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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Now, a team has for the first time mapped a huge, actively circulating groundwater system in deep sediments in West Antarctica. They say such systems, probably common in Antarctica, may have as-yet unknown implications for how the frozen continent reacts to, or possibly even contributes to, climate change. The research appears today in the journal Science. [...] The researchers in the new study concentrated on the 60-mile-wide Whillans Ice Stream, one of a half-dozen fast-moving streams feeding the Ross Ice Shelf, the world's largest, at about the size of Canada's Yukon Territory. Prior research has revealed a subglacial lake within the ice, and a sedimentary basin stretching beneath it. Shallow drilling into the first foot or so of sediments has brought up liquid water and a thriving community of microbes. But what lies further down has been a mystery. The team used a technique called magnetotelluric imaging, which measures the penetration into the earth of natural electromagnetic energy generated high in the planet's atmosphere. Ice, sediments, fresh water, salty water and bedrock all conduct electromagnetic energy to different degrees; by measuring the differences, researchers can create MRI-like maps of the different elements. The team planted their instruments in snow pits for a day or so at a time, then dug them out and relocated them, eventually taking readings at some four dozen locations. They also reanalyzed natural seismic waves emanating from the earth that had been collected by another team, to help distinguish bedrock, sediment and ice. Their analysis showed that, depending on location, the sediments extend below the base of the ice from a half kilometer to nearly two kilometers before hitting bedrock. And they confirmed that the sediments are loaded with liquid water all the way down. The researchers estimate that if all of it were extracted, it would form a water column from 220 to 820 meters high -- at least 10 times more than in the shallow hydrologic systems within and at the base of the ice -- maybe much more even than that. Salty water conducts energy better than fresh water, so they were also able to show that the groundwater becomes more saline with depth. Key said this makes sense, because the sediments are believed to have been formed in a marine environment long ago. Ocean waters probably last reached what is now the area covered by the Whillans during a warm period some 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, saturating the sediments with salt water. When the ice readvanced, fresh melt water produced by pressure from above and friction at the ice base was evidently forced into the upper sediments. It probably continues to filter down and mix in today. The researchers say this slow draining of fresh water into the sediments could prevent water from building up at the base of the ice. This could act as a brake on the ice's forward motion. Measurements by other scientists at the ice stream's grounding line -- the point where the landbound ice stream meets the floating ice shelf -- show that the water there is somewhat less salty than normal seawater. This suggests that fresh water is flowing through the sediments to the ocean, making room for more melt water to enter, and keeping the system stable. The direction of water flow could be reversed if the ice surface were to thin, warn the researchers. "Overlying pressures would decrease, and deeper groundwater could begin welling up toward the ice base," reports Phys.Org. "This could further lubricate the base of the ice and increase its forward motion. Furthermore, if deep groundwater flows upward, it could carry up geothermal heat naturally generated in the bedrock; this could further thaw the base of the ice and propel it forward." If the groundwater begins moving upward, it would bring up the dissolved carbon used by the microbes living in the shallow sediments. "Lateral groundwater flow would then send some of this carbon to the ocean," reports Phys.Org. "This would possibly turn Antarctica into a so-far unconsidered source of carbon in a world already swimming in it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wordle!, an old mobile game with the same name as the viral online game Wordle, has been bought by mobile marketing firm and game maker AppLovin in an undisclosed deal. TechCrunch reports: While you may have now heard of the popular online game Wordle, later bought by The NYT, you may have missed the story earlier this year about how a mobile game of the same name was blowing up on the App Store. [Developer Steven Cravotta] said he had been surprised to find a game he created as a teenager five years ago suddenly being downloaded 40,000 times per day, up from just 10 downloads per day the month before, The WSJ had reported at the time. As it turned out, iPhone users had gone to the App Store in search of the Wordle game everyone was talking about and had been downloading Cravotta's game by mistake. Cravotta's Wordle! game was similar to the online version that everyone was playing. He said he had created it as a teen because he wanted to make something that would challenge people's minds and be a great game for kids. But the app never took off. Cravotta promoted it for around half a year, he says, before deciding to move on to other things. "It just sat in my developer account for the longest time getting maybe one to two downloads a day for six years ... until all this craziness happened," Cravotta tells TechCrunch. The mobile game monetized through paid advertisements and in-app purchases. While Cravotta could have tweaked the game to make even more money to capitalize on the surge of users, he left it untouched. "I just kind of let it run and do its thing," he says. According to data from Sensor Tower, the mobile game was downloaded approximately 18.9 million times. The vast majority of the installs (more than 99.6%) arrived after the web game went viral -- with downloads spiking on Jan. 12, 2022. From Feb. 12, 2022 onward, the game has seen 13.7 million downloads -- or about 72% of its lifetime installs since its April 2016 launch, the firm said. Today, the iOS game is still the No. 19 mobile game in the U.S. by average monthly active users as of the first quarter, right behind bigger titles like Among Us and just ahead of notable games like Minecraft and PUBG Mobile.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has officially announced a new "moving platform" feature for the HoloLens 2, which is designed to let the augmented reality headset work in places like cars. The Verge reports: It addresses a long-standing HoloLens issue of moving environments confusing the headset's sensors. The enhancement was developed in collaboration with Volkswagen, which has been experimenting with using the headset as a heads-up display in its vehicles. As Microsoft's blog post explains, its augmented reality headset tracks movement using a combination of camera sensors and an inertial measurement unit (which typically includes accelerometers and gyroscopes). But in a car, the readings from these two sensors can conflict; the headset senses movement but sees a static environment. In other words, it was getting car sick. That's what VW discovered after it started investigating the use of augmented reality headsets to teach drivers how to get around a racetrack faster. It started collaborating with Microsoft to fix the sensor problem in 2018, and, eventually, the two developed a prototype system that allowed a car to display real-time information on a connected headset. The system allows virtual objects to be placed both inside and outside of the vehicle. One image released by Microsoft (above) shows the HoloLens 2 projecting a virtual map onto the dashboard of a car, with navigation arrows appearing ahead at key intersections. A second shows it alerting the driver to an upcoming pedestrian crossing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 C-series for Chromebooks today. "The top chip in the series has eight of AMD's Zen 3 cores, giving systems that use it more x86 CPU cores than any other Chromebook," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The 7nm Ryzen 5000 C-series ranges from the Ryzen 3 5125C with two Zen 3 cores and a base and boost clock speed of 3 GHz, up to the Ryzen 7 5825C with eight cores and a base clock speed of 2 GHz that can boost to 4.5 GHz. For comparison, Intel's Core i7-1185G7, found in some higher end Chromebooks, has four cores and a base clock speed of 3 GHz that can boost to 4.8 GHz. On their own, the chips aren't that exciting. They seemingly offer similar performance to the already-released Ryzen 5000 U-series chips. The Ryzen 5000 C-series also uses years-old Vega integrated graphics rather than the upgraded RDNA 2 found in Ryzen 6000 mobile chips, which, upon release, AMD said are "up to 2.1 times faster." But for someone who's constantly pushing their Chromebook to do more than just open a Chrome tab or two, the chips bring potentially elevated performance than what's currently available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The pig heart transplanted into an American patient earlier this year in a landmark operation carried a porcine virus that may have derailed the experiment and contributed to his death two months later, say transplant specialists. [...] In