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UnknowingFool writes: Google has proposed a change on how Linux kernel handles shutdowns specifically when NVMe drives are used. The issue that Google is finding is that the current NVMe drivers use synchronous APIs when shutting down and it can take 4.5 seconds for each NVMe drive. For a system with 16 NVMe drives that could take more than a minute longer. While this is a problem that only large enterprise systems face currently, more enterprises are replacing their mechanical disk RAID servers with SSD ones. [...] The proposed patches from Google allow for an optional asynchronous shutdown interface at the bus level. The new interface maintains backwards compatibility with the synchronous implementation. As part of the patches, all PCI Express based devices are moved to use the async interface, implements the changes at the PCIe level, and then the changes to the NVMe driver to exploit the async shutdown interface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Krebs on Security reports: In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about who owns an account at a social media firm, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past, they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name. But in certain circumstances -- such as a case involving imminent harm or death -- an investigating authority may make what's known as an Emergency Data Request (EDR), which largely bypasses any official review and does not require the requestor to supply any court-approved documents. It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using their illicit access to police email systems, the hackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately. In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR -- and potentially having someone's blood on their hands -- or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person. "We have a legal process to compel production of documents, and we have a streamlined legal process for police to get information from ISPs and other providers," said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. "And then we have this emergency process, almost like you see on [the television series] Law & Order, where they say they need certain information immediately," Rasch continued. "Providers have a streamlined process where they publish the fax or contact information for police to get emergency access to data. But there's no real mechanism defined by most Internet service providers or tech companies to test the validity of a search warrant or subpoena. And so as long as it looks right, they'll comply." To make matters more complicated, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world -- including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone -- and all it takes for hackers to succeed is illicit access to a single police email account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google was fined 2 million euros ($2.2 million) by the Paris Commercial Court over abusive practices toward developers on its app store. From a report: The U.S. tech giant will also have to change seven clauses from its contracts dating back to years 2015 and 2016, that included a 30% commission on revenues generated by developers on the Google Play Store, according to a text of Monday's ruling. Google, as well as Apple, were taken to court in 2018 by the French Ministry of Finance, for imposing a "significant imbalance in the rights and obligations" concerning app developers, including the right for Google to unilaterally modify or terminate the contracts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony is set to launch a new video game subscription service this summer, seeking to drive sales of its PlayStation consoles and compete with a similar offering from Microsoft. CNBC: The company said Tuesday it will bundle its existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services into one single subscription service called PlayStation Plus. The new PlayStation Plus will be available in June and comes in three tiers: 1. The basic package, PS Plus Essential, replaces the original PS Plus, which offers players two free games each month and access to online multiplayer. It costs $10 a month or $60 for an annual subscription.2. A step above Essential is PS Plus Extra, which comes with all the same perks as Essential but includes a selection of 400 downloadable PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles. It's priced at $15 monthly or $100 a year.3. The most expensive package is PS Plus Premium. This one includes 340 more games than Extra, and lets players stream a selection of PS, PS2, PSP, PS3, PS4 and PS5 games over the internet. PS Plus Premium costs $18 a month or $120 each year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost $10 billion over the next decade will be pumped into helping Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China in a major funding boost that will nearly double the size of the nation's leading cyber security agency. From a report: In its centrepiece defence budget announcement, the government will make the largest single investment in the 75-year history of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country's powerful and highly secretive electronic intelligence agency. The government said the funding increase -- dramatically named Project REDSPICE (Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers) -- will significantly expand the ASD's offensive cyber capabilities, as well as the agency's ability to prevent hacking and other digital attacks. The government intends to put national security at the centre of the upcoming election campaign, contrasting its latest announcements with reductions to defence spending during the Rudd-Gillard era. In his budget night speech Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the $9.9 billion in spending over 10 years as the country's "biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness." It comes on top of the government's previously announced expansion in Australian Defence Force personnel and the purchase of new Chinook helicopters, Abrams tanks and combat engineering vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, players have complained that ballooning game download sizes are clogging up hard drives and Internet bandwidth. In a recent interview with streamer TeeP, Call of Duty: Warzone Live Operations Lead Josh Bridge admitted that the game's massive file size is also impacting the team's ability to release new maps.Asked about the possibility of adding the original Verdansk map to cycle alongside the game's current Caldera map, Bridge said, "We want that. We all want that," before addressing the "technical problem" that makes it difficult: "The install and re-install sizes are fucking insane, right? If we pulled out Caldera and say we're gonna drop in Verdansk, this could be essentially re-downloading, like, the size of Warzone," he said. "And every time we've done that, we lose players," Bridge continued. "Because you're kind of like, 'I don't want to re-download that,' [so you] uninstall. I think you can't fit anything else but Warzone on a base PS4." Bridge is exaggerating, but only a little. Activision says you need a whopping 175GB of hard drive space on PC for a Warzone install. On Xbox, the base download is listed at nearly 92GB, similar to the size on PlayStation systems. Adding Modern Warfare onto the Warzone package increases the total size to about 250GB on PC and 150GB on consoles. About a year ago, Activision announced that the "larger than usual" Warzone "Season 2 Reloaded" patch would reduce the game's "overall footprint" on hard drives by 10-15GB (and 30-35GB when combined with Modern Warfare, depending on the platform). The "data optimization and streamlining" in that update would also ensure that "future patch sizes for Modern Warfare and Warzone [would] be smaller" than the 57GB update being offered at that point. The results over the ensuing year have been mixed. A February Season 2 patch required only about 11GB of file downloads, for instance, while a December 7 update that introduced new maps required a 41-45 GB download on consoles. [...] In any case, Bridge was remarkably frank about Warzone's file size issues and said that "looking to the future, we're putting a lot more effort into how we sort that out on a technical level so that we can have that [map] rotation. We've been really looking at it, so we'll have more to talk about that, but that is ultimately a goal to ensure that there's a freshness and a variety of experiences."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Corin Faife writes via The Verge: On March 24th, EU governing bodies announced that they had reached a deal on the most sweeping legislation to target Big Tech in Europe, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Seen as an ambitious law with far-reaching implications, the most eye-catching measure in the bill would require that every large tech company -- defined as having a market capitalization of more than 75 billion euros or a user base of more than 45 million people in the EU -- create products that are interoperable with smaller platforms. For messaging apps, that would mean letting end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp mingle with less secure protocols like SMS -- which security experts worry will undermine hard-won gains in the field of message encryption. The main focus of the DMA is a class of large tech companies termed "gatekeepers," defined by the size of their audience or revenue and, by extension, the structural power they are able to wield against smaller competitors. Through the new regulations, the government is hoping to "break open" some of the services provided by such companies to allow smaller businesses to compete. That could mean letting users install third-party apps outside of the App Store, letting outside sellers rank higher in Amazon searches, or requiring messaging apps to send texts across multiple protocols. But this could pose a real problem for services promising end-to-end encryption: the consensus among cryptographers is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain encryption between apps, with potentially enormous implications for users. Signal is small enough that it wouldn't be affected by the DMA provisions, but WhatsApp -- which uses the Signal protocol and is owned by Meta -- certainly would be. The result could be that some, if not all, of WhatsApp's end-to-end messaging encryption is weakened or removed, robbing a billion users of the protections of private messaging. Given the need for precise implementation of cryptographic standards, experts say that there's no simple fix that can reconcile security and interoperability for encrypted messaging services. Effectively, there would be no way to fuse together different forms of encryption across apps with different design features, said Steven Bellovin, an acclaimed internet security researcher and professor of computer science at Columbia University.