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A hacking group affiliated with the Chinese government is believed to have carried out a months-long attack against Taiwan's financial sector by leveraging a vulnerability in a security software solution used by roughly 80% of all local financial organizations. From a report: The attacks are believed to have started at the end of November 2021 and were still taking place this month, according to a report shared with The Record today by Taiwanese security firm CyCraft. The company attributed the intrusions -- which it tracked under the codename of Operation Cache Panda -- to a well-known Chinese cyber-espionage group known in the cybersecurity industry as APT10. The security firm told The Record in an interview earlier today that it couldn't share the name of the product exploited in the current attacks because of the ongoing law enforcement investigation and because of the efforts to have a patch released and installed across the local financial sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's won't be a big revival for BlackBerry phones anytime soon. OnwardMobility, the Austin-based startup that announced its plans to release a 5G BlackBerry device with a physical keyboard back in 2020, is shutting down. From a report: The company posted a notice of its closure on its website, making it clear that it won't be proceeding with the development of the smartphone. This comes a month after it responded to people asking about the status of the project with a blog post entitled "contrary to popular belief, we are not dead." While OnwardMobility didn't expound on the reason behind its closure, Android Police reported a few days ago that its license to use the BlackBerry name had been canceled. Apparently, BlackBerry wants to distance itself from its past as a smartphone manufacturer after it sold off its remaining mobile patents for $600 million in the beginning of February. OnwardMobility reportedly decided not to push through with the development of a new smartphone without the BlackBerry name, especially since it won't be easy entering the market with an ongoing global component shortage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us. As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker. While we're familiar with magpies being intelligent and social creatures, this was the first instance we knew of that showed this type of seemingly altruistic behaviour: helping another member of the group without getting an immediate, tangible reward. As academic scientists, we're accustomed to experiments going awry in one way or another. Expired substances, failing equipment, contaminated samples, an unplanned power outage -- these can all set back months (or even years) of carefully planned research. For those of us who study animals, and especially behaviour, unpredictability is part of the job description. This is the reason we often require pilot studies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Manchester City have begun building the world's first football stadium inside the metaverse with the help of virtual reality experts at Sony. From a report: Using image analysis and skeletal-tracking technologies created by Hawk-Eye, a subsidiary of the tech and entertainment giant, the club's stadium will become the central hub of City in a virtual reality world. Club officials working on the project envisage a time when City can fill a virtual Eithad Stadium several times over, allowing supporters who may never go to Manchester to watch live games from the comfort of their own homes anywhere in the world. The Premier League's digital pioneers have signed a three-year deal with Sony and, though work is still in its infancy, teams of the company's experts have already visited the Etihad to map it digitally and recreate it in virtual reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an AI copyright a work of art. From a report: Last week, a three-person board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, who tried to copyright a picture on behalf of an algorithm he dubbed Creativity Machine. The board found that Thaler's AI-created image didn't include an element of "human authorship" -- a necessary standard, it said, for protection. Creativity Machine's work is named "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." It's part of a series Thaler has described as a "simulated near-death experience" in which an algorithm reprocesses pictures to create hallucinatory images and a fictional narrative about the afterlife. Crucially, the AI is supposed to do this with extremely minimal human intervention, which has proven a dealbreaker for the Copyright Office. The board's decision calls "the nexus between the human mind and creative expression" a vital element of copyright. As it notes, copyright law doesn't directly outline rules for non-humans, but courts have taken a dim view of claims that animals or divine beings can take advantage of copyright protections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The OnePlus 10 Pro is out in China, and while it has some flagship specs, including a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor and a 5,000mAh battery, it turns out it might not be the most durable phone on the market. YouTuber Zack Nelson, creator of the popular JerryRigEverything channel, put the OnePlus 10 Pro through his usual durability test, and when he pushed on the middle of the phone to try and bend it, it snapped nearly in half. See for yourself -- the bend test for the portion of the video starts at 6:57. When Nelson first pushes on the OnePlus 10 Pro, the back glass begins to crack, and many of the cracks appear under the phone's stovetop-like camera bump. When he pushes again, those cracks turn into a full-on break, causing the top part of the phone to begin to fold over.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has spent almost three decades perfecting the art of bringing everything imaginable to your doorstep in the shortest amount of time, at the lowest possible price. By almost any measure, it's been one of the greatest corporate successes in history. But despite Amazon's unquestioned dominance in e-commerce, one giant market has proven particularly vexing: groceries. From a report: Amazon has introduced a dizzying array of services -- Prime Now, Fresh, Go and others -- in its effort to become a giant in the $750 billion U.S. grocery market. In 2017, it spent $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods, a price tag more than 10 times higher than Amazon had paid in any prior deal. Still, it's just a niche player in the industry. As of mid-December, Amazon.com and Whole Foods accounted for a combined 2.4% of the grocery market over the past 12 months, while Walmart controlled 18%, according to research firm Numerator. Amazon's delivery services have struggled to stand out in a crowded field, while the Go automated convenience stores have been deprioritized, according to people familiar with the company's strategy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The exoplanet WASP-121b, which resides about 900 light-years from Earth, is an egg-shaped scorcher. Temperatures on the planet's day side can reach up to 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so hot that heavy metal elements, like iron and magnesium, exist as gases and are constantly streaming out of the atmosphere and into space. But the planet's night side has, until now, remained in the dark. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Feb. 21, astronomers shared their first look at the planet's dark side using NASA's Hubble Telescope. Telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory discovered WASP-121b in 2015. The planet, which is a little bigger and heavier than Jupiter, is on the verge of being ripped apart by the gravitational forces of its home star, known as WASP 121. It makes a full orbit of that star once every 1.3 days and is tidally locked -- one side is perpetually bathed in starlight, the other is forever staring out into space. "This is one of the most extreme systems we have," says Ben Montet, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales who was not affiliated with the study. He notes its extremely hot day side is hotter than some stars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Midwestern fast-food chain White Castle is outsourcing some of its jobs to robots. The hamburger chain announced plans last week to install Miso Robotics' "Flippy 2" in 100 locations. From a report: The Ohio-based chain has been experimenting with the robotic fry cook since September 2020, when the original "Flippy" was installed in a Chicago area restaurant. After upgrading to "Flippy 2" at the original test location in November 2021, White Castle decided to roll out a larger version of the program. "By taking over the work of an entire fry station, Flippy 2 alleviates the pain points that come with back-of-house roles at quick-service restaurants to create a working environment for its human coworkers that maximizes the efficiency of the kitchen," Miso Robotics said in a statement. "The improved workflow allows for the redeployment of team members to focus on creating memorable moments for customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has said many crypto developers wouldn't be unhappy to see a continued