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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy have introduced the SMART Copyright Act of 2022. The bill requires online hosting services to implement standard technical protection measures, designated by the Copyright Office. The general idea is to grant the Copyright Office the power to designate standard technical protection measures to be implemented by online hosting platforms. These STMs can be tailored to specific niches such as audio and video, which offers much more flexibility than the current regime under the DMCA. In short, the bill will give the government more tools to facilitate and encourage the implementation of anti-piracy mechanisms, while allowing online services to keep their safe harbors. The full text of the bill provides more details on how the approval process of a proposed protection measure works. In addition to hearing stakeholders, experts, and the public, the designated protection measures have to be weighed on factors such as cost and availability. They shouldn't create any major burdens for online services. Similarly, the rights of the public are taken into account as well. This includes the impact a technical measure may have on privacy and data protection, as well as on free speech issues such as criticism and news. Finally, it is worth noting that online services will be able to appeal officially designated protection measures in court. In addition, they can also choose not to implement them. However, that opens the door to lawsuits from copyright holders. The statutory damages amounts for services that fail to implement the designated technical protection measures are capped at $150,000 for a single violation, but that number can shoot up for repeat offenders. [...] Rightsholders see the proposal as a great step forward to protect creators, while opponents classify it as a filtering tool that will censor free speech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden on Monday urged American companies to put up their cyber-defenses, citing "evolving intelligence that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks" against the U.S. From a report: "The Federal Government can't defend against this threat alone," Biden said in a lengthy statement released by the White House. He called on the private sector, as "critical infrastructure owners and operators," to "accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors." [...] "I urge our private sector partners to harden your cyber defenses immediately," Biden said in the statement. In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, the White House repeatedly publicized its intelligence about Moscow's plans in an effort to deter them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report: About 10 years ago, when Erik Arbuthnot first started hearing about phony-kidnapping hustles, his fellow agents at the FBI scoffed at the cases. "Don't worry about those," they told Arbuthnot. "Those are fake. We handle the real ones." Now the cases have become so widespread that the bureau has a name for them: virtual kidnappings. "It's a telephone extortion scheme," says Arbuthnot, who heads up virtual-kidnapping investigations for the FBI out of Los Angeles. Because many of the crimes go unreported, the bureau doesn't have a precise number on how widespread the scam is. But over the past few years, thousands of families like the Mendelsteins have experienced the same bizarre nightmare: a phone call, a screaming child, a demand for ransom money, and a kidnapping that -- after painful minutes, hours, or even days -- is revealed to be fake. There's the pastor in Memphis who, like Mendelstein, was told his daughter had been kidnapped. The man in Miami who thought his wife and baby daughter were being held for ransom. The guy in Missouri who got conned into thinking his elderly mother had been taken. Overall, the FBI reports, internet scams nearly doubled in 2020 -- and extortion cases like virtual kidnapping have rung up the third-most victims, right behind phishing schemes and phony sales calls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OneWeb, the satellite company part-owned by the British state, is turning to Elon Musk's SpaceX for help after it was barred from using Russian rockets to launch its latest orbiters. From a report: Under the arrangement, the communications firm will partner with SpaceX for its first launches later this year, adding to the 428 micro-satellites it already has in low-earth orbit. OneWeb and SpaceX did not disclose the terms of the launch arrangement. The company quotes a standard price of $67m to launch a Falcon 9 rocket â" up from $62m earlier this year, "to account for excessive levels of inflation." The 12% increase is the first in nearly six years. OneWeb was forced to abandon its plans to launch on one of Russia's Soyuz rockets earlier this month, after Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, demanded the satellites not be used for military purposes and the British government halt its financial backing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules today that could require companies to update investors annually on how much planet-heating pollution they're pumping out and how that pollution could ultimately affect their earnings. From a report: A slew of companies from Apple to Amazon have pledged to become carbon neutral in coming decades. Consistent updates on how much pollution they generate help ensure that climate pledges aren't just greenwashing or making false promises. The proposed rules are also supposed to protect investors as companies cope with disasters linked to climate change, like more extreme weather. "We are concerned that the existing disclosures of climate-related risks do not provide investors with the detailed and reliable climate-related information they need to make informed investments and voting decisions," Renee Jones, director of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, said during an SEC open meeting today. If the rules go into effect, public companies would need to share greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and electricity use. The SEC also sought to hold some companies responsible for indirect emissions that come from their supply chains and consumers using their products, a more contentious disclosure. Some companies have excluded these indirect emissions from climate pledges, arguing that this pollution is out of their control. The SEC said today that smaller companies won't have to disclose those indirect emissions, and larger companies only need to share the indirect emissions that are "material" or essential for investors' understanding of a company's financial situation -- a murky distinction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A data breach at HubSpot, a tool used by many companies to manage marketing campaigns and on-board new users, has affected BlockFi, Swan Bitcoin, NYDIG and Circle. From a report: However, all the companies said their operations were not affected and their treasuries were not at risk. HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool used to store users' names, phone numbers and email addresses for marketing purposes, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While user information was leaked to hackers, the affected companies said passwords and other internal information were not affected. In outreach emails seen by CoinDesk, the companies said HubSpot is an external tool and hackers did not gain access to internal systems. HubSpot said the breach was the result of a bad actor getting access to an employee account and using it to target stakeholders in the cryptocurrency industry.The company said 30 clients were affected, but has not published a full list.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk signaled plans to scale Tesla to the "extreme" while teasing the release of Tesla's "Master Plan Part 3" on Twitter one day before opening the automaker's first European factory. From a report: On Monday, Musk revealed on Twitter the themes that will dominate the next installment in Tesla's long-term playbook: artificial intelligence and scaling the automaker's operations. "Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI," Musk tweeted. "But I will also include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company."The plan may detail what "extreme size" looks like for Tesla and outline the automaker's strategy for scaling its manufacturing and supply chain amid a global pandemic and supply chain crunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's proposed taxation law of virtual digital assets won't permit individuals to offset loss from one asset against profit of another, the Ministry of Finance said Monday in a move that the head of the nation's top cryptocurrency exchange termed as "detrimental" and "regressive." From a report: India proposed law for taxing virtual currencies in February this year. It proposed taxing income from the transfer of any virtual assets at 30%. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, New Delhi proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. In a clarification posted on Monday, the Ministry of Finance today announced its intention to tax each digital asset investment independently, a departure from how the nation regulates transactions at the stock market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Moscow court on Monday found Meta Platforms guilty of "extremist activity", but said its decision would not affect the WhatsApp messenger service, focusing its ire on the company's already banned Facebook and Instagram social networks. From a report: Moscow's Tverskoi District Court upheld a lawsuit filed by Russian state prosecutors on banning the activities of Meta on Russian territory, the court's press service said in a statement. The U.S. company's lawyer, Victoria Shagina, had said in court earlier on Monday that Meta was not carrying out extremist activities and stood against Russophobia, the Interfax news agency reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uptake of the open-video codec AV1 has been slow, with major video providers waiting for broader device support. Things could change over the coming months, as both consumer electronics companies and chipset providers are poised to introduce new hardware with native AV1 decoding capabilities. From a report: Chief among them is Qualcomm, which is planning to add support for AV1 to its upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor, Protocol has learned from a source who has seen spec sheets for the chip. Internally known as SM8550, the chip is expected to be introduced at the end of this year at the earliest, which means we shouldn't expect any phones powered by it until 2023. The chip's Adreno video-processing unit will support native AV1 decode, something that none of Qualcomm's previous chips have offered. That's barring any major changes, with our source cautioning that things could shift before the chip actually enters production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is pushing ahead with plans to warn Windows 11 users that have installed the operating system on unsupported hardware. In a new update to Windows 11, a watermark