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Tesla has a vast network of over 30,000 superchargers spread across the globe. But there's also already another network of over 730 D.C. charging stations spread across the U.S. by "Electrify America." Thank Volkswagen, which founded the company as part of a $2 billion agreement to create clean car infrastructure in America after admitting it had cheated on diesel emissions tests, Reuters reported in 2017. But now they're trying to upgrade the vehicle-charging experience into a "customer oasis," reports The Drive:Chargers are typically out in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do, not very well lit, use hardware that very much feels like it was the first iteration of something, and are often just not very nice places to be. Electrify America, evidently, knows this and is planning to massively improve the electric car charging experience by appearing to model its new flagship charging stations after something we already know and are comfortable with: gas stations. The new locations are said to be designed aesthetically with its surrounding communities in mind and have been described with words like "customer oasis." Housing up to 20 DC fast chargers, the new EA stations will feature solar canopies that do double duty in helping provide electricity for the cars and covering customers from the elements, a lot like how most gas stations have roofs. In addition to being part of these new fancy stations right out of the gate, Electrify America says it's also retrofitting similar awnings to 100 existing stations across the U.S., covering 400-500 individual chargers... Further making these stations a nice place to hang out is the presence of lounges and possibly even EV showcase areas. Ones located at shopping centers may even feature valet charging and curbside delivery services.... As somebody who staunchly believes that the public charging infrastructure is, far and away, the least appealing part of owning a non-Tesla EV, it all looks and sounds very enticing. However, like all big and new things, it'll be coming to the two coastal U.S. regions first. Electrify America's new flagship charging stations will be installed throughout 2022 and 2023 exclusively in California and New York, with the company specifically namechecking Santa Barbara, San Francisco, San Diego, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. Existing flagship locations can be found in Baker and Santa Clara, California. Newsweek adds that the company "will also expand the deployment of battery energy storage systems to 150 sites. These systems store energy when electricity costs are low and deploys it to supplement a surge in a station's overall energy demand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines." The AV Club explains:Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter.... Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release. But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine:As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently. The Los Angeles Times supplies some context:The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China. It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...." The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party.... Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN Business reports a deepfake video of Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fabricated to falsely depict him urging viewers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. But at the same time, "there was another widely circulated deepfake video depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin supposedly declaring peace in the Ukraine war." Though both videos were "noticeably low resolution" (which they describe as a common tactic for hiding flaws), "experts still see them as dangerous."That's because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further. "Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist," said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school's Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. "If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It's not like everything will become true. It's just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything...." The fact that they are now being used in an attempt to influence people during a war is especially pernicious, experts told CNN Business, simply because the confusion they sow can be dangerous. Siwei Lyu, director of the computer vision and machine learning lab at University at Albany, said under normal circumstances, deepfakes may not have much impact beyond drawing interest and getting traction online. "But in critical situations, during a war or a national disaster, when people really can't think very rationally and they only have a very truly short span of attention, and they see something like this, that's when it becomes a problem," he added. Snuffing out misinformation in general has become more complex during the war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion of the country has been accompanied by a real-time deluge of information hitting social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of it is real, but some is fake or misleading. The visual nature of what's being shared — along with how emotional and visceral it often is — can make it hard to quickly tell what's real from what's fake. Nina Schick, author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse," sees deepfakes like those of Zelensky and Putin as signs of the much larger disinformation problem online, which she thinks social media companies aren't doing enough to solve. She argued that responses from companies such as Facebook, which quickly said it had removed the Zelensky video, are often a "fig leaf." "You're talking about one video," she said. The larger problem remains. As deepfakes get better, researchers and companies are trying to keep up with tools to spot them....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A massive ice shelf in eastern Antartica collapsed, scientists said on Friday, marking the first time an ice shelf has done so in the region," reports the Hill:The 460-square mile wide ice shelf, which was roughly the size of New York City and helped keep the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and March 16, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute ice scientist Catherine Walker told The Associated Press. University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff said the collapse was worrying because eastern Antartica holds five times more ice than western Antartica, and if the whole region were to melt, it could raise sea levels across the globe more than 160 feet, according to the AP. Scientists had long thought that the area had not been impacted heavily by climate change and was stable, according to the wire service, but Neff said the collapse of the ice shelf brought that belief into question. The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf has been shrinking since the 1970s, Neff noted. Walker added that it rapidly began losing ice in 2020, according to the AP. "The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years, and it's not ever going to be there again," Neff told the wire service. Last week the Washington Post reported that temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet had been "soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For months, a small group of volunteers has worked to get this Arch Linux-based distribution up and running on Apple Silicon Macs, adapting existing drivers and (in the case of the GPU) painstakingly writing their own. And that work is paying off -- last week, the team released its first alpha installer to the general public, and as of yesterday, the software supports the new M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio. In the current alpha, an impressive list of hardware already works, including Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 over the Thunderbolt ports (USB 3.0 only works on Macs with USB-A ports, but USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt is "coming soon"), and the built-in display. But there are still big features missing, including DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the webcam, Bluetooth, sleep mode, and GPU acceleration. That said, regarding GPU acceleration, the developers say that the M1 is fast enough that a software-rendered Linux desktop feels faster on