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Security researchers with U.S. cybersecurity firm Symantec said they have discovered a "highly sophisticated" Chinese hacking tool that has been able to escape public attention for more than a decade. Reuters reports: The discovery was shared with the U.S. government in recent months, who have shared the information with foreign partners, said a U.S. official. Symantec, a division of chipmaker Broadcom, published its research about the tool, which it calls Daxin, on Monday. "It's something we haven't seen before," said Clayton Romans, associate director with the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "This is the exact type of information we're hoping to receive." CISA highlighted Symantec's membership in a joint public-private cybersecurity information sharing partnership, known as the JCDC, alongside the new research paper. The JCDC, or Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, is a collective of government defense agencies, including the FBI and National Security Agency, and 22 U.S. technology companies that share intelligence about active cyberattacks with one another. Symantec's attribution to China is based on instances where components of Daxin were combined with other known, Chinese-linked computer hacker infrastructure or cyberattacks, said Vikram Thakur, a technical director with Symantec. [...] "Daxin can be controlled from anywhere in the world once a computer is actually infected," said Thakur. "That's what raises the bar from malware that we see coming out of groups operating from China."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A shipment of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet dishes arrived in Ukraine on Monday, less than 48 hours after CEO Elon Musk announced the company would send support, according to a top official in the nation's government. CNBC reports: Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who tagged Musk in a request on Twitter on Saturday, posted that Starlink was "here" in Ukraine -- with a photo showing more than dozen boxes of the company's user kits in the back of a truck. How many kits SpaceX is sending to support Ukraine is unknown. Each Starlink kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a Wi-Fi router. Musk responded to Fedorov, said: "you are most welcome." Ukraine-based Oleg Kutkov tweeted a screenshot of an internet speed test, saying "Starlink is working in Kyiv" and thanked SpaceX for the company's support. Musk emphasized on Saturday that Starlink was already "active in Ukraine."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VESA, which makes the DisplayPort spec, today announced a certification program aimed at helping consumers understand if a DisplayPort 2.0 cable, monitor, or video source can support the max refresh rates and resolutions the spec claims. VESA's latest certification is around DisplayPort 2.0. The spec can support a max throughput of 80Gbps compared to DisplayPort 1.4's 32.4Gbps. This enables extreme uses, like 16K resolution with display stream compression (DSC), 10K without compression, or two 8K HDR screens at 120 Hz. But just because a monitor or cable, for example, is DisplayPort 2.0-certified doesn't mean that's the performance you'll get. The Ultra-high Bit Rate (UHBR) Certification is what you'll have to check for if you want to be certain about these figures. VESA's new "DP80 UHBR" certification means the display, cable, or video source supports up to a 20Gbps link rate (what VESA calls UHBR20) and a throughput of up to 80Gbps via four lanes. Meanwhile, "DP40 UHBR" certification calls for support for a 10Gbps link rate (UHBR10) and a maximum throughput of 40Gbps via four-lane operation. Of course, it's possible that some products will still claim such performance without going through VESA's certification process, but UHBR certifications seem to be the only way to know for sure if the DisplayPort 2.0 product will give you that impressive bandwidth. There should eventually be UHBR-certified monitors and video sources, but today's announcement is only accompanied by UHBR-certified cables. According to VESA, there are now DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort DP40 and DP80 cables from companies including Accell, Bizlink, and WIZEN. The cables are also backward-compatible with other DisplayPort link rates, such as HBR 3 and 2. [...] In terms of DisplayPort over Alt Mode, VESA noted that "full-feature passive USB-C cables already support UHBR bit rate speeds." It added that UHBR-certified USB Type-C-to-DisplayPort converter cables will be available "soon." VESA also said that "multiple video source and display products" it's currently testing should be DisplayPort UHBR-certified "soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm is using Mobile World Congress to show off some new technology that should improve 5G connectivity and wireless audio. From a report:The Snapdragon X70 5G modem-RF system attempts to improve your phone's 5G connection with the help of an AI processor. This helps it maximize 5G signal for better coverage -- particularly important for mmWave signals, which are short-range compared to the broader coverage of low and mid-band frequencies. Qualcomm says this improvement is limited to situations like stadiums and city blocks, and that it doesn't address one of mmWave's key weaknesses: the signal's inability to travel from outdoors to indoors. But where there's no mmWave signal, the new AI processor should boost sub-6GHz coverage and speeds, too. The new audio features, wrapped up in a platform called Snapdragon Sound, include a feature teased last year: wireless earbud support for 16-bit "CD-quality" lossless audio over Bluetooth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Key Russian websites and state online portals have been taken offline by attacks claimed by the Ukrainian cyber police force, which now openly engages in cyber-warfare. From a report: As the announcement of the law enforcement agency's site details, specialists from the force have teamed with volunteers to attack the web resources of Russia and Belarus. The three countries are currently involved in an ongoing and large-scale armed forces conflict that includes a cyber frontline, which manifested even before the invasion. The Ukrainian cyber police have announced having targeted the websites of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the FSB (Federal Security Service), and the Sberbank, Russia's state-owned bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo has dumped a whole bunch of new ThinkPads into the world, and there's some exciting stuff in there. We're getting a brand-new ThinkPad X13s powered by Snapdragon chips, a fifth-generation ThinkPad X1 Extreme with a WQXGA 165Hz screen option, and new additions to the P-series and T-series as well. The news I'm personally most excited about is the screen shape. A few months ago, Lenovo told me that much of its portfolio would be moving to the 16:10 aspect ratio this year. They appear to be keeping their word. Across the board, the new models are 16:10 -- taller and roomier than they were in their 16:9 eras. Some news that's a bit more... intriguing is the all-new ThinkPad X13s, which is the first laptop to feature the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform. Qualcomm made some lofty claims about this platform upon its release, including "60 percent greater performance per watt" over competing x86 platforms and "multi-day battery life." The ThinkPad X13s will run an Arm version of Windows 11, with its x64 app emulation support. The P-series models and Intel T-series models will all be here in April, with prices ranging from $1,399 to $1,419.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It'll cost $52 for you to enter, but you could take home thousands -- at least. This is the latest project from art collective MSCHF: a one-off, winner-takes-all, massively multiplayer version of the SATs named the MSAT. From a report: The SAT -- for non-US readers -- is a multiple-choice test taken across the United States for college admissions. Because it's so widely taken, it's something of an object of cultural horror. "I actually took the ACT, but as 95 percent of my friends took the SAT, I remember them being out of their minds stressed and spending almost a full 12 months preparing with private tutors and study classes," MSCHF founder Daniel Greenberg tells The Verge. So, Greenberg and his colleagues made the MSAT. Registration is open for the rest of the week, and the test itself will take place at noon ET on Saturday, March 5th, with all entrants playing live against one another from their computers. The winner will take home all the entrance fees, and here's the kicker: cheating is encouraged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says it began detecting "destructive cyberattacks directed against Ukraine's digital infrastructure" several hours before the Russian military began launching missiles or moving tanks into the country last week. From a report: The disclosure Monday, part of a larger blog post about Ukraine by Microsoft President Brad Smith, provides a glimpse of how cyber-warfare is being used as part of the ongoing invasion. The company says it is giving ongoing guidance to the Ukrainian government about cyberthreats as the situation unfolds. Smith also outlined the company's efforts to combat state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, ensuring