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A group of major cryptocurrency firms including Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital and Huobi Global are forming a new coalition aimed at cracking down on market manipulation in an effort to instill trust in the burgeoning digital asset industry. From a report: The Crypto Market Integrity Coalition, which was convened by risk-monitoring software company Solidus Labs, is also urging digital currency companies to sign a market integrity pledge that acknowledges the potential for fraud in the cryptocurrency space and the need for the industry to protect investors. "It really is about recognizing that you need entities that are focused on a fair and orderly system here, and really trying to prevent the abuses that can happen if you're not paying attention," said Kathy Kraninger, vice president of regulatory affairs at Solidus Labs and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The new alliance and pledge comes as regulators remain concerned the new market is safe for investors, despite its surge in popularity. The Securities and Exchange Commission has cited the potential for market manipulation as one of the primary reasons for rejecting several applications for spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Over a decade ago, we wrote about how Google had to edit out the Australian Aboriginal flag from a logo because of copyright concerns. An 11-year-old girl had won a contest to design a Google logo for Australia Day, and her logo included a simple drawing of the popular Aboriginal flag. Harold Thomas created a (fairly simple) flag design "as a symbol of unity and national identity" for the Aboriginal people in Australia. The flag became quite popular... and then Thomas basically became a copyright landlord, demanding payment for pretty much any usage. In 2019, Thomas did a big licensing deal with a clothing company and proceeded to send out a bunch of cease-and-desist letters to others. It got so bad that the Australian Senate sought to have the government figure out a way to make sure the public could use the flag. Apparently it took over two years, but the "deal" has been worked out -- and it involves the Australian government paying over $20 million to basically buy out the copyright and the former licensing deals, but that still doesn't mean the flag is truly in the public domain: "Mr Thomas will retain moral rights over the flag, but has agreed to give up copyright in return for all future royalties the Commonwealth receives from commercial flag sales to be put towards the ongoing work of NAIDOC. A commercial company will keep its exclusive licence to be able to manufacture Aboriginal flags for commercial use, but the government said the company would not stop people from making their own flags for personal use."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

magzteel shares a report: For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming? They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again. The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can't model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region. When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth's atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared -- perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy. "We thought this was really strange," said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. "If that number was correct, that was really bad news." At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the worldâ(TM)s most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. "It was not just us," Dr. Danabasoglu said. The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. "The old way is just wrong, we know that," said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. "I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It's probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another." Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their climate-change algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire -- and still in flux. As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful -- able to crunch far more data and do better simulations -- that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo's latest financial report to investors, issued as an overview of its fiscal year's third quarter, came with a momentous announcement for the veteran video game and console producer: Switch has joined the 100 million-worldwide-sales club. From a report: What's more, Switch's current tally of 103.5 million means the device has leapfrogged over both the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Wii in terms of sales. The count makes the Switch Nintendo's highest-selling home console of all time. While Sony's PS4 and PS2 console families continue to hold higher sales counts, neither got to the 100 million mark as quickly as Switch, which only needed 57 months to do so (March 2017 to December 2021). The only console family to get to the 100 million-global-sales mark faster is Nintendo's own portable DS platform, which needed only 51 months. The DS, which came out in 2004, launched at a lower $149 price point and went lower from there, while Switch has never sold for less than $199. In a statement to investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa affirmed that the Switch console, as it nears its fifth anniversary, is "in the middle of its lifecycle." Furukawa said nearly the exact same thing a few months earlier when Switch crossed the 90 million-sales mark.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has launched today a new security feature for Google Cloud tenants that is meant to detect and block cryptomining operations that may be taking place behind the owners' backs. From a report: Named Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), Google said this new feature is an agentless system that continually scans the memory of virtual machines deployed in Google Cloud environments for tell-tale signs of increased CPU or GPU usage -- specific to cryptomining operations. To avoid false-positive detections, the feature has been left disabled by default; however, any customer can enable it for their GCP VMs. They can do this by going to the Settings page of their Security Command Center and looking under the Manage Settings section. Google said the feature will only work with non-sensitive memory, and VMTD will not process memory from nodes marked as "Confidential." VMTD has begun rolling out today for public preview, so tenants are recommended to enable it for smaller portions of their nodes and keep a close eye on its impact on performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israel will investigate allegations that police illicitly used homegrown spyware that's gained notoriety abroad against its own citizens. From a report: The government will form a committee to look into a series of reports by Calcalist, a Hebrew business daily, that law enforcement officials used NSO Group's Pegasus software without a court order to tap into the phones of citizens both prominent and obscure, including a key prosecution witness in former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial. Others allegedly targeted include an anti-Netanyahu protester, the former Israeli leader's son, high-ranking officials, and the heads of some of the country's biggest companies. Israeli officials, including the minister in charge of police, initially denied any impropriety. But the police later backtracked, citing "additional findings," and on Monday, Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev ordered the investigation. "The reports about Pegasus, if they are true, are very serious," Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement on Monday. "This tool (Pegasus) and similar tools, are important tools in the fight against terrorism and severe crime, but they were not intended to be used in phishing campaigns targeting the Israeli public or officials -- which is why we need to understand exactly what happened."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is being sued in Europe on competition grounds by price comparison service PriceRunner which is seeking at least ~$2.4 billion in damages. From a report: The lawsuit accuses Google of continuing to breach a 2017 European Commission antitrust enforcement order against Google Shopping. As well as fining Google what was -- at the time -- a record-breaking antitrust penalty (2.42 billion euro), the EU's competition division ordered the search giant to cease illegal behaviors, after finding it Google giving prominent placement to its own shopping comparison service while simultaneously demoting rivals in organic search results. Immediately following the order, Google made some initial tweaks to how its product search service works -- doubling down on an auction model. But complainants were instantly critical of the changes, arguing they neither remedied the unfairness nor complied with the EU's requirement for equal treatment of price comparison services. The following year, an investigation by Sky News also accused Google of trying to circumvent the EU antitrust ruling by offering incentives to ad agencies to create faux comparison sites filled with ads for their clients' products which Google could display in the Google Shopping box to present the impression of a thriving marketplace for price comparison services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel notified Congress that providers