security. Ubuntu Core 22 is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 Linux operating system, which is Canonical's flagship Linux distribution that's made available for cloud, server and desktop users. Rather than being a general purpose OS, Ubuntu Core makes use of the open-source Snap container technology that was originally developed by Canonical to run applications. With Snaps, an organization can configure which applications should run in a specific IoT or embedded device and lock down the applications for security. Snaps provide a cryptographically authenticated approach for application updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the Supreme Court's expected decision to overturn Roe v. Wade looms over Washington, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has announced sweeping legislation to ban the sale of location and health data. From a report: Warren's Health and Location Protection Act -- cosponsored by a slate of Democratic senators, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) -- would bar "data brokers from selling or transferring location data and health data." There are few limitations, making the bill one of the most strident proposals aimed at regulating data sales. "Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere by selling their most private information," Warren said in a statement on Wednesday. "With this extremist Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and states seeking to criminalize essential health care, it is more crucial than ever for Congress to protect consumers' sensitive data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Health Organization's top official in Europe on Wednesday called for urgent action by the authorities and civic groups to control fast-rising cases of monkeypox that he said posed a real risk to public health. From a report: Europe has emerged as the epicenter of an outbreak of monkeypox, with more than 1,500 cases identified in 25 European countries, which account for 85 percent of global cases, the official, Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.'s director of its European region, said at a news conference. The W.H.O. will convene its emergency committee in Geneva next week, Dr. Kluge added, to determine if the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, a formal declaration that calls for a coordinated response between countries. "The magnitude of this outbreak poses a real risk," Dr. Kluge said. "The longer the virus circulates, the more it will extend its reach, and the stronger the disease's foothold will get in nonendemic countries." Monkeypox is a viral infection endemic in West Africa, but it has now spread to 39 countries, including 32 that have no previous experience of it, the W.H.O. director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told reporters on Tuesday. Countries outside Africa and Europe that have identified cases of monkeypox include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many commercials continue to play on ad-supported streaming services after viewers turn off their television, new research shows, a problem that is causing an estimated waste of more than $1 billion a year for brands. From a report: The findings come as an ever-growing share of ad dollars is shifting from traditional TV to streaming platforms, a trend that is likely to accelerate now that industry giants Netflix and Walt Disney's Disney+ have embraced the idea of offering an ad-supported version of their services. Some 17% of ads shown on televisions connected through a streaming device -- including streaming boxes, dongles, sticks and gaming consoles -- are playing while the TV is off, according to a study by WPP's ad-buying giant GroupM and ad-measurement firm iSpot.tv. That is because when a TV set is turned off, it doesn't always send a signal to the streaming device connected to the TV through its HDMI port, GroupM said. As a result, the streaming device will continue playing the show and its ads unless users had exited or paused the streaming app they were watching before turning off their TV. Due to the nature of the problem, using a smart TV -- on which streaming apps are loaded -- makes it far less likely that ads would be shown while the TV is off, since in this instance the television and streaming device are just a single piece of hardware. GroupM said it found "virtually no incidence" of the issue on smart TV apps. The study, which included smart TVs and some hooked up with a streaming device, found that on average, between 8% and 10% of all streaming ads were shown while the TV was off.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keeping people out of rip currents is more about reading human behavior than reading warning signs. From a report: Worldwide, rips cause hundreds of drownings and necessitate tens of thousands of rescues every year. In Australia, where 85 percent of the population lives within an hour's drive of the coast, rips cause more fatalities than floods, cyclones, and shark attacks combined. In 1938, one of the country's most popular beaches, Sydney's Bondi Beach, was the site of an infamous rip-current tragedy: within minutes, roughly 200 swimmers were swept away by a rip, leaving 35 people unconscious and five dead. More often, however, rips take one life at a time, garnering little media attention. For many casual beach visitors, the toll of rip currents goes unnoticed. [...] Although almost three-quarters of beach users said they knew what a rip current is, only 54 percent could correctly define it. In addition, only half of the people she surveyed remembered seeing either the warning signs or the colored flags denoting surf conditions that were posted on or near the main access point to each beach. An even smaller percentage could recall what color the flags had been -- green for calm, yellow for moderate, or red for dangerous conditions. "I was genuinely shocked," Locknick says. [...] Part of the challenge of preventing rip-related drownings stems from the lack of a simple method to escape them. Rip currents form when waves pile water near the shoreline. The water then gushes back out to sea, taking the path of least resistance. It might flow along channels carved in between sandbars or next to solid structures, such as jetties or rocky headlands. These types of rips can stick around year after year. Others are more erratic, creating fleeting bursts of seaward-flowing water on smooth, open beaches. People often mislabel rip currents as undertows or rip tides. Rip currents are not caused by tides, however, and undertows are a different, weaker current, formed when water pushed onto the beach moves back offshore along the seabed. Some telltale signs of a rip include a streak of churned-up, sandy water or a dark, flat gap between breaking waves. It's not surprising that rip currents are often misunderstood by the public because, for decades, beach-safety experts also had an oversimplified perception of their mechanics. In some of the earliest research on rips in the mid-20th century, American scientists watched sticks, pieces of kelp, and volleyballs float out to sea and described lanes of flowing water extending more than 300 meters offshore. This work formed the basis for the popular view of rip currents as jets flowing perpendicular to the beach, shooting out past the surf. To escape the river of current, experts recommended that bathers swim parallel to the beach -- a message once broadcast through education campaigns and warning signs in the United States and Australia. As it turns out, that approach may not always work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and other companies contain a newly discovered weakness that remote attackers can exploit to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data traveling through the hardware, researchers said on Tuesday. From a report: Hardware manufacturers have long known that hackers can extract secret cryptographic data from a chip by measuring the power it consumes while processing those values. Fortunately, the means for exploiting power-analysis attacks against microprocessors is limited because the threat actor has few viable ways to remotely measure power consumption while processing the secret material. Now, a team of researchers has figured out how to turn power-analysis attacks into a different class of side-channel exploit that's considerably less demanding. The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) -- a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU -- allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what's required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely. The researchers have dubbed their attack Hertzbleed because it uses the insights into DVFS to expose -- or bleed out -- data that's expected to remain private. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-24436 for Intel chips and CVE-2022-23823 for AMD CPUs. The researchers have already shown how the exploit technique they developed can be used to extract an encryption key from a server running SIKE, a cryptographic algorithm used to establish a secret key between two parties over an otherwise insecure communications channel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Wednesday, its biggest move since 1994, as the central bank ramps up its efforts to tackle the fastest inflation in four decades. From a report: The big rate increase, which markets had expected, underlined that Fed officials are serious about crushing price increases even if it comes at a cost to the economy. Officials predicted that the unemployment rate will increase to 3.7 percent this year and to 4.1 percent by 2024, and that growth will slow notably as policymakers push borrowing costs sharply higher and choke off economic demand. The Fed's policy rate is now set in a range between 1.50 to 1.75. Policymakers penciled in interest rates hitting 3.4 percent by the end of 2022 -- a level that would be the highest since 2008 -- and officials saw their policy rate peaking at 3.8 percent at the end of 2023. Those figures are significantly higher than previous estimates, which showed rates topping out at 2.8 percent next year. Fed officials newly expected to be cutting rates in 2024, which could be a sign that they think the economy will weaken so much that they will need to reorient their policy approach. The major takeaway from the Fed's economic forecasts, which it released for the first time since March, was that officials have become more pessimistic about their chances of letting the economy down gently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't count Bill Gates among the fans of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. From a report: Those digital asset trends are "100% based on greater fool theory," the Microsoft co-founder said Tuesday at a TechCrunch conference, referencing the notion that investors can make money on worthless or overvalued assets as long as people are willing to bid them higher. Gates added that he's "not long or short" crypto. And he mocked Bored Apes NFTs, joking that "expensive digital images of monkeys" will "improve the world immensely." Instead, Gates said he prefers old fashioned investing. "I'm used to asset classes, like a farm where they have output, or like a company where they make products," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday won its fight against a 997 million euro ($1.05 billion) fine imposed by EU antitrust regulators four years ago, dealing a major setback to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager's crackdown on Big Tech. From a report: The European Commission in its 2018 decision said Qualcomm paid billions of dollars to Apple from 2011 to 2016 to use only its chips in all its iPhones and iPads in order to block out rivals such as Intel. Qualcomm's fine is one of several imposed by Vestager on companies ranging from Alphabet unit Google to banks and truckmakers over anti-competitive practices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight. Then came a long hangover. From a report: Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. "It's a bit disappointing," allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. "I thought we would discover supersymmetry," the leading extension of the standard model. It's too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena. Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. "If they don't find anything, this field is dead," says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. "It's going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's digital minister reiterated the government's ambition to make Britain a global crypto hub while sounding a cautious note about the potential criminal uses of digital assets. From a report: "We do intend the United Kingdom and London to be crypto centers," Chris Philp said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Wednesday. "But of course we've got to do that in a way that protects the public and in particular pays attention to issues concerning for example money laundering, and making sure that crypto is not used as a way to circumvent things like sanctions." The UK Treasury in April announced plans to make the country a global crypto hub, soothing an industry that had sparred with the financial regulator over what it considered to be overly strict guardrails. Retail investors in the UK are barred from using crypto derivatives, and authorities are imposing tougher rules on marketing. [...] "The Treasury are working closely with the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority to make sure that balance is struck in the right way," said Philp.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an effort to present itself as a viable competitor to the reigning short-form video platform TikTok, YouTube announced today its rival service YouTube Shorts is now being watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month, less than two years after its launch. By comparison, TikTok announced 1 billion monthly users in September 2021. From a report: Though it hasn't announced updated figures since, TikTok was forecast to hit the 1.5 billion month user figure sometime this year. Related to its new milestone, YouTube also promoted Shorts' ability to drive viewers to creators' long-form video channels as a byproduct of its investments in Shorts. It's referring to the trend as "the rise of the multiformat creator" but, in reality, it seems to be more an admission that YouTube still sees more value in its longer-form content. The company, in its announcement, positioned its video platform as one that better reflects the reality of today's viewer, who engages with video at different times and places throughout the day. In some cases, users will want to quickly scroll through shorter content -- such as when killing time while out and about. At other times, they may be able to watch for longer periods and will turn to traditional YouTube videos to do so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Block reports: The future of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital hangs in the balance as the firm faces potential insolvency after being liquidated by its lenders. According to well-placed sources, the investment firm -- which counts the likes of options exchange Deribit and financial services firm BlockFi among its venture bets -- is in the process of figuring out how to repay lenders and other counter-parties after it was liquidated by top tier lending firms in the space. Sources declined to share the names of those firms on the record for fear of reprisal, but three people said the liquidation totaled at least $400 million. They added that the firm has maintained limited contact with its counter-parties since being liquidated. The liquidation event is just one of several setbacks by the firm, which has backed projects like Avalanche, Polkadot, and Ether which are all down 57%, 38.8%, and 47% over the last 30 days respectively. The fund sustained significant losses during the collapse of the Terra ecosystem last month, after investing heavily in its native token LUNA. The firm, which reportedly managed approximately $10 billion at market peak by some estimates, is led by former classmates Su Zhu and Kyle Davies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Saul Griffith, the author of "Electrify" and the founder and chief scientist of Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia and Otherlab, writes in a column: I recently moved back here to my home country partly because I believe Australians can show the world how much money households can save through simple climate solutions like rooftop solar. How is it that Australia, a country that historically has been a coal-burning climate pariah, is leading the world on solar? The four-bedroom house we recently bought provides a hint: It came with two rooftop solar systems of 11 kilowatts of combined capacity and a battery with 16 kilowatt-hours of storage. This system should produce more than enough to power my family's home, one electric car and both of our electric bikes with some left over to send back to the grid. Solar is now so prevalent in Australia that over a quarter of households here have rooftop panels, compared with roughly 2.5 percent of American households. Australia pays its solar installers salaries comparable to those in the United States, and it buys most of its solar modules from China at 25 cents per watt, just a little less than what American buyers pay. Our houses are mostly detached single-family, like America, too. But unlike in the United States, it's easy to get permits and install rooftop solar in Australia. Australia's rooftop solar success is a function partly of luck, partly of design. In the early 1990s, regulators considered rooftop solar a hobby, and no one stood in the way of efforts to make the rules favorable to small-scale solar. Looking for a good headline to varnish over Australia's refusal to agree to the same greenhouse emissions reductions as the rest of the world in the 1997 Kyoto climate agreement, the federal government embraced renewable energy policies that set the stage for rooftop solar. Households were given rebates for the upfront costs, and were paid to send excess electricity back to the grid. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard doubled the rebate, a move that is credited with kick-starting a solar installation boom. Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution to high energy costs? The failures are mostly regulatory: local building codes and zoning laws, state rules that govern the grid connection and liability issues. Permitting can take as little as a day in Australia and is done over the web; in the United States permitting and connecting to the grid can take as long as six months. Many customers just give up. America also generally requires a metal conduit around the wiring; in Australia, the connections can be less expensive soft cables, similar to extension cords. The cost of rooftop solar in the United States depends on many things, including the latitude, tree cover and federal and state incentives. Installation costs can also vary quite a bit, depending on what laborers charge and the local permitting and inspection policies. My friend Andrew Birch, co-founder of the solar and solar software companies OpenSolar in Sydney and Sungevity in the United States, wrote an excellent critique of American rooftop solar and its high price in 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has been caught cheating by designing its TVs to recognize and react to test patterns used by reviewers. The company promises to provide software updates to address the situation. From a report: Reviewers, calibrators and certification bodies typically use a 10% window for HDR testing, which simply means that it takes up 10% of the screen. In this window multiple steps from black to white as well as a set of colors are measured. Samsung has designed its TVs to recognize this and other commonly used window sizes, after which the TV adjusts its picture output to make measurements appear more accurate than the picture really is. When using a non-standard window such as 9% (everything else equal), the cheating algorithm can be bypassed so the TV reveals its true colors. This is deliberate cheating, an orchestrated effort to mislead reviewers. Vincent Teoh of HDTVTest first identified and documented the issue on Samsung's S95B QD-OLED TV. FlatpanelsHD has since identified and documented the issue on Samsung's QN95B 'Neo QLED' LCD TV where it gets even worse. QN95B not only changes its color and luminance tracking during measurements to appear very accurate, it also boosts peak brightness momentarily by up to 80%, from approx. 1300 nits to 2300 nits. This is possible because the power supply can send short bursts into the miniLED backlight -- these cannot be sustained without damaging the panel. In our QN95B review we found no evidence of the TV surpassing 1300 nits with real content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. From a report: The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye -- the world's largest radio telescope -- differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley. It isn't clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US defence contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group's surveillance technology, in a possible deal that would give an American company control over one of the world's most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools. From a report: Multiple sources confirmed that discussions were centred on a sale of the Israeli company's core technology â" or code â" as well as a possible transfer of NSO personnel to L3Harris. But any agreement still faces significant hurdles, including requiring the blessing of the US and Israeli governments, which have not yet given the green light to a deal. In a statement, a senior White House official said: "Such a transaction, if it were to take place, raises serious counterintelligence and security concerns for the US government." If agreed, the deal would mark an astounding turnaround for NSO, less than a year after the Biden administration placed the company on a US blacklist and accused it of acting "contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a review: In its early pre-pandemic days, Keychron made a name for itself with its series of affordable mechanical keyboards -- including a few low-profile ones that remain a rarity to this day. Those boards didn't necessarily appeal to enthusiasts, but were more than good enough for most mainstream users who wanted a different kind of keyboard. Last year, Keychron upped the ante with the launch of the Q1, an enthusiast-level, fully customizable hotswap keyboard with a 75% layout that had more than a few similarities to the heavily hyped GMMK Pro. Since then, Keychron has expanded this series with the 65% Q2, which received pretty rave reviews at the time and now the Q3. The QMK-compatible Q3 clearly follows in the footsteps of the Q1 and Q2. It uses the same double-gasket design that should make for a relatively bouncy typing experience (though in my experience, there's less bounce than I would've expected), and the overall design is pretty much the same, with the exception that it's a tenkeyless (TKL), so you get a full keyboard with standalone arrow keys and a full row of function keys, but without the numpad. The body is made from aluminum and the whole unit weighs in at a hefty 4.5 pounds. In part, that's because Keychron opted for a steel plate here. You can opt to get a bare-bones version where you supply your own switches and keycaps for $154 (or $164 if you want to get the optional volume knob), or a fully assembled version with keycaps and your choice of Gateron Pro Red, Blue or Brown switches for $174 (or $184 with knob). For the extra $20, I think getting the assembled version is a no-brainer, given that the keycaps and switches will cost you significantly more and even if you want to replace them, you could always reuse them in another project (because who only has one keyboard, right?).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The open source Thunderbird email client has a long and storied history, but until now, that history has been limited to the desktop. That's about to change, according to a post on the Thunderbird blog. Thunderbird will be coming to Android through the popular open source mobile email client K-9 Mail. From a report: According to Thunderbird's Jason Evangelho, the Thunderbird team has acquired the source code and naming rights to K-9 Mail. K-9 Mail project maintainer Christian Ketterer (who goes by "cketti" in the OSS community) will join the Thunderbird team, and over time, K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android. Thunderbird's team will invest finance and development time in K-9 to add several features and quality-of-life enhancements before that happens, though.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's parliament has passed legislation making "online insults" punishable by imprisonment amid rising public concern over cyberbullying sparked by the suicide of a reality television star who had faced social media abuse. From a report: Under the amendment to the country's penal code -- set to take effect later this summer -- offenders convicted of online insults can be jailed for up to one year, or fined 300,000 yen (about $2,200). It's a significant increase from the existing punishments of detention for fewer than 30 days and a fine of up to 10,000 yen ($75). The bill proved controversial in the country, with opponents arguing it could impede free speech and criticism of those in power. However, supporters said the tougher legislation was needed to crack down on cyberbullying and online harassment. It was only passed after a provision was added, ordering the law be re-examined three years after it goes into effect to gauge its impact on freedom of expression. Under Japan's penal code, insults are defined as publicly demeaning someone's social standing without referring to specific facts about them or a specific action, according to a spokesperson from the Ministry of Justice. The crime is different to defamation, defined as publicly demeaning someone while pointing to specific facts. Both are punishable under the law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe has started testing a free-to-use version of Photoshop on the web and plans to open the service up to everyone as a way to introduce more users to the app. From a report: The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as "freemium" and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop's core functions. "We want to make [Photoshop] more accessible and easier for more people to try it out and experience the product," says Maria Yap, Adobe's VP of digital imaging.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NordVPN, one of the most popular VPN providers, is the latest to confirm that it will be removing its servers in India ahead of the nation enacting new strict guidelines later this month. From a report: The Lithuania-based firm, which counts General Catalyst and Novator among its backers and is valued at $1.6 billion, said on Tuesday that it doesn't maintain any logs of its customers' data, strings of information that New Delhi will soon require VPN providers to share. "Moreover, we are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers. Therefore, we are no longer able to keep servers in India," a company spokesperson said. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the body appointed by the government to protect India's information infrastructure, unveiled cybersecurity guidelines in late April that will require "virtual private server (VPS) providers, cloud service providers, VPN service providers, virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers, custodian wallet providers and government organisations" to store customers' names, email addresses, IP addresses, know-your-customer records and financial transactions for a period of five years. The new rules go into effect June 27. NordVPN's decision follows similar directions taken by ExpressVPN and SurfShark, both of which have removed servers in the country. It's unclear how popular VPN services are in India, but on their sites the aforementioned firms say they are used by millions of users worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla: Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows and Mac. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site. Whether it's applying for a student loan, seeking treatment or advice through a health site, or browsing an online dating app, massive amounts of your personal information is online -- and this data is leaking all over the web. The hyper-specific-to-you ads you so often see online are made possible by cookies that are used to track your behavior across sites and build an extremely sophisticated profile of who you are. Recent stories (including an excellent Last Week Tonight episode) have shown how robust, yet under-the-radar, the data selling economy is and how easy it is for anyone to buy your data, combine it with more data about you and use it for a variety of purposes, even beyond advertising. It's an alarming reality -- the possibility that your every move online is being watched, tracked and shared -- and one that's antithetical to the open web we at Mozilla have strived to build. That's why we developed Total Cookie Protection to help keep you safe online. Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate "cookie jar" for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don't belong to them and find out what the other websites' cookies know about you -- giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you. This approach strikes the balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies -- in particular the ability to track you -- and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics). With Total Cookie Protection in Firefox, people can enjoy better privacy and have the great browsing experience they've come to expect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liza Vertinsky, Professor of Law, University of Maryland, and Yaniv Heled, Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State University, writing for The Conversation: Every so often stories of genetic theft, or extreme precautions taken to avoid it, make headline news. So it was with a picture of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting at opposite ends of a very long table after Macron declined to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. Many speculated that Macron refused due to security concerns that the Russians would take and use his DNA for nefarious purposes. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly refused to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. While these concerns may seem relatively new, pop star celebrity Madonna has been raising alarm bells about the potential for nonconsensual, surreptitious collection and testing of DNA for over a decade. She has hired cleaning crews to sterilize her dressing rooms after concerts and requires her own new toilet seats at each stop of her tours. At first, Madonna was ridiculed for having DNA paranoia. But as more advanced, faster and cheaper genetic technologies have reached the consumer realm, these concerns seem not only reasonable, but justified. We are law professors who study how emerging technologies like genetic sequencing are regulated. We believe that growing public interest in genetics has increased the likelihood that genetic paparazzi with DNA collection kits may soon become as ubiquitous as ones with cameras. While courts have for the most part managed to evade dealing with the complexities of surreptitious DNA collection and testing of public figures, they won't be able to avoid dealing with it for much longer. And when they do, they are going to run squarely into the limitations of existing legal frameworks when it comes to genetics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase is laying off nearly a fifth of its workforce amid a collapse in its stock and crypto prices. From a report: The cryptocurrency exchange will cut 18% of full-time jobs, according to an email sent to employees Tuesday morning. Coinbase has roughly 5,000 full-time workers, translating to a headcount reduction of around 1,100 people. Shares of Coinbase are down about 7% premarket. CEO Brian Armstrong pointed to a possible recession, and a need to manage Coinbase's burn rate and increase efficiency. He also said the company grew "too quickly" during a bull market. "We appear to be entering a recession after a 10+ year economic boom. A recession could lead to another crypto winter, and could last for an extended period," Armstrong said, adding that past crypto winters have resulted in a significant decline in trading activity. "While it's hard to predict the economy or the markets, we always plan for the worst so we can operate the business through any environment." Coinbase had initially said it was pausing hiring. Two weeks later, the crypto giant announced that it was extending the freeze for the "foreseeable future." Earlier this year, Coinbase said it planned to add 2,000 jobs across product, engineering and design. Further reading: Coinbase Leaders Net $1.2 Billion in Share Sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Reserve is likely to discuss making its biggest interest rate increase since 1994 at its meeting this week, as a range of new data suggest that inflation is coming in hotter and proving more stubborn than policymakers had hoped. From a report: Central bankers have been promising to be nimble as they fight inflation -- a stance that will probably prompt them to at least discuss whether to raise interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Wednesday, when officials are set to release both their decision and a fresh set of economic projections. The Fed raised rates by half a percentage point in May and officials had suggested for weeks that a similar increase would be warranted at their meetings in June and July if data evolved as expected. But costs have not behaved as anticipated. Instead, a report last week showed that inflation re-accelerated in May and is running at the fastest pace since 1981. Two separate measures of inflation expectations, one out last week and another released Monday, showed that consumers were beginning to anticipate notably faster price increases. That is sure to increase the sense of unease at the Fed, which is trying to quash high inflation before it changes behavior and becomes a more permanent feature of the economic backdrop. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, and other officials have repeatedly stressed the need to bring prices back down to a stable level to ensure a healthy economy. The string of worrying news has caused economists and investors alike to bet that the central bank will begin to raise interest rates at a more rapid clip to signal that it recognizes the problem and is making fighting inflation a priority.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigeria has announced plans to regulate internet companies like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (all owned by Meta), Twitter, Google and TikTok in a draft shared by the country's internet regulator. From a report: This information, released by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) on Monday, can be viewed on its website and Twitter page. Just six months ago, Nigeria lifted the ban on Twitter, six months after it first declared a crackdown on the social media giant in the country. According to a memo written by Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, the director-general of NITDA to Nigeria's president, Muhammadu Buhari, at the time, one of the three conditions Twitter agreed to -- for its reinstatement -- was setting up "a legal entity in Nigeria during the first quarter of 2022." The others included paying taxes locally and cooperating with the Nigerian government to regulate content and harmful tweets. We're halfway through the year, and it appears that none of the conditions has been met yet. But that hasn't stopped the government from forging ahead to extend these requirements to other internet companies: Meta-owned platforms, Twitter and Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed survey of the Milky Way, revealing thousands of "starquakes" and