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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [R]esearchers are now finding vulnerabilities in newer hospital technologies that weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago. Enter autonomous hospital robots, the supposed-to-be-friendly self-controlled digital workhorses that can transport medications, bed linens, food, medications and laboratory specimens across a hospital campus. These robots, such as the ones built by robot maker Aethon, are equipped with the space to transport critical goods and security access to enter restricted parts of the hospital and ride elevators, all while cutting labor costs. But researchers at Cynerio, a cybersecurity startup focused on securing hospital and healthcare systems, discovered a set of five never-before-seen vulnerabilities in Aethon robots, which they say allowed malicious hackers to remotely hijack and control these autonomous robots -- and in some cases over the internet. The five vulnerabilities, which Cynerio collectively call JekyllBot:5, aren't with the robots themselves but with the base servers that are used to communicate with and control the robots that traverse the hallways of the hospitals and hotels. The bugs range from allowing hackers to create new users with high-level access in order to then log in and remotely control the robots and access restricted areas, snoop on patients or guests using the robot's in-built cameras, or otherwise cause mayhem. Asher Brass, the lead researcher on the Aethon vulnerabilities, warned that the flaws required a "very low skill set for exploitation." Cynerio said the base servers have a web interface that could be accessed from inside the hospital's network, allowing "guest" users to view real-time robot camera feeds and their upcoming schedules and tasks for the day without needing a password. But although the robots' functionality were protected by an "admin" account, the researchers said the vulnerabilities in the web interface could have allowed a hacker to interact with the robots without needing an admin password to log in. One of the five bugs, the researchers said, exposed robots to remote control using a joystick-style controller in the web interface, while exploiting another one of the bugs to interact with door locks, call and ride elevators, and open and close medication drawers. "The bugs were fixed in a batch of software and firmware updates released by Aethon, after Cynerio alerted the company to the issues," notes TechCrunch. "Aethon is said to have restricted internet-exposed servers to isolate the robots from potential remote attacks, and fixed other web-related vulnerabilities that affected the base station."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video-sharing app TikTok's advertisement revenue is likely to triple in 2022 to more than $11 billion, exceeding the combined sales of its rivals Twitter and Snap, according to research firm Insider Intelligence. Reuters reports: TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is one of the world's most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users. "TikTok's user base has exploded in the past couple of years, and the amount of time users spend on the app is extraordinary," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at Insider Intelligence. Twitter and Snapchat are expected to generate $5.58 billion and $4.86 billion, respectively, in advertising revenue for 2022, with the combined value still less than the $11 billion projected for TikTok. Nearly $6 billion, or more than half, of this year's ad revenue is expected to come from the United States, despite regulatory concerns over user data from U.S being passed on to China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell employees in the Netherlands will be able to work four days a week from this month, a director of Dell Technologies Netherlands has confirmed to The Register. From the report: The news comes just weeks before what is touted to be the biggest ever 4-day working week trial begins in the UK. Isabel Moll, newly appointed vice president and general manager at Dell Netherlands, told us the part-time pilot has already been rolled out by the Dutch and Argentinian operations. "On April 1 we welcomed our first starter, and we're currently in the late phases of the interviewing process with [another]. We're hoping to welcome many other candidates in the near future, once the word spreads more and more." She noted that the scheme was also open to existing employees, with pay corresponding to hours worked. Speaking to local financial news daily Financieele Dagblad, Dell GM Moll described the April Argentinian and Dutch pilot as addressing both the issues of scarcity in the labor market and a way to bring in a more diverse group, including women and younger people, who are no longer interested in working until "they drop" or have other obligations. She said such people often end up leaving the sector, to its detriment, or use their technical skills in other sectors which have less intensive hours, telling the paper: "Working harder won't pay off, because the pond is empty..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last year, T-Mobile confirmed it was breached after hackers offered to sell the personal data of 30 million of its customers for 6 bitcoin worth around $270,000 at the time. According to court documents unsealed today and reviewed by Motherboard, a third-party hired by T-Mobile tried to pay the hackers for exclusive access to that data and limit it from leaking more widely. The plan ultimately failed, and the criminals continued to sell the data despite the third-party giving them a total of $200,000. But the news unearths some of the controversial tactics that might be used by companies as they respond to data breaches, either to mitigate the leak of stolen information or in an attempt to identify who has breached their networks. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Diogo Santos Coelho, who it alleges is the administrator of a popular hacking site called RaidForums. Law enforcement also uploaded a banner to the RaidForums site announcing they had taken over its domain. Coelho was arrested in the United Kingdom in March. Included in the affidavit in support of request for his extradition to the United States is a section describing a particular set of data that was advertised on RaidForums in August. [...] The document does not name the victim company, instead referring to it as Company 3, but says another post confirmed that the data belonging to "a major telecommunications company and wireless network operator that provides services in the United States. The document goes on to say that this company "hired a third-party to purchase exclusive access to the database to prevent it being sold to criminals." An employee of this third-party posed as a potential buyer and used the RaidForums' administrator's middleman service to buy a sample of the data for $50,000 in Bitcoin, the document reads. That employee then purchased the entire database for around $150,000, with the caveat that SubVirt would delete their copy of the data, it adds. The purpose of the deletion would be that this undercover customer would be the only one with a copy of the stolen information, greatly limiting the chance of it leaking out further. That's not what happened. The document says that "it appears the co-conspirators continued to attempt to sell the databases after the third-party's purchase." Company 3, the unnamed telecommunications firm that hired this third-party, was T-Mobile, according to Motherboard's review of the timeline and information included in the court records. The third-party that paid cybercriminals $200,000 may have been Mandiant, though the security company has yet to confirm with Motherboard. In March, Mandiant announced it was being acquired by Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long decline in the price of Axie Infinity's Smooth Love Potion (SLP) token illustrates the challenge of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming: players need more than a way to earn some random token, the token needs mechanics that enable it to hold value. From a report: P2E worked great, particularly with one game, Axie Infinity (whose treasury clocked $1.3 billion in revenue last year), until profits took a dive in early December that it has never recovered from, as Token Terminal shows. The "Smooth Love Potion" (SLP) token is the fuel that Axie Infinity runs on. To access the game, players need once valuable NFTs called Axies. Axie owners can breed more Axies with their Axies, but they need to spend SLP to do so. Users spend SLP in the game and it gets destroyed, decreasing the supply. That's supposed to help maintain the price, but there's been too much earning and not enough burning. The token has been in a long fall since the peak of its strength last July, because too few players are using SLP to make more Axies, analytics firm Naavik contends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How much energy does it take to have a good and healthy life? A new Stanford University study has found that the answer is far less than the average American is using. From a report: Comparing energy use and quality of life across 140 countries, researchers found that the magic number is 75 gigajoules a year, or less. For context, one gigajoule of energy is equal to about 8 gallons of gasoline. Americans use 284 gigajoules a year per capita, nearly four times that much energy, according to the new research. "That suggests to me that we could nudge energy use downwards in a bunch of hyper-consuming countries and not just make a more equitable world, but perhaps make ourselves healthier and happier," said lead author and professor of earth system science Rob Jackson. The link between more energy and better quality of life is established. Globally, around 759 million people lived without electricity and 2.6 billion without clean cooking fuel in 2019, according to the World Bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian military hackers tried and failed to attack Ukraine's energy infrastructure last week, the country's government and a major cybersecurity company said Tuesday. From a report: The attack was designed to infiltrate computers connected to multiple substations, then delete all files, which would shut that infrastructure down, according to Ukraine's summary of the incident. ESET, a Slovakia-based cybersecurity company working to help secure Ukrainian infrastructure, said in a summary of the attack that it was conducted by the same arm of Russia's military intelligence agency, GRU, that had previously successfully executed similar attacks in 2014 and 2015. In both of those incidents, some residents of Kyiv temporarily lost power. This attack had been planned for at least two weeks, ESET said. Since Russia began its invasion in February, Ukraine hasn't been hit by any attacks as visibly destructive as those previous hacks of Kyiv energy companies. But Ukraine has faced multiple so-called "wiper" attacks, including ones that have targeted computers in Ukraine's government, financial institutions and internet service providers. Those attacks also look to mass-delete files from hacked computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As climate crisis allows new maritime routes to be used, sooty shipping emissions accelerates ice melt and risk to ecosystems. From a report: In February last year, a Russian gas tanker, Christophe de Margerie, made history by navigating the icy waters of the northern sea route in mid-winter. The pioneering voyage, from Jiangsu in China to a remote Arctic port in Siberia, was heralded as the start of a new era that could reshape global shipping routes -- cutting travel times between Europe and Asia by more than a third. It has been made possible by the climate crisis. Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the Arctic to rise 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the growth is expected to continue. But Arctic shipping is not only made possible by the climate crisis, it is adding to it too. More ships mean a rise in exhaust fumes, which is accelerating ice melt in this sensitive region due to a complex phenomenon involving "black carbon," an air pollutant formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. When black carbon, or soot, lands on snow and ice, it dramatically speeds up melting. Dark snow and ice, by absorbing more energy, melts far faster than heat-reflecting white snow, creating a vicious circle of faster warming. Environmentalists warn that the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average, has seen an 85% rise in black carbon from ships between 2015 and 2019, mainly because of the increase in oil tankers and bulk carriers. The particles, which exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illness in towns, are short-term but potent climate agents: they represent more than 20% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from ships, according to one estimate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is launching a big recruiting push aimed at teens who are about to graduate high school, in the e-commerce giant's latest effort to keep its sprawling network of warehouses staffed up in a tight labor market. The Information: In a hiring drive set to kick off next month, Amazon will attend events at schools across the U.S. and Canada, a person briefed on the matter said. The effort will involve recruiters going to hundreds of high school career days to talk up college tuition benefits and other perks of working at Amazon, the person said. Not having enough workers has already eaten into the company's bottom line. Amazon said operational disruptions from not being able to staff up its facilities during the 2021 holiday rush, along with inflationary pressures pushing up labor and transportation expenses, cost the company $4 billion in the fourth quarter. Further reading: Amazon workers made up almost half of all warehouse injuries last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. and European authorities said on Tuesday they had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and the United States also unsealed charges against the website's founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho. From a report: Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S. Justice Department said. The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol. Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit card information, log-in credentials and social security numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DuckDuckGo's privacy-focused browsing app is available in beta on Mac, but you'll have to join a private waitlist to gain access. From a report: Just like the mobile browsing app, DuckDuckGo on Mac uses the DuckDuckGo search engine by default, automatically blocks web trackers, and comes with the famous "Fire" button that burns up your browsing history and tabs in a single click. The browsing app also comes with a new feature that's supposed to help block those pesky cookie consent pop-ups that appear when you first open a website. DuckDuckGo says it will clear them on 50 percent of sites, while automatically selecting the option that blocks or minimizes the cookies that track you. Allison Goodman, the senior communications manager at DuckDuckGo, told The Verge that the company plans on increasing this coverage "significantly" as the beta progresses. You'll also gain access to a privacy feed that appears on DuckDuckGo's homepage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said that proposed app store regulations in the U.S. and European Union would put iPhone users' privacy at risk. From a report: "If we are forced to let unvetted apps onto iPhones, the unintended consequences will be profound," Cook said during a keynote address at the Global Privacy Summit on Tuesday in Washington. "Data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules and once again track our users against their will." Apple is under global scrutiny over app store policies. The EU is working on legislation that would force the company to allow apps to be installed from outside the Apple App Store, threatening Apple's grip on its platform and potentially limiting its ability to collect a commission from developers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The current tide of antitrust scrutiny and regulations focused on big technology companies has conspicuously omitted one company: Microsoft, the software and cloud-computing behemoth that was the notorious target of a landmark U.S. government lawsuit in the 1990s. Microsoft, the thinking goes, was already humbled by years of intense government oversight, and since it largely caters to other companies, instead of consumers, it doesn't belong in the same category as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. But now some Microsoft customers, and some of its fiercest rivals, are making a bold claim: The software giant is again using its sway over one market to thwart competition in another. Microsoft three years ago overhauled the way it licenses some of its most ubiquitous software programs, including Windows and Office, in ways that increase the cost of running those programs on rival cloud-computing systems like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. In some cases, the revamped agreements outright forbid using some products on competing cloud services. AWS and Google say they have complained to Microsoft on behalf of multiple customers. French cloud provider OVH, along with other unidentified companies, filed a complaint last year with European regulators about the practice, saying it's also being hurt by Microsoft's policies. Major business software customers, some of which are only now starting to see the impact as they renew deals or replace aging programs, are also incensed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's plan to add a highly anticipated blood-pressure monitor to its smartwatch has hit some snags and the technology isn't expected to be ready until 2024 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The company has teams working on an updated sensor and software for the Apple Watch that would determine if a user has high blood pressure, but accuracy has been a challenge during testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The feature has been planned for at least