a statement released by the university in March, a spokesperson said there was "no obvious cause identified at the time of his death" and that a full report was pending. Now MIT Technology Review has learned that Bennett's heart was affected by porcine cytomegalovirus, a preventable infection that is linked to devastating effects on transplants. The presence of the pig virus and the desperate efforts to defeat it were described by Griffith during a webinar streamed online by the American Society of Transplantation on April 20. The issue is now a subject of wide discussion among specialists, who think the infection was a potential contributor to Bennett's death and a possible reason why the heart did not last longer. The heart swap in Maryland was a major test of xenotransplantation, the process of moving tissues between species. But because the special pigs raised to provide organs are supposed to be virus-free, it now appears that the experiment was compromised by an unforced error. The biotechnology company that raised and engineered the pigs, Revivicor, declined to comment and has made no public statement about the virus. "It was surprising. That pig is supposed to be clean of all pig pathogens, and this is a significant one," says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis, a competing company that is also breeding pigs for transplant organs. "Without the virus, would Mr. Bennett have lived? We don't know, but the infection didn't help. It likely contributed to the failure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A New York bill that would ban new bitcoin mining operations is "swiftly making its way through the state capitol in Albany," reports CNBC. Some industry insiders fear that the bill, which calls for a two-year moratorium on certain cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions, could have a domino effect across the U.S. From the report: Lawmakers sponsoring the legislation say they are looking to curb the state's carbon footprint by cracking down on mines that use electricity from power plants that burn fossil fuels. For two years, unless a proof-of-work mining company uses 100% renewable energy, it would not be allowed to expand or renew permits, and new entrants would not be allowed to come online. [...] At this point, the State Assembly has passed the bill, and it is now under consideration by the Democratic-controlled State Senate, which will soon vote on the measure. If it passes, it will land on the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, who could sign it into law or veto it. "If it passes, it would make New York the first state in the country to ban blockchain technology infrastructure," explained Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Digital Chamber of Commerce. "New York will be left behind, losing to other states at best, and at worst, other more progressive nations," says Galaxy Digital's Head of Mining Amanda Fabiano. "New York is setting a bad precedent that other states could follow."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to some iPhone users, the Apple Music iOS app is installing itself directly to the iPhone's dock when downloaded, instead of to the phone's home screen. "It's also kicking out other apps users had set up in their dock and taking their spot, which is not something apps would normally do," adds TechCrunch. From the report: Some iPhone owners also found the bug was causing Apple Music to establish itself as the default music service for Siri requests, even if another service had previously been configured for this, like Spotify. It's unclear how widespread the bug is at this time, as we've tested it internally with mixed results. However, we've seen the dock issue taking place across different versions of iOS 15, old and new, so it does not appear to be related to a recent iOS update. It's also been seen impacting different iPhone models. [...] Apple was not able to provide further details about the bug, but said it's looking into it. You can view the "odd behavior" in a video posted on Twitter by iOS developer Kevin Archer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: YouTube is showing videos that promote skin-bleaching, weight loss, drug culture and firearms to children as young as two, a new investigation of the company's "Kids" app has found. YouTube Kids, an app and website released in 2015, is supposed to be a safer, curated version of the video-sharing website aimed at children under 13. It tailors content to three age groups: "older," "younger" and "preschool," roughly corresponding to those aged nine to 12 years old, four to seven, and under four. The company says it ensures that the videos on the service are family-friendly through "a mix of automated filters built by our engineering teams, human review and feedback from parents to protect our youngest users online." But, it cautions users "no system is perfect and inappropriate videos can slip through." Research from the Tech Transparency Project, a US-based non-profit, shows that the system is indeed far from perfect. Using three different accounts, each set to one of app's age groups, the analysts discovered numerous videos that should not have made it past Google's filters. A Breaking Bad-themed cooking show, for instance, in which the hosts dress up in respirators and make jokes about the risk of inhaling the fumes, might be light-hearted viewing for adults or teens, but has been categorized by YouTube as being appropriate for "younger children" -- as has a Minecraft project to recreate the RV, "where the crystal meth is cooked," from the hit show. Songs sometimes slip mature themes into the children's app, too. Eric Clapton's Cocaine -- sample lyric "When your feeling is gone, and you wanna ride on, cocaine" -- is available to children as young as five as part of a guitar tuition series. Content aimed at gun users slips through the net, leading to younger children being shown a ranking of recoil pads, which protect shooters from the kickback of a firing gun, and older children being offered step-by-step instructions on how to build a shelf with a hidden compartment to conceal a pistol. Most alarming was content for kids that could lead to harmful body image issues. A popular Indian beauty influencer's post on how to apply skin-bleaching products was available for older kids, while even preschool children were shown a cartoon about the importance of burning calories to lose weight, which exhorted them to "wiggle your jiggle". In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson said: "We built YouTube Kids to create a safer environment for kids to explore their interests and curiosity, while giving parents the tools to customize the experience for their kids. We have a higher bar for which videos can be a part of the app and also empower parents to control what content their child can and cannot see. Upon review we have removed or age-gated a number of the flagged videos from the Kids app."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube Go is shutting down beginning this August, Google has announced this week. From a report: The lightweight Android app first launched in 2016 and features offline viewing and nearby sharing. Like other apps designed for emerging markets, YouTube Go includes a suite of features that take into consideration the high costs of data, poor signal strength and the prevalent use of SD cards on Android devices. YouTube Go first launched in India and later became available in more than 130 countries worldwide. The company notes that since 2016, it has invested in improvements to the main YouTube app that make it perform better in emerging markets, while also delivering a better user experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VPN companies are squaring up for a fight with the Indian government over new rules designed to change how they operate in the country. Wired: On April 28, officials announced that virtual private network companies will be required to collect swathes of customer data -- and maintain it for five years or more -- under a new national directive. VPN providers have two months to accede to the rules and start collecting data. The justification from the country's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is that it needs to be able to investigate potential cybercrime. But that doesn't wash with VPN providers, some of whom have said they may ignore the demands. "This latest move by the Indian government to require VPN companies to hand over user personal data represents a worrying attempt to infringe on the digital rights of its citizens," says Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN. He adds that the company would never log user information or activity and that it will adjust its "operations and infrastructure to preserve this principle if and when necessary." Other VPN providers are also considering their options. Gytis Malinauskas, head of Surfshark's legal department, says the VPN provider couldn't currently comply with India's logging requirements because it uses RAM-only servers, which automatically overwrite user-related data. [...] ProtonVPN is similarly concerned, calling the move an erosion of civil liberties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cameo, the celebrity video greetings startup, laid off 87 of staffers Wednesday, a move that CEO Steven Galanis described as "right-sizing." From a report: The layoffs also affected some of Cameo's most senior executives, Protocol has learned. Leadership departures included Cameo CTO Rob Post, top marketing executive Emily Boschwitz, CPO Nundu Janakiram and Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach, according to a source close to the company. The team in charge of music partnerships saw big cuts, according to a LinkedIn post. Also affected by the layoffs were the company's international operations, including much of its London office, as well as a number of employees in sales and marketing, the source told Protocol. In some other lay off news: On Deck, a tech company that connects founders to each other, capital and advice, has laid off 25% off its staff, TechCrunch reported. The publication also reported that MainStreet, a startup that helps other startups uncover tax credits that was valued at $500 million last year, has laid off about 30% of its staff.