the M1 than a GPU-accelerated desktop feels on many other ARM chips. Asahi's developers don't think the software will be "done," with all basic M1-series hardware and functionality supported and working out of the box, "for another year, maybe two." By then, Apple will probably have introduced another generation or two of M-series chips. But the developers are optimistic that much of the work they're doing now will continue to work on future generations of Apple hardware with relatively minimal effort. [...] If you want to try Asahi Linux on an M1 Mac, the current installer is run from the command line and requires "at least 53GB of free space" for an install with a KDE Plasma desktop. Asahi only needs about 15GB, but the installer requires you to leave at least 38GB of free space to the macOS install so that macOS system updates don't break. From there, dual-booting should work similarly to the process on Intel Macs, with the alternate OS visible from within Startup Disk or the boot picker you can launch when your start your Mac. Future updates should be installable from within your new Asahi Linux installation and shouldn't require you to reinstall from scratch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: Alarming levels of dangerous chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) were discovered in food packaging at a number of well-known fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and grocery store chains, a new report found. The highest levels of indicators for PFAS were found in food packaging from Nathan's Famous, Cava, Arby's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Stop & Shop, Sweetgreen, McDonald's and Taco Bell according to an investigation released Thursday by Consumer Reports. The Consumer Reports investigation collected 118 food packaging products sold by 24 companies in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It tested those products for organic fluorine -- a marker for PFAS. Researchers then sent samples of products with the highest levels to an independent laboratory that could perform more specific tests, said Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for advocacy at Consumer Reports. Regulatory limits for how much PFAS food packaging should contain can vary greatly. In the US, there are no federal limits, leaving action up to the states. Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington have passed bills banning intentional use of PFAS in food packaging, but haven't yet specified a limit, according to Consumer Reports. In January 2023, a new law in California will set the limit at less than 100 ppm (parts per million). The Consumer Reports investigation found the highest indicators for PFAS -- 876 ppm and 618 ppm -- in two types of bags for sides at Nathan's Famous restaurants. High indicators of PFAS (in the 500s) were also found in a Chick-fil-A sandwich wrapper and in fiber bowls at Cava, a Mediterranean restaurant chain. Indicator levels in the 300s and 400s were found in a bag of cookies at Arby's, bamboo paper plates at Stop & Shop, and in a bag for both cookies and French toast sticks at Burger King. Levels of PFAS indicators in the 200s were found in a Sweetgreen paper bag for focaccia, additional items at Cava, and in bags for french fries, cookies and Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's. However, all of the companies listed had additional food packaging that tested at levels below 200 ppm. Four companies -- Arby's, Nathan's Famous, McDonald's and Stop & Shop -- also sold food in packaging that had no detectable levels of PFAS, the report said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol. PC Gamer reports: The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by the Ukrainian Software and Computer Museum account, which operates museums in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The owner of the Mariupul collection, Dmitry Cherepanov, is reportedly safe, though his collection of computers, consoles, and assorted tech from fifty years of computing has been wiped out. "There is neither my museum nor my house," writes Cherepanov on his Facebook page, it8bit.club. The museum itself may be gone, but Cherepanov has been chronicling his collection of exhibits online for some time now, and though this is all that's left, it is still a resource worth checking out. There are a host of fascinating old machines, including the Commodore C64 [...]. As well as images and information about all the 120 computers and consoles in his collection, Cherepanov also hosts RetroBit Radio on the site, too. Cherepanov has set up a Paypal account for donations, the details of which you can find on his Facebook page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Half of all women getting 3D mammograms will experience a false positive over a decade of annual screening, a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open found. False positives -- when a mammogram is flagged as abnormal, but there is no cancer -- have always been a problem. But 3D mammography has been aggressively marketed by hospitals, doctors and some patient groups for its ability to provide higher image quality images -- and previous studies have found they result in fewer false positives. The researchers analyzed data from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium on 3 million screening mammograms for more than 900,000 women ages 40-79. The screenings were performed between 2005 and 2018 at 126 radiology facilities. Researchers estimate over 10 years of getting 3D mammograms, 50% of women will experience at least one false-positive recall compared to 56% of women screened with 2D digital mammograms. Women with dense breasts or who were younger, as well as those who screened every year compared to once every two years, had a higher chance of a false positive. "Whenever you're called back for an additional workup, it's very stressful because women think they may have cancer," Diana Miglioretti, a lead author and professor and division chief of biostatistics at UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences, told Axios. "Often it may take days to even weeks to get that resolved," she said. "The main thing is we want to alleviate women's anxiety over these false positives and understand they are very common."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a "coding logic error" that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data. The Guardian reports: The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect. A total of 72,277 deaths in all age groups reported across 26 states were removed from the tracker "because CDC's algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not Covid-19-related," Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the agency, told the Guardian. The problem stemmed from two questions the CDC asks of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities, according to a source familiar with the issue. One data field asks if a person died "from illness/complications of illness," and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided. But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was "no" or "unknown." The CDC's system assumed that if a date was provided, then the "no" or "unknown" answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to "yes." This resulted in an overcount of deaths due to Covid in the demographic breakdown, and the error, once discovered, was corrected last week. The CDC did not answer a question on how long the coding error was in effect. "Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported," said Reed. The death counts in the data tracker are "real-time and subject to change," Reed noted, while numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, a center within the CDC, are "the most complete source of death data," despite lags in reporting, because the process includes a review of death certificates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. placed internet-security provider AO Kaspersky Lab on a list of companies deemed a threat to national security, for the first time adding a Russian entity to a list dominated by Chinese telecommunications firms. Bloomberg reports: The Federal Communications Commission on Friday also added China Telecom (Americas) Corp, and China Mobile International USA Inc. to the list. Once a company is on the list, federal subsidies can't be used to purchase its equipment or services. The action is part of the FCC's efforts to "strengthen