that its platforms are not displaying or distributing any content or apps from Russia's state-sponsored RT and Sputnik news organizations, in line with a recent European Union decision. He wrote that there's "a well-orchestrated battle ongoing in the information ecosystem where the ammunition is disinformation, undermining truth and sowing seeds of discord and distrust," he wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British science is facing the threat of a highly damaging brain drain that could see scores of top young researchers leaving the UK. In addition, the futures of several major British-led international projects are also now in jeopardy following a delay in funding by the European Union. From a report: Senior scientists say the UK's scientific standing is at serious risk while others have warned that major programmes -- including medical projects aimed at tackling global scourges such as malaria -- face cancellation. "There is a real prospect that bright young scientists will decide it will be best for their careers if they leave the UK," said Martin Smith, head of policy at the Wellcome Trust. "At the same time, if research partnerships involving the UK break down, Britain will no longer be seen as a reliable scientific partner. UK science will suffer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple still hasn't complied with a Dutch antitrust order to allow local dating apps to have the option to use third party payment tech to sell digital content to their app users. From a report: In a statement today, the Dutch Authority for Consumers & Market (ACM) said it has levied a sixth fine against the tech giant for non-compliance with an order first issued last year. The iPhone maker is now facing a $33.6 million penalty over the issue, with the prospect of further $5.6 million increases in the coming weeks if it continues to stonewall the regulator (up to a $56 million maximum).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota said it will suspend domestic factory operations on Tuesday, losing around 13,000 cars of output, after a supplier of plastic parts and electronic components was hit by a suspected cyber attack. From a report: No information was immediately available about who was behind the possible attack or the motive. The attack comes just after Japan joined Western allies in clamping down on Russia after it invaded Ukraine, although it was not clear if the attack was at all related. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said his government would investigate the incident and whether Russia was involved. Kishida on Sunday announced that Japan would join the United States and other countries in blocking some Russian banks from accessing the SWIFT international payment system. He also said Japan would give Ukraine $100 million in emergency aid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A member of the Conti ransomware group, believed to be Ukrainian of origin, has leaked the gang's internal chats after the group's leaders posted an aggressive pro-Russian message on their official site, on Friday, in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: The message appears to have rubbed Conti's Ukrainian members the wrong way, and one of them has hacked the gang's internal Jabber/XMPP server. Internal logs were leaked earlier today via an email sent to multiple journalists and security researchers. Dmitry Smilyanets, a threat intelligence analyst for Recorded Future, who has interacted with the Conti gang in the past, has confirmed the authenticity of the leaked conversations. The leaked data contains 339 JSON files, with each file consisting of a full day's log. Conversations from January 29, 2021, to last February 27, 2022, have been leaked and can be read online here, courtesy of security firm IntelligenceX.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple may be working on a device with a 20-inch foldable display, which Apple tracker Mark Gurman describes as an "iPad / MacBook hybrid" in Bloomberg's Power On newsletter. The Verge: Gurman says that Apple is, indeed, exploring the possibility of a folding device of the sort, backing up the claims of Ross Young, the CEO and analyst at Display Supply Chain Consultants. Gurman claims the device will feature a dual-screen display that omits a physical keyboard and trackpad -- navigating and typing on the device will be entirely touchscreen-based.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world. To catch up, it is pinning its hopes on companies such as Ion Storage Systems, a next-generation battery company started in a University of Maryland chemistry lab with a $574,275 federal grant. WSJ: At a new factory outside of Washington, D.C., Ion Storage will be among the first companies in the U.S. to produce a new kind of faster-charging, longer-lasting battery. The company's batteries also don't catch fire; combustibility is a problem that has bedeviled the industry's batteries for years. The U.S. government and private investors have poured cash into battery startups hoping to catch up to the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies that dominate battery manufacturing. The goal is to leapfrog their rivals with better technology. There is an urgency for U.S. battery makers to get products to market because big customers such as auto makers are lining up long-term suppliers. If there are no U.S. options, the buyers will go abroad. "This is our last chance to get it right" in the U.S., said Ricky Hanna, Ion Storage's chief executive and the former executive director of battery operations at Apple. [...] The company is one of several startups focusing on solid-state lithium-ion batteries. These batteries differ from most lithium-ion batteries today because the electrolyte that conducts a charge between cathode and anode is solid, rather than a flammable liquid. That allows faster charging, less risk of fire and longer battery life. Ion Storage scientists demonstrate their batteries' durability by cutting them open with scissors or putting them before an open flame.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the most important environmental case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments in a dispute that could restrict or even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to control the pollution that is heating the planet. From a report: A decision by the high court, with its conservative supermajority, could shred President Biden's plans to halve the nation's greenhouse emissions by the end of the decade, which scientists have said is necessary to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. "They could handcuff the federal government's ability to affordably reduce greenhouse gases from power plants," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. But the outcome could also have repercussions that stretch well beyond air pollution, restricting the ability of federal agencies to regulate health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more. [...] At issue is a federal regulation that broadly governs emissions from power plants. But in a curious twist, the regulation actually never took effect and does not currently exist. The legal wrangling began in 2015 when President Barack Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, his chief strategy to fight climate change. Citing its authority under the Clean Air Act, the Obama administration planned to require each state to lower carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector -- primarily by replacing coal-fired power plants with wind, solar and other clean sources. Electricity generation is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, behind transportation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though the Russian government has tried geofencing access to crucial web sites, the Jerusalem Post reports that two Russian government web site still went offline Saturday — the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense. "Gosuslugi, Russia's web portal of state services, went offline on Saturday night as well, with the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media telling TASS that the site is facing cyberattacks on an 'unprecedented scale.'" Meanwhile, the Washington Post interviews 22-year-old Alex Horlan, a Ukrainian cybersecurity expert in Spain "helping take down some of Russia's most powerful websites — including state media and even the official page of the Kremlin."The attacks he and others are helping to carry out on Russian websites are part of a wide information war in the background of the much larger conflict here, as Ukrainians target Russian websites to rewrite the narrative Moscow is presenting to Russians back home. "We are creating an IT army," Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted on Saturday. Horlan is a cybersecurity expert who recently launched an app called disBalancer that helps take down scam websites by overwhelming them with online traffic. He has redirected his team's efforts in recent days to instead target Russian websites he says are spreading dangerous disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.... Thousands of people are joining Horlan and others' efforts to target the Russian sites, with around 2,000 logging into his app at any given time, he said. The main challenge is that many are losing WiFi when air raid sirens force them to retreat to underground bunkers.... Volunteers are gathering information on attacks and casualties to fact check and challenge Russia's version of events, posting messages on Telegram and other Russian social media platforms [according to Liuba Tsbulska, a Ukrainian analyst and activist who has tracked Russian disinformation for eight year]. Others work to educate international audiences or produce patriotic content. Some also target Russian military and intelligence officers, flooding their emails and other platforms with messages. Volunteers are reaching out to the mothers of Russian soldiers to convince them to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring their boys back home. In Kharkiv, after reports that Russian troops and armored vehicles entered Ukraine's second largest city early Sunday, one local Telegram channel with more than 400,000 subscribers urged people to continue to document the adversary's movements as a way to aid Ukraine's forces in the area. In one message, the Truha Kharkiv channel asked citizens to "carefully film and send information about the movement of Russian troops to our channel. This is vital to the defense of our city." Another message instructed citizens on how to make molotov cocktails.