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AMD has confirmed to Tom's Hardware that a bug in its GPU driver is, in fact, changing Ryzen CPU settings in the BIOS without permission. This condition has been shown to auto-overclock Ryzen CPUs without the user's knowledge. From the report: Reports of this issue began cropping up on various social media outlets recently, with users reporting that their CPUs had mysteriously been overclocked without their consent. The issue was subsequently investigated and tracked back to AMD's GPU drivers. AMD originally added support for automatic CPU overclocking through its GPU drivers last year, with the idea that adding in a Ryzen Master module into the Radeon Adrenalin GPU drivers would simplify the overclocking experience. Users with a Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU could use one interface to overclock both. Previously, it required both the GPU driver and AMD's Ryzen Master software. Overclocking a Ryzen CPU requires the software to manipulate the BIOS settings, just as we see with other software overclocking utilities. For AMD, this can mean simply engaging the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature. This feature does all the dirty work, like adjusting voltages and frequency on the fly, to give you a one-click automatic overclock. However, applying a GPU profile in the AMD driver can now inexplicably alter the BIOS settings to enable automatic overclocking. This is problematic because of the potential ill effects of overclocking -- in fact, overclocking a Ryzen CPU automatically voids the warranty. AMD's software typically requires you to click a warning to acknowledge that you understand the risks associated with overclocking, and that it voids your warranty, before it allows you to overclock the system. Unfortunately, that isn't happening here. Until AMD issues a fix, "users have taken to using the Radeon Software Slimmer to delete the Ryzen Master SDK from the GPU driver, thus preventing any untoward changes to the BIOS settings," adds Tom's Hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research Sid Assawaworrarit and his colleagues have outfitted an ordinary solar panel with a thermoelectric generator, capable of generating a small amount of electricity from the slight difference in temperature between the ambient air and the surface of a solar panel pointed deep into space. Interesting Engineering reports: "During the day, there's a light coming in from the Sun and hitting the solar cell, but during the night, something of a reverse happens," Assawaworrarit says. That's because solar panels -- like everything warmer than absolute zero -- emit infrared radiation. "There's actually light going out [from the solar panel], and we use that to generate electricity at night. The photons going out into the night sky actually cool down the solar cell," he says. As those photons leave the skyward surface of the solar panel, they cary heat with them. That means that on a clear night -- when there are no clouds to reflect infrared light back toward the Earth -- the surface of a solar panel will be a few degrees cooler than the air around it. That temperature differential is what Assawaworrarit and his colleagues are taking advantage of. A device called a thermoelectric generator can capture some of the heat flowing from the warmer air to the cooler solar panel and convert it into electricity. On a clear night, the device Assawaworrarit tested on the Stanford rooftop generates roughly fifty milliwatts for every square meter of solar panel (50 mW/m2). "I think that's probably a record number," he says. But Assawaworrarit and his team aren't stopping there. He says that with a couple of improvements (and in a good location) such a device could generate twice that amount of electricity. "The theoretical limit is probably about one or two watts per square meter," he says. "That's not a huge number, but there are a lot of applications" where that kind of energy at night would come in handy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: What seems like a win-win for a pair of pressing environmental problems describes a Rice University lab's newly discovered chemical technique to turn waste plastic into an effective carbon dioxide (CO2) sorbent for industry. Rice chemist James Tour and co-lead authors Rice alumnus Wala Algozeeb, graduate student Paul Savas and postdoctoral researcher Zhe Yuan reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano that heating plastic waste in the presence of potassium acetate produced particles with nanometer-scale pores that trap carbon dioxide molecules. These particles can be used to remove CO2 from flue gas streams, they reported. "Point sources of CO2 emissions like power plant exhaust stacks can be fitted with this waste-plastic-derived material to remove enormous amounts of CO2 that would normally fill the atmosphere," Tour said. "It is a great way to have one problem, plastic waste, address another problem, CO2 emissions." A current process to pyrolyze plastic known as chemical recycling produces oils, gases and waxes, but the carbon byproduct is nearly useless, he said. However, pyrolyzing plastic in the presence of potassium acetate produces porous particles able to hold up to 18% of their own weight in CO2 at room temperature. In addition, while typical chemical recycling doesn't work for polymer wastes with low fixed carbon content in order to generate CO2 sorbent, including polypropylene and high- and low-density polyethylene, the main constituents in municipal waste, those plastics work especially well for capturing CO2 when treated with potassium acetate. The lab estimates the cost of carbon dioxide capture from a point source like post-combustion flue gas would be $21 a ton, far less expensive than the energy-intensive, amine-based process in common use to pull carbon dioxide from natural gas feeds, which costs $80-$160 a ton. Like amine-based materials, the sorbent can be reused. Heating it to about 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit) releases trapped carbon dioxide from the pores, regenerating about 90% of the material's binding sites. Because it cycles at 75 degrees Celsius, polyvinyl chloride vessels are sufficient to replace the expensive metal vessels that are normally required. The researchers noted the sorbent is expected to have a longer lifetime than liquid amines, cutting downtime due to corrosion and sludge formation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research. Axios reports: 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, The Lancet medical journal reports. This is all it takes for those 60 and older to dramatically increase their lifespans. Even for younger adults, the benefits of daily walking actually level off around 9,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the researchers found. The risk reduction plateaued beyond that number. "Walking benefits nearly every cell in the body," says Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist and public health expert at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study. It's wildly effective. Walking strengthens your heart, improves bone density, relaxes your mind, and helps with muscle-building and pain management. Almost everyone can do it anywhere: your house, the office, outside. Start with 30 minutes and work your way up."It's not an all or nothing situation," says Paluch. Even just boosting daily step count to 5,000 -- for 60 and older -- and 7,000 -- for younger folks -- slashed mortality risk by 40%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An artificial intelligence tool that reads chest X-rays without oversight from a radiologist got regulatory clearance in the European Union last week -- a first for a fully autonomous medical imaging AI, the company, called Oxipit, said in a statement. The Verge reports: The tool, called ChestLink, scans chest X-rays and automatically sends patient reports on those that it sees as totally healthy, with no abnormalities. Any images that the tool flags as having a potential problem are sent to a radiologist for review. Most X-rays in primary care don't have any problems, so automating the process for those scans could cut down on radiologists' workloads, the Oxipit said in informational materials. The tech now has a CE mark certification in the EU, which signals that a device meets safety standards. The certification is similar to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance in the United States, but they have slightly different metrics: a CE mark is less difficult to obtain, is quicker, and doesn't require as much evaluation as an FDA clearance. The FDA looks to see if a device is safe and effective and tends to ask for more information from device makers. Oxipit spokesperson Mantas Miksys told The Verge that the company plans to file with the FDA as well. Oxipit said in a statement that ChestLink made zero "clinically relevant" errors during pilot programs at multiple locations. When it is introduced into a new setting, the company said there should first be an audit of existing imaging programs. Then, the tool should be used under supervision for a period of time before it starts working autonomously. The company said in a statement that