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Microsoft says token theft attacks are on the rise. From a report: Microsoft has outlined several mitigations to protect against attacks on multi-factor authentication that will unfortunately make life more difficult for your remote workers. Three years ago, attacks on multi-factor authentication (MFA) were so rare that Microsoft didn't have decent statistics on them, largely because few organisations had enabled MFA. But with MFA use rising as attacks on passwords become more common, Microsoft has seen an increase in attackers using token theft in their attempts to sidestep MFA. In these attacks, the attacker compromises a token issued to someone who's already completed MFA and replays that token to gain access from a different device. Tokens are central to OAuth 2.0 identity platforms, including Azure Active Directory (AD), which aim to make authentication simpler and faster for users, but in a way that's still resilient to password attacks. Moreover, Microsoft warns that token theft is dangerous because it doesn't require high technical skills, detection is difficult and, because the technique has only recently seen an uptick, few organisations have mitigations in place. "Recently, the Microsoft Detection and Response Team (DART) has seen an increase in attackers utilizing token theft for this purpose," Microsoft says in a blogpost. "By compromising and replaying a token issued to an identity that has already completed multifactor authentication, the threat actor satisfies the validation of MFA and access is granted to organizational resources accordingly. This poses to be a concerning tactic for defenders because the expertise needed to compromise a token is very low, is hard to detect, and few organizations have token theft mitigations in their incident response plan."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon will be cutting jobs again at some point in early 2023, CEO Andy Jassy informed employees in a memo on Thursday. The company publicly confirmed some layoffs on Wednesday, and Jassy says that as Amazon's annual planning process extends into the new year, "there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments." From a report: Jassy says the company hasn't determined exactly how many additional roles will be cut but did state that there will be "reductions in our Stores and [People, Experience, and Technology] organizations." Amazon will inform who will be impacted by the future cuts early next year. In the Wednesday notice, devices and services SVP Dave Limp said that some staffers in the organization were being laid off, and Jassy said Thursday that the company has extended voluntary buyouts to some of its HR organization, confirming reporting from Vox. Vox's article highlighted how layoffs have been communicated internally before top executives shared information publicly, and based on Jassy's note, it seems that approach will continue. "As has been the case this week, we will prioritize communicating directly with impacted employees before making broad public or internal announcements," Jassy wrote. The company will try to find roles for impacted people internally, and if it can't, workers will be offered severance packages, according to Jassy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's core consumer inflation accelerated to a 40-year high in October as a weak yen pushed up the cost of imported commodities, which were already surging due to global supply constraints. From a report: The data suggests Japanese companies may be shaking off their deflationary mindset as they gradually raise prices of everything from fuel to food while coming under pressure from cost-push inflation. The nationwide core consumer price index (CPI), which excludes volatile fresh food prices but includes energy, rose 3.6% year on year in October, versus a 3.5% rise expected by economists, and accelerating from the prior month's 3.0% gain. The jump marked the fastest gain since February 1982. It also confirmed CPI growth remained above the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) 2% inflation goal for a seventh straight month. Despite broadening price pressures, which are a growing concern for households, however, the BOJ would not join a global trend of tightening monetary policy through rate hikes. BOJ Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda reiterated on Thursday a pledge to maintain monetary stimulus to support a fragile economy facing still weak inflation and reeling from the COVID downturn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India launched its first rocket developed by a startup into space on Friday, with the aim of testing the company's technology that will be used to design three orbital vehicles. From a report: The Vikram-S rocket, developed by Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace, took off at 11:30 a.m. local time from Sriharikota, an island near Chennai in southeastern India. The rocket reached an altitude of 89.5 kilometers (56 miles) and all systems worked as planned, Pawan Goenka, head of an industry space body said. "It's a major step forward to India developing its own space ecosystem and emerging as a front-line nation in space," Space Minister Jitendra Singh said. Built in just two years, the sub-orbital validated the pressure, temperature and vibration in Skyroot's orbital vehicles, with the first of the series, Vikram I, scheduled to launch next year. It carried a payload from two Indian aerospace startups and a non-profit space research laboratory in Armenia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frederick Brooks, the famed computer architect who discovered the software tar pit and designed OS/360, died Thursday. He also debunked the concept of the Mythical Man-Month in his book, writing: "Adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer." A true icon, who won the Turing Award in 2000, Brooks was one of the great thinkers in computing. Industry tributes are pouring in the celebration of his contribution and life. Further reading: His interview with Grady Booch for Computer History Museum [PDF].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Peter is an IT manager for a technology manufacturer that got hit with a Russian ransomware strain called "Zeppelin" in May 2020. He'd been on the job less than six months, and because of the way his predecessor architected things, the company's data backups also were encrypted by Zeppelin. After two weeks of stalling their extortionists, Peter's bosses were ready to capitulate and pay the ransom demand. Then came the unlikely call from an FBI agent. "Don't pay," the agent said. "We've found someone who can crack the encryption." Peter, who spoke candidly about the attack on condition of anonymity, said the FBI told him to contact a cybersecurity consulting firm in New Jersey called Unit 221B, and specifically its founder -- Lance James. Zeppelin sprang onto the crimeware scene in December 2019, but it wasn't long before James discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the malware's encryption routines that allowed him to brute-force the decryption keys in a matter of hours, using nearly 100 cloud computer servers. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, James said Unit 221B was wary of advertising its ability to crack Zeppelin ransomware keys because it didn't want to tip its hand to Zeppelin's creators, who were likely to modify their file encryption approach if they detected it was somehow being bypassed. This is not an idle concern. There are multiple examples of ransomware groups doing just that after security researchers crowed about finding vulnerabilities in their ransomware code. "The minute you announce you've got a decryptor for some ransomware, they change up the code," James said. But he said the Zeppelin group appears to have stopped spreading their ransomware code gradually over the past year, possibly because Unit 221B's referrals from the FBI let them quietly help nearly two dozen victim organizations recover without paying their extortionists. [...] The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects. "If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" [James and co-author Joel Lathrop wrote in a blog post]. "The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key." Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key. From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them. The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys. A more technical writeup on Unit 221B's discoveries (cheekily titled "0XDEAD ZEPPELIN") is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The iPhone 15 Pro models are in line for a massive upgrade to their wired transfer speeds with the switch to USB-C, according to noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Unfortunately, he doesn't believe that benefit is coming to the regular 2023 iPhones. The Verge reports: He predicts that the 15 and 15 Plus will also swap in USB-C ports but, just like the 2022 10th-gen iPad, they'll be stuck with the same USB 2.0 speeds they had with Lighting. Kuo made the prediction in a series of tweets on Wednesday and says the information is from his "latest survey." (The analyst is known for getting information from supply chain sources.) He specified by predicting that the "15 Pro & 15 Pro Max will support at least USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3." If that's true, that'd mean they could transfer data at speeds up to 40 Gbps -- a boon for people who actually use the Pro phones to shoot a lot of ProRes video and raw photos, where even fast WiFi and cloud uploads aren't really a good substitute.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's first vaccine to treat deadly cancerous brain tumors can potentially give patients years of extra life, a global clinical trial has concluded. The Guardian reports: A senior NHS doctor who was one of the trial's chief investigators said the evidence showed DCVax had resulted in "astonishing" enhanced survival for patients. One patient in the 331-person multicenter global study lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax. In Britain, 53-year-old Nigel French is still alive seven years after having it. If approved by medical regulators, DCVax would be the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and the first in 27 years for people in whom it had returned. "The total results are astonishing," said Prof Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College hospital in London who was the European chief investigator of the trial. "The final results of this phase three trial... offer fresh hope to patients battling with glioblastoma." Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology. The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn't take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake nude imagery of celebrities. But while Reddit quickly shut down many of the subreddits dedicated to AI porn, and communities like NewGrounds, which allows some forms of adult art, banned AI-generated artwork altogether, new forums emerged to fill the gap. By far the largest is Unstable Diffusion, whose operators are building a business around AI systems tailored to generate high-quality porn. The server's Patreon -- started to keep the server running as well as fund general development -- is currently raking in over $2,500 a month from several hundred donors. "In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators," Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, told TechCrunch in a conversation via Discord. "We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from." Unsurprisingly, some AI ethicists are as worried as Chaudhry is optimistic. While the use of AI to create porn isn't new [...] Unstable Diffusion's models are capable of generating higher-fidelity examples than most. The generated porn could have negative consequences particularly for marginalized groups, the ethicists say, including the artists and adult actors who make a living creating porn to fulfill customers' fantasies. Unstable Diffusion got its start in August -- around the same time that the Stable Diffusion model was released. Initially a subreddit, it eventually migrated to Discord, where it now has roughly 50,000 members. [...] Today, the Unstable Diffusion server hosts AI-generated porn in a range of different art styles, sexual preferences and kinks. [...] Users in these channels can invoke the bot to generate art that fits the theme, which they can then submit to a "starboard" if they're especially pleased with the results. Unstable Diffusion claims to have generated over 4,375,000 images to date. On a semiregular basis, the group hosts competitions that challenge members to recreate images using the bot, the results of which are used in turn to improve Unstable Diffusion's models. As it grows, Unstable Diffusion aspires to be an "ethical" community for AI-generated porn -- i.e. one that prohibits content like child pornography, deepfakes and excessive gore. Users of the Discord server must abide by the terms of service and submit to moderation of the images that they generate; Chaudhry claims the server employs a filter to block images containing people in its "named persons" database and has a full-time moderation team. "Chaudhry sees Unstable Diffusion evolving into an organization to support broader AI-powered content generation, sponsoring dev groups and providing tools and resources to help teams build their own systems," reports TechCrunch. "He claims that Equilibrium AI secured a spot in a startup accelerator program from an unnamed 'large cloud compute provider' that comes with a 'five-figure' grant in cloud hardware and compute, which Unstable Diffusion will use to expand its model training infrastructure." In addition to the grant, Unstable Diffusion will launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek venture funding, Chaudhry says. "We plan to create our own models and fine-tune and combine them for specialized use cases which we shall spin off into new brands and products," Chaudhry added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has confirmed that it's removing addresses, "interested in", political views and religion from Facebook profiles as of December 1st. Engadget reports: The move is meant to make Facebook "easier to navigate and use," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. If you've filled out any of these fields, you'll get a notification about the change. Other details you provide, such as your contact information and relationship status, will persist. You can download a copy of your Facebook data before December 1st if you're determined to preserve it, and you still have control over who can see the remaining profile content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: Yikes, gadzooks, and shiver my timbers! Elastic Labs has found surprisingly that 50% of malware comes from one app: MacKeeper, ironically. Ironic in that MacKeeper claims to "keep your Mac clean and safe with zero effort." MacKeeper also has a tainted reputation for being difficult to completely uninstall and as a malicious antivirus. A new spin on the biblical phrase, "Am I my brother's keeper..." Well, when the inmate is running the asylum. The findings appear in Elastic Security Labs' recently released 2022 Global Threat Report. As Neowin reports, MacKeeper "can be abused by threat actors because it has extensive permissions and access to processes and files." With that said, the report found that only 6.2% of malware ends up on macOS devices, compared to 54.4% and 39.4% on Windows and Linux, respectively.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced today that it's introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed a majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users. TechCrunch reports: Search Starting today, users will be able to use Search to find their favorite dish at a restaurant near them. For example, you can search "truffle mac and cheese near me" to see which nearby restaurants carry the dish on their menu. Once you find a specific dish that you're looking for, you can get more information about its price, ingredients and more. Another new Search functionality lets you use Google's multisearch feature to find specific food near you. Say you see something tasty-looking online, but don't know what it is or where to find it. You can now use Lens in the Google app for Android or iOS to snap a picture or take a screenshot of a dish and add the words "near me" to find a place that sells it nearby. Later this year, Google is going roll out an update to its Lens AR Translate capabilities so users can more seamlessly translate text on complex backgrounds. Instead of covering up the original text like it currently does, Google is going to erase the text and re-create the pixels underneath with an AI-generated background, and then overlay the translated text on top of the image. Maps As for the new Maps features, Google is launching a new visual search experience called Live View in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. [...] In addition to displaying information about where places are, users will be able to see key information about each spot overlaid, such as whether the location