slide in the price of digital currencies, as the slump could clear out less-viable projects. From a report: Cryptocurrencies have fallen in recent weeks alongside stocks, as investors grow more cautious about taking risks given persistent rises in inflation, expected interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and geopolitical tensions. But the prospect of more losses and a bear market -- generally, where prices fall 20% from a recent high -- won't deter some in the crypto world, Buterin told Bloomberg. "The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market," he said in an interview published Saturday. [...] On the other hand, falling prices separate the curious from the serious, he argued. That is why a "crypto winter" -- when prices keep crashing and fail to recover for a long time -- could be seen as a positive. "The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away, and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their models and in their teams and their people," the ethereum cofounder said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU is taking China to the World Trade Organization for alleged patent infringements that are costing companies billions of euros, as part of what officials in Brussels claim is a "power grab" by Beijing [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] to set smartphone technology licensing rates. Financial Times reports: Businesses, including Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China's supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said. Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added. The lower licensing fees set by Beijing deprive smartphone makers and other mobile telecommunications businesses of a crucial source of revenue to reinvest in research and development. "It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means," said a European Commission official. "It is a means to push Europe out." Smartphone makers have agreed global standards for telecommunications networks. In return, technology manufacturers must license their patents to others. If they cannot agree on a price, they go to court to set it. Chinese courts generally set prices at half the level of those in the west, meaning their companies pay less for the technology from overseas providers. In August 2020, China's Supreme People's Court decided that Chinese courts can impose "anti-suit injunctions," which forbid a company taking a case to a court outside the country. Those that do are liable for a â147,000 daily fine and the judgments of courts elsewhere are ignored.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus are expected to be among the first companies to release gaming Chromebooks. From a report: A code change in the Chromium Gerrit suggests the vendors are working on Chrome OS devices that will support Steam. In January 2020, Google said it would bring Steam to Chromebooks, and the plan may be starting to take shape. 9to5Google spotted a code change on Saturday showing a list of what appears to be Chromebook models that will support Steam: Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1H)Acer Chromebook 515Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)Asus Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)HP Pro c640 G2 ChromebookUnknown Chromebook from Lenovo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK is ready to launch cyber attacks on Russia if Moscow targets Britain's computer networks after a Ukraine invasion, the defence secretary has threatened. The Independent: In a Commons statement, Ben Wallace pointed to the "offensive cyber capability" the UK is already developing from a base in the north west of England. "I'm a soldier -- I was always taught the best part of defence is offence," he told an MP who urged him to "give as good as we get back to Russia" if necessary. Mr Wallace also stepped up UK threats by saying sanctions will be imposed for aggression that stops short of crossing the Ukraine border -- amid criticism they have not yet been used. Russian companies with links to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin's regime will be targeted if, for example, a no-fly zone is imposed in Ukraine, or ports blockaded "Many of these aggressive moves -- like a no-fly zone, a blockade to free trade -- would absolutely warrant a response ranging from sanctions and others," the defence secretary said. "Russia should be under no illusion that threatening the integrity of a sovereign nation, whether that is in the air or on the sea, is exactly the same as threatening it on the land." Sanctions have not yet been imposed in order to coordinate with the European Union, which has yet to announce what its package will be, Mr Wallace suggested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new claim that Microsoft and Google are gaming the online advertising market to the detriment of smaller rivals threatens to set up a new antitrust clash in Europe, according to previously unseen data. Politico: The two U.S. giants appear to be flooding smaller search engine partners with spam ads and keeping some of the most valuable ads for themselves, according to data reviewed by POLITICO, in a move that draws parallels with the infamous $2.7 billion Google Shopping case. While EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager's 2015 offensive against Google's abuses in the search market got the backing of the EU General Court in November, there are some who say that blind spots in the case have allowed for certain violations to continue -- illustrated by Swedish price-comparison site PriceRunner's decision earlier this month to sue Google for $2.4 billion in damages. And now, according to the same data, both Google and its closest rival in the search engine space, Microsoft, are siphoning off so-called spam ads to smaller search engines that use their search results, as well as limiting the quantity of higher-value ads that appear on these partner search engines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Zoom call had about 40 people on it -- or that's what the people who had logged on thought. The all-staff meeting at Madbird, a "glamorous design agency" had been called to welcome the growing company's newest recruits. Its dynamic and inspirational boss, Ali Ayad, wanted everyone on the call to be ambitious hustlers -- just like him. But what those who had turned on their cameras didn't know was that some of the others in the meeting weren't real people. They were listed as participants, and as the BBC reports, some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles but their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people. The whole thing was fake -- the real employees had been "jobfished." From the report: The company had not been "shipping products and experiences locally and globally for 10 years" as it had claimed. In fact, Ali Ayad only registered Madbird with Companies House on the same day he interviewed Chris Doocey to be a sales manager - 23 September 2020. At least six of the most senior employees profiled by Madbird were fake. Their identities stitched together using photos stolen from random corners of the internet and made-up names. They included Madbird's co-founder, Dave Stanfield -- despite him having a LinkedIn profile and Ali referring to him constantly. Some of the duped staff had even received emails from him. Ali told one employee that if they wanted to get in touch with Mr Stanfield they should email him, because he was too busy with projects for Nike to jump on a call. Using facial recognition technology we were able to match Dave Stanfield's headshot to its actual owner -- a Prague-based beehive maker named Michal Kalis. When we tracked Michal down, he confirmed he had never heard of Madbird, Ali Ayad or Dave Stanfield.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Dutch antitrust watchdog fined Apple 5 million euros ($5.7 million) on Monday, the fifth such penalty in successive weeks in a row over access to non-Apple payment methods for subscriptions to dating apps. From a report: The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) says the iPhone maker is abusing a dominant market position by failing to allow software application makers in the Netherlands to use other payment methods for dating apps accessible via its App Store. The ACM has been levying weekly fines of 5 million euros since Apple missed a Jan. 15 deadline to make changes that the watchdog had mandated. read more It said the U.S. company had not made any new proposal to comply with its ruling in the past week. "We have clearly explained to Apple how they can comply...," the watchdog said in a statement. "So far, however, they have refused to put forward any serious proposals."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AndroidPolice reports: Google has confirmed to us that the Pixel 3 series has received its last update, marking the end of a three-year promise. But revisiting the 2018-era flagship, I still can't help but be disappointed that Google didn't try harder to keep it supported longer. Google may have met its marketing requirements, but as I've said before, it's hypocritical for a company committed to sustainability and customer security to leave old smartphones behind so quickly. Revisiting it for the last few days, the Pixel 3 is still a perfectly good phone that could have years of life left in it. And, according to everyone I've spoken to, there aren't any good technical reasons for it being left behind. Google just doesn't care.