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Code Verify is a new browser extension from WhatsApp parent company Meta that aims to improve the security of WhatsApp's web version, the company has announced. From a report: The extension works by verifying that the contents of WhatsApp's web version haven't been tampered with. The aim is to make it a lot more difficult for a would-be attacker to compromise data or the privacy of WhatsApp's end-to-end encrypted messages when using the browser-based version of the service. The extension follows the launch of WhatsApp's multi-device beta last year. This aims to make using the messaging service from devices other than your primary phone easier and more seamless. Since the feature's launch, WhatsApp says it's seen an increase in people accessing its service through web browsers, which present new security challenges compared to an app. There's nothing particularly new about the security methods underpinning Code Verify. Ultimately it's just comparing a hash of the code running in your browser, with a hash held by trusted third-party Cloudflare.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian prosecutors have asked a court to ban Meta Platforms's Facebook and Instagram as "extremist," Interfax reported, the latest move in a growing crackdown on social networks. From a report: Authorities blocked access to Facebook last week under a new media law, but the "extremist" designation, if approved by a court, would effectively criminalize all of Meta's operations in Russia. The company's Instagram app would also be blocked. The move comes amid increasing tension between Moscow and U.S. tech companies. Earlier Friday, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, called on prosecutors to investigate Meta after Reuters reported that the company had temporarily eased internal restrictions on calling for violence against Russian soldiers due to the invasion of Ukraine. Russia has already banned certain social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, while tech companies have demonetized Russian state-sponsored media and blocked them in Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Consumer Reports wants the Federal Communications Commission to take a closer look at whether Internet service providers are complying with a US law that prohibits them from charging hardware rental fees when customers use their own equipment. In a filing submitted to the FCC this week, Consumer Reports said it asked members about their Internet bills and got over 350 responses, with some suggesting violations of either the letter or spirit of the law. "Some contain allegations that the law is being violated, whereas others state the new statute is being respected. Many more stories suggest that ISPs dissuade consumers from using their own equipment, typically by refusing to troubleshoot any service disruptions if consumers opt not to rent the ISP's devices. Such practices result in de facto situations where consumers feel pressured or forced to rent equipment that they would prefer to own instead," Consumer Reports told the FCC. Consumer Reports' filing came in response to the FCC asking for public comment on the implementation of the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which took effect in December 2020. In addition to price-transparency rules for TV service, the law prohibited TV and broadband providers from charging rental or lease fees when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." All the comments collected by Consumer Reports are available here. The FCC filing includes examples of complaints about AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Frontier, Windstream, and Cox, though the complaints weren't all about rental fees. In its call for public input, the FCC asked for comment on "the extent to which (if at all) subject entities continue to assess charges for equipment that are expressly prohibited by the statute." [...] Consumer Reports said its questions for members were "designed to measure whether or not ISPs were in compliance... and also to solicit consumer opinion on whether or not it was difficult to use consumer-owned equipment versus renting those devices from the provider. Notably, neither of the two cable industry trade associations mentioned this issue in any detail in their comments filed last month at the Commission." Consumer Reports said that some of the responses "suggest the statute is not being complied with as vigorously as Congress intended... These allegations merit further investigation by the Commission." Consumer Reports offered to share contact information for the customers with the FCC so it can investigate further.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Health Organization advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in the country's public health laboratories to prevent "any potential spills" that would spread disease among the population, the agency told Reuters on Thursday. From the report: Biosecurity experts say Russia's movement of troops into Ukraine and bombardment of its cities have raised the risk of an escape of disease-causing pathogens, should any of those facilities be damaged. Like many other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting both animals and humans including, most recently, COVID-19. Its labs have received support from the United States, the European Union and the WHO. In response to questions from Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia's invasion, the WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent "accidental or deliberate release of pathogens." "As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills," the WHO, a United Nations agency, said. The WHO would not say when it had made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine's laboratories. The agency also did not answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed. On Wednesday, Russian's foreign ministry claimed that the U.S. operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, "an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv," reports Reuters. A spokesperson for the ministry went on to claim that Russian forces unearthed documents in Ukraine that showed "an emergency attempt to erase evidence of military biological programs" by destroying lab samples. Not only has Ukraine denied these allegations, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby called them "laughable" and suggested Moscow could be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI software can help historians interpret and date ancient texts by reconstructing works destroyed over time, according to a new paper published in Nature. The Register reports: A team of computer scientists and experts in classical studies led by DeepMind and Ca' Foscari University of Venice trained a transformer-based neural network to restore inscriptions written in ancient Greek between 7th century BC and 5th century AD. The model, named "Ithaca" after the home of legendary Greek king Odysseus, can also estimate when the text was written and where it might have originated. By recovering fragments of text on broken pieces of pottery or blurry scripts, for example, researchers can begin translating them and learn more about ancient civilizations. [...] Why ancient Greek? The researchers said the variable content and available context in the Greek epigraphic record made it an "excellent challenge" for language processing, plus the large body of (digitized) written texts that is currently available -- essential for training the model. First, the text needs to be transcribed by scanning an image of an old object or script. The text is then fed into Ithaca for analysis. It works by predicting lost or blurry characters to restore words as outputs. The software generates and ranks a list of its top predictions; epigraphists can then scroll through them and judge whether the model's guesses seem accurate or not. The best results are reached when human and machine work together. When experts worked alone, they were 25 per cent accurate at piecing together ancient artefacts, but when they collaborated with Ithaca the accuracy level jumped up to 72 per cent. Ithaca's performance on its own is about 62 per cent, for comparison. It's also 71 per cent at pinpointing the location of where the text was written, and can date works to within 30 years of their creation between 800BC and 800AD. Ithaca was trained on over 63,000 Greek inscriptions containing over three million words from The Packard Humanities Institute's Searchable Greek Inscriptions public dataset. The team masked portions of the text and tasked the model with filling in the blanks. Ithaca analyses other words in a given sentence for context when generating characters. [...] DeepMind is now adjusting its model to adapt to other types of old writing systems, like Akkadian developed in Mesopotamia, Demotic from ancient Egypt, to Mayan originating from Central America and ancient Hebrew.