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House released a memorandum Wednesday that outlines a national effort to promote leadership in quantum computing and calls for security advances to prepare for future cyberthreats from quantum computing before they arise. From a report: "Quantum information science -- we'll call it 'QIS,' for short -- is a rapidly emerging scientific discipline that combines our best understanding of the subatomic world -- quantum mechanics -- with our best understanding of information systems -- information theory -- to generate revolutionary technologies and insights," said a senior administration official during a background press call on Tuesday. [...] The announcement goes on to note that quantum computers could be a problem for digital communications and security. Quantum research is thought to soon reach a point where a "cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer" is possible. These computers could jeopardize US communications, control systems of critical infrastructure and security protocols used for most internet-based financial transactions, according to the memorandum. "Current research shows that at some point in the not-too-distant future, when quantum information science matures and quantum computers are able reach a sufficient size and level of sophistication, they will be capable of breaking much of the cryptography that currently secures our digital communications," said the senior administration official.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a "joint effort" to kill the password. The major OS vendors want to "expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium." From a report: The standard is being called either a "multi-device FIDO credential" or just a "passkey." Instead of a long string of characters, this new scheme would have the app or website you're logging in to push a request to your phone for authentication. From there, you'd need to unlock the phone, authenticate with some kind of pin or biometric, and then you're on your way. This sounds like a familiar system for anyone with phone-based two-factor authentication set up, but this is a replacement for the password rather than an additional factor. Some push 2FA systems work over the Internet, but this new FIDO scheme works over Bluetooth. As the whitepaper explains, "Bluetooth requires physical proximity, which means that we now have a phishing-resistant way to leverage the user's phone during authentication." Bluetooth has a terrible reputation for compatibility, and I'm not sure "security" has ever been a real concern, but the FIDO alliance notes that Bluetooth is just "to verify physical proximity" and that the actual sign-in process "does not depend on Bluetooth security properties." Of course, that means both devices will need Bluetooth on board, which is a given for most smartphones and laptops but could be a tough ask for older desktop PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An influential thinktank that has led the backlash against the government's net zero policy has received funding from groups with oil and gas interests, according to tax documents seen by the Guardian and OpenDemocracy. From a report: Though the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has always said it is independent of the fossil fuel industry, the revelations about its funding will raise questions over its campaigning. The thinktank has always refused to disclose its donors, but tax documents filed with US authorities reveal that one of its donors has $30m of shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas. Over four years the GWPF's US arm, the American Friends of the GWPF, received more than $1m from US donors. The vast majority of this, $864,884, was channelled to the UK group, with some being held back for expenses. Of the $1.8m the GWPF has received in charitable donations since 2017, about 45% has come from the US. It received $210,525 in 2018 and 2020 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation -- set up by the billionaire libertarian heir to an oil and banking dynasty. The US-based foundation has $30m-worth of shares in 22 energy companies including $9m in Exxon and $5.7m in Chevron, according to its financial filings. Between 2016 and 2020, the American Friends of the GWPF received $620,259 from the Donors Trust, which is funded by the Koch brothers, who inherited their father's oil empire and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the climate denial movement. "It is disturbing that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is acting as a channel through which American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy," said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms has announced a sharp slowdown in hiring, ending an extended period in which the tech giant added thousands of jobs a year. From a report: "We regularly re-evaluate our talent pipeline according to our business needs and in light of the expense guidance given for this earnings period, we are slowing its growth accordingly," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. "However, we will continue to grow our workforce to ensure we focus on long term impact." Specifically, Meta will be halting, or in some cases slowing, hiring for more mid- to senior-level positions, according to the company. This follows a recent pause on hiring early-career engineers a few weeks back. Like other tech giants, Meta has been a hiring juggernaut in recent years, more than doubling the size of its workforce since 2018. At the end of the first quarter, Meta counted 77,800 full-time employees, up 28% from a year earlier, according to the company's most recent quarterly report. The company doesn't have any plans for layoffs at this time, it said. Meta overshot some of its hiring goals -- it hired more people in the first quarter of 2022 than it did in all of 2021 -- and it is adjusting accordingly, the company said. The shift in hiring strategy comes after a string of disappointing quarters for the social-media company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming launched two years ago, more than 10 million people worldwide have streamed games through the service. That number's likely to jump a bit higher as a result of a partnership Microsoft struck with Epic Games to offer Epic's hit title Fortnite for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. From a report: The move will effectively let people play Fortnite in a way similar to how they stream videos from companies like Netflix, regardless of how beefy their gaming device is. Unlike previous efforts, Microsoft said this agreement applies to anyone who wants to play, with or without a subscription. Gamers will be able to play on an iPhone or iPad or a device powered by Google's Android software, even though both Apple and Google have banned Fortnite from their respective app stores amid an ongoing legal dispute. "This is just the beginning for us -- we're going to learn, implement feedback, and in time look to bring even more free-to-play titles to players through the cloud," Microsoft said in a statement. The service will be available for free in 26 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm China said on Thursday its former CEO Allen Wu was refusing to relinquish his role despite being fired last week and that it would overhaul its communication system to protect against its misuse by Wu and his supporters. From a report: Wu, Arm China and its British parent Arm Ltd have been embroiled in a two-year-long dispute and the latest development shows a resolution is not imminent. At stake is a stock market listing for Arm Ltd, the chip designer that is owned by Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. Arm announced on April 29 that Wu was ousted as Arm China's CEO and was replaced by two new Co-CEOs. He was also removed as its legal representative. Wu's ouster was opposed by some staff at the unit. Arm China, a Shanghai-based joint venture between the British company and Chinese private equity firm Hopu Investment, first tried to oust Wu in 2020, citing "conflicts of interest."