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The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online. Many UK lawmakers have argued that the only way to guarantee that future is to criminalize tech leaders whose platforms knowingly fail to protect children. From a report: Today, the UK House of Commons reached a deal to appease those lawmakers, Reuters reports, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government agreeing to modify the Online Safety Bill to ensure its passage. It now appears that tech company executives found to be "deliberately" exposing children to harmful content could soon risk steep fines and jail time of up to two years. The agreement was reached during the safety bill's remaining stages before a vote in the House of Commons. Next, it will move on to review by the House of Lords, where the BBC reports it will "face a lengthy journey." Sunak says he will revise the bill to include new terms before it reaches the House of Lords, where lawmakers will have additional opportunities to revise the wording. Reports say that tech executives responsible for platforms hosting user-generated content would only be liable if they fail to take "proportionate measures" to prevent exposing children to harmful content, such as materials featuring child sexual abuse, child abuse, eating disorders, and self-harm. Some measures that tech companies can take to avoid jail time and fines of up to 10 percent of a company's global revenue include adding age verification, providing parental controls, and policing content. If passed, the Online Safety Bill would make managers liable for holding tech companies to their own community guidelines, including content and age restrictions. If a breach of online safety duties is discovered, UK media regulator Ofcom would be responsible for prosecuting tech leaders who fail to respond to enforcement notices. Anyone found to be acting in good faith to police content and protect kids reportedly won't be prosecuted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint from Republicans that Google's Gmail app aided Democratic candidates by sending GOP fundraising emails to spam at a far higher rate than Democratic solicitations. From a report: The Republican National Committee and others contended that the alleged benefit amounted to unreported campaign contributions to Democrats. But in a letter to Google last week, the FEC said it "found no reason to believe" that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions, and that any skewed results from its spam filter algorithms were inadvertent. "Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution" within the meaning of federal campaign laws, according to an FEC analysis reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee complained to the FEC last year, citing an academic study that showed that nearly 70% of emails from Republican candidates were sent to spam compared with fewer than 1 in 10 from Democrat candidates from 2019 to 2020. The RNC and other campaign committees argued that Google's "overwhelmingly disproportionate suppression of Republican emails" constituted an illegal corporate contribution to Democratic candidates. But the FEC disagreed, finding that Google established that it maintains its spam filter settings to aid its business in keeping out malware, phishing attacks and scams, and not for the purpose of benefiting any political candidates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mac Mini is Apple's next computer to get the bump up to the M2 chip -- and this time around, it's being offered with the Pro version of Apple's processor, too. From a report: The new model was announced this morning in a press release, with a starting price of $599, and is available to order today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24th. The Mac Mini's baseline configuration includes the M2 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. It features an HDMI port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a standard headphone jack, alongside two USB-A ports and two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports -- an upgrade from the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the previous generation. The M2 Pro configuration of the new Mac Mini features 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and an additional two Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside the ports already available on the standard M2 model. This configuration will set you back $1,299, more than double the price of the baseline model. This is the first time Apple has brought Pro-tier chips to the Mini. The Mini was previously only offered with the entry-level M1 chip -- the same one used in MacBook Air. This time, it's being offered with one of Apple's more powerful chip series. The M2 Max, however, is so far only being offered in the MacBook Pro.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has announced new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, featuring its latest M2 Pro and Max chips. From a report: The M2 Pro model will launch with a 12-core CPU, up to 19-core GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M2 Max includes up to 38 cores of GPU power and support for up to 96GB of unified memory. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at $1,999, with the 16-inch model starting at $2,499. Both are available to order online today and will start shipping and appearing in Apple stores on January 24th. Apple says the M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors the M2 shipped with and nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro. It also features 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, twice what's available on the regular M2. All of this power should result in better performance in apps like Adobe Photoshop and Xcode. Apple claims the MacBook Pro with M2 Pro "is able to process images in Adobe Photoshop up to 40 percent faster than with M1 Pro, and as much as 80 percent faster than MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor." The M2 Max chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but much like the M1 Max, it really pushes the GPU power more. Apple claims the M2 Max is up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Max in graphics and can apparently "tackle graphics-intensive projects that competing systems can't even run." Chips aside, the latest MacBook Pro models now include Wi-Fi 6E3 and a "more advanced HDMI" (probably HDMI 2.1) that supports 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation. From a report: In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright" to train its software and that Getty Images has "commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London" against the firm. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a "letter before action" -- a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: It was landing at Singapore's international airport a decade ago that sparked Shara Ticku's idea to create a lab-grown alternative to palm oil. "In 2013 I flew to Singapore, and when I landed I had to wear a mask," says the boss of US tech firm C16 Biosciences. "The air was toxic because they were burning the rainforest in Indonesia." Indonesian farmers, who were clearing land for palm oil and other crops, were blamed for the fires and the smoke that drifted across the sea to Singapore. Fast forward to today, and her business has just commercially released an alternative to palm oil that is created from yeast cells. Palm oil remains the world's most-produced vegetable oil, accounting for 40% of the total, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). [...] The widely-documented problem with this usage is that this demand for palm oil has led to significant deforestation in areas where oil palm trees can grow -- low-lying, hot, wet areas near the equator. The use of this land for palm oil cultivation, 85% of which is in Indonesia and Malaysia, has increased almost nine-fold from 3.3 million hectares (eight million acres) in 1970 to 28.7 million hectares in 2020. In financial terms, one report valued the worldwide palm oil industry at $62.3 billion in 2021. And such is the continuing growth in demand, this figure is expected to increase to $75.7 billion by 2028. To try to reduce the world's reliance on palm oil, Ms Ticku, who was formerly an investment banker, and her co-founders set up C16 Biosciences in New York City in 2018. Backed by multi-million dollar funding from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the company has spent the past four years developing and finessing their product, which is called Palmless. They grow a strain of yeast that naturally produces an oil with very similar properties to palm, which they harvest. The yeast is fed on sugars from sugar cane plants grown on land already used for arable farming. "Our process takes less than seven days from start to finish," says a spokeswoman for C16 Biosciences. "For a traditional oil palm tree, the oil wouldn't be ready to harvest until years after the seed is planted, and most trees don't reach peak production until seven years later." She adds that the company is now "actively collaborating on partnerships in the beauty and home categories -- for example, moisturizers, nourishing oils, soaps and cancels". "[And] we plan to enter into food in 2024." Chris Chuck, professor of bioprocess engineering at the University of Bath, leads another team that has created its own yeast-sourced alternative. "After hundreds of generations of yeast, and years of trial and error, they arrived at a unique strain called metschnikowia pulcherrima, or MP for short," reports the BBC. "MP is said to be hardy and not fussy what it eats. It can be fed on grass and food waste. And at the point of harvesting, its cells are full of oil. Even the leftover yeast cell biomass need not go to waste. It can be used for other products, for example creating a substitute for soya protein." Prof Chuck says the aim is for the oil to be as sustainable as possible. "In the best case scenarios we've modeled," he says, "it could be even just a couple of percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil grown in Indonesia or Malaysia."