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Tech-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org is inviting kids to join the Coldplay Dance Party, explaining in a Medium post that "we've teamed up with award-winning band Coldplay to launch a global campaign that celebrates music and computer science." Teachers and students are encouraged to "share your creations for Code.org and Coldplay to see!" on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, although a footnote warns: "In most countries, use of social media is not permitted for underage students [Dance Party targets kindergarten thru high school students]. Do not post videos or photos of students without the permission of a parent or guardian." From the announcement: "Coldplay and Code.org believe in the power of computer science education for every student, in every classroom around the world. That's why we're teaming up to inspire students everywhere to code and dance [YouTube] -- let's celebrate the magic of computer science and music! Join the party by using Code.org's Dance Party activity to code your own choreography to Coldplay's "Higher Power." Get creative with classic moves, and have fun with new album-inspired visuals and dancer formations! Post or submit your creations for Coldplay and Code.org to see, and we'll share the best ones on social media [GitHub]. Plus, you'll get a chance to win tickets to see Coldplay on tour, or a chance for your classroom to video chat with the band." "This is a new creative way to continue introducing people to play with and dance around the practice of programming," Google AI Chief Jeff Dean tweeted to his 200K+ Twitter followers. "Since it launched in 2018 [in partnership with Amazon]," Code.org exclaimed in its Medium post, "Dance Party has engaged more than 5.7 million students!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Cannon-Brookes thought Australia's biggest polluter wasn't doing enough to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, so he sought to buy the company. From a report: Mr. Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Nasdaq-listed software company Atlassian teamed up with Canada's Brookfield Asset Management to try to acquire electricity generator AGL Energy Ltd., in a proposal valued at more than $3.5 billion. Central to their ambition is a plan to shut AGL's coal-fired power plants years ahead of schedule and replace them with renewable energy. AGL, which the Australian government's Clean Energy Regulator says is Australia's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said Monday that it had rejected the takeover proposal as too low. The company plans to close the last of its coal plants by 2045. Mr. Cannon-Brookes and Brookfield, whose head of investing in low-carbon technology is former Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney, say they can make AGL a net-zero emitter by 2035. "AGL accounts for over 8% of Australia's emissions," Mr. Cannon-Brookes said. That is more than the current emissions of Australia's domestic aviation industry and fleet of jets flying on international routes, or every car on the country's roads, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Vice examines the toll on mental health experienced by people who invest a large portion of their net worth into volatile cryptocurrencies," writes long-time Slashdot reader leathered. Vice argues that "The stress and anxiety that goes with funneling your life savings into a volatile market is no joke."Countless people have watched thousands of pounds disappear before their eyes.... Many crypto-investors are ordinary people taking a risk with their life savings rather than elite traders who can swallow sudden losses. A recent CNBC survey of 750 crypto investors found that a third actually knew very little about what they were investing in. The question is: What happens to these people when they lose big...? It seems like this fast-growing investor community is generating its own fast-growing mental health crisis.... Contrary to the frequent declarations that investing is an everyman route to wealth and happiness, interviewees told me that crypto had nearly ruined their lives.... Despite the intense stress shared by some crypto investors, finding a space to discuss these experiences isn't easy. Across Reddit and Twitter conversations around crypto, there's usually one reaction to downturns: "Don't be an anxiety bitch, HODL [Hold on for Dear Life]" — in other words, don't you dare pull out. Memes regularly circulate that joke about the intense stress and torment that come with investing. The need to put on this brave face could be down to the fact that voicing your anxiety has a direct impact on the markets, which are essentially a reflection of confidence. Coins go higher the more people invest and drop the more people pull out. Crypto might be anxiety-inducing, but people don't make money from acknowledging this and actively lose out if they do.... HODL has become a joke in the crypto space, but that's exactly what so many investors are trying and failing to do with their psychological wellbeing. Experts say crypto will eventually bounce back — as it often seems to do — but you have to wonder just how much damage will be done to the lives of its investors before it does.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Industry analysts and former Mozilla employees are concerned about Firefox's future, reports Ars Technica, warning that the ultimate fate of Firefox "has larger implications for the web as a whole."Since its release in 2008, [Google's] Chrome has become synonymous with the web: it's used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the Internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are shaped in Google's image. "Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. "It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point." Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: "They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes...." Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.... Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox, says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people's online browsing. "I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first," she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox's personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down. Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome or Apple's Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. "All we really want is to be a viable choice," Deckelmann says. "Because we think that this makes a better Internet for everybody to have these different options." Interesting stats from the article:"Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022." Mozilla's figures now also show around 215 million Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days — a number which has stayed stable. Yet In 2008, a full 20% of the 1.5 billion people online were using Firefox to surf the web — including more than half the web surfers in Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia."Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market," writes Ars Technica. "On mobile it's a measly half a percent..." Next year, Firefox's "lucrative search deal with Google — responsible for the vast majority of its revenue" — is set to expire.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A "massive leak" by a whistleblower revealed the secret details of bank accounts linked to more than 30,000 Credit Suisse clients around the world, reports the Guardian. They note that Credit Suisse is one of the world's largest private banks, as well as Switzerland's second-biggest lender, with 50,000 employees — and yet the leaked information "points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds," including "clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes." The accounts are worth more than $108 billion USD (that's 100 billion Swiss Francs or £80 billion)...The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data. We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world. They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela's state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine. One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.... This month, Credit Suisse became the first major Swiss bank in the country's history to face criminal charges — which it denies — relating to allegation it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia. However, the repercussions of the leak could be much broader than one bank, threatening a crisis for Switzerland, which retains one of the world's most secretive banking laws... Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements. That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations. Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem. "The bank likes to say it's just rogue bankers. But how many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?" he said. Neiman alleges there has been a culture at the bank "which encourages its bankers probably from the top down to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, bury their heads in the sand on a good day, and on many days, actively assist folks to skirt whatever the law may be in order to best protect assets under management...." The debate over whether Switzerland's banking industry has undergone sufficient reforms is likely to be renewed in light of the leak. "Nearly 50 media organisations have spent months poring over the data," reports the BBC:But the Swiss bank rejected the allegations in a statement on Sunday, saying it strongly rejected the allegations and insinuations about the bank's alleged business practices or lack of due diligence carried out. "The matters presented are predominantly historical, in some cases dating back as far as the 1940s, and the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context", it said.... "Approximately 90% of the reviewed accounts are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015," it said, although it would not comment on specific clients mentioned.... In a statement published by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the anonymous source explained their motivation for leaking the records more than a year ago. "I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral. The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders," they wrote.... It follows other scandals for the Swiss bank, including the departure of two of its top executives after allegedly breaking Covid regulations and spying on former staff.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader McGruber shares a scathing column from New York magazine arguing that "There has never been a self-immolation quite like Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August peak — about half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever — as it starts to weaken from the constant siege of competitors and dissenters without and within. "The fallout is so bad that Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent..." They're calling it "an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies."Facebook's once unbeatable ad-tracking system — the engine that made it a more than $1 trillion company — has effectively been neutralized by the likes of Apple, which allows users to block the company's trackers. (Google is set to start phasing in similar protections to its users over the next two years.) Facebook's user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway. And Zuckerberg — clearly bored with the company he founded 18 years ago — has shifted his vision into an immersive version of the internet, complete with headsets and digital avatars, that he calls the metaverse, an ambition that sets up Facebook's competition not with another Silicon Valley company but with reality itself.... Apple and Google have decided they're going to allow their users to disable code that tracks people across the internet, which happens to be good for their business model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the fallout has been so severe that advertisers are shifting their entire ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable. The article's final point is that in the middle of all this, Zuckerberg has committed the company to a "metaverse" future — even though Wall Street investors seem almost unanimously unconvinced. "Clearly, Zuckerberg has plenty of money to burn on his ambitions, but what's less clear is if he'll be able to bring back the armies of people who once believed in his ability to conquer the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle. "With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations."From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said. Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said. "I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Around this time last year, millions of Texans were shivering without power during one of the coldest spells to hit the central United States," remembers the Washington Post. "For five days, blackouts prevented people from heating their homes, cooking or even sleeping. More than 200 people died in what is considered the nation's costliest winter storm on record, amounting to $24 billion in damages. "Twelve months later, the state's electrical grid, while improved, is still vulnerable to weather-induced power outages.""If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again," said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "This is still a huge risk for us." Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy. "Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today," said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation's electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow. The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people's health.... The team found the actual energy demand decreased significantly by simply shifting to renewable resources, which are more efficient. For the entire United States, total end-use energy demand decreased by around 57 percent. Per capita household annual energy costs were around 63 percent less than a "business as usual" scenario.... In Texas, a complete green transition would reduce the annual average end-use power demand by 56 percent. It also reduces peak loads, or the highest amount of energy one draws from the grid at a time. Jacobson said many homes would also have their own storage and wouldn't need to rely on the grid as much. The team also found interconnecting electrical grids from different geographic regions can make the power system more reliable and reduce costs. Larger regions are more likely to have the wind blowing, the sun shining or hydroelectric power running somewhere else, which may be able to help fill any supply gaps. "The intermittency of renewable energy declines as you look at larger and larger areas," said Dessler. "If it's not windy in Texas, it could be windy in Iowa. In that case, they could be overproducing power and they could be shipping some of their extra power to us." The study stated costs per unit energy in Texas are 27 percent lower when interconnected with the Midwest grid than when isolated, as it currently is. Interestingly, long-duration batteries aren't important for grid stability. the team found, since our current 4-hour batteries can just be connected for longer-term storage. Professor Dessler tells the Post we should think of "renewables" as a system which includes storage technology and easily-dispatchable energy solutions. And the Post adds that a grid powered by renewables "would also produce cleaner air, which could reduce pollution-related deaths by 53,000 people per year and reduce pollution-related illnesses for millions of people in 2050."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's the 25th anniversary of Slate.com, and writer William Saletan reflects on the last quarter century. "Print magazines that scorned internet journalism collapsed or faded (it's hard to believe now, but in the '90s, people thought your article wasn't real if it wasn't on paper), while new websites popped up to challenge us. In the struggle for survival, many outlets withered and died. But Slate adapted and grew..." But he also shares what worries him now about the online world we're living in:I don't see people learning from, or even recognizing, their mistakes. I see them caricaturing and gloating over the mistakes of others. In the old days, there was a lot of hope that the information age would make us smarter. It didn't. Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers. On Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and other platforms, we've formed like-minded battalions that quickly spot the other side's sins and falsehoods but are largely blind to our own. I don't mean to suggest that tribalism is new or that it's always political. In the late '90s, when Microsoft was on trial for antitrust violations, Slate's top editors — all of whom drew Microsoft paychecks and had Microsoft stock options — were almost comically unanimous in their motivated reasoning. Their politics ranged from progressive to neoliberal to libertarian, but their behavior was essentially identical: They summoned all of their intellectual power, which was prodigious, and used it to poke holes in the antitrust case — in effect, to defend Microsoft. Saletan argues that while the internet makes it easy to venture out from a "bubble" of viewpoints, too many idealists "insulated themselves from engagement with fundamentally opposing views...." "So that's what I've learned in my time here: seek out other perspectives, study your failures, and try to become wiser every day."