has appeared on the desktop wallpaper for unsupported systems, alongside a similar warning in the landing page of the settings app. From a report: Microsoft had been testing these changes last month, but they're now rolling out to Release Preview just ahead of a full release to all Windows 11 users in the coming days. While Microsoft doesn't mention the addition of a watermark in its "improvements" list for this update, testers have noticed it's included. If Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware, a new desktop watermark will state "System requirements not met. Go to settings to learn more." It's similar, but far less prominent, to the semi-transparent watermark that appears in Windows if you haven't activated the OS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in a remote mountainous area of southern China on Monday, officials said, setting off a forest fire visible from space in the country's worst air disaster in nearly a decade. From a report: More than seven hours after communication was lost with the plane, there was still no word of survivors. The Civil Aviation Administration of China said in a statement the crash occurred near the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. The flight was traveling from Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan to the industrial center of Guangzhou along the east coast, it added. Villagers were first to arrive at the forested area where the plane went down, sparking a blaze big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images. Hundreds of rescue workers were swiftly dispatched from Guangxi and neighboring Guangdong province. State media reported all 737-800s in China Eastern's fleet were ordered grounded, while broadcaster CCTV said the airliner had set up nine teams to deal with aircraft disposal, accident investigation, family assistance and other pressing matters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Swiss municipality of Arbedo-Castione, a 70-meter crane stands tall. Six arms protrude from the top, hoisting giant blocks into the sky. But these aren't building blocks, and the crane isn't being used for construction. From a report: The steel tower is a giant mechanical energy storage system, designed by American-Swiss startup Energy Vault, that relies on gravity and 35-ton bricks to store and release energy. When power demand is low, the crane uses surplus electricity from the Swiss grid to raise the bricks and stack them at the top. When power demand rises, the bricks are lowered, releasing kinetic energy back to the grid. It might sound like a school science project, but this form of energy storage could be vital as the world transitions to clean energy. "There's a big push to get renewables deployed," Robert Piconi, founder of Energy Vault, tells CNN Business, adding that companies are under increasing pressure from governments, investors and employees to decarbonize. But relying on renewables for consistent power is impossible without energy storage, he says. Unlike a fossil fuel power station, which can operate night and day, wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning that if a cloud blocks the sun or there's a lull in the wind, electricity generation drops. To compete with fossil fuels, you need to "make renewables predictable," says Piconi, which means storing excess energy and being able to dispatch it when required. [...] Instead, Energy Vault decided to base its technology on a method developed over 100 years ago, which is widely used to store renewable energy: pumped storage hydropower. During off-peak periods, a turbine pumps water from a reservoir on low ground to one on higher ground, and during periods of peak demand, the water is allowed to flow down through the turbine, generating electrical energy. Piconi says Energy Vault relies on gravity in the same way, but "instead of using water, we're using these composite blocks." By doing it this way, he says the company is not dependent on topography and doesn't have to dig out reservoirs or create dams, which can have negative effects on the environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet describes CafePress as "a U.S. platform offering print-on-demand products" like custom t-shirts, hats, and mugs. "CafePress's past owner has been fined $500,000 over a litany of security failures and data breaches," ZDNet reported this week:CafePress became the subject of a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation surrounding how it handled security — and how the firm allegedly "failed to secure consumers' sensitive personal data and covered up a major breach." On March 15, the US regulator said that Residual Pumpkin is required to pay $500,000 in damages. According to the FTC's complaint (PDF), issued against the platform's former owner Residual Pumpkin Entity, LLC, and its current owner PlanetArt, LLC, there was a lack of "reasonable security measures" to prevent data breaches. In addition, the FTC claims that CafePress kept user data for longer than necessary, stored personally identifiable information including Social Security numbers and password reset answers in cleartext, and did not patch against known system vulnerabilities. "As a result of its shoddy security practices, CafePress' network was breached multiple times," the FTC says. CafePress experienced a major security incident in 2019. An attacker infiltrated the platform in February 2019 and was able to access data belonging to millions of users. This included email addresses, poorly-encrypted passwords, names, home addresses, security questions and answers, some partial card payment records, phone numbers, and at least 180,000 unencrypted Social Security numbers.... According to the FTC, CafePress was notified a month after the breach and did patch the security flaw — but did not investigate the breach properly "for several months." Customers were also not told. Instead, CafePress implemented a forced password reset as part of its "policy" and only informed users in September 2019, once the data breach had been publicly reported. In a separate case in 2018, CafePress allegedly was made aware of shops being compromised. These accounts were closed — and the shopkeepers, the victims, were then charged $25 account closure fees. The FTC also claims that the company "misled" users by using consumer email addresses for marketing, despite promises to the contrary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Music was one of the first industries that felt the sonic boom of the internet, starting with song-sharing websites like Napster in the late 1990s and iTunes digital downloads later," writes the New York Times. They take a quick look at how the music industry "survived an online revolution," arguing that streaming services "saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet," making it financially healthy and giving it a wider reach. "But all is not entirely well."Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There's a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they're not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation.... First, I'll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month. The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs.... Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999. Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.) There aren't an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That's what worries people who believe the music industry's digital success has peaked. Finally, the article points out that even the most-popular songs...aren't as popular as songs got in the past. And then it links to a story headlined "Streaming Saved Music. Artists Hate It." "The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The board members of the FIDO alliance include Amazon, Google, PayPal, RSA, and Apple and Microsoft (as well as Intel and Arm). It describes its mission as reducing the world's "over-reliance on passwords." Today Wired reports that the group thinks "it has finally identified the missing piece of the puzzle" for finally achieving large-scale adoption of a password-supplanting technology:On Thursday, the organization published a white paper that lays out FIDO's vision for solving the usability issues that have dogged passwordless features and, seemingly, kept them from achieving broad adoption.... The paper is conceptual, not technical, but after years of investment to integrate what are known as the FIDO2 and WebAuthn passwordless standards into Windows, Android, iOS, and more, everything is now riding on the success of this next step.... FIDO is looking to get to the heart of what still makes passwordless schemes tough to navigate. And the group has concluded that it all comes down to the procedure for switching or adding devices. If the process for setting up a new phone, say, is too complicated, and there's no simple way to log in to all of your apps and accounts — or if you have to fall back to passwords to reestablish your ownership of those accounts — then most users will conclude that it's too much of a hassle to change the status quo. The passwordless FIDO standard already relies on a device's biometric scanners (or a master PIN you select) to authenticate you locally without any of your data traveling over the Internet to a web server for validation. The main concept that FIDO believes will ultimately solve the new device issue is for operating systems to implement a "FIDO credential" manager, which is somewhat similar to a built-in password manager. Instead of literally storing passwords, this mechanism will store cryptographic keys that can sync between devices and are guarded by your device's biometric or passcode lock. At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last summer, the company announced its own version of what FIDO is describing, an iCloud feature known as "Passkeys in iCloud Keychain," which Apple says is its "contribution to a post-password world...." FIDO's white paper also includes another component, a proposed addition to its specification that would allow one of your existing devices, like your laptop, to act as a hardware token itself, similar to stand-alone Bluetooth authentication dongles, and provide physical authentication over Bluetooth. The idea is that this would still be virtually phish-proof since Bluetooth is a proximity-based protocol and can be a useful tool as needed in developing different versions of truly passwordless schemes that don't have to retain a backup password. Christiaan Brand, a product manager at Google who focuses on identity and security and collaborates on FIDO projects, says that the passkey-style plan follows logically from the smartphone or multi-device image of a passwordless future. "This grand vision of 'Let's move beyond the password,' we've always had this end state in mind to be honest, it just took until everyone had mobile phones in their pockets," Brand says.... To FIDO, the biggest priority is a paradigm shift in account security that will make phishing a thing of the past.... When asked if this is really it, if the death knell for passwords is truly, finally tolling, Google's Brand turns serious, but he doesn't hesitate to answer: "I feel like everything is coalescing," he says. "This should be durable." Such a change won't happen overnight, the article points out. "With any other tech migration (ahem, Windows XP), the road will inevitably prove arduous."