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. New Atlas reports: [T]he new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against. So both MingYang and CSSC sell these mammoth mega-turbines primarily as cost-cutting measures that'll help bring down the capital cost of wind farm setup, and eventually the cost of the energy they produce. "Compared to the installation of 13MW models," reads a statement by MingYang on LinkedIn, "the higher output of the MySE18.X-28X would save 18 units required for a 1GW wind farm, shaving off construction costs by 120,000 - 150,000 USD/MW." New Atlas calculated this to "represent a CAPEX saving of $120-150 million on a gigawatt-scale project." "For reference, the 1.2-GW Hornsea One Project, built using 7-MW turbines, is estimated to have cost "at least $5.153 billion, so while $150 million can't be considered chump change, it might represent a couple of percent on a project this big."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a blog post this evening, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service, which allows businesses to power their apps with large-scale AI models, including GPT-3.5, DALL-E 2, and Codex. VentureBeat reports: According to a press statement, availability is "restricted to customers who meet and adhere to the standards for responsible and ethical AI principles that Microsoft has set and published (linked here). Customers are required to apply for access describing their intended use-case or application before they are given access to the service." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted the announcement, adding that "ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure Open AI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world's most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives." OpenAI tweeted the news, adding that "We've learned a lot from the ChatGPT research preview and have been making important updates based on user feedback. ChatGPT will be coming to our API and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: China's population declined in 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday. The drop was the first since the early 1960s, according to Yi Fuxian, a critic of China's one-child policy and author of the book "Big Country With an Empty Nest." Mainland China's population, excluding foreigners, fell by 850,000 people in 2022 to 1.41 billion, the statistics bureau said. The country reported 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths for 2022. In 2021, China's population grew by the slowest increase on record. The mainland China population, excluding foreigners, rose by 480,000 to 1.41 billion people at the end of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. New births on the mainland fell by 13% in 2021 to 10.62 million babies, the data showed. In 2020, new births fell by 22%, according to the data. "The population will likely trend down from here in coming years," said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. "This is very important, with implications for potential growth and domestic demand." The National Bureau of Statistics also reported that China's economy expanded by 3% in 2022, far below the government's target. "It also marks one of the worst performances in nearly half a century," reports CNN. This is a developing story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Engadget: Lightning rods have been used to safely guide strikes into the ground since Benjamin Franklin's day, but their short range (roughly the same radius as the height) and fixed-in-place design makes them ineffective for protecting large areas. The technology may finally be here to replace them in some situations. European researchers have successfully tested a system that uses terawatt-level laser pulses to steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod. It's not limited by its physical height, and can cover much wider areas -- in this case, 590 feet -- while penetrating clouds and fog. ["The experiment was performed on Santis Mountain, in northeast Switzerland," adds The Washington Post. "A 407-foot (124-meter) communications tower there, equipped with a lightning rod, is struck roughly a hundred times a year."] The design ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules, releasing electrons and creating a plasma that conducts electricity. As the laser fires at a very quick 1,000 pulses per second, it's considerably more likely to intercept lightning as it forms. In the test, conducted between June and September 2021, lightning followed the beam for nearly 197 feet before hitting the rod. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Photonics. A video of the work has also been published on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, CircleCI urged users to rotate their secrets following a breach of the company's systems. The company confirmed in a blog post on Friday that some customers' data was stolen in the breach. While the customer data was encrypted, cybercriminals obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt the data. TechCrunch reports: The company said in a detailed blog post on Friday that it identified the intruder's initial point of access as an employee's laptop that was compromised with malware, allowing the theft of session tokens used to keep the employee logged in to certain applications, even though their access was protected with two-factor authentication. The company took the blame for the compromise, calling it a "systems failure," adding that its antivirus software failed to detect the token-stealing malware on the employee's laptop. Session tokens allow a user to stay logged in without having to keep re-entering their password or re-authorizing using two-factor authentication each time. But a stolen session token allows an intruder to gain the same access as the account holder without needing their password or two-factor code. As such, it can be difficult to differentiate between a session token of the account owner, or a hacker who stole the token. CircleCi said the theft of the session token allowed the cybercriminals to impersonate the employee and gain access to some of the company's production systems, which store customer data. "Because the targeted employee had privileges to generate production access tokens as part of the employee's regular duties, the unauthorized third party was able to access and exfiltrate data from a subset of databases and stores, including customer environment variables, tokens, and keys," said Rob Zuber, the company's chief technology officer. Zuber said the intruders had access from December 16 through January 4. Zuber said that while customer data was encrypted, the cybercriminals also obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt customer data. "We encourage customers who have yet to take action to do so in order to prevent unauthorized access to third-party systems and stores," Zuber added. Several customers have already informed CircleCi of unauthorized access to their systems, Zuber said. Zuber said that CircleCi employees who retain access to production systems "have added additional step-up authentication steps and controls," which should prevent a repeat-incident, likely by way of using hardware security keys.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Register, IBM has shifted the roles of US IBM Systems employees developing AIX over to the Indian office. From the report: Prior to this transition, said to taken place in the third quarter of 2022, AIX development was split more or less evenly between the US and India, an IBM source told The Register. With the arrival of 2023, the entire group had been moved to India. Roughly 80 US-based AIX developers were affected, our source estimates. We're told they were "redeployed," and given an indeterminate amount of time to find a new position internally, in keeping with practices we reported last week based on claims by other IBM employees. Evidently, the majority of those redeployed found jobs elsewhere at IBM. A lesser number of staff are evidently stuck in "redeployment limbo," with no IBM job identified and no evident prospects at the company. "It also appears that these people in 'redeployment' limbo within IBM are all older, retirement eligible employees," our source said. "The general sense among my peers is that redeployment is being used to nudge older employees out of the company and to do so in a manner that avoids the type of scrutiny that comes with layoffs." Layoffs generally come with a severance payment and may have reporting requirements. Redeployments -- directing workers to find another internal position, which may require relocating -- can avoid cost and bureaucracy. They also have the potential to encourage workers to depart on their own. We're told that IBM does not disclose redeployment numbers to its employees and does not report how internal jobs were obtained -- through internal search, with the assistance of management -- or were not obtained -- employees left in limbo or who choose to leave rather than wait.