America's communications networks against national security threats," Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency's chairwoman, said in a news release. Kaspersky is a well known provider of anti-virus software, and has conducted investigations into a range of nation-state hacking incidents. It calls itself the world's largest privately-owned cybersecurity company on its website. It says it protects over 400 million users and 240,000 companies. [...] For Friday's update of the list, the FCC said it relied on findings by the Department of Homeland Security and an executive branch interagency body called the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bbsguru writes: Sony/PlayStation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Turismo 7 more dependent on microtransactions. Gamers say the well-reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn't improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. [To make matters worse, Gran Turismo 7 owners weren't even able to play single player because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game went down.] After several tentative responses, Sony is [finally] paying out, "gifting players with a million in-game credits and outlining the near-term updates for Gran Turismo 7 that will address the problems," writes Eurogamer's Martin Robinson. "We want to thank you for your continued patience and valuable feedback as we grow and evolve GT7 to make it as enjoyable and rewarding for as many players as possible," wrote series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in a blog post. "We always want to keep communication lines open with our community so that we can work together to build the best racing experience possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Russia is considering accepting Bitcoin as payment for its oil and gas exports, according to a high-ranking lawmaker. Pavel Zavalny says "friendly" countries could be allowed to pay in the crypto-currency or in their local currencies. Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he wanted "unfriendly" countries to buy its gas with roubles. The move is understood to be aimed at boosting the Russian currency, which has lost over 20% in value this year. Sanctions imposed by the UK, US and the European Union, following the invasion of Ukraine, have put a strain on Russia's rouble and raised its cost of living. Mr Zavalny, who heads Russia's State Duma committee on energy, said on Thursday that the country has been exploring alternative ways to receive payment for energy exports. He said China and Turkey were among "friendly" countries which were "not involved in the sanctions pressure." "We have been proposing to China for a long time to switch to settlements in national currencies for roubles and yuan," said Mr Zavalny. "With Turkey, it will be lira and roubles." Mr Zavalny added: "You can also trade bitcoins." Analysts said Russia may benefit from accepting the popular cryptocurrency, despite the risks. "Russia is very quickly feeling the impact of unprecedented sanctions," said David Broadstock, a senior research fellow at the Energy Studies Institute in Singapore. "There is a need to shore up the economy and in many ways, Bitcoin is seen as a high growth asset." However, he noted that the value of Bitcoin has swung by as much as 30% this year. In comparison, the dollar has traded within 5% against the euro. "Clearly accepting Bitcoin, compared with other traditional currencies, introduces considerably more risk in the trade of natural gas," Mr Broadstock said. "Moreover, one of the major 'friendly' trade partners for Russia is China, and cryptocurrency is banned for use in China," he added. "This clearly limits potential for payment using Bitcoin."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To date, Google has released three Assistant Smart Displays. 9to5Google can now report that the company is working on a new Nest Hub for 2022 with a dockable tablet form factor where the screen detaches from a base/speaker. From the report: According to a source that has proven familiar with Google's plans, the next Nest Smart Display will have a removable screen that can be used as a tablet. It attaches to the base/speaker for a more conventional-looking smart home device. This new form factor comes as Google has spent the last few months adding more interface elements to the 2nd-gen Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen reveals a row of "apps" above the settings bar. You can open a fullscreen grid of icons from there. Applications and games on the Nest Hub are essentially web views, so this is technically a launcher for shortcuts. Speaking of the web, Google also spent the end of last year adding a more feature-rich browser that even features a Gboard-esque keyboard. You can also send sites directly to your phone and enable text-to-speech. Both of these additions can be seen as laying the groundwork for a tablet-like experience, with web browsing obviously being a popular task on big screens. Many questions about the implementation remain unknown, including what OS/experience the undocked tablet will run. Chrome OS is likely too power-hungry (and as such costly) considering the affordability of Nest devices, while Android would open the door to existing apps and the Play Store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com has announced that he will appeal the piracy verdict, where the RIAA won $83 million in damages. According to his attorneys, the legal process has gone off the rails, as the music companies didn't have to prove a single instance of copyright infringement. More context on the verdict, from TorrentFreak: Last October, the RIAA secured a major victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com and their Russian operator Tofig Kurbanov. A Virginia federal court issued a default judgment in favor of several prominent music companies after the defendant walked away from the lawsuit. According to the order, there is a clear need to deter the behavior of Kurbanov who failed to hand over evidence including server logs. "A less drastic sanction is unlikely to salvage this case," the judge wrote. Following this win, the RIAA asked for an injunction to stop the sites' worldwide stream-ripping activities. In addition, the music group demanded nearly $83 million in damages. Both of these requests were taken up in a report and recommendation issued by Magistrate Judge Buchanan last December. "Defendant's Websites caused the Plaintiffs to lose profits and streaming revenue because of the enormous internet traffic to and use of the Websites' stream-ripping functions," Judge Buchanan wrote. Mr. Kurbanov's legal team opposed this recommendation, arguing that the music companies failed to provide evidence that any infringing activity actually took place in the United States. Also, if the court believes that damages are appropriate, they should be substantially lower. The RIAA predictably disagreed and asked the court to stay the course and take over the recommendation. After weighing the positions from both sides, that's exactly what happened.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Washington Post reports that at the outset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian military communications, as well as that of customers across Europe, was accomplished by the compromise of tens of thousands of satellite modems provided by Viasat's KA-SAT service," writes longtime Slashdot reader An Ominous Cow Erred. "Viasat is now having to replace the insecure modems for all affected customers. This raises questions about the vulnerability of other broadband services with poorly-maintained firmware on their customer network infrastructure." From the report: Earlier this month, Zhora described the impact of the sabotage as "a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war." Dmitri Alperovitch, a cyber expert and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, said satellite communications "have been used extensively by Ukrainian military not just for command and control of forces but also for tactical missions such as use of drones against Russian armor." Said Alperovitch: "We can't know for sure, but this KA-SAT attack may have had a serious impact on degrading Ukrainian military capabilities at the outset of the war.'' Elon Musk has responded to Slashdot on Twitter, stating that: "Starlink, at least so far, has resisted all hacking & jamming attempts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers -- employed by staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions, which is subcontracted by Alphabet -- voted nine to one to form a union. They'll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA.) Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. Kansas City was the market where Google Fiber first launched, approximately a decade ago. Workers at this store skipped straight to petitioning the NLRB for union recognition because, for reasons unknown, the supermajority of union card-signers were seemingly ignored by Google and BDS alike. At the time Emrys Adair, a worker at this location said, "There's been no acknowledgement, no pushback. No response at all yet." Among the ballots cast, nine were in favor while one was opposed; an additional ballot was challenged, but the number of challenged ballots was not sufficient to change the result of the election. [...] The Alphabet Workers Union sees this not only as a victory for this specific store, but part of a broader campaign to level the playing field between Alphabet's full-time staff, and its larger and reportedly worse-compensated TVCs (temps, vendors and contractors, in Google parlance.) [...] What remains next is for these Google Fiber workers to bargain their first contract, itself a herculean effort that companies have tremendous power to draw out or undermine. Thus far, the specific changes these workers hope to win in bargaining have not been disclosed by the AWU-CWA, though keeping those goals close to the chest is by no means unusual.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Molly White: On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff piece on cryptocurrencies, both online and as an entire section of the Sunday print edition. Though its author, Kevin Roose, wrote that it aimed to be a "sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is", it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency that appeared to have received little in the way of fact-checking or critical editorial scrutiny. It uncritically repeated many questionable or entirely fallacious arguments from cryptocurrency advocates, and it appears that no experts on the topic were consulted, or even anyone with a less-than-rosy view on crypto. This is grossly irresponsible. Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won't.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced charges against four Russian government employees for a years-long hacking campaign targeting critical infrastructure, including a U.S. nuclear power operator and a Saudi petrochemical facility. From a report: The first indictment, from June 2021, charges Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, 36, a computer programmer at the Russian Ministry of Defense, and two co-conspirators, of planning to hack industrial control systems -- the critical devices that keep industrial facilities operational -- at global energy facilities. Gladkikh is believed to be behind the infamous Triton malware, which was used to target a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia in 2017. Hackers used the malware in an attempt to disable safety systems in the plant designed to prevent dangerous conditions that could lead to leaks or explosions. Triton was first linked to Russia in October 2018. Following their failed plot to blow up the Saudi plant, the hackers attempted to hack the computers of a company that managed similar critical infrastructure entities in the U.S, according to the DOJ.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exxon Mobil is running a pilot program using excess natural gas that would otherwise be burned off from North Dakota oil wells to power cryptocurrency-mining operations and is considering doing the same at other sites around the globe, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The oil giant has an agreement with Crusoe Energy Systems to take gas from an oil well pad in the Bakken shale basin to power mobile generators used to run Bitcoin mining servers on site, said the people, who asked to not be named because the information isn't public. The pilot project, which launched in January 2021 and expanded in July, uses up 18 million cubic feet of gas per month that would have otherwise been burned off -- or flared -- because there aren't enough pipelines. Exxon, the largest U.S. oil producer, is considering similar pilots in Alaska, the Qua Iboe Terminal in Nigeria, Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale field, Guyana and Germany, one of the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced on Wednesday that it would test letting Android developers use their own billing systems in their apps, the first step in what could lead to a dramatic reshaping of the app economy. However, Epic Games, which has been a strong proponent for opening app marketplaces and sued Google after the search giant removed Fortnite from Google Play for including direct payments, still isn't happy. From a report: It plans to continue advocating for an app ecosystem that offers more choices, according to a statement the company shared with The Verge. "Apple and Google continue to abuse their market power with policies that stifle innovation, inflate prices and reduce consumer choice," Corie Wright, Epic's VP of public policy, said in the statement. "One deal does not change the anticompetitive status quo. We will continue to fight for fair and open platforms for all developers and consumers and work with policymakers and regulators to hold these gatekeepers accountable for their anticompetitive conduct."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony is preparing to introduce a new video game subscription service for the PlayStation as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The service, which has been in development under the codename Spartacus, is Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, a sort of Netflix for video games that has amassed more than 25 million subscribers. Sony's will debut with a splashy lineup of hit games from recent years, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private. Sony's new service will combine two of its current offerings, PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus. Customers will be able to choose from multiple tiers offering catalogs of modern games and classics from older PlayStation eras.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs now spreading the conspiracy theory that Moderna created Covid. New York Times reporter Paul Mozur: Hard to believe they don't see the credibility they lose amplifying this stuff. Takeaway is still no sign the wolf warrior approach has been reconsidered. [...] It underscores how the CAC quashes rumors it doesn't like, but let's those of political expediency flourish within China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple argued in court papers this week that appeals filings by Epic Games don't point to legal errors by a US District Court judge who ruled last year that the iPhone maker hadn't violated antitrust laws with its App Store. Instead, Apple cited the many times the judge said Epic had "failed to demonstrate," "failed to show" and "failed to prove" the facts of its case. From a report: "On the facts and the law, the court correctly decided every issue presented in Epic's appeal," Apple lawyers wrote in the company's filing. They repeated earlier arguments that Epic is attempting to fundamentally change the App Store. "While these appeals are both important and complex, resolving the issues should not be difficult: Applying settled precedent to the adjudicated facts requires ruling for Apple across the board." Apple's 135-page filing is the latest in the legal battle it's been fighting with Epic since August 2020. On the surface, the two companies are battling over who gets how much when consumers spend money on the App Store. Apple is fighting to maintain control of its App Store, which has become such a key feature of its iPhones that the company's ads saying "there's an app for that" are referenced in crossword puzzles and on the trivia TV show Jeopardy. Over the past couple of years, though, Apple's runaway success with its App Store has been challenged. Epic, which makes the hit online battle game Fortnite, argued that Apple should loosen its control. In emails, court filings and public statements, Epic has said Apple should allow alternative app stores onto the iPhone and iPad, something it currently