it expects the first healthcare organizations to be using the autonomous tool by 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. government owns about 1,100 charging stations. It may need more than 100,000 charging stations to support widespread EV use in the next decade, according to testimony from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday. The testimony, which was first reported by Reuters, mainly delved into the U.S. Postal Service's efforts to transition its fleet to EVs and federal fleet transition issues. GAO found that federal agencies like USPS held certain incorrect assumptions about the cost and benefits of using gas versus electric vehicles, namely that USPS used gas prices that are about $2 per gallon less than the current national average in its estimates, and assumed maintenance and acquisition costs that are higher than the reality. GAO has identified charging infrastructure costs and installation as a key challenge to acquiring EVs for federal fleets. [...] The General Services Administration (GSA) said that as of March 10, federal agencies have only ordered an additional 1,854 zero-emission vehicles since its prior report. The U.S. government usually purchases about 50,000 vehicles annually. The federal fleet currently has about 657,000 cars, SUVs and trucks, out of which less than 1% are currently electric, according to GSA data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today announced that its 33rd annual Worldwide Developers Conference is set to take place from Monday, June 6 to Friday, June 10. As with the last several WWDC events, the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference will be held digitally with no in-person gathering. MacRumors reports: There will be no cost associated with WWDC 2022, with all developers worldwide able to attend the virtual event. Apple plans to provide sessions and labs for developers to allow them to learn about the new features and software updates that will be introduced at the event, plus there will be a traditional Swift Student Challenge. Apple says that this year's event will feature additional information sessions, more learning labs, more digital lounges to engage with attendees, and more localized content, with the aim of making WWDC22 "a truly global event." Though the event will be digital, Apple also plans to host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6 to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together. Space will be limited, and Apple will take applications. Apple is expected to hold an online keynote on the first day of WWDC to unveil new software, including iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9. It is also possible we could see new hardware at WWDC, as Apple is working on an updated Apple silicon Mac Pro, a new version of the MacBook Air, and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk will join Twitter's board of directors after taking a 9.2% stake in the social media company. CNBC reports: "Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board," CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet. "He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term," Agrawal added. Former chief Jack Dorsey praised the move, saying in a tweet that Musk "cares deeply about our world and Twitter's role in it." "I've wanted Elon on the board for a long time," Dorsey later added. Musk's term is set to expire in 2024, according to a filing with the SEC. For his entire board term or 90 days after, Musk cannot be the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the company's common stock outstanding. [...] After he was named to the board, Musk on Tuesday teased he would push for adjustments to the product. "Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!" Musk said in a tweet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet fads come and go faster than a hiccup, but one that's somehow lasted almost as long as the internet itself is the "Rick roll." From a report: The term refers to an online prank in which the "Rick rollee" receives a URL address and it leads them to the music video for singer Rick Astley's hit debut single "Never Gonna Give You Up." The opening synthed "doo-de-doo-doo-doo-doo" has created more grins and eye rolls than when the song scored an ungodly amount of airplay in 1987. Sky Elements Drone Shows found a way to Rick roll a sizable portion of the city for April Fools' Day with 300 of its customizable drones by forming a QR code in the sky that linked to Astley's music video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today IBM unveiled the latest mainframe in its storied history, the z16. It runs on the IBM Telum processor, which the company released last summer. The chip has been optimized to run massive workloads, processing 300 billion high-value financial transactions per day with just one millisecond of latency, according to the company. From a report: That's for customers who have a serious need for speed with heavy volume. The primary use case the company is selling for this monster machine is real-time fraud prevention. Financial institutions in particular are the target customers, but Ric Lewis, SVP for IBM systems, says it's for just about any company processing a lot of business-critical transactions. "It's still banking, insurance, public sector, government, healthcare, retail -- anywhere where you really have high transaction throughput, where you need security, reliability and the world's best transaction processing," Lewis said. That comes down to the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos, which are using mainframes, according to data provided by IBM. Most of those machines come from IBM.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One-click checkout startup Fast is shutting down entirely and will discontinue its products and brand, The Information reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: It's a stunning collapse for a fintech company that had raised $120 million in funding from backers including payments giant Stripe, Index Ventures and Lee Fixel's Addition. Fast has been aiming to transform online shopping by making it easier to check out across a wide range of stores. But after failing to generate more than a sliver of revenue -- and spending wildly on hiring hundreds of employees -- the company was in desperate need of a new investor or a buyer. The company had hired Morgan Stanley to run an auction and explore options. Meanwhile, it had just weeks' worth of cash left to spend. Some Fast engineers will be offered an opportunity to work at Affirm, whose software lets people buy goods and pay for them in installments, according to two other people familiar with the matter. The number of potential job offers couldn't be learned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plex has an audacious plan to become the daily go-to app for everyone's streaming needs: The media center app rolled out new universal search, watchlist and discovery features Tuesday that are designed to help people find and keep track of all of the shows and movies available across a growing universe of streaming services. From a report: "The app dance, going from app to app to find something to watch, just doesn't make any sense," said Plex's senior product and design director, Jason Williams. Instead, Williams hopes that people will just open Plex to browse everything that's new on various streaming services, and then follow deep links to directly launch playback on Netflix, Hulu or anywhere else. "You're going to open up Plex every day," Williams said. "It's going to be your trusted source." Universal search and discovery have long been a holy grail for the streaming industry, but efforts by platform operators to integrate these types of features directly into the smart TV home screen have been held back by industry power struggles. Plex hopes it can avert some of those issues, and is betting on the ingenuity of its power users to help out along the way. In addition to universal search and a universal watchlist across multiple streaming services as well as personal media, Plex is also launching a dedicated discovery section in its app that highlights new titles on Netflix and other services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Endpoint Manager is the company's platform for helping IT teams manage and secure large fleets of devices, something that's become increasingly complicated since the start of the pandemic. As part of its larger "Future of Hybrid Work" event, the company also today launched some updates to Endpoint Manager that go beyond some of the traditional feature sets for similar services, with the promise to expand on these in the future. The first new feature Microsoft is adding to the platform under the name of "Microsoft Advanced Management" is remote help. If you've ever used Teamviewer to help a family member fix a computer issue, you can basically think of it as that, but with all of the enterprise bells and whistles it takes to make sure a service like this is secure, the devices on both ends are configured correctly and everybody is who they say they are. And that's why this is part of the overall Endpoint Manager story, because that's what provides the access and idenity controls through a