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Summer has arrived in South Asia WAY too early. A punishing heat wave has pushed temperatures past 120F (50C) in some areas. Some schools have closed early for the summer. Dozens of people have died of heatstroke. From a report: The region is already hard-hit by climate change. Extreme heat is common in May. But not in April and March, both of which were the hottest across much of India for more than a century. "It's smoldering hot! It's also humid, which is making it very difficult," Chrisell Rebello, 37, told NPR in line outside a Mumbai ice cream parlor at 11 p.m. "We need a lot of cold drinks, air conditioning -- and multiple baths a day." Only a fraction of Indians -- mostly, the wealthy -- have air conditioning. Instead people soak rags in water and hang them in doors and windows. Still, electric fans and AC have pushed India's electricity demand to a record high. The problem is that 70% of India's electricity comes from coal. So the government is converting passenger trains to cargo service, to rush coal supplies to beleaguered power plants, and also importing more coal from abroad. And rolling blackouts are hurting industrial output. In the short term, experts say India has no choice but to burn coal to keep fans and ACs on. But in the long term, it must transition to renewables, to avoid a vicious circle of warming, says Ulka Kelkar, a Bengaluru-based economist and climate change expert with the World Resources Institute. "[With] heat plus humidity, at some stage [it] becomes almost impossible for the human body's organs to function normally," Kelkar explains. "Basically the body just cannot cool itself, and a large fraction of our population in India still works outside in the fields, on building construction, in factories which are not cooled." More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related illness across South Asia. Hospitals are preparing special wards. Further reading: India's Heatwaves Are Testing the Limits of Human Survival.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newly minted graduates are in for a shock. Although the job market and starting salaries for the Class of 2022 look significantly better than last year, they may fall far short of graduates' expectations. From a report: Employers plan to hire about 31% more new degree holders from this year's graduating class than they hired from the Class of 2021, according to a report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The increased demand for workers is also driving starting salaries higher for some majors, NACE found. The average starting salary for this year's crop of graduates is projected to be more than $50,000, based on the most recent data. Yet current college students expect to earn twice that -- $103,880 -- in their first job, according to a separate survey of college students pursuing a bachelor's degree by Real Estate Witch in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of nearly two dozen investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, crypto exchange Binance and asset management firm Fidelity is backing Elon Musk's $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter. From a report: The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive said in a filing Thursday that he had raised over $7.1 billion in total from the investors. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison delivered the largest check, at $1 billion, the filing revealed. Sequoia has chipped in $800 million, VyCapital $700 million, Binance financed $500 million, and Andreessen Horowitz has invested $400 million, the amended 13D filing said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday to "create a transparent regulatory and business environment for Web 3 companies" in the state, according to a press release. Under the order, as well as the California Consumer Financial Protection Law passed in 2020, the state will create a "transparent and consistent business environment" for blockchain-related companies, including crypto asset projects and those of related financial technologies. California will also collect stakeholder feedback to create crypto asset regulations in conjunction with federal authorities, assess the use of blockchain technologies for state and public institutions, and create paths for blockchain-related research and work development programs. On the regulation front, California plans to coordinate with Washington, D.C., for advice based on the crypto federal executive order that President Joe Biden signed in March. "California is a global hub of innovation, and we're setting up the state for success with this emerging technology -- spurring responsible innovation, protecting consumers and leveraging this technology for the public good," Newsom said in a statement. "Too often government lags behind technological advancements, so we're getting ahead of the curve on this, laying the foundation to allow for consumers and business to thrive." In late 2020, Newsom restructured the California department responsible for regulating financial services to also supervise the growing crypto industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will meet Wednesday with telecom and airline industry officials on a push to retrofit and ultimately replace some airplane radio altimeters that could face interference from C-Band 5G wireless service. Reuters reports: The altimeters give data on a plane's height above the ground and are crucial for bad-weather landings, but airline concerns about wireless interference from a planned 5G rollout led to disruptions at some U.S. airports earlier this year. The FAA wants to use the meeting to establish "an achievable timeframe to retrofit/replace radar altimeters in the U.S. fleet," according to a previously unreported letter from the FAA's top aviation safety official Chris Rocheleau reviewed by Reuters. It also asked aviation representatives "to offer options and commit to actions necessary to meet these objectives." The planned three-and-a-half hour roundtable meeting will also include a discussion on prioritizing retrofits with antenna filters, which mitigate potential interference from 5G. Antenna filters are currently in production, officials said. A key question is how to determine which planes are most at risk of interference and should therefore get retrofitted first. The meeting will also look at what is set to happen after July 5 and outline "changes to U.S. national airspace operating environment as a result of future 5G C-band deployment in the coming months."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluesky, Twitter's open-source offshoot, has released early code for a decentralized social network protocol. The Verge reports: The system is dubbed the Authenticated Data Experiment (or ADX) and is available on GitHub for developers to test, although Bluesky emphasizes that it's incomplete. It's one of the most substantive windows into Bluesky's workings since the project was conceived in 2019 and formally incorporated in early 2022. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber writes that ADX will be the start of a semi-public development process. "We're going to take a middle path of releasing work before it's complete, but also giving ourselves time to workshop new directions at early stages," Graber says. The GitHub repository includes an overview of ADX's goals and design as well as some experimental code. "Feel free to play around, but don't try to build your next big social app on this yet. Things are missing, and things are going to change," Graber says. The code is available under an open source MIT License. ADX isn't a single, standalone social network design. It's a protocol built around user-controlled "Personal Data Repositories" that social network developers could choose to support. Among other things, it's supposed to let users transfer social media posts or engagement between networks without eroding the networks' own moderation options. "On the Web, this data lives on the social platform where it was created. In ADX, this data will live in Personal Data Repositories owned by the user," the overview explains. Platforms can choose to only index some of this content -- drawing a distinction between "speech," or the ability to keep data in the repository, and "reach," or being able to see that data on a given platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: When the pandemic hit, the stay-at-home orders didn't give American families more babies, instead, it generated a "baby bust." Now, economists found that the so-called bust recovered just as quickly as the economy picked up. Recessions and a decline in birth rates go hand-in-hand in history -- as seen with the 2008 financial crisis and the 1918 influenza, when the pandemic started in early 2020. Similarly, economists predicted that a sharp decrease in jobs and household spending would result in a fall in conception rates. Job cuts and business shutdowns resulted in 62,000 "missing births" in the U.S. from January 2020 to May 2020, the paper found. The lowest dip in approximate conception numbers happened in April, when the country saw the highest COVID-era unemployment rate at 14.7%. But the "baby bust" was short-lived due to a rebound of 51,000 conceptions later in 2020, driven by fast growth in the labor market and the arrival of government relief programs to individuals and households. The paper, which was distributed this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used five years of monthly birth data from October 2016 through September 2021, the most recent month available when the researchers conducted their analysis. The immediate drop in conception rate in the U.S. at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak was part of a bigger global