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Bozhidar Batsov writes: Every now and again I come across some discussion on making Emacs "modern". The argument always go more or less like this - Emacs doesn't look and behave like and the world will end if we don't copy something "crucial" from it. [...] If you ask me -- there's pretty much nothing we can do that would suddenly make Emacs as popular as VS Code. But you know what -- that's perfectly fine. After all there are plenty of "modern" editors that are even less popular than Emacs, so clearly being "modern" doesn't make you popular. And there's also our "arch-nemesis" vim, that's supposedly as "dated" as Emacs, but is extremely popular.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hirrolot's blog: When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you find an issue with an explanation that it is theoretically impossible to design your API in this way, owing to some subtle language bug. The issue is Open and dated Apr 5, 2017. I entered Rust four years ago. To this moment, I co-authored teloxide and dptree, wrote several publications and translated a number of language release announcements. I also managed to write some production code in Rust, and had a chance to speak at one online meetup dedicated to Rust. Still, from time to time I find myself disputing with Rust's borrow checker and type system for no practical reason. Yes, I am no longer stupefied by such errors as cannot return reference to temporary value - over time, I developed multiple heuristic strategies to cope with lifetimes... But one recent situation has made me to fail ignominiously. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world appears to be at an inflection point. Foreign Affairs: Business leaders have declared the acceleration of deglobalization and sounded the alarm about a new period of stagflation. Academics have decried the return of conquest and hailed the renewal of transatlantic ties. And countries are rethinking almost every aspect of their foreign policies, including trade, defense spending, and military alliances. These dramatic shifts have overshadowed another profound transformation in the global energy system. For the last two decades, the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions has gradually reshaped the global energy order. Now, as a result of the war in Ukraine, energy security has returned to the fore, joining climate change as a top concern for policymakers. Together, these dual priorities are poised to reshape national energy planning, energy trade flows, and the broader global economy. Countries will increasingly look inward, prioritizing domestic energy production and regional cooperation even as they seek to transition to net-zero carbon emissions. If countries retreat into strategic energy blocs, a multidecade trend toward more energy interconnectedness risks giving way to an age of energy fragmentation. But in addition to economic nationalism and deglobalization, the coming energy order will be defined by something that few analysts have fully appreciated: government intervention in the energy sector on a scale not seen in recent memory. After four decades during which they generally sought to curb their activity in energy markets, Western governments are now recognizing the need to play a more expansive role in everything from building (and retiring) fossil fuel infrastructure to influencing where private companies buy and sell energy to limiting emissions through carbon pricing, subsidies, mandates, and standards. This shift is bound to invite comparisons to the 1970s, when excessive government intervention in energy markets exacerbated repeated energy crises. The dawning era of government intervention won't be a bad thing, however, if managed correctly. Appropriately limited and tailored to address specific market failures, it can forestall the worst effects of climate change, mitigate many energy security risks, and help manage the biggest geopolitical challenges of the coming energy transition. The current energy crisis has refocused the world's attention on geopolitical energy risks, forcing a reckoning between tomorrow's climate ambitions and today's energy needs and offering a preview of the tumultuous era ahead. How governments respond to these challenges, brought into sharp relief by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, will shape the new energy order for decades to come.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it. Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it. From a report: The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as "health span." The sum, if the Saudis can spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging -- and how it might be slowed down with drugs. The foundation hasn't yet made a formal announcement, but the scope of its effort has been outlined at scientific meetings and is the subject of excited chatter among aging researchers, who hope it will underwrite large human studies of potential anti-aging drugs. The fund is managed by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the onetime chief scientist at PespsiCo, who was recruited to the CEO job in 2020. "Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan," Khan said in an interview. "There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one." The idea, popular among some longevity scientists, is that if you can slow the body's aging process, you can delay the onset of multiple diseases and extend the healthy years people are able to enjoy as they grow older. Khan says the fund is going to give grants for basic scientific research on what causes aging, just as others have done, but it also plans to go a step further by supporting drug studies, including trials of "treatments that are patent expired or never got commercialized."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IRA Financial Trust, a platform that lets users save for retirement in alternative assets like cryptocurrency, is suing the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange over an alleged failure to protect its customers from a heist that resulted in the theft of $36 million in crypto. The financial platform partners with Gemini, owned by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, to allow customers to trade and store cryptocurrency. From a report: In February, IRA was the victim of a major attack that drained the millions in funds customers had stored with Gemini. The company was reportedly swatted, the act of calling the police to report a fake crime at someone's location, when the cyberattack occurred. Police showed up at IRA's South Dakota headquarters after false reports of a robbery, while bad actors made off with millions in crypto. At the time, a source close to Gemini told CoinDesk it wasn't hacked and that it makes various security controls available to its partners. "Gemini knew about the risks attendant to crypto assets," IRA's complaint states. "In fact, it built its public image around purportedly mitigating those risks. But like so much else in the world of crypto, Gemini's image is just that: an image. In reality, Gemini brushes security aside when there is a chance to earn more revenue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The developers behind the open source MongoDB, and its commercial service counterpart MongoDB Atlas, have been busy making the document database easier to use for developers. From a report: Available in preview, Queryable Encryption provides the ability to query encrypted data, and with the entire query transaction be encrypted -- an industry first according to MongoDB. This feature will be of interest to organizations with a lot of sensitive data, such as banks, health care institutions and the government. This eliminates the need for developers to be experts in encryption, Davidson said. This end-to-end client-side encryption uses novel encrypted index data structures, the data being searched remains encrypted at all times on the database server, including in memory and in the CPU. The keys never leave the application and the company maintains that the query speed nor overall application performance are impacted by the new feature. MongoDB is also now supporting time series data, which are important for monitoring physical systems, quick-moving financial data, or other temporally-oriented datasets. In MongoDB 6.0, time-series collections can have secondary indexes on measurements, and the database system has been optimized to sort time-based data more quickly. Although there are a number of databases specifically geared towards time-series data specifically, such as InfluxDB, many organizations may not want to stand-up an entire database system for this specific use, a separate system costing more in terms of support and expertise, Davidson argued. Another feature is Cluster-to-Cluster Synchronization, which provides the continuous data synchronization of MongoDB clusters across environments. It works with Atlas, in private cloud, on-premises, or on the edge. This sets the stage for using data in multiple places for testing, analytics, and backup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple announced some major new features for Mail that finally bring the email app closer to parity with Gmail and other popular email clients. From a report: Perhaps the most useful will be an undo send feature, which will let you call back an email within 10 seconds of hitting the send button. A "remind me" feature will let you set a time for an email to come back to the top of your inbox. A new scheduled send feature that allows you to specify exactly when an email should go out. And Mail will even tell you when it thinks you've forgotten to include an attachment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is going to force smartphone manufacturers like Apple and other electronics makers to equip their devices with a standard USB-C charging port. From a report: EU lawmakers on Tuesday