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming announced plans for a "hydrogen hub," reports the Associated Press. The states hope to use $8 billion in recently approved federal infrastructure funding to make hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — "more available and useful as clean-burning fuel for cars, trucks and trains."Hydrogen can be derived from water using an electric current and when burned emits only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel could theoretically reduce greenhouse emissions and air pollution, depending on how it's obtained. As with electric vehicles, however, hydrogen's potential has been limited by infrastructure. Lack of fueling stations limits the market for hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Few hydrogen-fueled vehicles limits investment in producing and moving hydrogen.... Critics point out that as it's now produced, hydrogen isn't green, carbon-free or unlimited. Currently nearly all hydrogen commercially produced in the U.S. comes not from water but natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While advocates say using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen now can help to develop a clean industry later, environmentalists are skeptical. "It's essentially a push for expanded oil and gas development. More oil and gas development is completely at odds with the need to confront the climate crisis and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," Jeremy Nichols with the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based environmental group WildEarth Guardians said by email. Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming rank seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, for U.S. onshore gas production. Utah also is significant gas-producing state, according to the Energy Information Administration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub's Copilot is an AI-powered autocompletion tool for coders, but the FSF has come up with a new way to describe it: Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). But they also feel the service "immediately raised serious questions for the free software movement and our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom" — which is why last July they'd put out a call for papers from the free software community. And they're now announcing the results:[W]e concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.... The papers contain opinions with which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) may or may not agree, and any views expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent the FSF. They were selected because we thought they advanced discussion of important questions, and did so clearly.... The five papers are: Copilot, copying, commons, community, culture Copyright implications of the use of code repositories to train a machine learning model If software is my copilot, who programmed my software? Interpreting docstrings without common sense On the nature of AI code copilots The FSF adds: "If this subject is of interest to you, we recommend you read this selection of papers and share your thoughts and feedback. Several of the authors have agreed to participate in follow-up discussions which will be held via IRC, LibrePlanet Wiki, and LibrePlanet Discuss mailing list.... Whether or not you are able to attend any of the live events, we encourage you to contribute to the discussion on the wiki and mailing list. As stakeholders in free software, the preservation of user freedom and copyleft, we would like to engage the community in any possible actions that must be taken."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's power grid consists of 3,000 public and private sector power companies, with 55,000 substations scattered across the country. On the CBS News show 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker notes that each grid hold grid-powering transformers — then tells the story of "the most serious attack on our power grid in history" on the night of April 16, 2013:For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain link fence. Jon Wellinghoff: They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation. At the time, Jon Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high voltage transmission system.... [T]he attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation. Jon Wellinghoff: Then they went from these vaults, across this road, over into a pasture area here. There were at least four or five different firing positions. Bill Whitaker: No real security? Jon Wellinghoff: There was no security at all, really. They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working. Jon Wellinghoff: They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night, with muzzle flash in their face. Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911. The gunmen disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived. The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster. Bill Whitaker: If they had succeeded, what would've happened? Jon Wellinghoff: Could've brought down all of Silicon Valley. Bill Whitaker: We're talking Google, Apple; all these guys-- Jon Wellinghoff: Yes, yes. That's correct. Bill Whitaker: Who do you think this could have been? Jon Wellinghoff: I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could in fact plan out this kind of a very sophisticated attack.... A few months before the assault on Metcalf, Jon Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts... The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations.... In 2016, an eco terrorist in Utah shot up a large transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he'd planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called "lights out" to simultaneously attack substations around the country. While the threats can also come from the internet, America's deputy national security advisor for cyber (formerly at the NSA) tells the reporter "We've taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it." The reporter later spoke to the president's homeland security advisor, who points out there's no specific national regulation for the power plants, arguing that one of the system's strengths is "the resources for energy are different in different regions." But they also acknowledged the federal government is now setting standards "in a variety of arenas."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The creator of Apple's Swift programming language stayed involved in the Swift core team and Evolution community... until this week. Though he'd left Apple more than five years ago, "Swift is important to me, so I've been happy to spend a significant amount of time to help improve and steer it," Lattner wrote in an explanatory comment on the Swift community forum. "This included the ~weekly core team meetings (initially in person, then over WebEx)..." The tech news site DevClass notes Lattner is also "the mind behind compiler infrastructure project LLVM," but reports that "Apparently, Lattner hasn't been part of the [Swift] core team since autumn 2021, when he tried discussing what he perceived as a toxic meeting environment with project leadership after an especially noteworthy call made him take a break in summer.""