trend for countries with higher incomes. Arnstein Aassve, professor of social and political science at Bocconi University, has found that seven out of 22 countries with higher incomes experienced a sharp decline in birth rates at the beginning of the pandemic. He attributed the explanation to a sense of uncertainty. "You may not forego childbearing totally, but at least you might postpone it until you see that times are a bit better," Aassve told Scientific American. He also attributed the sentiment to people's unfamiliarity with a new disease at the time. Kearney said the NBER findings confirm this pattern. By comparing data from different states, she pointed out that although the number of COVID-19 cases in the region also contributed to the reduction of birth rates early in the pandemic, people started having more babies later in the year regardless of the number of new COVID-19 cases. However, Levine said that the changes in 2020 are "far less significant" compared to the general U.S. trend in the last 15 years, which results in a roughly 20% drop in births. The decline in birth rates indicates a challenge ahead for labor supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the results of Patreon's first creator census, 43% of creators are strongly against crypto payments, while 30% said they don't care. "Nine percent said crypto payments would be crucial, while 18% said they would be nice to have," adds TechCrunch. From the report: Out of 250,000 creators active on Patreon, over 13,000 people responded to the survey, representing 113 countries and 18 languages. According to the survey, video is the most popular primary medium on Patreon, representing 38% of respondents. The next most popular categories are writing (17%) and podcasting (14%). Fifty-six percent of Patreon creators consider themselves closer to being seasoned professionals, while 44% say they're closer to just starting out. Interestingly enough, respondents also said that over 40% of their creative income came from Patreon. [Patreon CPO Julian Gutman] told TechCrunch in December that the company had considered building a small crypto team to examine potential options, but that there weren't any plans set in stone for a plunge into web3. [...] "Some creators, including many who took this survey, are opposed to Patreon building any web3 functionality due to concerns about potential fraudulent behavior, environmental sustainability and inaccessibility of the technology in its present applications," the census report said. "Other creators already offer web3 benefits off Patreon and are excited about the flexibility and value they can offer memberships with new types of digital goods." Sure, crypto skeptics could simply just not use web3 features with their audience. But some creators worry that their audience will be less likely to support them via Patreon if the company dabbles in web3. For now, Patreon will focus more on building features like a native video player, one-time tipping, gift memberships and a customized landing page layout. "Our focus continues to be on how to give creators more ownership and leverage over their content, and that includes exploring the benefits of web3 technologies," Patreon said in an email to TechCrunch. "However, neither our creators nor Patreon are prioritizing this space right now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sonos is preparing to introduce its own voice assistant service within the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The voice functionality will let customers play and control music on Sonos' whole-home audio platform. The Verge reports: It will be part of a forthcoming software update set to arrive first to customers in the US on June 1st, with an international rollout to follow. Sonos Voice will serve as an alternative to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, which Sonos already supports on its smart speakers and voice-enabled soundbars. All Sonos products that run the company's S2 software will support Sonos Voice Control. Sonos has recently posted job openings related to the "Sonos Voice Experience," with the company saying its ambition is to "make voice interactions fully private, more personal, and more natural." The debut of Sonos Voice will mark a pivotal moment in Sonos' expansion into services as the company seeks to augment its hardware business. (Sonos Radio and the paid, higher quality Sonos Radio HD were the first such forays into services.) The offering will provide core conveniences that are similar to existing competitors, allowing Sonos product owners to play specific songs, artists, or playlists with voice commands, among other functions. At launch, Sonos Voice will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and the company's own Sonos Radio. Spotify and Google's YouTube Music aren't yet on board. In keeping with Sonos' interest in privacy, the feature will not record user audio commands or relay them to the cloud for processing. "Hey Sonos" will be the wake word for Sonos Voice Control, and the company's internal tests show it to be quicker than competing assistant services at core music tasks. [...] The Sonos Voice Experience will stick to the fundamentals at launch. But if people are able to use Alexa at the same time -- Sonos calls this feature "voice concurrency" -- they'll be able to give the Sonos offering a shot without sacrificing smart home integrations or other more varied features that the Sonos voice service may lack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Volvo will only sell electrified cars in the US beginning with the 2023 model year, the automaker confirmed Tuesday. "Electrified" means that in addition to EVs, Volvo will continue to offer gas-powered cars, but they'll all either have mild-hybrid or plug-in hybrid technology. Volvo will continue to offer plug-in hybrid powertrains, as well. In fact, these T8 Recharge models recently received a power boost, in addition to increased electric-only driving range. The 2023 model year Volvos should arrive at dealers this summer. Meanwhile, Volkswagen says it has "sold out" of battery-powered models in the U.S. and Europe for this year as persistent supply chain bottlenecks hit global production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stripe, one of the world's most valuable startup ($95 billion), today launched Financial Connections, which will enable businesses and their customers to safely share their financial data. "Businesses can go directly to Stripe to access a privacy-first authentication flow and our new data API," Jay Shah, Stripe executive running Financial Connections said today. Or in other words, Stripe has launched its Plaid competitor. Following the announcement from Shah, Plaid CEO Zachary Perret tweeted: Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP's (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y'all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok is launching a new way for the top creators on its billion-user app make money -- and for advertisers to reach the cream of the short-form video crop. Variety reports: The company announced TikTok Pulse, an advertising program to let marketers buy inventory in the top 4% of all videos on the platform in a dozen different categories (including beauty, fashion, cooking and gaming). Creators and publishers with at least 100,000 followers will be eligible to participate in the initial stage of TikTok Pulse. The company said that with the launch of Pulse, it will "begin exploring" its first advertising-revenue share program with creators, public figures and media publishers. TikTok Pulse will roll out first in the U.S. in June, with additional markets to follow in the fall, according to Sofia Hernandez, TikTok's global head of business marketing. "This finally offers marketers something they have been asking for for years -- to be part of a community," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub, the code hosting platform used by tens of millions of software developers around the world, announced today that all users who upload code to the site will need to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023 in order to continue using the platform. The Verge reports: The new policy was announced Wednesday in a blog post by GitHub's chief security officer (CSO) Mike Hanley, which highlighted the Microsoft-owned platform's role in protecting the integrity of the software development process in the face of threats created by bad actors taking over developers' accounts. "The software supply chain starts with the developer," Hanley wrote. "Developer accounts are frequent targets for social engineering and account takeover, and protecting developers from these types of attacks is the first and most critical step toward securing the supply chain." Even though multi-factor authentication provides significant additional protection to online accounts, GitHub's internal research shows that only around 16.5 percent of active users (roughly one in six) currently enable the enhanced security measures on their accounts -- a surprisingly low figure given that the platform's user base should be aware of the risks of password-only protection. By steering these users towards a higher minimum standard of account protection, GitHub hopes to boost the overall security of the software development community as a whole, Hanley told The Verge. "GitHub is in a unique position here, just by virtue of the vast majority of open source and creator communities living on GitHub.com, that we can have a significant positive impact on the security of the overall ecosystem by raising the bar from a security hygiene perspective," Hanley said. "We feel like it's really one of the best ecosystem-wide benefits that we can provide, and we're committed to making sure that we work through any of the challenges or obstacles to making sure that there's successful adoption."