is busy, if its open, what the price range is, etc. Another new Maps feature makes it easier for EV owners to find the best charging station for their vehicle. Now, you can search for "EV charging stations" and select the "fast charge" filter. You can also filter for stations that offer your EV's plug type. Google also announced that it's expanding its "accessible places" feature globally after initially launching it in the U.S., Australia, Japan and the U.K. in 2020. The feature is designed to help people determine whether a place is wheelchair accessible. Shopping Google has announced a new AR shopping feature that is designed to make it easier to find your exact foundation match. The company says its new photo library features 148 models representing a diverse spectrum of skin tones, ages, genders, face shapes, ethnicities and skin types. As a result, it should be easier for shoppers to better visualize what different products will look like on them. [...] Users can now also shop for shoes using AR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars. The fact that electric vehicles are "simpler" than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has long been a talking point of electric vehicle fans and evangelists (aka EVangelists). This has mostly come into play when talking about lower maintenance costs. There aren't all the belts, tubes, hoses, etc. that you find in a gasmobile. That means fewer parts that can break and less maintenance over time. What is less discussed is what Jim Farley has highlighted this week -- that it also means simpler production and a smaller labor force manufacturing the world's cars and trucks. Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges. The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, announced late Wednesday that his government plans to buy one Bitcoin every day starting on Thursday. Gizmodo reports: The current price of one Bitcoin is roughly $16,540, down 1.5% from a day earlier and down 73% from a year ago. Bitcoin was trading at an all-time high of over $68,000 in November 2021 when El Salvador was purchasing large quantities of Bitcoin. President Bukele has already lost El Salvador tens of millions of dollars, according to the latest calculations by Bloomberg News. El Salvador hasn't publicly confirmed how many bitcoin purchases the country has made, but based on Bukele's tweets we can determine he's purchased 2,381 Bitcoin since the start of his experiment. The price for all the country's Bitcoin holdings has totaled $105 million to purchase, according to Bloomberg, while the current worth is roughly $39.4 million. Bukele would've been smarter just holding U.S. dollars as cash, even with annual inflation at almost 8%. Despite declaring Bitcoin an official currency in El Salvador in late 2021, few people are actually using the crypto for purchases in the country. And one of the common reasons cited for declaring it a currency, sending remittances back to the country from abroad, has been a bust as well. Roughly $6.4 billion dollars was sent as remittances to El Salvador from September 2021 until June 2022, but less than 2% of those were in cryptocurrency, according to Reuters. The Bitcoin experiment has also caused El Salvador's credit rating to get knocked down repeatedly, with the country's rating currently sitting at CC, due to the likelihood it will default on bond obligations that are coming due in 2023, according to CoinDesk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1Password has announced that passkey support will be available to its customers in "early 2023," allowing users to securely log in to apps and websites without a password. The Verge reports: Passkeys are a passwordless login technology developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include most of the Big Tech companies. The tech allows users to replace traditional passwords with their device's own authentication -- such as an iPhone with Face ID -- offering greater security and protection since there's no password to steal or accidentally hand over via a phishing attack. 1Password claims its own variation, called Universal Sign On, will be superior to others by supporting multiple platforms and cross-platform syncing when it launches next year. By contrast, passkey support through companies like Apple is only built to seamlessly synchronize access on devices within the same ecosystem. A live demonstration of how passkeys will work is available for 1Password users using the latest version of its Chrome browser extension, alongside a video demo for those not using the service and a directory listing which websites, apps, and services are using passkeys for authentication. 1Password will bring full support for passkeys to its browser extension and desktop apps in early 2023, with mobile support to follow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, the alleged masterminds behind Z-Library -- an e-book pirate site that claims to be "the world's largest library" -- were arrested. According to a press release yesterday from the US Department of Justice, Russian nationals Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova have been charged with "criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering for operating Z-Library." "As alleged, the defendants profited illegally off work they stole, often uploading works within mere hours of publication, and in the process victimized authors, publishers, and booksellers," Breon Peace, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. At the request of the US government, Napolsky and Ermakova were arrested in Argentina on November 3. On the same day, the US government seized "a complex network of approximately 249 interrelated web domains," the press release said. For many less web-savvy users, the domain seizure essentially shut down access to Z-Library's 11 million e-books, but anyone on the dark web knows it's still up and running -- suggesting that while arresting Napolsky and Ermakova has stifled Z-Library, it has not shuttered it, and it could come back. TorrentFreak reported that it's still unknown if the pair has been involved with Z-Library since the start. Michael J. Driscoll, the assistant director in charge at the New York Federal Bureau of Investigation field office, seems to suspect they have. Although the indictment is only focused on the duo's alleged criminal activity between 2018 and 2022, Driscoll said that they are believed to have "operated a website for over a decade whose central purpose was providing stolen intellectual property, in violation of copyright laws." "Intellectual property theft crimes deprive their victims of both ingenuity and hard-earned revenue," Driscoll said. "The FBI is determined to ensure those willing to steal and profit from the creativity of others are stopped and made to face the consequences in the criminal justice system." If Napolsky and Ermakova are charged, the indictment said that they will be required to "forfeit any property, real or personal, constituting, or derived from, proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of such offenses." TorrentFreak reported that Argentina has not yet received a request from the US to extradite the accused Z-Library operators, but that will be the next step toward shutting down Z-Library. "Z-Library has linked eager readers to millions of free e-books since 2009, but it wasn't until Z-Library began recently trending on TikTok that authors protesting the piracy decided enough was enough," adds Ars. The TikTok hashtag #zlibrary was viewed 19 million times, which spurred The Authors Guild to complain to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. "Z-Library is killing us," romance writer Sarina Bowen told officials. "A book we release in the morning is up on Z-Library by lunchtime. This isn't the only site that hurts us, but it's the site that keeps showing up in TikTok videos."