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Netherlands, once famed for being cycle-friendly, is facing a surprising threat: souped-up electric bikes speeding at up to 42kph (26mph). [...] Fietsersbond [is] a cyclists' union that is campaigning to crack down on speedy e-bikes and "fat bikes" -- those with extremely wide tyres. These should only use cycle paths with a maximum speed of 25kph -- but some of the bikes are designed to go faster or are being altered by the user to allow them to do so. Last June, Dutch MPs voted to ban people from boosting factory-programmed e-bike speeds, and cycling experts warn that nations rapidly adopting them, such as the UK, will soon face the same issues. Recent Dutch government research found e-bikes typically travel at almost 24kph, 3kph faster than normal bicycles, but a quarter of e-bikers exceed the limit – especially young adults. Mopeds and racers might be worse, but the Netherlands has an estimated 5m e-bikes, for a population of 17.8 million, and users include primary school children. Esther van Garderen, director of the Fietsersbond, is campaigning for quick enforcement of the speed-boost ban and prohibiting fast e-bikes in bike lanes. "The problem is not normal e-bikes, but ever more souped-up bikes that are basically illegal mopeds," she said. "In the Netherlands, since January, moped users must wear a helmet and young people don't like this. They also need to be 16 and have a driving licence, but illegal 'fat' bikes are just sold, youngsters under 16 use them on the roads going at 40kph, without a helmet. This isn't allowed, but there is no enforcement." She added that a plan by Amsterdam-Zuid district council to research whether child cyclists should be obliged to attach a flag to their bikes to improve road safety made her blood boil: "To think that the solution is that children need to have a flag is blaming the victim to the max." This autumn, Amsterdam will reduce speed limits from 50 to 30kph on 500 roads and the city is also researching "intelligent speed adaptation" systems to warn speeding cyclists or even force e-bikes to slow down. "Traffic safety and safe biking are areas where I really want to break ground in the coming years," said Melanie van der Horst, deputy mayor for traffic. "Two-thirds of Amsterdammers tell us they don't feel safe in the traffic. So more than 80% of roads will become a 30kph zone and we are researching a speed limit on the bike lanes. The growth of electric vehicles means there are huge speed differences on bike lanes and studies show that this creates risks." [...] The international cycling advocacy foundation BYCS believes that slightly slower cities might be better ones. "Technology is praised as progress, but it's not about progress," said Maud de Vries, the chief executive. "It's about urban health and a system where people are more active, healthy and cross each other's paths, in a good way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a real possibility that SODIMM memory sticks could be replaced by a new type of removable memory called CAMM. According to PC World, "Memory overseer JEDEC will formally adopt the 'CAMM Common Spec' as the next RAM module standard for laptops." From the report: JEDEC, the memory group that homologates RAM standards, is in the process of hammering out the new spec to replace the basic SO-DIMMs that have been in use for 25 years, according to JEDEC committee member, and Dell Senior Distinguished Engineer Tom Schnell. Schnell actually created the original CAMM -- or Compression Attached Memory Module -- design for Dell last year. JEDEC's CAMM standard will be based on that CAMM design but is likely to be somewhat different as companies hammer it out. "We have unanimous approval of the 0.5 spec," Schnell told PCWorld. Schnell said JEDEC is targeting the second half of the 2023 to finalize the 1.0 spec, with CAMM-based systems out by next year. Who are the companies that voted for it? Schnell can't say, as that's up to each member to reveal, but group covers the range of suppliers, from SoC, to connectors, to OEMs, and all unanimously voted to adopt the CAMM Common Spec, with no dissenters. There are currently 332 companies listed in JEDEC, from Apple to ZTE, each involved in different aspects of memory in different industries. For those who haven't followed it, Dell introduced its CAMM design in April 2022 with the aim of replacing the decades old SO-DIMM design that has been used in most gaming and workstation laptops up to now. CAMM's main appeal is that it enables higher memory density while also scaling to ever higher clock speeds. Some of the motivation for expediency likely comes from the fast-approaching "brick wall" facing laptops when SO-DIMMs hit at DDR5/6400. Schnell said the CAMM spec is far from finalized, but the first JEDEC CAMM modules should take over right where SO-DIMM ends at 6400. [...] With CAMM being hammered out now, Schnell did lay out some possible paths for CAMM as it replaces SO-DIMM. DDR6 is an obvious road, he said, but CAMM even enables the possibility of LPDDR6 on a replaceable module. LPDDR, or low-power DDR RAM, has long been preferred for smaller and thinner laptops as well as phones for power savings. It's also long been implemented only as soldered-on. Schnell foresees a version of CAMM enabling the performance and power benefits of LPDDR, but in a replaceable and upgradeable module. With JEDEC adopting CAMM now, that future gets closer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, citing preliminary research from LMC Automotive and EV-Volumes.com, there were 7.8 million electric vehicles sold worldwide in 2022, a 68% increase from 2021. "The uptick helped electric vehicles achieve a roughly 10% global market share in the automotive industry for the first time," reports Insider. From the report: While 10% is only a modest share of the total market, the industry is growing faster than some had predicted. In 2021, for instance, the International Energy Agency projected that it would take until 2030 for the EV industry to reach between 7% and 12% of global auto sales. Europe and China have led the way, where electric vehicles already account for 11% and 19% of total car sales respectively, WSJ reported, citing data from LMC Automotive. CBInsights Auto and Mobility Trends estimated that its global market share could reach 22% by 2030. BloombergNEF projected the industry's market share could reach nearly 40% by the end of the decade. The Biden Administration, which included a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electric vehicle in last year's Inflation Reduction Act, is aiming for half of US vehicle sales to be electric by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: GitHub has taken down a popular Pirate Bay proxy information portal from Github.io. The developer platform took action in response to a takedown request sent by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The takedown notice concludes that the site, which did not link to any infringing content directly, is illegal. [...] "This site is in breach of UK law, namely Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud," PIPCU writes. "Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert," the notice adds. This takedown request was honored by GitHub, meaning that people who try to access the domain now get a 404 error instead. While GitHub's swift response is understandable, it's worth pointing out how these blocking efforts are evolving and expanding, far beyond blocking the original Pirate Bay site. The Proxy Bay doesn't link to infringing content directly. The site links to other proxy sites which serve up the Pirate Bay homepage. From there, users may search for or browse torrent links that, once loaded, can download infringing content. Does this mean that simply linking to The Pirate Bay can be considered a crime in itself? If that's the case, other sites such as Wikipedia and Bing are in trouble too. A more reasonable middle ground would be to consider the intent of a site. The Proxy Bay was launched to facilitate access to The Pirate Bay, which makes court orders less effective. In 2015 UK ISPs began blocking proxy and proxy indexing sites, so that explains why thepirateproxybay.com and others are regularly blocked. Whether this constitutes criminal activity is ultimately for the court to decide, not the police. In this regard, it's worth noting that City of London Police previously arrested the alleged operator of a range of torrent site proxies. The then 20-year-old defendant, who also developed censorship circumvention tool Immunicity, was threatened with a hefty prison sentence but the court disagreed and dismissed the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As farmers in Europe and across the world grapple with increases in the cost of fertilizers, researchers suggest a solution may be closer to home in what people flush down the toilet. From a report: A peer-reviewed paper by scientists in Europe published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that fertilizer made from human feces and urine is safe to use, and that only extremely tiny quantities of chemicals from medicines or drugs, for example, would get into the food. Governments worldwide are struggling to keep fertilizer costs manageable and increase self-sufficiency after Russia's invasion of Ukraine drove up prices of natural gas, a key feedstock for crop nutrients. European Union authorities are considering ways to speed up development of manure-based fertilizers after the surge in costs spurred anger among the bloc's farmers. In terms of safety, the researchers screened human waste for 310 chemicals, from pharmaceuticals to insect repellents, and found that only 6.5% of these were above the limit for detection and at low concentrations. "In general, the risk for human health of pharmaceutical compounds entering the food system by means of fecal compost use, seems low," the authors concluded. While they detected two pharmaceutical products in edible parts of cabbages, the painkiller ibuprofen and the anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine, the concentrations were markedly low. This means that more than half a million cabbage heads would need to be eaten to accumulate a dose equivalent to one carbamazepine pill, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The return of the El Nino climate phenomenon later this year will cause global temperatures to rise "off the chart" and deliver unprecedented heatwaves, scientists have warned. From a report: Early forecasts suggest El Nino will return later in 2023, exacerbating extreme weather around the globe and making it "very likely" the world will exceed 1.5C of warming. The hottest year in recorded history, 2016, was driven by a major El Nino. It is part of a natural oscillation driven by ocean temperatures and winds in the Pacific, which switches between El Nino, its cooler counterpart La Nina, and neutral conditions. The last three years have seen an unusual run of consecutive La Nina events. This year is already forecast to be hotter than 2022, which global datasets rank as the fifth or sixth hottest year on record. But El Nino occurs during the northern hemisphere winter and its heating effect takes months to be felt, meaning 2024 is much more likely to set a new global temperature