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A company that plans to drill deeper into Earth than ever before, creating holes that would extend a record-shattering 12 miles under our planet's surface, has raised a total of $63 million since its launch in 2020. Most recently, Quaise Energy, a startup that aims to revolutionize the geothermal energy market, secured $40 million in series A funding in February, reports Axios. The goal of these super-deep holes is to access a limitless amount of renewable energy from the heat deep inside Earth. "This funding round brings us closer to providing clean, renewable baseload energy," said Carlos Araque, CEO and co-founder of Quaise Energy, according to BusinessWire. "Our technology allows us to access energy anywhere in the world, at a scale far greater than wind and solar, enabling future generations to thrive in a world powered with abundant clean energy." Geothermal energy has a low profile compared to other renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro, but Quaise believes it is "at the core of an energy-independent world," according to the company's website. This form of energy is among the oldest power sources harnessed by humans, but it only accounts for about 0.4 percent of net energy production in the United States, which is the world's biggest geothermal producer. Quaise, which is a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intends to pioneer this technology using vacuum tubes known as gyrotrons that shoot millimeter-wave light beams, powered by electrons in a strong magnetic field. Using these devices, the company plans to burn almost twice as far into Earth as the deepest holes ever made, such as Russia's Kola Superdeep Borehole or Qatar's Al Shaheen oil well, both of which extend for about 7.5 miles. Gyrotrons are powerful enough to heat plasma in nuclear fusion experiments, making them an ideal tool to probe unprecedented depths of some 12 miles, where subterranean rocks roil at temperatures of about 500C (930F). Water pumped into this searing environment would instantly vaporize as steam that could be efficiently converted to electricity. Araque and his team at Quaise plan to funnel their seed money into prototype technologies within the next few years. By 2028, the company aspires to retrofit coal-fueled power plants into geothermal energy hotspots, reports ScienceAlert. The process of drilling out these super-deep holes would take a few months, but once the setup is complete, they could provide limitless energy to a region for up to a century, according to Araque.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries "unfriendly" to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia's huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald's that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a "priority watch list" for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission. The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. "It's just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world," Gerben said. Russia's decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality. The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia's Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering "removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted," according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would "mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries," Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald's, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is updating the default "Messages" app to include a number of new features, such as the ability to handle iMessage "Tapbacks." TechCrunch reports: Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction -- like love, laughter, confusion or excitement -- will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it's the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. [...] Android's interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the "heart" reaction on Android becomes the "face with the heart eyes" emoji. And the iMessage's exclamation mark reaction becomes the "face with the open mouth" emoji. Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn't support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) filed by Left Field Holdings, a Florida franchisee of Lime Fresh Mexican restaurants, said Google has been creating illegitimate digital "storefronts" for restaurants and deceiving users into thinking that the restaurants approved them. The lawsuit says Google takes a cut from the delivery sites for orders made through the storefronts, and in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them. Left Field said restaurants are charged up to 30% of each order in fees by delivery sites, and therefore see "little (if any)" profits from them. Google never received permission to sell the restaurants' food, designed the storefronts to look like they were restaurant-appproved, and placed a large "Order Online" button under restaurant search results to lure users to its storefronts, according to Left Field. [...] The lawsuit accuses Google of deceiving customers and violating federal trademark law starting in 2019. It asks for an undisclosed amount of money damages on behalf of Left Field and similarly affected restaurant owners and a ban on Google's alleged misuse of their trade names. In response to the lawsuit, a Google spokesperson said that the "Order Online" feature is meant to "connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from," and that it lets restaurants "indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released what it says is 800GB of data from a section of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government body responsible for censorship in the country. On Distributed Denial of Secrets' website, the organization describes the data as coming from a hack and says that Anonymous claimed responsibility. Roskomnadzor is the agency that has in recent days announced a block of Facebook and other websites in the country as the war in Ukraine intensifies. Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of Bashkortostan is in the west of the country. Motherboard found references to the Republic of Bashkortostan in some of the released files. The data is split into two main categories: a series of over 360,000 files totalling in at 526.9GB and which date up to as recently as March 5, and then two databases that are 290.6GB in size, according to Distributed Denial of Secrets' website. "The source, a part of Anonymous, urgently felt the Russian people should have access to information about their government. They also expressed their opposition to the Russian people being cut off from independent media and the outside world," wrote DDoSecrets on its website, as highlighted by Forbes. "We will soon be releasing the raw data while we look for solutions to extracting the data. One appears to be a legal research database that was, according to the file timestamp, last modified in 2020. The other appears to be a database for HR procedures." Given the size of the leak and timing, they note "it's always possible that something could be modified or planted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Niantic is acquiring 8th Wall, a company that helps developers make web-based augmented reality apps, in what it says is its "largest acquisition to date." The Verge reports: The acquisition will help boost Niantic's Lightship developer platform and to help developers "realize their visions for AR in the real-world metaverse," Niantic's Brian McClendon said in a blog post. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, and when asked, Niantic spokesperson Jen Stratton said the details were confidential. [...] [G]iven the acquisition announced Thursday, it seems that Niantic still believes in the potential for augmented reality apps and is aiming to make it easier for developers to make them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers' viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law. Variety reports: A class action law firm, Bursor & Fisher, filed the suit in federal court in New York on behalf of two HBO Max subscribers, Angel McDaniel and Constance Simon. The suit alleges that HBO provides Facebook with customer lists, which allows Facebook to match customers' viewing habits with their Facebook profiles. The suit alleges that HBO never receives consent from subscribers to do this, thereby violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. The act was passed in 1988, after a reporter obtained Robert Bork's rental history from a video store. The lawsuit argues that HBO knows that Facebook can combine such data because HBO is a major advertiser on Facebook, and it in fact uses that information to retarget Facebook ads to its own subscribers. HBO Max has a privacy policy on its website, in which it discloses that it and its partners use cookies to deliver personalized ads, among other purposes. But the VPPA requires that subscribers give separate consent to share their video viewing history. "In other words," the lawsuit states, "a standard privacy policy will not suffice."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: DuckDuckGo is now down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation in response to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, but some critics say the change amounts to censorship. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced the down-ranking on Twitter. "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create," he wrote in the tweet, which included the hashtag StandWithUkraine. "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation," he added. Weinberg didn't elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work. [...] Weinberg was quick to defend the decision, saying it was necessary to provide relevant search results over disinformation. Not everyone is a fan of the decision. "So you are censoring your users? DDG now decides what is or isn't misinformation? This decision should be left to the user," wrote one user on Twitter. "You've got that magic 'disinformation finder' eh?" wrote another user. "You're just sure you're going to only downrank things that are wrong?" Others referenced DuckDuckGo's commitment to "unbiased search."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn't stop them from being featured on Russian state TV. ProPublica: Researchers at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account. The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub. "The reason that it's so effective is because you don't actually have to convince someone that it's true. It's sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust," said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. "In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As daily life gets more expensive, workers are having a harder time making ends meet. From a report: While wage growth is high by historical standards, it isn't keeping up with the increased cost of living, which is growing at the fastest annual pace in about four decades. "Wages are up 5.1% over the past year, which is trailing the pace of inflation," said Bankrate.com senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick. "Indeed, surging prices are stealing the show on the minds of consumers." When wages rise at a slower pace than inflation, those paychecks won't go as far at the grocery store and at the gas pump -- two areas of the budget that are getting particularly squeezed. At the start of 2022, 64% of the U.S. population was living paycheck to paycheck, up from 61% in December and just shy of the high of 65% in 2020, according to a LendingClub report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has created its own trusted TLS certificate authority (CA) to solve website access problems that have been piling up after sanctions prevent certificate renewals. From a report: The sanctions imposed by western companies and governments are preventing Russian sites from renewing existing TLS certificates, causing browsers to block access to sites with expired certificates. [...] The Russian state has envisioned a solution in a domestic certificate authority for the independent issuing and renewal of TLS certificates. "It will replace the foreign security certificate if it is revoked or expires. The Ministry of Digital Development will provide a free domestic analogue. The service is provided to legal entities -- site owners upon request within 5 working days," explains the Russian public services portal, Gosuslugi (translated). However, for new Certificate Authorities (CA) to be trusted by web browsers, they first needed to be vetted by various companies, which can take a long time. Currently, the only web browsers that recognize Russia's new CA as trustworthy are the Russia-based Yandex browser and Atom products, so Russian users are told to use these instead of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: Two separate lawsuits against American University and George Washington University have new life after an appeals court revived cases that allege both institutions violated contractual obligations to students when they shifted to online instruction in early 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic [Qureshi v. American University, No. 21-7064 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022); Shaffer v. George Washington University, No. 21-7040 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022)]. At the core of the issue is the refusal of both universities to refund students' tuition and fees. The plaintiffs allege that both universities had a contractual commitment to provide in-person education and should have offered at least partial tuition and fee refunds for students forced into online classes. Plaintiffs in both cases are seeking class action status for their lawsuits. The lawsuits against American University and GWU are just two among dozens of similar suits filed by students and families since 2020, which have had various outcomes in courts across the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve shipped its $400 handheld gaming console, the Steam Deck, before all its promised features were ready -- but one of the biggest is now here. From a report: You can now install Windows 10 on a Steam Deck and actually expect it to work because Valve has just released the all-important GPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth drivers you'll need to download and play games. Importantly, you'll need to wipe a Steam Deck to do this, there's no dual-boot yet, and Valve says you can only install Windows 10 since the Steam Deck's current BIOS apparently doesn't include firmware TPM support (which Microsoft infamously requires for Windows 11). Speakers and headphone jack don't work yet as there are no audio drivers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly discovered fossilized vampire squid has been named after the US president, Joe Biden, a team of paleontologists has announced. From a report: The Syllipsimopodi bideni, which has been described as an "incredibly rare" fossil, was first dug up in Montana and then donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988. But it sat untouched in a drawer for decades until a scientist pulled it out for a closer look. Speaking to the New York Times, Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist from New York's American Museum of Natural History, said he first noticed the squid's preserved arms and saw small suckers in the rock. "This was sitting in a museum since the 80s and no one realized it was important," said Whalen. "We chanced on that importance because I happened to notice the arm suckers." The Syllipsimopodi bideni drifted across oceans nearly 328m years ago. According to Whalen, it is the oldest known ancestor of vampyropods, a group that includes vampire squids and octopuses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse. "Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft appears to be adding a tabbed interface to the top of File Explorer, as Insiders testing the latest Windows 11 preview build have discovered the feature in a hidden state. From a report: First spotted by Windows Insider Rafael Rivera on Twitter, once enabled, tabs will appear along the top of the File Explorer app, allowing users to have multiple folders open in one window. Tabs in File Explorer has been a highly requested feature among the Windows community for years at this point. Microsoft almost delivered the feature via its canceled "Sets" UX, which saw the introduction of tabs in every app window, including File Explorer. But when Sets was