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A frustrated owner of an RTX 4090 graphics card, suffering from the infamous melty power connector problem, has filed a class action suit against Nvidia. From a report: Filed in a California court on November 11th, the suit may make for painful reading for Nvidia and includes numerous allegations from fraud to unjust enrichment. The case refers to widely reported instances of the new-style 16-pin power connector used by Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 boards overheating and melting under heavy load. Reportedly, the lawsuit claims that Nvidia sold RTX 4090s with, "defective and dangerous power cable plug and socket(s), which has rendered consumers' cards inoperable and poses a serious electrical and fire hazard for each and every purchaser." It's notable that the claimant, one Lucas Genova, describes himself as "experienced in the installation of computer componentry like graphics cards," thereby aiming to head off any implication of user error at the pass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will be adopting USB-C type as a common charging port for smart devices, with stakeholders reaching a consensus at a meeting of an inter-ministerial task force, consumer affairs secretary Rohit Kumar Singh said on Wednesday. From a report: The government held wide-ranging consultations to standardize charging ports for all compatible smart devices, but it is yet to reach a decision on chargers for low-cost feature phones. With universal chargers consumers will no longer need a different charger every time they purchase a new device. Besides, the move will also reduce massive amounts of e-waste. In 2021, India is estimated to have generated 5 million tonnes of e-waste , only behind China and the US, according to an ASSOCHAM-EY report, Electronic Waste Management in India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Food and Drug Administration has given a safety clearance to lab-grown meat for the first time. From a report: Upside Foods, a California-based company that makes meat from cultured chicken cells, will be able to begin selling its products once its facilities have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture. The agency said it had evaluated the information submitted by Upside Foods and it had "no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusion." "Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs and Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has fixed yet another problem in some versions of Windows 10, a bug that makes the taskbar and desktop temporarily vanish or causes the system to ignore you. From a report: According to Redmond, users "might experience an error in which the desktop or taskbar might momentarily disappear, or your device might become unresponsive." The issue affects PCs running Windows 10 versions 22H2, 21H2, 21H1, and 20H2, the company wrote on its Windows Health Dashboard. Microsoft didn't outline the exact cause but notes it was related to the KB5016688 220820_03051 cumulative update and later. The software giant is using its Known Issue Rollback (KIR) feature -- which enables IT administrators to roll back the unwanted changes of an update -- to resolve the problem, adding that it could take up to 24 hours for the fix to reach non-managed business systems and consumer devices. Restarting the device may accelerate the timeframe. Organizations that use enterprise-managed devices can install and configure a special Group Policy by going to "Computer Configuration" and then "Administrative Templates" and "Group Policy name." If the resolution doesn't work, users can try restarting the Windows device, according to Microsoft. The latest fix comes after a number of other problems were resolved this week.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river is running under the ice sheet. That could be bad news for sea-level rise. From a report: For all its treacherousness and general inclination to kill you, Antarctica's icy surface is fairly tranquil: vast stretches of miles-thick whiteness, with not a plant or animal to speak of. But way below the surface, where that ice meets land, things get wild. What scientists used to think was a ho-hum subglacial environment is in fact humming with hydrological activity, recent research is revealing, with major implications for global sea-level rise. Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica's ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. "Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed," says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. "Now we're in a position that we've just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet." Antarctica's ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet -- where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean -- is known as the grounding line. But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what's going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds -- the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analyzing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there's land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below -- a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2022, the latest version of its database software, which originally launched more than 33 years ago. From a report: Microsoft describes this release as the "most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet" and with connections to Azure Synapse Link for enabling real-time analytics over the database, Azure Purview for data governance and disaster recovery with the help of Azure SQL Managed Instance, this release is, in many ways, the culmination of the cloud-connection groundwork the team started quite a few years ago. "From the very beginning, the vision [for SQL Server] really was about -- databases were very complex -- how do you make that extremely simple? And in many ways, I think that has been a key reason why it lasted for so long and how we've evolved it as well," Rohan Kumar, Microsoft's corporate VP for Azure Data, told me. "One of the big things that I think about with SQL Server 2022 is that we've made it completely cloud-connected to Azure." He noted that while the migration of on-prem workloads is happening, Microsoft's customers are all moving at very different speeds and some, for a multitude of reasons, may never move to the cloud at all. That, he argues, is why the company always bet on a hybrid approach, but it is also why a lot of customers started asking about how they could get the value of being in the cloud without actually having to move all of their data to it. "That was really the key thesis of why we invested in making this into a cloud release," Kumar said. A good example here is the new disaster recovery function that allows users to replicate their data in SQL Managed Instance on Azure and use that as a backup for their main on-premises SQL Server, which should make it easy to fail over to that when the main server goes down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Respiratory illnesses are raging this fall, slamming children particularly hard. From a report: Cases of influenza-like illnesses are off to a startlingly strong and early start this season. RSV -- respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus -- continues to skyrocket. A stew of SARS-CoV-2 variants is still simmering in the background. And the rabble of usual cold-season viruses, such as rhinoviruses and enteroviruses, is also making the rounds. With the surge in infections, children's hospitals around the country have reported being at capacity or overwhelmed, as Ars has reported before. But another effect of the crush of viruses is a squeeze on the workforce. As The Washington Post first reported Tuesday, the US broke its record last month for people missing work due to childcare problems -- such as having children home sick and childcare facilities or schools shuttered due to staffing shortages and sickness. In October, more than 100,000 employed Americans missed work for childcare-related problems, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is more missing workers than in any other month in recent records, including the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many childcare facilities and schools closed down for extended periods. At the height of pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020, the number of Americans missing work for childcare problems only reached the low 90,000s.