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were trying to understand how water might behave under the high pressures inside distant planets. But along the way the team discovered a new form of ice, reports Phys.org, "redefining the properties of water at high pressures."Solid water, or ice, is like many other materials in that it can form different solid materials based on variable temperature and pressure conditions, like carbon forming diamond or graphite. However, water is exceptional in this aspect as there are at least 20 solid forms of ice known to us. A team of scientists working in UNLV's Nevada Extreme Conditions Lab pioneered a new method for measuring the properties of water under high pressure. The water sample was first squeezed between the tips of two opposite-facing diamonds — freezing into several jumbled ice crystals. The ice was then subjected to a laser-heating technique that temporarily melted it before it quickly re-formed into a powder-like collection of tiny crystals. By incrementally raising the pressure, and periodically blasting it with the laser beam, the team observed the water ice make the transition from a known cubic phase, Ice-VII, to the newly discovered intermediate, and tetragonal, phase, Ice-VIIt, before settling into another known phase, Ice-X.... While it's unlikely we'll find this new phase of ice anywhere on the surface of Earth, it is likely a common ingredient within the mantle of Earth as well as in large moons and water-rich planets outside of our solar system. The team's findings were reported in the March 17 issue of the journal Physical Review B.... The work also recalibrates our understanding of the composition of exoplanets, UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat added. Researchers hypothesize that the Ice-VIIt phase of ice could exist in abundance in the crust and upper mantle of expected water-rich planets outside of our solar system, meaning they could have conditions habitable for life. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post looks at what happened after Starlink activated its satellite-based internet service to help Ukraine:Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk's companies and European allies, which has proved "very effective," Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday. "The quality of the link is excellent," Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. "We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day...." A person familiar with Starlink's effort in Ukraine, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there are more than 5,000 terminals in the country.... Internet flows deteriorated on the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and have not fully recovered, according to data-monitoring services. But since that initial dip, connectivity has remained fairly stable, with mainly temporary, isolated outages even during heavy Russian shelling. "Every day there are outages, but generally service comes back," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which monitors global data flows. Even before Fedorov tweeted at Musk for help, SpaceX was working on a way to get Starlink to Ukraine. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a talk at California Institute of Technology this month that the company had been working for several weeks to get regulatory approval to allow the satellites to communicate in Ukraine. In addition, the Washington Post reports, this week on Twitter Elon Musk also "challenged Putin to a fight and followed up by pledging he would use just one hand if Putin was scared. And he told Putin he could bring a bear." Reached for comment by the Post's reporters, Elon Musk responded by telling The Post to give his regards "to your puppet master Besos," following it with two emojis. But the Post's article also argues Starlink's technology "could have widespread implications for the future of war. Internet has become an essential tool for communication, staying informed and even powering weapons." And The Telegraph reports that Starlink "is helping Ukrainian forces win the drone war as they use the technology in their effort to track and kill invading Russians."In the vanguard of Ukraine's astonishingly effective military effort against Vladimir Putin's forces is a unit called Aerorozvidka (Aerial Reconnaissance) which is using surveillance and attack drones to target Russian tanks and positions. Amid internet and power outages, which are expected to get worse, Ukraine is turning to the newly available Starlink system for some of its communications. Drone teams in the field, sometimes in badly connected rural areas, are able to use Starlink to connect them to targeters and intelligence on their battlefield database. They can direct the drones to drop anti-tank munitions, sometimes flying up silently to Russian forces at night as they sleep in their vehicles... Should Ukraine's internet largely collapse, the "drone warriors" of Aerorozvidka would still be able to communicate with their bases by sending signals from mobile Starlink terminals, and using ground stations in neighbouring countries including Poland.... As Ukraine's internet is inevitably degraded, Starlink will be an alternative. General James Dickinson, commander of US Space Command, told the Senate armed services committee: "What we're seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation, or a proliferated architecture, can provide in terms of redundancy and capability." It's not all Starlink. The Telegraph points out that "The Ukrainian system benefitted from equipment given by Western countries, including radio communications which superceded Soviet-era technology, and the US has also poured in millions of dollars to protect against Russian hacking, jamming of signals and attempts to 'spoof' GPS technology." And meanwhile, weakness in Russia's own communications infrastructure may have played a role in the killing of five senior Russian generals in the last three weeks, according to a recent CNN interview with retired U.S. army general and former CIA director David Petraeus:"The bottom line is that [Russia's] command-and-control has broken down. Their communications have been jammed by the Ukranians. Their secure comms didn't work. They had to go single-channel. That's jammable, and that's exactly what the Ukranians have been doing to that. They used cellphones. The Ukranians blocked the prefix for Russia, so that didn't work. Then they took down 3G. [The Russians] are literally stealing cellphones from Ukranian civilians to communicate among each other. So what happens? The column gets stopped. An impatient general is sitting back there in his armored or whatever vehicle. He goes forward to find out what's going on... And the Ukranians have very, very good snipers, and they've just been picking them off left and right. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Exposure to even moderate ambient lighting during nighttime sleep, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms your cardiovascular function during sleep and increases your insulin resistance the following morning," announced Northwestern Medicine, citing a new study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Washington Post reports:Researchers at Northwestern University had two groups of 10 young adults sleep in differently lit rooms. One group slept in rooms with dim light for two nights; the other slept one night in a room with dim night and the next in a room with moderate overhead light — about the equivalent of an overcast day. Participants wore heart monitors at night. In the morning, they did a variety of glucose tests. Both groups got the same amount of sleep but their bodies experienced very different nights. Both groups responded well to insulin the first night, when they both slept in dim lighting. On the second night, however, the group sleeping in brighter lighting didn't respond as well to insulin. The dim light sleepers' insulin resistance scores fell about 4 percent on the second night, while the bright sleepers' rose about 15 percent. Their heart rates were faster on the bright night, too. "[J]ust a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome," concludes senior study author Dr. Phyllis Zee. "It's important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep." From Northwestern's announcement:There is already evidence that light exposure during daytime increases heart rate via activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks your heart into high gear and heightens alertness to meet the challenges of the day. "Our results indicate that a similar effect is also present when exposure to light occurs during nighttime sleep," Zee said.... An earlier study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at a large population of healthy people who had exposure to light during sleep. They were more overweight and obese, Zee said. "Now we are showing a mechanism that might be fundamental to explain why this happens. We show it's affecting your ability to regulate glucose," Zee said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday."Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue. It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated. For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...." Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions. Earlier this month a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) argued in the Wall Street Journal that"An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers, as the U.S. was encroaching on Russia's largest nuclear export market...." "The project was intended to allow Ukraine to store this fuel safely without shipping it back to Russia for reprocessing. The processing and storage facility was completed in 2020, and Holtec and SSE Chernobyl were loading the canisters to be stored when the war began on February 24..."By taking over Chernobyl, Russia gives itself control of the disposal of its spent fuel, which it can store in canisters at the site or ship to a reprocessing facility in Russia. Either way, this represents hundreds of millions of dollars for Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear enterprise.... The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday."Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue. It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated. For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...." Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New Yorker argues that photos on newer iPhones are "coldly crisp and vaguely inhuman, caught in the uncanny valley where creative expression meets machine learning...." "[T]he truth is that iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of 'computational photography,' a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information. Each picture registered by the lens is altered to bring it closer to a pre-programmed ideal."In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro... But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, "I feel a little duped." Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl's upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that, when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), "what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture." The new iPhone promises "next level" photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. "Make it less smart — I'm serious," she said. Lately she's taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google's line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures.... Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, "I've tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing." A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device "sees the things I'm trying to photograph as a problem to solve," he added. The image processing also eliminates digital noise, smoothing it into a soft blur, which might be the reason behind the smudginess that McCabe sees in photos of her daughter's gymnastics. The "fix" ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original. Earlier this month, Apple's iPhone team agreed to provide me information, on background, about the camera's latest upgrades. A staff member explained that, when a user takes a photograph with the newest iPhones, the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a "Deep Fusion" feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. This process is an extreme version of high-dynamic range, or H.D.R., a technique that previously required some software savvy.... The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame — faces, landscapes, skies — and exposes each one differently. On both the 12 Pro and 13 Pro, I've found that the image processing makes clouds and contrails stand out with more clarity than the human eye can perceive, creating skies that resemble the supersaturated horizons of an anime film or a video game. Andy Adams, a longtime photo blogger, told me, "H.D.R. is a technique that, like salt, should be applied very judiciously." Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not.... The average iPhone photo strains toward the appearance of professionalism and mimics artistry without ever getting there. We are all pro photographers now, at the tap of a finger, but that doesn't mean our photos are good.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quanta magazine describes an "explosion of interest" in what they're calling algorithms with predictions, arguing that machine learning tools "have, in a real way, rejuvenated research into basic algorithms."Machine learning and traditional algorithms are "two substantially different ways of computing, and algorithms with predictions is a way to bridge the two," said Piotr Indyk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a way to combine these two quite different threads...." In the past few years, researchers have shown how to incorporate algorithms with predictions into scheduling algorithms, chip design and DNA-sequence searches. In addition to performance gains, the field also advances an approach to computer science that's growing in popularity: making algorithms more efficient by designing them for typical uses.... By ignoring the worst-case scenarios, researchers can design algorithms tailored to the situations they'll likely encounter. For example, while databases currently treat all data equally, algorithms with predictions could lead to databases that structure their data storage based on their contents and uses.... [M]ost of these new structures only incorporate a single machine learning element. Tim Kraska, a computer scientist at MIT, imagines an entire system built up from several separate pieces, each of which relies on algorithms with predictions and whose interactions are regulated by prediction-enhanced components. "Taking advantage of that will impact a lot of different areas," Kraska said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader mmanciop reminded us that Ubuntu released a new version of its "circle of friends" logo this week (which its designer says gives it "a more contemporary look and feel.") From the Ubuntu blog:We proudly present to you the transformation of the Circle of Friends logo for Ubuntu. The new logo isn't a revolution; rather, it's an evolution of the Circle of Friends. As you can see at the top of the post, the classic white-on-orange colour scheme hasn't changed. But the new version sports sleek lines which bind the Circle of Friends even more closely together. While it is important to have a respectful continuity with the previous Circle of Friends, the updated version is leaner, more focused, more sophisticated. It also makes a little more sense that the heads are now inside the circle, facing each other and connecting more directly. The rectangular orange tag is a break from the conventional square or circle, as it allows for the boldness of the orange to express itself and provides a recognisable colourful mark across media. Finally, the logo moves from a tiny superscript to a large, dynamic and leading presence. Some might wonder why we had to touch the Ubuntu logo at all. As one can imagine, it is a daunting honour to work on something so many of us have such a strong connection to. But in the end, a logo should match what it represents. Similar to how Ubuntu continues to evolve and adapt to new uses in technology, its logo should follow suit to encapsulate and reflect such ongoing change. For comparison, here's the original logo. Share your reactions in the comments. (For example, how do you think it compares to other logos?) Do you like it more or less than, say, the logo for Raku?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A former Apple employee has been charged with defrauding the tech giant out of more than $10 million," reports NBC News, "by taking kickbacks, stealing equipment and laundering money, federal prosecutors said."Dhirendra Prasad, 52, worked for 10 years as a buyer in Apple's Global Service Supply Chain department. A federal criminal case unsealed Friday alleges that he exploited his position to defraud the company in several schemes, including stealing parts and causing the company to pay for items and services it never received. A court has allowed the federal government to seize five real estate properties and financial accounts worth about $5 million from Prasad, and the government is seeking to keep those assets as proceeds of crime, the U.S. Attorney's office in San Jose said in a news release... Two owners of vendor companies that did business with Apple have admitted to conspiring with Prasad to commit fraud and launder money, prosecutors said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In On the Weaponisation of Open Source, software engineering consultant Gerald Benischke examines how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has spilled over into areas of software development, with some unintended consequences. In particular, Benischke looks at the decision by MongoDB to cut off services in Russia, the destructive change in a node library that deleted files on Russian IPs, and even a change in the code/licence in a community terraform module to assert that Putin is a 'dickhead.' Benischke concludes, "My problem is that this weaponisation is killing off trust. I think the temptation of using open source projects as weapons against Russia should be resisted because it sets a dangerous precedent and may ultimately set back the open source movement and push organisations back into seeking refuge in commercial software with all its opaqueness and obscurity. It's not about sitting on the fence or taking sides in a war. It's about what open source has achieved over the last 30 years and I think that's now at risk of become collateral damage." Meanwhile, the war is also being fought on the Cloud front, with Microsoft halting all new sales in Russia. In fact, all of the major U.S. cloud providers have stepped back from doing business in Russia. "You basically have Russia becoming a commercial pariah," explained economist Mary Lovely. "Pretty much no company, no multinational, wants to be caught on the wrong side of U.S. and Western sanctions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader summarizes some important news from the web page of Jason Donenfeld (creator of the open-source VPN protocol WireGuard):The Linux kernel's random number generator has seen its first set of major improvements in over a decade, improving everything from the cryptography to the interface used. Not only does it finally retire SHA-1 in favor of BLAKE2s [in Linux kernel 5.17], but it also at long last unites '/dev/random' and '/dev/urandom' [in the upcoming Linux kernel 5.18], finally ending years of Slashdot banter and debate: The most significant outward-facing change is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are now exactly the same thing, with no differences between them at all, thanks to their unification in random: block in /dev/urandom. This removes a significant age-old crypto footgun, already accomplished by other operating systems eons ago. [...] The upshot is that every Internet message board disagreement on /dev/random versus /dev/urandom has now been resolved by making everybody simultaneously right! Now, for the first time, these are both the right choice to make, in addition to getrandom(0); they all return the same bytes with the same semantics. There are only right choices. Phoronix adds:One exciting change to also note is the getrandom() system call may be a hell of a lot faster with the new kernel. The getrandom() call for obtaining random bytes is yielding much faster performance with the latest code in development. Intel's kernel test robot is seeing an 8450% improvement with the stress-ng getrandom() benchmark. Yes, an 8450% improvement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are already several startups focused on replacing long-haul freight trucks with self-driving trucks, reports Bloomberg — and the potential is huge. (Alternate URLs here and here.)The short trip from a factory or distribution center to an interstate is usually far more complicated than the next several hundred miles. The same is true once the machine exits the interstate. One solution is for trucking companies to set up transfer stations at either end, where human drivers handle the tricky first leg of the trip and then hitch their cargo up to robot rigs for the tiresome middle portion. Another station at the exit would flip the freight back to an analog truck for delivery. Such a system, according to a new study out of the University of Michigan, could replace about 90% of human driving in U.S. long-haul trucking, the equivalent of roughly 500,000 jobs. "When we talked to truck drivers, literally every one said, 'Yeah, this part of the job can be automated,'" explained Aniruddh Mohan, a PhD candidate in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-author of the study. "We thought they would be a bit more dubious." There are, however, a handful of big ifs. For one, the autonomous systems would have to figure out how to navigate in crummy weather far better than they can now. Second, regulators in many states still haven't cleared the way for robot rigs. Finally, there's the infrastructure to consider — all the transfer stations where the cargo would pass from the