killed off, so was the idea of tabs in File Explorer. But now, Tabs in File Explorer appears to be making a return, and it works exactly like you'd expect. This feature is yet to be officially announced by Microsoft, and since this is currently only in the Dev Channel, it's possible that Microsoft could cancel the feature before it ships, though we think that's unlikely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Goldman Sachs said it plans to close its operations in Russia, the first major Wall Street bank to leave in response to the nation's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: "Goldman Sachs is winding down its business in Russia in compliance with regulatory and licensing requirements," the company said Thursday in an emailed statement. "We are focused on supporting our clients across the globe in managing or closing out pre-existing obligations in the market and ensuring the well-being of our people." The Wall Street powerhouse has maintained a presence in Russia in recent years, but the country doesn't amount to a meaningful portion of its global banking business. At the end of 2021, the firm's total credit exposure to Russia was $650 million, most of which was tied to non-sovereign counterparties or borrowers. While Goldman is exiting Russia, the firm is still trading corporate debt tied to the country without the bank itself making wagers on price movements, a representative said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has confirmed that the brand new Studio Display will work when connected to PCs, but critical new features of the display will not carry over and the experience will be lacking compared to using the display with a Mac. MacRumors adds: Features that require macOS, such as True Tone, will not work when connected to PCs. When connected to a PC, the webcam in the Studio Display will work as a normal webcam, but Center Stage does require macOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2018, an international team of scientists announced a startling discovery: Buried beneath the thick ice of the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland is an impact crater 31 kilometers wide -- not as big as the crater from the dinosaur-killing impact 66 million years ago, but perhaps still big enough to mess with the climate. Scientists were especially excited by hints in the crater and the surrounding ice that the Hiawatha strike was recent -- perhaps within the past 100,000 years, when humans might have been around to witness it. But now, using dates gleaned from tiny mineral crystals in rocks shocked by the impact, the same team says the strike is much, much older. The researchers say it occurred 58 million years ago, a warm time when vast forests covered Greenland -- and humanity was not yet even a glimmer in evolution's eye. Kurt Kjaer, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and a co-author of the new study, says the new date is at odds with the team's initial impression, gleaned from ice-penetrating radar. "But this is the way science works and should work," he says. The date is a blow to a group of scientists that for more than a decade has advanced a controversial hypothesis that the Younger Dryas, a drastic, 1000-year cooling about 12,800 years ago, was triggered when a comet struck Earth. They had seized on the first Hiawatha paper as a smoking gun: The crater seemed about the right age, and it was in the right place -- near a region of the North Atlantic Ocean that heavily influences Northern Hemisphere climate. Now, says Brandon Johnson, a co-author and impact modeler at Purdue University, West Lafayette, "It's probably safe to put the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis back to rest for a while."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by Ars Tecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: The Biden administration is restoring California's authority to set its own rules on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, pickups and SUVs, a move that rolls back a Trump-era decision and puts California at the forefront of combatting climate change in the U.S. The decision reinstates a Clean Air Act waiver that allows California to adopt stronger fuel economy standards than those of the federal government and set the precedent for the rest of the country on how to mitigate vehicle emissions. The state's past ability to control vehicle emissions led to some innovative strategies in the auto industry, such as catalytic converters, which convert toxic gases and pollutants in exhaust gas into less-toxic pollutants, as well as 'check engine' lights. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted California's tighter standards. Under the Clean Air Act, the state has the ability to receive permission from the federal government to set its own rules on tailpipe standards that help lower emissions from gas-powered vehicles. California established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the country in 1966. The Trump administration in 2019 revoked California's authority to regulate its own air quality, arguing that it wouldn't allow "political agendas in a single state" to set national policy. That decision was part of a broader rollback of Obama-era vehicle emissions standards and climate change regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Microsoft Azure has nosed ahead of AWS in the public cloud adoption stakes, according to a report from IT Management outfit Flexera. The 2022 State of the Cloud Report survey will have brought smiles to the teams at Redmond and Amazon, and less cheer to Oracle's cloud crew, which continued to languish in fourth place behind Google. The key takeaway on the Azure front is its leadership with enterprise users, with 80 percent of respondents adopting Microsoft's public cloud, up from 76 percent the previous year. This was just ahead of AWS, which claimed a 77 percent adoption rate, down from 79 percent a year earlier. Some way behind was Google, with 48 percent, followed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which tumbled to 27 percent from 32 percent a year ago. The report indicates Azure is ahead of AWS for breadth of adoption, although Google has the highest percentage for experimentation (at 23 percent). There was some cause for optimism at Oracle with the highest percentage (12 percent) planning to use its cloud, meaning there is every chance its showing in the survey could improve in the coming years. "AWS is still leading the SMB public cloud pack, although it still experienced a slight drop in adoption rate, from 72 percent to 69 percent while Azure jumped from 48 percent to 59 percent," notes The Register. "Oracle also saw strong growth, nearly doubling its adoption rate from 15 percent to 28 percent year on year." The survey also reported an increase in wasted cloud spend. According to The Register, "respondents estimated their organizations wasted 32 percent of the cloud spend this time around, up from 30 percent the previous year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are preparing to open the first tube that one of the astronauts on the Apollo missions hammered into the surface of the moon. As NPR reports, it's "remained tightly sealed all these years since that 1972 Apollo 17 mission -- the last time humans set foot on the moon." From the report: The unsealed tube from that mission was opened in 2019. The layers of lunar soil had been preserved, and the sample offered insight into subjects like landslides in airless places. Because the sample being opened now has been sealed, it may contain something in addition to rocks and soil: gas. The tube could contain substances known as volatiles, which evaporate at normal temperatures, such as water ice and carbon dioxide. The materials at the bottom of the tube were extremely cold at the time they were collected. The amount of these gases in the sample is expected to be very low, so scientists are using a special device called a manifold, designed by a team at Washington University in St. Louis, to extract and collect the gas. Another tool was developed at the European Space Agency (ESA) to pierce the sample and capture the gases as they escape. Scientists there have called that tool the "Apollo can opener." The careful process of opening and capturing has begun, and so far, so good: the seal on the inner sample tube seems to be intact. Now, the piercing process is underway, with that special "can opener" ready to trap whatever gases might come out. If there are gases in the sample, scientists