four years, but it's probably two years away from hitting the market and may slip until 2025, they said. Apple's shares were up about 1% at 9:41 a.m. in New York. Blood-pressure features may become a key selling point for smartwatches in coming years, but the technology hasn't been easy to master. Though Apple rivals such as Samsung have launched watches with the capability, they require monthly calibration with a traditional monitor. Last year, Alphabet-owned Fitbit launched a public study to test wrist-based blood-pressure measurement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News reports: Multiple people were shot in a New York City subway station during rush hour on Tuesday, and several undetonated devices were found, officials said. At least 13 people were injured during the mayhem that unfolded at a station in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood, the FDNY said, though it was not immediately clear how many of those victims were shot. A man, possibly wearing clothes that resembled MTA attire, was spotted throwing a device in the subway station before opening fire, law enforcement sources told NBC New York. The NYPD, though, said no "active explosive devices" were immediately found at the scene. Police were looking for a man, believed to be about 5-foot-5, 180 pounds and wearing a gas mask, who shot at least five people, sources said. Live coverage: CNN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior officials at the European Commission were targeted last year with spy software designed by an Israeli surveillance firm, according to two EU officials and documentation reviewed by Reuters. From the report: Among them was Didier Reynders, a senior Belgian statesman who has served as the European Justice Commissioner since 2019, according to one of the documents. At least four other commission staffers were also targeted, according to the document and another person familiar with the matter. The two EU officials confirmed that staffers at the commission had been targeted but did not provide details. The commission became aware of the targeting following messages issued by Apple to thousands of iPhone owners in November telling them they were "targeted by state-sponsored attackers," the two EU officials said. It was the first time Apple had sent a mass alert to users that they were in government hackers' crosshairs. The warnings triggered immediate concern at the commission, the two officials said. In a Nov. 26 email reviewed by Reuters, a senior tech staffer sent a message to colleagues with background about Israeli hacking tools and a request to be on the lookout for additional warnings from Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple faces an additional EU antitrust charge in the coming weeks in an investigation triggered by a complaint from Spotify, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter said, a sign that EU enforcers are strengthening their case against the U.S. company. From a report: The European Commission last year accused the iPhone maker of distorting competition in the music streaming market via restrictive rules for its App Store that force developers to use its own in-app payment system and prevent them from informing users of other purchasing options. Such requirements have also come under scrutiny in countries including the United States and Britain. Extra charges set out in a so-called supplementary statement of objections are usually issued to companies when the EU competition enforcer has gathered new evidence or has modified some elements to boost its case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Twitter, will no longer be joining the social media firm's board, CEO Parag Agrawal said late Sunday, in a surprising reversal following last week's announcement that the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive had been appointed to the panel. From a report: The Sunday disclosure from Agrawal, who said last week that he had been engaging with Musk for "a few weeks" before announcing his appointment to the board, follows a series of unusual tweets from the SpaceX executive over the weekend in which he wondered aloud to his over 80 million followers if Twitter was dying, citing low frequency of tweets from some of the most popular personalities on the social network. Musk also asked his followers if Twitter should convert its San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, prompting a discussion that saw participation from a wide-range of industry figures, including Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang," writes Live Science. "And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests."The researchers' calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be "seen" through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. "Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early universe. This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates," study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science. But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the universe. The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found. This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter — which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the universe.... The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time. In the team's theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our universe as massive gravitons. But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart. "The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence," Cacciapaglia said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable." The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own."Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store. While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library. Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response.... The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company reviews the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami this week — arguing that it was actually Ethereum that sparked 2021's boom in cryptocurrenies. (And that with NFTs and DAOs, Ethereum still remains the flashier, main driver of popular crypto culture.) Their conclusion? There's "a real sense of desperation for some kind of star power that can elevate Bitcoin from digital gold for the techno-libertarian set to the true mainstream cultural movement it needs to be in order to actually catch on." In fact, the issue of what influencers or celebrities can do for the Bitcoin community came up directly on Thursday morning, during a panel featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams, Aaron Rodgers, and Cash App's crypto product lead, Miles Suter. Beckham and Rodgers have both made headlines recently for taking their salaries in Bitcoin; Williams is heavily involved in the Bitcoin startup world.... It was pretty far away from the high energy radiating from the world of NFTs, and it was clear that the event's bigger names aren't sure what else to do other than just tell the audience to buy Bitcoin over and over again. A lot of people make fun of NFTs, but they're an easier cultural product to point to and talk about than trying to have a fun conversation about lightning networks.... Bitcoin's attempts at going mainstream feel like a real two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Its most vocal supporters see it as a war-ending miracle technology. Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer led a panel on Thursday that argued it could lead to peace on Earth. It's not uncommon to hear presenters at Bitcoin 2022 argue that Bitcoin could end all wars forever. But that flies in the face of the conference's wilder, bawdier attractions — the big robot bull statue, the wild after-parties, the endless panels about cancel culture and Twitter drama. And these competing attitudes within the world of Bitcoin came to a head on Thursday afternoon, when chaos briefly erupted in the conference's main stage when it was announced that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had dropped out of his much talked-about panel, titled "Bitcoin Is Fuck You Money". Portnoy has not issued any explanation for why he dropped out, but he did spend the rest of the afternoon live tweeting the PGA Masters Tournament. For someone who claims to be all in on the technology, the so-called "baron of Bitcoin" didn't even stay for his panel. "Fuck you, Dave," the emcee gleefully told the crowd as they cheered and booed in response. The article reports that other speakers at the conference included:Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang Shark Tank's Kevin O'LearyPaypal and Palantir co-founder Peter ThielBut the article ultimately argues that the conference "feels like a low-level comic convention that's being held in the same event space as an economic forum."