stellar DNA, and helping to identify the most habitable corners of our home galaxy. From a report: The observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia probe cover almost two billion stars -- about 1% of the total number in the galaxy -- and are allowing astronomers to reconstruct our home galaxy's structure and find out how it has evolved over billions of years. Previous surveys by Gaia, a robotic spacecraft launched in 2013, have pinpointed the motion of the stars in our home galaxy in exquisite detail. By rewinding these movements astronomers can model how our galaxy has morphed over time. The latest observations add details of chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses and ages based on spectroscopy, where starlight is split into different wavelengths. These measurements unexpectedly revealed thousands of starquakes, cataclysmic tsunami-like events on the surface of stars. "Starquakes teach us a lot about stars -- notably, their internal workings," said Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration. "Gaia is opening a goldmine for asteroseismology of massive stars." Dr George Seabroke, senior research associate at Mullard space science laboratory at University College London, said: "If you can see these stars changing in brightness halfway across the Milky Way, if you were anywhere near them, it would be like the sun changing shape in front of your eyes." Gaia is fitted with a 1bn pixel camera -- the largest ever in space -- complete with more than 100 electronic detectors. The latest dataset represents the largest chemical map of the galaxy to date, cataloguing the composition of six million stars, ten times the number measured in previous ground-based catalogues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PlayStation's revamped version of its video game subscription service went live on Monday, giving members access to a catalog of several hundred games both new and old. From a report: PlayStation Plus, once code-named Spartacus, is Sony Group's attempt to compete with rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass as both publishers jockey to be the Netflix of video games. The new service combines Sony's previous subscription offerings into a three-tiered system. The most basic level, Essential, costs $10 a month and replaces the old PlayStation Plus, offering two downloadable games per month, a smattering of discounts and access to online multiplayer games. It's the top two tiers that are new for PlayStation users. The Extra tier, at $15 a month, offers a library of about four hundred PlayStation 4 and 5 games, while the $18 a month Premium level adds a few hundred classic games to the pool, mostly from the PlayStation 3. The service only has around thirty PS1, PS2 and PSP games, which has been a disappointment for retro gamers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is shutting down Talk (also known as GChat) for good -- its instant-messaging service you probably haven't used much since 2007. From a report: Although Google migrated Talk users over to Google Hangouts in 2017 -- another one of its now-sidelined messaging platforms -- it was still accessible by third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin and Gajim. But Google will cut these last lines of life support on June 16th -- three days from now. In a message on Talk's support page, Google says it's "winding down Google Talk" and will no longer support third-party apps, citing its initial announcement in 2017. Users who try to sign into GChat after the 16th will see a sign-in error. If you still want to use Pidgin through Google services, Pidgin recommends using this plugin for Google Chat instead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's chip manufacturing technology has been outpaced by rivals like TSMC and Samsung in recent years, but the company is looking to put its troubles behind it. From a report: The first step forward will be the Intel 4 manufacturing process, which Intel has shared more details about at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' annual VLSI Technology Symposium (as reported by AnandTech and Tom's Hardware). The new manufacturing tech is on track to be used in consumer chips starting in 2023, starting with Intel's "Meteor Lake" CPU architecture. Meteor Lake will likely come to market as Intel's 14th-generation Core CPU sometime next year. Intel 4's biggest improvement is its integration of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light to etch tiny patterns into silicon wafers. TSMC and Samsung use EUV technology in their most advanced manufacturing processes. Intel says that compared to the Intel 7 process, Intel 4 will enable either 21.5 percent better clock speeds using the same amount of power or the same speeds using 40 percent less power. After Intel 4, Intel will move on to Intel 3, which is a higher-density iteration of Intel 4 using the same EUV technology. Notably, chipmakers will be able to port designs made for Intel 4 directly to Intel 3 without having to make changes, which will hopefully allow both Intel and third-party chip designers to start using it quickly (Intel 3 will be offered to third parties through Intel Foundry Services). By making smaller jumps between process technologies -- introducing EUV lithography in Intel 4 and then optimizing for maximum density in Intel 3, rather than trying to do both at once -- Intel hopes to avoid the delays and yield problems that held the 10nm/Intel 7 process back for so many years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's finally happening. Microsoft will be ending support for most versions of its Internet Explorer (IE) 11 browser on June 15. ZDNet: Microsoft announced more than a year ago that IE would be removed from most versions of Windows 10 this year and has spent months encouraging customers to get ready by proactively retiring the browser from their organizations. IE 11 will be retired for Windows 10 client SKUs (version 20H2 and later) and Windows 10 IoT (version 20H2 and later). Products not affected by this retirement include IE Mode in Edge; IE 11 desktop on Windows 8.1, Windows 7 (with Extended Security Updates), Windows Server LTSC (all versions), Windows Server 2022, Windows 10 client LTSC (all versions), Windows 10 IoT LTSC (all versions). The IE 11 desktop app is not available on Windows 11, as Edge is the default browser for Windows 11. IE Mode in Microsoft Edge will be supported through at least 2029 to give web developers eight years to modernize legacy apps and eventually remove the need for IE mode, officials have said. According to Net Applications, a web monitoring tool, Internet Explorer still has a market share of 5.21% on desktops and laptops, far behind Chrome at over 69%, to be sure, but still ahead of Apple's Safari, which commands 3.73% market share.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The particle collider at CERN will soon restart. From a report: In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic gun, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons -- the naked guts of hydrogen atoms -- around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. In early July, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy. And so the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and the refreshed hopes of particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had been producing hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular. Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as "the most exciting set of results I've seen in my professional lifetime." A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find? Almost everything, optimistic physicists say. When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The machine, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson. That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of equations that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world. But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain: Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the "dark matter" that suffuses the cosmos? How does the Higgs particle itself have mass? Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010 when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs -- in particular, no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dozens of companies and business organizations are sending a letter to U.S. senators on Monday to urge them to support a bill aimed at reining in the biggest tech companies, such as Amazon.com and Alphabet's Google. From a report: Democratic U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and lawmakers from both parties said last week they had the Senate votes needed to pass legislation that would prevent the tech platforms, including Apple and Facebook, from favoring their own businesses on their platforms. The companies supporting the measure, which include Yelp, Sonos, DuckDuckGo and Spotify, called it a "moderate and sensible bill aimed squarely at well-documented abuses by the very largest online platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin plunged to the lowest in about 18 months after the freezing of withdrawals by the Celsius lending platform added to concern that systemic risk in the crypto ecosystem will accelerate the digital-asset market meltdown. From a report: The world's largest digital token tumbled as much as 17% to $22,603 -- its lowest since December 2020. Other cryptocurrencies also declined as a broader sell-off continued. The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 100 Index, which measures 100 of the top tokens, dropped as much as 17%. And the total market value, which topped $3 trillion in November, dropped below $1 trillion as of 10:54 a.m. New York time on Monday, according to CoinGecko. "The fundamentals to support stabilization and recovery just aren't there," said Steven McClurg, co-founder and CIO at crypto fund manager Valkyrie Investments. "Things can and likely will get worse before they get better."