will be able to use modern mass spectrometry technology to identify them. (Mass spectrometry is a tool for analyzing and measuring molecules.) The gas could also be divided into tiny samples for other researchers to study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: An extinct rat that once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean may have put the kibosh on scientists' dreams of resurrecting more famous extinct animals like the woolly mammoth. The Christmas Island rat disappeared just over 100 years ago, but researchers now say even its detailed genome isn't complete enough to bring it back to life. The work "shows both how wonderfully close -- and yet -- how devastatingly far" scientists are from being able to bring back extinct species by genetically transforming a close relative in what's called "de-extinction," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study. [...] To bring back an extinct species, scientists would first need to sequence its genome, then edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Next comes the challenge of making embryos with the revised genome and bringing them to term in a living surrogate mother. So far, scientists have sequenced the genomes of about 20 extinct species, including a cave bear, passenger pigeon, and several types of mammoths and moas. But no one has yet reported re-creating the extinct genome in a living relative. In the new study, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, thought it best to start small. "If we want to try something so crazy, why not start with a simple model," he reasoned. So, he, Jian-Qing Lin, a molecular biologist at Shantou University, and their colleagues, focused on the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), which disappeared by 1908 from that island, located about 1200 kilometers west of Australia. This species "should be a dreamy candidate for de-extinction," McCauley says, given its close relationship with the Norway rat, a well-studied lab animal with a complete genome sequence that scientists already know how to modify. Gilbert and Lin extracted DNA from the skins of two preserved Christmas Island rats and sequenced it many times over to get as much of the genome as possible. They achieved more than 60 times' coverage of it. Old DNA only survives in small fragments, so the team used the genome of the Norway rat as a reference to piece together as much as possible of the vanished rat's genome. Comparing the two genomes revealed almost 5% of the Christmas Island rat's genome was still missing, Lin, Gilbert, and their colleagues report today in Current Biology. The lost sequences included bits of about 2500 of the rat's estimated 34,000 genes. "I was surprised," Gilbert says. The recovered DNA included the genes for the Christmas Island rat's characteristic rounded ears, for example, but important immune system and olfaction genes were either missing or incomplete. The work "really highlights the difficulties, maybe even the ridiculousness, of [de-extinction] efforts," says Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos. Others researchers like Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, says that the missing 5% of an extinct animal's genome likely won't affect how the transformed animal looks or behaves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China exported nearly 500,000 electric cars in 2021 -- more than any other country in the world -- thanks to increasing sales in Europe and Southeast Asia by emerging cost-competitive automakers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of passenger EVs exported in 2021 increased 2.6 times to 499,573 units. Meanwhile, Germany doubled its exports to about 230,000 units, while the U.S fell 30% to around 110,000 units, and Japan increased 24% to 27,400 units -- according to data compiled by the German Association of the Automotive Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization. China accounts for 60% of global EV production, and is emerging as the world's factory for EVs having already secured the same position in digital product manufacturing. Exports to the EU grew in the wake of it announcing a policy to ban the sale of new hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035. China's EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units, with the region absorbing half of China's total EV exports. Belgium imported 87,000 units and the U.K. 50,000 units. Of the almost 500,000 units exported, more than 100,000 appear to have originated from Tesla's Shanghai plant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Texas A&M have come up with a novel way for touchscreens to feel more than just perfectly smooth by fooling a user's sense of touch through temperature changes. Gizmodo reports: In a recently published paper in the Science Robotics journal, they found that by regulating the temperature of the surface of a touchscreen, they can increase or decrease the amount of friction a finger feels like it's experiencing. The sensation of friction can be increased by as much as 50% by increasing a touchscreen's surface temperature from 23 degrees Celsius to 42 degrees Celsius, while the actual temperature changes are imperceptible to the user, assuming they're sticking to taps or quick swipe gestures on the screen. The current prototypes don't facilitate temperature adjustments in fine detail, but the eventual goal is to be able to manipulate and quickly change the temperature on any region of a touchscreen so that as a finger is sliding across it the changes in friction that are felt fool the brain into thinking it's feeling physical buttons like keyboards, playback controls, even joysticks and action buttons for gaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On February 24, Russian forces seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and took its staff hostage, causing radiation levels to increase about 20-fold from all the heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the exclusion zone surrounding the plant. Today, the Ukrainian government warned that the abandoned nuclear power plant, including other nuclear facilities nearby, no longer have electricity after a power line was damaged. Axios reports: A loss of power at the plant could disrupt the cooling of radioactive material stored there, risking radioactive leakage that can be carried by wind to other parts of Europe. [...] "About 20,000 spent fuel assemblies are stored in the spent nuclear fuel storage facility-1. They need constant cooling, which is possible only if there is electricity. If it is not there, the pumps will not cool. As a result, the temperature in the holding pools will increase," the Ukrainian government said. "After that evaporation will occur, that will lead to nuclear discharge. The wind can transfer the radioactive cloud to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Europe. In addition, there is no ventilation inside the facility," it added. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday that Ukraine had informed it of the power outage and called it a violation of a "key safety pillar" but saw "no critical impact on safety" in this case. The agency's director general said Tuesday that it was no longer receiving data monitoring systems installed at the plant and other facilities and that the handling of nuclear material in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone had been put on hold."I'm deeply concerned about the difficult and stressful situation facing staff at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the potential risks this entails for nuclear safety. I call on the forces in effective control of the site to urgently facilitate the safe rotation of personnel there," IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Microsoft Corp. has begun calling employees back to its headquarters in recent weeks, but its return-to-office strategy hinges on hybrid work. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, companies are navigating the messy transition to the workplace after a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Microsoft has a unique perspective since it sells remote collaboration tools that compete with Zoom and Cisco. Even as workers trickle back to their desks, the company's leaders are focused on those employees who aren't working in the office. "It's counterintuitive," Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Modern Work at Microsoft, said in an interview. "You have to design your physical space for the people who aren't there." At The Hive, its test center a few miles from its Redmond, Washington campus, engineers roll office chairs back and forth and shift camera angles around to capture the optimal teleconference environment. Staffers down the hall pose as remote attendees, providing immediate feedback. A full-size replica of a room Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and other senior leadership use for top-level meetings fills a warehouse floor. What they've found is that small tweaks can really improve the experience, making those daily calls less of a grind. The typical conference table, for example, was redesigned to a triangle pointed away from the screens, or a truncated semi-circle facing the screen, United Nations-style. Both setups address a big problem with standard conference rooms: Attendees don't fully face the camera, and in-person participants migrate toward each other. Meantime, at Microsoft's headquarters last week, occupancy jumped 142% from the prior one, according to the company, which declined to provide further details. The mood resembled a college move-in day, with giddy staffers excited to no longer be stuck at home. [...] While Microsoft executives from Nadella on down have been promoting the idea of the so-called metaverse to connect workers in various locations, the company also says it knows it has to take it slow. "We're just trying to meet people where they are," Spataro said. "You kind of have to crawl before you can move to a fully virtual world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's board has approved the company's first stock split in more than two decades. GeekWire reports: Subject to shareholder approval, the 20-for-1 split would revalue Amazon's individual shares, aiming to make them more affordable for individual investors, recognizing the long-term increase in the company's share price. The change will take effect in June if shareholders approve the split at the company's annual meeting in May. Amazon's board also authorized a buyback of up to $10 billion of its common stock. The new authorization replaces a prior $5 billion buyback plan, approved in 2016. Amazon bought back $2.12 billion of its shares under that prior plan. The company has split its stock three times before, all of them in the late 1990s, prior to the dot-com bust: a 2-for-1 split in June 1998; a 3-for-1 split in January 1999; and a 2-for-1 split in September 1999. Amazon's share price has risen from $62.44 after the last split to close at $2,785.58 on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ukrainian government is preparing for the potential need to move its data and servers abroad if Russia's invading forces push deeper into the country, a senior cybersecurity official told Reuters on Wednesday. From the report: Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, emphasized his department was planning for a contingency, but that it is being considered at all suggests Ukrainians want to be ready for any Russian threat to seize sensitive government documents. The move could only happen after regulatory changes approved by Ukrainian lawmakers, Zhora said. Government officials have already been shipping equipment and backups to more secure areas of Ukraine beyond the reach of Russian forces, who invaded on Feb. 24 and are laying siege to several cities. Last month Zhora told Politico there were plans to move critical data out of the capital Kyiv should it be threatened, but preparations for potentially moving data abroad go a step further. Ukraine has received offers to host data from a variety of countries, Zhora said, declining to identify them. For reasons of proximity "a European location will be preferred," he said. Zhora gave few details of how such a move might be executed, but he said past efforts to keep government data out of Russia's grasp involved either the physical transport of servers and removable storage devices or the digital migration of data from one service or server to another. Government agencies would have to decide on a case by case basis whether to keep their operations running inside the country or evacuate them. [...] Russia possessing Ukrainian government databases and intelligence files could be helpful if Russia wanted to control Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Another European privacy watchdog has sanctioned the controversial facial recognition firm, Clearview AI, which scrapes selfies off the Internet to amass a databased of some 10 billion of faces to power an identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement. Italy's data protection agency today announced a [roughly $22 million] penalty for breaches of EU law -- as well as ordering the controversial company to delete any data on Italians it holds and banning it from any further processing of citizens' facial biometrics. Its investigation was instigated following "complaints and reports," it said, noting that as well as breaches of privacy law it found the company had been tracking Italian citizens and people located in Italy. "The findings revealed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation data, are processed illegally, without an adequate legal basis, which certainly cannot be the legitimate interest of the American company," the Garante said in a press release. Other General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) breaches it identified included transparency obligations (on account of Clearview not having adequately informed users of what it was doing with their selfies); violations of purpose limitation and having used user data for purposes other than those for which they were published online; and also breaches of data retention rules with no limit on storage. "Clearview AI's activity therefore violates the freedoms of the data subjects, including the protection of confidentiality and the right not to be discriminated against," the authority also said. CEO Hoan Ton-That said in a statement: "Clearview AI does not have a place of business in Italy or the EU, it does not have any customers in Italy or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR." Ton-That added: "We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in Italy, where we do no business, of Clearview AI's technology to society. My intentions and those of my company have always been to help communities and their people to live better, safer lives."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week Nvidia confirmed that it had been the victim of an internal hack, though it claimed no customer information was compromised. Now we're seeing one of the first effects of the hack on end-users: Nvidia GPU driver packages with malware hidden inside. PCWorld: While it was always possible for malefactors to host links pretending to be drivers in the hopes of installing viruses, trojans, and other nasty stuff on a user's PC, this situation is more concerning. The hackers appear to have leaked Nvidia's official code signing certificates, a means by which users (and Microsoft) can verify that a downloaded program comes from the publisher it says it's from. That's allowing files containing a host of popular malware suites to be posted and downloaded, bypassing Windows Defender's built-in executable verification and slipping past anti-virus software. BleepingComputer reports that two now-expired (but still usable) verification codes have been compromised and used to deliver remote access trojans. Another example, using the Nvidia verification to sign a fake Windows driver, was also spotted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Congress' sweeping new spending bill is signed, it would finally provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been underfunded over the last few years. From a report: Notably, NASA's program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president's budget requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit. Overall, NASA would receive $24.041 billion for 2022 in this new bill, which will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022. NASA's portion is roughly $800 million less than the $24.8 billion that President Joe Biden's budget request called for in May of 2021. However, NASA would still see a slight bump from its total funding for fiscal year 2021, which sat at $23.27 billion. Though Congress's plan would not fully meet the president's budget request, there are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety. The bill would give NASA's human landing system the full $1.195 billion that the request asked for. Currently, NASA is developing a new human lunar lander as part of its Artemis program, an initiative to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. Previously, Congress showed its reluctance to give NASA the money it requested for the lander. For 2021, appropriators only provided $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion for the lander.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