agreed to a single mobile charging port for mobile phones, tablets and cameras. It means equipment makers will have to comply with the new terms by 2024. "We have a deal on the #CommonCharger!" EU commissioner Thierry Breton said via Twitter. The legislation is designed to cut waste and make life easier for consumers who would theoretically be able to use one charger for multiple devices. It could have a huge impact on Apple, as the company still uses its own Lightning connector to charge iPhones. The company has recently equipped iPads and MacBooks with USB-C ports. Apple did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. However, a spokesperson for the company said last September that the firm stands for "innovation and deeply cares about the customer experience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon's new head of artificial intelligence wants to speed up technological modernization after an onslaught of what he calls "valid" criticism from recently departed senior leaders who expressed frustration at slow progress. From a report: Craig Martell, who was previously head of machine learning at Lyft and Dropbox and led AI initiatives at LinkedIn, told Bloomberg News in his first interview since starting his job as the Pentagon's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer that he wanted to make progress despite the department's labyrinthine "bureaucratic inertia." Martell's arrival is a boost for the Pentagon, which is seeking to attract expert talent from the private sector. Martell, who said his first day at the Pentagon on Monday was "overwhelming," added he had taken a "not trivial" pay cut to do the job. "It's not my goal to come in here and change the entire culture of the DoD. It's my goal to demonstrate that with the right cultural changes, we can have really big impact," he said, adding that the opinions of senior leaders who had left were "mostly correct."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report from the Department of Justice proposes more international cooperation among law enforcement agencies on the crypto and blockchain front. From a report: Information sharing and the harmonization of anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules were also proposed in the DOJ report, which was developed in conjunction with other US agencies in the wake of the Biden White House's executive order on crypto. That EO was released in March. The report itself was drafted in response to that executive order. In the introduction, US Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that "the growing use of digital assets in the global financial system has profound implications for investors, consumers, and businesses and increases the risk of crimes such as money laundering, ransomware, terrorist financing, fraud and theft, and sanctions evasion."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The next generation of CarPlay will be compatible with a variety of aspect ratios -- from portrait to landscape -- and can even adapt to multidisplay dashboards, including vehicles with digital instrument clusters or with ultrawide pillar-to-pillar displays. CarPlay will be more integrated with all the host vehicle's systems. Beyond its current navigation and media consumption functionalities, Apple CarPlay will handle traditional instrumentation like speedometer, tachometer, temperature gauges and fuel or EV battery level displays. Users will be able to adjust their climate controls, activate seat heaters, monitor air quality and even tie into Apple's smart home technologies directly from the CarPlay interface. As with the next generation of iOS on the phone, Apple is also giving CarPlay users the ability to customize how CarPlay looks with selectable themes, backgrounds and widgets. From loud pink analog-style gauges to slick numerical displays and bar graphs, CarPlay will be able to match a wide range of vehicle interior designs and personal aesthetic tastes. Perhaps most interestingly, Apple says that this new full-fat approach to CarPlay as a complete vehicle interface will continue to be powered entirely by the connected iPhone, giving Apple an unprecedented amount of control over the vehicle's operation as well as access to data generated by each host vehicle. According to Apple, the first vehicles to support the new CarPlay update should be announced in late 2023. It lists Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar-Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Volvo and Polestar as partners that are "excited to bring this new vision of CarPlay to customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo described the sentencing of a hacker earlier this year as a "unique opportunity" to send a message to all gamers about video game piracy. Axios reports: A newly released transcript of the Feb. 10 sentencing of Gary Bowser provides rare insight, directly from Nintendo, about the company's grievances. Bowser, a Canadian national, pled guilty last year to U.S. government cybercrime charges over his role as a top member of Team Xecuter. The group sold tech that circumvented copyright protections and enabled the Nintendo Switch and other systems to play pirated games. Authorities estimated the piracy cost Nintendo upward of $65 million over nearly a decade and even compelled the company to spend resources releasing a more secure model of the Switch. "This is a very significant moment for us," Nintendo lawyer Ajay Singh told the court at the time, as he laid out the company's case against piracy and awaited the sentencing. "It's the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile," Singh said. "It's for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen." He noted Nintendo's losses from Team Xecuter's piracy and sounded a note of sympathy for smaller non-Nintendo game makers whose works are also pirated.And he wove in a complaint about cheating, which he said Team Xecuter's hacks enabled. Cheating could scare off honest players and upset families: "Parents should not be forced to explain to their children why people cheat and why sometimes games are not fair, just because one person wants an unfair advantage." At the hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik noted that TV and movies glorify hackers as "sticking it to the man," suggesting that "big companies are reaping tremendous profits and it's good for the little guy to have this." "What do you think?" Lasnik asked Nintendo's lawyer at one point. "What else can we do to convince people that there's no glory in this hacking/piracy?" "There would be a large benefit to further education of the public," Singh replied. In brief remarks directly to Lasnik, Bowser said longer prison time wouldn't scare off hackers. "There's so much money to be made from piracy that it's insignificant," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, the SEC is looking into whether Binance's initial coin offering of its Binance coin (BNB) token in 2017 was an unregistered security offering that should have been registered with the regulatory agency. CoinDesk reports: Without commenting on the details of the reported probe, a spokesperson for Binance told CoinDesk via email, "As the industry has grown at a rapid pace, we have been working very diligently to educate and assist law enforcement and regulators in the U.S. and internationally, while also adhering to new guidelines. We will continue to meet all requirements set by regulators." BNB was trading down 4% after news of the report came out. The SEC is also investigating market-making companies owned or partially owned by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao that do business with Binance.US, a U.S.-based affiliate of the global exchange, [...]. According to the report, one of the SEC's focuses is on whether Binance.US is wholly independent of the global exchange and whether employees may be involved in insider trading.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Independent: The biggest ever four-day working week pilot is set to begin in the UK, with over 70 companies and 3,300 workers ready to take part. The trial will result in no loss of pay for employees, based on the principle of the 100:80:100 model. Employees will receive 100 percent of the pay for 80 percent of the time in exchange for a commitment to maintaining 100 percent productivity. An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more. The pilot is running for six months and is being organized by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with leading think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College. [...] Researchers will work with each participating organization to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality. Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling. Ars Technica reports: The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made "Neural Engine" system. By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction -- even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones. The report notes that Metal 3 also includes "a new 'resource-loading' API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games." The same Metal 3 API benefits will also come to iPadOS 16 later this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday he is investigating Twitter over its reporting of how many accounts on the platform are from bots and fake users, saying the company may be misrepresenting the number to inflate its value and raise its revenue. The Texas Tribune reports: Twitter has claimed in its financial regulatory filings that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts. But Paxton on Monday alleged that spam accounts could make up as much as 20% of users or more. "Bot accounts can not only reduce the quality of users' experience on the platform but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming Texas consumers and businesses," Paxton said. False reporting of fake users could be considered "false, misleading, or deceptive" under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, he said. Paxton sent Twitter a civil investigative demand, requiring the social media company to turn over documents related to how it calculates and manages its user data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LastPass says they're now the first password manager with a passwordless sign-in feature. Engadget reports: Grant permission through the LastPass Authenticator mobile app and you can update account info on the web without entering your master password. The approach relies on FIDO-compliant password-free technology. The feature is available to both personal and business users. LastPass is also promising options beyond the Authenticator app in the future, such as relying on biometric scans or hardware security keys.