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The drones are coming as Amazon announces Monday that it's launching a fleet of delivery drones. The retail giant will test its new Amazon Prime Air delivery system in Lockeford, California, the company said. From a report: Amazon worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and local officials in Lockeford, a small town south of Sacramento, to gain permission for the drones to take flight. "Lockeford residents will soon have access to one of the world's leading delivery innovations," California State Assemblyman Heath Flora said in a release. "It's exciting that Amazon will be listening to the feedback of the San Joaquin County community to inform the future development of this technology." The company has been developing drones for years. It gained FAA approval for the drones in 2020, before scaling back the project the following year. The drones use sense-and-avoid systems in order to operate safely. The drones can reliably avoid obstacles including other aircraft, people and pets, Amazon said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celsius Network, one of the biggest crypto lenders, told customers Sunday evening that it is pausing withdrawals, swap, and transfers between accounts in a move that has sparked discussions and prompted the price of the firm's token to take a 60% tumble in the past one hour to as low as 19 cents. From a report: "We are taking this action today to put Celsius in a better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations," wrote Celsius, which counts stablecoin-issuer Tether International, growth equity fund WestCap Group and Canadian pension fund Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec among its investors. [...] Celsius, which was valued at $3.25 billion when it extended its "oversubscribed" Series B financing round to $750 million in November, allows users to deposit their Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments. Depending on the time horizon and the token, the platform offers as much as 18% interest a year. On its website, Celsius says 1.7 million people call "Celsius their home for crypto."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shutterfly recently moved its photo libraries to Amazon's cloud division — and became one of the companies that stopped using Oracle for it database management, Bloomberg reports:Businesses are opting to align with newer providers such as MongoDB Inc., Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. instead of Oracle, the sector stalwart, as a result of changes across the enterprise technology landscape. The move to the cloud is challenging the systems of the past. Newer providers are also making it much easier to adopt their technology directly, alleviating the need for corporate purchasers to negotiate large contracts with salespeople and allowing end users to more easily pick their own tools. Offerings from the newer software makers can also be deployed without large teams of database administrators that are typically needed to support Oracle's products, a cost-saver for organizations that would otherwise have to fight against other businesses for these in-demand engineers. The evidence of the shift is widespread. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chose Cockroach Labs Inc. as the database vendor to support its new retail banking application in Europe. Nasdaq Inc. is working with closely held Databricks and Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services, among others, in its quest to upgrade from on-premises Oracle data repositories. Alongside AWS, database products from rival cloud vendors Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud are also growing quickly. And many businesses, like JetBlue Airways Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., are tapping Snowflake to help store and analyze corporate data to power sales dashboards, among other uses.... Collectively, the initiatives are just a small fragment of the estimated $155 billion database market. But it's evidence of a tectonic shift happening within the industry, one that is threatening the leadership status Oracle cultivated over the past 43 years, ever since co-founder Larry Ellison and his team brought to market the first relational database, or one in which information was organized in tables that could be more easily accessed, manipulated and analyzed.... Oracle doesn't disclose financial results specifically for its database business. Much of that revenue comes from providing support and maintenance for existing customers versus new sales. But Oracle's influence is slowly fading. While it owned an estimated 27% of the database market in 2019, that fell to 24% in 2020, per Gartner. In the same time frame, Amazon went from 17% market share to almost 21%. Oracle declined to comment for this story. Rivals are growing quickly. At MongoDB, for example, sales rose 57% to $285 million in the most recent quarter. Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects.... Oracle makes a significant portion of its revenue on existing customers. Every few years, when companies have to renew their contracts, Oracle can raise prices for maintenance and support — a business with margins hovering around 95%, according to Craig Guarente, a 16-year veteran of Oracle who is now CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Palisade Compliance. "The entire profit of the company comes from Oracle database maintenance," he said. With each contract negotiation, "you go from paying $20 million a year, to $30 million a year, to paying $50 million a year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jakub Kaminski is a robotics engineering graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. With some volunteers he spent two months designing the perfect tourniquet for the battlefields of Ukraine, designed meet the highest medical standards — and then uploaded it to 3DPrintingForUkraine.com. Now in less than 8 weeks "around 120 individuals and companies worldwide with 3D printers have accessed the design," reports the Washington Post. [Alternate URL here] "Together, they have made roughly 5,000 reusable tourniquets that are bound for Ukraine, where they will be stitched and sent off to the battlefield, Kaminski said..."Using digital files, people are designing supplies such as bandages, tourniquets, splints and add-ons to AK-47 guns.... [In February, as Russia began its invasion] people in the 3D-printing community talked with Ukrainian military officials, hospital administrators and charity organizations, trying to gauge what they could print quickly that would be most helpful. Tourniquets and bandages were repeated requests. Mykhailo Shulhan, the chief operating officer of a Ukrainian 3D-printing company in Lviv, said that as soon as the invasion began, he started researching how 3D printers helped in other conflicts.... These days, his company, 3D Tech Addtive, develops and prints an array of weapons accessories: AK-47 holsters so soldiers have a way to rest their guns; bullet magazines since empty cartridges often get thrown away instead of reused; carrying bags for grenades; and most recently, anti-reflective lenses for sniper scopes to reduce glare and prevent Ukrainian snipers from being seen. (All together, they have provided over 5,000 components to the front lines, Shulhan estimated....) While most 3D printers create supplies to stop death or ease fighting conditions, others are focusing on rehabilitating soldiers. Brett Carey, a physical therapist in Hawaii, designs 3D printed splints that can be sent to fighters... Carey has created two digital designs for splints that have been uploaded online and 3D printed over 1,500 times. If injuries are advanced, he has people send him images of their injuries using EM3D — a 3D imaging app — which allows him to make a custom made splint which is then shipped to Ukraine... The Post also got this quote from the robotics engineering student whose team designed the tourniquets. "It's a beautiful thing," he said. "If you make people in Ukraine feel better, and enable people to help. ... This is something really special."