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen have now responded to Elon Musk's suggestion to create a homeless shelter out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, "since no one shows up anyway." And at some point over the weekend, Musk also suggested a new way that Twitter could use Dogecoin... It all started when the newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — began tweeting new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets. "And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Musk later offered suggestions about how to implement that subscription fee, according to the Associated Press. Musk suggested it "should be proportionate to affordability and in local currency." And he added, "Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?" referring to Dogecoin cryptocurrency. But moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea: Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway. Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.") Sunday night Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, "a fellow billionaire, responded Sunday with a link to a report about an [8-story] homeless shelter attached to an Amazon office building, noting that a portion of Twitter's space could be converted, making it easier for employees who want to volunteer.Musk called the suggestion a "great idea...." Homelessness is a particularly visible problem at Twitter's headquarters, located in a part of San Francisco where residents have grappled with urban decay and drug addiction. Silicon valley entrepreneur/investor Marc Andreessen then posted his own three-word reply. Apparently in response to Bezos's suggestion that employees could volunteer more easily if if a portion of their building were a homeless shelter, Andreessen joked, "Every other desk?" And five hours after Musk's homeless shelter poll, he'd moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea: Delete the w in Twitter?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million). You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth." Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series.Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally. As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 million people trade stocks and cryptocurrency on the Robinhood app. Now Gizmodo has obtained copies of hundreds of complaints filed about the app between mid-2020 until and-2021 with America's consumer protection agency, the FTC:The inability to withdraw money from Robinhood accounts for extended periods of time was a common complaint from consumers. There were also people who said they were hacked and then became frustrated that Robinhood was unresponsive when they tried to resolve the issue. Some users who say they were hacked even claimed they lost thousands of dollars when they couldn't reach Robinhood about the issue... The FTC found 3,081 complaints, but only released 200 of those to Gizmodo under its obligations to comply with the Freedom of Information Act law... But we're publishing a small sample of the complaints in an effort to highlight patterns that point to larger problems, just as we have with other companies like Binance, Tinder, Venmo, Rent-A-Center, AirBNB, and Honest Company, to name a few. One of the most common complaints about Robinhood was an inability to reach someone with the company's customer service team. Robinhood only introduced phone support in October of 2021, so it was common for people with complaints to be unable to reach anyone, according to the FTC documents we obtained. Robinhood is aware of the issue, the company told Gizmodo, and has worked to ameliorate it with a 24/7 hotline.... "Since 2020, when some of these complaints were filed, we've invested heavily in phone support, systems stability, and security processes. We're committed to supporting our customers and offering a safe experience, and we're confident that the steps we've taken over the past two years put us in a strong position to serve our growing customer base." Another recurring complaint involves people being unable to sell a given stock while its value tanked on the market. This issue, as you can imagine, is troubling because it prevents people from minimizing their losses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News looks at the "thriving ecosystem" of space businesses "dramatically expanding access to the cosmos and fueling what is projected to grow into a trillion-dollar commercial space industry." "Yet alongside the numerous benefits to society, increasing access to space and supporting an economy in orbit comes with its share of challenges, including how to balance a growing industry with the safe and sustainable use of outer space...."Speckled among the operational satellites in low-Earth orbit are thousands of tons of space debris, ranging from tiny flecks of paint to spent rocket parts to huge defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbital graveyards for decades. Adding more satellites to the mix not only increases the chances of a catastrophic on-orbit collision, but also pushes humanity closer to a perilous tipping point, beyond which certain parts of low-Earth orbit may become too cluttered and risky to operate in safely. "We're really on borrowed time before we have another big collision," said Charity Weeden, vice president of global space policy and government relations at Astroscale U.S., a private company that specializes in satellite servicing and orbital debris removal. "There are thousands of close calls every day in orbit...." But placing all the blame on these megaconstellations is oversimplifying the problem, said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a California-based aerospace company that operates networks of ground-based radars and tracking systems to monitor objects in low-Earth orbit and map their movements. For one, operational satellites make up only a small fraction of the total number of objects in low-Earth orbit that pose collision risks, he said. And unlike defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbit for decades, most newer satellites can be maneuvered out of harm's way, if necessary. It has also become standard practice for satellite operators to have an end-of-life plan to cut down on the accumulation of space junk. These strategies include purposefully commanding a spacecraft to "deorbit," or burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, or strand it in a higher, "graveyard" orbit away from the most congested sections around the planet. Still, the risks are serious. And the amount of debris in space is expected to grow as launches continue. McKnight said "bad neighborhoods" have already emerged — areas in low-Earth orbit where big clouds of debris pose very real threats." There are certain places in Earth orbit where we are destined to have a major event within the next five to 10 years," he said. "We're looking at a 10 to 15 percent probability of a collision, which sounds unlikely, but by leaving these objects in orbit since the mid-'80s, we're rolling the dice a lot" These risks were amplified by a series of recent anti-satellite missile tests — one conducted by China in 2007, one by India in 2019 and one carried out by Russia last year — and a separate accidental collision between two satellites in 2009. Each event is estimated to have produced thousands of pieces of debris larger than the size of a golf ball, and even smaller, harder-to-track objects, according to the Secure World Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on space policy... Part of the problem is that while launches are subject to domestic regulations in individual countries, there is no international body to oversee what happens in orbit. Policies have yet to catch up with the industry's growth, and it's unclear if any binding global agreements can be achieved anytime soon. "It's like we're building the plane as we're flying it," said Josef Koller, a systems director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp. The article also points out that companies like Astroscale are currently "developing technologies to actively remove objects from orbit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chainalysis is a software for tracing cryptocurrency, "to turn the digital underworld's preferred means of exchange into its Achilles' heel," writes Wired. This week they describe what happened when that company's co-founder discovered that for two yeras, hundreds of users of a child pornography-trading site — and its administrators — "had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails..." and "seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain."Over the previous few years, [Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Chris] Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics.... Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world.... When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses — long, unique strings of letters and numbers — without any identifying information about those coins' owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that "participants can be anonymous" in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism. But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can't be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight. Within a few years of Bitcoin's arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users' addresses and their real-world identities. The article describes some investigative techniques — like pressuring exchanges for identities, tying a transaction to a known identity, or even performing an undercover transaction themselves. "Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals. "By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the IRS's Criminal Investigation division had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis. "The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum...." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNET points out the far side of the moon — the one that never faces earth — is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements." "In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different."But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava.... They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said. In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to a new International Money Fund (IMF) report, cryptocurrency is much more popular in countries with insecure currencies and corrupt governments..." reports The Street, adding that the report concludes "the best way forward is not fight, but to learn how to better regulate cryptocurrency."The IMF surveyed more than 110,000 respondents in over 55 countries, polling between 2,000 and 12,000 people in each country, about their cryptocurrency use...."Crypto usage is empirically associated with higher perceived corruption and more intensive capital controls," the study's authors write. "[...] This evidence adds to the case for regulating crypto usage — for example, by requiring intermediaries to implement know-your-customer procedures." Bloomberg adds:The report shows why countries might want to require intermediaries, such as digital currency exchanges, to implement know-your-customer procedures — ID verification standards that are designed to prevent fraud, money laundering and terrorism financing, the organization said. Some countries, like the U.S., have already instituted those kinds of controls. Nations around the world are struggling over the best way to regulate the $2 trillion crypto market, with the level of oversight varying greatly from one country to another. The findings suggest that crypto assets "may be used to transfer corruption proceeds or circumvent capital controls," the organization said, without singling out individual countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The newest member of Twitter's board of directors just tweeted "Is Twitter dying?" That would be Elon Musk — who'd preceded the question with a list of Twitter's ten most-followed accounts, noting that most of them "tweet rarely and post very little content." And in follow-up tweets, Musk pointed out that Taylor Swift hasn't posted anything in three months, while Justin Bieber "only posted once this entire year." When someone posted a bar graph showing that Twitter's user count continued to grow, Musk posted a reply which he's since pinned to the top of his own Twitter feed. "Now subtract crypto scam accounts that twitter constantly shows as 'real' people in everyone's feed" This isn't the first time Elon Musk has posted something interesting on Twitter, reports AFP:On Thursday, Musk tweeted a photo of himself smoking marijuana on a Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, with the caption, "Twitter's next board meeting is gonna be lit." About an hour ago Musk also shared a graph from YouGov (a British market research and data analytics firm) showing that Democrats and Republicans have starkly different levels of trust in major news sources. On the chart Republicans show an average "trustworthiness" rating above 50% for just two of the 22 news outlets: Fox News and the Weather Channel. Above the chart Musk added the words, "Truth is the first casualty." Two minutes later he followed that tweet with an equally cryptic remark. "69.420% of statistics are false."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new article on the Verge argues that the era of fixing your own phone "has nearly arrived."When I called up iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, I figured he'd be celebrating — after years of fighting for right-to-repair, big name companies like Google and Samsung have suddenly agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. Not only that, they signed deals with him to sell those parts through iFixit, alongside the company's repair guides and tools. So did Valve. But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving. What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point. "The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher. "There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal. Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvard University's school of engineering has an announcement. "For all the recent advances in integrated lithium niobate photonic circuits — from frequency combs to frequency converters and modulators — one big component has remained frustratingly difficult to integrate: lasers..."Long haul telecommunication networks, data center optical interconnects, and microwave photonic systems all rely on lasers to generate an optical carrier used in data transmission. In most cases, lasers are stand-alone devices, external to the modulators, making the whole system more expensive and less stable and scalable. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in collaboration with industry partners at Freedom Photonics and HyperLight Corporation, have developed the first fully integrated high-power laser on a lithium niobate chip, paving the way for high-powered telecommunication systems, fully integrated spectrometers, optical remote sensing, and efficient frequency conversion for quantum networks, among other applications.... "Integrating high-performance plug-and-play lasers would significantly reduce the cost, complexity, and power consumption of future communication systems," said Amirhassan Shams-Ansari, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the study. "It's a building block that can be integrated into larger optical systems for a range of applications, in sensing, lidar, and data telecommunications." By combining thin-film lithium niobate devices with high-power lasers using an industry-friendly process, this research represents a key step towards large-scale, low-cost, and high-performance transmitter arrays and optical networks. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hari Pota for sharing the story (via Semicounductor Digest)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"English rock band Pink Floyd has released new music for the first time in 28 years," reports UPI, "with proceeds from the track going to humanitarian relief in Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia." "The single will be available on all streaming and download platforms..." the band said on their official web site. [Including downloads on Amazon Music and Apple Music]. "This is the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994's The Division Bell."The track sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long-time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards and features an extraordinary vocal performance by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.... David, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: "We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers...." "Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music." While writing the music for the track, David managed to speak with Andriy from his hospital bed in Kyiv where he was recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury. "I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing...." Speaking about the track David says, "I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities and raise morale. We want to express our support for Ukraine and, in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become". All proceeds will go towards Ukrainian humanitarian relief. On March 11 the band had posted another update on their official site:To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour's solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia and Belarus....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports: Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago... "If you're able to actually identify it, and we're on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, 'Amazing, we know what it was,'" Robert DePalma, a paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.... A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. Many paleontologists were intrigued but uncertain about the scope of DePalma's claims; a research paper published that year by DePalma and his collaborators mostly described the geological setting of the site, which once lay along the banks of a river. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts. In the 2019 paper, DePalma and his colleagues described how spherules raining down from the sky clogged the gills of paddlefish and sturgeon, suffocating them. Usually the outsides of impact spherules have been mineralogically transformed by millions of years of chemical reactions with water. But at Tanis, some of them landed in tree resin, which provided a protective enclosure of amber, keeping them almost as pristine as the day they formed.... Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, "collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now...." DePalma said there also appear to be some bubbles within some of the spherules. Because the spherules do not look to be cracked, it's possible that they could hold bits of air from 66 million years ago. In 1998, UCLA geochemist Frank Kyte claimed he'd found a fragment of that meteor in a core sample drilled off Hawaii, the article points out, "but other scientists were skeptical that any bits of the meteor could have survived." But now DePalma tells the Times that this North Dakota discovery "actually falls in line with what Frank Kyte was telling us years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leaders of the successful unionization drive at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island have heard from workers at 100 other Amazon facilities in all 50 states, the union's president told AFP. "We are witnessing a revolution," he added Friday. But meanwhile, "Amazon tipped its hand" this week on how it plans to try to defeat that vote, reports the Washington Post. Specifically, yesterday Amazon filed a list of 25 objections to the election with America's National Labor Relations Board — objecting mostly to the actions of the National Labor Relations Board:The company alleged that the regional office of the agency, based in Brooklyn, "created the impression" it was supporting the union by filing a lawsuit against Amazon before the vote. Amazon also alleged the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delayed investigating "unmeritorious" unfair labor practice charges and understaffed the election. Amazon also alleges the independent Amazon Labor Union harassed employees who did not support the union, trespassed on Amazon's property and "misled employees by telling them that they would lose their benefits if they did not support the ALU," among other issues.... Labor lawyers say the company, which strongly opposed unionization, could try to delay the process of workers forming a union for years. "Amazon probably figures it has nothing to lose by exhausting every possible appeals process because time is on its side," said John Logan, chair of the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University.... A representative for the Amazon Labor Union said none of Amazon's objections had merit and called them a tactic to delay the union. "It's a blatant attempt by Amazon to interfere with and go around the democratic choice of their workforce," Amazon worker and labor organizer Connor Spence said.... The NLRB will need to certify the vote before the union can try to bargain a contract with Amazon. The objections could delay or even cancel that process, depending on what the NLRB decides. Amazon has many avenues to fight the vote results, including by refusing to bargain and forcing regulators to get involved. The president of the Amazon warehouse's reminded AFP what happened after two Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to union in December. More than 180 more Starbucks cafes launched unionization campaigns, and "On Friday, three more Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to unionize, taking the national total to 16."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine:Tiny molecular machines make life possible. Spinning rotary motors generate the chemical fuel our cells need, miniature walkers carry nutrients, and minute construction crews build proteins. Now, chemists are getting in on the act by making even smaller and simpler versions of these biological machines. In three studies, scientists report designing their own molecular pumps and rotary motors. The puny devices are not quite ready to make their real-world debut, but future versions could suck carbon dioxide from the air and harvest valuable metals from seawater. The new studies show it's possible to get teams of motors all working in the same direction and concentrate target chemicals in a confined space, a feat biology uses to sustain work. "These are very important steps toward useful real-life molecular machines," says Ivan Aprahamian, a chemist at Dartmouth College who wasn't involved with the studies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The sudden ear-piercing beep of a radiation meter fills the room," reports CNN, "as a Ukrainian soldier walks in. "This is where Russian soldiers were living at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and radiation levels are now higher than normal."There's no visible presence of the source of the radioactive material in the room, but Ukrainian officials say it's coming from small particles and dust that the soldiers brought into the building. "They went to the Red Forest and brought radioactive material back with them on their shoes," soldier Ihor Ugolkov explains. "Other places are fine, but radiation increased here, because they were living here." CNN was given exclusive access to the power plant for the first time since it came back into Ukrainian control. Officials at the plant explain the levels inside the room used by Russian soldiers are only slightly above what the World Nuclear Association describes as naturally occurring radiation. One-time contact would not be dangerous but continuous exposure would pose a health hazard. "They went everywhere, and they also took some radioactive dust on them [when they left]," Ugolkov adds. It's an example of what Ukrainian officials say was the lax and careless behavior of Russian soldiers while they were in control of the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area around Chernobyl, namely the Red Forest, is still the most nuclear contaminated area on the planet, with most of the radioactive particles present on the soil.... Russian soldiers held Chernobyl for a month and are thought to have been operating in contaminated areas most of the time. Russian soldiers entered the Red Forest and dug trenches, Ukranian officials believe — and on the edge of the area CNN spotted a Russian military ration box "that exhibited radiation levels 50 times above naturally occurring values." The 169 Ukraine National Guard soldiers, who guarded the facility, were locked in the plant's Cold War era underground nuclear bunker, crammed up in tight quarters without access to natural light, fresh air or communication with the outside world, according to the Ukrainian Interior Minister. "They were kept here for 30 days without sufficient lighting and food. They were not allowed outside. On the last day they were taken away from here to an unknown direction," Denys Monastyrskyy says while standing inside the bunker. The minister says he believes the men have been taken to Russia, via Belarus, as prisoners of war, but doesn't know for certain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A newly proposed amendment to California's hiring discrimination laws would make AI-powered employment decision-making software a source of legal liability. The proposal would make it illegal for businesses and employment agencies to use automated-decision systems to screen out applicants who are considered a protected class by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Broad language, however, means the law could be easily applied to "applications or systems that may only be tangentially related to employment decisions," lawyers Brent Hamilton and Jeffrey Bosley of Davis Wright Tremaine wrote. Automated-decision systems and algorithms, both fundamental to the law, are broadly defined in the draft, Hamilton and Bosley said. The lack of specificity means that technologies designed to aid human decision-making in small, subtle ways could end up being lumped together with hiring software, as could third-party vendors who provide the code. Strict record keeping requirements are included in the proposed law that double record retention time from two to four years, and require anyone using automated-decision systems to retain all machine-learning data generated as part of its operation and training. Training datasets leave vendors responsible, too: "Any person who engages the advertisement, sale, provision, or use of a selection tool, including but not limited to an automated-decision system, to an employer or other covered entity must maintain records of the assessment criteria used by the automated-decision system," the proposed text says. It specifically mentions it must maintain records for each customer it trains models for, too. Unintentional filtering isn't covered by the newly proposed California law, which focuses on the ways in which software can discriminate against certain types of people, unintentionally or otherwise. [...] Hamilton and Bosley suggest that California employers review their ATS and RMS software to ensure it conforms to the proposal, enhance their understanding of how the algorithms they use function, be prepared to demonstrate that the results of their process is fair and speak with vendors to ensure they are doing what they need to do to comply. The 45-day public commentary period for the proposed changes is not yet open, meaning there's no timetable for the changes to be reviewed, amended and submitted for passage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The French aerospace company Gama has raised 2 million euros to deploy a solar sail in space. The Guardian reports: Solar sails require no engines to move. Instead, they are pushed around by the pressure of sunlight. The angle of the sail determines the direction of motion. Gama plans to deploy a 73.3-sq-meter solar sail in a 550km-altitude orbit in October. It will be launched as an additional payload on a SpaceX rocket. Gama hopes to demonstrate that solar sails can revolutionize access to deep space because they are cost-effective and scalable in size. After this year's deployment test, the company plans to launch a follow-up mission in 2024 to a higher orbit to demonstrate control and onboard navigation. In 2025, it hopes to emulate the Japanese and fly to Venus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. Live Science reports: That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness -- about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies -- and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies. [...] The researchers discovered HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the U.K. Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were particularly looking at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch out or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggested HD1 was extremely distant. The researchers found that the red wavelengths were the equivalent to a galaxy located 13.5 billion light-years away. HD1 also seems to be growing at a feverish rate -- about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for starburst galaxies that are known to produce stars at an extraordinarily high pace. These stars were also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found. As such, HD1 could be home to the universe's very first stars, called Population III stars; if that identity is verified, this would be the first observation of this type of star, the researchers said. There's also the possibility that HD1 is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the sun. To figure out HD1's true identity, the researchers can look for X-rays, which are emitted as material gets devoured by the gravity of a black hole. "If HD1 is a black hole, we should see X-ray emission from it. If we do not find X-rays, the emission must originate from massive stars," [one of the researchers told Live Science].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: It's a sunny day on a city street as a green bus pulls up by the kerb. Onboard, a handful of passengers sit stony-faced as you step up to present your pass. But you cannot see your body -- only a floating pair of blue hands. It might sound like a bizarre dream, but the scenario is part of a virtual reality (VR) system designed to help people with agoraphobia -- those for whom certain environments, situations and interactions can cause intense fear and distress. Scientists say the approach enables participants to build confidence and ease their fears, helping them to undertake tasks in real life that they had previously avoided. The study also found those with more severe psychological problems benefited the most. "It leads to a real step-change in people's lives," said Prof Daniel Freeman, the lead researcher in the work, from the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford. The VR experience begins in a virtual therapist's office before moving to scenarios such as opening the front door or being in a doctor's surgery, each with varying levels of difficulty. Participants are asked to complete certain tasks, such as asking for a cup of coffee, and are encouraged to make eye contact or move closer to other characters. Freeman said while the scenarios feel real, the computer-generated scenes allow participants to feel able to try something new or approach the situation differently. "There's a little bit of the conscious bit [of the brain] going: 'OK, it's OK, I know it's not real and therefore I can persist, try something new and do something differently,'" he said. "That enables people to apply it in the real world. Basically, if you get over something in VR, you will get over in the real world." Writing in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, Freeman and colleagues report how they randomly allocated 174 patients with difficulties going outside and psychosis to use the "gameChange" VR technology alongside their usual care. Another 172 patients were allocated to receive their usual care alone. [...] The results show that six weeks after the trial began, those allocated to the VR therapy had a small but significant reduction in avoiding real-life situations because of agoraphobia, as well as less distress, compared with those who had only received their usual care. However, by six months there was no difference between the two groups. But further analysis revealed that those who had severe agoraphobia benefited most, and for these people the effect was sustained at six months. Such patients were able to complete, on average, two more activities than before -- such as going shopping or getting on a bus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge more quickly and be lighter yet safe, the Japanese automaker said Friday. CBS News reports: The all-solid-state battery will replace the lithium-ion battery now in use for a 2028 product launch and a pilot plant launch in 2024, according to Nissan. The battery would be stable enough to be used in pacemakers, Nissan said. When finished, it will be about half the size of the current battery and fully charge in 15 minutes instead of a few hours. The collaboration with the U.S. space program, as well as the University of California San Diego, involves the testing of various materials, Corporate Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters. "Both NASA and Nissan need the same kind of battery," he said. Nissan and NASA are using what's called the "original material informatics platform," a computerized database, to test various combinations to see what works best among hundreds of thousands of materials, Doi said. The goal is to avoid the use of expensive materials like rare metals needed for lithium-ion batteries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter is experimenting with an "unmentioning" feature that will allow users to remove themselves from conversations. The Verge reports: It's limited to some users and only on the web version for now but looks like a very useful way to clean up your mentions. "We're experimenting with Unmentioning -- a way to help you protect your peace and remove yourself from conversations," the tweet reads. The company posted a short GIF of what the feature will look like to its Twitter Safety account. The "leave this conversation" option will appear on the menu that pops out of the corner of a tweet on the web version of Twitter. (It includes the "mute" and "embed" options as well.) Clicking the "leave this conversation" option brings up another menu that details what happens when you leave a conversation: your username gets untagged, it stops any future mentions in that conversation, and, perhaps most importantly, it will stop notifications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E Ink has unveiled a new version of its "Kaleido" color e-paper color display capable of playing animations and videos. It can also support displays up to 13.3-inches. Gizmodo reports: Kaleido was followed by Kaleido Plus which offered some key improvements, but it is now being replaced by the freshly announced Kaleido 3. We haven't had a chance to go eyes-on with Kaleido 3 just yet, but according to E Ink, "by optimizing the design of the ePaper module structure, E Ink Kaleido 3 has increased its color saturation by 30 percent compared to the previous generation." That's not a stark contrast on paper (pun intended) and Kaleido 3 still only supports 4,096 colors, but in person, the improvements between versions are usually far more obvious. E Ink also claims that Kaleido 3, which will be available in three sizes (7.8-inch, 10.3-inch, and 13.3-inch) for everything from e-readers to larger tablets, employs a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light bouncing off the screen to make reading easier at night without resorting to warmer color temperature options for the LEDs which would throw off the accuracy of the colors being displayed. The most interesting upgrade with Kaleido 3 is that E Ink claims the responsiveness of the display has been improved which "enables the module to play animations and videos, providing new options for digital reading and writing in educational and professional applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi OS (and most operating systems based on it) has shipped with a default "pi" user account, making it simpler to boot up a Pi and start working without needing to hook up the device to a monitor or go through a multi-step setup process. But as of today, that's changing -- new installs of the Raspberry Pi OS are shedding that default user account for both security and regulatory reasons. Raspberry Pi Foundation software engineer Simon Long explains the thinking in this blog post. "[The "pi" user account] could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials," he writes. This move will improve the Pi operating system's security. Before, even if you assigned a good password to the "pi" account, attackers could still assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that most Raspberry Pi boards were using the "pi" username. Many Pi OS-based operating systems also ship with the default "pi" user account enabled and are completely passwordless, requiring extra steps to assign the account a password in the first place. The flip side is that the change could break some software and scripts, particularly those that are hard-coded to use the "pi" user account and home folder. "[T]he Raspberry Pi OS now boots into a dedicated setup mode the first time you start it up instead of running the setup wizard as an app in the normal desktop environment," adds Ars. "And that setup wizard now prompts you to create a username and password rather than simply assigning a password to the default 'pi' user account. To aid with setup, the wizard can now pair Bluetooth keyboards and mice without requiring you to plug in a USB accessory first." The new version of the Pi OS also includes experimental support for the Wayland display server protocol, but Long says most people should ignore it for now since it's explicitly labeled as "experimental."