tight integration with Azure Active Directory and helps verify the users and devices. You wouldn't just want your employees to be able to give control over their machines to any random social hacker, after all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The plot was worthy of a Dan Brown thriller -- two Charles Darwin manuscripts worth millions of pounds reported as stolen from Cambridge University library after being missing for two decades. From a report: The disappearance prompted a worldwide appeal with the help of the local police force and Interpol. Now, in a peculiar twist, the notebooks -- one of which contains Darwin's seminal 1837 Tree of Life Sketch -- have been anonymously returned in a pink gift bag, with a typed note on an envelope wishing a happy Easter to the librarian. The bag was left on the floor of a public area of the library outside the librarian's office on the fourth floor of the 17-storey building on 9 March, in an area not covered by CCTV. Who left them and where they had been remains a mystery. Dr Jessica Gardner, who became director of library services in 2017 and who reported the notebooks as stolen to police, described her joy at their return as "immense." "My sense of relief at the notebooks' safe return is profound and almost impossible to adequately express," she said. "I, along with so many others, all across the world, was heartbroken to learn of their loss. The notebooks can now retake their rightful place alongside the rest of the Darwin archive at Cambridge, at the heart of the nation's cultural and scientific heritage, alongside the archives of Sir Isaac Newton and Prof Stephen Hawking."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is bringing tabs to the File Explorer in Windows 11 soon, alongside a refreshed design that makes it easier to quickly access folders or find favorite files. The highly requested tabs feature was first spotted in Windows 11 test builds last month, and now Microsoft is making it official at a hybrid work event for Windows 11 today. From a report: The updated File Explorer design includes tabs to navigate multiple folders in a single window and the ability to move tabs around. Microsoft first started testing tabs in Windows 10 apps, under a feature named Sets. This included support for tabs inside File Explorer, but Microsoft eventually canceled the project and never shipped it to Windows 10 users. Microsoft is also adding a new File Explorer homepage that includes the typical Quick Access folders, recent documents, and a new favorites option. You'll soon be able to right-click a file to add it to favorites, and it will appear pinned on the homepage of File Explorer. There are even improved sharing options for files, with an updated share dialog that lets you send to recent contacts or apps like Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft put PCs in the cloud with Windows 365 last year, and now it's integrating these Cloud PCs directly into Windows 11. From a report: Windows 365 lets businesses access Cloud PCs from anywhere to stream a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 inside a web browser. It's something Citrix and many others have been doing for years, but now Microsoft will allow Windows 11 PCs to boot straight to Windows 365 Cloud PCs or easily switch between them using Windows 11's virtual desktops feature. It's part of a hybrid work push for Windows, allowing businesses to support a mix of working remotely on traditional devices or through virtual cloud-powered ones. Microsoft is working on three new Windows 365 features that will be deeply integrated into Windows 11. The first is Windows 365 Boot, which will enable Windows 11 devices to log directly into a Cloud PC instance at startup instead of the local install of Windows. It's designed for devices that are shared between multiple people or for businesses that allow employees to bring your own device (BYOD) to work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Block has confirmed a data breach involving a former employee who downloaded reports from Cash App that contained some U.S. customer information. From a report: In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 4, Block -- formerly known as Square -- said that the reports were accessed by the insider on December 10. "While this employee had regular access to these reports as part of their past job responsibilities, in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended," the filing reads. Block refused to answer our questions about why a former employee still had access to this data, and for how long they retained access after their employment at the company had ended. The information in the reports included users' full names and brokerage account numbers, and for some customers the accessed data also included brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings, and stock trading activity for one trading day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach," reports the Washington Post. The tool "could improve the detection and treatment of lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases."In a medical paper released in the journal of Soft Robotics last week, scientists from the University of Leeds unveiled a new "magnetic tentacle robot," which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters thick — about double the size of a ballpoint pen tip — and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long. In the future, the robot's use could be expanded to help doctors better, and more thoroughly, investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas, they said.... The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient's lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.... [I]ts smaller size and magnetic composition would allow it to shape-shift more easily and better navigate the intricate shape of a lung's network of airways, which can look like a tree.... Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment.... Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said the autonomous robot is "very novel and interesting technology" that could become potentially useful in areas outside the lungs, most notably the heart. The device's autonomous capability is its unique factor, he said, and has the capability to change invasive surgeries. "I can imagine a future," he said, "where a full [cancer-screening] CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: 'Go get it.' "Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. president Joe Biden "will invoke the Defense Production Act to encourage domestic production of minerals required to make batteries for electric vehicles and long-term energy storage," reports CNBC. "It will also help the U.S. minimize dependence on foreign supply chains."The president's order could help companies receive government funding for feasibility studies on projects that extract materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese, for EV production. The Defense Production Act, established by President Harry Truman during the Cold War, allows the president to use emergency authority to prioritize the development of specific materials for national production.... The administration also said it's reviewing further uses of the law to "secure safer, cleaner, and more resilient energy for America." The transportation sector is one of the largest contributors to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, representing about one-third of emissions every year. The transition away from gas vehicles to EVs is considered critical to combating human-caused climate change.... The administration in February unveiled a plan to allocate $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. The White House said in a statement the move would reduce America's reliance on China and other countries "for the minerals and materials that will power our clean energy future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In March of 2021 the Krebs on Security blog reported that Ubiquiti, "a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things devices," had disclosed a breach exposing customer account credentials. But Krebs added that a company source "alleges" that Ubiquiti was downplaying the severity of the incident — which is not true, says Ubiquiti. Krebs' original post now includes an update — putting the word "breach" in quotation marks, and noting that actually a former Ubiquiti developer had been indicted for the incident...and also for trying to extort the company. It was that extortionist, Ubiquiti says, who'd "alleged" they were downplaying the incident (which the extortionist had actually caused themselves). Ubiquiti is now suing Krebs, "alleging that he falsely accused the company of 'covering up' a cyberattack," ITWire reports:In its complaint, Ubiquiti said contrary to what Krebs had reported, the company had promptly notified its clients about the attack and instructed them to take additional security precautions to protect their information. "Ubiquiti then notified the public in the next filing it made with the SEC. But Krebs intentionally disregarded these facts to target Ubiquiti and increase ad revenue by driving traffic to his website, www.KrebsOnSecurity.com," the complaint alleged. It said there was no evidence to