have initially requested approximately $5.6 billion from the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program to cover the costs of removing, replacing, and disposing of insecure equipment and services in U.S. networks. From a report: "Last year Congress created a first-of-its kind program for the FCC to reimburse service providers for their efforts to increase the security of our nations communications networks," said Chairwoman Rosenworcel. "We've received over 181 applications from carriers who have developed plans to remove and replace equipment in their networks that pose a national security threat. While we have more work to do to review these applications, I look forward to working with Congress to ensure that there is enough funding available for this program to advance Congress's security goals and ensure that the U.S. will continue to lead the way on 5G security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If Meta is not given the option to transfer, store and process data from its European users on US-based servers, Facebook and Instagram may be shut down across Europe, the social media giants' owner reportedly warned in its annual report. The key issue for Meta is transatlantic data transfers, regulated via the so-called Privacy Shield and other model agreements that Meta uses or used to store data from European users on American servers. The current agreements to enable data transfers are currently under heavy scrutiny in the EU. In its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Meta warns that if a new framework is not adopted and the company is no longer allowed to use the current model agreements "or alternatives," the company will "probably" no longer be able to offer many of its "most significant products and services," including Facebook and Instagram, in the EU, according to various media reports, including in iTWire, The Guardian newspaper and Side Line Magazine. Sharing data between countries and regions is crucial for the provision of its services and targeted advertising, Meta stressed. Therefore, it previously used the transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield as the legal basis to carry out those data transfers. However, this treaty was annulled by the European Court of Justice in July 2020, because of data protection violations. Since then, the EU and the US did stress they are working on a new or updated version of the treaty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba said it would divide into two companies and sell non-core assets, scrapping an initial three-way split that faced fierce criticism from activist shareholders. From a report: The Japanese tech giant plans to spin off the devices business, which includes semiconductors, and list it, Toshiba said in a statement Monday in Tokyo. It scrapped an earlier plan to separate out its infrastructure operations, which will instead continue to come under Toshiba. Splitting into two companies would be cheaper and smoother than the original plan, it said. Toshiba also designated Toshiba Tec, its listed electronic equipment business, as a non-core business, it said, though it stopped short of saying it would sell the unit. The company will also use 300 billion yen ($2.6 billion) of excess capital for shareholder returns over two years, it said. Shares of memory-chip business Kioxia Holdings will continue to be held by Toshiba, it said, but the firm will seek to monetize the shares "immediately" and return proceeds to shareholders. Kioxia has been pursuing an initial public offering, but has also been reported to be in talks to merge with Western Digital.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNBC interviewed six adult entertainers about cryptocurrency use, including webcam performer Allie Eve Knox, who became interested in cryptocurrencies after "several vendors, including PayPal, Square Cash, and Venmo, shut down her accounts because of red flags related to sex work."[T]he biggest attraction was having total and irreversible ownership over the money she had earned. "I could cash it out. I could hold it. I could watch it go up and down," said Knox. "It was mine." Knox is one of many adult workers who say that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin give them a sense of security and independence as banks, credit card companies, and payment processors tighten regulations around adult content. With crypto, there is no middleman making a judgment call on which transactions are acceptable.... "The majority of sex work in the U.S. is legal. It's not dealt with fairly, but it's still legal," explained Kristen DiAngelo, an activist and Sacramento-based sex worker who has spent over four decades in the industry.... Some escorts — who charge anywhere from $1,700 an hour to $11,000 for a full 24 hours — now explicitly say in their ads that they prefer to be paid in bitcoin or ethereum.... DiAngelo tells CNBC she will never forget the first time her bank account was closed without warning.... DiAngelo called Citibank and learned that her account had been frozen and she should tear up her credit card. DiAngelo says the customer service rep told her that they weren't "at liberty" to tell her why it had happened, and she would have to write a formal letter to request additional details. They did, however, say that she was still responsible for any money owed.... There was particular irony in her situation, as DiAngelo did a stint as a stockbroker at Citibank in the 1980âs, always pays her taxes, and has a credit score over 800.... [S]he brought her money to another bank. When they also flagged and closed her account, she moved on to the next. After being shut out of a third bank, DiAngelo says she turned exclusively to bitcoin for her online banking needs. Nearly every sex worker interviewed for this story mentioned platform hopping.... Nowadays, it's par for the course to see adult websites accept cryptocurrency, and some deal in it exclusively... Some adult media companies have even turned to blockchain technology to develop their own digital currencies and platforms.... Sex workers who do accept crypto also have to contend with volatile prices, which can cut into their earnings. For instance, bitcoin is down more than 40% from its November all-time high. Knox also tells CNBC she's sold photos of herself as NFTs on sites like OpenSea. "Thus far, the most she's gotten from a single sale is $1,200 worth of ethereum."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts..." reports Wired. Subaru buyers in Massachusetts also lose access to the telematics system's app, so "no emergency assistance; no automated messages when the tire pressure was low or the oil needed changing."Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state's voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car's internal systems. But the "open data platform" envisioned by the law doesn't exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts.... "This was not to comply with the law — compliance with the law at this time is impossible — but rather to avoid violating it," Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment. The dispute is the latest chapter in long-running disagreements between the state and automakers over the right to repair, or consumers' ability to fix their own cars or control who does it for them.... [N]ew vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data — the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn't useful to them and is discarded. But some — a vehicle's location, how specific components are operating at a given moment — is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers.... These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships.... Automakers say opening the car's mechanical data to anyone would be dangerous — and a violation of federal law. In November 2020, just after voters approved the ballot measure, a trade group that represents most major automakers sued Massachusetts in federal court. The group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, argued that the federal government, not states, should control who gets access to cars' telematics systems. The group also said that it would be irresponsible and dangerous to create the open data platform that the law required, especially by 2022.... Dealerships are caught in the middle. It's an especially unfortunate time to be there, given the chip shortage that has curtailed vehicle production — and sales. One dealer reportedly even asked a potential car buyer, "Don't you have any friends in Rhode Island whose address you can use?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....." But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made."Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China... News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters. Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo: - "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this." - "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions." And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap:Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event. Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..."Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end." And another example from the Hollywood Reporter:After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film. But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club. "Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists have made the first steps to develop an atlas of world cancer, hoping it will bring us closer to a cure," reports the Telegraph. "A map showing stark differences in the incidence of 10 types of cancer between Spain and Portugal has sparked a race to pinpoint causes and risk factors people should avoid."It shows huge differences for people living only a short distance apart, sometimes across the border between Spain and Portugal, and others occurring within the same country. Scientists say it will take years to solve the puzzle completely but are confident that the map provides the pieces. There are easier questions and more complex riddles. But it all points to environmental factors — as opposed to genetics — playing a major role in causing cancers. The lung cancer map tells a clear story of far higher levels of smoking tobacco in Spain than in Portugal, with the latter country showing a consistent hue of dark blue for a lower risk of mortality, while Spain has large areas lit up in red, at least on the map representing men. Twenty per cent of Spanish adults are daily smokers, compared with just over 11 per cent in Portugal. But the data from cancer of the larynx, also linked to smoking, tells a vastly different story, with a high mortality risk for men shown straddling the border in southern Portugal and south western Spain, as well as patches in the north of both countries. "The lung cancer and smoking connection is very clear, so why in other cancers that have a strong link with tobacco are we seeing such surprising differences?" asks Pablo Fernández-Navarro, the lead co-ordinator of the atlas from the Spanish side. "This is what is so fantastic. If whole countries had uniform levels of mortality, the maps would be in plain colours. Given that it is not the case, now we have to investigate and explain these differences, eliminating one factor after another," Fernández-Navarro told The Telegraph. In the case of larynx cancer, the Spanish epidemiologist says the map confirms that smoking is by no means the only risk factor, and that other elements must also be at work, from alcohol intake to levels of pollutants such as asbestos or petrochemicals in the environment. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the link.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

North Korea funded its missile programs with millions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency, reports the BBC, citing a new UN report:Between 2020 and mid-2021 cyber-attackers stole more than $50m (£37m) of digital assets, investigators found. Such attacks are an "important revenue source" for Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programme, they said. The findings were reportedly handed to the UN's sanctions committee on Friday. The cyber-attacks targeted at least three cryptocurrency exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. The report also referenced a study published last month by the security firm Chainalysis that suggested North Korean cyberattacks could have netted as much as $400m worth of digital assets last year. And in 2019, the UN reported that North Korea had accumulated an estimated $2bn for its weapons of mass destruction programmes by using sophisticated cyber-attacks.... The US said on Friday that North Korea — formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) — carried out nine missile tests last month alone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether if it is no longer able to share data about European users with its U.S. operations, applications, and data centres," reports ITWire. It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices). Though courts are now determining the ruling's ramifications, ITWire notes that "with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) well in force, the U.S. Privacy Shield principles were found non-compliant and consequently invalid." So while that ruling affects every American company, including cloud companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, it's Facebook/Meta that "says stopping transatlantic data transfers will have a devastating impact on its targeted online advertisements capabilities." Read it yourself, in Meta's own words: "If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on Standard Contractual Clauses [now also subject to new judical scrutiny] or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations." Of course, the filing also cites other hazards like the possibility of new legislation restricting Facebook's ability to collect data about minors, complaining that such legislation "may also result in limitations on our advertising services or our ability to offer products and services to minors in certain jurisdictions." And in addition, "We are, and expect to continue to be, the subject of investigations, inquiries, data requests, requests for information, actions, and audits by government authorities and regulators in the United States, Europe, and around the world, particularly in the areas of privacy, data protection, law enforcement, consumer protection, civil rights, content moderation, and competition..." "Orders issued by, or inquiries or enforcement actions initiated by, government or regulatory authorities could cause us to incur substantial costs, expose us to unanticipated civil and criminal liability or penalties (including substantial monetary remedies), interrupt or require us to change our business practices in a manner materially adverse to our business, result in negative publicity and reputational harm, divert resources and the time and attention of management from our business, or subject us to other structural or behavioral remedies that adversely affect our business." (Thanks to Slashdot reader juul_advocate for sharing the story!)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News tells the story of Rich, a Coca-Cola delivery driver who didn't get a paycheck at Christmas because of a ransomware attack on the payroll company serving Coke's largest distributor. But then "more than a month after hackers crippled Kronos," paychecks to its employees in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia "have been sporadic, according to union representatives."Rich, who asked not to be identified by his last name for fear of retaliation from his employer, is among hundreds of workers who deliver Coke products in at least three states who say they're still owed wages — fallout from one of the many ransomware attacks that hit U.S. companies practically every day. Rich, a father of three, said he's had to dip into his savings, which have dwindled down in recent weeks. "They went from $1,100, $1,200 a week to $300, $600," he said of his paychecks. "I got one $300 paycheck, and I called and told them exactly what I needed paid, and they sent me a $46 check...." "We've got 130 people and they've all got problems," said Max Zemla, the president of the Cleveland-area Teamsters Local 293. "Some are telling me they're not as bad off. I have a guy who's off a thousand dollars. Uses his money for his kid's tuition for school, and he's not able to pay it...." "The timekeeping vendor Kronos that suffered the attack is in the process of coming back online," [said Josh Gelinas, Coca-Cola Consolidated's vice president of communications February 1st] in an emailed statement. "But, until these digital systems are fully restored, we must continue manually recording work hours for thousands of our teammates. This process is taking longer than we would like and may have resulted in some inconsistencies, but our teammates will be paid for every hour they've worked...." [NBC reports that a spokesperson for Kronos "noted that the company announced on Jan. 22 that it had finally restored all its services."] Jeff Combs, the secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis, said the vast majority of the roughly 200 Coca-Cola Consolidated employees he represents are still owed pay. "Some are still owed as high as $4,700," Combs said. Rich complains to NBC News that "now my savings have dwindled down because a billion-dollar company can't give you an average paycheck." But it shows ransomware's effects ultimately reach farther than we realize. "It's often assumed that ransomware mainly affects governments and major corporations because it's those incidents that make the news," a ransomware analyst at Emsisoft tells NBC News. "The reality, however, is that more than half of all ransomware victims are small businesses and individuals. And, unfortunately, they are usually not as well prepared to deal with the problem as larger organizations and probably feel more pain as a result."