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The state of Utah has the largest saltware lake in the entire western hemisphere — but it's like the tide went out and never came back, warns the New York Times. [Alternate URL here.] "If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here's what's in store."The lake's flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop. Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah's population. "We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that's going to go off if we don't take some pretty dramatic action," said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake. As climate change continues to cause record-breaking drought, there are no easy solutions. Saving the Great Salt Lake would require letting more snowmelt from the mountains flow to the lake, which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture — something state leaders seem reluctant to do. Utah's dilemma raises a core question as the country heats up: How quickly are Americans willing to adapt to the effects of climate change, even as those effects become urgent, obvious, and potentially catastrophic...? Until recently, that hydrological system existed in a delicate balance... [T]wo changes are throwing that system out of balance. One is explosive population growth, diverting more water from those rivers before they reach the lake. The other shift is climate change, according to Robert Gillies, a professor at Utah State University and Utah's state climatologist. Higher temperatures cause more snowpack to transform to water vapor, which then escapes into the atmosphere, rather than turning to liquid and running into rivers. More heat also means greater demand for water for lawns or crops, further reducing the amount that reaches the lake.... The lake's surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Two CEOs on a podcast casually proposed a shareable database of worker performance that would follow them between companies, forever, and encouraged listeners to create one," writes Slashdot reader merauder128 , summarizing a recent article on Vice. "HR professionals say it's a terrible idea." Vice points out the podcast both the host and guest were CEOs of "data harvesters that package and resell data to other parties."Through one lens, it was a mundane musing between two CEOs of data companies talking about how awesome it would be to have more data on something. But in the context of experiments occurring in the tech industry around hiring practices, it was two influential CEOs encouraging other entrepreneurs to create a business that would be an absolute nightmare for workers, a type of credit score for workers that could be a permanent HR file that follows workers from one job to the next, and where a worker who struggles at one job may have trouble getting another.... It is also in line with a growing trend among tech companies that, spurred by work-from-home and hybrid work, are increasingly interested in quantifying employee performance. The most prominent example is Coinbase introducing an app so employees can constantly rate each other's performances, a scenario even the normally cheery TechCrunch said "sounds rough." Over the last several years, there has been a boom in employee management software solutions such as Workday, Lattice, CultureAmp that are used across thousands of companies for performance reviews and other sensitive HR tasks. Technologically speaking, what Youakim and Hoffman are talking about is opening those confidential resources — or some condensed version of them that can be easily digested and analyzed — up to everyone. None of these HR software companies have indicated that they have any intention of doing this. The article warns that experts who have studied hiring extensively believe a permanent database database "would allow this complete, random mess to follow workers their entire careers, affecting their job prospects, earning potential, and their broader lives." And the article summarizes a reaction to the idea from John Hausknecht, a professor of human resources at Cornell University. "It assumes people don't change, that jobs require similar attributes, that a person's experience at one company is relevant to another where they will be in a different environment with a different manager and different company culture.... "Or, to put it a different way, 'Just because we can track it, collect it, and ask about it,' Hausknecht said, 'doesn't necessarily mean we should.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"All appeared to be going smoothly," reports CBS News, "when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard 'rocketcam' showed a flash in the engine's exhaust plume. "The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off...."California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company's low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost. "The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," Astra tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis." It was the seventh launch of Astra's small "Venture-class" rocket and the company's fifth failure. Sunday's launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday's failure is not yet known. "Although today's launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen....After Sunday's failure, he tweeted: "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times tells the story of crop circles, "the mysterious patterns that regularly intrigued people around the world in the 1980s and '90s, prompting speculation about alien visitors, ancient spiritual forces, weather anomalies, secret weapons tests and other theories." They call the phenomenon "a reminder that even before the era of social media and the internet, hoaxes were able to spread virally around the world and true believers could cling stubbornly to conspiracy theories despite a lack of evidence — or even the existence of evidence to the contrary."In the case of crop circles, the most important contradictory evidence emerged on Sept. 9, 1991, when the British newspaper Today ran a front-page story under the headline "Men who conned the world," revealing that two mischievous friends from Southampton had secretly made more than 200 of the patterns over the previous decade. Doug Bower, then 67, and his friend Dave Chorley, 62, admitted to a reporter, Graham Brough, that in the late 1970s they had begun using planks of wood with ropes attached to each end to stamp circles in crops by holding the ropes in their hands and pressing the planks underfoot. They had then watched with amusement as their anonymous antics eventually attracted media attention and began being copied by imitators around the world... The real-life pranksters phoned the newspaper to come clean, according to Mr. Brough, now 62, who says he verified their claims by checking an archive of more than 200 crop circle designs stored in a shed behind Mr. Bower's home. The designs were clearly aged and matched the patterns they had made over the years, Mr. Brough said. "I spent a week getting them to show me how they had done it all, and I have never laughed as much in my life," he recalled. "The prevailing wisdom at the time was that aliens were about to land any day, but it had all been kicked off by these two blokes who'd have a couple of pints at their favorite pub and then head out into the night to have a bit of fun...." "The people who wanted to keep believing in aliens and everything else just ignored the evidence, no matter how obvious it was," said Rob Irving, who had begun emulating the two pranksters' work in 1989 and befriended them after they went public.... "The power of the art came from the mystery, and Doug forever regretted coming forward because the mystery was lost." A professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in Britain explains to the Times the thought process of believers (which he says predated the internet). "instead of admitting that we live in a world we can't control, they take comfort from believing that there is agency involved and someone who can be blamed." The Times finds an example in a crop circle proponent who now believes, to this day, that even if crop circles are all man-made, the people making them have unwittingly "been prompted by an independent nonhuman mind." Although after a new crop circle appeared, the Times obtained an alternative perspective — from a neighboring farmer. "It is just so irresponsible to be trespassing and destroying food in the middle of a global wheat shortage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disneyland's Galaxy's Edge, aka "Star Wars Land," lets its visitors "immersively" experience the planet Batuu during the period between Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi and Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker. But there's some big changes coming, reports SFGate.com:Disney recently announced — at the "From a Galaxy Far, Far Away to Disney Park Near You" panel at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim 2022 event — that main characters from the immensely popular Disney Plus series "The Book of Boba Fett" and "The Mandalorian" would begin appearing at Disneyland. Yes, including the universally adored, merchandise and