support Krebs' claims and only one source, [the indicted former employee] Nickolas Sharp.... According to the indictment issued by the Department of Justice against Sharp in December 2021, after publication of the articles in question on 30 and 31 March, Ubiquiti's stock price fell by about 20% and the company lost more than US$4 billion (A$5.32 billion) in market capitalisation.... The complaint alleged Krebs had intentionally misrepresented the truth because he had a financial incentive to do so, adding, "His entire business model is premised on publishing stories that conform to this narrative...." "Through its investigation, Ubiquiti learned that Sharp had used his administrative access codes (which Ubiquiti provided to him as part of his employment) to download gigabytes of data. Sharp used a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to mask his online activity, and he also altered log retention policies and related files to conceal his wrongful actions," the complaint alleged. "Ubiquiti shared this information with federal authorities and the company assisted the FBI's investigation into Sharp's blackmail attempt. The federal investigation culminated with the FBI executing a search warrant on Sharp's home on 24 March 2021." The complaint then went into detail about how Sharp contacted Krebs and how the story came to be published. Krebs was accused of two counts of defamation, with Ubiquiti seeking a jury trial and asking for a judgment against him that awarded compensatory damages of more than US$75,000, punitive damages of US$350,000, all expenses and costs including lawyers' fees and any further relief deemed appropriate by the court. Krebs' follow-up post in December had included more details:Investigators say they were able to tie the downloads to Sharp and his work-issued laptop because his Internet connection briefly failed on several occasions while he was downloading the Ubiquiti data. Those outages were enough to prevent Sharp's Surfshark VPN connection from functioning properly — thus exposing his Internet address as the source of the downloads... Several days after the FBI executed its search warrant, Sharp "caused false or misleading news stories to be published about the incident," prosecutors say. Among the claims made in those news stories was that Ubiquiti had neglected to keep access logs that would allow the company to understand the full scope of the intrusion. In reality, the indictment alleges, Sharp had shortened to one day the amount of time Ubiquiti's systems kept certain logs of user activity in AWS. Thanks to Slashdot reader juul_advocate for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports:A group of Facebook engineers identified a "massive ranking failure" that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to potential "integrity risks" over the past six months, according to an internal report on the incident obtained by The Verge. The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing posts from repeat misinformation offenders that were reviewed by the company's network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th. In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook's systems failed to properly demote probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or site event — a label reserved for high-priority technical crises, like Russia's ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Anyone who has worked in the financial services sector will at least be aware of Bloomberg Terminal, a research, data and analytics platform used to garner real-time insights on the financial markets. Bloomberg Terminal has emerged as something of an industry standard, used by more than 300,000 people at just about every major financial and investment-related corporation globally -- but it costs north of $20,000 per user each year to license, a fee that is prohibitively high for many organizations. This is something that OpenBB has set out to tackle, by democratizing an industry that has been "dominated by monopolistic and proprietary incumbents" for the past four decades -- and it's doing so with an entirely open source approach. After launching initially last year as an open source investment research terminal called Gamestonk Terminal, the founding team, Didier Lopes, Artem Veremey, and James Maslek, were approached by OSS Capital to make an investment and build a commercial company on top of the terminal. And so OpenBB is formally launching this week with $8.5 million in funding from OSS Capital, with contributions from notable angel investors including early Google backer Ram Shriram, entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, and Elad Gil. The newly named OpenBB Terminal is very much an alpha-stage product, one that's aimed at the more technically minded. It's pitched as a "Python-based integrated environment for investment research," allowing any trader to access data science and machine learning smarts to unpack raw, unrefined data. OpenBB hopes that its open source credentials, and foundations in Python, will position it to win over many new users -- flexibility is the name of the game. [...] Indeed, being open source means that the broader community can add their own flavors to the OpenBB mix -- by way of example, one contributor who was interested in the foreign currency exchange market (Forex) added an Oanda integration to the project. Given that the entire source code is available for anyone to modify, companies can create their own version of the terminal with customizations that suit their niche use-cases. If they want to remove all the clutter and work purely with one type of asset, they can create a sort of light-weight version of the terminal with a much narrower focus on Forex, or cryptocurrency, for example. But who is the actual intended end-user, exactly? In truth, it could be anyone from regional investment banks and hedge funds, to venture capitalists, family offices, and mutual funds. Although the product isn't quite at that stage yet -- that is where the initial seed capital enters the fray. It's all about building the product into something that could serve a potentially large market. OpenBB Terminal will be free for now, but "there will be a concerted push to monetize it," adds VentureBeat. "Some ideas currently under consideration include building a 'slick 21st century UI,' as well as developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, where OpenBB serves up the computational power to run machine learning models on vast amounts of data." "OpenBB is also exploring ways to build bridges between data sources and investors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The owner of an Audi Q4 E-Tron decided not to purchase the automaker's tri-zone climate control feature, yet still received a "Sync" button in their brand new battery-powered SUV. "Instead of just doing nothing [when it was pressed], or, you know, syncing the climate zones, it instead caused a message to pop up on the screen indicating that the function had not been purchased," reports The Drive. From the report: Audi U.S. and U.K. both offer tri-zone climate control on the base trim. However, some markets offer tri-zone climate control as an optional add-on. In Denmark, where this particular owner told us they're based, the add-on costs around $758 (5,114 Kroner). The owner acknowledged that they chose against purchasing it but didn't expect pressing the button to display a message. Historically, cars with unpurchased features simply had those blank pieces of plastic in place of a button. They couldn't be pressed, and they didn't look too out of place as they mostly blended in with the interior. Audi's implementation here is kind of serving the same purpose, and while it sharpens up the appearance of the interior, it comes with a reminder that's a lot more in-your-face than a blank button that you simply can't press. "Blank buttons aren't rude," wrote the owner. "This one is reminding me that I'm cheap." Interestingly, the message doesn't feature any sort of prompt to purchase the function.