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post's editorial board announces its position in "The Post's view," a section of its site which officially "represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board." Its newest position? America's Internal Revenue Service "should not make you scan your face to see your tax returns."The Internal Revenue Service might soon force every American who wants to access their taxes online to record a selfie of themselves and submit to facial recognition to verify their identity. The IRS wants to start this extra verification procedure this summer. That would be a mistake. This cannot be the only way to access an account online, as 90 percent of tax filers currently do. Requiring facial recognition could prevent a substantial number of people from accessing their accounts. Low-income Americans often lack the necessary technology, and research shows people of color are more likely to be misidentified. There are equally serious concerns about privacy and what will happen to the potentially more than 100 million selfies the IRS will collect. Cutting down on fraud is a worthy goal, but facial recognition should not be introduced so swiftly without clear guardrails around the data.... [T]here is no federal law regulating how this sensitive information can be used. And let's not forget that hackers exposed the personal information of more than 140 million Americans when they broke into Equifax — itself once an IRS verification company.... There have been encouraging reports that the IRS is reconsidering its sole reliance on ID.me for online verification for website access. At a minimum, the IRS must offer other verification options and clearly articulate guidelines on what happens to all facial data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockstar Games recently acknowledged the "unprecedented longevity" of Grand Theft Auto V (and its online component Grand Theft Auto Online) — and confirmed their working on the next new game for the series. But Forbes argues "The success of GTA Online itself may end up fundamentally changing the way Rockstar makes this series going forward..."The success of Grand Theft Auto 5 has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for Rockstar, making zillions from the success of GTA Online, and for those deeply invested in that world which has continually gotten new expansions and additions. But a curse for those waiting for GTA 6, as Rockstar is now about to release GTA 5 across three different generations, cementing its massive lead as the best-selling game in history, endlessly delaying a true sequel. Now, however, Rockstar has finally stated the obvious, they are working on the next GTA game, which we're all calling GTA 6, but Rockstar stops short of saying number that outright.... I don't know if we can say for sure if this is going to be GTA 6 specifically, either the name or the concept.... I can imagine a "new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series" being a massive game that is perhaps online from the start, including for its base campaign. And not to use the "m" word, but there are less compelling metaverses than what GTA Online has become, and Rockstar may want to lean into that even further to try to get ahead of competition trying to make their own virtual worlds. As such, I could see a future that blends a traditional numbered GTA sequel and GTA Online, and who knows what that would be called ("GTA World?" "GTA Infinite?"). Just saying, it may not be "GTA 6," exactly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's privacy push could cost Meta $10 billion in lost 2022 advertising revenue — and that news alone erased $250 billion in Meta's value, notes long-time Slashdot reader theodp. But this leads them to a thought experiment: What would happen to Meta's and Google's business models if the privacy invasion behind the companies' lucrative advertising model were actually criminalized?While there would likely still be the same massive demand for the free services provided by Meta and Google, being unable to target customers of interest to advertisers based on snooped behaviors and demographics seems likely to throw the duopoly's lucrative cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) advertising model that powers these free services into disarray. So what might the end game look like for Facebook and Google in a Web world where privacy was enforced by law? One imagines the pair could try to incur the additional cost of delivering many times more untargeted impressions in an effort to reach the same number of behavior and demographic-targeted impressions desired by advertisers, assuming they could get that to work and gain advertisers' trust in the new model. But one wonders if advertisers might start diverting more ad dollars away from Meta and Google to other sources such as media providers, whose varied content naturally segments audiences and could deliver greater assurance to advertisers that more relevant viewers are being reached. Might Meta and Google pivot to become syndicators of media content and be forced to share more of the advertising loot? And what about the Metaverse — could Meta-sponsored events and interest groups hosted there provide Meta with opportunities to naturally segment its massive user base into areas that could facilitate targeting audiences relevant to advertisers even without privacy invasion? Finally — if worse comes to worst — would users actually pay to use Meta's and Google's services if the new advertising model failed to deliver sufficient revenue to keep services free?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm." So writes Ted Gioia, author of the Substack music/pop culture newsletter "The Honest Broker". But it gets worse: "The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago....." The signs are everywhere — including the fact that viewership for the music industry's Grammy awards plummeted 53% this year to just 8.8 million. "More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors)." And even then, "When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before.... Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form — via holograms and 'deepfake' music — making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace." But in the end the real problem may ultimately be that "nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music."Who can blame them for feeling this way? The radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven't changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work. Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world — rock or jazz or hip-hop — face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured 10 or 20 years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs. This state of affairs is not inevitable. A lot of musicians around the world — especially in Los Angeles and London — are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that same reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers. A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don't even get me started on the classical-music industry, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an amazing era of classical composition, with one tiny problem: The institutions controlling the genre don't want you to hear it. The problem isn't a lack of good new music. It's an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. So while the author acknowledges that "The fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings," far deeper than that is the problem that, "The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music." Yet if there's any hope, the author argues, it's that people "crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different.... Songs can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That will be how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place...." "The CEOs are the last to know. That's what gives me solace.... The decision makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We're lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A California newspaper covers "pleas" to the state's governor to delay the closure of a nuclear power plant:On Thursday, Dr. Steven Chu, former U.S. Secretary of Energy under the Obama administration and a Nobel laureate, and more than 79 scientists, academics and entrepreneurs sent a letter to [California governor] Newsom urging him to find a way to keep the plant open because of the necessary carbon-free, clean electricity it provides to the state's electricity grid. Diablo Canyon currently provides about 18,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity annually, comprising of about 10% of the state's electricity portfolio.... The letter was sent by the nonprofit foundation Save Clean Energy, which was organized primarily to protest the closure of the nuclear power plant.... The letter details how Diablo Canyon is critical to the state's clean energy goals, which the state is legally mandated to meet, and how it seems unlikely the state will be able to meet those goals with the plant's current scheduled decommissioning beginning in November 2024, when the first of its two Nuclear Regulatory Licenses expires.... The movement to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open has recently gained new traction after a Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released in November claimed operating the plant for 10 years beyond its expected closure would significantly help the state meet its clean energy goals. In a statement sent to The Tribune in December, a spokesperson for Newsom indicated the governor has no intention of delaying the closure of Diablo Canyon. "California has the technology to achieve California's clean energy goals without compromising our energy needs. The pathway is through diverse renewable energy sources, expanded energy storage and grid climate resiliency," Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon wrote in an email to The Tribune. "Our retail energy providers are already in the process of procuring new energy projects to replace the energy produced by Diablo Canyon." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gordm for sharing the linkRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"Proponents of AI audiobook narration tout its much lower production costs (compared to a traditional recording of a human narrator) as a way to improve profitability of audiobooks," reports Publisher's Weekly, "as well as allowing publishers to publish more audiobooks that have limited audiences. "But according to actor and narrator Emily Lawrence, cofounder of the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association and president of its board of directors, 'It's very easy to reduce this issue to dollars and cents, but it's very complicated and nuanced.'"If AI narration proliferates, "it's not just narrators who will lose their jobs," Lawrence said. "There's an entire ecosystem of people who rely on audiobooks for their livelihood. People who direct audiobooks, people who edit audiobooks, people who check audiobook narration for word-for-word perfection against the manuscript.... Similarly, in audiobook narrator Hillary Huber's view, the negatives of AI outweigh any positives. She places "loss of livelihoods, loss of integrity in storytelling, and loss of personal connection" high on her list of concerns. "The only pros I see are financial," she said. "And it's the other team that benefits, not the narrators nor the listeners. Do you really think [AI company] Speechki is going to pass their savings on to the listener? No. Listeners make choices about what to spend money on, and they have a right to demand clear labeling of robot voices, as do authors.... [Anthony Goff, who until this month was senior v-p and publisher of Hachette Audio] noted at Hachette... his team is looking at using AI for some titles that have never been produced in audio before — a move that would help ensure that "the largest possible number of Hachette's titles are always accessible in audio format," he said. "Interest in previously unrecorded content would help us make decisions about what would make sense to bring to market as fully produced audiobook editions moving forward, created by a professional narrator and our dedicated production staff." Goff's experimentation lines up with the key point that those who champion AI narration raise: AI can provide publishers with a cost-effective way to produce more audiobooks to help meet burgeoning consumer demand. Industry statistics illustrate the gulf between the number of audiobooks that get to market and the number that could potentially be recorded. According to the most recent data from the Audio Publishers Association, more than 71,000 audiobooks were published in 2020. Though that number marks an industry high, it's still only a fraction of the number of print books published in 2020.... Despite AI narration's potential to help grow the audiobook sector, its emergence is "creating an existential crisis for our narrator community," Lawrence said. "It is not only threatening to take away our jobs and completely remove us from the equation but — and this is my main concern — it's threatening the art that we love. And as a community, we fully believe that what we do is art. Whether I'm out of a job or not, I would be devastated that the art that I care so deeply about is so horribly compromised."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep 'ghost flights' in the air," Wired reported this week — adding "The climate impact is massive."Lufthansa, Germany's national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots. Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don't publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures.... Lufthansa's own chief executive, Carsten Spohr [said] the journeys were "empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights." But the company argues that it can't change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports. A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa's practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 "ghost flights" were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. "We're in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU," says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. "Pointless, polluting 'ghost flights' are just the tip of the iceberg." Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating — with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader olddoc and his wife have three frequently-used credit cards, stored and many online businesses for easy checkout. "In the past 6 months we have received fraud notices from the card companies three times."Typically there is a $1 charge in a far away location. Once there was a charge for thousands of dollars at a bar. The card companies seem to pick up the fact that they are fraudulent even though once it was described as "chip present". What can we do to cut down the number of times we have to update all our ongoing bills with a new card number? The original submission acknowledges that "We have never lost money to fraud, just time." But is the problem storing the card numbers with online businesses? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K argues "Never ever do this. Never ever have your card stored at an online business even if it's more inconvenient to enter it every time. You NEVER know how your number is stored, it can be stored in a database that's not secure enough or it can be stored in an encrypted cookie on your computer in which case that cookie might be read and decrypted by just about any web site out there if they have figured out how to access cookies for another site. There are a lot of ways that your card details can leak." That comment also concedes it's possible someone's using a card-number generator to target the same range of credit card numbers. But is there a better solution? Share your own thoughts in the comments. How can you keep your credit card numbers from being stolen?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021," notes The Drift magazine, noting last year's event was held in Monterey, California. "Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was 'the case for optimism.'" The magazine makes the case that over the last decade TED talks have been "endlessly re-articulating tech's promises without any serious critical reflection." And they start with how Bill Gates told an audience in 2015 that "we can be ready for the next epidemic."Gates's popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn't alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other "ideas worth spreading" (the organization's tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky's massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer's talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year..... At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates's 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn't so sure. It seems to me that Gates's prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don't mean to suggest that Gates's TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid. But it embodies a certain story about "the future" that TED talks have been telling for the past two decades — one that has contributed to our unending present crisis. The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories.... In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world... may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned. But the article also notes that TED's philosophy became "a magnet for narcissistic, recognition-seeking characters and their Theranos-like projects." (In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes herself spoke at a medical-themed TED conference.) And since 2009 the TEDx franchise lets licensees use the brand platform to stage independent events — which is how at a 2010 TEDx event, Randy Powell gave his infamous talk about vortex-based mathematics which he said would "create inexhaustible free energy, end all diseases, produce all food, travel anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and make obsolete all existing technology." Yet these are all just symptoms of a larger problem, the article ultimately argues. "As the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The region around this Winter's Olympic venues "is in an extreme drought," reports CNN, though "even in normal years, it isn't particularly suitable for snow sports." In fact, it's the first year all the snow for the Winter Games has been created by a single company:It is almost beautiful — except that the venues are surrounded by an endless brown, dry landscape completely devoid of snow. In an Olympic first, though not an achievement to boast about, climate variability has forced the Winter Games to be virtually 100% reliant on artificial snow — part of a trend that is taking place across winter sports venues around the world. Just one of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics in the past 50 years will have a climate suitable for winter sports by the end of the century, a recent study found, if fossil fuel emissions remain unchecked. As the planet warms and the weather becomes increasingly more erratic, natural snow is becoming less reliable for winter sports, which forces venues to lean more on artificial snow. But it comes at a cost: human-made snow is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring massive amounts of energy and water to produce in a climate that's getting warmer and warmer. Elite athletes also say that the sports themselves become trickier and less safe when human-made snow is involved.... "There have been recent technological advances that allow for the generation of snow when it is above freezing," explained Jordy Hendrikx, the director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University. "This is not your 'light fluffy' snow that you might think of — it is much denser and not very soft...." Making snow demands significant resources, namely energy and water.... And with 1.2 million cubic meters of snow needed to cover roughly 800,000 square meters of competition area... the water demand at this year's Winter Olympics is massive. [According to a "Slippery Slopes" report led by Loughborough University in London on how the climate crisis is affecting the Winter Olympics.] The International Olympic Committee estimated that 49 million gallons of water will be needed to produce snow for The Games, which is a lot when you consider how rapidly the world is running out of freshwater. It's enough to fill 3,600 average-sized backyard swimming pools, or — more to the point — it's a day's worth of drinking water for nearly 100 million people.... The IOC does not face these challenges alone. Artificial snow is being used as a tool to extend ski seasons in competitions and at resorts across the globe, many of which are threatened by the warming temperatures of the climate crisis. These challenges will continue to drive the snow sports industry toward artificial snow when Mother Nature doesn't produce it. But the question remains — just because we can, does that mean we should?