record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's attacks on Ukraine's electrical grid are straining the war-torn country's mobile-telephone network, leading to a global hunt for batteries and other equipment critical for keeping the communications system working. From a report: Ukraine's power outages aren't just putting out the lights. The electricity shortages also affect water supplies, heating systems, manufacturing and the cellular-telephone and internet network, a vital communications link in a nation where fixed-line telephones are uncommon. Consumers can charge their cellphones at cafes or gas stations with generators, but the phones have to communicate with base stations whose antennas and switching equipment need large amounts of power. With rolling blackouts now a regular feature of life in Ukraine, the internet providers are relying on batteries to keep the network going. The stakes are high, since Ukrainian officials are using positive news of the war, speeches by President Volodymyr Zelensky and videos distributed by cellphone to maintain popular support for fighting Russia. First responders and evacuees rely on the mobile network, and a long-term loss of communications in major cities would compound the existing problems of electrical, heating and water outages, the companies say. Labor shortages have exacerbated the mobile-network issues as many Ukrainians have been displaced by the war or gone to the front to fight. In December, the chief executive of Ukraine's Lifecell mobile operator, Ismet Yazici, went into the field himself to wheel in a generator and restore backup power at a cell tower, according to the company. But the biggest problem is power equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals -- which operates project management platform Basecamp and other products -- has detailed the colossal cloud bills that saw the outfit quit the cloud in October 2022. The CTO and creator of Ruby On Rails did all the sums and came up with an eye-watering cloud bill for $3,201,564 in 2022 -- or $266,797 each month. Plenty of that spend -- $759,983 -- went on compute, in the form of Amazon Web Services' EC2 and EKS services. On Twitter, Hansson contrasted that cost with the spend needed to acquire servers packing 288 vCPUs and plenty more besides over three years. Hansson was at pains to point out that even that bill was the result of a concerted effort to keep it low. "Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we've entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement," he wrote. "This is a highly optimized budget."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. From a report: Only a week ago, we wrote about CSSC's new H260-18MW, the world's largest wind turbine. Partially constructed at a special and very spacious seaside facility, this offshore wind giant took over from MingYang's MySE 16.0-242 as the biggest wind turbine on the planet. Now, MingYang has struck back in this game of one-upsmanship with the announcement of something significantly bigger. And it's not like CSSC's 18-megawatt rated effort was small; each of its three blades stretches a near-unthinkable 128 m (420 ft). But the new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: What many of us had expected has finally happened, artist have sued for copyright infringement a couple of AI companies, as well as an art repository site {complaint here (PDF)}. Is this the end of AI tools? I don't think so, I'll try to explain why, this will not be a detailed look at the lawsuit, there will be more time for that, this is my own take on some of the technical issues that I think the complaint gets wrong, so this is not intended as an in-depth look at the law anyway, as I suspect this may not get to a trial, more on that later. I'm also aware that this is at a very early stage, things may change, and most importantly, nobody can be sure of what the result will be, this is my own early speculation on the first filing as it stands, I'll update and write further blog posts as needed. Three artists are starting a class-action lawsuit against Stability.ai, Midjourney, and DeviantArt alleging direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, publicity rights violation, and unfair competition. DeviantArt appears to be included as punishment for "betrayal of its artist community," so I will mostly ignore their part in this analysis for now. Specifically with regards to the copyright claims, the lawsuit alleges that Stability.ai and Midjourney have scraped the Internet to copy billions of works without permission, including works belonging to the claimants. They allege that these works are then stored by the defendants, and these copies are then used to produce derivative works. This is at the very core of the lawsuit. The complaint is very clear that the resulting images produced by Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are not directly reproducing the works by the claimants, no evidence is presented of even a close reproduction of one of their works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

England will ban businesses from selling and offering a variety of single-use plastics, including plates and cutlery, by the end of the year, the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced on Saturday. From a report: The government will begin enforcing the legislation in October 2023. In addition to some plastics, the ban will cover single-use trays and certain types of polystyrene cups and food containers but will exempt plates, trays and bowls included with supermarket-ready meals; the government intends to target those through a separate plan that incentives manufacturers to meet higher recycling standards. According to one estimate cited by the environment ministry, English consumers use about 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery every year, and only about 10 percent of those are recycled. The department said 95 percent of people it consulted before today's announcement were in favor of a ban. "We have listened to the public and these new single-use plastics bans will continue our vital work to protect the environment for future generations," said Environment Secretary Therese Coffey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The pharmaceutical company Moderna didn't present a set of infection data on the company's new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when [FDA] advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the publicThat data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. Specifically, Moderna hid data on actual infection rates among patients who were administered the original booster and those who got the bivalent "vaccine." The reason is obvious: The data showed that the original booster resulted in fewer infections than the bivalent version, which clearly wouldn't be good news for sales. 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine -- the one that scientists hoped would work better -- a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected. Research released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that "boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4-BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines." In English, that means they don't work as promised.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany wants to force its power-hungry data centers to harness excess heat for warming residential homes -- an effort which the industry warns is likely to fall flat. From a report: The country has become one of the largest global hubs for data centers thanks to its clear data protection and security laws. Politicians are now trying to re-purpose some of their controversial excess heat to improve efficiency in light of the energy crisis. While in theory an innovative way to reduce the industry's immense carbon footprint, experts have pointed to a flaw in the government's proposal expected to be passed this month: potential recipients of waste heat are not being compelled to take it. The warm air expelled by server farms isn't nearly as hot as that required by most district heating networks. That means any utility they partner with must invest in heat pumps to bring the air to usable levels, further ramping up costs and power usage. What's at stake for Europe's largest economy is that it either risks scaring off IT investments and slowing its efforts to digitize, or falling behind on climate goals. The energy efficiency law being prepared by the government aims to save some 500 terawatt-hours of energy by 2030 -- pegged in part on a requirement to reuse at least 30% of a new data center's heat by 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Employment scams using fake job opportunities to swindle applicants are on the rise and have found a new, prime target in laid-off tech workers. From a report: These schemes -- which often involve fictitious job listings, interviews with fake recruiters and sham onboarding processes to steal job seekers' money or identities -- proliferated during the pandemic alongside virtual hiring and remote work, according to Federal Trade Commission data. Scammers now appear to be zeroing in on workers who have recently lost jobs, particularly in the tech industry, workforce experts and recent job-scam victims say. The number of reported job scams nearly tripled to 104,000 between 2019 and 2021 and remained elevated in 2022, according to the FTC. U.S. workers lost more than $200 million from employment-related scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019, agency data show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is likely to receive an EU antitrust warning about its $69 billion bid for "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, that could pose another challenge to completing the deal. From the report: The European Commission is readying a charge sheet known as a statement of objections setting out its concerns about the deal which will be sent to Microsoft in the coming weeks, the people said. The EU antitrust watchdog, which has set an April 11 deadline for its decision on the deal, declined to comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: In case there are