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk's space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. From the report: Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule's eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX's moon and Mars rocket. Starship's debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews. It also poses new challenges as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions. "We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that "fleet management is key." Musk's business model is underpinned by reusable spacecraft, so it was inevitable the company would cease production at some point. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions. "Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency's primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station," notes Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Energy bills for people living near onshore wind farms could be slashed under new reforms, according to a cabinet minister. Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi also suggested he supports more onshore wind farms but only if they are backed by the local community. Boris Johnson has committed to publishing a British energy security strategy although when asked about onshore wind farms, the Prime Minister stressed there is a "massive opportunity" for the UK with offshore wind. Mr Zahawi told Sky's Sophy Ridge On Sunday program: "I would say that if we are going to make sure that we carry the will of local people, whether it's onshore wind or nuclear, we have to learn from how it's done well in other countries. "The way you do that is to make sure the local community has a real say. "But also we've seen great examples of other people where if they build a nuclear power station, within a certain radius of that power station they get free power. So it's right to look at innovation to make sure we wean ourselves off hydrocarbons, we have to do that, we have to do that well, part of that is making sure we look after the will of the local people." Mr Zahawi insisted there "isn't a row" around the Cabinet table about onshore wind.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Lapsus$ hackers used compromised credentials to break into the network of customer service giant Sitel in January, days before subsequently accessing the internal systems of authentication giant Okta, according to documents seen by TechCrunch that provide new details of the cyber intrusion that have not yet been reported. The report adds: [...] The documents provide the most detailed account to date of the Sitel compromise, which allowed the hackers to later gain access to Okta's network. [...] The documents, obtained by independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi and shared with TechCrunch, include a Sitel customer communication sent on January 25 -- more than a week after hackers first compromised its network -- and a detailed timeline of the Sitel intrusion compiled by incident response firm Mandiant dated March 17 that was shared with Okta. According to the documents, Sitel said it discovered the security incident in its VPN gateways on a legacy network belonging to Sykes, a customer service company working for Okta that Sitel acquired in 2021. The timeline details how the attackers used remote access services and publicly accessible hacking tools to compromise and navigate through Sitel's network, gaining deeper visibility to the network over the five days that Lapsus$ had access. Sitel said that its Azure cloud infrastructure was also compromised by hackers. According to the timeline, the hackers accessed a spreadsheet on Sitel's internal network early on January 21 called "DomAdmins-LastPass.xlsx." The filename suggests that the spreadsheet contained passwords for domain administrator accounts that were exported from a Sitel employee's LastPass password manager.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

juul_advocate shares a report from iTWire: Apple's output of the iPhone SE will drop by a fifth in the coming quarter, indicating that the Russia-Ukraine conflict and fears of inflation have affected demand for the device, a report claims. The Nikkei Asia website reported that the company had been telling a number of suppliers that production orders for the next three months would be lower by about two or three million units. Orders for AirPods earphones were also down, by about 10 million units for the whole year, the website said, citing four unnamed individuals as sources. Apple announced the third-generation iPhone SE earlier this month at its "Peek Performance" event. It features the A15 Bionic chip, improved battery life, 5G connectivity, and a new camera system, among other things, for a starting price of $429.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone's GPS receiver. The Camaliot app works on devices running Android version 7.0 or later that support satellite navigation. Researchers think that they can use satellite signals to get more information about the atmosphere. For example, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can affect how a satellite signal travels through the air to something like a phone. The app gathers information to track signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the phone being used, and the satellite's carrier phase, according to Camaliot's FAQs. With enough data collected from around the world, researchers can theoretically combine that with existing weather readings to measure long-term water vapor trends. They hope to use that data to inform weather forecasting models with machine learning. They can also track changes in Earth's ionosphere -- the part of the atmosphere near space. Creating better ionospheric forecasts could be relevant in tracking space weather and could eventually make Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by accounting for events like geomagnetic storms. Camaliot could eventually expand to include more attempts at collecting data on a massive scale using sensors present in "Internet of Things" connected home devices. According to The Verge, these are the steps to take to begin using the Camaliot app on your Android phone: 1. Select "start logging" and place your phone in an area with a clear sky view to begin logging the data 2. Once you have measured to your liking, select "stop logging" 3. Then, upload your session to the server and repeat the process over time to collect more data. You can also delete your locally-stored log files at this step. "In addition to being able to view your own measurements against others accumulated over time, you can also see a leaderboard showing logging sessions done by other participants," adds The Verge. "Eventually, the information collected for the study will be available in a separate portal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A reputed expert in the quantum computing field puts it in black and white: as of today, quantum computing is a paper tiger, and nobody knows when (if ever) it will become commercially practical," writes Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen. "In the meantime, the hype continues." In an opinion piece for MIT Technology Review, Sankar Das Sarma, a "pro-quantum-computing" physicist that's "published more than 100 technical papers on the subject," says he's disturbed by some of the quantum computing hype he sees today, "particularly when it comes to claims about how it will be commercialized." Here's an excerpt from his article: Established applications for quantum computers do exist. The best known is Peter Shor's 1994 theoretical demonstration that a quantum computer can solve the hard problem of finding the prime factors of large numbers exponentially faster than all classical schemes. Prime factorization is at the heart of breaking the universally used RSA-based cryptography, so Shor's factorization scheme immediately attracted the attention of national governments everywhere, leading to considerable quantum-computing research funding. The only problem? Actually making a quantum computer that could do it. That depends on implementing an idea pioneered by Shor and others called quantum-error correction, a process to compensate for the fact that quantum states disappear quickly because of environmental noise (a phenomenon called "decoherence"). In 1994, scientists thought that such error correction would be easy because physics allows it. But in practice, it is extremely difficult. The most advanced quantum computers today have dozens of decohering (or "noisy") physical qubits. Building a quantum computer that could crack RSA codes out of such components would require many millions if not billions of qubits. Only tens of thousands of these would be used for computation -- so-called logical qubits; the rest would be needed for error correction, compensating for decoherence. The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about. It is akin to trying to make today's best smartphones using vacuum tubes from the early 1900s. You can put 100 tubes together and establish the principle that if you could somehow get 10 billion of them to work together in a coherent, seamless manner, you could achieve all kinds of miracles. What, however, is missing is the breakthrough of integrated circuits and CPUs leading to smartphones -- it took 60 years of very difficult engineering to go from the invention of transistors to the smartphone with no new physics involved in the process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of U.S. lawmakers says the U.S. Treasury Department may be the right government entity to create a digital dollar -- not the Federal Reserve. A new bill introduced Monday would authorize just that. CoinDesk reports: Reps. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Jesus Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced the "Electronic Currency And Secure Hardware Act" (ECASH Act) to direct the Treasury Secretary to develop and issue an electronic version of the U.S. dollar, with an eye to preserving privacy and anonymity in transactions. The electronic dollar, as defined in the bill, would be a bearer instrument that people could hold on their phone or a card. The system would be token-based, not account-based, meaning if someone were to lose their phone or card, they would lose the funds. In other words, it would be like losing a wallet with dollar bills in it. This electronic dollar would be deemed legal tender and be functionally identical to a physical greenback. Rohan Grey, an assistant professor at Willamette University who consulted on the bill, told CoinDesk the bill is meant to create a true digital analogue to the U.S. dollar. "We're proposing to have a genuine cash-like bearer instrument, a token-based system that doesn't have either a centralized ledger or distributed ledger because it had no ledger whatsoever. It uses secured hardware software and it's issued by the Treasury," he said. This form of e-cash would support peer-to-peer transactions, and given the nature of its setup, it would support fully anonymous transactions. Thus, it would differ from other proposals for a digital dollar, which are based on stablecoins or other decentralized ledger tools. The full text of the E-CASH Bill can be read here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukraine's state-owned telecommunications company Ukrtelecom experienced a disruption in internet service on Monday after a "powerful" cyberattack, according to Ukrainian government officials and company representatives. Reuters reports: The incident is the latest hacking attack against Ukrainian internet services since Russian military forces invaded in late February. "Today, the enemy launched a powerful cyberattack against Ukrtelecom's IT-infrastructure," said Yurii Shchyhol, chairman of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine. "The attack was repelled. And now Ukrtelecom has an ability to begin restoring its services to the clients." "Currently, the attack is repulsed, the provision of services is gradually resumed," said Ukrtelecom spokesperson Mikhail Shuranov. NetBlocks, which monitors internet service disruptions, posted on Twitter earlier on Monday that it saw "connectivity collapsing" with an "ongoing and intensifying nation-scale disruption." A similar incident took place earlier this month with Triolan, a smaller Ukrainian telecom company, Forbes previously reported. That company suffered a hack that reset some internal systems, resulting in some local subscribers losing access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP has purchased Poly, the company formerly known as Plantronics, for $3.3 billion. "HP Inc sees the future of its business as one supporting a workforce partially based at home and partially in the office, and appears to have bought office telecom giant Poly for that reason," reports The Register. From the report: Formerly known as Plantronics, Poly changed its name shortly after it acquired Polycom in 2018. HP didn't mention in its acquisition announcement whether or not it would keep the Poly brand separate, but it's still early: the deal is not expected to close until the end of the 2022 calendar year. HP described the $3.3 billion purchase ($40 per share) as a bid to refocus its portfolio on growth and take advantage of what it said is a massive growth opportunity due to the likely permanence of hybrid work. Plantronics and Polycom have long had a considerable presence in the enterprise space, with Polycom's and Plantronics video conferencing hardware and headsets likely familiar to people in the world of work. Plantronics itself has a history reaching back to early airline headsets and the Apollo 11 mission: It's a Plantronics headset that relayed Neil Armstrong's "one small step" back to Earth. The value of peripherals like headsets hasn't declined in the years since, with HP saying the peripheral market is growing 9 percent annually and is worth $110 billion. Workforce solutions, like conference room telecom equipment, represents a $120 billion market segment that HP said is growing 8 percent yearly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play -- but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn't colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. "The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV," Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, "games are about systems; they're about the mechanics," Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can "teach" people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. "The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems," Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me. In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you'll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you're unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox's Second World War simulator, and you'll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: "General Frost." The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works -- what The Atlantic's Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric." Paradox's titles don't take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe's rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of "institutions," such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: One of the first products made using a novel animal-free egg white is now available in the United States. The unique macarons are the first to be made with an egg white protein that comes from engineered yeast, designed to be indistinguishable from what is found in chicken eggs. The Every Company, founded in 2014 under the name Clara Foods, is one of several food technology companies working to create real animal-free proteins using a method called precision fermentation. The idea behind the process is to break down certain animal products, such as milk and eggs, to their molecular components and then use microorganisms to produce those components. Earlier this year the first cow-free dairy milk using this method hit supermarket shelves in the United States. That product was created using whey proteins from engineered fungus, while other companies are working on similar dairy products using engineered yeast to produce the desired milk proteins. The Every Company has spent the last few years focusing on using the same technique to produce chicken-free egg whites, working with engineered yeast to produce proteins found in egg whites. The company has not disclosed the specific combination of proteins used to create its final egg white product, however it is likely ovalbumin -- the primary protein component in egg whites -- plays a strong role in the recipe. Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Every Company, said the new egg white product functions exactly like a chicken-derived egg white. It whips, aerates and bakes in ways identical to traditional egg whites, and the company has teamed up with San Francisco-based bakery Chantal Guillon to launch the product in a line of iconic French macarons. The chicken-free egg white is the third animal-free product created by the Every Company. Its first fully commercialized product was an animal-free pepsin, launched in early 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Particles of light called photons can be trapped inside mirrors to form a gas with unusual properties, New Scientist reports. From the report: A gas made of particles of light, or photons, becomes easier to compress the more you squash it. This strange property could prove useful in making highly sensitive sensors. While gases are normally made from atoms or molecules, it is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. But a gas made this way doesn't have a uniform density -- researchers say it isn't homogeneous, or pure -- making it difficult to study properly. Now Julian Schmitt at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues have made a homogeneous photon gas for the first time by trapping photons between two nanoscale mirrors. They then moved one of the mirrors to measure the compressibility of the photon gas and derive basic properties about it. "We can consider the system to be like an air pump, but it's not filled with air, it's filled with light," says Schmitt. "We compress it and look at how it responds. In this way, we can learn about very fundamental properties." Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abm2543.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Insecure radioactive materials are the latest worry as Russia continues occupation of infamous nuclear reservation. schwit1 shares a report: When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi's worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant's emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete "sarcophagus" that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl's Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident. Although power was restored to Chornobyl on 14 March, Nosovskyi's worries have multiplied. In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village -- apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a âoedirty bombâ that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: "powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation" used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so "the fate of these sources is unknown to us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A "powerful" cyberattack has hit Ukraine's biggest fixed line telecommunications company, Ukrtelecom. Described as the most severe cyberattack since the start of the Russian invasion in February, it has sent the company's services across the country down. From a report: Victor Zhora, deputy head of the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection, confirmed to Forbes that the government was investigating the attack. He said it's not yet known whether Ukrtelecom -- a telephone, internet and mobile provider -- has been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or a deeper, more sophisticated intrusion. The attack has only been acknowledged by Ukrtelecom in responses to customer comments on Facebook. In one, it responded by saying that services were down as a result of a "powerful cyber attack of the enemy." When Forbes messaged Ukrtelecom over Facebook, an automated response was provided, reading, "Currently, there are difficulties in using the internet service from Ukrtelecom. Our specialists are doing everything possible to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Due to the abnormal load and problems with internal systems, the operators of the contact center and Facebook can not process customer requests." NetBlocks, which tracks internet downtimes across the world, found Ukrtelecom had been dealing with a disrupted service since this morning, "collapsing to 13% of pre-war levels."