doesn't allow. Epic also says Apple should free developers to use alternative payment processors in their apps, rather than Apple's current rule requiring they use only its App Store, through which Apple takes a cut of in-app purchases on its devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. From a report: "Music," wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, "has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation." A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers -- that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life. A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed "music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing," as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd is working with whistleblowing agency Lioness to share information about kickbacks and bribery in the Middle East and North Africa. From a report: In June 2019, former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney General's office to discuss his allegations that Microsoft was ignoring bribery at subsidiaries in the Middle East and Africa. The meetings lasted nearly the entire day. Federal agents asked Elabd questions for hours. Elabd's attorney told him that it was one of the first times they had witnessed the AG's office send a representative to a whistleblower meeting like his. But more than a year later, the SEC still hadn't made a decision about Elabd's allegations. The agency kept promising him that the team in charge of his case would make a decision soon about whether they would bring charges against Microsoft. Finally, at the beginning of March 2022, the case agent in charge of Elabd's whistleblowing report told his lawyer that the SEC was closing the case because it didn't have the resources to conduct interviews and find documentation abroad during the coronavirus pandemic. So Elabd decided to try a different route to share what he knows. Today he published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness that accuses Microsoft of firing him after two decades with the company because he asked questions about what he saw as bribery within the contracting services Microsoft uses to sell software to government and public bodies in countries in the Middle East and Africa.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's upcoming MacBook Air redesign has been extensively reported on, but new information suggests it may come in two sizes. According to Display Supply Chain Consultants' latest quarterly report, Apple is working on a 15-inch version of the laptop to sit alongside the 13-inch model, which may itself get a slightly larger screen as well. TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo followed up on the report, saying that mass production is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023. Kuo also says that the laptop is being designed to use the same 30W adapter as the MacBook Air, which would put it well below the latest MacBook Pro machines in terms of power consumption. Finally, Kuo notes that this new laptop "might not be called MacBook Air," which is more of a question of branding than anything else and is likely to be in the realm of speculation for a product that's so far out from production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. and the European Union reached a preliminary deal to allow data about Europeans to be stored on U.S. soil, heading off a growing threat to thousands of companies' trans-Atlantic operations. From a report: The deal, announced Friday by President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, could if concluded resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. It also assuages concerns of companies including Meta and Alphabet's Google that were facing mounting legal challenges to data transfers that underpin some of their operations in Europe. An earlier deal regulating trans-Atlantic data flows was deemed illegal by the EU's top court in 2020. That ruling was the second time since 2015 that the EU's Court of Justice had deemed U.S. safeguards on Europeans' data to be insufficient. The court said the U.S. didn't provide EU citizens effective means to challenge U.S. government surveillance of their data. Mr. Biden and Ms. von der Leyen didn't provide details of how the new agreement would work and withstand legal challenges. At issue in the talks has been whether the U.S. could convince the EU -- and its top court -- with new administrative appeals mechanisms for Europeans, but without a change to U.S. law, which would require approval by Congress, people briefed on the talks have said in recent months. Officials and observers on both sides of the Atlantic expect any new agreement to be challenged in court again, raising uncertainty about how long Friday's deal will last.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, one secretive U.S. company is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won't be able to take down. The company is Lantern, which says it has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But now the company is building something even more robust, an internal peer-to-peer network that will allow dissenting voices to continue to upload and share content even if the Kremlin pulls the plug on the internet. Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked. [...] Lantern was founded in California in 2010 with the goal of keeping "the world's information, speech, expression, and finance uncensored." The free version of the app has a data cap of 500MB, but the pro version, which costs $32 a year, has no data cap. It has become hugely popular in China because of its ability to stay one step ahead of the government's censorship efforts, spreading mainly via word-of-mouth as it's not available via the Google or Apple app stores inside China. n Russia, like all new markets it enters, Lantern removed the data cap for all users. Despite this, some users still paid for the pro version.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Techdirt's Timothy Geigner, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation was recently rendered unplayable because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game crumbled during a maintenance window. From the report: "The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning," reports Ars Technica. "Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that 'due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'" "Inconvenience" in this case means not being able to play the game the customer purchased. Like, basically at all. Why the single player content in a console game of all things should require an online check-in is completely beyond me. Console piracy is a thing, but certainly not much of a thing. There is zero chance that this DRM is worth the headache Sony now has on its hands. A headache that lasted for more than a full calendar day, by the way. And a headache that Sony's competitors picked up on to use in messaging to the public on social media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world's toughest rules to protect people's online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. [...] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple's in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission. Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads -- based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook -- are immensely lucrative for both companies. [...] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight -- just like health care, transportation and banking industries."Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were 'too big to care,' Europe has put its foot down," said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. "We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide." On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks -- a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy -- and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft's DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix's Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD. As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken's numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API -- from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives -- dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy. On the other hand, Ono's demo showed that game load time wasn't improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage -- nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That's a decrease that wouldn't be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you're using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That's a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Japanese startup called H2L Technologies wants you to be able to feel pain inside the metaverse, via a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks. Futurism reports: "Feeling pain enables us to turn the metaverse world into a real [world], with increased feelings of presence and immersion," H2L CEO Emi Tamaki told the Financial Times. The Sony-backed startup's wearable isn't designed with only inflicting pain in mind. It's also meant to convey "weight and resistance feeling to users and avatars on the Metaverse," according to the company. Thanks to the wristband's electrical stimulation, it can mimic a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer's skin. Tamaki's goals are much greater than a simple wristband. She's hoping to "release humans from any sort of constraint in terms of space, body and time" within the next decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas Brooks, an avid Windows fan who digs through and analyzes its early iterations, recently shared his discovery of an easter egg that's been hiding in Windows 1.0 for nearly 37 years. PC Gamer reports: Brooks discovered the secret, a credits list of Windows developers and a "congratulations" message, buried in the data of a smiley face bitmap file that came with the OS. The data for the credits was encrypted, and according to Brooks, the tools he needed to extract the data didn't even exist at the time of the OS' release. There's also a name in the credits all PC gamers will recognize: Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. Newell began his career at Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard, and contributed to the development of the first three iterations of Windows. He also led the team that ported Doom to Windows from DOS, a crucial step in the transition between the operating systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Police in the United Kingdom have arrested seven people over suspected connections to the Lapsus$ hacking group, which has in recent weeks targeted tech giants including Samsung, Nvidia, Microsoft and Okta. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan from the City of London Police said: "The City of London Police has been conducting an investigation with its partners into members of a hacking group. Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation. Our enquiries remain ongoing." News of the arrests comes just hours after a Bloomberg report revealed a teenager based in Oxford, U.K. is suspected of being the mastermind of the now-prolific Lapsus$ hacking group. Four researchers investigating the gang's recent hacks said they believed the 16-year-old, who uses the online moniker "White" or "Breachbase," was a leading figure in Lapsus$, and Bloomberg was able to track down the suspected hacker after his personal information was leaked online by rival hackers. TechCrunch has seen a copy of the the suspected hacker's leaked personal information, which we are not sharing -- but it matches Bloomberg's reporting. City of London Police, which primarily focuses on financial crimes, did not say if the 16-year-old was among those arrested. At least one member of Lapsus$ was also apparently involved with a recent data breach at Electronic Arts, according to [security reporter Brian Krebs], and another is suspected to be a teenager residing in Brazil. The latter is said to be so capable of hacking that researchers first believed that the activity they were witnessing was automated. Researchers' ability to track the suspected Lapsus$ members may be because the group, which now has more than 45,000 subscribers to its Telegram channel where it frequently recruits insiders and leaks victims' data, does little to cover its tracks. In a blog post this week, Microsoft said the group uses brazen tactics to gain initial access to a target organization, which has included publicly recruiting company insiders. As reported by Bloomberg this week, the group has even gone as far as to join the Zoom calls of companies they've breached and taunted employees trying to clean up their hack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. The Verge reports: The archive was never built to be a permanent repository of content, and maintaining the outdated site was no longer "cost effective," the EPA said to The Verge in an emailed statement. The EPA announced the retirement early this year, after finishing an overhaul of its main website in 2021, but says that the decision was years in the making. The agency maintains that it's abiding by federal rules for records management and that not all webpages qualify as official records that need to be preserved. The EPA says it plans to migrate much of the information to other places. Old news releases will go to the current EPA website's page for press releases. When it comes to the rest of the content, the EPA has a process for making case-by-case decisions on what content can be deleted -- and what is relevant enough to move to the modern website. Some content might be deemed important enough to join the National Archives. The public will be able to request that content through the Freedom of Information Act. The archive is the only comprehensive way that public information about agency policies, like fact sheets breaking down the impact of environmental legislation, and actions, like how the agency implements those laws, have been preserved, [says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the cofounders of a group called Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that's fighting for public access to resources like the EPA's online archives]. That makes the archive vital for understanding how regulation and enforcement have changed over the years. It also shows how the agency's understanding of an issue, like climate change, has evolved. And when the Trump administration deleted information about climate change on the EPA's website, much of it could still be found on the archive. Besides that, Gehrke says the content should just be available on principle because it's public information, paid for by taxpayer dollars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub has introduced a new feed into the dashboard of users and it doesn't appear to have gone down well with the code shack's regulars. The Register reports: As soon as the new feed arrived, replete with all kinds of exciting suggestions for developers to look at, the complaints began rolling in as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. "I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don't follow," said one user. "Don't fix what's not broken." Others were blunter, stating: "I don't want algorithmic feed" and requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered â" issues, releases, PRs and so on. GitHub pushed out a new beta version of its Home Feed earlier this week, with the avowed intention of developers reaching a wider audience and building communities. The plan is to make discovery easier and help users "find new repositories or users to follow based on your interests." As if to demonstrate the levels of discontent around GitHub's new feature, a Chrome extension quickly showed up to disable the social feed by removing the "For You" section on the GitHub dashboard. Not all users were upset by the appearance of the new feed, and GitHub staff popped up to promise that there would be an option to make one's profile private and opt out of pretty much everything via a single setting. It will, however, take until late April before this option is likely to appear, they said. Which prompted the obvious question: "Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A hacker group claims to have stolen and leaked a trove of Nestle's data. The company says that can't possibly be true. Why? Because the data was actually leaked by Nestle itself several weeks ago. In emails to Gizmodo, a Nestle spokesperson disavowed allegations from the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which claimed this week to have stolen and leaked a 10 gigabyte tranche from the global food and beverage conglomerate. Anonymous said it was punishing Nestle for its reticence to withdraw from Russia, as a host of other major companies have done. The data, which Anonymous said included internal