any doubts that the hiring party is over at Amazon, the number of open jobs in the Software Development category has declined to 299 in January 2023 from 32,692 in May 2022, according to Amazon's Jobs site. Internet Archive captures of Amazon's Software Development jobs category show the number of open jobs declined from 32,692 in May to 31,840 in June, 30,124 in July, 24,747 in August, 17,141 in September, 2,829 in November, and 373 in December. The number of Software Development job openings currently stands at 299 (164 of those in the U.S.), or less than 1% of the 32,692 May job openings. Declaring that "the U.S. isn't producing nearly enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce," Amazon in May publicly called on Congress and legislatures across the U.S. to support and fund CS education in public schools to "create a much-needed pipeline of talent that will carry us into the future." And in July, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy joined other Tech Giant CEOs as signatories to a public letter calling for state governments and education leaders to bring more CS to K-12 students. "The USA has over 700,000 open computing jobs but only 80,000 computer science graduates a year," the 'CEOs for CS' explained. "We must educate American students as a matter of national competitiveness." Days later, 50 of the nation's Governors accepted the challenge, signing a Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education in their states and territories. Last fall, a new Amazon-bankrolled $15 million CS curriculum aimed at dramatically boosting the number of high school students who take the Java-based AP CS A course was rolled out nationwide (Java founder and AWS employee James Gosling recently noted that "A lot of the guts of AWS is Java, and AWS has a pretty big Java team"). And in December, Amazon News reported that "600,000 students across 5,000 schools received computer science education through the Amazon Future Engineer 'childhood-to-career' program." The next business day, the Financial Times reported that Amazon had delayed start dates for some university graduates who had been set to the join the company in May 2023, blaming the "macroeconomic environment" and telling students they would now not be able to begin until the end of 2023. The FT article followed an NY Times report on the shrinking Big Tech job market faced by CS students.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I saw the future at CES 2023," writes Geoffrey Morrison, describing "a new, top-secret prototype display technology" that could one day replace LCD and OLED for phones and TVs. "It was impossibly flat, like a vibrantly glowing piece of paper." Meet electroluminescent quantum dots:Until now, quantum dots were always a supporting player in another technology's game. A futuristic booster for older tech, elevating that tech's performance. QDs weren't a character on their own. That is no longer the case. The prototype I saw was completely different. No traditional LEDs and no OLED. Instead of using light to excite quantum dots into emitting light, it uses electricity. Nothing but quantum dots. Electroluminescent, aka direct-view, quantum dots. This is huge. Or at least, has the potential to be huge. Theoretically, this will mean thinner, more energy-efficient displays. It means displays that can be easier, as in cheaper, to manufacture. That could mean even less expensive, more efficient, bigger-screen TVs. The potential in picture quality is at least as good as QD-OLED, if not better. The tech is scalable from tiny, lightweight, high-brightness displays for next-generation VR headsets, to highly efficient phone screens, to high-performance flat-screen TVs. The article predicts the simpler structure means "Essentially, you can print an entire QD display onto a surface without the heat required by other 'printable' tech.... Just about any flat or curved surface could be a screen." This leads to QD screens not just on TVs and phones, but on car windshields, eyeglass lenses, and even bus or subway windows. ("These will initially be pitched by cities as a way to show people important info, but inevitably they'll be used for advertising. That's certainly not a knock against the tech, just how things work in the world....") Nanosys is calling this direct-view, electroluminescent quantum dot tech "nanoLED," and told CNET that "their as-yet-unnamed manufacturing partner is going to be talking more about the technology in a few months... "Even Nanosys admits direct-view quantum dot displays are still several years away from mass production.... But 5-10 years from now we'll almost certainly have options for QD [quantum dot] displays in our phones, probably in our living rooms, and possibly on our windshields and windows."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports "undeniable momentum" for Matter, the royalty-free interoperability standard that "allows smart home devices from any manufacturer to talk to other devices directly and locally with no need to use the cloud." "Matter was the buzzword throughout CES 2023 this year, with most companies even remotely connected to the smart home loudly discussing their Matter plans."The new smart home standard was featured in several keynotes and displayed prominently in smart home device makers' booths as well as in Google, Amazon, and Samsung's big, showy displays. More importantly, dozens of companies and manufacturers announced specific plans. Several companies said they would update entire product lines, while others announced new ones, sometimes with actual dates and prices. And Matter controllers have become a major thing, with at least four brand-new ones debuting at CES. Interestingly, nearly all of them have a dual or triple function, helping banish the specter of seemingly pointless white hubs stuck in your router closet.... Matter works over the protocols Thread, Wi-Fi, and ethernet and has been jointly developed by Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, and pretty much every other smart home brand you can name, big or small. If a device supports Matter, it will work locally with Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home, Google Home, and any other smart home platform that supports Matter. It will also be controllable by any of the four voice assistants.... The big four have turned on Matter support on their platforms, but Amazon's approach has been piecemeal, and aside from Apple, nobody supports onboarding devices to Matter on iOS yet. However, that is shifting: at CES, Amazon announced a full rollout by spring, and Samsung's Jaeyeon Jung told The Verge that Matter support is coming to its iOS app this month. There's still no news on Matter support in Google Home's iOS app. Then there's the whole competing Thread network issue, although that sounds like it will be resolved sooner rather than later.... The Matter device drought should be over soon — although, judging by most of these ship dates, not until at least the second half of 2023. "It's also likely we'll see dedicated bridges coming out that can bring Z-Wave and other products with proprietary protocols into Matter...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Watch a rare launch of SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket livestreamed on SpaceX's YouTube channel. "Nearly five years have passed since the massive Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful debut launch in February 2018," writes Ars Technica. "Since then, however, SpaceX's heavy lift rocket has flown just three additional times."Why? It's partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense. But now this trickle of Falcon Heavy launches may turn into a flood. [Sunday's launch is the first of potentially five launches this year] SpaceX completed a hot fire test of the rocket on Tuesday, and declared that the vehicle was ready for liftoff. The rocket will use a brand new core stage, and side-mounted boosters that have flown into space one time, as side-mounted boosters on the USSF-44 Falcon Heavy mission that launched on November 1 2022. What's it carrying? Space.com writes:The main payload is a military communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM 2, which the Falcon Heavy will send to geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above Earth. Also flying Saturday is a rideshare spacecraft called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A, a payload adapter that can hold up to six small satellites, according to EverydayAstronaut.com. LDPE-3A will carry five Space Force payloads on USSF-67. Among them are "two operational prototypes for enhanced situational awareness and an operational prototype crypto/interface encryption payload providing secure space-to-ground communications capability," Space Force officials said in an emailed statement on Friday.... If all goes according to plan, the two side boosters will come back to Earth shortly after liftoff on Sunday, making vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The central booster will not return, instead ditching into the Atlantic Ocean.... USSF-67 is part of a busy week for SpaceX. The company also plans to launch 51 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 on Thursday, January 19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Thousands of CES 2023 attendees tested out the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop tunnel transit system," reports Fierce Electronics, "for quick 1.7-mile trips offering them a prelude of more of the efficient tunnels to come."The service was free during the early January event, offering 115,000 CES attendees a chance to reduce a 45-minute LVCC cross-campus walk time down to 2 minutes, not including short waits for Tesla vehicles with drivers. "I call shotgun!" one gleeful CES attendee said while waiting in line. Once inside the white Tesla vehicle, the man used his phone to video the entire trip, marking its sudden acceleration to maximum speed in the single lane white tunnel, an experience the design engineer likened to a slick amusement park ride over a tunnel race track.... Construction is expected to begin in 2023 on the 29-mile Vegas Loop tunnel network approved by the county