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "To wake up to one of these things is pretty special -- to have a Leonardo at home," said Joe Kennedy, the director of the contemporary art dealership Unit London, enthusing recently about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "Portrait of a Musician" glowing on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan. The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit's moodily lit "Eternalizing Art History" exhibition, which closed on Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions. Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized government spending have put the world's public museums under financial pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism. Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait, Caravaggio's "Bowl of Fruit" (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael's "Madonna of the Goldfinch" (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to $549,000 per piece (around $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums. By the Friday after the show closed, seven sales had been confirmed up to $274.5,000, which included at least one of the Leonardo NFTs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia's cyberspying, documents show, raising questions of corporate responsibility. From a report: Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn't mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government's most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation's largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia. For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia's largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system's connection to the MTS network. Russia's main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications. The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time in more than a decade, a narrow majority in Japan now supports restarting idled nuclear reactors, according to a poll in the country's top business newspaper. From a report: The survey result marks the first time since the Fukushima disaster in 2011 that an increasing role for nuclear energy has been favored. It comes amid surging power prices and warnings of electricity shortages in Tokyo. Some 53% of people said nuclear reactors should restart if safety can be ensured, while 38% said they should remain shut, according to the poll conducted by the Nikkei. That's up from 44% support for the restarts in a similar survey in September. The newspaper has been conducting semiregular polls on the issue for more than a decade. Japanese public opinion moved decisively against atomic power after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami resulted in the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima, with most of the country's operable nuclear reactors remaining shut. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has pushed up energy prices globally, however, and a recent tremor in Japan took several gas- and coal-fired plants offline, leading to the first-ever electricity supply alert for Tokyo. "There is a strong tailwind for nuclear power at this moment," Nobuo Tanaka, a former executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in an interview Monday. If Japan restarts nuclear, the country's utilities could resell spare liquefied natural gas to Europe, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's new security chief Charlie Bell issued a call to arms to build protection from hackers and criminals in the emerging metaverse from the start of the new technology. From a report: "There's going to be a lot of innovation and there will be a lot of struggling to figure out what has to be done," Bell said in an interview. "But I think because of the speed, there will be fast innovation on the security side." The metaverse -- a concept that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds -- will present some unique and more serious security challenges for technology and cybersecurity companies. As an example, hackers may be able to make avatars that look like a user's trusted contacts, a twist on the traditional email phishing scheme that will be hard for users to resist, he said. The nature of the metaverse, which offers the possibility of less centralized control of content and users, also is a challenge for those trying to protect customers. "Picture what phishing could look like in the metaverse -- it won't be a fake e-mail from your bank," wrote Bell, Microsoft's executive vice president, security, compliance, identity, and management, in a blog posted Monday on Microsoft's web site. "It could be an avatar of a teller in a virtual bank lobby asking for your information. It could be an impersonation of your CEO inviting you to a meeting in a malicious virtual conference room."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Covid-19 patients who have been hospitalised should also be routinely tested for flu, researchers have said. The call was made after the publication of a paper in the medical journal the Lancet that revealed having both conditions more than doubles the risk of a patient dying. From a report: Scientists also discovered that individuals who had contracted both Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and influenza viruses were more than four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they just had Covid-19. "We found that the combination of Covid-19 and flu viruses is particularly dangerous," said Professor Kenneth Baillie of Edinburgh University. "We expect that Covid-19 will circulate with flu, increasing the chance of co-infections. That is why we should change our testing strategy for Covid-19 patients in hospital and test for flu much more widely." The study looked at more than 305,000 hospitalised patients with Covid-19 and involved researchers from Edinburgh University, Liverpool University, Imperial College London and Leiden University in the Netherlands. A total of 6,965 patients were found to have had Covid-19, while 227 also had the influenza virus. These individuals experienced significantly more severe outcomes, researchers found. "We were surprised that the risk of death more than doubled when people were infected by both flu and Covid-19 viruses," said Professor Calum Semple of Liverpool University. "It is now very important that people get fully vaccinated and boosted against both viruses, and not leave it until it is too late."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: That chance message launched DiResta and her colleague Josh Goldstein at the Stanford Internet Observatory on an investigation that uncovered more than 1,000 LinkedIn profiles using what appear to be faces created by artificial intelligence. Social media accounts using computer-generated faces have pushed Chinese disinformation; harassed activists; and masqueraded as Americans supporting former President Donald Trump and independent news outlets spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. NPR found that many of the LinkedIn profiles seem to have a far more mundane purpose: drumming up sales for companies big and small. Accounts like Keenan Ramsey's send messages to potential customers. Anyone who takes the bait gets connected to a real salesperson who tries to close the deal. Think telemarketing for the digital age. By using fake profiles, companies can cast a wide net online without beefing up their own sales staff or hitting LinkedIn's limits on messages. Demand for online sales leads exploded during the pandemic as it became hard for sales teams to pitch their products in person. More than 70 businesses were listed as employers on these fake profiles. Several told NPR they had hired outside marketers to help with sales. They said they hadn't authorized any use of computer-generated images, however, and many were surprised to learn about them when NPR asked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports Russian troops in Ukraine "have relied, with surprising frequency, on unsecured communication devices such as smartphones and push-to-talk radios." But this is leaving Russia's units "vulnerable to targeting...further underscoring the command-and-control deficiencies that have come to define Moscow's month-long invasion, observers say."The Russian military possesses modern equipment capable of secure transmission, but troops on the battlefield have reached for simpler-to-use but less-secure lines because of uneven discipline across the ranks, an apparent lack of planning for conducting a sustained fight over long distances, and Russian attacks on Ukraine's communication infrastructure that it, too, has relied on, experts say. A European intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss NATO's battlefield assessments, said that since the invasion began in late-February, there have been multiple instances of Russian commanders confiscating their subordinates' personal phones for fear they would unwittingly give away a unit's location.... There is evidence that the United States and other NATO countries have provided Ukrainian forces with electronic warfare equipment capable of interrupting Russian transmissions and allowing them to target Russian command posts, said Kostas Tigkos, a Russian military expert at the defense analysis firm Janes Group. By destroying Russia's communication nodes, the Ukrainians could pressure their adversaries to use less-secure equipment, he said, increasing the likelihood their conversations will be intercepted or their positions triangulated.... There is anecdotal evidence that Russia's unsecured communications have led to battlefield losses. One Russian general was purportedly killed in an airstrike after his cellphone was detected by the Ukrainians, the New York Times reported earlier this month. The Post reports that Russian military transmissions over unsecured lines are now even being listened to by amateur radio enthusiasts at online sites like WebSDR (a software-defined radio receiver connected to the internet). "Don't say the last names on air!" one Russian service member was apparently overheard saying by Shadow Break International, a U.K.