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tens of thousands of Viasat satellite broadband modems that were disabled in a cyber-attack some weeks ago were wiped by malware with possible links to Russia's destructive VPNFilter, according to SentinelOne. The Register reports: On February 24, as Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Viasat terminals in Europe and Ukraine were suddenly and unexpectedly knocked offline and rendered inoperable. This caused, among other things, thousands of wind turbines in Germany to lose satellite internet connectivity needed for remote monitoring and control. Earlier this week, Viasat provided some details about the outage: it blamed a poorly configured VPN appliance, which allowed a miscreant to access a trusted management segment of Viasat's KA-SAT satellite network. The broadband provider said this intruder then explored its internal network until they were able to instruct subscribers' modems to overwrite their flash storage, requiring a factory reset to restore the equipment. We were told: "The attacker moved laterally through this trusted management network to a specific network segment used to manage and operate the network, and then used this network access to execute legitimate, targeted management commands on a large number of residential modems simultaneously. Specifically, these destructive commands overwrote key data in flash memory on the modems, rendering the modems unable to access the network, but not permanently unusable." How exactly these modems had their memory overwritten wasn't said. According to the research arm of SentinelOne, though, it may have been wiper malware deployed to the devices as a malicious firmware update from Viasat's compromised backend. This conclusion was based on a suspicious-looking MIPS ELF binary named "ukrop" that was uploaded to VirusTotal on March 15. "Only the incident responders in the Viasat case could say definitively whether this was in fact the malware used in this particular incident," SentinelOne's Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Max van Amerongen wrote on Thursday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Some species play an outsize role in the environment they inhabit. Beavers build dams that create ponds where fish thrive. Otters in kelp forests eat enough sea urchins so that the kelp can grow without being gobbled up first. These so-called keystone species hold their ecosystem together. But what if ecosystems not only hinge on a single species but can be made or broken by a single gene? In a study published on Thursday in Science, researchers have demonstrated the existence of what they call a "keystone gene." The discovery may have implications for how scientists think about the ways ecosystems, and the species in them, persist over time. In the lab, the researchers built several miniature ecosystems that consisted of just four species each. At the bottom of the food chain was Arabidopsis thaliana, a small annual plant that is a favorite study organism among biologists (its genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago). In each ecosystem, the plant served as food for two species of aphids, which in turn fed a parasitoid wasp. Each bread-box-sized ecosystem contained multiple Arabidopsis plants. In some systems, the plants were genetically identical -- a monoculture. In others, genetic variations were introduced by turning on and off three genes -- MAM1, AOP2 and GSOH -- in various combinations.The researchers focused on these genes because they maintain the production of compounds called aliphatic glucosinolates, which protect the plant by deterring hungry aphids. Some of the experimental ecosystems had more variation in the number of genetic combinations than others; the researchers watched to see how well plants, aphids and wasps would coexist in each scenario. As the team expected, the ecosystems with more genetically diverse plants turned out to be more stable. For each plant with a different genetic makeup that the researchers added to the mix, the insects' extinction rate fell by nearly 20 percent, compared with monocultures. But what stunned the researchers was that this result seemed to hinge on a single gene. Regardless of diversity, if systems contained plants with a certain variant, or allele, of the AOP2 gene, the extinction rate of the insects decreased by 29 percent, compared with systems without it. Essentially, if you change that AOP2 allele, you lose the insects. Increasing genetic diversity helped the insects because it increased the likelihood of the aphids encountering plants with this one critical gene variant. [...] Also surprising was the mechanism by which the AOP2 allele impacted the aphids. Although the variant changed the way a plant produced its aphid-deterring compound, it also allowed the plant to grow faster. This in turn allowed the aphids, as well as the wasps that relied on them for food, to become larger faster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to The Verge, health providers writing Google reviews about patients with identifiable information is a HIPAA violation," writes Slashdot reader August Oleman. From the report: In the past few years, the phrase 'HIPAA violation' has been thrown around a lot, often incorrectly. People have cited the law, which protects patient health information, as a reason they can't be asked if they're vaccinated or get a doctor's note for an employer. But asking someone if they're vaccinated isn't actually a HIPAA violation. That's a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. [...] In the post, he used the patient's full name and described, in detail, the specific dental problem he was in for: "excruciating pain" from the lower left quadrant, which resulted in a referral for a root canal. That's what a HIPAA violation actually looks like. The law says that healthcare providers and insurance companies can't share identifiable, personal information without a patient's consent. In this case, the dentist (a healthcare provider) publicly shared a patient's name, medical condition, and medical history (personal information). As a result, the office was fined $50,000 (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A controversial facial recognition company that's built a massive photographic dossier of the world's people for use by police, national governments and -- most recently -- the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. The Washington Post reports: Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale. "We don't have any plans to sell the company," he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people's identity using facial recognition. The new "consent-based" product would use Clearview's algorithms to verify a person's face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the "least controversial use case" of facial recognition, he said. That's in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New vehicles sold in the U.S. will have to average at least 40 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026, up from about 28 mpg, under new federal rules unveiled Friday that undo a rollback of standards enacted under President Donald Trump. The Associated Press reports: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its new fuel economy requirements are the strongest to date and the maximum the industry can achieve over the time period. They will reduce gasoline consumption by more than 220 billion gallons over the life of vehicles, compared with the Trump standards. They're expected to decrease carbon dioxide emissions -- but not as much as some environmentalists want -- and raise new vehicle prices in an industry already pressed by inflation and supply chain issues. For the current model year, standards enacted under Trump require the fleet of new vehicles to get just under 28 miles per gallon in real-world driving. The new requirements increase gas mileage by 8% per year for model years 2024 and 2025 and 10% in the 2026 model year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What makes the ["Infinite Mac"] project unique isn't necessarily the fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS, Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now. Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds, reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some of his work in this blog post. Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote. CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states -- your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when "there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9) because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist. Not yet, anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Twitter user from the UK named Joseph Kelly has been sentenced to 150 hours of community service for posting a "grossly offensive" tweet about Captain Sir Tom Moore, a British Army officer who raised money for the NHS during the pandemic. The Verge reports: Moore became a national figure in the UK after walking 100 laps around his garden before his 100th birthday. He was later knighted by the Queen. The day after his death, Kelly, 36, tweeted "the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn." Kelly was found guilty in February last year and faced possible jail time. His case brought attention to an often-criticized piece of UK legislation that allows social media users to be prosecuted for sending "grossly offensive" messages. As reported by The National, Kelly was sentenced on Wednesday. His defense argued that Kelly had few followers on Twitter at the time; that he had been drinking before writing the post; and that he deleted the tweet just 20 minutes after sending it. "He accepts he was wrong. He did not anticipate what would happen. He took steps almost immediately to delete the tweet but the genie was out of the bottle by then," said Kelly's defence agent Tony Callahan. "His level of criminality was a drunken post, at a time when he was struggling emotionally, which he regretted and almost instantly removed." Kelly was sentenced to 18 months of supervision and 150 hours of unpaid work in the form of a Scottish Community Payback Order (CPO).