in 2021 to ultimately connect 51 stations throughout the resort corridor. In 2022, the city of Las Vegas unanimously approved bringing the Vegas Loop to city limits, which increases the system to 34 miles and 55 stations in all. The dream is for Vegas Loop to eventually connect to Los Angeles, a distance of 270 miles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: In what is becoming a recurring theme, Gen Z keeps harkening back to nostalgia. Whether low-rise jeans or disposable cameras, they can't seem to get enough of vintage technology from the past. Their latest obsession? Flip phones. Why this fascination? Several reasons. Flip phones are far less expensive than any smart phone, easier to operate as they have few, if any, software included, there isn't the incessant need to see who messaged you or who said what and, perhaps just as important, privacy. For a generation which grew up on being tracked wherever they go via their phone, a flip phone's simplicity allows them the freedom to simply enjoy their life. HMD Global (the company which owns Nokia) said many people like the idea being less available. "We attribute this shift to many smartphone users beginning to recognize they are spending too much time glued to their devices and having a strong desire to disconnect and 'be fully present' to improve their quality of social connections," Kates said. CNN spoke to one influencer pushing flip phones — Sammy Palazzolo, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:Palazzolo's TikTok encouraging others to purchase flip phones has more than 14 million views and over 3 million likes, with hashtags that include #BRINGBACKFLIPPHONES and #y2kaesthetic. [The video says that instead of apps, the phones will only have the phone numbers of their other friends.] "It eliminates all the bad things about college and brings all of the good things about a phone," Palazzolo said. "Which is connecting with people and taking photos and videos...." Palozzolo wanted to use a flip phone during one high school summer because she thought it would be "cool." "My parents said absolutely not, we need to be able to track you," she said. "I love the photos on the flip phones because they are grainy and blurry," Palazzolo tells CNN. "And I think that captures the vibe of going out in college perfectly...." And one 18-year-old told CNN what they think is missing from the flip phone era. "People were more involved in each other than our phones and social media. It seemed like people just were talking to each other more and everything was more genuine and spontaneous."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From BuzzFeed News:Technology news outlet CNET has been found to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write articles about personal finance without any prior announcement or explanation. The articles, which numbered at 73, covered topics such as "What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?" and had a small disclaimer at the bottom of each reading, "This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff." The bylines on these articles read "CNET Money Staff" without any indication that they were generated by AI. The use of AI to write these articles was first brought to light by a Twitter user, and further investigation revealed that the articles have been generated using AI since November 2022.... Note: This article was written entirely by ChatGPT and reviewed by a human editor. (Actually, we had to rewrite the prompt a few times to get it to stop inserting factual errors.) CNET's editor in chief defends their AI-written stories:I use the term "AI assist" because while the AI engine compiled the story draft or gathered some of the information in the story, every article on CNET — and we publish thousands of new and updated stories each month — is reviewed, fact-checked and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish. That will remain true as our policy no matter what tools or tech we use to create those stories. Our reputation as a fact-based, unbiased source of news and advice is based on being transparent about how we work and the sources we rely on. So in the past 24 hours, we've changed the byline to CNET Money and moved our disclosure so you won't need to hover over the byline to see it: "This story was assisted by an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff...."Will we make more changes and try new things as we continue to test, learn and understand the benefits and challenges of AI? Yes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When Robert Wood came to Harvard University 17 years ago, he wanted to design an insect-sized robot that could fly," reports the Boston Globe. And finally Last month, technology from Wood's "RoboBee" project was commercialized for the first time, "spinning out as a surgical-robot startup backed by venture capital firm 1955 Capital. "RoboBee was funded by $10 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. Its evolution into a company says a lot about how schools like Harvard are doing more to encourage entrepreneurship."The RoboBee first took flight in 2012, connected to a tether that provided a power supply. In 2019, it became the lightest object to take off and fly on its own.... When it takes off, its little wings flap about 150 times per second, but a slowed-down video of the wings resembles a human treading water. Many wonder what tiny, flying robots that weigh less than one-tenth of a gram might be useful for. Pollinating crops? Surveillance? Wood said he never paid too much attention to that. "It's never really been about, 'Oh, I'm going to start a company based upon this,'" he said. But that changed recently, he said, mostly because of a growing push at Harvard to move research from its labs into the real world.... Wood was connected to venture capitalist and Harvard alum Andrew Chung by the school's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean, Frank Doyle, during the pandemic. The managing partner of 1955 Capital said he's been investing in surgical-robotics companies for the past decade. "The one key thing that we have been dreaming about is how we can make the robotic arms a lot smaller," Chung said. "Not necessarily what other VCs might be thinking, which is maybe 15 to 20 percent smaller. We're thinking 90 percent smaller." Chung noticed how the RoboBee was designed and manufactured — Wood got his inspiration from origami and children's-book layering and folding techniques — and thought it could help make better small-scale surgical robots. "Thinking about how to shrink these devices to insect size or smaller opens up a whole range of possibilities that even surgeons haven't quite imagined," Chung said. For now, the startup is called Project 1985, a reference to the year the first robotic-assisted surgery took place. The company will initially focus on neurosurgery, urology, and lung surgery. Wood will serve as an advisor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns. RNDIS is the proprietary protocol used atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. The support for RNDIS outside of Microsoft Windows has been mixed. RNDIS isn't widely used today in cross-platform environments and due to security concerns the upstream Linux kernel is looking to move the RNDIS kernel drivers behind the "BROKEN" Kconfig option so they effectively become disabled in future kernel builds. Ultimately once marked as "BROKEN" for a while, the drivers will likely be eventually removed from the upstream source tree. Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in a commit:"The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and vulnerable on any system that uses it with untrusted hosts or devices. Because the protocol is impossible to make secure, just disable all rndis drivers to prevent anyone from using them again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contrails — the wispy ice clouds trailing behind flying jets — "are surprisingly bad for the environment," reports CNN:A study that looked at aviation's contribution to climate change between 2000 and 2018 concluded that contrails create 57% of the sector's warming impact, significantly more than the CO2 emissions from burning fuel. They do so by trapping heat that would otherwise be released into space. And yet, the problem may have an apparently straightforward solution. Contrails — short for condensation trails, which form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines — require cold and humid atmospheric conditions, and don't always stay around for long. Researchers say that by targeting specific flights that have a high chance of producing contrails, and varying their flight path ever so slightly, much of the damage could be prevented. Adam Durant, a volcanologist and entrepreneur based in the UK, is aiming to do just that. "We could, in theory, solve this problem for aviation within one or two years," he says.... Of contrails' climate impact, "80 or 90% is coming from only maybe five to 10% of all flights," says Durant. "Simply redirecting a small proportion of flights can actually save the majority of the contrail climate impact...." In 2021, scientists calculated that addressing the contrail problem would cost under $1 billion a year, but provide benefits worth more than 1,000 times as much. And a study from Imperial College London showed that diverting just 1.7% of flights could reduce the climate damage of contrails by as much as 59%. Durant's company Satavia is now testing its technology with two airlines and "actively looking for more airlines in 2023 to work with, as we start scaling up the service that we offer." Truly addressing the issue may require some changes to air traffic rules, Durant says — but he's not the only one working on the issue. There's also the task force of a non-profit energy think tank that includes six airlines, plus researchers and academics. "We could seriously reduce, say, 50% of the industry's contrails impact by 2030," Durant tells CNN. "That's totally attainable, because we can do it with software and analytics."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