emails, passwords, and information on Nestle's customers, was posted to the web on Tuesday. But, according to Nestle, Anonymous is full of it. A spokesperson told Gizmodo, "This recent claim of a cyber-attack against Nestle and subsequent data leak has no foundation." The spokesperson explained that the trove of data floating around the web was, in fact, the product of a mistake the company made earlier this year: "It relates to a case from February, when some randomized and predominantly publicly available test data of a B2B nature was made accessible unintentionally online for a short period of time." [...] In a follow-up email, the same company spokesperson explained that the data, some of which was already public and some of which was not, had been accidentally published to the open internet for multiple weeks. According to the spokesperson: "Some predominantly publicly-available data (e.g., company names and company addresses and some business email addresses) was erroneously made available on the web for a limited period of time (a few weeks). It was detected by our security team at the time and the appropriate review was carried out. The data was prepared for a B2B test website to perform some functionality checks." Nestle on Wednesday said it planned to partly scale back its operations in Russia, continuing to provide "essential food, such as infant food and medical/hospital nutrition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Threat Analysis Group announced on Thursday that it had discovered a pair of North Korean hacking cadres going by the monikers Operation Dream Job and Operation AppleJeus in February that were leveraging a remote code execution exploit in the Chrome web browser. From a report: The blackhatters reportedly targeted the US news media, IT, crypto and fintech industries, with evidence of their attacks going back as far as January 4th, 2022, though the Threat Analysis Group notes that organizations outside the US could have been targets as well. "We suspect that these groups work for the same entity with a shared supply chain, hence the use of the same exploit kit, but each operate with a different mission set and deploy different techniques," the Google team wrote on Thursday. "It is possible that other North Korean government-backed attackers have access to the same exploit kit." Operation Dream Job targeted 250 people across 10 companies with fraudulent job offers from the likes of Disney and Oracle sent from accounts spoofed to look like they came from Indeed or ZipRecruiter. Clicking on the link would launch a hidden iframe that would trigger the exploit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israel blocked Ukraine from buying NSO Group's Pegasus spyware for fear that Russian officials would be angered by the sale of the sophisticated hacking tool to a regional foe, The Guardian reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The revelation, following a joint investigation by the Guardian and Washington Post, offers new insight into the way Israel's relationship with Russia has at times undermined Ukraine's offensive capabilities -- and contradicted US priorities. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been critical of Israel's stance since Russia launched its full and bloody invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, saying in a recent address before members of Israel's Knesset that Israel would have to "give answers" on why it had not given weapons to Ukraine or applied sanctions on Russians. People with direct knowledge of the matter say that, dating back to at least 2019, Ukrainian officials lobbied Israel to try to convince it to license the spyware tool for use by Ukraine. But those efforts were rebuffed and NSO Group, which is regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, was never permitted to market or sell the company's spyware to Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google executives, facing a barrage of criticism from employees on issues related to compensation, defended the company's competitiveness at a recent all-hands meeting while acknowledging that the performance review process could change. From a report: The companywide virtual gathering earlier this month followed the release of internal survey results, which showed a growing number of staffers don't view their pay packages as fair or competitive with what they could make elsewhere. At all-hands meetings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior executives regularly read top submissions from Dory, a site where employees write questions and give a thumbs up to those they want leadership to address. The second highest-rated question ahead of the March meeting was about the annual "Googlegeist" survey. As CNBC reported, the lowest scores from the survey, which went out to employees in January, were in the areas of compensation and execution. "Compensation-related questions showed the biggest decrease from last year, what is your understanding of why that is?" Pichai read aloud from the employee submissions. According to the survey results, only 46% of respondents said their total compensation is competitive compared to similar jobs at other companies. Bret Hill was first to respond. Hill is Google's vice president of "Total Rewards," which refers to compensation and stock packages. "There's some macro economic trends at play," Hill said. "It's a very competitive market and you're probably hearing anecdotal stories of colleagues getting better offers at other companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After seemingly forgetting that Android tablets existed for a while, Google is suddenly very invested in the market. Android 12L is in development to support larger-screened devices, and one of the platform's co-founders, Rich Miner, has rejoined the team with the title "CTO of Android tablets." Now, speaking to developers during an episode of Google's The Android Show, Miner explained the opportunity the company is seeing. [...] The other reason he cites is that tablets can be "very capable, less expensive than a laptop." That spurred Google's work on Android 12L to optimize its system UI for use on bigger devices, as well as the way it formats apps to fit on big screens. Miner is making the pitch for developers to look at their apps and consider taking advantage of the tools Google's building to improve tablet support or even building apps that approach the market as a tablet-first experience. He points to 2020 sales data, where "tablet purchases actually started to approach the number of laptop shipments... I actually think there's going to be a crossover point at some point in the not too distant future where there are more tablets sold annually than there are laptops. I think once you cross over that point, you're not going to be coming back."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba shareholders on Thursday voted down competing proposals -- one presented by management and the other backed by activist shareholders, leaving the future direction of the embattled Japanese conglomerate uncertain. From a report: Management's plan to spin off Toshiba's devices unit and the separate call to seek buyout offers had both failed to gain the required 50% of the vote. The untidy outcome ensures there will be no immediate end to a four-year scandal-filled battle between management and foreign activist hedge funds, while underscoring deep divisions among Toshiba shareholders. Opposition to Toshiba's plans to break up the company had been widespread and included proxy advisory firms, and its failure comes as no surprise. But the outlook for Singapore-based 3D Investment Partners' proposal that Toshiba solicit private equity buyout offers or a minority investment had been less clear cut. Although 3D and Toshiba's other top two shareholders had supported the quest for a buyout offer, proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) had advised against it, saying the proposal "appears overly prescriptive and premature."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the internet-popular short-video format, the GIF, has died. He was 74. From a report: His wife, Kathaleen, said Thursday in a phone interview that he died of COVID on March 14. Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, won a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which decades after its creation became omnipresent in memes and on social media, often used as a cheeky representation of a cultural moment. Wilhite was working at CompuServe in 1987 when he invented the GIF. "I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming," he told The New York Times in 2013, saying the first image was an airplane and insisting that the file had only one pronunciation - a soft "G," like Jif peanut butter. Those using the hard "G," as in "got" or "given," "are wrong," he said. "End of story." "There's way more to him than inventing GIF," Kathaleen Wilhite said of her husband, who loved trains, with a room dedicated to them in the basement of their house with "enormous train tracks," as well as taking camping trips. Still, even after he retired in 2001, "he never stopped programming," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla today launched MDN Plus, a paid subscription product on top of the existing (and recently re-designed) Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), one of the web's most popular destinations for finding documentation and code samples related to web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. From a report: The new subscription offering will introduce features like notifications, collections (think lists of articles you want to save) and MDN offline for when you want to access MDN when you're not online. There will be three subscription tiers: MDN core, a free limited version of the paid plans; MDN Plus 5, with access to notifications, collections and MDN offline for $5 per month or $50 per year; and MDN Supporter 10 for those who are willing to pay a bit more to support the platform in addition to getting a direct feedback channel to the MDN team (as well as "pride and joy," Mozila says). As the name implies, that more expensive plan will cost $10 a month or $100 for an annual subscription.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is working on a subscription service for the iPhone and other hardware products, a move that could make device ownership similar to paying a monthly app fee, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The service would be Apple's biggest push yet into automatically recurring sales, allowing users to subscribe to hardware for the first time -- rather than just digital services. But the project is still in development, said the people, who asked not to identified because the initiative hasn't been announced, Bloomberg News reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The global umbrella organisation for securities regulators has warned that decentralised finance contains myriad hidden conflicts and risks, as authorities begin circling one of the fastest growing corners of cryptocurrency markets. From a report: Comparing the current rise of decentralised finance, or DeFi, to the dotcom bubble, Martin Moloney, secretary-general of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (Iosco), said its explosive growth warranted "closer attention by regulators." Iosco on Thursday plans to publish a 43-page report on DeFi listing more than a dozen "key risks" it has identified in the market. Moloney said the group would gather feedback from market participants and consider drafting guidelines for regulating DeFi. "Most DeFi protocols rely on centralisation in one or more areas, and there are protocols that have a hidden centralised authority and are decentralised in name only," the board of Iosco wrote in the report, which was reviewed by the Financial Times. "What we're seeing is a lot of conflicts of interest are emerging in this space, and a lot of them are not transparent,â Moloney told the FT in an interview. "A lot of the participants in this space are claiming to be doing one thing and actually doing another thing, or actually doing multiple things at the same time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung's new portable projector disappoints, multiple reviewers noted today. The Verge: The Freestyle could have been something really special. As Samsung's first portable projector, it immediately stood out from all of the company's other CES product announcements in January. What wasn't to like? At under two pounds, the Freestyle was hyped as tiny in form but big on features and convenience. The device is compact enough to be packed in a bag for travel or bringing on camping trips. It'd be a cinch to set up The Freestyle in the backyard for movie night, and the projector can run off some portable USB-C battery packs for added flexibility. Want an easy way to entertain your kids on vacation? Here you go. You can point the 180-degree tilting projector in a wide range of directions -- including at the ceiling. And since it has the same software as Samsung's smart TVs, it comes with a vast selection of entertainment apps in tow. What Samsung has shipped is a dim, flawed, and often sluggish projector that fails to realize its potential. For a company that's been on a run of home theater hits with products like The Frame, this is an uncharacteristic misstep. It's not a cheap one, either: The Freestyle costs $899.99. That awkward price can be seen as another illustration of the projector's challenges. It's far more expensive than many portable pico projectors from smaller brands such as Anker and Xgimi but nowhere near as pricey as top-shelf home projectors. The Freestyle is caught in a no man's land: if the asking price had been higher, maybe Samsung could've gone more ambitious on specs -- especially brightness, which I'll get to later. And if it were cheaper, I might've been more forgiving of its underwhelming performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber is becoming friends with a former foe. The company has reached an agreement to list all New York City taxis on its app, an alliance that could ease the ride-hailing giant's driver shortage and temper high fares while directing more business to cabdrivers, whose livelihoods were affected by the emergence of car-sharing apps and the pandemic. From a report: While Uber has formed partnerships with some taxi operators overseas, and riders in several U.S. cities can use its app to book taxis if cabdrivers choose to be listed there, the New York City alliance is its first citywide partnership in the U.S. New York, one of Uber's most lucrative markets, has been a battlefield for the company and the city's iconic yellow taxis for years. "It's bigger and bolder than anything we've done," said Andrew Macdonald, Uber's global mobility chief. The company expects to launch the offering to riders later this spring. As part of the deal, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission's licensed technology partners will integrate their taxi-hailing apps' software with Uber's. Those apps -- run by Creative Mobile Technologies and Curb Mobility -- are used by the city's roughly 14,000 taxis, according to Uber. The two companies enable credit-card payments in taxis and also run the screens that display the weather, news and ads to riders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece: Protest is an important element of free speech that should be protected. Openness and inclusivity are cornerstones of the culture of open source, and the tools of open source communities are designed for global access and participation. Collectively, the very culture and tooling of open source -- issue tracking, messaging systems, repositories -- offer a unique signaling channel that may route around censorship imposed by tyrants to hold their power. Instead of malware, a better approach to free expression would be to use messages in commit logs to send anti-propaganda messages and to issue trackers to share accurate news inside Russia of what is really happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian military, to cite two obvious possibilities. There are so many outlets for open source communities to be creative without harming everyone who happens to load the update. We encourage community members to use both the freedoms and tools of open source innovatively and wisely to inform Russian citizens about the reality of the harm imposed on Ukrainian citizens and to support humanitarian and relief efforts in and supportive of Ukraine. Longer term, it's likely these weaponizations are like spitting into the wind: The downsides of vandalizing open source projects far outweigh any possible benefit, and the blowback will ultimately damage the projects and contributors responsible. By extension, all of open source is harmed. Use your power, yes -- but use it wisely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.