caffeine-fueled analog to the algorithms. Still, if trucking companies focused only on America's Sun Belt, they could fairly easily offset 10% of human driving, the study shows. If they deployed the robots nationwide, but in warmer months only, half of the country's trucking hours could go autonomous. The article points out that as it is, the workforce of low-paid long-haul truckers "tends to turn over entirely every 12 months or so." "At the moment, the industry is short about 61,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Belarusian railway workers have reportedly cut off all rail connections between their country and Ukraine," reports Germany's public broadcaster DW:Ukrainian railway chief Olexander Kamyshin thanked Belarusian railway workers for this claimed act of sabotage on Saturday. "As of today, I can say there is no rail traffic between Belarus and Ukraine," Kamyshin was quoted as saying by Ukraine's Unian news agency. Kamyshin said that he would not give further details. Franak Viacorka, advisor to exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, tweeted about the incident and said that it had been confirmed by Belarusian railway workers, while declining to provide details. Although Russia has moved many of its troops and military equipment into Ukraine through Belarus, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has not committed Belarusian troops to the offensive. A Ukrainian online newspaper claims that "There is no longer a railway connection between Ukraine and Belarus, so the Russian occupiers will not be able to deliver Russian equipment by rail from Belarus," citing the longer televisied remarks of Ukrainian railway chief Olexander Kamyshin:"I believe that these people will be able to prevent Belarusian Railways from transporting military convoys to Ukraine," Kamyshin added. "Currently, the railways are out of order", Kamyshin confirmed, "so Russian equipment from Belarus will not be able to be delivered."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom's Guide tested a Mac Studio workstation equipped with an M1 Ultra with the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarks "to get a sense of how effectively it handles single-core and multi-core workflows." "Since our M1 Ultra is the best you can buy (at a rough price of $6,199) it sports a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU, as well as 128GB of unified memory (RAM) and a 2TB SSD." Slashdot reader exomondo shares their results:We ran the M1 Ultra through the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarking test multiple times and after averaging the results, we found that the M1 Ultra does indeed outperform top-of-the-line Windows gaming PCs when it comes to multi-core CPU performance. Specifically, the M1 Ultra outperformed a recent Alienware Aurora R13 desktop we tested (w/ Intel Core i7-12700KF, GeForce RTX 3080, 32GB RAM), an Origin Millennium (2022) we just reviewed (Core i9-12900K CPU, RTX 3080 Ti GPU, 32GB RAM), and an even more 3090-equipped HP Omen 45L we tested recently (Core i9-12900K, GeForce RTX 3090, 64GB RAM) in the Geekbench 5.4 multi-core CPU benchmark. However, as you can see from the chart of results below, the M1 Ultra couldn't match its Intel-powered competition in terms of CPU single-core performance. The Ultra-powered Studio also proved slower to transcode video than the afore-mentioned gaming PCs, taking nearly 4 minutes to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake. All of the gaming PCs I just mentioned completed the same task faster, over 30 seconds faster in the case of the Origin Millennium. Before we even get into the GPU performance tests it's clear that while the M1 Ultra excels at multi-core workflows, it doesn't trounce the competition across the board. When we ran our Mac Studio review unit through the Geekbench 5.4 OpenCL test (which benchmarks GPU performance by simulating common tasks like image processing), the Ultra earned an average score of 83,868. That's quite good, but again it fails to outperform Nvidia GPUs in similarly-priced systems. They also share some results from the OpenCL Benchmarks browser, which publicly displays scores from different GPUs that users have uploaded:Apple's various M1 chips are on the list as well, and while the M1 Ultra leads that pack it's still quite a ways down the list, with an average score of 83,940. Incidentally, that means it ranks below much older GPUs like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 (85,639) and AMD's Radeon VII (86,509). So here again we see that while the Ultra is fast, it can't match the graphical performance of GPUs that are 2-3 years old at this point — at least, not in these synthetic benchmarks. These tests don't always accurately reflect real-world CPU and GPU performance, which can be dramatically influenced by what programs you're running and how they're optimized to make use of your PC's components. Their conclusion?When it comes to tasks like photo editing or video and music production, the M1 Ultra w/ 128GB of RAM blazes through workloads, and it does so while remaining whisper-quiet. It also makes the Mac Studio a decent gaming machine, as I was able to play less demanding games like Crusader Kings III, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Total War: Warhammer II at reasonable (30+ fps) framerates. But that's just not on par with the performance we expect from high-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090.... Of course, if you don't care about games and are in the market for a new Mac with more power than just about anything Apple's ever made, you want the Studio with M1 Ultra.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Supporting generics has been Go's most often requested feature, and we're proud to deliver the generic support that the majority of users need today," the Go blog announced this week. * It's part of what Go's development team is calling the "biggest change ever to the language". SiliconANGLE writes that "Right out of the gate, Go 1.18 is getting a CPU speed performance boost of up to 20% for Apple M1, ARM64 and PowerPC64 chips. This is all from an expansion of Go 1.17's calling conventions for the application binary interface on these processor architectures." And Go 1.18 also introduces native support for fuzz testing — the first major programming language to do so, writes ZDNet:As Google explains, fuzz testing or 'fuzzing' is a means of testing the vulnerability of a piece of software by throwing arbitrary or invalid data at it to expose bugs and unknown errors. This adds an additional layer of security to Go's code that will keep it protected as its functionality evolves — crucial as attacks on software continue to escalate both in frequency and complexity. "At Google we are committed to securing the online infrastructure and applications the world depends upon," said Eric Brewer, VIP infrastructure at Google.... While other languages support fuzzing, Go is the first major programming language to incorporate it into its core toolchain, meaning — unlike other languages — third-party support integrations aren't required. Google is emphasizing Go's security features — and its widespread adoption. ZDNet writes:Google created Go in 2007 and was designed specifically to help software engineers build secure, open-source enterprise applications for modern, multi-core computing systems. More than three-quarters of Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects, including Kubernetes and Istio, are written in Go, says Google. [Also Docker and Etc.] According to data from Stack Overflow, some 10% of developers are writing in Go worldwide, and there are signs that more recruiters are seeking out Go coders in their search for tech talent..... "Although we have a dedicated Go team at Google, we welcome a significant amount of contributions from our community. It's a shared effort, and with their updates we're helping our community achieve Go's long-term vision. Or, as the Go blog says:We want to thank every Go user who filed a bug, sent in a change, wrote a tutorial, or helped in any way to make Go 1.18 a reality. We couldn't do it without you. Thank you. Enjoy Go 1.18! * Supporting generics "includes major — but fully backward-compatible — changes to the language," explains the release notes. Although it adds a few cautionary notes:These new language changes required a large amount of new code that has not had significant testing in production settings. That will only happen as more people write and use generic code. We believe that this feature is well implemented and high quality. However, unlike most aspects of Go, we can't back up that belief with real world experience. Therefore, while we encourage the use of generics where it makes sense, please use appropriate caution when deploying generic code in production. While we believe that the new language features are well designed and clearly specified, it is possible that we have made mistakes.... it is possible that there will be code using generics that will work with the 1.18 release but break in later releases. We do not plan or expect to make any such change. However, breaking 1.18 programs in future releases may become necessary for reasons that we cannot today foresee. We will minimize any such breakage as much as possible, but we can't guarantee that the breakage will be zero.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LibrePlanet, the annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, will be happening online this weekend. The event "provides an opportunity for community activists, domain experts, and people seeking solutions for themselves to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics," according to its web page. This year's LibrePlanet theme is "Living Liberation". And while you're listening to the presentations, you can apparently also interact with the rest of the community:Each LibrePlanet room has its own IRC channel on the Libera.Chat network... Want to interact with other conference-goers in a virtual space? Join us on LibreAdventure, where you'll be able to video chat with fellow free software users, journey to the stars, and walk around a replica of the FSF office! Our Minetest server is back by popular demand, and now running version 5.x of everyone's favorite free software, voxel sandbox game. You can install Minetest through your GNU/Linux distro's package manager, and point your client to minetest.libreplanet.org with the default port 30000. Sunday's presentations include "Living in freedom with GNU Emacs" and "Hacking my brain: Free virtual reality implementations and their potential for therapeutic use." And Sunday will also include a talk from Seth Schoen, the first staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who helped develop the Let's Encrypt certificate authority) titled "Reducing Internet address waste: The IPv4 unicast extensions project." View the complete schedule here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal," reports the Washington Post. "The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.""This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system," said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email. "Antarctic climatology has been rewritten," tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered "impossible" and "unthinkable" before they actually occurred. Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change. What is considered "warm" over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they've been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius) — but that's a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards. The average high temperature in Vostok — at the center of the eastern ice sheet — is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to zero (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it's been there during March since record keeping began 65 years ago. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius). "In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values ââabove -30ÂC were never observed," wrote Di Battista in an email.... University of Wisconsin Antarctic researchers Linda Keller and Matt Lazzara said in an email that such a high temperature is particularly noteworthy since March marks the beginning of autumn in Antarctica, rather than January, when there is more sunlight. At this time of year, Antarctica is losing about 25 minutes of sunlight each day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine turns up in Mike Melanson's column "This Week in Programming":While the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) definition of open source software is quite clear on the matter — there must be "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" — the issue of who should be allowed to use open source software, according to ethical considerations, has long been debated. Over the last month, this topic has again become a focus of debate as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to developers calling for blanket bans by companies like GitHub and GitLab; and to some developers even taking action. Earlier this month, we wrote about how open source gateway Scarf began limiting access to open source packages for the Russian government and military entities, via its gateway. As we noted at the time, there was a primary distinction made when Scarf took this action: distribution of open source software is separate from the licensing of it. Those points of the OSI definition pertain to the licensing, not to some entity actively providing the software to others. Since then, discussions around these ideas have continued, and this week an essay by Bradley M. Kuhn, a policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy, argues that copyleft won't solve all problems, just some of them. The essay specifically takes to task the idea that open source software can effectively affect change by way of licensing limitations. He spent nearly 3,000 words on the topic, before pointedly addressing the issue of Russia — with a similar conclusion to the one reached by Scarf earlier this month. Kuhn argues that "FOSS licenses are not an effective tool to advance social justice causes other than software freedom" and that, instead, developers have a moral obligation to take stances by way of other methods. "For example, FOSS developers should refuse to work specifically on bug reports from companies who don't pay their workers a living wage," Kuhn offers in an example. Regarding Russia specifically, Kuhn again points to distribution as an avenue of protest, while still remaining in line with the principles of free and open source software. "Every FOSS license in existence permits capricious distribution; software freedom guarantees the right to refuse to distribute new versions of the software. (i.e., Copyleft does not require that you publish all your software on the Internet for everyone, or that you give equal access to everyone — rather, it merely requires that those whom you chose to give legitimate access to the software also receive CCS). FOSS projects should thus avoid providing Putin easy access to updates to their FOSS," writes Kuhn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs," explains the project's web site. And now that first Asahi Linux alpha release is out — ready for testing on M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max machines (except Mac Studio):We're really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward! Keep in mind that this is still a very early, alpha release. It is intended for developers and power users; if you decide to install it, we hope you will be able to help us out by filing detailed bug reports and helping debug issues. That said, we welcome everyone to give it a try — just expect things to be a bit rough.... Asahi Linux is developed by a group of volunteers, and led by marcan as his primary job. You can support him directly via Patreon and GitHub Sponsors.... Can I dual-boot macOS and Linux? Yes! In fact, we expect you to do that, and the installer doesn't support replacing macOS at this point. This is because we have no mechanism for updating system firmware from Linux yet, and until we do it makes sense to keep a macOS install lying around for that. You can have as many macOS and Linux installs as you want, and they will all play nicely and show up in Apple's boot picker. Each Linux install acts as a self-contained OS and should not interfere with the others. Note that keeping a macOS install around does mean you lose ~70GB of disk space (in order to allow for updates, since the macOS updater is quite inefficient). In the future we expect to have a mechanism for firmware updates from Linux and better integration, at which point we'll be comfortable recommending Linux-only setups.... Is this just Arch Linux ARM? Pretty much! Most of our work is in the kernel and a few core support packages, and we rely on Linux's excellent existing ARM64 support. The Asahi Linux reference distro images are based off of Arch Linux ARM and simply add our own package repository, which only adds a few packages. You can freely convert between Arch Linux ARM and Asahi Linux by adding or removing this repository and the relevant packages, although vanilla Arch Linux ARM kernels will not boot on these machines at this time. The project's home page adds that "All contributors are welcome, of any skill level!" "Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform," the team explains. "In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it." But they're already documenting the Apple Silicon platform on their GitHub wiki.We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects.... Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn't a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won't help with the development). As long as no code is taken from macOS to build the Linux support, the result is completely legal to distribute and for end-users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. An interesting observataion from Slashdot reader mrwireless: It once again seems Apple is informally supportive of these efforts, as the recent release of OS Monterey 12.3 makes the process even simpler. As Twitter user Matthew Garrett writes: "People who hate UEFI should read https://github.com/AsahiLinux/... — Apple made deliberate design choices that allow third party OSes to run on M1 hardware without compromising security, and with much less closed code than on basically any modern x86."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A wild new theory suggests there may be another 'anti-universe,' running backward in time prior to the Big Bang," writes Live Science, citing a new paper recently accepted for publication in the journal Annals of Physics.The idea assumes that the early universe was small, hot and dense — and so uniform that time looks symmetric going backward and forward. If true, the new theory means that dark matter isn't so mysterious; it's just a new flavor of a ghostly particle called a neutrino that can only exist in this kind of universe. And the theory implies there would be no need for a period of "inflation" that rapidly expanded the size of the young cosmos soon after the Big Bang. If true, then future experiments to hunt for gravitational waves, or to pin down the mass of neutrinos, could answer once and for all whether this mirror anti-universe exists.... Physicists have identified a set of fundamental symmetries in nature.... We live in an expanding universe. This universe is filled with lots of particles doing lots of interesting things, and the evolution of the universe moves forward in time. If we extend the concept of CPT [charge/parity/time] symmetry to our entire cosmos, then our view of the universe can't be the entire picture. Instead, there must be more. To preserve the CPT symmetry throughout the cosmos, there must be a mirror-image cosmos that balances out our own. This cosmos would have all opposite charges than we have, be flipped in the mirror, and run backward in time. Our universe is just one of a twin. Taken together, the two universes obey CPT symmetry. The study researchers next asked what the consequences of such a universe would be. They found many wonderful things. For one, a CPT-respecting universe naturally expands and fills itself with particles, without the need for a long-theorized period of rapid expansion known as inflation. While there's a lot of evidence that an event like inflation occurred, the theoretical picture of that event is incredibly fuzzy. It's so fuzzy that there is plenty of room for proposals of viable alternatives.... We would never have access to our twin, the CPT-mirror universe, because it exists "behind" our Big Bang, before the beginning of our cosmos. The theory ultimately just extends the symmetry of CPT, argues the article, "from applying to just the 'actors' of the universe (forces and fields) to the 'stage' itself, the entire physical object of the universe." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the story!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers testing repurposed drugs against Covid-19 found that ivermectin didn't reduce hospital admissions, in the largest trial yet of the effect of the antiparasitic on the disease driving the pandemic," reports the Wall Street Journal:Public-health authorities and researchers have for months said the drug hasn't shown any benefit in treating the disease.... The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn't fare better than those who received a placebo. "There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful," said Edward Mills, one of the study's lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada's McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. "That finding is consistent with long-standing FDA claims that ivermectin showed no benefits in clinical testing and could be dangerous in large doses," reports the New York Daily News. These new findings "have been accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal," notes Seeking Alpha.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise":When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years.... On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.) By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible." Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too." Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'" Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible. The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max." The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: A simple electrical circuit has learned to recognize flowers based on their petal size. That may seem trivial compared with artificial intelligence (AI) systems that recognize faces in a crowd, transcribe spoken words into text, and perform other astounding feats. However, the tiny circuit outshines conventional machine learning systems in one key way: It teaches itself without any help from a computer -- akin to a living brain. The result demonstrates one way to avoid the massive amount of computation typically required to tune an AI system, an issue that could become more of a roadblock as such programs grow increasingly complex. [...] The network was tuned to perform a variety of simple AI tasks. For example, it could distinguish with greater than 95% accuracy between three species of iris depending on four physical measurements of a flower: the lengths and widths of its petals and sepals -- the leaves just below the blossom. That's a canonical AI test that uses a standard set of 150 images, 30 of which were used to train the network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j. The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 percent free and open source version" of Neo4J EE. And last month, two other companies challenged by Neo4j -- PureThink and iGov -- were also required by a court ruling to make similar concessions. ONgDB is forked from Neo4j EE, which in May 2018 dropped the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) and adopted a new license that incorporates the AGPLv3 alongside additional limitations spelled out in the Commons Clause license. This new Neo4j EE license forbade non-paying users of the software from reselling the code or offering some support services, and thus is not open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative. The Graph Foundation, PureThink, and iGov offered ONgDB as a "free and open source" version of Neo4j in the hope of winning customers who preferred an open-source license. That made it more challenging for Neo4j to compete. So in 2018 and 2019 Neo4j and its Swedish subsidiary pursued legal claims against the respective firms and their principals for trademark and copyright infringement, among other things. The Graph Foundation settled [PDF] in February 2021 as the company explained in a blog post. The organization discontinued support for ONgDB versions 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. And it released ONgDB 1.0 in their place as a fork of AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j EE version 3.4.0.rc02. Last May, the judge hearing the claims against PureThink, and iGov granted Neo4j's motion for partial summary judgment [PDF] and forbade the defendants from infringing on the company's Neo4j trademark and from advertising ONgDB "as a free and open source drop-in replacement of Neo4j Enterprise Edition" The defendants appealed, and in February the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision that the company's "statements regarding ONgDB as 'free and open source' versions of Neo4j EE are false." "Stop saying Open Source when it's not," said the Open Source Initiative in a blog post. "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we've always known: that it's false advertising to claim that software is 'open source' when it's not licensed under an open source license."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station last night for a six-month stay, writess the Times of London. They were wearing flight suits "in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag, in what appeared to be a daring statement against the war." Space.com reports:Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, the Soyuz commander, was asked about the colors during a hatch-opening ceremony webcast by Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos. He responded (in Russian) that there was a surplus of yellow fabric in the warehouse, according to space exploration enthusiast Katya Pavlushchenko, who posted a Twitter thread about the exchange. Not everybody's buying this answer, however. Some folks with knowledge of spaceflight procedures seem to think it could be a show of support for Ukraine, which Russia invaded on February 24.... There are other possible explanations for the flight suits as well. For example, multiple people on Twitter have pointed out that the colors are close to those of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, which Artemyev, Matveev and Korsakov all attended. This is all just speculation; all we have to go on at the moment is Artemyev's cryptic response during the hatch-opening ceremony. Hopefully one of the cosmonauts will offer some more details in the not-too-distant future. None of the three newly arrived cosmonauts hails from Ukraine, by the way. Artemyev was born in present-day Latvia, Matveev is from St. Petersburg and Korsakov was born in what is now Kyrgyzstan. Next month a SpaceX Dragon is expected to carry three millionaires to the Space Station for a week-long visit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, NASA's new giant rocket, the Space Launch System, emerged out into the Florida air, embarking on a torturously slow 11-hour journey to its primary launchpad at Kennedy Space Center. The Verge reports: It was a big moment for NASA, having spent more than a decade on the development of this rocket, with the goal of using the vehicle to send cargo and people into deep space. The rollout of the SLS was just a taste of what's to come. The rocket will undergo what is known as a wet dress rehearsal in April, going through all the operations and procedures it will go through during a typical launch, including filling up its tanks with propellant. If that goes well, then the rocket will be rolled back to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, the giant cavernous building where the SLS was pieced together. Following a few more tests, the rocket will be rolled back out to the launchpad ahead of its first flight, scheduled for sometime this summer at the earliest. You can view photos from the SLS's big debut embedded in The Verge's article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Proposed UK laws could see top managers at tech companies be jailed if they fail to meet the demands of regulators. The laws, coming in the form of an Online Safety Bill, were introduced to Parliament on Thursday after almost a year of consultation. The UK government commenced work on the proposed laws in May last year to push a duty of care onto social media platforms so that tech companies are forced to protect users from dangerous content, such as disinformation and online abuse. Under the proposed legislation, executives of tech companies could face prosecution or jail time if they fail to cooperate with information notices issued by Ofcom, UK's communications regulator. Through the Bill, Ofcom would gain the power to issue information notices for the purpose of determining whether tech companies are performing their online safety functions. A raft of new offenses have also been added to the Bill, including making in-scope companies' senior managers criminally liable if they destroy evidence, fail to attend or provide false information in interviews with Ofcom, or obstruct the regulator when it enters company offices. The Bill also looks to require social media platforms, search engines, and other apps and websites that allow people to post their own content to implement various measures to protect children, tackle illegal activity and uphold their stated terms and conditions. Among these measures are mandatory age checks for sites that host pornography, criminalizing cyberflashing, and a requirement for large social media platforms to give adults the ability to automatically block people who have not verified their identity on the platforms. The proposed laws, if passed, would also force social media platforms to up their moderation efforts, with the Bill calling for platforms to remove paid-for scam ads swiftly once they are alerted of their existence. A requirement for social media platforms to moderate "legal but harmful" content is also contained in the Bill, which will make large social media platforms have a duty to carry risk assessments on these types of content. Platforms will also have to set out clearly in terms of service how they will deal with such content and enforce these terms consistently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies including Highland Electric and Thomas Built have fleet-as-a-service offerings for U.S. school districts that struggle with the high upfront costs of electric school buses and the charging equipment needed to keep them running. Jeff St. John from Canary Media writes: On Thursday, the Massachusetts-based startup and the North Carolina-based school bus manufacturer announced a plan to offer "electric school bus subscriptions through 2025 at prices that put them at cost parity with diesel." This is essentially a nationwide extension of Highland Electric's "turnkey solutions provider" business model, backed by a big bus maker as its partner. Highland provides the buses and charging infrastructure, pays for the electricity to charge them, covers maintenance costs and manages the other complexities of going electric. The school district or transit authority pays an all-inclusive subscription fee, one that's structured to be lower than its current budget for owning, fueling and maintaining its existing diesel fleets. Highland, which has raised $253 million in venture capital funding, has projects in 17 states and two Canadian provinces, including one of the largest single electric school bus deployments in the U.S., in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. While most of its projects have started small, CEO Duncan McIntyre sees the Montgomery County project -- now at 25 electric buses and set to expand to 326 over the next four years -- as the model for the future. "We are in the business of helping communities that want to complete a full fleet-electrification effort," McIntyre said in an interview. "They don't have to commit to that upfront -- but there's usually an interest in going beyond a few-vehicles pilot." Other companies are also pulling together private-sector financing to tackle this public-sector market. Nuvve, a publicly traded EV-charging and vehicle-to-grid provider, has formed a financing joint venture that's teamed up with school bus manufacturer Blue Bird Corp. to offer similar electric bus leasing and infrastructure offerings with school districts in California, Colorado, Illinois and other states. And Canadian EV maker Lion Electric has teamed up with Zum, a San Francisco-based startup offering transportation-as-a-service for a number of school districts, in a project aiming at replacing half of Oakland, California's school buses with electric models in the coming year. Such large-scale electric bus projects remain the exception rather than the rule, however. Out of the roughly 500,000 school buses in the U.S., only about 0.2 percent -- just over 1,000 -- were electric as of the end of 2021, according to data from the World Resources Institute's Electric School Bus Initiative. And of the 354 