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitLab has addressed a critical severity vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to take over user accounts using hardcoded passwords. Bleeping Computer reports: The bug (discovered internally and tracked as CVE-2022-1162) affects both GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). This flaw results from static passwords accidentally set during OmniAuth-based registration in GitLab CE/EE. GitLab urged users to immediately upgrade all GitLab installations to the latest versions (14.9.2, 14.8.5, or 14.7.7) to block potential attacks. GitLab also added that it reset the passwords of a limited number of GitLab.com users as part of the CVE-2022-1162 mitigation effort. It also found no evidence that any accounts have been compromised by attackers using this hardcode password security flaw.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: In the depths of the Amazon jungle, a dispute over WiFi turned deadly earlier this month when four Yanomami were killed in what the government is calling a "clash" between the Indigenous group and Venezuelan soldiers. On March 20, a group of Indigenous men approached soldiers at a military base in Parima B -- a remote part of the Venezuelan Amazon that borders Brazil -- to ask them for the WiFi password, according to five people with knowledge of the situation. The Indigenous community and the military had agreed to share the router, but the soldiers changed the password without the authorization of the Yanomami, igniting the conflict, said the five people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab launched an investigation into what he referred to as a "clash" between the Venezuelan soldiers and the Yanomami. No information has been shared since the investigation started, and Saab did not answer questions from The Washington Post about the inquiry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Bray, writing in a blog post: When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there'd be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn't believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G offered, or I didn't believe the opportunity was anywhere near big enough to justify the trillion-dollar build-out investment. Six years later, I still don't. This is a report on a little online survey I ran, looking for actual real-world 5G impact to see if I was wrong.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has opened an investigation into Amazon's labor practices during severe weather events, according to a letter members sent to Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive. From a report: "We are concerned by recent reports that Amazon may be putting the health and safety of its workers at risk, including by requiring them to work in dangerous conditions during tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather," said the letter, signed by the committee chairwoman, Carolyn B. Maloney, as well as Representatives Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The investigation will focus on the December tornado that hit Amazon's delivery station in Edwardsville, Ill., killing six people. Most people at the facility were not Amazon's direct employees. They were subcontracted delivery drivers, a complication that impeded the response when the authorities could not readily determine how many people were on site. The facility did not have a tornado safe room, which was not required by building code. At least one subcontracted driver was told to keep delivering during the storm, according to text messages Bloomberg News published.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a market gripped by concerns over rising interest rates and soaring inflation, investors are avoiding European food delivery companies, turned off by their steep losses and determined efforts to expand. From a report: Shares in Delivery Hero SE plunged 59% last quarter, the second-worst performance in Europe's Stoxx 600 Index. Peers Just Eat Takeaway.com and Deliveroo Plc dropped more than 35%. The three stocks wiped out a combined $23.7 billion, more than half their market value. While it's no surprise when tech stocks struggle in times of rising borrowing costs, the sharp slump in food delivery shares underscores the penalties markets can impose on companies for prioritizing growth when they are yet to turn a profit. Companies in the sector have done a bad job of adjusting their strategies to the rising cost of capital, Jefferies analyst Giles Thorne said in an interview. "The cost of capital goes up, you don't make money and you've got debt -- then that's how equity gets crushed." The fear of losing market share has driven increased spending, even as sliding equity valuations signaled investor disapproval. Just Eat expanded into the U.K. grocery delivery market in December, after previously saying the category lacked scale. Delivery Hero agreed to buy a majority stake in Glovo in a transaction that valued the Spanish delivery startup at 2.3 billion euros ($2.5 billion).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's billing system for app developers is "unfair and discriminatory," India's antitrust regulator said in the initial findings of an extensive investigation, paving the way for potential penalties in future. From a report: The Competition Commission of India found Google discriminated against developers in its Play store billing policy, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News. The findings come after a months-long investigation triggered by protests from developers, who've complained the U.S. internet giant charges an unfairly high fee in return for using Android app stores and its proprietary payments service. Alphabet, Google's parent, and Apple have come under pressure from regulators around the world who accuse the twin mobile giants of forcing developers to use their payment systems, then taking an outsized cut of revenue. In South Korea, Google was forced to provide an alternative billing system after regulatory action. In that market, Google said it was reducing app makers' fees by 4%. "Google is imposing unfair and discriminatory conditions in violation" of regulations, the Indian agency said in its preliminary report dated March 14.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three newly released CIA reports from 1963 and 1964 investigate the Soviet Union's apparent use of extrasensory perception (ESP) and attempted development of "cybernetic telepathy." Motherboard: The documents detail conversations an agent had with Soviet scientists and a student about the USSR's interest in developing ESP. Guided by these second hand accounts, it sounds like the Soviet Union's plans of developing telepathy went as well as America's well-documented efforts. "At the moment, he does not have a clear detailed language program for this," one report said. "Rather, he has an overall goal for the future of finding out about ESP generally." The documents come courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act via the transparency site the Government Attic. They're three reports to the CIA about conversations an agent had with a Soviet cybernetics researcher and a visiting foreign exchange student.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweden has long been at the forefront of road innovation and is again leading the way with trials of a technology known as geofencing. From a report: In April 2017, a man drove a stolen truck into a crowded shopping district in central Stockholm and crashed it into a department store, killing four people and injuring 15 others. The terrorist attack prompted the Swedish government to investigate how digital technology could be used to prevent these kinds of incidents in the future. It began a four-year research program to test one type, geofencing, in urban environments. Geofencing is a virtual tool in which software uses GPS or similar technology to trigger a preprogrammed or real-time action in vehicles to control their movements within a geographical area. It can regulate a vehicle's speed within the zone, determine whether the vehicle belongs there and automatically switch hybrid vehicles to electric driving mode. Johannes Berg, senior adviser for digitalization at the Swedish Transport Administration, said the technology can improve traffic safety and lower emissions. It also has the potential to adjust speed based on road and weather conditions, and to ensure compliance with regulations, like stopping a vehicle if a driver doesn't have a permit to enter a geofenced area, he added. In simple uses -- like when a map with restrictions is downloaded to a vehicle before the start of a trip to reduce speed automatically when it enters a low-speed zone -- vehicles do not need to be connected to an outside source, Mr. Berg said. But in more advanced applications -- real-time use, for example -- vehicles must be connected. Rules and regulations are in a tech cloud and could be changed based on the actual position of the vehicles, he said. "The cloud service can access the engine of the vehicle using the telematics connection of the vehicle." Sweden, which began a series of geofencing trials in 2019, has long been an innovator in vehicle-related safety. In the 1990s, it introduced Vision Zero, an approach to safety that takes human error into account. The goal is to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries by creating multiple layers of protection; if one fails, others will create a safety net. Sweden now has one of the lowest crash death rates in the world, and many cities globally have implemented the approach. Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Transportation officially adopted the strategy to address a dramatic spike in the death toll in the United States. In Stockholm, geofencing pilot programs have focused on commercial traffic in the city center, assessing such things as whether deliveries to businesses could occur at lower speeds at night when streets typically have fewer people. [...] In another trial, sensors added to pavements monitor pedestrian flow, which have been able to trigger speed reduction in pilot vehicles. "The trucks are actually decreasing their speed automatically," Mr. Berg said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the past five years, reports of staggering insect declines have stoked anxiety and debate concerning the fate of the "little things that run the world," as the late biologist E. O. Wilson once called them. As for the how and why of these declines, the prime culprits are habitat destruction, rampant use of pesticides, and climate change. But new research published March 30 in Biology Letters adds an unexpected suspect, at least for a large swath of North America: the earthworm. From a report: The study looked at 60 plots in an aspen and poplar forest in Alberta, Canada, and found that as the numbers of earthworms wriggling in the soil and leaf litter increased, the diversity and abundance of invertebrates aboveground decreased. These results might sound surprising, since earthworms are widely considered to be helpful garden residents. Worms earned their reputation by aerating and mixing soil with their burrows and releasing locked up nutrients in their castings, all of which can help certain plants thrive. But this new study is part of a growing body of research suggesting that at least in the forests of northern North America, earthworms may not be the slimy angels of the underworld we tend to think they are. "When people talk about insect decline, they rarely talk about the soil," says Nico Eisenhauer, a soil ecologist at Leipzig University in Germany and one of the authors of the new study. "Many of the insects and invertebrates that are in decline have life phases in the soil. What you don't see flying around now has first disappeared from the soil, and earthworms can fundamentally alter soil conditions." Earthworms' subterranean engineering isn't a problem in their native ecosystems, but in the northern half of North America, the glaciers of the last ice age wiped out virtually all soil-dwelling worms more than 10,000 years ago. The ice sheets covered nearly all of Canada, most of the northeast U.S., and much of the upper Midwest. When the ice receded, forests returned but the worms did not because they can only expand their range by a maximum of about 30 feet a year. These northerly ecosystems evolved for millennia in the absence of earthworms. Without worms munching through fallen foliage and churning the soil, these forests accumulated thick layers of leaf litter, which came to support a vast array of animals, fungi, and plants. Eisenhauer says even non-scientists can appreciate the difference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long associated with Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the Patagonia vest has endured as a tribal symbol of finance and tech. But those who've dared in recent weeks to put on their vests in San Francisco have been the target of a resistance of sorts. From a report: "Urgent: Stop wearing vests," implore flyers plastered around the city. "You live in San Francisco now. It's time to start acting like it." It's the latest show of frustration from city residents against the tech workers that many blame for making the city one of the nation's most expensive. NPR tried but was unable to track down the creator of the flyers. Not everyone who sports a Patagonia vest is a "tech bro," says proud Patagonia vest-wearer Sam Runkle. "The kind of people who wear Patagonia are maybe raising rents and maybe are the kind of people that these other groups are trying to push back on," he said on a recent afternoon as he played fetch with his golden retriever, with a lacrosse stick and ball, in a grassy field overlooking the San Francisco Bay. "But there's another cohort of people who do wear Patagonia who are not at all part of that." For instance, Runkle, who works in sales at the software startup Paylode, said of his digs in the city's trendy Marina neighborhood: "I live in a four-bedroom that's really a two-bedroom with a plywood wall, so I don't think I'm raising any rents." And, he notes, a Patagonia vest is practical in San Francisco: the perfect wind shield for a city on the tip of a peninsula. "It's comfy," Runkle says. It gets the job done." Indeed, plenty of women and non-tech workers adore the vests in the Bay Area for the same reason, but Runkle admits it's most often sported by bros. In particular, bros who know something about venture capital or software engineering. "It's true," he says. The tension fueled by the vests comes as no surprise to historian Margaret O'Mara at the University of Washington and author of the book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. She said the rise of the fleece vest in tech circles coincided with the throng of new investors piling into flashy startups in the early 2000s.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon.com workers at a New York warehouse voted to join an upstart labor union, a historic victory that gives organized labor its first foothold in the company's U.S. operations. Bloomberg adds: The election at Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island wasn't close. With only a few hundred ballots left to count, the Amazon Labor Union led with 2,300 yes votes versus 1,855 no votes for Amazon. The victory is a watershed moment for Amazon. The Seattle-based company has managed to keep unions out of its U.S. operations for more than a quarter-century. Unless the company can get the result overturned, Amazon will have to start contract negotiations that potentially could hamper its ability to adjust work requirements and scheduling on the fly. The outcome also could embolden workers and labor activists to try to organize other Amazon facilities and even spill over into other industries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On a winter night in early 2016, Jeremy Kitson gathered in his buddy's large shed with some neighbors to plan their fight against a proposed wind farm in rural Van Wert County, Ohio. The project would be about a mile from his home. From the beginning, Kitson -- who teaches physics and chemistry at the local high school -- knew he didn't want the turbines anywhere near him. He had heard from folks who lived near another wind project about 10 miles away that the turbines were noisy and that they couldn't sleep. "There were so many people saying that it's horrible, you do not want to live under these things,'" Kitson says. He and his neighbors went on the offensive. "I was just like, there's got to be a way to beat 'em," he says of the developer, Apex Clean Energy. "You got to outsmart them. You got to figure out the science. You got to figure out the economic arguments. You got to figure out what they're going to say and figure out how to counter it." At the shed, according to Kitson, they agreed that part of their outreach would involve posting information on a Facebook community page called "Citizens for Clear Skies," which ultimately grew to more than 770 followers. In between posts selling anti-wind yard signs and posts about public meetings opposing local wind projects, there were posts that spread false, misleading and questionable information about wind energy. Links to stories about wind turbine noise causing birth defects in Portuguese horses. Posts about the health effects of low frequency infrasound, also called wind turbine syndrome. Posts about wind energy not actually reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Photos of wind turbines breaking, burning and falling -- some in nearby counties and states, but some in Germany and New Zealand. According to 2014 data from the Department of Energy, the most recent available, out of the then-40,000 turbines in the U.S., there had been fewer than 40 incidents. Kitson, the administrator of the Facebook page, says he knows that these accidents aren't typical. "Those events are not likely. We know that," Kitson says. But Kitson has seen a broken piece of a fallen turbine blade himself, which got him worrying about how the fiberglass might affect the integrity of the soil and the crops. So he posts the photos and articles, many of which he receives from an anti-wind email list. "I do that just to try to show people what's possible." Kitson's group is one of dozens in the United States and abroad that oppose utility-scale wind and solar projects. Researchers say that in many groups, misinformation is raising doubts about renewable energy and slowing or derailing projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Genetic testing to predict how individuals will respond to common medicines should be implemented without delay to reduce the risk of side-effects and ensure that everyone is given the right drug at the right dose, experts have said. From a report: About 6.5% of UK hospital admissions are caused by adverse drug reactions, while most prescription medicines only work on 30% to 50% of people. A significant part of this is due to genetics: almost 99% of people carry at least one genetic variation that affects their response to certain drugs, including commonly prescribed painkillers, heart disease drugs and antidepressants. By the age of 70, about 90% of people are taking at least one of these medications. A new report, published by the British Pharmacological Society and the Royal College of Physicians, argues that many of these issues could be addressed through pharmacogenomic testing, which allows personalised prescribing according to people's genes. "The ultimate goal is to make pharmacogenomic prescribing a reality for everyone within the NHS, which will empower healthcare professionals to deliver better, more personalised care," said Sir Munir Pirmohamed, a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Liverpool, who chaired the report's working party. "The aim of pharmacogenomics is to make sure patients get the right drug, at the right dose, at the right time to be able to improve their outcomes, treat their symptoms, cure their disease and prevent side-effects."