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China. White House officials said Biden's actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production -- even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...] The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration's clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple brought its iPad tablet a bit closer to the Mac computers in spirit on Monday at WWDC 2022, announcing new features for its iPadOS 16 software that add better multitasking features. From a report: The new changes to the iPad represent another key shift to the device, aiming to advance the "pro" capabilities of Apple's tablets. While Apple's added to the power and capabilities of its iPads, the software has been criticized by many reviewers, including us at CNET, for not offering enough functionality. [...] Apple also has a collaborative workspace app called Freeform, coming later this year, that will work like a giant whiteboard. Invited collaborators could can start adding stuff at the same time. iPadOS 16 is also aiming to make better use of more advanced iPads that feature Apple's M1 chip. Metal 3 promises better graphics, but Apple's also aiming to add more desktop-like features in apps: Some will have customizable toolbars, and the Files app looks like it's finally getting a little more versatile for file management. M1 iPads are getting display scaling to create an effectively larger-feeling display, allowing more app screen space (but with smaller text and images). There's also free-form window resizing, along with external display support. Both features have been overdue on iPadOS. Stage Manager, a MacOS feature that's coming later this year, is also on iPadOS. The result looks to be windows that can overlap and be different sizes, just like a Mac.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palermo in Southern Italy, home to about 1.3 million people, has shut down all its services, public websites, and online portals following a cyberattack on Friday. BleepingComputer reports: It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public offices. Moreover, tourists cannot access online bookings for tickets to museums and theaters (Massimo Theater) or even confirm their reservations on sports facilities. Finally, limited traffic zone cards are impossible to acquire, so no regulation occurs, and no fines are issued for relevant violations. Unfortunately, the historical city center requires these passes for entrance, so tourists and local residents are severely impacted. Italy recently received threats from the Killnet group, a pro-Russian hacktivist who attacks countries that support Ukraine with resource-depleting cyberattacks known as DDoS (distributed denial of service). While some were quick to point the finger at Killnet, the cyberattack on Palermo bears the signs of a ransomware attack rather than a DDoS. The councilor for innovation in the municipality of Palermo, Paolo Petralia Camassa, has stated that all systems were cautiously shut down and isolated from the network while he also warned that the outage might last for a while.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple demonstrated "passkeys" at WWDC 2022, a new biometric sign-in standard that could finally kill off the password for good. TechCrunch reports: Passkeys are based on the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn), a standard that uses public-key cryptography instead of passwords for authenticating users to websites and applications, and are stored on-device rather than on a web server. The digital password replacement uses Touch ID or Face ID for biometric verification, which means that rather than having to input a long string of characters, an app or website you're logging into will push a request to your phone for authentication. During its WWDC demo of the password-free technology, Apple showed how passkeys are backed up within the iCloud Keychain and can be synced across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV with end-to-end encryption. Users will also be able to sign in to websites and apps on non-Apple devices using an iPhone or iPad to scan a QR code and Touch ID or Face ID to authenticate. "Because it's just a single tap to sign in, it's simultaneously easier, faster and more secure than almost all common forms of authentication today," said Garrett Davidson, an Apple engineer on the Authentication Experience team.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The phones of Ukrainian officials have been targeted by hackers as Russia pursues its invasion of Ukraine, a senior cybersecurity official said Monday. Reuters: Victor Zhora, the deputy head of Ukraine's State Special Communications Service, said that phones being used by the country's public servants had come under sustained targeting. "We see a lot of attempts to hack Ukrainian officials' phones, mainly with the spreading of malware," Zhora told journalists at an online news conference meant to mark the 100 days since Russian forces poured across the border. Zhora said his service had, so far, not seen any evidence that Ukrainian devices had been compromised. The hacking of government leaders' devices crept up the international agenda following a cascade of revelations last year around the how phones used by presidents, ministers, and other government officials had been targeted or compromised.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its WWDC event today, Apple previewed several new features coming with iOS 16, which will debut this fall after spending the summer in beta testing. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The lock screen is at the center of Apple's iOS 16 updates, starting with the ability to customize fonts and colors used. It will be possible to add widgets and configure multiple lock screens that you can switch between by swiping across the screen. Different focus modes can also be assigned to different lock screens. Apple-supplied wallpapers get a refresh too, with animated and Pride-themed choices. Notifications appear on the lock screen differently, too. Instead of piling up across the screen, they "roll in" at the bottom of the screen. There's also a "live activities" feature to display notifications associated with an event like an Uber ride or sporting event in a single tile. There's a major update coming to messages, too: iOS 16 adds the ability to edit typos out of sent messages, recall messages that you didn't mean to send, and the ability to mark a message thread as unread so you can come back to it later. SharePlay is also coming to messages. Apple's powerful Live Text feature will be coming to video. Additionally, there will be more actions available when you use Live Text in photos or videos. Wallet gets some expanded features too, with a way to share saved IDs securely by supplying only necessary information. It'll be easier to share saved keys, too. Apple Pay gets a new "Pay Later" feature, adding the option to split a bill into four equal payments without interest or fees. Apple Maps will get multi-stop routing in iOS 16, and six more cities will be added to the "detailed city experience" introduced in iOS 15. Apple is also adding shared iCloud photo libraries, in an effort to make it easier to share certain photos across family and friends' accounts. Up to six users can access a shared library. Photos will include sharing suggestions, and image edits and keywords will be synced for all users. There's also a new feature called Safety Check, which is aimed to protect people in abusive situations. It allows you to easily revoke access to certain information, like location, that you may have shared with someone else previously. In order to download iOS 16, you'll need an iPhone 8 or later, meaning Apple is "more or less ending support for the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and original iPhone SE," reports The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers have shared the following report: Messaging apps that offer end-to-end encryption can claim that they're protecting their users by saying that they've thrown away the key -- metaphorical and literal -- and can't undo what's been scrambled in transmission. Telegram, however, claims it protects every user whether they use E2EE or not, saying that government data requests have to pass an especially high muster before they would comply and that they have never acceded to such request. Not so, a report claims. Der Spiegel reports from sources that Telegram has fulfilled a number data requests from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office involving terror and child abuse suspects. Still more data requests for other criminal cases have been more or less ignored. [...] The German government has been pressuring Dubai-based Telegram to cooperate with its investigations into right-wing extremist groups who have been using the messaging platform to spread their cause and coordinate action. Telegram has ramped up its own enforcement actions recently, but its user and group bans have been as comprehensive as lawmakers have been looking for.