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jon Victor, reporting for The Information: As layoffs spread across Silicon Valley, Google has stood out by not cutting employees so far. But as outside pressure builds on the company to improve the productivity of its workers, a new performance management system could help managers push out thousands of underperforming employees starting early next year. Managers could also use the ratings to avoid paying them bonuses and stock grants. Under the new system, managers have been asked to categorize 6% of employees, or roughly 10,000 people, as low performers in terms of their impact for the business, according to people with knowledge of the system. In the previous performance review system, managers were expected to put 2% of employees in that bucket. The new system, which Google in May announced in broad terms, also reduces the percentage of employees that can score a high rating. Details of the rating system haven't been previously reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has fired or disciplined more than two dozen employees and contractors over the last year whom it accused of improperly taking over user accounts, in some cases allegedly for bribes, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter and documents. From the report: Some of those fired were contractors who worked as security guards stationed at Meta facilities and were given access to the Facebook parent's internal mechanism for employees to help users having trouble with their accounts, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter. The mechanism, known internally as "Oops," has existed since Facebook's early years as a means for employees to help users they know who have forgotten their passwords or emails, or had their accounts taken over by hackers. As part of the alleged abuse of the system, Meta says that in some cases workers accepted thousands of dollars in bribes from outside hackers to access user accounts, the people and documents say. The disciplinary actions are part of a lengthy internal probe led by Meta executives, according to the documents and one of the people. "Individuals selling fraudulent services are always targeting online platforms, including ours, and adapting their tactics in response to the detection methods that are commonly used across the industry," said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. He added that the company "will keep taking appropriate action against those involved in these kinds of schemes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NetEase and Blizzard Entertainment plan to end their 14-year partnership after January, depriving the Chinese firm of a slice of revenue and suspending service for some of the country's most popular games. From a report: The Hangzhou-based publishing giant and Activision Blizzard Inc. subsidiary failed to agree on an extension to their long-running collaboration, which had encompassed famed franchises like StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Blizzard will suspend most online game services in mainland China from Jan. 23, the US company said on Wednesday. Game sales will also halt in the coming days. Beyond financial terms, key sticking points to the NetEase extension were ownership of intellectual property and control of the data of millions of players across China, people familiar with the discussions said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks weren't public.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla today released its annual "State of Mozilla" report and for the most part, the news here is positive. From a report: Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit side of the overall Mozilla organization, generated $585 million from its search partnerships, subscriptions and ad revenue in 2021 -- up 25% from the year before. And while Mozilla continues to mostly rely on its search partnerships, revenue from its new products like the Mozilla VPN, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Plus, Pocket and others now accounts for $57 million of its revenue, up 125% compared to the previous year. For the most part, that's driven by ads on the New Tab in Firefox and in Pocket, but the security products now also have an annual revenue of $4 million. With the launch of this year's report, the Mozilla leadership team is also taking some time to look ahead, because in many ways, this is an inflection point for Mozilla. When Mozilla was founded, the internet was essentially the web and the browser was the way to access it. Since then, the way we experience the internet has changed dramatically and while the browser is still one of the most important tools around, it's not the only one. With that, Mozilla, too, has to change. Its Firefox browser has gone from dominating the space to being something of a niche product, but the organization's mission ("to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all") is just as important today -- and maybe more so -- as it was almost 25 years ago when Mozilla was founded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dairy cows fed industrial hemp produced milk with detectable levels of the buzz-inducing molecular compound THC, according to a new study from Germany that could influence the potential uses of hemp as an ingredient in animal feed. The dairy cows also showed behavioral changes -- yawning and salivating a lot, moving a little unsteadily on their hoofs, standing in one place for a protracted period, and having a "somnolent appearance." The Washington Post reports: The peer-reviewed study, conducted on Holstein cows in Berlin and published Monday in the journal Nature Food, is one of the first major investigations of the use of industrial hemp as a potential supplement in animal feed. For now, such use is illegal under U.S. law, which does not allow THC in the food chain. But the new research comes as hemp, which has many industrial uses, continues to emerge from an agricultural exile that dates to the "reefer madness" hysteria of the 1930s. [...] The researchers at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment found no behavioral change in cows given the entire hemp plant, which contained very low levels of THC. Only when fed solely the portions of the hemp plant with higher THC concentrations -- including the flowers and leaves -- did the behavioral effects appear, according to the study. Those effects included slower heart rate and respiration, "pronounced tongue play, increased yawning, salivation, nasal secretion formation," and reddening of a portion of the eyes, the report states. Some animals "displayed careful, occasionally unsteady gait, unusually long standing and abnormal posture." The animals also ate less and produced less milk, according to Robert Pieper, head of the department of food chain safety for the institute and co-author of the new paper. "That is a strong effect on animal health. Not a positive effect," he said. But he did not predict how it would play out in the policy world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Privacy-focused search site DuckDuckGo has added yet another way to prevent more of your data from going to advertisers, opening its App Tracking Protection for Android to beta testers. DuckDuckGo is positioning App Tracking Protection as something like Apple's App Tracking Transparency for iOS devices, but "even more powerful." Enabling the service in the DuckDuckGo app for Android (under the "More from DuckDuckGo" section) installs a local VPN service on your phone, which can then start automatically blocking trackers on DDG's public blocklist. DuckDuckGo says this happens "without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers." Google recently gave Android users some native tools to prevent wanton tracking, including app-by-app location-tracking approval and a limited native ad-tracking opt-out. Apple's App Tracking Transparency asks if users want to block apps from accessing the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), but apps can still use the largest tracking networks across many apps to better profile app users. Allison Goodman, senior communications manager for DuckDuckGo, told Ars Technica that App Tracking Protection needs Android's VPN permission so it can monitor network traffic. When it recognizes a tracker from its blocklist, it "looks at the destination domain for any outbound request and blocks them if they are in our blocklist and the requesting app is not owned by the same company that owns the domain." Goodman added that "much of the data collected by trackers is not controlled by [Android] permissions," making App Tracking Protection a complementary offering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have developed a fentanyl vaccine that could eliminate the drug's "high" by blocking its ability to enter the brain -- which could be a major step forward in the ongoing opioid crisis. Yahoo News reports: The study, conducted by a research team led by the University of Houston and funded by the Department of Defense through the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Disorder Research Program, was published in the journal Pharmaceutics at the end of October. Colin Haile, a research associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said in a news release that the vaccine "is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys. "Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can "get back on the wagon' to sobriety." Haile added that the anti-fentanyl