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Saturday, attackers stole hundreds of NFTs from OpenSea users, causing a late-night panic among the site's broad user base," reports the Verge. "A spreadsheet compiled by the blockchain security service PeckShield counted 254 tokens stolen over the course of the attack, including tokens from Decentraland and Bored Ape Yacht Club."The bulk of the attacks took place between 5PM and 8PM ET, targeting 32 users in total. Molly White, who runs the blog Web3 is Going Great, estimated the value of the stolen tokens at more than $1.7 million. The attack appears to have exploited a flexibility in the Wyvern Protocol, the open-source standard underlying most NFT smart contracts, including those made on OpenSea. One explanation (linked by CEO Devin Finzer on Twitter) described the attack in two parts: first, targets signed a partial contract, with a general authorization and large portions left blank. With the signature in place, attackers completed the contract with a call to their own contract, which transferred ownership of the NFTs without payment. In essence, targets of the attack had signed a blank check — and once it was signed, attackers filled in the rest of the check to take their holdings. "I checked every transaction," said the user, who goes by Neso. "They all have valid signatures from the people who lost NFTs so anyone claiming they didn't get phished but lost NFTs is sadly wrong...." Writing on Twitter shortly before 3AM ET, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said the attacks had not originated from OpenSea's website, its various listing systems, or any emails from the company. The rapid pace of the attack — hundreds of transactions in a matter of hours — suggests some common vector of attack, but so far no link has been discovered. An update to OpenSea's smart contract was scheduled the day before (to remove old and inactive listings from the platform), and the scammer mimicked a genuine OpenSea email, according to The Street. A user who posted the text of the phishing email online explains that the scammer "then got a number of people to sign permissions with WyvernExchange. No exploit, just people not reading sign permissions as normal." CEO Finzer told Bloomberg that some of the stolen NFTs have actually been returned, with no further malicious activity seen from the attacker's account. "He also dispelled rumors of a $200 million hack, saying the attacker has $1.7 million of Ethereum in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs." And PC Magazine shares this update about the wallet:CoinDesk reports that Etherscan, which bills itself as "the Ethereum blockchain explorer," has flagged the account that appears to be connected to these NFT thefts. (The public name of which is, fittingly enough, "Fake_Phishing5169.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux programmers fixed bugs faster than anyone — in an average of just 25 days (improving from 32 days in 2019 to just 15 in 2021). That's the conclusion of Google's "Project Zero" security research team, which studied the speed of bug-fixing from January 2019 to December 2021. ZDNet reports that Linux's competition "didn't do nearly as well."For instance, Apple, 69 days; Google, 44 days; and Mozilla, 46 days. Coming in at the bottom was Microsoft, 83 days, and Oracle, albeit with only a handful of security problems, with 109 days. By Project Zero's count, others, which included primarily open-source organizations and companies such as Apache, Canonical, Github, and Kubernetes, came in with a respectable 44 days. Generally, everyone's getting faster at fixing security bugs. In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix reported security vulnerabilities. Only three years ago the average was 80 days. In particular, the Project Zero crew noted that Microsoft, Apple, and Linux all significantly reduced their time to fix over the last two years. As for mobile operating systems, Apple iOS with an average of 70 days is a nose better than Android with its 72 days. On the other hand, iOS had far more bugs, 72, than Android with its 10 problems. Browsers problems are also being fixed at a faster pace. Chrome fixed its 40 problems with an average of just under 30 days. Mozilla Firefox, with a mere 8 security holes, patched them in an average of 37.8 days. Webkit, Apple's web browser engine, which is primarily used by Safari, has a much poorer track record. Webkit's programmers take an average of over 72 days to fix bugs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In NFL news, an American football team — the Denver Broncos — "are up for sale," reports CNBC, "and a group of crypto enthusiasts is aiming to raise more than $4 billion using a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to make it their own...."This group includes an eclectic mix of attorneys, accountants, software developers, pro athletes, and at least one mathematician. One of the people spearheading the cause is Sean O'Brien, who spent over a decade in Cisco's legal department, before leaving the corporate world to run a few small businesses with his wife. "We know it sounds a bit crazy, but it's also a bit badass," said O'Brien. "The purpose essentially is to establish an infrastructure so that fans from all walks of life can be owners of the Denver Broncos." The pro football team is valued at just under $4 billion, and it is expected to garner the biggest price tag in North American sports history, according to ESPN.... DAOs take coordination of resources on the internet to a new level, according to Auston Bunsen, co-founder of QuikNode, which provides blockchain infrastructure to developers and companies. "They represent a new kind of organization moving at hyper speed," said Bunsen. Investor Cooper Turley, who has helped build several popular DAOs, says they're like an "internet community with a shared bank account." "Basically, a small group of people come together to form a chat group, and then they decide to pull capital together, [typically] using an Ethereum wallet," Turley previously told CNBC.... Though the group will still fundraise in cryptocurrency, the idea is to give people partial ownership, in which they will participate in deciding how the team is run... The BuyTheBroncos group also has a pretty solid plan B. Organizers tell CNBC the more realistic goal is to raise around 25% of the money needed to place the winning bid, and from there, join forces with a consortium of more traditional buyers to make up the difference. The group's Twitter account had less than 50 followers before CNBC's article — but 390 followers after the article ran. And O'Brien tells CBNC his ultimate goal is "to essentially open up peoples' eyes to what a DAO can do in the real world and make a tangible connection between this web3 life and the real world. "Our thought is that it accelerates DAO adoption for solving real-world problems such as food scarcity or unhoused peoples."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A fourth movie in the rebooted Star Trek franchise will be produced by J. J. Abrams and star Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, according to an announcement this week by Paramount. But Variety remembers how Quentin Tarantino once approached Paramount with his own Star Trek idea with a "Pulp Fiction vibe" in 2017 — and both Paramont and J.J. Abrams loved it.Tarantino ultimately partnered with "The Revenant" screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who was tasked with writing a "Star Trek" film script based on Tarantino's idea while Tarantino was busy finishing post-production and touring the world for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Smith revealed on the "Bulletproof Screenwriting" podcast in April 2021 that J.J. Abrams' production company Bad Robot gave him a call on Tarantino's behalf. "They just called me and said, 'Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.' And I said, 'Yeah,'" the screenwriter said. "And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he's reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome, cool gangster scene, and he's acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn't record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing." Tarantino intended to bring a "Pulp Fiction" vibe to "Star Trek" with an idea that was a largely earthbound story set in a 1930s gangster setting. Tarantino's pitch appeared to take inspiration from "A Piece of the Action," the 17th episode of the second season of "Star Trek: The Original Series." The installment, which aired in 1968, followed the Enterprise crew as they visit a planet with an Earth-like 1920s gangster culture.... According to Smith, Tarantino's "Star Trek" idea was "really wild" and like "its own very cool episode." The plot included "a little time travel stuff going on" and "had a lot of fun" with Chris Pine's Captain Kirk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have only caught glimpses of the two interstellar objects identified in our solar system, reports Space.com — but there's hope that the Webb Space Telescope will show us more:"With Webb, we can do really interesting science at much fainter magnitudes or brightnesses," Cristina Thomas, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University, said in a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees operations for the Webb mission. Thomas is on a research team that has arranged to use the observatory to study an interstellar object, should one appear during the telescope's first year of work. Webb brings some new talents to the table as well. "The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," Martin Cordiner, principal investigator of the project, said in the statement. Cordiner is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.... "We've never been able to observe interstellar objects in this region of the infrared," Thomas said. "It opens a lot of opportunities for the different compositional signatures that we're interested in. That's going to be a huge boon for us!" Specifically, the team would use infrared observations to study any gas and dust that the interstellar object is emitting, giving scientists a taste of the object's native system. Right now, far out in space, the Webb Telescope has finished the first stage of aligning its 18-segmented primary mirror, reports another article at Space.com. "A single star that the observatory looked at was deliberately rendered 18 times into a hexagonal shape. "Eventually, those 18 images will perfectly align into a single, sharp focus, but the interim result portrays a star repeated perfectly in a hexagonal pattern reminiscent of a stunning celestial snowflake." Further Reading: "Exclusive interview: answers to 20 questions from the James Webb Space Telescope team."