[...] after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren't planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return," Lattner wrote in his explanation post. Back then, he planned to keep participating via the Swift Evolution community "but after several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time." Lattner had been the steering force behind Swift since the language's inception in 2010. However, after leaving Apple in 2017 and handing over his project lead role, design premises like "single things that compose" seem to have fallen by the wayside, making the decision to move on completely easier for language-creator Lattner. The article points out Lattner's latest endeavour is AI infrastructure company Modular.AI. And Lattner wrote in his comment that Swift's leadership "reassures me they 'want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about' though...."Swift has a ton of well meaning and super talented people involved in and driving it. They are trying to be doing the best they can with a complicated situation and many pressures (including lofty goals, fixed schedules, deep bug queues to clear, internal folks that want to review/design things before the public has access to them, and pressures outside their team) that induce odd interactions with the community. By the time things get out to us, the plans are already very far along and sometimes the individuals are attached to the designs they've put a lot of energy into. This leads to a challenging dynamic for everyone involved. I think that Swift is a phenomenal language and has a long and successful future ahead, but it certainly isn't a community designed language, and this isn't ambiguous. The new ideas on how to improve things sounds promising — I hope they address the fundamental incentive system challenges that the engineers/leaders face that cause the symptoms we see. I think that a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift. DevClass also reported on the aftermath:Probably as a consequence of the move, the Swift core team is currently looking to restructure project leadership. According to Swift project lead Ted Kremenek... "The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions." Kremenek also used the announcement to thank Lattner for his leadership throughout the formative years of the project, writing "it has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with Chris on Swift." In 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a "news media bargaining code" forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers?Wired reports:Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021... One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to [Australia's communications minister Paul] Fletcher. Now countries around the world are looking at Australia's code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of "news deserts" — communities that no longer have a local newspaper. Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals. The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia's code works. "We know it works, we can see the evidence," says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. "The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers," Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws.... The criticism of Australia's system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.... Concerns about the code's flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. "We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides," says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada's Carleton University.... Yet Canada's news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada.... They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. "We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink." Deegan agrees the code isn't perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, "this is a badly needed Band-Aid."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney World's "Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser" hotel will be expensive and immersive, writes SFGate. ("For two adults, the starting price is about $5,000. For three adults and one child, it's nearly $6,000.") And while the hotel doesn't open to paid guests until Tuesday, free previews have already been given to online influencers:Reviews so far are generally positive — particularly praised are the character actors who carry the experience — with a few caveats. Because the hotel itself, called the Halcyon, is supposed to be a luxury cruise ship in space, the biggest complaint is that rooms are small and cramped... For some, the lack of windows may add to a sense of claustrophobia. Hotel rooms have a digital display showing outer space and no view of the real outside world. Folks needing some fresh air can, however, visit an outdoor communal space called a "climate simulator." Reporters from the YouTube channel Disney Food Blog, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers, were invited to the media preview. In their review of the hotel, they put it thusly: "Disney went all-in on an experience that seemingly puts only the wealthiest guests inside a windowless bunker for two full days." But most reviewers agreed that guests will be spending minimal time in their room anyway. The two days are packed with lightsaber training, clandestine rendezvous, elaborate entertainment and exploration of the ship. Guests need to download an app for their smartphone to chat with characters on board, receive their missions and learn their storylines. This was the other major drawback: If you're an introvert, this may be the wrong trip for you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SFGate reports:The largest plane ever built has been destroyed at an airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Sunday.... The Antonov An-225 Mriya was built in Ukraine in 1985 when the nation was still controlled by the Soviet Union. It has six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built. It was created as a strategic airlift cargo craft, carrying Soviet space orbiters, but was later purchased by Antonov Airlines. It's since been used to airlift oversized cargo and large loads of emergency aid during natural disasters.... Although Kuleba's tweet confirmed the plane's demise, Antonov says it is still gathering information on the massive plane's fate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday the head of Russia's space agency "warned that new sanctions imposed on his country could have dire consequences for the International Space Station program," reports Space.com (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm):"Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?" read one of the tweets from Roscosmos Director-General Dimitry Rogozin, which was translated by Rob Mitchell for Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger, who shared Mitchell's translation on Twitter. Russia and the United States are the major partners in the ISS program, which also includes Canada, Japan and multiple European nations... NASA, however, told Space.com later Thursday that civil cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in space will continue, particularly with regard to the ISS. But Rogozin struck a much different tone, suggesting that the new sanctions could potentially result in the ISS crashing to Earth in an uncontrolled fashion. (The Russian segment of the ISS is responsible for guidance, navigation and control for the entire complex, according to the European Space Agency. And Russian Progress cargo craft provide periodic orbit-raising boosts for the ISS, to ensure that it doesn't sink too low into Earth's atmosphere....) Rogozin also stressed that the ISS would deorbit naturally without periodic reboosts courtesy of Progress freighters.... Just days ago, however, a Cygnus spacecraft built by aerospace company Northrop Grumman arrived at the ISS with a mandate to perform the program's first operational reboost, which may eventually transfer this capability to U.S. vehicles as well. Business Insider reports that Thursday's tweets from the head of Russia's space agency also included a dire hypothetical. "If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?" On Saturday Elon Musk "responded by posting the logo of his company, SpaceX."Musk appeared to confirm that SpaceX would get involved, should the ISS fall out of orbit. A Twitter user asked if that's what the tech mogul really meant, to which Musk simply replied: "Yes." NASA, meanwhile, said it "continues working with Roscosmos and our other international partners in Canada, Europe, and Japan to maintain safe and continuous ISS operations," in a statement to Euronews.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Friday the Washington Post's live updates on the Russia-Ukraine situation included the story of a tech firm trying to get its employees out of Kyiv:John Sung Kim, chief executive of the software outsourcing company JetBridge, has been communicating with his 24 employees in Kyiv, all software developers, through Slack. Half of them are trying to leave Ukraine, but Kim says he is struggling to help them and has been unable to get them train tickets, a rental car or gasoline. "The other half of my team wants to stay and fight," said Kim. "I got on an all-hands with them this morning and told them it's not their responsibility to be soldiers and there's other ways they can contribute since they're software engineers, but there's nothing I can say to dissuade them."Kim said JetBridge's clients are almost exclusively Silicon Valley tech companies that are publicly traded or have raised venture capital financing. "The universal issue other than transportation logistics seems to be grandparents. 