InfoWorld reports: JavaScript, Java, and Python skills are most in-demand by recruiters, according to a report published this week by tech hiring platforms CodinGame and CoderPad. But while the supply of those skills exceeds demand, the demand for TypeScript, Swift, Scala, Kotlin, and Go skills all exceed supply. The State of Tech Hiring in 2023, a CodinGame-CoderPad report published January 10, draws on a survey of 14,000 professionals and offers insights into what 2023 may hold for tech industry recruiters and job seekers. The demand for JavaScript, Java, and Python skills is consistent with previous years, the report notes. Among development frameworks, Node.js, React, and .NET Core proved to be the best-known and most in-demand. InfoWorld summarizes some other interesting findings:"59% of developers do not have a university degree in computer science. Nearly one-third consider themselves primarily self-taught.""Developers' main challenges at work include unplanned changes to their schedule, unclear direction, and a lack of technical knowledge by team members.""Most teams are now hybrid between remote and on-site work. Only 15% work onsite 100% of the time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Can editing code feel more tactile, like painting with Photoshop brushes?" Researchers at GitHub Next asked that question this week — and then supplied the answer. "We added a toolbox of brushes to our Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension that can modify your code.... Just select a few lines, choose your brush, and see your code update." The tool's web page includes interactive before-and-after examples demonstrating:Add Types brushFix Bugs brushAdd Debugging Statements brushMake More Readable brushAnd last month Microsoft's principle program manager for browser tools shared an animated GIF showing all the brushes in action. "In the future, we're interested in adding more useful brushes, as well as letting developers store their own custom brushes," adds this week's announcement. "As we explore enhancing developers' workflows with Machine Learning, we're focused on how to empower developers, instead of automating them. This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines." It's ultimately grafting an incredibly easy interface onto "ML-powered code modification", writes Visual Studio Magazine, noting that "The bug-fixing brush, for example can fix a simple typo, changing a variable name from the incorrect 'low' to the correct 'lo'.... "All of the above brushes and a few others have been added to the Copilot Labs brushes toolbox, which is available for anyone with a GitHub Copilot license, costing $10 per month or $100 per year.... At the time of this writing, the extension has been installed 131,369 times, earning a perfect 5.0 rating from six reviewers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year in America, "Renewable energy surpassed coal power nationwide for the first time in over six decades," reports the New York Times. Wind, solar and hydropower generated 22% of America's electricity, compared with 20% from coal. But unfortunately, America's greenhouse gas emissions still increased from the year before, "according to preliminary estimates published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research firm." The New Yorker supplies some context:This increase, according to the report, "was driven mainly by the demand for jet fuel," as air travel rebounded from COVID levels, and it might have been even larger but for the war in Ukraine, which drove up fuel prices.... As part of the Paris Agreement, the U.S. pledged to reduce its emissions by half by 2030, using 2005 as a baseline. Emissions are now down only around fifteen per cent compared with 2005, which leaves a thirty-five-per-cent cut to be implemented in just eight years. Last summer's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes some four hundred billion dollars' worth of spending on clean energy, was a "turning point," the Rhodium Group said, and could produce emissions cuts "as early as this year if the government can fast-track implementation." Still, the group admonished, the U.S. "needs to significantly increase its efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's plans for a presence on the moon "will allow the program to practice how to live in space sustainably," writes the Washington Post. "It will allow scientists to tap into the moon's considerable scientific value to learn more about how Earth was formed. And perhaps, it would also serve as a steppingstone to Mars and other deep-space destinations years in the future." First, unlike in the 1960s — we now know that the moon has water.Water is not only key to sustaining human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a gas station in space. That could be critical for long-duration missions, allowing spacecraft to refuel on the moon instead of lugging all the fuel from Earth. And since the moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, it is a relatively easy springboard to other points of the solar system. NASA is also considering building a nuclear reactor on the moon:It's one of several initiatives NASA has begun under its Artemis program, designed to help astronauts stay for extended periods when they'll need power, transportation and the ability to use the moon's resources.... The effort is still very much in its nascent stages, and the funding NASA would need for the long term has not materialized in full.... A sustainable presence, despite the rosy predictions coming from the top echelons of the agency, is still years away, and the technical challenges are immense. But NASA has begun developing the technologies that would be needed to sustain astronauts on the surface for extended periods. In June of last year, the agency and the Energy Department awarded contracts, worth $5 million each, to three companies to develop nuclear power systems that could be ready to launch by the end of the decade for a test on the moon. The systems would generate 40 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power six or seven American households, and last about 10 years.... NASA is also looking to build solar farms, using arrays that point vertically and catch the angle of the sun over the horizon. And it's exploring how best to exploit what are called "in situ resources" — meaning those that already exist, such as the regolith. The article even broaches the idea of "a lunar economy that would help sustain a permanent presence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Toronto Star notes "the near-elimination of cursive from the school curriculum and a move to paperless commerce" over the past two decades. So where does that leave handwritten signatures?Then the pandemic hit, and with it came an accelerated adoption of technology, including the electronic signature, which helped us through forcibly distant transactions. Overnight, companies like Docusign and Adobe became vital lifelines as people shifted to relying on e-signatures. Docusign, for example, went from 585,000 customers in 2020 to 1.1 million as of January 2022 and revenue over the same period grew from $974 million to $2.1 billion, according to the company's most recent annual report. "We believe that once businesses have shifted to digital agreement processes, they will not return to manual ones," noted Docusign. So even as life has returned to a semblance of normal, the now near ubiquitous option to just tap an electronic device doesn't bode well for the signature as we know it.... During the pandemic, jurisdictions round the world, including Ontario, amended legislation or relaxed rules around contract activity to mitigate the challenges social distancing posed.... Since 2006, the Ontario language curriculum lists cursive only as an option beginning in Grade 3. A plan by the Toronto Catholic District School Board in 2019 to reintroduce it as part of a pilot project was shuttered by the pandemic. And so you get stories of parents shocked to discover their child has to resort to block letters on a passport because they don't know how to "sign" their name. Digital signatures may be poised for even more growth. Market research firm P&S Intelligence estimates that just the U.S. digital signature market alone "stood at $921.3 million in 2021," and "will propel at a mammoth compound annual growth rate of 31.2% in the years to come, reaching $10.6 billion by 2030." Of course, there's always the question of whether or not handwritten signatures ever worked in the first place.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report from the Washington Post:Staff at Activision Blizzard-owned video game studio Proletariat — whose name is a term for the working class — announced their intention to form a union in December of last year. "Well, what'd you expect?" the Proletariat Workers Alliance wrote on Twitter at the time. Earlier this week, however, Proletariat leadership shared an update: Instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, it will conduct an anonymous vote through the National Labor Relations Board. Proletariat owner Activision Blizzard has been accused of employing union-busting tactics in its negotiations with two other subsidiaries that have voted to unionize, Raven Software and Blizzard Albany.