U.S. school districts that have committed to buying electric buses, only 28 plan to deploy 10 or more, according to WRI data. This relatively low rate of adoption is bound to accelerate as the economics of electric school buses grow more attractive, however. A 2020 study (PDF) conducted by Atlas Public Policy for Washington state indicated that falling battery costs and rising manufacturing volumes should bring electric school buses within total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) parity with fossil-fueled buses by 2030. Total cost of ownership -- a metric that bundles long-term fueling, operating, maintenance and insurance costs and a vehicle's residual value into one single figure -- can be brought down with structures that reduce costs or open up revenue-generating opportunities for the fleets in question, Nick Nigro, Atlas Public Policy's founder, said in an interview. The right combination of structures could allow electric buses to come into TCO parity with diesel buses as soon as 2025, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify may be the latest service to adopt NFTs. According to the Financial Times, the company is "drawing up plans to add blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens to its streaming service, fueling excitement in the crypto and music industries about the potential of NFTs to boost artists' earnings." It comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg confirmed NFTs will soon be coming to Instagram. From the report: Two recent job ads show Spotify is recruiting people to work on early stage projects related to "Web3," a tech buzzword for a blockchain-powered network that some crypto enthusiasts hope will wrestle control back from the Big Tech platforms that dominate today's internet. Spotify's recruitment in the sector appears to be at an exploratory stage. It pointed to Web3 in a recruitment notice for an engineer on its "experimental growth" team. "This small and full-stack team is responsible for driving growth through new technologies, like Web3," the ad said. A separate Spotify job listing, for a manager in its future-gazing "Innovation and Market Intelligence" group, shows the music streaming service is looking for a candidate with experience in "content, creator, media, web3, and emerging technology industries" to "help define Spotify Moonshots," a term for ambitious new projects. The report goes on to note that Spotify "was an early collaborator on Facebook's ill-fated cryptocurrency project, Diem." Daniel Ek, Spotify's chief executive, told a company podcast back in 2019 that cryptocurrencies and blockchain could allow users of "a service like Spotify [...] to be able to pay artists directly," especially across international borders or in regions where few people have traditional bank accounts. "That can open up massive opportunities where all of a sudden, a user in Japan might pay a creator in Argentina. And that opens up huge opportunities for how we can further our mission."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christopher Alexander, a British-American architect and design theorist that affected fields including software and sociology, died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness. He was 86. Christopher Newport University reports: Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism -- one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement -- died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness, it was reported by Michael Mehaffy, a long-time collaborator and protege. Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time. He is considered to be the father of the pattern language movement in software, which is the idea behind Wikipedia. In 2006, he was one of the first two recipients, along with Leon Krier, of CNU's Athena Medal, which honors those who laid the groundwork for The New Urbanism movement. In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. Other works include The Timeless Way of Building and A New Theory of Urban Design. Alexander was more than a theorist: In 2006, when he was awarded the Athena, it was reported he had designed and built more than 200 buildings around the world. In 2012, his The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, tells the story of a school campus in Japan that was designed and built using the principles that he articulated (see photo at top).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Thursday a new bill to block cryptocurrency companies from conducting business with sanctioned companies. The Digital Assets Sanctions Compliance Enhancement Act, introduced with Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and others, would allow the U.S. president to add non-U.S.-based crypto companies to sanctions list if they support sanctions evasion. "This is a bill that would authorize the president to sanction foreign cryptocurrency firms that are doing business with sanctioned Russian entities and authorize the Secretary of Treasury to act," she said. According to a draft of the bill, the presidential administration would be tasked with identifying "any foreign person" who operates a crypto exchange or otherwise facilitates digital asset transactions who has also supported sanctions evasion by Russian individuals named to the Office of Foreign Asset Control's sanctions list. Moreover, the U.S. president could sanction these exchange operators unless there was a national security interest in not doing so. The U.S. Treasury secretary could also require that crypto exchanges operating in the U.S. not conduct transactions for, or otherwise work with, crypto addresses belonging to people based in Russia if this is deemed to be in the national interest. The Treasury secretary would have to report to Congress about this decision. The bill seems to extend beyond just Russian sanctions. Another provision would authorize the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to identify users transacting with more than $10,000 in crypto. "Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network shall require United States persons engaged in a transaction with a value greater than $10,000 in digital assets through [one] or more accounts outside of the United States to file a report," the bill said. The Treasury secretary would also be tasked with identifying exchanges that could be at "high risk for sanctions evasion" or other crimes, and reporting these entities to Congress. "Any exchange included in the report may petition the Office of Foreign Assets Control for removal, which shall be granted upon demonstrating that the exchange is taking steps sufficient to comply with applicable United States law," the bill said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of Telegram, claiming it had "repeatedly refused to adhere to judicial orders or comply with the country's laws." From the report: Moraes' decision, which is likely to stoke debate about freedom of speech in politically polarized Brazil, represents the latest chapter in the crusading justice's battle with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies. The president and his supporters have increasingly come to rely on Telegram as a form of mass communication as larger tech companies like Meta, which owns messaging app WhatsApp, Google and Twitter have been forced by the Supreme Court to drop offending accounts over allegedly spreading disinformation. Moraes has been leading a series of Supreme Court probes into the president and his supporters for disseminating fake news that have enraged many on the right and sparked questions of judicial overreach. According to Moraes' ruling, Telegram has repeatedly failed to block offending accounts and ignored the court's decisions. He gave Wilson Diniz Wellisch, the head of telecoms regulator Anatel, 24 hours to implement the suspension, which would stand until Telegram complies with outstanding judicial orders, pays a series of fines, and presents a country representative before the court. Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to help block users on their platforms from being able to use Telegram in Brazil.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released a beta version of Microsoft Edge for Valve's Steam Deck that includes full support for Xbox Cloud Gaming. The Verge reports: "We worked closely with Valve and the Xbox Cloud Gaming team to bring support for Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft Edge Beta for the Steam Deck," says Missy Quarry, a community manager for Microsoft Edge. "We're particularly excited about this ourselves as we feel it can open new opportunities in the Linux gaming community." While a number of Xbox Game Studios titles are able to run natively on the Steam Deck, Xbox Game Pass isn't available on Steam, so subscribers will have to stream titles from Microsoft's service instead. The Linux version of Microsoft Edge now includes support for the Steam Deck controls and is available from the Discover Software Center part of SteamOS. Microsoft also has detailed instructions for creating a link to Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck to make it easier to access in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Minnesota state lawmakers are trying to prohibit social media platforms from using algorithms to recommend content to anyone under age 18. The bill was approved Tuesday by the House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee in a 15-1 vote. The potential state law goes next to the House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee, which has put it on the docket for a hearing on March 22. The algorithm ban applies to platforms with at least 1 million account holders and says those companies would be "prohibited from using a social media algorithm to target user-created content at an account holder under the age of 18." There are exemptions for content created by federal, state, or local governments and by public or private schools. "This bill prohibits a social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, and others, from using algorithms to target children with specific types of content," the bill summary says (PDF). "The bill would require anyone operating a social media platform with more than one million users to require that algorithm functions be turned off for accounts owned by anyone under the age of 18." Social media companies would be "liable for damages and a civil penalty of $1,000 for each violation." Tech-industry lobbyists say the bill would violate the First Amendment, prevent companies from recommending useful content, and require them to collect more data on the ages and locations of users. TechDirt's Mike Masnick slammed the bill in an article titled, "Minnesota pushing bill that says websites can no longer be useful for teenagers." "I get that for computer illiterate people the word 'algorithm' is scary," Masnick wrote. "And that there's some ridiculous belief among people who don't know any better that recommendation algorithms are like mind control, but the point of an algorithm is... to recommend content. That is, to make a social media (or other kind of service) useful. Without it, you just get an undifferentiated mass of content, and that's not very useful."Read more of this story at Slashdot.