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura. From a report: Ventura's headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It's being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop -- enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column. Spotlight also gets some handy quality-of-life updates, adding the ability to Quick Look search results directly from the Spotlight window, and the ability to run Shortcuts from within Spotlight. Safari picks up the ability to share groups of tabs with other users, letting all users add and remove tabs. The browser is also adding a FIDO-compliant security technology called PassKeys, which aim to replace passwords with cryptographically generated keys that sync between devices using iCloud Keychain. Sites that support PassKeys can be opened using TouchID or FaceID. Apple's cross-device Continuity features were also updated. FaceTime calls can be handed off seamlessly between different Macs and iDevices, while Continuity Camera allows you to use an iPhone as a webcam (your iPhone's LED can even be used as a makeshift ring light). Continuity Camera supports Center Stage and Portrait Mode effects, too, though presumably they will require newer iPhones with hardware that supports those features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's WWDC isn't an event that traditionally packs in several hardware announcements, but nevertheless, a new MacBook Air took the stage during the keynote. From a report: The new 2022 model has been designed around the more powerful M2 processor, and its design comes closer to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, with a more squared-off look than the traditional wedge shape. It features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack. It's 11mm thick and comes in at 2.7 pounds. It will be available in silver, space grey, and new "starlight" gold and "midnight" blue colors. This MacBook Air will be available in July starting at $1,199. The M1-based Air will continue to be available for $999. The 2022 MacBook Air features a larger 13.6-inch display with smaller bezels surrounding it. Apple says it has 500 nits of peak brightness. It features a silent, fan-less design, which is impressive given the performance gains that Apple is claiming to squeeze from the M2. Apple says that it's 40-percent faster than the previous model, but that performance boost likely varies depending on the app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today announced a major update to Apple Pay, called Apple Pay Later, which will allow users to split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments without interest or late fees. From a report: The new financial product -- which was rumored ahead of its debut at Apple's 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference -- marks Apple's move into the enormous and growing buy now, pay later industry. Apple Pay Later is available everywhere Apple Pay is available, both in apps and on the web -- it requires no additional integration from the developer or merchant side. Upcoming payments are made, and can be tracked or managed, through Apple Wallet on iOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After a long, long month of laptop releases, Computex 2022 is finally over. In some ways, it's the Computex that wasn't. The early part of this year was an exciting time to be a laptop reporter. Every company and its mother announced that big ideas were on the way. Wacky products abounded, from monitors to phones. LG Display (which supplied the 13.3-inch panel for Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Fold) showed off a 17-inch foldable OLED screen. We saw RGB, OLEDs, and haptics galore. Chipmakers promised architectural innovations and performance gains. We were told that these were all coming soon. At the end of May was Computex, the biggest laptop-specific show of the year. This would've been the perfect time for some of these innovative releases to be, you know, released -- or get a release date. But we didn't get them at Computex 2022. The show was, in fact, aggressively unexciting. We got a heck of a lot of chip bumps. We got some higher refresh rate displays. We got an HP Spectre x360 with rounder corners. Don't get me wrong: incremental upgrades, both to internal specs and external elements, are important. They will make a difference in people's lives. Companies do not need to reinvent the wheel with every single laptop they release. But it is still worth noting that a number of devices that truly seem poised to expand or redefine their categories are not yet here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has halted businesses from using RCS for promotion in India, the company's biggest market by users, following reports of rampant spam by some firms in a setback for the standard that the company is hoping to help become the future of SMS messaging. From a report: Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption. Google, Samsung and a number of other firms including telecom operators have rolled out support for RCS to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in recent years. Google said last month that RCS messaging in the Messages app for Android had amassed over 500 million monthly active users. The problem, however, is that scores of businesses in India including top banks and other lending firms have been abusing the feature to send unsolicited promotional materials to any individual's phone number they can find in the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some startups are bold and original. And some, like Nate, had more modest goals: automatically filling out shoppers' contact and payment information on retailers' websites. In exchange for sparing them a minute or two of data entry on their phones, Nate charged shoppers $1 per transaction. But it struggled to turn even that vision into reality. The Information: While the company said it was using artificial intelligence to populate customer information during the checkout process, it had actually hired workers in the Philippines to manually enter the data on retailers' sites for a significant portion of the transactions Nate facilitated in 2021, according to two people with direct knowledge of the company's practices. That meant customers' orders were sometimes placed hours after they clicked the buy button through the Nate app. Nate didn't disclose its decidedly low-tech methods to at least some of the investors from whom the startup tried to raise money, according to a person with direct knowledge of fundraising discussions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kim Yong-rae is the CEO of Speefox, South Korea's biggest manufacturer of capacitors, and he thinks robots are key to the company's survival. On his factory floor, free-standing machines squeal as they spit out gleaming sheets of aluminum that roll into coils. The air is filled with the rhythmic thud of stamping and the buzzing of machinery moving continuously, on the ground and overhead. Capacitors are essential to almost every electronic device, and these will end up in thousands of smartphones, cameras, and home appliances. "Throughout our history, we've always had to find ways to stay ahead," Kim told Rest of World. "Automation is the next step in that process." Speefox's factory is 75% automated, representing South Korea's continued push away from human labor. Part of that drive is labor costs: South Korea's minimum wage has climbed, rising 5% just this year. But the most recent impetus is legal liability for worker death or injury. In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison. Experts and local media say that the law has shaken the heavy industry and construction sectors. Along with pushing the companies to invest to make workplaces safer, they point out, it's triggered a ramp-up of automation in order to require fewer workers -- or, ideally, none at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked President Joe Biden's administration to weigh in on whether the justices should hear a case on whether Meta Platforms' WhatsApp can pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software. From a report: The justices are considering NSO's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the lawsuit to move forward. NSO has argued that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the "Pegasus" spyware. WhatsApp has said the software was used for the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents. The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Justice Department to file a brief offering its views on the legal issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ASML has pressed IP theft allegations against two firms created by 'flagbearer' for China's semiconductor industry. From a report: Few companies are better positioned to benefit from the crippling shortage of computer chips than ASML, a Dutch manufacturer whose equipment plays an integral role in making the world's most advanced semiconductors. But four lines tucked halfway into an otherwise upbeat, 281-page annual report from February hinted at a potentially incendiary problem. ASML accused a Beijing-based firm, regarded by Chinese officials as one of the country's most promising tech ventures, of potentially stealing its trade secrets. Behind the brief disclosure is an extraordinary multiyear tale of intellectual property theft and a broader threat facing the $556 billion semiconductor industry. In the report, ASML said the Chinese company, Dongfang Jingyuan Electron, is related to a defunct Silicon Valley firm, Xtal, which ASML sued for intellectual property theft. A 2018 trial in California, which received scant attention at the time, provided more detail. Dongfang and Xtal were essentially the same, created a month apart in 2014 by a former ASML engineer named Zongchang Yu, ASML's attorney told the court. The two companies worked in tandem toward the same goal: obtaining ASML's technology and transferring it to China, which is seeking to foster its own semiconductor industry, often at the expense of Western companies, the attorney argued. That technology was secured in sometimes audacious fashion: one engineer was accused of stealing all 2 million lines of source code for critical ASML software and then sharing part of it with Xtal and Dongfang employees in the US and China, according to transcripts of the proceedings. "It's not an accident. It's not anything else," Patrick Ryan, ASML's lead attorney, told the court. "But it is a plot to get technology for the Chinese government."