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The New York Times' seven-figure purchase of viral hit Wordle in January was "incredibly valuable" to the company and was responsible for "an unprecedented tens of millions of new users to The Times," the media giant said in announcing its quarterly earnings (PDF) Wednesday morning. And while New York Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said the "majority of these incremental users only played Wordle, many... stayed to play other games, which drove our best quarter ever for net subscriber additions to Games." Levien said during an earnings call that the number of average weekly users for the Times' non-Wordle games "nearly doubled" during the quarter ending in March. The game "played an outsized role in the quarter's engagement and subscriber growth," she added. The Wordle acquisition was part of a larger effort to make The New York Times seem "more valuable to more people by helping them make the most of their lives and passions," Levien said during the call. [...] Despite all the Wordle love, Levien's remarks also offered a small hint that the Times doesn't necessarily expect the game to remain quite as strong of a draw going forward. Levien said the Times is "moving swiftly to leverage [Wordle's] massive audience to introduce Wordle players to our other games, recognizing that its audience may moderate over time." In other words, the Times seems aware that, across months and years, players may start to grow less interested in Wordle and that the simple five-letter daily guessing game may not be as consistent and long-lasting a draw as deeper and more complicated puzzles like the crossword.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A funny thing happened in 2020: AMD won the gaming laptop for the first time ever. Until the Asus Zephyrus G14, we'd never seen a laptop with an AMD CPU and AMD GPU run circles around the competition. Since then, we've repeatedly seen that "AMD laptop" no longer means cheap. But now, AMD is setting its sights higher than mid-range gaming machines -- it just revealed it's building a new CPU aimed at the "pinnacle of gaming performance" with the "highest core, thread and cache ever." The new CPU line is codenamed "Dragon Range," and they'll live exclusively at 55W TDP and up -- enough power that they'll "largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time," says AMD director of technical marketing Robert Hallock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News is reporting that the United States has officially surpassed 1 million COVID-19 deaths -- "a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world's highest recorded toll from the virus." From the report: The number -- equivalent to the population of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. -- was reached at stunning speed: 27 months after the country confirmed its first case of the virus. While deaths from Covid have slowed in recent weeks, about 360 people have still been dying every day. The casualty count is far higher than what most people could have imagined in the early days of the pandemic [...]. Now, more than two years and 999,999 fatalities later, the U.S. death toll is the world's highest total by a significant margin, figures show. In a distant second is Brazil, which has recorded just over 660,000 confirmed Covid deaths.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is scrapping a time-consuming, twice-a-year staff performance review process in an effort to improve morale and reduce the time employees spend preparing the assessments, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the changes. From the report: CEO Sundar Pichai told staff Wednesday that the new program, which will take place only once a year, aims to give more employees a sense of accomplishment and acknowledge that "most Googlers are doing great work." The new system, which also creates an easier path to promotions, came after only 53% of Googlers said in surveys that the current system is "time well spent," Pichai said. The change makes Google the latest Silicon Valley company to switch to less-frequent reviews. Meta last year said it would conduct performance reviews once per year rather than twice. Google has for years conducted extensive performance review processes twice a year through a process that required extensive preparation from employees and managers. Now, the review process will happen once a year and staff won't have to prepare packets of information ahead of time, the company told employees. The company will still consider promotions twice a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Reserve intensified its fight against the worst inflation in 40 years by raising its benchmark short-term interest rate by a half-percentage point Wednesday -- its most aggressive move since 2000 -- and signaling further large rate hikes to come. From a report: The increase in the Fed's key rate raised it to a range of 0.75% to 1%, the highest point since the pandemic struck two years ago. The Fed also announced that it will start reducing its huge $9 trillion balance sheet, which consists mainly of Treasury and mortgage bonds. Those holdings more than doubled after the pandemic recession hit as the Fed bought trillions in bonds to try to hold down long-term borrowing rates. Reducing the Fed's holdings will have the effect of further raising loan costs throughout the economy. All told, the Fed's credit tightening will likely mean higher loan rates for many consumers and businesses over time, including for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans. Speaking at a news conference Wednesday, Chair Jerome Powell made clear that further large rate hikes are coming. "There is a broad sense on the committee," he said, referring to the Fed, "that additional (half-point) increases should be on the table in the next couple of meetings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

technology_dude shares a report from Ars Technica: As part of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon this decade, NASA has a minimum requirement that its "human landing system" must be able to deliver 865 kg to the lunar surface. This is based on the mass of two crew members and their equipment needed for a short stay. However, in selecting SpaceX's Starship vehicle to serve as its human lander, NASA has chosen a system with a lot more capability. Starship will, in fact, be able to deliver 100 metric tons to the surface of the Moon -- more than 100 times NASA's baseline goal. "Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX. "And it's really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It's 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants." Matthews made her comments last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston. She was responding to a question from an audience member, Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. [...] "NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that's coming online." "We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That's gone away entirely." [...] "If you, as an engineer, are developing an in-situ resource utilization system, what does your system look like when you have no mass constraint?" she asked. "What about when you have no volume constraint? That would be the exciting thing that I would like to hear from NASA engineers, what they can do with this capability." "The engineer says NASA is not thinking big enough," adds Slashdot reader technology_dude. "I think it's pretty obvious what the payload should be, a nuclear powered boring machine. With flamethrower weapons just in case! Leave a comment for my resume. Maybe I'll call."