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco mayor London Breed "is working with business leaders to push San Francisco employers to start bringing more workers back to downtown offices at some point in March," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. "Breed said she was developing a strategy with the Chamber of Commerce and other groups to help turn around the city's once-bustling commercial core."San Francisco's downtown has been hit hard as most employees have stayed home during the pandemic.... Breed's comments reflect the pressure she's under to revive San Francisco's struggling downtown where weekday foot traffic remains sparse, small businesses have shuttered and massive office towers sit largely empty nearly two years after COVID-19 sent most workers home indefinitely. Some workers are likely to stay remote because they're concerned about being exposed to the virus or for other personal reasons.... San Francisco officials predict that around 15% of office workers will stay remote when the economy is expected to stabilize in 2023, a major shift that would permanently hurt business tax revenue, according to a report released last month.... Despite rampant commercial vacancies and an abundance of employees choosing to work remotely in perpetuity or leave San Francisco entirely, Breed said she was encouraged by a number of businesses that have signed new leases or are looking at new opportunities in the city. "Working from home has been so convenient and so comfortable, let's be honest," Breed said. "But at the same time, people miss people. They miss being out in the streets. They miss being at places and restaurants." John Bryant, CEO of the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco, tells the newspaper that downtown San Francisco's buildings are only about 20% occupied now. And that this year he hopes to see that double — to 40%. Thanks to Slashdot reader nray for sharing the story...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions." It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java." But there's another reason they're promoting Rust:Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand... [J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria. Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages. There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate.... No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community. That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C." And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.") The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientific American reports on a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on the effectiveness of deep fakes. "The results suggest that real humans can easily fall for machine-generated faces — and even interpret them as more trustworthy than the genuine article.""We found that not only are synthetic faces highly realistic, they are deemed more trustworthy than real faces," says study co-author Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The result raises concerns that "these faces could be highly effective when used for nefarious purposes."The first group did not do better than a coin toss at telling real faces from fake ones, with an average accuracy of 48.2 percent... The group rating trustworthiness gave the synthetic faces a slightly higher average rating of 4.82, compared with 4.48 for real people... Study participants did overwhelmingly identify some of the fakes as fake. "We're not saying that every single image generated is indistinguishable from a real face, but a significant number of them are," says study co-author Sophie Nightingale....The authors of the study end with a stark conclusion after emphasizing that deceptive uses of deepfakes will continue to pose a threat: "We, therefore, encourage those developing these technologies to consider whether the associated risks are greater than their benefits," they write. "If so, then we discourage the development of technology simply because it is possible." Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the link!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UnknowingFool writes: In November 2021, Roblox sued YouTuber, Benjamin Simon aka "Ruben Sim" for $1.6M accusing him of griefing: harassment of users, harassment of employees, and disrupting the October 2021 Roblox Developers Conference by posting a false bomb threat. Ruben Sim has settled the suit with actions including: paying $150,000, staying off the platform [for several years], staying away from all Roblox facilities, and taking down all his YouTube videos regarding Roblox [if they make false statements, encourage violence, or glamorize Roblox rule-breaking].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg reports:A decade from now, offices shall be used for one thing and one thing only: quality time with colleagues. This seemingly bold prediction comes from Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor and expert on remote work. âoeWe will probably in 10 years stop calling this âremote workâ(TM). Weâ(TM)ll just call it work,â he said.... His research showed that a hybrid workforce is more productive, more loyal and less likely to leave. With companies from Twitter Inc. to PwC now giving employees the option to work virtually forever, Choudhury said businesses that donâ(TM)t adapt risk higher attrition... "For employers, itâ(TM)s a win as well because you are not constrained to hiring from the local labor market â" where you have an office... This is a once-in-a-generation moment when people are not going to be forced to live where they donâ(TM)t want to. Some people will find a permanent place to live; some will move around. The digital nomad revolution is going on...." "We should not care about how many days or hours anyone works. Every job and task should have objective metrics, which are output based, and if an employee can perform those metrics in two days, so be it. I am a firm believer that we should stop counting time. We should give people the flexibility to work when they want to, whichever hours they want to, whichever days they want to, and care only about their work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:Google announced it will begin the process of getting rid of long-standing ad trackers on its Android operating system, upending how advertising and data-collection work on phones and tablets used by more than 2.5 billion people around the world. Right now, Google assigns special IDs to each Android device, allowing advertisers to build profiles of what people do on their phones and serve them highly targeted ads. Google will begin testing alternatives to those IDs this year and eventually remove them completely, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google said the changes will improve privacy for Android users, limiting the massive amounts of data that app developers collect from people using the platform. But the move also could give Google even more power over digital advertising, and is likely to deepen concerns regulators have already expressed about the company's competitive practices... It made $61 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone.... The announcement comes over a year after Apple began blocking trackers on its own operating system, which runs on its iPhones, giving customers more tools to limit the data they share with app developers.... Google contrasted its plan with Apple's, saying it would make the changes over the next two years, working closely with app developers and the advertising industry to craft new ways of targeting ads and measuring their effectiveness before making any drastic changes. "We realize that other platforms have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers," said Anthony Chavez, vice president of product management for Android security and privacy, in the blog post. "We believe that without first providing a privacy-preserving alternative path such approaches can be ineffective and lead to worse outcomes for user privacy and developer businesses." The Post also includes this quote from the chief security office of Mozilla (which began restricting ad tracking in Firefox several years ago). "Google's two year plan is too long. People deserve better privacy now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past few weeks the sun "has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space," reports Science Alert:Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February 15 just before midnight. Based on the size, it's possible that the eruption was in the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable: an X-class flare. Because the flare and CME were directed away from Earth, we're unlikely to see any of the effects associated with a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when material from the eruption slams into Earth's atmosphere. These include interruptions to communications, power grid fluctuations, and auroras. But the escalating activity suggests that we may anticipate such storms in the imminent future. "This is only the second farside active region of this size since September 2017," astronomer Junwei Zhao of Stanford University's helioseismology group told SpaceWeather. "If this region remains huge as it rotates to the Earth-facing side of the Sun, it could give us some exciting flares." According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January. The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29. The article suggests this is normal activity, since the sun is about halfway towards "solar maximum" (its peak of sunspot and flare activity) expected to arrive in 2025, while the "solar minimum" was in 2019. Further Reading: SciTechDaily reports that the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has now "captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the storyRead more of this story at Slashdot.

From Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column:The 20th anniversary of .NET is upon us this week and with it, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in celebration of what it says is "the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now — 2019, 2020, 2021, according to Stack Overflow's developer survey." First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years. It went from a company embroiled in a monopoly case just a year before this release, to one that later decided to turn around, mend its former ways, and open source .NET Core. "When Microsoft made another major transformation, this time towards open source, .NET was also at the forefront," Microsoft writes in this week's celebratory blog post. "By 2012, we had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft's first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, we started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and were floored at the incredible support and contributions from the open-source community...." Certainly, in comparison to the Microsoft we once knew, there has been a massive shift in its approach to open source software and openness in general. Indeed, these days, Microsoft is also synonymous with another giant in the world of open source, its now-subsidiary GitHub — as well as the npm Registry and countless other projects. Microsoft has transformed from a company that was once led by a man who said that "Linux is a cancer" to one that has more recently welcomed Linux to the Windows desktop, among numerous other open source endeavors. The column ends by remembering what it calls "Microsoft 'hot reload' drama" last year — Microsoft's removal of the feature from the .NET SDK repo (and its subsequent return, with an apology). "All that's to say, perhaps all's well that ends well, and we should indeed celebrate 20 years of success with a now open source framework. In the same breath, vigilance may be necessary should we want to celebrate another such anniversary in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He produced the science fiction film THX 1138 — George Lucas's first movie — in 1971. 28 years later he supervised the re-editing of the science fiction film Supernova. But now 82-year-old Francis Ford Coppola — who has also made a second fortune in the wine business — has an even grander vision. GQ reports:It is a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can't, because Coppola can't either. Ask him. "It's very simple," he'll say. "The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it's basically... I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?" The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it's set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life — a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. "On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it." Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes. Annually.... [T]his is Coppola's plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune, at 82 years of age, and make the damn movie himself. The article describes it as the kind of "personal" movie that Coppola had wanted to make back when his studio had insisted he instead direct The Godfather.This, of course, is the paradox of Coppola's career: that for all his success, he has, to some extent, been waiting to make his own films, rather than someone else's, for practically his entire life.... "If you're going to make art, let it be personal. Let it be very personal to you." Megalopolis "remains in development for now," reports Variety. "Coppola has not yet announced a production start date."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tThe Washington Post reports:Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure "almost everyone in the world will be identifiable," according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post. Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar. The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month. With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation." The article notes that major tech companies like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all limited or ended their own sales of facial recognition technology — adding that Clearview's presentation simple describes this as a major business opportunity for themselves. In addition, the Post reports Clearview's presentation brags "that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its 'facial database' is connected to 'public source metadata' and 'social linkage' information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports:Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.... The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.... Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports. "Today, most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel..." reports Ars Technica:The extra land put under the plow released a significant amount of carbon, enough to flip the assessment of corn ethanol from a carbon-negative fuel to a carbon-emitting one. The biggest decline came when new cropland released carbon that had been stored in soils and vegetation, including roots of living plants. Farmers were also less likely to enter a field into the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant perennial vegetation on unused farmland. After the fertilizer was applied, it released a significant amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 300 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The researchers' estimates of the carbon impact of the fertilizer are probably low, too, since the authors didn't calculate how much additional pollution the manufacturing process released or the extent to which degraded water quality in downstream waterways released more greenhouse gases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As of the 1st of May, the Alexa web traffic ranking engine is going to stop its services," the TIOBE Index reminds us. So for the first time, TIOBE has switched to Similarweb this month to choose which search engines' results to use for its ranking of the popularity of programming languages.Fortunately, there are no big changes in the index due to this swap. The only striking difference is that the top 3 languages, Python, C, and Java, all gained more than 1 percent in the rankings. We are still fine-tuning the integration with Similarweb, which is combined with a shift to HtmlUnit in the back-end. Some websites are not onboarded yet, but will follow soon. Now that HtmlUnit is applied for web crawling, it will become possible to add more sites to the index, such as Stackoverflow and Github. This will hopefully happen in the next few months. TechRepublic reports: Python continues to sit atop the index, with C and Java directly behind it. In Feb. 2021, those three also occupied the top spot, but with Python in the number three position, C at top, and Java in second place. Beyond the top three, there hasn't been much movement in the index, with positions four through eight unchanged from the same time last year. Those slots are occupied, respectively, by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript and PHP. Positions nine and 10 swapped from Feb. 21 to now, with Assembly Language and SQL now occupying each other's positions. The one big move of note between Feb. 2021 and Feb. 2022 was with the Groovy programming language, an object-oriented language for Java. Over the course of the year, Groovy fell from 12th position all the way to 20th, putting it perilously close to the "other programming languages" list. Thanks to Amigan (Slashdot reader #25,469) for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protocol reports that Google "plans to reduce the equity packages for Durham, North Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Houston, Texas, in January 2022, according to an Alphabet Workers Union petition circulating today that demands a reversion to pay and equity cuts." The Washington Post notes that "For some employees, that means their stock grants could be 25 percent lower than if they worked at other Google offices, like in Atlanta, the workers said in the letter." With over 