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet," writes ScienceAlert. It's all based on the idea that melting absorbs heats."The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem," says mechanical engineer Drew Lilley, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn't hurt the environment. We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately...." A current running through the system would move the ions in it, shifting the material's melting point to change temperature. The team also ran experiments using a salt made with iodine and sodium, to melt ethylene carbonate. This common organic solvent is also used in lithium-ion batteries, and is produced using carbon dioxide as an input. That could make the system not just GWP [global warming potential] zero, but GWP negative. A temperature shift of 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) was measured through the application of less than a single volt of charge in the experiment, a result that exceeds what other caloric technologies have managed to achieve so far.... "Now, it's time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges," says mechanical engineer Ravi Prasher, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It often feels like you're tossing your resume into the abyss and praying to the recruitment gods for a response," writes Vox. But then the real ordeal begins:Companies are seemingly coming up with new, higher, and harder hoops to jump through at every turn. That translates to endless rounds of interviews, various arbitrary tests, and complex exercises and presentations that entail hours of work and prep. There can be good reasons for firms to do this — they really want to make sure they get the right person, and they're trying to reduce biases — but it's hard not to feel like it can just be too much. "There's no reason why 10 years ago we were able to hire people on two interviews and now it's taking 20 rounds of interviews," said Maddie Machado, a career strategist who has previously worked as a recruiter at companies such as LinkedIn, Meta, and Microsoft. "It's kind of like dating. When you go on a first date, you need a second date. You don't need 20 dates to know if you like somebody...." Another man was told to start looking for apartments across the country after being flown out for a final interview, only to follow up a couple of weeks later and learn that the recruiter simply forget to tell him he hadn't gotten the job. "My interviewing experiences have been worse than dating, with the ghosting and non-responses," he said.... There's no denying that over the years, in many instances, the hiring process has gotten harder and more convoluted. A 2022 survey from hiring software company Greenhouse found that 60 percent of job seekers were "unimpressed by time-consuming recruitment processes...." The pandemic and current economic conditions may be exacerbating employers' anxiety even more. Sondra Levitt [a leadership and career coach with Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm] said she thinks many firms feel like they "jumped too fast" to make hires amid the great resignation or great reshuffle, as for much of 2021 and 2022 workers hopped jobs in droves. The pendulum is swinging the other way now, with managers being extra careful to do their due diligence, especially as the economy looks rocky. "Perhaps the simplest answer to why companies make it so hard is that they can," the article concludes. Job-hunters have faced IQ tests, credit checks, and even reviews of their grades from high school. (I still remember one employer who asked everyone to take the Meyers-Briggs personality test.) And it's painfully annoying to do multiple rounds of interviews — and then be rejected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue," reports CNN:On the flip side, young mice have prematurely aged, with devastating results to nearly every tissue in their bodies. The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven "forwards and backwards at will," said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. Our bodies hold a backup copy of our youth that can be triggered to regenerate, said Sinclair, the senior author of a new paper showcasing the work of his lab and international scientists. The combined experiments, published for the first time Thursday in the journal Cell, challenge the scientific belief aging is the result of genetic mutations that undermine our DNA, creating a junkyard of damaged cellular tissue that can lead to deterioration, disease and death. "It's not junk, it's not damage that causes us to get old," said Sinclair, who described the work last year at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. "We believe it's a loss of information — a loss in the cell's ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function — in much the same way an old computer may develop corrupted software. I call it the information theory of aging." Jae-Hyun Yang, a genetics research fellow in the Sinclair Lab who coauthored the paper, said he expects the findings "will transform the way we view the process of aging and the way we approach the treatment of diseases associated with aging." While Sinclair is now testing "genetic resets" in primates, the article warns that "decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval." But Sinclair suggests damage could probably also be repaired through healthy behaviors like exercise and sufficient sleep, social support and lower stress levels, eating less often and focusing on plants. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top." "On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...."Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say. "This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...." "Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this." Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020. Other stats from the article about 2022:Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high."Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you've been itching to try an Arch Linux distribution and want something outside of the usual GNOME/KDE/Xfce desktop environments, Mabox Linux is an outstanding option...." writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "It reminded me of my early days using Linux, only with a bit of a modern, user-centric twist...."Linux was hard in its infancy. So, when I see a Linux distribution that reminds me of those days but manages to make it easy on users without years of experience under their belts, it reminds me how far the open-source operating system has come. Such is the case with Mabox Linux.... It's not that Mabox doesn't make Arch Linux easy...it does. But when you first log into the desktop, you are greeted with something most hard-core Linux users love to see but can be a real put-off to new users. I'm talking about information...and lots of it. You see, Mabox Linux places four information-centric widgets front and center on the desktop, so you can get an at-a-glance look at how the OS is using your system resources and even two widgets that give you keyboard shortcuts for things like opening various apps, menus, and even window management controls. Also on the OpenBox Window Manager desktop, you'll find a single top panel that gives you quick access to all your installed apps, the Mabox Colorizer... and a system tray with plenty of controls.... Once you have the distribution installed, the big surprise comes by way of performance. Mabox Linux is amazingly fast...like faster than most distributions I've used. A big part of that is due to the OpenBox Window Manager, which is very lightweight. Compared to my regular GNOME-based Linux desktop, Mabox is like driving a Lamborgini instead of a Prius. The difference is that obvious. The installation process lets you choose between open-source or proprietary video drivers, the article points out. And "you can easily customize the color of your Mabox desktop, including the theme, side panels, Conky (which creates the desktop widgets), wallpaper, Tint2 Panel, and even the terminal theme."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC. But instead "at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper stage experienced an anomaly which 'prematurely ended' the first burn. The company said this event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor.,,," At this point the unmanned rocket became "a slow moving fireball in the sky," astrodynamics lecturer Marco Langbroek told Gizmodo in an email. The rocket's hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space. Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. He released the footage on YouTube, as well as on Twitter. Earlier this week Space.com noted that four previous Virgin Orbit missions have all been successful, deploying a total of 33 satellites into orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the mid-1970s, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to film Dune (working with artists including H.R. Giger). A documentary about that attempt was filmed by Frank Pavich, who now writes in the New York Times that "The cast would have included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Alejandro's 12-year-old son, Brontis, in the lead role. The soundtrack would have been composed and recorded by Pink Floyd.... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations." Just because you cannot watch Alejandro's "Dune" doesn't mean it didn't change the world. This unfilmed film's influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the "Dune" art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as "Blade Runner," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Prometheus," "The Terminator" and even the original "Star Wars." His "Dune" does not exist, yet it's all around us. Nearly half a century later... I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1976 version of "Tron." The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian. However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make "Tron." I'm not even sure he knows what "Tron" is. And Disney's original "Tron" was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from...? The truth is that these weren't stills from a long-lost movie. They weren't photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. The article notes that the real Jodorowsky is now almost 94 — and is planning to direct a new film. But it also points out that in the early 1970s Jodorowsky's team put in "two years of pure analog struggle to create his Dune," — while Canadian film director Johnny Darrell generated the Tron images in less than a minute using an A.I. program called Midjourney. Pavich says this raises several questions. "Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?" In his great documentary F for Fake Orson Welles intones wrly that "A forgery — is still a painting." So Pavich's piece concludes with perhaps the ultimate question. "What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students... can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven't yet even been imagined? "I have a feeling we're all about to find out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.