meme-dominating Grogu, aka "Baby Yoda." However, there is one sarlacc-sized snag: Those stories are set about five years after Return of the Jedi, and about 25 years before The Force Awakens, which raises a galaxy of questions about how this will impact Galaxy's Edge. The introduction of new characters into the attraction will either break the timeline of Star Wars land or, perhaps, unburden it from self-imposed shackles.This could be a good thing, the article suggests, since "Currently there is frankly not a lot of character interaction on Batuu."Kylo Ren pops in on occasion to interrogate guests, and some stormtroopers march around. Rey and Chewie pose for pics, R2-D2 wheels around, and Vi randomly shows up. But that's about it. There is no BB-8 or C-3PO, no Poe or Finn walking around, no Captain Phasma (who died in "The Last Jedi"). The cast members do their part to speak the local lingo of "bright suns" and "till the spire," but Black Spire Outpost feels somewhat unpopulated. It looks and feels like a Star Wars town, but lacks true full immersion. Oga's Cantina does feel lived in, and always crowded, but the closest immersive experience is Savi's Workshop, where building a lightsaber is a damn near religious experience, complete with the Force ghost voice of Yoda. So how would new characters impact this? If Mando appears at Galaxy's Edge, are guests to assume he (and Grogu) are still bouncing about by the time of the sequel series...? The town of Black Spire Outpost might come to resemble Fantasyland, for instance, where multiple characters occupy their own zones and don't intersect... Regardless, this change further populates Galaxy's Edge, which is good for the guest who wants to take a lot of character photos. It also allows Disney to roll out their most popular modern characters, and potentially open the door for them to showcase original trilogy and prequel trilogy characters (which are having a moment right now). But it does create major story hiccups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's Warren Buffett versus Google, Facebook and Microsoft, according to a recent article by Bloomberg. (Alternate URL here.)Google, Facebook and Microsoft Corp. — three of the world's biggest corporate buyers of clean power — are sounding the alarm that a nearly $4-billion, Warren Buffett-backed renewable-energy project proposed in Iowa isn't necessarily in the best interest of customers, including them. If approved, it would be the largest complex of wind farms in the entire country when it comes online by the end of 2024, producing enough electricity for more than 700,000 homes. MidAmerican Energy, a utility owned by Buffett conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has asked state regulators to approve terms including a guaranteed 11.25% rate of return before starting construction on a project it says will help in its efforts to trim carbon emissions by 75% compared to 2005 levels. But the big-name tech giants that operate data centers in the state warn the project, dubbed Wind Prime, could drive up electricity costs. MidAmerican, they say, should consider alternatives.... The fight is an important one to watch because it demonstrates the increasing influence technology giants have on the energy transition. Tech companies have pushed utilities in other parts of the U.S. to offer more clean energy options as they seek to clean up the sources of power for their energy-intensive operations. And since they buy so much power, the utilities often listen to them.... Facebook, which also buys large amounts of power to run data centers in Iowa, referred to the proposed project in a joint regulatory filing with Google as an "exceedingly costly, massive increase in generation that MidAmerican has not demonstrated is necessary." Last month, Microsoft filed its own petition with the Iowa Utilities Board saying it planned to join the tech-customer coalition. Facebook and Google specifically complain that "Without a resource planning analysis, it is difficult if not impossible to assess all feasible alternatives to replace/expand existing generation capacity and which alternatives are a reasonable, cost-effective way to meet reliability requirements, forecasted customer need, a diversified fuel mix, and the like, or if it is simply being proposed to drive utility — or parent company — profitability.... "Wind Prime is an exceedingly costly, massive increase in generation that MidAmerican has not demonstrated is necessary or reasonable in light of other feasible alternatives. Before customers are forced to bear the increased costs that this project will result in, Wind Prime should be carefully considered by the Board through a complete record informed by a full and thorough discovery process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A panel at this week's RSA Conference argued that 90% of security buyers aren't getting the efficacy from their products that vendors claim they can deliver. Slashdot reader storagedude writes: Joe Hubback of cyber risk management startup ISTARI led both the panel and the study, which was based on in-depth interviews with more than a hundred high-level security officials, including CISOs, CIOs, CEOs, security and tech vendors, evaluation organizations and government organizations. Hubback said that "90% of the people that I spoke to said that the security technologies they were buying from the market are just not delivering the effect that the vendors claim they can deliver. Quite a shocking proportion of people are suffering from technology that doesn't deliver." A number of reasons for that product failure came out in the panel discussion, according to eSecurity Planet, but they can be boiled down to some key points: - Cybersecurity buyers are pressed for time and most don't test the products they buy. "They're basically just buying and hoping that the solutions they're buying are really going to work," Hubback said. - Vendors are under pressure from investors to get products to market quickly and from sales and marketing teams to make aggressive claims. - On top of those pressures, it's difficult to architect tools that are effective for a range of complex environments – and equally difficult for buyers to properly assess these "black box" solutions. Those conditions create an information asymmetry, said Hubback: "A vendor knows a lot more about the quality of the product than the buyer so the vendor is not incentivized to bring high-quality products to market because buyers can't properly evaluate what they're buying." Hubback and fellow panelists hope to create a GSMA-like process for evaluating security product abilities, and he invited RSA attendees to join the effort.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On June 4 a 10-minute Blue Origin flight (using a reusable rocket and capsule) carried six more people on a visit to suborbital space, reports Space.com — the fifth human spaceflight mission for the Jeff Bezos-founded company, and the second one this year. But GeekWire points out that civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha had his seat funded by the Crypto Space Agency — that is, funded entirely by the NFT community through mint proceeds — after he was the winner of its lottery for a ride to space. And they're not the only crypto community buying rides into space. CNET reports on MoonDAO:Over 8,000 people "minted" a "Ticket to Space" NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for free (plus a small transaction or "gas" fee), and...one of those NFT holders plus several alternates will be chosen at random for one of the seats to space. MoonDAO's members will also vote on a specific person from a list of predetermined nominees to gift the second ticket to. The two astronauts could fly as soon as the next Blue Origin launch in the coming weeks, but no target date has been announced.... "Our mission is to decentralize access to space research and exploration," co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told me during an interview on stage at the DAODenver conference in February. In addition to sending people on a short trip to space, MoonDAO is also using funds from its treasury — it's raised millions worth of cryptocurrency through a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox — for community projects that include designing a small rocket and satellite. In other words, the ultimate vision is to build an organization something like SpaceX, but that's run as a community cooperative rather than in the traditional top-down corporate structure. "We definitely need more capital to get to the level of competing directly with Virgin Galactic or SpaceX," Moncada-Larrotiz said via Discord direct message on May 26. "It's for sure a long term project and I think it'll be a matter of building the right type of organization where builders are free to just focus on making awesome things in a collaborative environment." Unfortunately, MoonDAO's drawing Saturday experienced technical glitches, and after a two-hour livestream — no winner was chosen. They promised a winner would be chosen by Sunday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.