antibodies didn't cross-react with other opioids, meaning a vaccinated person could still be treated for pain relief with other opioids. The vaccine did not cause any adverse side effects in rats involved in lab studies, and clinical trials in humans are planned "soon," with manufacturing of clinical-grade vaccine to begin in the coming months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study has found that Apple's wireless earbuds can serve as a more affordable and accessible sound amplification device than medical hearing aids. Gizmodo reports: Inspired by a feature called Live Listen released in 2016 by Apple, which allows an iPhone or iPad to be used as sound-boosting microphone, researchers from the Taipei Veterans General Hospital wondered whether the performance of AirPods 2 and the original AirPods Pro using this feature could compare to medical hearing aids. Apple does not position Live Listen as a tool for those dealing with hearing loss but as a way for users with normal hearing to boost desired sounds, like the calls of a bird. However, the researchers found that, in some situations, consumer-level personal sound amplification products faired quite well against pricier medically prescribed solutions, and given the popularity of products like Apple's AirPods, there's no stigma associated with wearing them. The researchers tested the $129 AirPods 2 and $249 AirPods Pro paired with iPhone XS Max smartphones running iOS 13. They compared these against the $10,000 OTICON Opn 1 behind-the-ear hearing aids and a more affordable alternative, the $1,500 Bernafon MD1. The four options were tested with 21 participants dealing with mild to moderate hearing loss, who were asked to repeat short sentences read to them by the researchers in varying environments. In a quiet setting, the AirPods Pro were found to perform as well as the cheaper hearing aids and almost as good as the premium model, while the Air Pods 2 performed the worst of all four tested devices but still helped participants hear what was being read to them more clearly than not using a sound-enhancing device at all. In a noisy environment, the AirPods Pro performed even closer to the premium hearing aid model, thanks to their built-in noise cancellation, but only when the distracting noises were coming from the sides of the participant. When the noise was coming from the front, alongside the sample sentences being read by the researchers, both wireless earbud products failed to help improve what was being heard. "Hearing aids remain the best option for those dealing with hearing loss, but for those who don't have access to them for whatever reason, a cheaper product like Apple's AirPods Pro could provide noticeable improvements in hearing and clarity for those dealing with mild-to-moderate hearing loss and could serve as a useful alternative until over-the-counter solutions are more readily available and affordable," concludes the report. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration decided to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and without a prescription to adults, a decision that "could fundamentally change technology," said Nicholas Reed, an audiologist at the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sony's first OTC hearing aids were announced last month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) warned Americans against buying or using any Onewheel self-balance skateboardings, ranging from the original through to newer models like the GT and Pint X. Engadget reports: The vehicles can forcefully eject riders, the CPSC said. The Commission added that here have been reports of "at least" four deaths and multiple serious injuries between 2019 and 2021 after the boards either stopped balancing properly or came to an abrupt stop. Onewheel creator Future Motion has refused a recall and rejected the CPSC's stance. The company believes the Commission's warning is "unjustified and alarmist," and that its boards are safe if they're used responsibly with appropriate safety equipment. Board owners are "adults" who know that there's always a risk to any board sport or even riding a bike, Future Motion argued. To that end, it noted that the CPSC itself prized safety education over warnings when snowboarding took off in the 1990s. The firm said it had studied boards affected by sudden stops, and hadn't found any inherent technical problems. Onewheels have lower serious injury rates than bikes, ATVs and motorcycles, Future Motion claimed. It also accused the CPSC of preferring a "sensational" alert over cooperating on safety improvements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI and CISA revealed in a joint advisory published today that an unnamed Iranian-backed threat group hacked a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) organization to deploy XMRig cryptomining malware. The attackers compromised the federal network after hacking into an unpatched VMware Horizon server using an exploit targeting the Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) remote code execution vulnerability. After deploying the cryptocurrency miner, the Iranian threat actors also set up reverse proxies on compromised servers to maintain persistence within the FCEB agency's network. "In the course of incident response activities, CISA determined that cyber threat actors exploited the Log4Shell vulnerability in an unpatched VMware Horizon server, installed XMRig crypto mining software, moved laterally to the domain controller (DC), compromised credentials, and then implanted Ngrok reverse proxies on several hosts to maintain persistence," the joint advisory reads. The two U.S. federal agencies added that all organizations who haven't yet patched their VMware systems against Log4Shell should assume that they've already been breached and advise them to start hunting for malicious activity within their networks. CISA warned in June that VMware Horizon and Unified Access Gateway (UAG) servers are still being preyed upon by multiple threat actors, including state-sponsored hacking groups, using Log4Shell exploits. Log4Shell can be exploited remotely to target vulnerable servers exposed to local or Internet access to move laterally across breached networks to access internal systems that store sensitive data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell on Wednesday said it reached a $1 billion settlement of a lawsuit accusing it of short-changing some shareholders in a controversial $23.9 billion transaction in 2018 that marked its return as a publicly traded company. Reuters reports: The all-cash settlement is subject to approval by a Delaware Chancery Court judge, and will be reflected in Dell's third-quarter results. It resolves claims against the Round Rock, Texas-based computing and technology services company and controlling shareholders, including billionaire Chief Executive Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake. The disputed December 2018 transaction involved a stock swap related to Dell's interest in software maker VMware. Dell paid $14 billion in cash and issued 149.4 million Class C shares in exchange for outstanding Class V shares, which tracked VMware's publicly traded stock. Holders of the Class V shares sought $10.7 billion in damages, saying their stock was worth far more than Dell paid for it, while the Class C stock was worth far less than Michael Dell and Silver Lake claimed. A trial had been scheduled to begin next month. The settlement also resolves claims against Goldman Sachs Group, which advised Dell on the transaction and stood to receive a $70 million fee. Insurers may pay part of the settlement amount.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has introduced a new account management page called "Manage Access and Devices" that gives users the ability to remove access privileges from specific devices. The feature is available on the web and in the streaming service's Android and iOS apps. Ars Technica reports: Previously, users could see a list of devices that had recently accessed their accounts, and they could revoke access to all devices simultaneously, but they could not revoke access on a case-by-case basis. Each item in the list of devices will include an IP address-based location, a device type, and the user profile that most recently accessed Netflix from that device. Netflix describes it as a security feature, in that it's useful to users who don't share their passwords at all. For example, you now have a way to clean up after yourself if you stayed at an Airbnb and signed into your Netflix account on the smart TV there but forgot to sign out before you left. Further, the page could help you identify if someone has gained access to your account via a compromised password.