-based open-source intelligence consultancy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dune won six Academy Awards tonight — the most of any movie — at this year's Oscar's ceremony, taking home Oscars for its cinematography, visual effects, film editing, original score, production design, and "achievement in sound." But the movie's Oscar-winning crew were surprised there was no Oscar nomination for the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, reports IndieWire:"I was very confused when Denis was not nominated for directing. It's as if the film directed itself and all of these craft categories magically did great work," sound designer/supervising sound editor Theo Green said. "Seeing the sweep that Dune is having tonight makes me very proud for Denis." Green and other below-the-line winners painted a production picture where Villeneuve orchestrated a kind of cross-department collaboration that allowed each craftsperson's work to shine and work in concert with every other piece. Re-recording mixer Ron Bartlett said it all started with Villeneuve's deep study of the book. "It's better than the sum of its parts," Fraser said. "We are the culmination of Denis Villeneuve's combined group effort to make a movie, and that's what I'm most proud of." Several winners also called out editor Joe Walker as a key piece of the creation of Dune. Besides the six Oscars it won, Dune had also been nominated for four other awards, including Best Picture. Tonight's ceremony featured a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies — and the franchise's most recent film also won the "Best Song" Oscar (for the song "No Time to Die" by Billie Eilish). This marks the third consecutive time that a James Bond movie's theme song has gone on to win the "Best Song" award. And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to ever win the prestigious Best Picture award for their movie CODA. NBC News calls this "a major moment for a film industry that has been dramatically transformed by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the growing popularity of at-home entertainment." (The film also won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and for best supporting actor.)In the days before the Oscars telecast, the best picture race came to be seen as a proxy battle between Apple and Netflix, the streaming giant that has been angling for Hollywood's marquee prize for at least the last half-decade, spending heavily on splashy promotional campaigns. Netflix was a double best picture contender this year, recognized for Jane Campion's haunting Western The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay's doomsday satire Don't Look Up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential," argues a new article in Fast Company. "But that may soon change — for an unexpected reason. "Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California's Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego..."As a geologist who works with geothermal brines and an energy policy scholar, we believe this technology can bolster the nation's critical minerals supply chain at a time when concerns about the supply chain's security are rising. Geothermal power plants use heat from the earth to generate a constant supply of steam to run turbines that produce electricity. The plants operate by bringing up a complex saline solution located far underground, where it absorbs heat and is enriched with minerals such as lithium, manganese, zinc, potassium, and boron. Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations — about 30% — of dissolved solids. If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand. Three operators at the Salton Sea geothermal field are in various stages of designing, constructing, and testing pilot plants for direct lithium extraction from the hot brines. At full production capacity, the 11 existing power plants near the Salton Sea, which currently generate about 432 megawatts of electricity, could also produce about 20,000 metric tons of lithium metal per year. At current prices, the annual market value of this metal would be more than $5 billion.... Geothermal power has the ability to complement solar and wind energy as a baseload power source — it is constant, unlike sunshine and wind — and to provide energy and mineral security. It could also offer a professional bridge for oil, gas, and coal employees to transition into the clean energy economy. The industry could benefit from policies like risk mitigation funds to lessen drilling exploration costs, grant programs to demonstrate innovations, long-term power contracts, or tax incentives. Adding the production of critical metals like lithium, manganese, and zinc from geothermal brines could provide geothermal electrical power operators a new competitive advantage and help get geothermal onto the policy agenda.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2018 police arrested "the Golden State Killer" — now a 72-year-old man who had committed 13 murders between 1974 and 1986, the New York Times remembers:What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities' decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts' data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases. But now using similar techniques, a wellness coach born in Mississippi (through a Facebook group called DNA Detectives) has helped over 200 strangers identify their unknown parents, the Times reports. And she's recently donated more than $100,000 to a genetics lab called Othram — to fund the sequencing of DNA to solve cold cases back in her home state. "These families have waited so long for answers," she told the New York Times, which calls her "part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives..."[Othram] created a site called DNASolves to tell the stories of horrific crimes and tragic John and Jane Does — with catchy names like "Christmas tree lady" and "angel baby" — to encourage people to fund budget-crunched police departments, so that they can hire Othram. A competitor, Parabon NanoLabs, had created a similar site called JusticeDrive, which has raised around $30,000. In addition to money, Othram encouraged supporters to donate their DNA, a request that some critics called unseemly, saying donors should contribute to databases easily available to all investigators. "Some people are too nervous to put their DNA in a general database," said Mr. Mittelman, who declined to say how large his database is. "Ours is purpose-built for law enforcement." Another group raising money for genetic investigations are the producers of true-crime podcasts — and their listeners. According to the article, the podcast-producing company Audiochuck has donated roughly $800,000 to organizations doing investigative genealogical research (including Othram), though the majority went to a nonprofit started by the host of the "Crime Junkie" podcast. (And that nonprofit raised another $250,000, some through crowdfunding.) "Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?" the Times asks?So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets.... A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989.... [T]he perpetrators were dead.... Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, expressed concern about "the public picking and choosing between cases," saying investigative priorities could be determined by who can donate the most. Ms. Ram said the "largest share" of cases solved so far with the method "tend to involve white female victims...." Ms. Ram is also concerned about the constitutional privacy issues raised by the searches, particularly for those people who haven't taken DNA tests or uploaded their results to the public internet. Even if you resolve never to put your DNA on a site accessible to law enforcement authorities, you share DNA with many other people so could still be discoverable. All it takes is your sibling, aunt or even a distant cousin deciding differently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1983 the annual revenue at the electronics chain Crazy Eddie was roughly $134 million (or about $372 million today), remembers The Hustle. The next year they'd sold $44 million just in computers and games — and eventually grew to 43 stores. The company's stock ticker symbol was CRZY. "There was just one major problem," the article notes. "Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception — and the higher the stock soared the further founder Eddie Antar went to maintain the illusion." It's a colorful story from the early days of home PC sales. Antar's uncle hid up to $3.5 million in cash in a false ceiling at Antar's father's house, according to The Hustle. "Eddie Antar kept close tabs, usually calling his uncle twice a day to see how much money they were skimming.... The skimming strategy allowed Antar to not only hoard cash but also evade sales taxes. His employees were also paid off the books so Crazy Eddie could avoid payroll taxes.""Money was always in the house," said Debbie Rosen Antar, Antar's first wife, to investigators in the late 1980s. "And if I needed it and I asked him, he would say, 'Go underneath the bed and take what you need....'" Why would a company built on a family