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I do want to shift the culture away from crypto being associated only with cryptocurrency," Chelsea Manning recently told a digital assets news site named the Block.In a world where celebrities are coughing up more than half a million dollars for a jpeg of a cartoon ape, Manning says that the sector has "unequivocally" been overrun by greed... She says this has resulted in a huge misunderstanding of crypto by critics, drawing it away from its privacy-focused roots. "Without cryptography, my entire life history wouldn't have been able to take place," she says. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, used encrypted communication services to disclose classified information to Julian Assange, which was later posted on WikiLeaks. Now, she's a part of privacy blockchain startup Nym as both a security analyst and serving in a hardware optimization role. The Switzerland-based Nym is a decentralized network that uses blockchain technology to mix and scramble packets of metadata — e.g. your IP address, who you talk to, and when and where.... Manning sees Nym as the successor to privacy tech such as the Tor browser and VPNs. Tor, however, has been used both as a way for people in unstable countries to access information and by bad actors looking to access dark web marketplaces such as The Silk Road. Nym says that there are disincentives put in place to stop such abuse via the validation and verification of actors running the nodes on the network. And while blockchain technology is often associated with transparency as opposed to privacy, Nym says it is only the nodes of the so-called mixnet that are ledger-based — and none of the data itself is stored on the ledger. Manning and her colleagues at Nym hope that its mixnet can act as the infrastructure upon which applications can be built to create a privacy-focused internet. By doing this, they hope to foster an alternative to surveillance capitalism — a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff to describe the tracking and commodification of personal data shared online for profit by big tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in 2029," reports Gizmodo, adding that a new paper "details this upcoming journey, a daring mission that could shed new light on the scorching hot planet's mysterious, and potentially habitable, past."Upon its arrival at the second planet from the Sun, the probe will plunge through Venus' atmosphere, ingesting its gases for approximately one hour before landing on the planet's surface, according to the paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. DAVINCI is designed to act as a flying chemistry lab, and it will use its built-in instruments to analyze Venus's atmosphere, temperatures, pressure and wind speed, while taking a few photos of its trip through planetary hell... If it survives the atmospheric entry, the probe will — hopefully — land in the Alpha Regio mountains, which are roughly the size of Texas, according to the researchers behind the new paper. Under ideal conditions, the probe will operate for 17 to 18 minutes once it sticks the landing, but it isn't really required to operate on Venus since all the precious data will have already been collected during its atmospheric plunge. Digital Trends calls Venus "a frontier in planetary science about which very little is known" — then explains why that is.The biggest issue for any potential mission to Venus is the heat, as the surface temperatures can be as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius). That's hot enough to melt lead, and it wreaks havoc with electronics... The pressure at the surface is around 95 bars, or nearly 100 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth's surface, so engineering a probe for this kind of environment is kind of like building a submarine... To keep the probe active for as long as possible, it is spherical and covered in a thick titanium shell to withstand the pressure and insulate against the heat. Then there's more insulation inside this shell, made of special materials including astroquartz, a type of fiber made from fused quartz... It's then filled with carbon dioxide gas to protect the high-voltage electronics from sparking and to stop any Earth gases from leaking in during launch.... The descent sphere will also have a camera that will be snapping high-contrast images of the surface, which can then be built up into 3D maps. For a camera to operate from inside a metal sphere, though, you need a window. And glass isn't a great material for dealing with intensely high-pressure environments. That's why DAVINCI's window will be made not of glass but sapphire... "Our final images will have 10-centimeter resolution," said the team's principal investigator, Jim Garvin. "That's the scale you'd see looking out across your living room...." Researchers know that the clouds of Venus have drops of sulfuric acid in them — and sulfuric acid eats through materials. It's a particular concern for the Kevlar lanyard that will attach the descent sphere to the parachute. So to test whether the lanyard can withstand the acidic environment, the engineers don't just suspend it in a few drops of acid — they coat the entire surface in acid, then test the lanyard's pull strength to make sure it can survive long enough to take the probe through the atmosphere even in the worst possible case. SciTechDaily notes DAVINCI "is the first mission to study Venus using both spacecraft flybys and a descent probe.... "It will also provide the first descent imaging of the mountainous highlands of Venus while mapping their rock composition and surface relief at scales not possible from orbit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Venus crossed the sun's face 10 years ago today," writes Space.com. "Most people alive will never see the sight again." Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr is still thinking about it:Slashdot, what are your memories of the 2012 or 2004 transits? What about other celestial events that you probably won't live long enough to see again? At Space.com, astronomer Tom Kress points out Mercury transits are more common, occurring about 13 times each century — and supplies some context (along with some cool photos):In 1639, English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks had improved on Kepler's tables using his own observations and aptitude for mathematics. He predicted a transit of Venus in December of that year with just a few weeks' notice, and sure enough it occurred. Kepler had miscalculated, and Horrocks became one of the only people in the world to have seen a transit of Venus.... Only six Venus transits have occurred since: in 1761 (as predicted by Kepler), 1769, 1874, 1882, 2004 and 2012. They come in pairs separated by eight years, but with more than a century between each set. The next transit won't occur until 2117 and, with this in mind, I made every effort to witness the entirety of the last one 10 years ago.... Shortly after noon local time, the black edge of the silhouette of Venus emerged on the face of the sun... A chorus of vocal awe erupted across the crowd of skywatchers, culminating in cheers of excitement as Venus' night-side began its rapid ingress onto the disk of the sun — a process that took just over 15 minutes.... I couldn't help but feel closer to Venus than I really was, standing on a huge terrestrial volcano and looking out at the most volcanic planet in the solar system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports on "a crewless robotic boat that had tried to retrace the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower" from the U.K. to Massachusetts' Plymouth Rock. And after five weeks it finally did reach North America. Halifax, Canada. "The technology that makes up the autonomous system worked perfectly, flawlessly," an IBM computing executive involved in the project told the Associated Press. But "Mechanically, we did run into problems." It's especially disappointing because they'd tried the same voyage last year. (Slashdot had noted that "Unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger 'had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem,' reports the Associated Press...") So what happened this year? A new article from the Associated Press reports:It set off again from England nearly a year later on April 27, bound for Virginia — but a generator problem diverted it to Portugal's Azores islands, where a team member flew in to perform emergency repairs. More troubles on the open sea came in late May when the U.S.-bound boat developed a problem with the charging circuit for the generator's starter batteries. AI software is getting better at helping self-driving machines understand their surroundings and pilot themselves, but most robots can't heal themselves when the hardware goes awry. Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the ship, switched to a back-up navigation computer on May 30 and charted a course to Halifax — which was closer than any U.S. destination. And unlike the real Mayflower, "the boat's webcam on Sunday morning showed it being towed by a larger boat as the Halifax skyline neared — a safety requirement under international maritime rules, IBM said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR reports:Just last month [Apple] decided to postpone its plan after more than 1,000 current and former employees signed an open letter called the plan inefficient, inflexible and a waste of time. "Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do," they wrote. It was yet more evidence of the shift in the balance of power between management and rank and file, as demand for workers has hit record highs in the past year. Companies are finding it hard to enforce unpopular policies and mandates when they fear their workers could just walk away.... Google maps workers, who are employed by the tech company Cognizant, also decided to fight back. They connected with the Alphabet Workers Union and signed a petition citing COVID fears, the costs of commuting amid $5 gas, and the increase in productivity and morale that employees have experienced while working from home.... "Our first day back to the Bothell office full-time will now be September 6," the company said in a statement released on Thursday. Even as some companies seek to bring back some semblance of office life, others are asking: What is the office for anyway? In an iconic moment, NPR's reporter also visited a management consulting firm, where their new human resources worker (who started in May) admits that "It's hard to even fathom going into the office 100%. I don't think I could do it ever again." Saturday the New York Times also reported that some corporate leaders "might find themselves fighting a culture shift beyond their control.... [Non-paywalled version here] "If the pandemic's two-plus years of remote work experimentation have taught us anything, it's that many people can be productive outside the office, and quite a few are happier doing so."Even as the pandemic has changed course, there are signs that the work-from-home trend is actually accelerating. One recent survey published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers are now saying they will allow employees to work from home an average of 2.3 days per week, up from 1.5 days in the summer of 2020. It's not just the office — it's also the commute. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that almost all of the major cities with the biggest drops in office occupancy during the pandemic had an average one-way commute of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with the smallest drops had shorter commutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft on Thursday announced a new strategy for dealing with organized labor..." reports the Washington Post (in a story republished on MSN.com): In a blog post shared with The Washington Post, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote that the company will respect workers' rights to unionize and plans to work collaboratively with organized labor organizations to "make it simpler rather than more difficult" for employees to unionize if they so choose. Microsoft is in the process of completing a $69 billion acquisition of Activision, a video game company where employees of a small subsidiary voted to unionize in March. That union, the Game Workers Alliance, is a division of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which in a statement called Microsoft's announcement "encouraging and unique among the major tech companies." CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens added that "to truly give workers a legally protected voice in decisions that affect them and their families, these principles must be put into action and incorporated into Microsoft's day-to-day operations and its expectations for its contractors...." Rebecca Givan, a Rutgers University professor of labor relations, said Microsoft's announcement could mean the company is trying to smooth things over with employees interested in unionizing. "There's a lot of actual organizing or talk or desire in the video game sector, and that's a piece of what Microsoft does. That might be what they're trying to get out in front of," Givan said. The article argues that Microsoft is "attempting to set itself apart from other Big Tech firms like Google and Amazon that have clashed publicly with employees seeking union representation." And it provides specific examples where other big tech companies have "gotten into trouble" with America's National Labor Relations Board:"The labor board has repeatedly found that Amazon wrongfully terminated or retaliated against workers who were involved with union organizing.""Google, too, has had to settle charges with workers who said the company fired them in response to union organizing.""Workers at Apple told The Post in April that they were targeted by management for supporting the union and threatened with the loss of certain benefits and opportunities for promotion."The president of America's largest federation of union, the AFL-CIO, tells the Post in a statement that "Microsoft's collaborative approach to working with its employees who seek to organize is a best practice that we look forward to seeing implemented at Microsoft and other companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened after U.S. prosecutors indicted an NFT marketplace's product manager for insider trading? Vice reports:The reaction among crypto investors was largely characterized by surprise, and an acknowledgement that trading on insider information (considered by some to be A-OK in private markets) is rampant in the space. "Bro they are prosecuting insider trading on NFTs. we're all fucked," said one pseudonymous user in reply to a tweet about the case by Steven Zheng, director of research at The Block. "This is pretty shocking. I can't imagine any NFT or DeFi developer doesn't somehow profit from insider trading," said another. Of course, not every NFT investor sees this kind of activity as acceptable. Traders themselves first brought Chastain's activity to light in September using blockchain records. A pseudonymous NFT trader, who goes by Zuwu, pointed out those trades, which were easily traceable to Chastain's publicly-known Etheruem address. Unlike Chastain, other NFT traders involved in potential insider trades are often too careful to leave traces. When they do, blockchain sleuths are quick to uncover those signs of unsavory behavior and call them out — a recent phenomenon that attempts to bring some justice to an otherwise permissive market. As a result, that surprise move by the U.S. Department of Justice has NFT traders wondering what's on the horizon for this largely unregulated industry. "Insider trading is a pretty common problem in the NFT space, especially in the case of hyped-up NFT collections as lots of stuff on the market is being driven by FOMO," Fedor Linnik, an NFT trader and creator, told Motherboard. The article also explores the question of whether the NFT marketplace falls under same restrictions as stock trading, with a professor of securities law calling it "somewhat misleading" to label this an "insider trading" case. Even to call it a wire fraud case is a stretch, the professor tells them, adding "If it goes to a jury they will wonder why they should care whether someone traded jpegs ahead of them being moved around on a webpage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week CNN published an article chronicling how 35 countries "have come together to try and master nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun — and all stars — but is painfully difficult to replicate on Earth. "Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy that, unlike fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases and, unlike the nuclear fission power used today, produces no long-life radioactive waste. Mastering it could literally save humanity from climate change, a crisis of our own making."If it is mastered, fusion energy will undoubtedly power much of the world. Just 1 gram of fuel as input can create the equivalent of eight tons of oil in fusion power. That's an astonishing yield of 8 million to 1. Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it's always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true.... The main challenge is sustaining it. The tokamak in the UK — called the Joint European Torus, or JET — held fusion energy for five seconds, but that's simply the longest that machine will go for. Its magnets were made of copper and were built in the 1970s. Any more than five seconds under such heat would cause them to melt. ITER uses newer magnets that can last much longer, and the project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.... The dimensions are mind-blowing. The tokamak will ultimately weigh 23,000 tons. That's the combined weight of three Eiffel towers. It will comprise a million components, further differing into no fewer than 10 million smaller parts. This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. Their staggering size — some of them have diameters of up to 24 meters — means they are are too large to transport and must be assembled on site in a giant hall.... Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. That's the same amount of space you could save more than 160 million one-page Word documents on. Behind hundreds of workers putting the ITER project together are around 4,500 companies with 15,000 employees from all over the globe... Now commercial businesses are preparing to generate and sell fusion energy, so optimistic they are that this energy of the future could come online by mid-century. But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn't bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel... First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues. "This article has some nice photography," writes Slashdot reader technology_dude. "It really makes it hit home on the incredible amount of design and planning work that is required." The article notes that when Stephen Hawking was asked which scientific discovery he'd like to see in his lifetime, Hawking answered, "I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"C++ allows for writing high-performance applications but this comes at a price, security..." So says Google's Chrome security team in a recent blog post, adding that in general, "While there is appetite for different languages than C++ with stronger memory safety guarantees, large codebases such as Chromium will use C++ for the foreseeable future." So the post discusses "our journey of using heap scanning technologies to improve memory safety of C++."The basic idea is to put explicitly freed memory into quarantine and only make it available when a certain safety condition is reached. Microsoft has shipped versions of this mitigation in its browsers: MemoryProtector in Internet Explorer in 2014 and its successor MemGC in (pre-Chromium) Edge in 2015. In the Linux kernel a probabilistic approach was used where memory was eventually just recycled. And this approach has seen attention in academia in recent years with the MarkUs paper. The rest of this article summarizes our journey of experimenting with quarantines and heap scanning in Chrome. In essence the C++ memory allocator (used by new and delete) is "intercepted."There are various hardening options which come with a performance cost: - Overwrite the quarantined memory with special values (e.g. zero); - Stop all application threads when the scan is running or scan the heap concurrently; - Intercept memory writes (e.g. by page protection) to catch pointer updates; - Scan memory word by word for possible pointers (conservative handling) or provide descriptors for objects (precise handling); - Segregation of application memory in safe and unsafe partitions to opt-out certain objects which are either performance sensitive or can be statically proven as being safe to skip; - Scan the execution stack in addition to just scanning heap memory... Running our basic version on Speedometer2 regresses the total score by 8%. Bummer... To reduce the regression we implemented various optimizations that improve the raw scanning speed. Naturally, the fastest way to scan memory is to not scan it at all and so we partitioned the heap into two classes: memory that can contain pointers and memory that we can statically prove to not contain pointers, e.g. strings. We avoid scanning memory that cannot contain any pointers. Note that such memory is still part of the quarantine, it is just not scanned.... [That and other] optimizations helped to reduce the Speedometer2 regression from 8% down to 2%. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hari Pota for sharing the linkRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"An actively exploited Microsoft zero-day flaw still has no patch," Wired wrote Friday (in an article they've designated as "free for a limited time only.") Microsoft first received reports of the flaw on April 21st, the article points out, and researchers have now seen malicious Word documents exploiting Follina for targets in Russia, India, the Philippines, Belarus, and Nepal. Yet "The company continues to downplay the severity of the Follina vulnerability, which remains present in all supported versions of Windows."Researchers warned last weekend that a flaw in Microsoft's Support Diagnostic Tool could be exploited using malicious Word documents to remotely take control of target devices. Microsoft released guidance on Monday, including temporary defense measures. By Tuesday, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had warned that "a remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability," known as Follina, "to take control of an affected system." But Microsoft would not say when or whether a patch is coming for the vulnerability, even though the company acknowledged that the flaw was being actively exploited by attackers in the wild. And the company still had no comment about the possibility of a patch when asked by WIRED [Thursday]. The Follina vulnerability in a Windows support tool can be easily exploited by a specially crafted Word document. The lure is outfitted with a remote template that can retrieve a malicious HTML file and ultimately allow an attacker to execute Powershell commands within Windows. Researchers note that they would describe the bug as a "zero-day," or previously unknown vulnerability, but Microsoft has not classified it as such. "After public knowledge of the exploit grew, we began seeing an immediate response from a variety of attackers beginning to use it," says Tom Hegel, senior threat researcher at security firm SentinelOne. He adds that while attackers have primarily been observed exploiting the flaw through malicious documents thus far, researchers have discovered other methods as well, including the manipulation of HTML content in network traffic.... The vulnerability is present in all supported versions of Windows and can be exploited through Microsoft Office 365, Office 2013 through 2019, Office 2021, and Office ProPlus. Microsoft's main proposed mitigation involves disabling a specific protocol within Support Diagnostic Tool and using Microsoft Defender Antivirus to monitor for and block exploitation. But incident responders say that more action is needed, given how easy it is to exploit the vulnerability and how much malicious activity is being detected. The Register adds that the flaw works in Microsoft Word even when macros are disabled. (Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the story!) Friday Microsoft went into the vulnerability's official CVE report and added this update. "Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change:About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas. In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion.... [T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts... As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate. Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse. "Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website. "Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Linux Mint is taking over development of Timeshift, a popular open-source backup tool," reports the blog OMG! Ubuntu:Anyone familiar with Mint will be familiar with this utility. Timeshift is, as the distro's own lead Clement Lefebvre says in the latest monthly update, a central plank in the system's backup and update 'strategy'. Sadly, as happens, the creator of Timeshift is unable to keep working on it owing to other responsibilities. Not keen to see it stagnate, Mint says it 'got in touch' to see how they could help. Long story short: Linux Mint is assuming maintenance of the app henceforth. And as part of the process Timeshift is becoming an official member of the XApp family (this is Mint's stable of home-grown software it designs and develops to be distro-agnostic for widest possible use).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sheryl Sandberg started at a company called Facebook, but stepped down from a changed company called Meta. So who will replace her? No one, suggests the New York Times. CEO/co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted Wednesday on Facebook that he didn't "plan to replace Sheryl's role in our existing structure." Instead, the Times notes, around 2020 his company has been structured with "four executives who have equally large responsibilities and who answer to and run major decisions by him." (There's the "public face" ambassador, the Metaverse man, and then the overseer of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook — with another executive handling analytics, infrastructure and growth.) "But none of them have as much power as Ms. Sandberg used to, when she effectively ran all of the business operations while Mr. Zuckerberg focused on developing Facebook's products..."Mr. Zuckerberg made the structural shift because he wanted to consolidate his control over all arms of the company, three people close to him said. While Mr. Zuckerberg has always been the undisputed boss, with a majority of the company's voting shares, he shared power with Ms. Sandberg when he was a younger businessman and needed help expanding the company. But with more than 18 years of experience under his belt, he wants to exercise all of his power and be identified more clearly as Meta's sole leader, the people said.... For years, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg had clear-cut responsibilities, which employees often referred to as the "Sandberg side" and "Mark side." Ms. Sandberg ran the business, policy and legal teams with a lot of autonomy, while Mr. Zuckerberg was responsible for the engineering and product teams. That began changing in 2020 after Facebook dealt with scandals involving privacy, misinformation and other toxic content on the platform. Mr. Zuckerberg told his teams that he was done apologizing and wanted to focus more time and attention on innovative products that the company was designing. Since then, Mr. Zuckerberg has assumed more control over public messaging and policy decisions, which Ms. Sandberg used to handle. He also brought in hires with public policy expertise and promoted longtime executives who were loyal to his vision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Google's Open Source blog:The Google Hardware Toolchains team is launching a new developer portal, developers.google.com/silicon, to help the developer community get started with its Open MPW shuttle program. This will allow anyone to submit open source integrated circuit designs to get manufactured at no-cost. Since November 2020, when Skywater Technologies announced their partnership with Google to open source their Process Design Kit for the SKY130 process node, the Hardware Toolchains team here at Google has been on a journey to make building open silicon accessible to all developers. Having access to an open source and manufacturable PDK changes the status-quo in the custom silicon design industry and academia: — Designers are now free to start their projects liberated from NDAs and usage restrictions — Researchers are able to make their research reproducible by their fellow peers — Open source EDA tools can integrate deeply with the manufacturing process Together we've built a community of more than 3,000 members, where hardware designers and software developers alike, can all contribute in their own way to advance the state of the art of open silicon design.... We need to go beyond cramming more transistors into smaller areas and toward more efficient dedicated hardware accelerators. Given the recent global chip supply chain struggles, and the lead time for popular ICs sometimes going over a year, we need to do this by leveraging more of the existing global foundry capacity that provides access to older and proven process node technologies.... By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world. Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other's works rather than reinventing the wheel.... To help you on-board on future shuttles, we created a new developer portal that provides pointers to get started with the various tools of the open silicon ecosystem: so make sure to check out the portal and start your open silicon journey!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Ukraine's battlefields, the simple act of powering up a cellphone can beckon a rain of deathly skyfall," reports the Associated Press. "Artillery radar and remote controls for unmanned aerial vehicles may also invite fiery shrapnel showers." And the same technology can also be used to target navigation, guidance, and communications systems "to blind and deceive the enemy."This is electronic warfare, a critical but largely invisible aspect of Russia's war against Ukraine. Military commanders largely shun discussing it, fearing they'll jeopardize operations by revealing secrets.... It is used against artillery, fighter jets, cruise missiles, drones and more. Militaries also use it to protect their forces. It's an area where Russia was thought to have a clear advantage going into the war. Yet, for reasons not entirely clear, its much-touted electronic warfare prowess was barely seen in the war's early stages in the chaotic failure to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. [A former U.S. Army commander tells the AP "What we're learning now is that the Russians eventually turned it off because it was interfering with their own communications so much."] It has become far more of a factor in fierce fighting in eastern Ukraine, where shorter, easier-to-defend supply lines let Russia move electronic warfare gear closer to the battlefield. "They are jamming everything their systems can reach," said an official of Aerorozvidka, a reconnaissance team of Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle tinkerers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. "We can't say they dominate, but they hinder us greatly." A Ukrainian intelligence official called the Russian threat "pretty severe" when it comes to disrupting reconnaissance efforts and commanders' communications with troops. Russian jamming of GPS receivers on drones that Ukraine uses to locate the enemy and direct artillery fire is particularly intense "on the line of contact," he said. Later the article says Ukraine's Aerorozvidka has also modified camera-equipped drones "to pinpoint enemy positions and drop mortars and grenades. Hacking is also used to poison or disable enemy electronics and collect intelligence." So far Ukraine has captured "captured important pieces of hardware — a significant intelligence coup — and destroyed at least two multi-vehicle mobile electronic warfare units." They've been aided by technology and intelligence from NATO members (including from satellites and surveillance aircraft). But the article also calls Elon Musk's Starlink "a proven asset."Its more than 2,200 low-orbiting satellites provide broadband internet to more than 150,000 Ukrainian ground stations. Severing those connections is a challenge for Russia. It is far more difficult to jam low-earth orbiting satellites than geostationary ones. Musk has won plaudits from the Pentagon for at least temporarily defeating Russian jamming of Ukrainian satellite uplinks with a quick software fix. But he has warned Ukrainians to keep those terminals powered down when possible — they are vulnerable to geolocation — and recently worried on Twitter about redoubled Russian interference efforts. The article points out that to "stay nimble," Ukraine is also using cutting-edge technologies including software-defined radio and 3D printing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In molecular biologist David Sinclair's lab at Harvard Medical School, old mice are growing young again," reports CNN:Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves. In his team's first breakthrough, published in late 2020, old mice with poor eyesight and damaged retinas could suddenly see again, with vision that at times rivaled their offspring's. "It's a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age," said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time. "If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer's in your 90s." Sinclair told an audience at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. "This is the world that is coming. It's literally a question of when and for most of us, it's going to happen in our lifetimes," Sinclair told the audience.... Sinclair said his lab has reversed aging in the muscles and brains of mice and is now working on rejuvenating a mouse's entire body. The article points out that he's building on research by Japan's Dr. Shinya Yamanaka (which in 2007 won a Nobel prize). But one key caveat: "Studies on whether the genetic intervention that revitalized mice will do the same for people are in early stages, Sinclair said. It will be years before human trials are finished, analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for a federal stamp of approval."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity," reported the team lead for NASA's Mars helicopter, Teddy Tzanetos, in a blog post last week.As detailed in our last blog post, for the first time in our yearlong extended mission we had a loss of communications with Ingenuity from the downlink of May 3 (Sol 427) and May 4 (Sol 428). After a week of anomaly investigation, two sols dedicated to data collection, and the heroic efforts of the Perseverance and Ingenuity operations teams, I am very happy to report that we have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity. Based on all available telemetry, the helicopter appears healthy, and we have resumed a modified form of operations. Assuming winter recommissioning activities complete nominally, Ingenuity's 29th flight may occur in the next few sols.... All telemetry downlinked so far suggests that Ingenuity is healthy, with no signs of damage from the overnight cold cycles. That's the good news. The bad news?Telemetry from Ingenuity confirmed that the loss of communications was due to insufficient battery state-of-charge (SOC) going into the night, which resulted in a reset of our mission clock. This daily state-of-charge deficit is likely to persist for the duration of Martian winter (until September/October). Challenges like these are to be expected: After hundreds of sols and dozens of flights beyond the five flights originally planned, the solar-powered helicopter is in uncharted terrain. We are now operating far outside our original design limits. Historically, Mars is very challenging for spacecraft (particularly solar-powered spacecraft). Each sol could be Ingenuity's last.... We have reached the point in Martian late fall/early winter at which Ingenuity can no longer support the energy demands of nominal operations. Starting on the evening of Sol 426, we believe Ingenuity started experiencing overnight battery brownouts (drops in the battery's voltage), which reset the electronics. Due to the seasonal decrease in available solar energy, increases in airborne dust density, and the drop in temperatures, the energy demand to keep the electronics powered and warm throughout the night has surpassed Ingenuity's available energy budget.... We expect to be in this challenging winter energy paradigm until around Sol 600, at which point we expect to return to being power-positive from sol to sol. The blog post says NASA can cope with a resetting mission clock. But the helicopter's battery (and other electronics) are now facing overnight ambient temperatures of about minus 80 degrees C (minus 112 degrees F), "a lifetime risk to our electronic components."Although component failure has always been a risk that we have carried since rover deployment, that risk is now magnified... We do have limited electronics core module (ECM) component testing to suggest that select components may survive through the winter, but we cannot predict how the entire ECM will fare throughout winter. Cold-soaking electronics is believed to have caused the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions. Given our elevated risk posture, our focus in the last several sols has been to prioritize data downlink from Ingenuity to the Helicopter Base Station (HBS). We have a handful of Heli-to-HBS transfer activities left before all unique data are copied from Ingenuity to the HBS. Specifically, we are copying flight performance logs, electronics logs, and high-resolution color images from the last eight flights that are still onboard Ingenuity. After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity's flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta. In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter. Mashable notes that Ingenuity recently sent back new footage showing its April 8th flight — calling it Ingenuity's "farthest and fastest flight yet." Flying 33 feet above the surface of Mars on April 8, "it traveled 2,310 feet — a bit less than half a mile — at 12 mph."The whole record-breaking feat lasted a little over 2.5 minutes, but that's much longer than its first flight of 39 seconds in the spring of 2021. NASA increased the new video's speed fivefold, reducing its runtime to less than 35 seconds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.