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia and Microsoft announced Wednesday a multi-year collaboration to build an AI supercomputer in the cloud, adding tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to Microsoft Azure. ZDNet: The new agreement makes Azure the first public cloud to incorporate Nvidia's full AI stack -- its GPUs, networking, and AI software. By beefing up Azure's infrastructure with Nvidia's full AI suite, more enterprises will be able to train, deploy, and scale AI -- including large, state-of-the-art models. "AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating," Manuvir Das, Nvidia's VP of enterprise computing, said in a statement. "The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups, and enabled new enterprise applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing next month on FTX's collapse and the broader implications for the digital asset industry. From a report: The committee says it expects to hear from "the companies and individuals involved, the companies and individuals involved, including Sam Bankman-Fried, Alameda Research, Binance, FTX, and related entities, among others," for a hearing to take place in December. "Oversight is one of Congress' most critical functions and we must get to the bottom of this for FTX's customers and the American people," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the top committee Republican, in a statement. "It's essential that we hold bad actors accountable so responsible players can harness technology to build a more inclusive financial system." Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the current but likely outgoing chair of the House Financial Services Committee, added: "The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, is asking managers to weed out underperforming workers on teams that have grown too fast, and will extend a hiring freeze across the organization into the first quarter of 2023 as the business seeks to keep costs in check amid slowing growth. Fortune: In a meeting this week, numerous AWS managers were informed that a hiring freeze that began earlier this month would continue into the first three months of the new year, but that layoffs were not currently planned at AWS, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The lack of layoffs was greeted with relief by some AWS insiders, given the recent news that parent company Amazon was eliminating roughly 10,000 jobs across its retail and devices operations, as well as in human resources. Some AWS teams may still shrink however, as the business takes steps to reduce staffing levels in groups that are currently above their headcount targets for the year. Managers of such teams are expected to "fix" the situation by the end of Q1 next year by managing out low performers through performance improvement plans, attrition, and other means, the person told Fortune.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fedora 37 is now officially released. From a report: Fedora 37 brings the GNOME 43 desktop to Fedora Workstation 37, updated toolchain components like Glibc 2.36 and LLVM 15 and Binutils 2.38, official support for the Raspberry Pi 4, retiring 32-bit ARMv7 support, Fedora CoreOS has been promoted to a Fedora Edition, Perl 5.36, Python 3.11, RPM 4.18, LXQt 1.1, and a wealth of other updated packages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that he is "extremely concerned" about TikTok's operations in the U.S. From a report: "We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI's end about TikTok," Wray told members of the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing about worldwide threats. "They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose. Or to control software on millions of devices, which gives it opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices." Wray's remarks build on those from other government officials and members of Congress who have expressed deep skepticism about the ability of the Chinese-owned video platform to protect U.S. user information from an adversarial government. TikTok has maintained it doesn't store U.S. user data in China, where the law allows the government to force companies to hand over internal information. Wray said that law alone was "plenty of reason by itself to be extremely concerned."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MrBeast has ended PewDiePie's reign as the YouTuber with the most subscribers -- the first change at the top in almost 10 years. From a report: Swedish creator PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, became the most-subscribed YouTuber in August 2013 with his gaming reaction videos. In 2019, he was the first person to attract 100 million subscribers. But the philanthropy of MrBeast, really called Jimmy Donaldson, gained him his 112 millionth subscriber this month. Although YouTube does not show the exact numbers, that pushed him above PewDiePie's 111 million. MrBeast is known for videos featuring huge cash giveaways and prizes, as well as charity work. In 2021, he launched a separate philanthropy-themed YouTube channel, which itself has more than 10 million subscribers, and he has a licensed charity that functions as a food bank to feed communities across the US. He and fellow YouTuber Mark Rober organised international collaborative fundraisers TeamSeas and TeamTrees, which focus on environmental issues - the latter raising more than $24m to plant 20 million trees worldwide. And PewDiePie himself donated almost $70,000 to the TeamTrees project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft and Riot Games are teaming up on a new research project that's intended to reduce toxic in-game chats. From a report: The new project, called "Zero Harm in Comms," will be broken up into two main phases. For the first phase, Ubisoft and Riot will try to create a framework that lets them share, collect, and tag data in a privacy-protecting way. It's a critical first step to ensure that the companies aren't keeping data that contains personally identifiable information, and if Ubisoft and Riot find they can't do it, "the project stops," Yves Jacquier, executive director at Ubisoft La Forge, said in an interview with The Verge. Once that privacy-protecting framework is established, Ubisoft and Riot plan to build tools that use AI trained by the datasets to try and detect and mitigate "disruptive behaviors," according to a press release. Traditionally, detecting harmful intent has relied on "dictionary-based technologies," where you have a list of words spelled in different ways that can be used to determine if a message might be bad, according to Jacquier. With this partnership, Ubisoft and Riot are trying to use natural language processing to extract the general meaning of a sentence but take the context of the discussion into account, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Evernote, in a blog post: Today we are pleased to announce that Evernote has agreed to join Bending Spoons, a leading developer of stand-out mobile apps. In the deal signed between Bending Spoons and Evernote, Bending Spoons agrees to take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to complete early in 2023. For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain. The path we've taken in recent years -- rebuilding our apps in order to expand Evernote's utility and deepen its appeal -- has made possible new features, deep focus on our customers, and ultimately, an #everbetter productivity solution on the cusp of the next stage of innovation and growth. Teaming up with Bending Spoons will speed that journey, accelerating the delivery of improvements across our Teams, Professional, Personal, and Free offerings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Transportation Department has fined a half-dozen airlines a total of more than $7 million for failing to provide timely refunds to customers. The department's intervention contributed to the airlines' issuing more than $600 million in refunds, it said. From a report: Frontier Airlines, a budget carrier based in Denver, was fined $2.2 million, more than any other company. It was the only U.S. airline penalized as part of Monday's announcement and has issued $222 million in refunds, according to the department. The refunds were meant to compensate passengers for flights that were canceled, significantly delayed or otherwise altered substantially, the department said. "As people get ready to fly this holiday season, I want customers to know that the D.O.T. has their