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge. The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The full 90-minute keynote of the Windows 95 launch was uploaded this week by the Blue OS Museum YouTube account. As Gizmodo's Florence Ion notes, "clips from the presentation have floated around online for decades," but the full keynote "has been harder to track down." From the report: [T]he complete presentation is an absolute time capsule of technology culture as it existed on Aug. 24, 1995. It also features some incredibly cringe moments, most of which stem from Jay Leno's cheesy and problematic joke-telling. My face felt flush the entire time I watched this presentation from all the nostalgia pulsating throughout it. There are all the requisite hairstyles, khaki pants, and overly-used Bill Clinton jokes that make this a quintessential event of the '90s. In a slideshow, Gizmodo highlights the "best and worst parts" of the event, adding that if you do watch the entire presentation, "you will have The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' stuck in your head for the rest of the day."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States set a major renewable energy milestone last Tuesday: wind power was the second-highest source of electricity for the first time since the Energy Information Administration began gathering the data. From a report: As E&E reporter Ben Storrow noted and the EIA confirmed, wind turbines last Tuesday generated over 2,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, edging out electricity generated by nuclear and coal (but still trailing behind natural gas). Last year, wind was the fourth-largest electricity source behind natural gas, coal, and nuclear, generating close to 380 terawatt-hours for the entire year, according to the EIA. For context, a terawatt is a thousand times bigger than a gigawatt. Major milestone aside, wind energy in the US is still lagging behind one European country that recently broke a record of its own: Germany. Although the US has more wind capacity by sheer numbers -- it's a larger country with a larger population -- Germany is outpacing the US in terms of how much electricity it gets from wind. In February alone, windmills in Germany generated a record 20.6 terawatt-hours of wind energy, Rystad Energy reported Tuesday, which made up 45% of its total energy in February. In 2020 -- the most recent year the EIA has robust statistics for -- Germany got 24% of its electricity from wind, compared to 8% in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. Nature: According to Trish Greenhalgh, a primary-care health researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, the IPC GDG members were guided by their medical training and the dominant thinking in the medical field about how infectious respiratory diseases spread; this turned out to be flawed in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and could be inaccurate for other viruses as well. These biases led the group to discount relevant information -- from laboratory-based aerosol studies and outbreak reports, for instance. So the IPC GDG concluded that airborne transmission was rare or unlikely outside a small set of aerosol-generating medical procedures, such as inserting a breathing tube into a patient. That viewpoint is clear in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, including Schwaber, Sobsey and Fisher, published in August 20202. The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports "opinion pieces." Instead, they concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent." In effect, the group failed to look at the whole picture that was emerging, says Greenhalgh. "You've got to explain all the data, not just the data that you've picked to support your view," and the airborne hypothesis is the best fit for all the data available, she says. One example she cites is the propensity for the virus to transmit in 'superspreader events,' in which numerous individuals are infected at a single gathering, often by a single person. "Nothing explains some of these superspreader events except aerosol spread," says Greenhalgh. Throughout 2020, there was also mounting evidence that indoor spaces posed a much greater risk of infection than outdoor environments did. An analysis of reported outbreaks recorded up to the middle of August 2020 revealed that people were more than 18 times as likely to be infected indoors as outdoors3. If heavy droplets or dirty hands had been the main vehicles for transmitting the virus, such a strong discrepancy would not have been observed. Although the WHO played down the risk of airborne transmission, it did invite Li [a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong who suspected early on that SARS-CoV-2 was also airborne] to become a member of the IPC GDG after he spoke to the group in mid-2020. Had the organization not at least been open to his view that infections were caused by aerosols, especially at short range, "they would not have invited me there as they knew my standing," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tesla opened its Austin, Texas-based Gigafactory on Thursday, a crucial step in the company's delayed plans to begin production of its electric Cybertruck. To celebrate the opening, Tesla held an event, billed as a "Cyber Rodeo," to which it invited 15,000 people to listen to live music, eat food, and pay homage to Elon Musk and his company. "We are really entering a new phase of Tesla's future," Musk told the audience. Clad in a black cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses, Musk said he was excited to begin working on Cybertruck production at last. "I can't wait to see this baby in production, it's going to be epic." Along with a new version of the Cybertruck, Musk also showed off a new Roadster vehicle, which is slated to begin production next year. He also teased a robotaxi he said would look "quite futuristic" but didn't elaborate or provide any details. It is the company's fourth factory in the US, following the vehicle factory in Fremont, California, battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, and solar factory in Buffalo, New York. Tesla also has a vehicle factory outside Shanghai, China, and recently opened its first European factory near Berlin, Germany. Tesla spent an estimated $5 million purchasing the land outside Austin, plus another $1.1 billion to build the plant. "We need a place where we can be really big, and there's no place like Texas," Musk said. "We going to move to a truly massive scale." The Texas factory is expected to be the site where, starting in 2023, Tesla will make its long-delayed Cybertruck. Indications that the Cybertruck would be delayed first emerged last year, when the online reservation page was changed and then later withdrawn from the site. Musk had said that he expected a few trucks to be delivered to customers by the end of 2021, but no deliveries were ever made. The Cybertruck has already gone through some changes since its initial reveal in 2019 -- including the addition of a comically oversized single windshield wiper, traditional folding mirrors, and invisible door handles. In addition to the Cybertruck, Tesla also plans to build Model Ys and Model 3s destined for the East Coast, as well as the long-delayed Tesla Semi. The company has already started to build Model Y crossovers at the unfinished Texas Gigafactory in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to the company's latest earnings report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OneHundredAndTen writes: It would seem that a majority of managers have decided to launch a campaign of threats to force people back into the office. From the report: About 77% of managers said they'd be willing to implement "severe consequences" -- including firing workers or cutting pay and benefits -- on those who refuse to return to the office, according to a recent survey by employment background check company GoodHire of 3,500 American managers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.