800 members the Alphabet Workers Union is part of a larger effort to organize workers at tech companies. Protocol writes:The Research Triangle area, where the Durham, North Carolina, office is located, was also moved from the "National" pay band to a "Discount" pay band in late 2020, according to the Amazon Workers Union petition. The union said it would affect 300 workers there, but that Google plans to expand to 1,000 employees in the coming years.... Many workers relocated there before the changes in pay and equity were made, the union wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPI reports on the results of a new randomized-controlled trial of ivermectin, the "gold standard" of medical research. UPI reports that treatment with ivermectin "failed to prevent patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from progressing to serious illness, a study published Friday by JAMA Internal Medicine found."Of 241 patients in the study with mild to moderate symptoms treated with the medication, 52, or 22% developed severe COVID-19, the data showed. Meanwhile, 43 of 249 patients, or 17%, who received "standard" treatment, including corticosteroids and, in a handful of cases, other experimental drugs, progressed to serious illness from the virus, the researchers said. "Essentially, our study findings have dismissed the notion of ivermectin being a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19," study co-author Dr. Steven Chee Loon Lim told UPI in an email.... In addition, study participants treated with ivermectin reported more side effects than those given other drugs, Lim said. This "raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug," he said.... 14 of the ivermectin patients developed severe diarrhea and four suffered potentially life-threatening kidney damage, the researchers said. The new study also examined whether patients had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections — and discovered "there were no significant differences between groups." And the researchers' study also points out that two additional randomized clinical trials conducted in 2021 also "found no significant effect of ivermectin on symptom resolution and hospitalization rates." UPI now quotes Dr. Lim as saying Friday that despite early hopes for ivermectin, "large and well-designed randomized clinical trials, including ours, have consistently shown that ivermectin offered little or no significant clinical benefits. "I believe the findings in our study will likely 'close the door' on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The delayed 5G BlackBerry phone is dead, OnwardMobility has confirmed on its website. "It is with great sadness that we announce that OnwardMobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard," OnwardMobility said in a message posted Friday, as spotted earlier by CrackBerry. "Please know that this was not a decision that we made lightly or in haste. We share your disappointment in this news and assure you this is not the outcome we worked and hoped for." Android Police and CrackBerry originally reported the phone had been cancelled on Feb. 11, saying OnwardMobility, a Texas-based startup seeking to revitalize the iconic brand through an Android-based, next-gen Wi-Fi device, lost the license from BlackBerry Ltd. to use the BlackBerry brand name. OnwardMobility did not expand on why it is shutting down and cancelling production of the phone. The news comes after BlackBerry ended service for its legacy devices in early January. "Before OnwardMobility picked up the license, Chinese manufacturer TCL was the most recent maker of BlackBerry-branded phones," adds CNET. Most recently, the company sold its prized patent portfolio to "Catapult IP Innovations Inc." for $600 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn't drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. New Scientist reports: Mischa von Krause at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues analysed data collected from around 1.2 million people aged 10 to 80 who took part in an experiment that was originally designed to measure implicit racial bias. During the task, participants were asked to sort words and images, for example by labelling faces as white or Black, or classifying words such as "joy" or "agony" as good or bad, by pressing one of two buttons. In support of previous studies, the researchers found that people's reaction times speed up from their teens to around age 20, then slow down as they get older. This decline has typically been attributed to slower mental speed, but this isn't the case, says von Krause. The team used an established model of cognition based on previous research, which assumes people make decisions by continuously considering information until they reach a threshold of certainty. According to this model, the decrease in reaction time from age 20 is probably due to people wanting more certainty before making decisions as they age, visual information taking more time to travel from their eyes to their brain and people taking longer to physically hit the button as they get older. The analysis suggests that people's mental speed increases in their 20s, and stays high until age 60. [...] While the team expects the results will apply to a wide range of cognitive tasks, it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space." You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Wall Street institutions' growing connections to crypto markets could threaten financial stability and cause a credit crunch-style financial crisis, global regulators have warned. The Financial Stability Board said (PDF) "ongoing vigilance" of institutional investors such as big banks and hedge funds is needed as they deepen their involvement in the $1.9 trillion crypto market. "If the current trajectory of growth in scale and interconnectedness of crypto-assets to these institutions were to continue, this could have implications for global financial stability," the FSB said in a report published Wednesday. The FSB was concerned the volatility in cryptocurrency markets -- even though crypto makes up just a fraction of global assets -- could feed through as digital and traditional finance become more interconnected. "If financial institutions continue to become more involved in crypto-asset markets, this could affect their balance sheets and liquidity in unexpected ways," it said. The regulator compared the risk from a crypto event to the credit crunch that sparked the 2008 financial crisis. "As in the case of the US subprime mortgage crisis, a small amount of known exposure does not necessarily mean a small amount of risk, particularly if there exists a lack of transparency and insufficient regulatory coverage," it said. It noted that "systemically important" banks and other financial firms are increasingly keen to play a role in and gain exposure to crypto assets. Systemically important institutions are ones which, if they failed, could set off a financial crisis. The overall value of the cryptocurrency market grew 3.5 times in 2021 to $2.6 trillion as institutional interest soared, the FSB noted. Its worth has fallen in the early months of 2022 as prices slumped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, have provided evidence to suggest that fish have the capacity for MSR, a behavioral test to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. As Phys.Org explains, an animal's capacity for MSR is determined when they "touch or scrape a mark placed on their body in a location that can only be indirectly viewed in a mirror." From the report: Professor [Masanori Kohda] says, "Previously, using a brown marking on the throat area of [cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus], we had shown three out of four cleaner fish to scrape their throats several times after swimming in front of a mirror, a number on par with similar studies done on other animals like elephants, dolphins, and magpies." However, one of the criticisms laid against this result was sample size and the need for repeated studies showing positive results. Teaming up with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, this study increased the sample size to 18 cleaner fish, with a 94% positive result of 17 of them demonstrating the same behavior from the previous study.[...]Prof. Kohda says, "Our previous study demonstrated MSR in L. dimidiatus; however, studies with other animals have shown that simply moving a mirror reignites aggressive behavior, suggesting the animal has only learned a spatial contingency, not MSR." To address this, the team transferred mirror-trained cleaner fish to a tank with a mirror on one side of the tank and then three days later to a tank with a mirror on the other side, and saw the fish show no aggression toward their mirror image in both tanks. Also, to ensure the L. dimidiatus that passed the mark test truly are recognizing themselves, they placed mirror-trained fish in adjacent tanks that were separated by transparent glass. After two to three days, when fish largely reduced their aggressive behavior towards each other, they were marked the standard way the following night. None of the fish scraped their throat during the 120 mins of exposure to each other the following morning. This new experiment was recently published in PLOS Biology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.