back," the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said on a call with reporters. Air India was assessed the second-largest fine, of $1.4 million, and TAP Air Portugal was fined $1.1 million. The remaining three carriers -- Aeromexico, El Al and Avianca -- will each pay less than $1 million. Including the penalties announced on Monday, the department's Office of Aviation Consumer Protection has issued a record $8.1 million in fines in 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gemini Trust, the cryptocurrency platform run by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, said redemptions by customers for its Earn program are being delayed after its partner in the product, Genesis Global, paused withdrawals on its borrowing platform amid a liquidity crunch. From a report: Genesis is one of the main borrowers of Gemini Earn, a product used to generate yields for its customers, according to Gemini Earn's website. Gemini is working with Genesis to allow users to redeem funds as 'quickly as possible.' The delay doesn't impact any other Gemini products and services, the New York-based firm said in a statement. "The past week has been an incredibly challenging and stressful time for our industry. We are disappointed that the Earn program SLA will not be met, but we are encouraged by Genesis' and its parent company Digital Currency Group's commitment to doing everything in their power to fulfill their obligations to customers under the Earn program," the statement said. Genesis suspended lending withdrawals, as the spectacular collapse of crypto exchange FTX shocked the digital-asset industry. The firm said it has hired advisers to explore all possible options, including new funding, and will deliver a plan for its lending business next week. Genesis' lending business had previously been affected by its exposure to bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Trading and other services at Genesis remain operational.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A partnership with Driscoll's exemplifies a shift toward more pedestrian projects with actual commercial applications. From a report: When Deb Menicos walks a strawberry field, she doesn't just look at the berries. Menicos, who holds a Ph.D. in plant breeding from Ohio State University and works as a senior scientist at Driscoll's, will often find herself counting leaves and examining the small stalks protruding from the base of the plant. These parts, known as trusses, are important because they're where the flowers and berries grow. "We want a small plant, with compact leaves and trusses poking out -- not too long, because we don't want them to touch the dirt," she says. Developing a new berry variety at Driscoll's takes at least five years. It begins with a crop of 25,000 genetically distinct plants that grow in the company's breeding field near its headquarters in Watsonville, California. Menicos and her colleagues winnow that down first to 250 plants, then clone them and replant them, narrowing the field until they have a winner. The goal is to make the most and tastiest berries while minimizing the cost of fertilizers, pesticides and labor. Today, determining which genetic attributes translate into the easiest plants to harvest comes down to "observations and feelings," Menicos says. "We want to have better data, more quantitative data. And that's where Mineral comes in." Mineral is another way of saying Google. The closely guarded project grew out of an effort by the company's famous innovation lab, X, to use cameras and machine learning to help farmers make better decisions. Working with Driscoll's, Mineral created large unmanned rovers -- the vehicles are a little bigger than a Smart car and are packed with sensors and cameras -- that drive up and down crop rows collecting data that tell farmers which plants are thriving and which aren't. This is known as "phenotyping," and it's a huge challenge for farmers, says Elliott Grant, Mineral's general manager. "The price of genetic modeling went down to pretty much nothing, but you still don't know what the plant does when you engineer it," he says. "Breeders and crop researchers are still going into the fields with tape measures and notepads." [...] Besides at Driscoll's, Google is testing versions of its agricultural technology with more than a dozen other companies including Syngenta, the Chinese state-owned agricultural giant that develops seeds, insecticides and herbicides for staples such as soybeans, corn and wheat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tuvalu says it plans to build a digital version of itself, replicating islands and landmarks and preserving its history and culture as rising sea levels threaten to submerge the tiny Pacific island nation. From a report: Tuvalu's Foreign Minister Simon Kofe told the COP27 climate summit it was time to look at alternative solutions for his country's survival and this included Tuvalu becoming the first digitised nation in the metaverse -- an online realm that uses augmented and virtual reality (VR) to help users interact. "Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud," he said in the video that sees him standing on a digital replica of an islet threatened by rising sea levels. Kofe grabbed global attention at last year's COP26 when he addressed the conference standing knee-deep in the sea to illustrate how Tuvalu is on the front line of climate change. Tuvalu was having to act because countries globally were not doing enough to prevent climate change, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has revealed why the company delayed its plans to introduce an Xbox streaming console, speaking to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast this week. The Verge reports: "It was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside," said Spencer, discussing the Keystone prototype device that recently appeared on his office shelves. "We decided to focus that team's effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app." Microsoft delivered an Xbox TV app in partnership with Samsung instead, but it doesn't mean the idea for a streaming-only Xbox console is fully over. "With Keystone, we're still focused on it and watching when we can get the right cost," reveals Spencer. Microsoft wanted to aim for around $129 or $99 for this Xbox streaming device, says Spencer, and hints that bundling a controller with the streaming console, as well as Microsoft's silicon component choices, had pushed the price up closer to the $299 Xbox Series S. The choice to bundle a controller matches what Microsoft traditionally does with its Xbox consoles and was also Google's original approach to putting its discontinued Stadia cloud gaming service on TVs. But a cloud gaming TV stick or puck could support any controller you have if the hardware supports Bluetooth, so it's interesting Microsoft specifically wanted to bundle an Xbox controller, likely to make the user experience feel more seamless.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California. This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. NASA posted a video of the liftoff on their Twitter. Additional updates are available @NASA_SLS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE 7:22 UTC: NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California. This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. The original story from Space.com: NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission will once again attempt to launch after all. Mission managers met on Monday (Nov. 14) to discuss the flight readiness of the Artemis 1's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft following slight damage caused by Hurricane Nicole, which was swiftly downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall, on Thursday (Nov. 10). Despite the fact that a band of insulating caulking on Orion was damaged by high winds during the storm's landfall, Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, said "there's no change in our plan to attempt to launch on the 16th" during a media teleconference today (Nov. 14). "The unanimous recommendation for the team was that we were in a good position to go ahead and proceed with the launch countdown," added Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. If all goes according to plan during additional preflight checks and the cryogenic fueling process on Tuesday (Nov. 15), the Artemis 1 mission will launch from Launch Pad 39B at 1:04 a.m. EST (0604 GMT) on Nov. 16. You can watch the countdown, fueling and launch of Artemis 1 live online here on Space.com courtesy of NASA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.