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two teenagers from the UK have been charged by police over hacking for a notorious cyber-crime gang. From a report: A 16 and 17-year-old will appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on Friday. The boys have been charged with multiple cyber-offences and remain in police custody. The teens were arrested as part of an international police investigation into the Lapsus$ gang, which is relatively new but much talked-about. The cyber-crime group successfully breached major firms like Microsoft, and then bragged about it online. Last week, the FBI launched an appeal for information about the people behind the hacking crew. According to Det Insp Michael O'Sullivan, from the City of London Police, both teenagers have been charged with three counts of unauthorised access to a computer with intent to impair the reliability of data, one count of fraud by false representation, and one count of unauthorised access to a computer with intent to hinder access to data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's tech workers are looking for safer and more secure professional pastures. By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow. From a report: For some countries, Russia's loss is being seen as their potential gain and an opportunity to bring fresh expertise to their own high-tech industries. Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed the brain drain even in the throes of a war that, according to the U.N. refugee agency, has caused more than 4 million people to flee Ukraine and displaced millions more within the country. This week, Putin reacted to the exodus of tech professionals by approving legislation to eliminate income taxes between now and 2024 for individuals who work for information technology companies. Some people in the vast new pool of high-tech exiles say they are in no rush to return home. An elite crowd furnished with European Union visas has relocated to Poland or the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania. A larger contingent has fallen back on countries where Russians do not need visas: Armenia, Georgia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. In normal times, millions of less-skilled laborers emigrate from those economically shaky countries to comparatively more prosperous Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Addition and subtraction must be hard for fish, especially because they don't have fingers to count on. But they can do it -- albeit with small numbers -- a new study reveals. By training the animals to use blue and yellow colors as codes for the commands "add one" and "subtract one," respectively, researchers showed fish have the capacity for simple arithmetic. To make the find, researchers at the University of Bonn adopted the design of a similar experiment conducted in bees. They focused on bony cichlids (Pseudotropheus zebra) and cartilaginous stingrays (Potamotrygon motoro), which the lab uses to study fish cognition. In the training phase, the scientists showed a fish in a tank an image of up to five squares, circles, and triangles that were all either blue or yellow. The animals had 5 seconds to memorize the number and color of the shapes; then a gate opened, and the fish had to choose between two doors: one with an additional shape and the other with one fewer shape. The rules were simple: If the shapes in the original image were blue, head for the door with one extra shape; if they were yellow, go for the door with one fewer. Choosing the correct door earned the fish a food reward: pellets for cichlids, and earthworms, shrimp, or mussels for stingrays. Only six of the eight cichlids and four of the eight stingrays successfully completed their training. But those that made it through testing performed well above chance, the researchers report today in Scientific Reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of people have lost access to their cryptocurrency, and recovering those lost Bitcoins has become a lucrative business. "Motherboard talks to some of the people trying to get back their crypto, and the people who are making that happen in the newest episode of CRYPTOLAND on YouTube," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. Here's an excerpt from an article accompanying the episode: It's hard to know exactly how much Bitcoin is locked forever in wallets whose owners forgot the password, or in hard drives thrown out. There's plenty of anecdotes of desperate people trying to recover their lost Bitcoin. Chainalysis, a firm that tracks cryptocurrencies to help companies and law enforcement, estimated in 2018 that up to 23% of all Bitcoin is lost forever -- around 3.79 million bitcoins or the equivalent of around $170 billion at today's conversion rate. Naturally, some of the people who own those lost Bitcoin are willing to do anything to get them back. And there's a market for companies or individuals who promise to recover the lost Bitcoin for a fee. There's the mysterious Wallet Recovery Service, run by an anonymous person who goes by DaveBitcoin, or Crypto Asset Recovery, a father and son startup based in New Hampshire. In essence, what these organizations do is try as many password or passphrase combinations as fast as they can -- or as fast as their password cracking software and hardware will allow -- until they get the right one for a specific wallet they're trying to break into. They brute force the password, but they need help from their customers -- some guess, at least, of what their password may have been. Charlie Brooks, the son in the duo that runs Crypto Asset Recovery, told Motherboard that their success rate is 32 percent, without counting those customers that they believe have almost no chance of getting their Bitcoin back (who they decline to take on as clients).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1+1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1+1 = 2: either representation would be, well, alien to them. "Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed," reads the paper. "These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: More than two decades after the draft human genome was celebrated as a scientific milestone, scientists have finally finished the job. The first complete, gap-free sequence of a human genome has been published in an advance expected to pave the way for new insights into health and what makes our species unique. Until now, about 8% of the human genome was missing, including large stretches of highly repetitive sequences, sometimes described as "junk DNA." In reality though, these repeated sections were omitted due to technical difficulties in sequencing them, rather than pure lack of interest. Sequencing a genome is something like slicing up a book into snippets of text then trying to reconstruct the book by piecing them together again. Stretches of text that contain a lot of common or repeated words and phrases would be harder to put in their correct place than more unique pieces of text. New "long-read" sequencing techniques that decode big chunks of DNA at once -- enough to capture many repeats -- helped overcome this hurdle. Scientists were able to simplify the puzzle further by using an unusual cell type that only contains DNA inherited from the father (most cells in the body contain two genomes -- one from each parent). Together these two advances allowed them to decode the more than 3 billion letters that comprise the human genome. The science behind the sequencing effort and some initial analysis of the new genome regions are outlined in six papers published in the journal Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of internet usage, especially given this system's eye-rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly. The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed. With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."Read more of this story at Slashdot.