fraud go public? Somebody told Antar he could keep making millions skimming cash, but he could make tens of millions if the company traded on the stock market. Strangely, Crazy Eddie's fraudulent history gave it an advantage. To provide the illusion of quickly increasing profits ahead of the IPO, the Antars simply reduced the amount of cash they were skimming. With millions more on the ledger instead of in the family's pockets, the company's profits looked more impressive. As a public company, Crazy Eddie then made up for its inability to skim cash by initiating new fraud streams. - The company embellished its inventories by millions of dollars to appear better-stocked and better positioned for profits. - The Antar family laundered profits it had previously skimmed — and deposited in foreign bank accounts — back into the company to inflate revenues.... In November 1987, a hostile investment group led by Houston entrepreneur Elias Zinn pounced, purchasing Crazy Eddie. As Antar's cousin later recounted, Antar thought the sale would at least give them an opportunity to pin the fraud on the new owners. But Zinn immediately discovered $45 million of listed inventory was missing. Stores soon closed, and the company went bankrupt in 1989. Two disgruntled ex-employees then brought fraud allegations to America's stock-regulating agency, the article reports, while the FBI "started sniffing around, too." Crazy Eddie fled the country, using forged passports to escape to Tel Aviv, Zurich, São Paulo, and the Cayman Islands. But he was eventually arrested in Israel, sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, and ordered to repay investors $121 million (though he apparently served only seven). But Crazy Eddie also became a cultural phenomenon -- sort of. In the 1984 movie Splash, Darryl Hannah's character even watches a Crazy Eddie TV ad. The Hustle's article also includes photos of a Crazy Eddie stock certificate — and an actual "Wanted" poster issued the next year by the U.S. Marshalls office. Yet just four years before his death in 2016, Antar — a high school dropout — was telling an interviewer from The Record that "I changed the business...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2021, the European Union imported about 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia, reports the Associated Press. But now EU officials "are fixated on rapidly reducing the continent's reliance on Russian oil and natural gas — and that means friction between security and climate goals, at least in the short term. "To wean itself from Russian energy supplies as quickly as possible, Europe will need to burn more coal and build more pipelines and terminals to import fossil fuels from elsewhere...."[T]he EU plans to reduce Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of this year, and to eliminate them altogether before 2030... In the near-term, ending energy ties with Russia puts the focus on securing alternative sources of fossil fuels. But longer term, the geopolitical and price pressures stoked by Russia's war in Ukraine may actually accelerate Europe's transition away from oil, gas and coal. Experts say the war has served as a reminder that renewable energy isn't just good for the climate, but also for national security. That could help speed up the development of wind and solar power, as well as provide a boost to conservation and energy-efficiency initiatives.... The rapid pursuit of energy independence from Russia will likely require "a slight increase" in carbon emissions, said George Zachmann, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. But "in the long term, the effect will be that we will see more investment in renewables and energy efficiency in Europe," Zachmann said. Plans that wouldn't have been contemplated just a few months ago are now being actively discussed, such as running coal plants in Germany beyond 2030, which had previously been seen as an end date. Germany's vice chancellor and energy minister, Robert Habeck, said there should be "no taboos." The Czech government has made the same calculation about extending the life of coal power plants. "We will need it until we find alternative sources," Czech energy security commissioner Václav Bartuska, told the news site Seznam Zprávy. "Until that time, even the greenest government will not phase out coal...." In Britain, which is no longer part of the EU, Prime Minister Boris Johnson says it's "time to take back control of our energy supplies." Britain will phase out the small amount of oil it imports from Russia this year. More significantly, Johnson has signaled plans to approve new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, to the dismay of environmentalists, who say that is incompatible with Britain's climate targets. Some within the governing Conservative Party and the wider political right want the British government to retreat on its commitment to reach net zero by 2050, a pledge made less than six months ago at a global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.... Yet the shock waves from the war cut both ways. Sharply higher gas and electricity prices, and the desire to be less dependent on Russia, are increasing pressure to expand the development of home-grown renewables and to propel conservation. The International Energy Agency recently released a 10-point plan for Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian gas by a third within a year. Simply lowering building thermostats by an average of one degree Celsius during the home-heating season would save 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, or roughly 6% of what Europe imports from Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In January the virally-popular game Wordle was sold to the New York Times for between between $1 million (£758,345) and $5 million. Now the Independent reveals why the game's creator took that step. "Because so many people were cloning it and making money from it without his permission."Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said in a talk on Thursday that selling to the Times was "a way to walk away" from the pressure he felt to stop his creation being exploited.... The game's success inspired numerous smartphone apps that simply copied Mr Wardle's version while adding ads, in-app-purchases, or subscription fees, many of which were later removed from Apple's app store. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr Wardle said: "That isn't money that I would have made, because I said I don't want to make money, but something about that felt really deeply unpleasant for me. And so selling to the New York Times was a way for me to walk away from that. I didn't want to be paying a lawyer to issue cease and desists on the game that I'm not making money from. It felt like it was all going to get really, really complicated in a way that just [made me] pretty stressed out, truthfully." Answering a question from The Independent after the talk, Mr Wardle added that he felt "an enormous amount of pressure" and a sense of limited time to act because so many people were trying to copy the game. Besides the outright clones, Wordle has also led to some interesting variations, including Nerdle (which challenges players to guess the digits and symbols in an eight-digit equation). There's Dordle (which challenges players to guess two words at the same time), as well as a four-word variation called Quordle, and even an eight-word version called Octordle. In a recent article in Tom's Guide (titled "I don't like Wordle — but I love these alternatives") they also recommended Heardle and Framed. "The former tasks you with guessing a song based on a short audio clip, and the latter asks you to name a movie based on a single frame." (As well as Adverswordle, where you choose the word while an AI tries to guess it.) And then there's the excruciatingly difficult Semantle...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft has been struggling to reach a state of convergence between tablet and desktop ever since Windows 8 and the original Surface," argues Neowin, adding "If we're using Windows 11 as a barometer of their progress, they'll likely never get there...." But meanwhile, writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, "KDE's new swipe gesture is awesome. It's about 1000% smoother than the overview in Windows 11 and the swiping mechanism is easier, too. Is KDE getting better for tablets?" From Neowin's report:Starting in KDE Plasma 5.25, users with touch screen devices will be able to enter their tasks and virtual desktops overview by simply swiping down from the top edge, but with a special twist. The scale of the windows directly follows the path of your finger. The result is every bit as fluid as you might imagine. While you can achieve the same result in Windows 11 with a simple three-finger swipe up, this implementation looks great and performs great too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Saturday CNBC published a remarkable headline. "Stem cells may finally offer a cure for Type 1 diabetes."There are 537 million people around the world living with diabetes. And that number is growing.... But over the past 20 years, significant advancements in stem cell research and therapies have revealed promising methods of creating new insulin-making cells, which are needed to cure Type 1 diabetes. Biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently began a clinical trial where it plans to treat 17 participants who have Type 1 diabetes with new insulin-making cells derived from stem cells. The first patient in the trial, Brian Shelton, has had positive results. After 150 days, Shelton was able to reduce the amount of insulin he injects by 92%. Other global companies are also working to cure diabetes, such as ViaCyte, CRISPR, and Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest insulin manufacturers in the world. In CNBC's 20-minute video, a VP/disease area executive from Vertex Pharmaceuticals explains that diabetes is "one of the few diseases where a single cell type is destroyed or missing" — the pancreas cell that produces insulin. So they're exploring "the idea that if you could create those cells and replace them, you can really address the underlying causal biology of the disease directly." CNBC also spoke to Brian Shelton, the trial's first patient, who's been a Type 1 diabetic for 44 years, and whose pancreas suddenly started producing insulin again. "Now my body does it all on its own," Shelton says. The news was especially surprising, CNBC reports, because "as the first person in the trial, Shelton received only half of the anticipated dose to ensure it was safe." One researcher they spoke to even predicts that biological solutions will compete with "ongoing efforts to use nanotechnology to miniaturize all the hardware necessary to do this," and that within the next 3 to 5 years patients will finally have the option of "something that is really Cadillac." And Aaron Kowalski, CEO of the nonprofit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, tells CNBC, "I am fully convinced that I will walk away from my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor in my lifetime, and I would be disappointed if it wasn't in this decade." CNBC's report concludes, "For diabetics who want a cure that requires no additional treatment, it may no longer be a question of if, but a matter of when."