McGruber writes: Retired NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly just announced that he was returning a medal awarded to him by Russia. A translation of his announcement, which Mr Kelly made in Russian: Mr. Medvedev, I am returning to you the Russian medal "For Merit in Space Exploration", which you presented to me. Please give it to a Russian mother whose son died in this unjust war. I will mail the medal to the Russian embassy in Washington. Good luck.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows "emulator" for Linux next week at the company's Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. From a report: Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail "how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch." The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google's Stadia porting platform team, and promises a "detailed overview of the technology behind Google's solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia." It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux. If the emulator runs live on Stadia instead of just testing environments, this could open the door to a lot more games making their way to Stadia in the futureRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Justin Sun, a budding Chinese cryptocurrency mogul, walked through the shiny lofted atrium of the departure terminal at South Korea's Incheon International Airport. It was September 2017, an early height of the crypto craze, and Sun had every reason to be nervous after his first ICO. An ICO, or initial coin offering, is like an initial public offering for a new stock. It's the first time cryptocurrency traders have the opportunity to buy a brand-new token. But Sun wasn't anxious about the money he stood to gain if it took off or what he'd lose if the token flopped. In fact, his company, Tron, introduced a coin called TRX -- a huge success, selling out quickly for $70 million. The problem for Sun was that the Chinese government, just days before, had banned ICOs entirely. The state claimed ICOs were vehicles for financial fraud, pyramid schemes, and other illegal and criminal activities -- a credible claim because, in 2017, hundreds of new and highly dubious cryptocurrency tokens were being introduced. People buy into initial coin offerings for all sorts of reasons: sometimes because the coin's underlying blockchain technology is promising, or sometimes because they're speculating that a cryptocurrency's value might rise astronomically over time, like Bitcoin has. But in many cases, the coin founders immediately sold all the tokens they held for a vast sum of money, crashing the its value in the process and every other buyer's investment. These were "exit scams" or "pump-and-dumps," and all told, they bilked crypto buyers for billions of dollars. People were swindled so frequently the United States Securities and Exchange Commission could barely file criminal charges fast enough. The Chinese government's ICO ban was why, a week later, Sun was waiting for a flight in Incheon International Airport. Sources who heard him tell this story say Justin believed he was a fugitive and was ready to take off at a moment's notice. Sun's true escape route from Beijing to Seoul remains cloaked in rumor. But the reason for his getaway was simple: he likely knew the ICO ban was coming and went through with it anyway. Sun pushed TRX to finish its token sale the day before the ban was announced. Sun had been tipped off by Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance, one of the world's busiest cryptocurrency exchanges. "They were in it together," a former employee told me. Allegedly, Zhao learned of the impending government ban from his own connections. But at some point after the ICO ban, Zhao made clear his relationship with Justin Sun was not personal, saying, "We have only talked business and haven't really 'hung out' in any way." But as recently as 2019, Zhao and Sun vacationed together on the shores of Lake Geneva. Over social media, they gave the impression it was a business trip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center, two months after the transplant surgery. From a report: David Bennett Sr., who lived in Maryland, was 57. He had severe heart disease, and had agreed to receive the experimental pig's heart after he was rejected from several waiting lists to receive a human heart. It was unclear whether his body had rejected the foreign organ. "There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death," a hospital spokeswoman told the newspaper. The report adds: Hospital officials said they could not comment further on the cause of death, because his physicians had yet to conduct a thorough examination. They plan to publish the results in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the transplant, said the hospital's staff was "devastated" by the loss of Mr. Bennett. "He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end," Dr. Griffith said. "Mr. Bennett became known by millions of people around the world for his courage and steadfast will to live."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A House Committee is urging the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon over what lawmakers contend is potentially criminal obstruction of Congress. From a report: In a letter sent Wednesday and addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, a bipartisan group of lawmakers alleged that Amazon repeatedly misled the House Judiciary Committee throughout a 16-month probe into the competitive practices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. In particular, lawmakers have zeroed in on Amazon's private-label practices and its collection of third-party seller data. Lawmakers claim Amazon has made false and misleading statements to the House Committee about its practices, then refused to turn over evidence that would "either corroborate its claims or correct the record," according to the 24-page letter. "It appears to have done so to conceal the truth about its use of third-party sellers' data to advantage its private-label business and its preferencing of private-label products in search results -- subjects of the Committee's investigation," according to the letter, which was signed by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., House Antitrust Subcommittee chair David Cicilline, D-R.I., and committee members Reps. Ken Buck, R-Colo., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. tech companies are scrambling to react to sanctions and public pressure after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: When Arina, a 22-year-old illustrator in Russia, first started using the freelance work platform Upwork last year, it changed her life. But this weekend, Upwork abruptly pulled out of Russia. For more than a decade, American and European tech companies have made a business of facilitating online labor -- from gig work to content creation and online marketplaces to payment processors. Now, tens of thousands of Russian video game streamers on Twitch, gig workers on Upwork, adult-content creators on OnlyFans and computer programmers working on contract have all lost their livelihoods, at least temporarily. The gig work companies acted in response to demands from lawmakers and public sentiment against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some cited the restrictions that sanctions had placed on processing payments and depositing funds in Russian banks. Twitch told streamers in Russia that it was no longer able to pay them because of sanctions placed on payment services. Many of the platforms that allow fans to pay creators and influencers for their content use payment systems such as Mastercard and Visa, which began blocking Russian accounts in the days after Russia invaded. So did the London-based cross-border payments company Wise and the New York City-based financial services provider Payoneer. On Saturday, PayPal suspended services in Russia, citing both sanctions and solidarity with Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday instructing agencies across the federal government to study the possible risks presented by the explosion in popularity