'My babushka' is the common theme of why they're torn from actually leaving," he said.The fallout from Russia's invasion has also impacted JetBridge's employees in Belarus. "The males in Belarus are scared that there's going to be military conscription, and unlike the Ukrainians, my Belarusian engineers have zero desire to pick up a rifle. Zero," he said. In anticipation of European Union sanctions on Belarus, Kim said JetBridge has started paying employees in bitcoin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Redwood Materials, founded by ex-Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery-recycling program in California. Automakers Ford and Volvo are the first to partner with the Carson City, Nevada-based company. Protocol reports: Redwood Materials announced in a press release this week that it will be collecting and recycling hybrid and EV battery packs at the end of their useful life into new battery materials. It says it will accept all lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries in the state of California. Though hybrids have been around for decades, we're still a few years out from the first major wave of EV getting retired from the road. But Redwood Materials is not alone in getting a head start on developing recycling technology and infrastructure to deal with the coming influx of tapped-out batteries. Last year, Massachusetts-based startup Ascend Elements announced a partnership with Honda to provide the automaker with new cathodes made from recycled lithium-ion batteries, with plans to build the largest battery recycling plant in North America. Redwood Materials currently recycles more than 6 gigawatt hours of batteries each year, enough for 60,000 EVs, according to the company. Volvo is aiming for its lineup to be fully electric by 2030 and be a circular business by 2040, something battery recycling will help it achieve. Ford's carbon-neutral target date is 2050, and the company had previously invested $50 million in Redwood Materials. "It goes without saying that California is in the front lines of climate change," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in the company's promotional video. "With raging wildfires and record droughts, we know there's no time to waste."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have unveiled the largest human family tree ever created, a shared ancestry that is woven out of more than 3,600 individual genome sequences that date back more than 100,000 years, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the deep past and complex present of our species. Motherboard reports: The immense family tree was stitched together from existing datasets and contains modern genetic information from around the world as well as samples from extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists led by Anthony Wilder Wohns, who conducted the research while earning a PhD at the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute, were able to confirm major events in human history from this integrated framework, such our species' migration out of Africa, while also encountering surprises about past populations that will require more research to understand. The outcome is a "unified genealogy of modern and ancient humans" that demonstrates the power of computational methods "to recover relationships between individuals and populations as well as to identify descendants of ancient samples," according to a study published on Thursday in Science. Though this particular study is focused on humans, the team noted that the same approach could be used for almost any other species. One of the innovations of study is a new algorithm that can more efficiently collate all this information into a single genealogy or tree sequence. By revealing relationships between individuals and populations of humans that stretch back deep into our prehistory, the approach mapped out 231 million ancestral lineages of our human family over time, as shown in the [video here]. The findings confirmed the timing of many migrations that are known from archaeological evidence, but there were a few unexpected implications in the data as well. For instance, the new family tree hints that humans first arrived in North America 56,000 years ago, much earlier than is currently estimated, and points to human migration to Papua New Guinea a full 100,000 years before the earliest documented evidence of habitation in that region. These tantalizing results do not necessarily mean that those migration timelines should be pushed back, but they do offer a compelling avenue of research going forward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new study (PDF) of YouTube's algorithmic captions on videos aimed at kids documents how the text sometimes veers into very adult language. In a sample of more than 7,000 videos from 24 top-ranked kids' channels, 40 percent displayed words in their captions found on a list of 1,300 "taboo" terms, drawn in part from a study on cursing. In about 1 percent of videos, the captions included words from a list of 16 "highly inappropriate" terms, with YouTube's algorithms most likely to add the words "bitch," "bastard," or "penis." Some videos posted on Ryan's World, a top kids' channel with more than 30 million subscribers, illustrate the problem. In one, the phrase "You should also buy corn" is rendered in captions as "you should also buy porn." In other videos, a "beach towel" is transcribed as a "bitch towel," "buster" becomes "bastard," a "crab" becomes a "crap," and a craft video on making a monster-themed dollhouse features a "bed for penis." Automated captions are not available on YouTube Kids, the version of the service aimed at children. But many families use the standard version of YouTube, where they can be seen. Pew Research Center reported in 2020 that 80 percent of parents to children 11 or younger said their child watched YouTube content; more than 50 percent of children did so daily. [...] YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby says children under 13 are recommended to use YouTube Kids, where automated captions cannot be seen. On the standard version of YouTube, she says the feature improves accessibility. "We are continually working to improve automatic captions and reduce errors," she says. "The team also ran audio from kids' YouTube videos through an automated transcription service offered by Amazon," adds Wired. "It too sometimes made mistakes that made the content edgier. [...] 'Fluffy' became the F-word in the transcript of a video about a toy; one video host asked viewers to send in not 'craft ideas' but 'crap ideas.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A viral video showing the "Ghost of Kyiv" shooting down a Russian fighter yet was created with Digital Combat Simulator, "a simulation game that was first released in 2008," reports fact-checking website Snopes. From the report: The video was originally posted to YouTube by âoeComrade_Corb.â The original caption identified this clip as a simulation and noted that it was created as an homage to the Ghost of Kyiv. This footage is from DCS, but is nevertheless made out of respect for âoeThe Ghost of Kiev.â If he is real, may God be with him; if he is fake, I pray for more like "him." When this video was posted to other social media sites, it was miscaptioned as genuine footage of the Ghost of Kyiv. While this video does not feature genuine footage, the general of the Ukrainian armed forces claimed that they had truly downed several Russian aircraft. CNN reported: "The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has claimed five Russian aircraft and a helicopter were shot down early Thursday, as Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The Russian military has denied the claims, state news agency TASS reported on Thursday."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Secret recordings of a surveillance firm's presentation show how much iCloud data Apple surrenders to law enforcement with a warrant -- though it's Google and Facebook that can track a suspect to within three feet. Apple Insider reports: PenLink is a little-known firm from Nebraska which earns $20 million annually from helping the US government track criminal suspects. PenLink also sells its services to local law enforcement -- and it's from such a sales presentation that details of iCloud warrants has emerged. According to Forbes, Jack Poulson of the Tech Inquiry watchdog attended the National Sheriff's Association winter conference. While there, he secretly recorded the event. During the presentation, PenLink's Scott Tuma described how the company works with law enforcement to track users through multiple services, including the "phenomenal" Apple with iCloud. Apple is open about what it does in the event of a suboena from law enforcement. It's specific about how it will not unlock iPhones, for instance, but it will surrender information from iCloud backups that are stored on its servers. "If you did something bad," said Tuma, "I bet you I could find it on that backup." Tuma also says that in his experience, it's been possible to find people's locations through different services, although not through iCloud. "[Google] can get me within three feet of a precise location," he said. "I cannot tell you how many cold cases I've helped work on where this is five, six, seven years old and people need to put [the suspect] at a hit-and-run or it was a sexual assault that took place." It's also possible for law enforcement and firms like PenLink which help them, to get location data from Facebook and Snapchat. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roger Chen and Rui Max from Harvard Business Review explain how ByteDance became the world's most valuable startup. What's the secret? According to the editors, it's the company's shared-service platform, or SSP, which it uses to power innovation. From the report: Bytedance uses its SSP platform differently from most companies. The company's product teams or units don't control their own operating resources. Instead, many common business, technology, and operating functions (among them HR and legal) are centralized and organized into corresponding teams. The teams are highly specialized, so that the right people can be found and flexibly deployed as needed to each new venture. Cloud and shared operational tools, some of which have been developed in house, allow ByteDance to maintain this seemingly complex organizational setup. Product and related teams still focus on serving customer needs, but they rely on different SSP teams to accelerate development and growth. For example, when ByteDance tasks a new venture team with investigating user needs and market opportunities, the team can go to the user-research specialists at the SSP for data support, saving time on market analysis. In other companies, these tasks are undertaken by the product team, which is rarely best equipped for such information gathering. Subsequently, when a use case has been identified that justifies developing a new app or product feature, the product team is paired with engineers at the SSP level to develop the new product or feature. In some cases, product teams customize existing technologies that have already been developed by the SSP. Algorithms are a case in point. Product teams at ByteDance work with SSP algorithm engineers to fine-tune their enormously powerful recommendation engines. The SSP has also brought together other important teams: user-growth teams, which help identify and acquire desired users; content teams, which establish partnerships to acquire new content; analytics teams, which help to develop deeper user insights; and sales teams, which drive monetization. As expected, because so many capabilities have been centralized into this large SSP, the actual product teams tend to be small and focused, especially in the exploration stage. Douyin, for example, began with just a handful of employees, and the education team began with just two. Importantly, the relationship between the SSP and market-facing teams is symbiotic and mutually beneficial. It's this virtuous loop of continued discovery and improvement that has enabled ByteDance's success. Relying on its SSP, ByteDance has developed unique innovation and growth strategies. These strategies have five main characteristics: [broad exploration, rapid iteration, selective focus, maximum-capability cross-pollination, and productizing platform services]. [...] ByteDance's SSP strategy -- accelerate new projects by providing instant access to best in class technology and operations -- has been so successful that one would expect many other companies to have embraced it. Yet few companies have managed to replicate ByteDance's success with the strategy. Why? Because they have not put in the organizational enablers that helped ByteDance overcome fiefdom mindsets, which inhibit collaboration. Three of these organizational enablers are particularly important: [OKR system, explicitly flattened hierarchy, and data-driven culture]. [...] ByteDance's SSP-based innovation strategy has clearly played a key role in its first decade of explosive growth. It has allowed the company to incubate rapidly and broadly and to scale efficiently, by using centralized but flexibly deployed technical and operational stacks. This strategy has served the company well in part because of the similarity among its various algorithm-driven products. ByteDance is now exploring other product categories and is refining its strategy to be more suitable for its evolving organizational model and processes, but no matter how the company evolves, its SSP-based innovation strategy is sure to play an important role.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As of this writing, the Ruble is worth about 0.012 U.S. dollars. The Robux, the money people use to buy things in Roblox, is worth about 0.0125. This means that the Robux has slightly more buying power than the Russian ruble. The Russian economy has been in decline for some time, but both the Ruble and its main stock index took a nose dive on Thursday after Russia invaded Ukraine. As trading began that day, the Ruble collapsed and the Russian equities index, the MOEX, fell 45 percent. Both are in flux and have recovered some of their losses, but the situation with the Ruble is so dire that the Russian central bank has decided to step in and prop it up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reviews of Valve's Steam Deck portable gaming PC are pouring in, but one surprise that has flown under the radar is Aperture Desk Job -- "a new bite-size experience set in the Portal universe that'll be a free download March 1st," reports The Verge. "It's designed to introduce new Steam Deck buyers to the handheld's incredible array of controls, and it involves... toilets and chairs." From the report: [H]ere's how Valve tries to thread the needle between our rampant desire for Valve to remember how to count to three and the potential disappointment that Valve has not yet managed it: "Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work -- your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life's got other plans, and they all involve chairs. Designed as a free playable short for Valve's new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld's controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds. Not Portal 3! Lower your expectations: This is not a sequel to Portal. Now get ready to raise them slightly, because it is in the expanded universe of those games."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that cyberattacks could trigger Article 5 of the organization's charter, the so-called "commitment clause" that considers an attack on any NATO ally an attack on all. NBC News reports: Stoltenberg's comment comes as national security professionals and cybersecurity industry professionals remain on high alert for any major attacks. While conflict on the ground in Ukraine continues to escalate, little has been seen thus far in terms of major cyberwar activities. Still, some hacker and activist groups have sprung into action. One ransomware group announced Friday that it supported the Russian government and would respond to cyberattacks on Russia by going after "critical infrastructures of an enemy." As for attacks on Ukraine, the country's computer emergency response team said Friday that it had seen a large email phishing campaign from Belarus targeted at military personnel. The statement comes amid a major cyberattack on Nvidia that was initiated at the same time as the Russian cyber warfare division started their offensive against Ukraine. Security researchers are concerned that somebody could put something malicious in one of the software updates that are then sent out to Nvidia's clients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wccftech: NVIDIA has seemingly been hit by a major cyberattack that may have completely compromised parts of its business, reports The Telegraph. In their exclusive report, The Telegraph reports that the cyberattack was initiated at the same time as the Russian cyber warfare division started their offensive against Ukraine. All Nato allies have announced major sanctions on Russia and this could potentially be why Russia has decided to target major companies such as NVIDIA. The report further states that the cyberattack on NVIDIA has completely compromised parts of their business and there are already reports from several users coming in regarding services disruption. The scale of this attack is currently unknown but it clearly seems to be a major one as NVIDIA had to take several systems offline to pacify the intrusion before it could spread further: "'The ultimate concern is that somebody may have put something in one of the software updates,' Dr Woodward said, pointing to the devastating SolarWinds hack that exploited American software companies to gain access to US government computer systems. 'They'll be going through trying to make sure to see if there's any indication that anything has been changed in their software that they then shipped to their clients.'" NVIDIA's mail servers were also partially operational during this time so it's entirely likely that there might have been a breach in confidential documents. But it is not confirmed yet if any data was stolen. In a brief statement, an Nvidia spokesperson confirmed the report, saying: "We are investigating an incident. We don't have any additional information to share at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We often think of multiplication and division as calculations that need to be taught in school. But a large body of research suggests that, even before children begin formal education, they possess intuitive arithmetic abilities. A new study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience argues that this ability to do approximate calculations even extends to that most dreaded basic math problem -- true division -- with implications for how students are taught mathematical concepts in the future. The foundation for the study is the approximate number system (ANS), a well-established theory that says people (and even nonhuman primates) from an early age have an intuitive ability to compare and estimate large sets of objects without relying upon language or symbols. For instance, under this non-symbolic system, a child can recognize that a group of 20 dots is bigger than a group of four dots, even when the four dots take up more space on a page. The ability to make finer approximations -- say, 20 dots versus 17 dots -- improves into adulthood.