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protocol reports: The web is overrun with junk. This is so obvious, I almost don't need to say it. But I will: Between the pop-ups, the autoplaying videos, the cookie banners, the incessant calls for sign-ups, the coupon offers, the "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders on top of the other "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders, the in-line ads slowing the page down, the slew of trackers also slowing the page down ... you get the idea. For lots of reasons, some good and some bad, much of the internet has become totally unusable. Plain Text Sports is nothing like any of those sites. The site, created by developer Paul Julius Martinez (who you might know as CodeIsTheEnd all over the internet), is more like something out of the 1970s, a wall of monospaced plain text with ASCII-art boxes surrounding real-time scores for all the professional sports games happening right now. It has no images, no pop-ups, no trackers. It loads practically instantly, even on a bad connection. I've been refreshing it obsessively the last few weeks, through the end of the NBA seasons and the beginning of March Madness. Not only is it a useful site for sports fans, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come.... He loves that Plain Text Sports is simple. "There's no cookie banner, there's no GDPR banner, there's no asking-you-to-donate banner...." Plain Text Sports manages to be that simple on the front end with a surprising amount of complexity on the back end, making sure the whole sports world is represented in real time on that page. In general, we're starting to see developers and designers rebel against the general overwhelm of the internet, as sites and apps ditch their cruft and complications for things that load faster and work more intuitively. Social networks are bringing back chronological feeds; reading modes are now everywhere in browsers. Even apps like Obsidian, a favorite among productivity obsessives, are based primarily on plain text. They don't look like much, but that's kind of the point.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science magazine explores how actual scientists feel about Twitter:"I like that there's a low bar to entry [on Twitter] — I can put something out and see how other scientists are thinking of a problem, people who have a different skill set than mine," says biostatistician Natalie Dean of Emory University, whose Twitter account has some 138,000 followers. But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter — some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards.... [A]s the pandemic exploded and researchers sought to pump out information to each other and an eager public, many saw advantages to Twitter. Its vast reach became a draw: more than 200 million active daily users, including an estimated one-quarter of U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center. This allows scientists to use a single platform to share research findings with both peers and the public and to foster open discussions... One result is that the platform has carried posts about a majority of the total COVID-19 literature — about 51% of journal articles on pandemic research had been mentioned in at least one tweet through May 2021, according to a report by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). That exceeds the number cited in scholarly articles or mentioned in several other communications venues, including news stories, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, and policy documents. And it's well above the level before the pandemic, when studies found that just 10% to 30% of papers on any scientific topic got a mention on Twitter.... But an emerging body of research about tweeting suggests that, overall, scientists often struggle to be heard on social media. One study, for example, found tweets containing links to scholarly papers typically get little engagement. Of 1.1 million such tweets about papers published before the pandemic, half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. An information scientist at the University of Ottawa tells the magazine that "We are really not at the point where we want to get, which is, ideally, seeing the impact of research on the greater good of society." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing... but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That's uncharted territory," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81. Neowin reports:The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming... Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn't sound very interesting, but it's a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite? That's a 24 x 21 pixels object. ("It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel," explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again. Here's the repository for the "Tiny Pong" code. It's written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound(). And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heath workers worry Russia's invasion of Ukraine "threatens to upend decades of progress against infectious diseases throughout the region," reports the New York Times, "sparking new epidemics that will be nearly impossible to control."Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with HIV and hepatitis C and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and COVID-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and other diarrheal diseases, not to mention respiratory plagues like COVID-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis.... Ukraine and the surrounding region also make up a world epicenter of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease impervious to the most powerful medications. The Ukrainian health ministry in recent years had made progress in bringing these epidemics under control, including a 21% drop in new HIV infections and a 36% decline in TB diagnoses since 2010. But health officials now fear that delays in diagnosis and treatment interruptions during the war may allow these pathogens to flourish again, with consequences that ripple for years. "Last year, we were working to differentiate between different TB mutations," Iana Terleeva, who heads tuberculosis programs for Ukraine's Ministry of Health, said in a statement. "Now instead, we are trying to differentiate between aerial shelling, raids and other military hardware." The fighting also has damaged health facilities throughout the country and spawned a refugee crisis, imperiling thousands of people with chronic conditions like diabetes and cancer who depend on continuing care.... Only about 80% of Ukrainian children were immunized against polio in 2021, and the country had detected a few polio cases even before the war began. The vaccination coverage for measles in Ukraine is likewise too low to prevent outbreaks. These are the ingredients of a public health calamity, many experts fear. The WHO and other organizations are deploying medical teams and shipping supplies, vaccines and drugs to Ukraine and to neighboring countries. But the aid may never reach areas of active conflict.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new essay from The Baffler suggests burnout is "a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system," rather than a trendy term that "resonates with affluent professionals who fetishize overwork." And then the essay turns to Jonathan Malesic's new book The End of Burnout:He casts a critical eye on burnout discourse, in which the term is used loosely and self-flatteringly. Journalistic treatments of burnout — such as Anne Helen Petersen's widely read 2019 essay — tend to emphasize the heroic exertions of the burned-out worker, who presses on and gets her work done, no matter what. Such accounts have significantly raised burnout's prestige, Malesic argues, by aligning the disorder with "the American ideal of constant work." But they give, at best, a partial view of what burnout is. The psychologist Christina Maslach, a foundational figure in burnout research — the Maslach Burnout Inventory is the standard burnout assessment — sees burnout as having three components: exhaustion; cynicism or depersonalization (detectable in doctors, for example, who see their patients as "problems" to be solved, rather than people to be treated); and a sense of ineffectiveness or futility.... Accounts of the desperate worker as labor-hero ignore the important fact that burnout impairs your ability to do your job. A "precise diagnostic checklist" for burnout, Malesic writes, would curtail loose claims of fashionable exhaustion, while helping people who suffer from burnout seek medical treatment. Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout's clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise.... [The book] is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don't work — the old, the disabled — lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another's humanity.... William Morris, in his famous essay "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil," dreamed of a political transformation in which all work would be made pleasurable. Malesic thinks, instead, that work should not be the center of our lives at all.... Burnout is an indicator that something has gone wrong in the way we organize our work. But as a concept it remains lodged in an old paradigm — a work ethic that was already dubious in America's industrial period, and now, in a period of extreme inequality and increasing precarity across once-stable professions, is even harder to credit.... The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week.... But the strange work ethic the rich have devised seems highly relevant for our understanding of burnout as a cultural phenomenon, especially as it spreads beyond its traditional victims — doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, anti-poverty lawyers — and courses through the ranks of knowledge workers more generally."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story:Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.) GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format. Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.) GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor.... GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Neowin reports that after more than 17 years, Ubuntu is finally switching to the same "rolling" release cycles that helped popularize Arch Linux:While there are many positive qualities that would draw a user into the world of Arch, its headlining feature would be the one that remains the most relevant in today's world of continuous integration and delivery and that's its rolling release strategy. While I don't think Judd Vinet could have predicted the proliferation of DevOps or the massive shift to cloud computing, it must be interesting to see that the entire industry is following the Arch strategy in all sorts of different places. One could even argue that Microsoft Windows has become a rolling release. While many of Arch's contemporaries have joined the fray, one notable open-source giant has yet to make the leap. Rolling Rhino looks to change that by converting Ubuntu into a rolling release. Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for submitting the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that "proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content." We've long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We're joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.) But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of "myths" Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a "filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users" as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC's metadata as support for his position. Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect.... Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times. "My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing."When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies.... [W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today.... Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined... [T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance. The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. " In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Wannabe innovation hubs from coast to coast have been slavering over the prospect that the work-from-home revolution triggered by the COVID pandemic would finally break the stranglehold that California and Silicon Valley have had on high-tech jobs," writes a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times. "Here's the latest picture on this expectation: Not happening."That's the conclusion of some new studies, most recently by Mark Muro and Yang You of the Brookings Institution. They found that although the pandemic brought about some changes in the trend toward the concentration of tech jobs in a handful of metropolitan areas, the largest established hubs as a group "slightly increased their share" of national high-tech employment from 2019 through 2020. (Emphasis theirs....) "[T]he big tech superstar cities aren't going anywhere," Muro told me. "There's a suggestion that we're on the brink of an entirely different geography. I don't think recent history or the nature of the technologies point in that direction.... " "The California metropolises really do retain their irreplaceable depth and strength," Muro says. "That's not to say there won't be some movement. Early in the period we saw some exiting, especially from the Bay Area, but it turned out that much of it was within California, rather than to Kansas." This shouldn't be too surprising. The value of concentrated ecosystems in nurturing innovation has been documented for decades.... The pandemic-driven shift to remote work does seem to have opened entrepreneurs' eyes at least to the potential for doing away with centralized workforces. In a recent survey of tech startup founders, the share of respondents saying they would prefer to start a firm with an entirely remote workforce from Day One rose to 42.1% in 2021 from only 6% in 2020. Among physical locations where the founders said prefer to launch their businesses, however, San Francisco still dominated, at 28.4%, with New York a distant second.... Unlike service industries such as leisure and tourism, most tech industries experienced barely a hiccup in their long-term growth trends during the pandemic. The column also questions when, "if ever," work-from-home jobs will become a significant share of the workforce. "Full-scale work-from-home only applies to about 6% of workers, UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti says. That's triple the 2% level of the pre-pandemic era, but still an exception to the rule."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia points out that America's two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons). It's now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports:The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums.... Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it's not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won't present much of a problem. AARP isn't saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020. At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There's no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging.As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of "house rules" that encourages users to "be courteous" and "cite your sources." Posts about politics aren't forbidden, but the rules say posts can't stray off-topic, and users can't "attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures." Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward. "The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend.... " Suzanne Myklebust, OATS's director of communications, told Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Thirty five years after Andy Warhol's death, the NY Times reports on a new wave of Warhol-Mania as the famed pop artist is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series (The Andy Warhol Diaries), an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works. The documentary revisits the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, where Warhol demonstrated the Amiga's then-unparalleled graphical power by 'painting' Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry's portrait. Even as the flood-filling goes bad, Warhol does his best to put on a brave public face ("This is kind of pretty. Oh, it's beautiful."), but reveals his true thoughts in his demo day diary entry. "The day started off with dread as I woke up from my dreams and thought about my live appearance for Commodore computers," Warhol recalls in the documentary (in an AI-generated voice). "And how nothing is worth all this worrying, to wake up and feel so terrified. Commodore wants me to be a spokesman. It's a $3,000 machine that's like the Apple thing, but can do 100 times more. The whole day was spent being nervous and telling myself that if I could just get good at stuff like this, then I could make money that way, and I wouldn't have to paint. The drawing came out terrible. And I called it a masterpiece. It was a real mess. "I said I wanted to be Walt Disney and that if I'd had this machine ten years ago, I could have made it." Five NFT versions of Warhol's recovered Amiga artwork were sold for $3,377,500 last May to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is paying six-figure "special retention grants" to a handful of hardware and software engineers. Protocol reports:The bonuses, anonymous sources told Bloomberg, are worth between $100,000 and more than $200,000 in restricted stock units that vest over several years, providing another incentive for engineers to stay at Apple... The bonuses show the level of insecurity that some of the top-paying companies in the industry feel in this tight market for tech talent. (Even Google employees are feeling unhappy with their compensation....) Apple and other tech giants are throwing more and more money at employees to retain them. In the last few months, Alphabet has adopted a new cash bonus plan that allows employee bonuses "of nearly any size for nearly any reason," The Wall Street Journal reported last month, and Amazon has raised its cash-pay cap from $160,000 to $350,000, according to The New York Times. Bloomberg points out Apple "has suffered some attrition in its chip design group," as Facebook's parent Meta Platforms "has stepped up recruiting of engineers — aiming to put them to work on the so-called metaverse," and the payouts also went to Apple employees working on virtual and augmented reality headsets.Inflation also has put pressure on employers to boost compensation. And Apple is preparing for a return to the office — a source of tension for some employees. By May, the company will require engineers and other corporate staff to work out of the office at least three days a week. So the bonuses "are designed to keep the employees from leaving by vesting over several years," Bloomberg concludes, "and they could become more valuable over time if Apple's stock price continues to rise. "The shares are up more than 40% over the past 12 months..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.