of cryptocurrencies and consider the creation of a U.S. digital currency. From a report: The executive order urges federal regulators to review the risks a roughly $1.75 trillion crypto market presents to consumers, investors and the broader economy. Federal agencies will have several months to prepare a report with their findings, which would then inform any new regulatory actions the White House takes. About 16% of adult Americans, or roughly 40 million people, have invested in, traded or used cryptocurrencies, according to a White House fact sheet. That growing prevalence of digital assets, which include volatile cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and so-called stablecoins pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar, has pushed the Biden administration to centralize its work on the topic. White House officials have been working with the crypto industry and experts for several months to prepare the executive order. "We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business protections," Mr. Biden said in the order, adding that the White House will monitor cryptocurrencies' impact on financial stability, nationals security and climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russians are rapidly turning to internet services that cloak their location to help bypass restrictions on accessing foreign social media and news sites. From a report: Providers of virtual private networks, or VPNs, are recording a surge in usage from Russia after the Kremlin cracked down on Facebook and other services as part of a broader effort to silence dissent and limit information about its invasion of Ukraine. "In the past week, we saw traffic to our website from Russia increase by around 330% week over week," Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN, said in an email to Bloomberg on Wednesday. As of Tuesday, Russian interest in VPNs was more than eight times pre-invasion levels, according to data gathered by Top10VPN. Usage peaked at more than 10 times on March 5, the day after Facebook and Twitter were blocked by Russian authorities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Explorers and researchers, battling freezing temperatures, have located Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's ship that sank in the Antarctic in 1915. From a report: The wreck of Endurance has been found in the Antarctic, 106 years after the historic ship was crushed in pack ice and sank during an expedition by the explorer Ernest Shackleton. A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones. Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915. Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship, holds a revered place in polar history because it spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration. Its location, nearly 10,000 feet down in waters that are among the iciest on Earth, placed it among the most celebrated shipwrecks that had not been found. The discovery of the wreck was announced Wednesday in a statement by the search expedition, Endurance22.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LimeWire has announced it will relaunch as a "mainstream-ready, digital collectibles marketplace for art and entertainment, initially focusing on music" in May, confirming a Tuesday scoop by Slashdot that reported precisely the same thing. Engadget adds: Its backers believe that it will be a place for artists and fans to create and sell digital trinkets without the "technical hurdles of the current NFT landscape." It is hoping to partner with a raft of high-profile musicians in the hope of spreading word about LimeWire's resurrection in the hope of getting a million willing buyers signed up before the first year is done. The phrase of the day is ensuring that "NFT newbies" are well catered-for, offering easy signup, pricing in US dollars and a lack of any crypto-based gatekeeping. Users will be able to buy straight from their credit cards (or any other regular money) via Wyre's payment platform, which is also used by OpenSea. The company added that it is working with "top-tier artists" from the music world who will create content for the platform and also open lines of communication with willing fans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Georgia state Senate voted 33-21 on Tuesday to pass a bill that seeks to prohibit social media platforms from removing or censoring content amid an outcry from conservatives that their political views are being discriminated against, even though a similar Texas law has been put on hold by a federal court. The Associated Press reports: Senate Bill 393 moves to the House for more debate. It declares that social media companies that have more than 20 million users in the United States are common carriers and that they can't block people from receiving certain messages based on viewpoints, location, race, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation or disability. "What we are stating here is you cannot be discriminated against for your viewpoint, your gender, your age or other things in this 21st century public square," said Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Cumming Republican who is sponsoring the bill. Dolezal said companies could still pull down lewd, obscene or offensive materials. But the technology industry says the measure is illegal, in part because it would unconstitutionally make private companies host speech they don't agree with. They also argue that private owners should be able to do as they please with their own property. Dolezal has acknowledged that the state would be sued if it passed the law, but argues that a challenge could be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, breaking new and desirable ground. Researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials. The bill says social media companies must publish how it moderates content, targets content to specific users, and how it boosts the reach or hides specific content. It also says social media companies have to publish a report every six months on how often they were alerted to potentially illegal content and how many times they removed or downplayed content and suspended or removed users. Anyone who doesn't think a company is following the law could file a civil lawsuit, including a class action, in Georgia courts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GIzmodo: Ormeus is a cryptocurrency that was launched in 2017, the brainchild of John and Tina Barksdale -- two siblings and self-identified crypto marketers -- who are now facing federal securities charges in connection with their business. In a complaint unsealed Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the siblings with defrauding their investors out of $124 million. In an accompanying federal indictment unsealed the same day, the Justice Department announced multiple charges against John Barksdale -- wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Both agencies allege that the duo used misleading and outright fraudulent marketing techniques to lure in investors to a coin that wasn't nearly as valuable as they claimed. "As alleged, Barksdale operated like a traveling salesman and peddled lies, overstatements, and misrepresentations regarding a cryptocurrency called Ormeus Coin, which resulted in duping thousands of investors throughout the world," said Ricky J. Patel, Homeland Security Investigations New York Special Agent in Charge, in a statement. According to officials, the Barksdales claimed that their business was supported by "one of the largest crypto mining operations in the world" and that the company was raking in monthly mining revenue between $5.4 and $8 million. The Barksdales also heralded their token as a "new digital money system backed by a fully-audited industrial crypto-mining operation." But, according to federal officials, most of those claims were BS. Officials say the Ormeus mining operations shut down in 2019 after drawing too little money, that it never reached even a million dollars per month. According to the DOJ, John Barksdale claimed to have $250 million worth of Bitcoin stored at the mining operation that would secure the token's value. In reality, the coins belonged to someone else, the indictment states. The indictment against him claims that misrepresentations and fabrications about the coin's value were promoted via Ormeus Global, a multi-level marketing company that used false and manipulative advertising to encourage hapless investors to go all-in on the coin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.