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Helga and Zohar are headed for a trip around the Moon on an important mission, measuring radiation risks for female astronauts for the first time. The inanimate pair are manikins modeled after the body of an adult woman. For the Artemis 1 mission, in which an uncrewed Orion capsule will travel to the Moon and back, one of the manikins will be outfitted with a newly developed radiation protection vest. Helga and Zohar, as they're called, won't be alone, as they'll be joined by a third manikin that will collect data about flight accelerations and vibrations. Artemis 1 is scheduled to blast off later this year. The Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, but this time the space agency has vowed to land the first woman on the dusty lunar surface. [...] The Helga and Zohar manikins are part of the MARE experiment, designed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The experiment will use two identical representations of the female body to investigate radiation exposure throughout the flight of the Artemis 1 mission, which may last up to six weeks. Artemis 1 will set the stage for Artemis 2, in which an Orion capsule carrying real humans will fly to the Moon and back (without landing), possibly as early as 2024. [...] Here's how it will work. The manikins are made from materials that mimic the bones, soft tissues, and organs of an adult woman, all of which will be tracked by more than 10,000 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors, according to DLR. One of the manikins, Helga, will fly to the Moon unprotected while the other one, Zohar, will wear a radiation protection vest called the AstroRad (which was developed by American aerospace company Lockheed Martin and Israeli startup StemRad). As they travel aboard the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, Helga and Zohar will be affected by the harsh environment of space. The manikins, having traveled beyond the protective shielding of Earth's magnetosphere, will be exposed to various types of space radiation, like charged particles produced by the Sun or energy particles trapped within Earth's atmosphere. Space radiation is known to alter molecules of DNA, which is obviously not good for human health. Upon their arrival back at Earth, data collected from the two manikins will help researchers to better understand the level of protection provided by the newly developed AstroRad vest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Irish Times, citing new figures from the Central Statistics Office, data centers used up a greater share of electricity consumption than rural homes in the State last year. From the report: The overall share of metered electricity consumed by data centers has almost tripled in just six years, from 5 percent in 2015 to 14 percent last year. By comparison, urban homes accounted for 21 per cent of metered electricity consumed in 2021 compared with 12 percent consumed by rural dwellings. The figure for electricity consumption by data centers last year represents an increase of 32 percent in that year. Data centers consumed 265 per cent more electricity in the three-month period between October and December 2021 compared with the three months between January and March 2015. Total metered electricity consumption increased by 16 per cent over the six years with data centers accounting for the 70 per cent of the increased consumption over that period. The surge in electricity use by data centers has come under scrutiny due to concerns about the State's energy supply and the targeted reduction in carbon emissions to tackle climate change. "There should be more discussion and more serious consideration of a moratorium [to block the opening of more data centers in order to reduce emissions]," said Dr Patrick Bresnihan, a geography lecturer at Maynooth University. Allowing electricity consumption by data centers to continue to increase would make it harder for the Government to push policies where it is asking individuals to reduce consumption at a time "when consumption by data centers is so high and clearly just growing," said Dr Bresnihan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Edge has overtaken Apple's Safari to become the world's second most popular desktop browser, based on data provided by web analytics service StatCounter. MacRumors reports: According to the data, Microsoft Edge is now used on 10.07 percent of desktop computers worldwide, 0.46 percent ahead of Safari, which stands at 9.61 percent. Google Chrome remains in first place with a dominant 66.64 percent share, and Mozilla's Firefox stands in fourth with 7.86 percent. As the default Windows 11 browser, the popularity of Edge has crept up in recent months, with the first concrete signs that it would surpass Safari to take second place coming in February, when it was used on 9.54 percent of desktops globally. Back in January 2021, Safari held a 10.38 percent market share, indicating a gradual slippage in popularity over the last 14 months. Meanwhile, first-placed Chrome has seen its user base increase incrementally over that time, but perhaps surprisingly, Firefox has leaked users since the beginning of the year, despite regular updates and improvements. That suggests Safari's hold on third place isn't in immediate danger, having lost only 0.23 percent share since February, but things could always change fast if Apple decides to introduce sweeping changes to the way Safari works in macOS 13 later this year. It's a different story when it comes to mobile platforms, notes MacRumors. "In StatCounter's analysis, Edge doesn't even make it into the top six browsers on mobile, but first-placed Chrome commands 62.87 of usage share, with Safari on iPhones and iPads taking a comfortable 25.35 percent in second place, 20.65 percent ahead of third-placed Samsung Internet, with 4.9 percent."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tsu doh nimh shares a report from Krebs on Security: Faced with a brain drain of smart people fleeing the country following its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Federation is floating a new strategy to address a worsening shortage of qualified information technology experts: Forcing tech-savvy people within the nation's prison population to perform low-cost IT work for domestic companies. Multiple Russian news outlets published stories on April 27 saying the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service had announced a plan to recruit IT specialists from Russian prisons to work remotely for domestic commercial companies. Russians sentenced to forced labor will serve out their time at one of many correctional centers across dozens of Russian regions, usually at the center that is closest to their hometown. Alexander Khabarov, deputy head of Russia's penitentiary service, said his agency had received proposals from businessmen in different regions to involve IT specialists serving sentences in correctional centers to work remotely for commercial companies. Khabarov told Russian media outlets that under the proposal people with IT skills at these facilities would labor only in IT-related roles, but would not be limited to working with companies in their own region. "We are approached with this initiative in a number of territories, in a number of subjects by entrepreneurs who work in this area," Khabarov told Russian state media organization TASS. "We are only at the initial stage. If this is in demand, and this is most likely in demand, we think that we will not force specialists in this field to work in some other industries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Just ahead of its presentation to media ad buyers later this week at the 2022 NewFronts, Twitter acknowledged in a new SEC filing that its core advertising business could now be at risk as a result of the Elon Musk takeover, in addition to employee hiring and retention efforts and other factors. While Musk's vision for Twitter is one of a more free speech-focused platform, he hasn't offered assurances to Twitter's advertiser base that Twitter will remain "brand safe," post-acquisition. To the extent that he's clarified his vision, Musk said only that he believes any speech not deemed illegal by a government will soon be permitted on Twitter. Of course, Twitter today already moderates a wide range of prohibited types of content beyond what's considered illegal. [...] They may just decide that reaching Twitter's small-ish user base -- at least in comparison with the larger social giants like Meta and TikTok -- is not worth the risk. [...] Among the many new risks related to the transactional nature of the Musk deal -- like if the merger is delayed or doesn't close (the latter which comes with a billion-dollar financial hit to Twitter, for instance) -- the company said it's exposed to new risks related to its "business relationships, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, and business," including "whether advertisers continue their spending on our platform." As the company explains further in the filing, amid its ongoing risk factors, it continues to generate the "substantial majority of our revenue from advertising" and its loss could harm the business. It notes as well that if its reputation among advertisers declined, it may be less competitive. [T]he company also acknowledged a more immediate threat of employee departures and an inability to effectively recruit as other potential ramifications of the merge, and noted that "current employees could be distracted, and their productivity decline as a result, due to uncertainty regarding the merger." Musk downplayed any worries over employee departures when speaking to reporters on the red carpet at the annual Met Gala in New York, Reuters noted, saying that "it's a free country," and that: "Certainly if anyone doesn't feel comfortable with that, they will on their own accord go somewhere else. That's fine."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, leading to important drug discoveries. From a report: In a small room in a building at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the invertebrate keeper, Emma Califf, lifts up a rock in a plastic box. "This is one of our desert hairies," she said, exposing a three-inch-long scorpion, its tail arced over its back. "The largest scorpion in North America." This captive hairy, along with a swarm of inch-long bark scorpions in another box, and two dozen rattlesnakes of varying species and sub- species across the hall, are kept here for the coin of the realm: their venom. Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, and the growing catalog of compounds has led to a number of drug discoveries. As the components of these natural toxins continue to be assayed by evolving technologies, the number of promising molecules is also growing. "A century ago we thought venom had three or four components, and now we know just one type of venom can have thousands," said Leslie V. Boyer, a professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Arizona. "Things are accelerating because a small number of very good laboratories have been pumping out information that everyone else can now use to make discoveries." She added, "There's a pharmacopoeia out there waiting to be explored." It is a striking case of modern-day scientific alchemy: The most highly evolved of natural poisons on the planet are creating a number of effective medicines with the potential for many more. One of the most promising venom-derived drugs to date comes from the deadly Fraser Island funnel web spider of Australia, which halts cell death after a heart attack. Blood flow to the heart is reduced after a heart attack, which makes the cell environment more acidic and leads to cell death. The drug, a protein called Hi1A, is scheduled for clinical trials next year. In the lab, it was tested on the cells of beating human hearts. It was found to block their ability to sense acid, "so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival," said Nathan Palpant, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia who helped make the discovery.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paramount Plus' subscriber count has ballooned to almost 40 million with the service gaining 6.8 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 alone, Paramount announced in its earnings report on Tuesday. The Verge reports: An increase in subscriber count led to more money for the company as well â" its direct-to-consumer revenue, which includes Paramount Plus and its free TV streaming service, Pluto TV, increased 82 percent year over year. While revenue from subscriptions for both Pluto TV and Paramount Plus grew 95 percent year over year, advertising revenue increased 59 percent. The company says Paramount Plus subscribers watched more shows for longer periods of time as well. This, along with a higher subscriber count, was mostly driven by the service strengthening its roster of shows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak: In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, several Hollywood studios announced the immediate suspension of new releases in Russia. Unexpectedly, some Russian theaters are still able to show movies such as The Batman on the big screen but this isn't down to the studios. The movies are sourced from illegal torrent sites and few seem afraid to admit it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by nearly 30% compared to last year. The publishing category is growing particularly hard, mostly driven by manga piracy. The United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers. TorrentFreak reports: During the first quarter of 2022, pirate site visits increased by more than 29% compared to a year earlier, which is good for a dazzling 52.5 billion visits. Nearly half of this traffic (48%) goes to TV-related content. The publishing category takes second spot with 27%, followed by the film (12%), music (7%), and software (6%) categories. The traffic increase is noticeable across all types of piracy but the publishing category stands out. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, the number of visits in this category has grown explosively. Software piracy is lagging behind, but the category still continues to grow. The strong growth in the publishing category is largely driven by manga, comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Some of the pirate sites dedicated to this 'niche', such as Manganato.com, attract well over 100 million 'visits' per month. That's more than iconic pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay and Fmovies.to. The United States is the country that sends most visitors to pirate sites. With well over 5.7 billion 'visits' in the first three months of the year, the U.S. is good for more than 10% of all piracy traffic. With a 39% increase compared to last year, pirate audience growth exceeds the global average. Russia and India follow at a respectable distance with just over 3 billion visits to pirate sites, followed by China and France, with 1.8 and 1.7 billion visits, respectively. There is no single explanation for the apparent piracy boom. However, MUSO sees the upward trend as an alarming signal and expects that the 'streaming wars' and growing subscription fatigue may play a role.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Techinca: It's not the kind of security discovery that happens often. A previously unknown hacker group used a novel backdoor, top-notch tradecraft, and software engineering to create an espionage botnet that was largely invisible in many victim networks. The group, which security firm Mandiant is calling UNC3524, has spent the past 18 months burrowing into victims' networks with unusual stealth. In cases where the group is ejected, it wastes no time reinfecting the victim environment and picking up where things left off. There are many keys to its stealth, including: - The use of a unique backdoor Mandiant calls Quietexit, which runs on load balancers, wireless access point controllers, and other types of IoT devices that don't support antivirus or endpoint detection. This makes detection through traditional means difficult. - Customized versions of the backdoor that use file names and creation dates that are similar to legitimate files used on a specific infected device. - A live-off-the-land approach that favors common Windows programming interfaces and tools over custom code with the goal of leaving as light a footprint as possible. - An unusual way a second-stage backdoor connects to attacker-controlled infrastructure by, in essence, acting as a TLS-encrypted server that proxies data through the SOCKS protocol. The SOCKS tunnel allowed the hackers to effectively connect their control servers to a victim's network where they could then execute tools without leaving traces on any of the victims' computers. A secondary backdoor provided an alternate means of access to infected networks. It was based on a version of the legitimate reGeorg webshell that had been heavily obfuscated to make detection harder. The threat actor used it in the event the primary backdoor stopped working. [...] One of the ways the hackers maintain a low profile is by favoring standard Windows protocols over malware to move laterally. To move to systems of interest, UNC3524 used a customized version of WMIEXEC, a tool that uses Windows Management Instrumentation to establish a shell on the remote system. Eventually, Quietexit executes its final objective: accessing email accounts of executives and IT personnel in hopes of obtaining documents related to things like corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, and large financial transactions. "Unpacking this threat group is difficult," says Ars' Dan Goodin. "From outward appearances, their focus on corporate transactions suggests a financial interest. But UNC3524's high-caliber tradecraft, proficiency with sophisticated IoT botnets, and ability to remain undetected for so long suggests something more."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk likened Apple and its App Store to the equivalent of a "30% tax on the Internet" and said the fee is "10 times higher than it should be," in a series of tweets responding to a Slashdot tweet about the European Union's latest antitrust complaint against the tech giant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Apple employees have written an open letter to the company's executive team complaining about its new policy that only allows for two days of working from home, iMore has reported. From a report: They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce. "You have characterized the decision for the Hybrid Working Pilot as being about combining the "need to commune in-person" and the value of flexible work," the letter states. "But in reality, it does not recognize flexible work and is only driven by fear. Fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is vastly expanding its fight against cryptocurrency fraud by hiring more than a dozen new employees to combat cybercrime, the agency said Tuesday. From a report: The additional 20 positions will result in almost a doubling in size of the agency's Cyber Unit, which is also being renamed the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit to reflect the group's growing mission, the SEC said in a release. The Cyber Unit was first founded within the SEC's enforcement division in 2017. "By nearly doubling the size of this key unit, the SEC will be better equipped to police wrongdoing in the crypto markets while continuing to identify disclosure and controls issues with respect to cybersecurity," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. From a report: The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes. Location data is information on a device's location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated -- meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people -- but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people. The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.