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK has said it will work "all day" to persuade fellow European states to cut Russia off from the international Swift payment system. From a report: The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, ended the pretence that Britain was not at odds with its fellow European leaders over the issue. He said there was still time for Russia to be excluded, and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said: "The UK is working with allies to exclude Russia from the Swift financial system." Wallace added: "We will work all the magic, do everything we can in diplomacy." Truss is to undertake a round of shuttle diplomacy to try to rally support for the British position after the EU refused to adopt what has been billed as the "nuclear option" of sanctions. The story adds: Swift is incorporated under Belgian law and, although supervised by a complex web of central banks, it was forced in 2012 to comply with an EU regulation, as confirmed by its home country government, that had cut Iran off from the banking system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A radiation spike has been recorded near Chernobyl's nuclear power plant which has been seized by Russian forces, monitoring data shows. BBC: Invading Russian troops took control of the plant - the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986 - on Thursday, Ukraine said. Radiation levels increased about 20-fold on Thursday, monitoring stations there reported. But experts say another major nuclear disaster there is "extremely unlikely." The rise was caused by heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the 4,000-sq-km (2,485 sq-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned plant, Ukraine's State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate reported. The biggest spike was recorded close to the damaged reactor. Radiation levels are continuously monitored there -- measured as a dose that you would receive per hour in a location. Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units -- called microsieverts -- every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs -- about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook's parent company Meta said Friday that Russia will hit its services with restrictions after the social media giant refused authorities' order to stop fact-checkers and content warning labels on its platforms. From a report: "Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organize for action," Meta's Nick Clegg said in a statement. "We want to continue to make their voices heard."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While billionaires are battling it out in a race to colonise the moon, mere stratospherically rich mortals on Earth were able to grab a small slice of space rock for themselves on Wednesday at Christie's annual sale of rare and unusual meteorites. From a report: Star-gazers and meteorite enthusiasts bid frantically for fragments of the "oldest matter humankind can touch" -- as the auction house put it -- while other objects such as a comet-cracked kennel from Costa Rica sold for tens of thousands of dollars. A 15g fragment of the Winchcombe meteorite, which briefly became Britain's most coveted rock after the bright fireball was seen blazing across the sky over the Cotswold town last year, sold for $30,200, while a smaller 1.7g fragment fetched $12,600. According to the Christie's catalogue of the 66-lot Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar and other Rare Meteorites" sale, only 602g of Winchcombe was ever found -- with 90% of the material now housed in the UK's national collection, curated by London's Natural History Museum. Among the more usual items for sale was a dog house hit by a meteorite which crashed through the tin roof in April 2019 in Aguas Zarcas, Costa Rica. But while it was expected to sell for as much as $300,000, after all it boasted a seven-inch hole which "marks where the meteorite punctured the roof," it finally sold for $44,100.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian cybersecurity officials have warned that Belarusian state-sponsored hackers are targeting the private email addresses of Ukrainian military personnel. From a report: Announcing the activity in a Facebook post, Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) said that a mass phishing campaign is targeting the private i.ua and meta.ua accounts belonging to Ukrainian military personnel. "After the account is compromised, the attackers, by the IMAP protocol, get access to all the messages," it added. "Later, the attackers use contact details from the victim's address book to send the phishing emails." CERT-UA has attributed the ongoing campaign to the UNC1151 threat group, which Mandiant formally linked to the Belarusian government in November 2021. Mandiant also linked the state-backed cyber-espionage group to the Ghostwriter disinformation campaign, which has been involved in spreading anti-NATO rhetoric and hack-and-leak operations throughout Europe. "The Minsk-based group 'UNC1151' is behind these activities. Its members are officers of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Belarus," CERT-UA wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple appears to be exploring the possibility of integrating a fully functioning Mac within a keyboard, reminiscent of home computers of the 80s, such as the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. MacRumors: The concept was revealed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in a new Apple patent application called "Computer in an input device," which describes a thicker Magic Keyboard-style chassis with "all the components of a high performance computer" integrated under the hood. The patent describes the premise for such a device, which could be plugged into a separate external display via a single I/O port designed to receive both data and power, and wirelessly paired with a trackpad or mouse for additional input.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MattSparkes writes: Bitstamp, Europe's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has handed over information on some of its customers to the UK's intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6. The news suggests that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are being used in serious organised crime and terrorism, as well as domestic crime. The Security Service, also known as MI5, is responsible for preventing terrorism and espionage within the UK, while the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, is tasked with foreign intelligence. Neither organisation tackles ordinary crime, unless there is a threat to national security, and until now no cryptocurrency investigations have been confirmed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People who speak limited English struggled to access telehealth services in the US during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new analysis, affecting their ability to connect with medical care. It's something experts worried about as soon as health organizations made the switch from in-person to virtual care. From a report: "That was really a concern of ours -- who is getting left out?" says Denise Payan, an assistant professor of health, society, and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who worked on the study. Payan and her colleagues interviewed staff and patients at two community health centers in California about their experiences with telehealth between December 2020 and April 2021. One of the clinics serves a primarily Spanish-speaking population, and the second serves a primarily Chinese-speaking population. Neither had offered video or phone visits before the pandemic started. Both started to them available soon after the California stay-at-home orders in March 2020 -- first with phone calls, then with video. The researchers spoke with 15 clinic workers and nine patients. Clinic patients who spoke limited English struggled to set up and use platforms like Zoom for health visits, the researchers found. "Things like not being able to read FAQs," Payan says. "There's reliance on either clinic personnel, staff, or family members -- like kids, who are helping their parents get connected to video visits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media users could be cut off from other accounts on platforms such as Twitter if they do not sign up for ID verification, under government proposals to tackle anonymous trolls. From a report: Popular services including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram will be required to give users the option to opt in or opt out from receiving messages, replies and content from unverified or anonymous accounts. Verified users could also block unverified or anonymous accounts from seeing their content under the opt in/opt out proposals. This means people or organisations without verified accounts -- symbolised by a blue tick on Twitter and Instagram -- would be blocked from communicating with, or being seen by, accounts that have opted out from interactions with unverified sources. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said platforms had a number of options for verifying users, including using government-issued ID such as a passport to open an account or using two-factor authentication, where a platform sends a prompt to a user's mobile phone. The new system will be introduced under the online safety bill, which requires tech firms to protect users from harmful content or face the threat of substantial fines imposed by Ofcom, the communications regulator. The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, said: "Tech firms have a responsibility to stop anonymous trolls polluting their platforms." She added: "People will now have more control over who can contact them and be able to stop the tidal wave of hate served up to them by rogue algorithms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With sanctions on Russia ramping up following its invasion of Ukraine, Google's YouTube is under pressure to remove or cut commercial ties with some of its most prolific pro-Russian channels. From a report: The online video giant has a massive reach in Russia and has long been a popular platform for both government critics and state-backed media. But now officials in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe are discussing restrictions that could target groups and people with huge audiences on the platform, creating a dilemma for the Alphabet-owned business. European Union sanctions, for instance, would target Vladimir Solovyov, a TV and radio journalist behind a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers. An EU report issued on Wednesday said that "Solovyov is known for his extremely hostile attitude toward Ukraine and praise of the Russian government." A four-hour video livestream published overnight on his YouTube channel about the Russian military attacks had over 2.7 million views within its first nine hours. That video also ran advertisements, at least for U.S. viewers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The government of Ukraine is asking for volunteers from the country's hacker underground to help protect critical infrastructure and conduct cyber spying missions against Russian troops, according two people involved in the project. From a report: As Russian forces attacked cities across Ukraine, requests for volunteers began to appear on hacker forums on Thursday morning, as many residents fled the capital Kyiv. "Ukrainian cybercommunity! It's time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country," the post read, asking hackers and cybersecurity experts to submit an application via Google docs, listing their specialties, such as malware development, and professional references. Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he wrote the post at the request of a senior Defense Ministry official who contacted him on Thursday. Aushev's firm Cyber Unit Technologies is known for working with Ukraine's government on the defense of critical infrastructure. Another person directly involved in the effort confirmed that the request came from the Defense Ministry on Thursday morning. Further reading: Washington steels for Russian cyberattacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [T]he last couple Windows 11 Insider Preview builds have augmented Windows 11's touchscreen capabilities. The build released to Dev channel users last week included new gestures, changes to how snapping windows works when in tablet mode, and a few other improvements. And a new build released today totally overhauls the taskbar for touchscreens. Windows 11 in its current form adds more space between icons when you're using your device as a tablet, but the new preview goes further. When you're using apps, the taskbar will shrink to a narrow strip across the bottom of the screen: it's still tall enough to show the clock and your network, sound, and battery status icons, but all your pinned apps and other system tray icons are hidden. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen or closing an app window brings up a new, larger version of the taskbar with larger, more finger-friendly icons and spacing. The taskbar disappears again once you've launched your app. "Windows 11 still doesn't have a dedicated Tablet Mode toggle like Windows 10 did," notes Ars. "Instead, the OS relies on signals from your hardware to enable and disable the tablet-centric UI tweaks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

echo123 shares a report from the Washington Post: The U.S. Postal Service finalized plans Wednesday to purchase up to 148,000 gasoline-powered mail delivery trucks (Warning: paywalled; alternative source), defying Biden administration officials' objections that the multibillion dollar contract would undercut the nation's climate goals. The White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency asked the Postal Service this month to reassess its plan to replace its delivery fleet with 90% gas-powered trucks and 10% electric vehicles, at a cost of as much as $11.3 billion. The contract, orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, offers only a 0.4-mile-per-gallon fuel economy improvement over the agency's current fleet. Federal climate science officials said the Postal Service vastly underestimated the emissions of its proposed fleet of "Next Generation Delivery Vehicles," or NGDVs, and accused the mail agency of fudging the math of its environmental studies to justify such a large purchase of internal combustion engine trucks. But DeJoy, a holdover from the Trump administration, has called his agency's investment in green transportation "ambitious," even as environmental groups and even other postal leaders have privately questioned it. [...] Environmental advocates assailed the agency's decision, saying it would lock in decades of climate-warming emissions and worsen air pollution. The Postal Service plans call for the new trucks, built by Oshkosh Defense, to hit the streets in 2023 and remain in service for at least 20 years. DeJoy said in a statement that the agency was open to pursuing more electric vehicles if "additional funding - from either internal or congressional sources -- becomes available." But he added that the agency had "waited long enough" for new vehicles. The White House and EPA had asked the Postal Service to conduct a supplemental environmental impact statement on the new fleet and to hold a public hearing on its procurement plan. The Postal Service rejected those requests: Mark Guilfoil, the agency's vice president of supply management, said they "would not add value" to the mail service's analysis. Now that the Postal Service has finalized it agreement with Oshkosh, environmentalists are expected to file lawsuits challenging it on the grounds that the agency's environmental review failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. They will probably base their case on the litany of problems Biden administration officials previously identified with the agency's technical analysis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly described bacterium living in the Caribbean "is visible to the naked eye, growing up to 2 centimeters -- as long as a peanut -- and 5,000 times bigger than many other microbes," writes Elizabeth Pennisi via Science.org. "What's more, this giant has a huge genome that's not free floating inside the cell as in other bacteria, but is instead encased in a membrane, an innovation characteristic of much more complex cells, like those in the human body." From the report: The bacterium was unveiled in a preprint (PDF) posted online last week and it has astounded some researchers who have reviewed its features. Aside from upending ideas about how big -- and sophisticated -- microbes can become, this bacterium "could be a missing link in the evolution of complex cells," says Kazuhiro Takemoto, a computational biologist at Kyushu Institute of Technology. Researchers have long divided life into two groups: prokaryotes, which include bacteria and single-cell microbes called archaea, and eukaryotes, which include everything from yeast to most forms of multicellular life, including humans. Prokaryotes have free-floating DNA, whereas eukaryotes package their DNA in a nucleus. Eukaryotes also compartmentalize various cell functions into vesicles called organelles and can move molecules from one compartment to another -- something prokaryotes can't. But the newly discovered microbe blurs the line between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. [...] Furthermore, that cell includes two membrane sacs, one of which contains all the cell's DNA, [researchers] report in their 18 February preprint on bioRxiv. Volland calls that sac an organelle and that's "a big new step" that implies the two branches of life are not as different as previously thought, [Verena Carvalho, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst] says. "Perhaps it's time to rethink our definition of eukaryote and prokaryote!" agrees Petra Levin, a microbiologist at Washington University in St Louis. "It's a supercool story." The other, water-filled sac may be the reason the bacterium could grow so big. [...] The DNA-filled sac, also squished along the inner edge of this bacterium, proved extraordinary as well. When researchers at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute sequenced the DNA inside, they found the genome was huge, with 11 million bases harboring some 11,000 clearly distinguishable genes. Typically, bacterial genomes average about 4 million bases and about 3900 genes. By labeling the DNA with fluorescent tags, [researchers] determined the bacterium's genome was so big because there are more than 500,000 copies of the same stretches of DNA. Protein production factories called ribosomes were inside the DNA-filled sac as well, likely making the translation of a gene's code into a protein more efficient.Read more of this story at Slashdot.