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet reporter Steven Vaughan-Nichols has solved the mystery of whether Linus Torvalds is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto: no. But what's interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place:In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: 'Name = I am Satoshi....' Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It's just so, so not Linus. So, while many people were discussing the "evidence," I decided just to ask Linus. Here's what he had to say. "I'm afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 'name' of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree...." Torvalds went on, "So the "torvalds/linux" part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it's in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part...." "So no," Torvalds concluded, "I'm sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins." And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto's real identity remains a secret. Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world . "An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative have come up with an initial design for a central bank digital currency," reports Yahoo Finance. Reuters cautions that the newly-released research does not suggest that the U.S. central bank will move toward launching a CBDC, a step it has said it would not take without clear support from the White House and Congress...." Instead the team "developed technology that can be adjusted as more policy questions regarding the structure and purpose of a CBDC are addressed." The Washington Post describes it as "a system that can settle the vast majority of payments in less than two seconds, handles more than 1.7 million transactions per second and operates around-the-clock with no service outages in the case of a disruption in its network." The Boston Globe adds that "The team noted there's a lot more work to do in the next phase, including researching various privacy features, and stressed the digital dollar remains hypothetical until the Fed decides whether to move forward with government-backed electronic cash." Some context from the Washington Post:The ultimate product could help extend financial services to people who lack a bank account and make cross-border payments such as remittances safer and easier, said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Narula, in a conference call with reporters, noted that the Boston researchers "aren't the ones making policy decision on how such a system might operate," so they have aimed to "create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models." Along with a paper describing the team's work to date, researchers on Thursday published open-source code for the platform that would support the digital currency. Jim Cunha, executive vice president of the Boston Fed, called that a first for the central bank, intended to encourage public input that improves the technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality business is to introduce a mandatory distance between people's digital avatars after warnings that the social media tycoon's plans for a metaverse will lead to a new wave of online harassment. From a report: Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is making a multibillion-dollar bet on VR as the next source of growth for his empire but his strategy has already been dogged by warnings that virtual worlds are rife with abuse. In December a user testing Horizon Worlds, a VR app owned by Zuckerberg's Meta business, complained of being groped online and called for a protective bubble around their avatar, or digital representation of themselves. "Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense," said the user.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple plans to charge developers of dating apps a 27 percent commission on any in-app purchases made via alternative payment systems in the Netherlands, the company has announced. From a report: The change comes in response to an order from Dutch competition regulator, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), which has demanded that Apple allow dating app developers -- and only dating app developers -- to use alternatives to Apple's in-app payment system in the country. Twenty-seven percent represents a reduction of only 3 percentage points compared to the 30 percent commission Apple typically charges for developers using its own payment system. The announcement follows Google's proposal to reduce its commission by 4 percentage points for developers using alternative payment systems in South Korea, Reuters reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba will spend roughly 100 billion yen ($873 million) to build a power semiconductor fabrication facility in Japan, with production expected to begin by March 2025, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The new plant will be built on the grounds of Kaga Toshiba Electronics, a chipmaking subsidiary in Ishikawa Prefecture. Toshiba aims to meet the rise in demand for power chips -- used in automobiles, servers and industrial equipment -- that save energy and contribute to lower carbon emissions. All of the production equipment will be compatible with large 300 mm wafers. Compared with a 200 mm wafer conventionally used for power chips, one 300 mm wafer can produce more chips and boost production efficiency. Kaga Toshiba is also installing a 300 mm wafer production line at one of its existing buildings. The line is expected to begin operation between October 2022 and March 2023. Toshiba's investment for these endeavors totals around 130 billion yen. The 300 mm production lines to be installed in the old and new buildings will more than double the Japanese group's power-chip production capacity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime membership to $139 from $119, the company announced on Thursday as part of its fourth-quarter earnings results. From a report: Amazon last hiked the price of Prime in 2018, when it increased to $119 from $99. Four years before that, it raised the subscription fee to $99 from $79. Amazon's annual increase amounts to about a 17% rise in price. Amazon also raised the monthly price of a Prime membership from $12.99 to $14.99, the company said. New members will see the increased prices on Feb. 18, and current members will be billed at the higher rate after March 25. Launched in 2005, Amazon Prime gives members access to free two-day shipping, as well as access to exclusive movies and TV shows, among other perks. As of last April, the service had more than 200 million subscribers worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mark Zuckerberg quipped that if he started to cry, it wasn't because of the day's news. His red, teary eyes were the result of a scratched cornea, the Facebook founder said Thursday, attempting to lighten the mood as Meta Platforms' stock price lost more than a quarter of its value. At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook's short-video product, he said. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the rival viral-video platform. Meta's Instagram app has a copycat of TikTok called Reels, which the company is now prioritizing. Employees were glued to the stock price. Facebook lost a record $251 billion of value in a single day. Some were discussing buying shares during the dip, believing in Zuckerberg's long-term vision for the metaverse, an immersive version of the internet. Others fretted about what a continued decline might mean for their net worth, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg's own wealth dropped by $31 billion. Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of extending existing three-day holiday weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week all the time would not be productive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big tech companies whose online platforms carry advertisements for scams should be made to reimburse victims, British lawmakers said, as part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud in Britain. From a report: While banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in, Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury committee, told Reuters. "The government should look at some kind of arrangement that makes the polluter pay," he said. "Online platforms are hosting this stuff, not really putting enough effort into weeding it out, and indeed financially benefiting because they're getting the advertising revenues," Stride said. TechUK, a trade body that represents major tech companies in Britain, including Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, declined to provide an immediate comment. Stride's comments came as the Treasury committee on Wednesday published the findings of a report on economic crime, which urged the government to seriously consider forcing online platforms to help to refund victims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Falcon 9 reached a notable US milestone in January, equaling and then exceeding the tally of space shuttle launches. During its more than three decades in service, NASA's space shuttle launched 135 times, with 133 successes. To put the Falcon 9's flight rate into perspective, it surpassed the larger shuttle in flights in about one-third of the time. There is no way to know how many missions the Falcon 9 will ultimately fly. At its current rate, the rocket could reach 500 flights before the end of this decade. However, SpaceX is also actively working to put its own booster out of business. The success of the company's Starship project will probably ultimately determine how long the Falcon 9 will remain a workhorse. Nevertheless, it seems likely the Falcon 9 will fly for a long time yet. That is because it now provides the only means for US astronauts to get into space. And while NASA's deep-space Orion vehicle and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft should come online within the next couple of years, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft will very likely remain the lowest risk, and lowest cost, means of putting humans into orbit for at least the next decade. Speaking of safety, this is where the Falcon 9 rocket has really shone of late. Since the Amos-6 failure during its static fire test, SpaceX has completed a record-setting run of 111 successful Falcon 9 missions in a row. It probably will be 112 after Thursday. There are only two other rockets with a string of successful flights comparable to the Falcon 9. One is the Soyuz-U variant of the Russian rocket, which launched 786 times from 1973 to 2017. The other is the American Delta II rocket, which recently retired. (Eventually, the Atlas V rocket could also exceed 100 consecutive successes before its retirement later this decade.) According to Wikipedia, amid its long run, the Soyuz-U rocket had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches between July 1990 and May 1996. However this period includes the Cosmos 2243 launch in April 1993. This mission should more properly be classified as a failure. According to noted space scientist Jonathan McDowell, the control system of the rocket failed during the final phase of the Blok-I burn, and the payload was auto-destructed. Taking this failure into account, the Soyuz-U had a run of 100 successful launches from 1983 to 1986. This happens to be the exact same number of consecutive successes by the Delta II rocket, originally designed and built by McDonnell Douglas and later flown by Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Overall the Delta II rocket launched 155 times, with two failures. Its final flight, in 2018, was the rocket's 100th consecutive successful mission. So the Falcon 9 has now exceeded both the Soyuz-U and Delta II rockets for consecutive mission successes, and apparently its low flight insurance costs reflect this. What seems remarkable about all of this is that the Falcon 9 amassed this safety record at the very same time SpaceX was experimenting with and demonstrating reuse. At the time of the Amos-6 failure in 2016, the company had yet to re-fly a single Falcon 9 first stage. Now it has pushed some of its boosters to fly 11 flights, and SpaceX has never lost a mission on a reused first stage, even though founder Elon Musk and other officials have explicitly said they are pushing the technology to find its limits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study out of Germany says having traffic lights use AI technology may keep traffic flowing faster and smoother. Jalopnik reports: One of the partners in the study with an aggressively German name -- the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation -- recently installed high-resolution cameras and radar sensors at a busy intersection with a traffic light in the city of Lemgo, according to New Atlas. The setup recorded the number of vehicles waiting for the light to change, the amount of time each of them had to wait and the average speed a vehicle drove through the intersection. Science wizardry was then used to train a machine-learning based computer algorithm. It experimented with different light-changing patterns. They would continuously adapt to real time traffic conditions and see which ones worked best to keep wait times down. According to the simulations, the best artificial intelligence patterns could improve traffic flow by 10 to 15 percent. That may not sound like a ton, but add up all the time you spend white-knuckled at a long traffic light, and chop 15 percent off. Not too bad. The algorithm will be used to run the traffic lights at actual intersections in Germany for the next few months, and can only get better. The study is also looking to find ways to reduce waiting times at crosswalks for pedestrians. They're using LiDAR sensors among other things to assess the walking speed of pedestrians to make sure they have enough time to cross before the light turns on them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg rallied his employees to focus on video products, after they watched the stock lose a quarter of its value. Bloomberg reports: At a company-wide virtual meeting Thursday, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the short-video platform Facebook doesn't own. Zuckerberg appeared red-eyed and wore glasses, the person said. He said he might tear up because he'd scratched his eye -- not because of the topics up for discussion. Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of offering long weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week would not be productive. Employee shares vest on Feb. 15, and manager conversations about bonuses and promotions happen in March -- both of which could be factors in workers' potential decisions to leave, according to another person familiar with the company's plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the most outspoken proponents of the metaverse is struggling to find its place in this hypothetical virtual world. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped plans to make a HoloLens 3 -- what would have been a successor to its current mixed reality headset -- and infighting within the mixed reality division has fueled uncertainty about its future, according to Business Insider. One source told Insider that the decision to abandon plans for a HoloLens 3 would mark the end of the "product as we know it." Multiple sources said Microsoft had agreed to partner with Samsung to develop a new mixed reality device, a decision that has reportedly "inflamed" division within the team. One employee called the partnership a "shit show." Insider spoke to 20 current and former employees at Microsoft who described "confusion and strategic uncertainty." Some folks within Microsoft believe the company should continue to make hardware while others favor pivoting to a software platform for the metaverse -- that is, a Windows for the digital world. There is also a question of which customer base to target. Microsoft employees are apparently split on creating hardware and software for consumers or continuing their focus on enterprise customers. HoloLens 2, the company's latest AR/VR hardware, is a commercial product that sells for $3,500. Ruben Caballero, a former Apple executive who was hired in 2020 to join the mixed reality and AI division, reportedly wants to shift focus to consumers and the metaverse. Others within the team believe they should continue selling to businesses, and even fulfill military contracts. LinkedIn profiles show that at least 25 Microsoft employees working on mixed reality left to join Meta last year alone, and Wall Street Journal reports the team lost around 100 people in 2021, many of them to Facebook's parent company. The HoloLens team is now uncertain about the long-term goals of the project and whether they will transition to working on a software platform. Disagreement on what to do next has made HoloLens's future unclear, though Microsoft maintains its commitment to the headset and promises to release more products in the future, "Microsoft HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse," said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw. "We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development." Despite slow progress, Microsoft has doubled down on augmented and virtual reality in recent months, claiming its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard will provide the "building blocks for the metaverse." Microsoft's mixed-reality plans now appear to be hanging by a thread, and its most ambitious project yet is on the brink of collapse, just as talk about the metaverse -- the future it was meant to help create -- reaches a fever pitch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Washington Post, the EPA and White House Council on Environmental Quality have objected to the US Postal Service's proposal to mostly buy gas-powered next-gen delivery trucks in a project worth up to $11.3 billion. "The current strategy is a 'lost opportunity' to more drastically reduce the carbon footprint of one of the world's largest government fleets," reports Engadget, citing EPA associate policy administrator Vicki Arroyo. From the report: Only 10 percent of the USPS' new trucks would be electric under the existing proposal, and the overall effort would only improve the fleet's fuel economy by 0.4MPG. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously claimed the Postal Service couldn't afford more electric mail vehicles, and has argued his agency needs to focus on basic infrastructure improvements over technology. The USPS is required by law to be self-sufficient, and can't simply request government funds. There may be an uphill battle to make any changes. DeJoy has staunchly refused to alter the purchasing plan, and the USPS rejected California officials' January 28th request for a public hearing on the plans. The service also largely ignored EPA advice when it created the analysis guiding its plan. The environmental regulator accused the USPS of using "biased" estimates that preferred gas-based trucks. The mail institution reportedly assumed battery and gas prices would remain static even decades later, and that the existing charging infrastructure wouldn't grow. It further overestimated the emissions from plug-in vehicles, according to the EPA. The Postal Service might be forced to change regardless. The EPA has the option of referring its disagreements to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which can mediate disputes like this. The letters gave the USPS a last chance to voluntarily rethink its proposal before the Council stepped in, sources for The Post claimed. Environmental groups are also likely to sue if the gas-centric plan moves ahead, and the law firm Earthjustice told The Post the USPS might lose when its proposal often lacks supporting evidence. You may well see a transition toward mail-carrying EVs, even if the transition is particularly messy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. lawmakers are introducing "Right to Repair" legislation this week to ensure consumers can get vehicles, electronic devices and agriculture equipment serviced by independent outlets. Reuters reports: Representative Bobby Rush, a Democrat, said Thursday he had introduced legislation to ensure vehicle owners and independent repair shops have equal access to repair and maintenance tools as automakers' dealerships. Representatives Mondaire Jones, a Democrat, and Republican Victoria Spartz introduced separate legislation Wednesday dubbed the Freedom to Repair Act to reform copyright law to make it easier for consumers to get repairs. Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Kathleen Burke said the bill would allow "consumers to repair their own devices without needing to get the Copyright Office's permission every three years." Rush's bill would require all tools and equipment, wireless transmission of repair and diagnostic data and access to on-board diagnostic systems needed for repairs be made available to the independent repair industry. Rush said it would "end manufacturers' monopoly on vehicle repair and maintenance and allow Americans the freedom to choose where to repair their vehicles." Rush's bill would create a committee to provide recommendations to the FTC on addressing barriers to vehicle repairs. Yesterday, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) introduced a bill to allow farmers to fix their own equipment. Specifically, the bill "would require agriculture equipment manufacturers to make spare parts, instruction manuals and software codes publicly available, allowing farmers to fix devices by themselves or hire third-party mechanics of their own choosing," reports NBC News.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Most companies still haven't shifted their entire NVMe SSD lineups to use PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are already on the horizon. Storage company Silicon Motion said in a recent earnings call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-capable SSD controllers for consumer SSDs will be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a wide variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD manufacturer ADATA teased some PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month (albeit without an expected release date), boasting of read speeds up to 14GB/s and write speeds of up to 12GB/s using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. Current high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung's 980 Pro top out at roughly half those speeds. Other reports have suggested that these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs are coming later in 2022, but according to the call transcript, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs -- the products that end up in servers and data centers, not what typically ends up in the PC on your desk or lap. Early PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated at CES a couple of years before they became products that you could actually buy. For 2022 and 2023, Silicon Motion will continue to focus on those PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Budget SSDs like Western Digital's WD Black SN770 SE are only beginning to transition to PCIe 4.0, and according to reviews like this one from Tom's Hardware, their controllers and flash memory aren't yet fast enough to benefit much from the extra bandwidth. Silicon Motion also says that PCIe 4.0 SSDs have only become common in pre-built PCs within the last year because of "extensive verification and testing" requirements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Quantum computing is still rare enough that merely installing a system in a country is a breakthrough, and IBM is taking advantage of that novelty. The company has forged a partnership with the Canadian province of Quebec to install what it says is Canada's first universal quantum computer. The five-year deal will see IBM install a Quantum System One as part of a Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator project tackling scientific and commercial challenges. The team-up will see IBM and the Quebec government foster microelectronics work, including progress in chip packaging thanks to an existing IBM facility in the province. The two also plan to show how quantum and classical computers can work together to address scientific challenges, and expect quantum-powered AI to help discover new medicines and materials. IBM didn't say exactly when it would install the quantum computer. However, it will be just the fifth Quantum One installation planned by 2023 following similar partnerships in Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US. Canada is joining a relatively exclusive club, then.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One day, we will all don AR glasses, capable of serving up information geospatially tied to every house and place in our neighborhoods. But who will own and control these spatial AR layers? From a report: It's the stuff of nightmares: The other day, I found my property occupied by a stranger, who was renting it out, Airbnb style. The good news: I'm OK. I wasn't actually evicted from my own home -- at least not in this world. Someone had acquired my property in Upland, a blockchain-powered game that allows people to buy, develop, rent out and sell virtual land parcels based on real-world property borders. It's a bit like Monopoly, played on top of Google Maps, with virtual land speculation happening on a gamified version of the real world. With bright and colorful imagery, and a goofy-looking llama as a mascot, Upland emphasizes that it's all fun and games. That's true for its economy as well, as most of its in-game transactions have little to no monetary value in the real world. The person who bought my property currently makes the equivalent of 4 cents a month in Upland's in-game currency by renting it out to other players. However, Upland has big ambitions, which include eventually expanding into AR, and providing its data via APIs to third-party developers who may one day be able to build their own game and nongame applications with it. And the company is not alone: A small but growing number of startups and crypto initiatives have begun selling and renting out AR spaces tied to real-world addresses. One day, these efforts could be key to telling your smart glasses which information to display as you look at a famous landmark, or even your neighbor's home. This brings up a ton of questions: Who should have the rights to an AR layer tied to a physical address? What does it mean that these AR properties are being divided up among early adopters before most people even know they exist? Will we see the same issues that have plagued real world real estate, including gentrification and displacement, replicated in AR?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved legislation that, if passed into law, would force Apple to let users install apps from outside of the App Store. From a report: The bipartisan 21-1 vote is a strong endorsement for the bill from Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn and eight other cosponsors, but it still faces a long road to get a vote in the full Senate. The bill seeks to loosen the duopoly that Apple and Alphabet's Google have over mobile app distribution, part of Congress's push to curb the power of U.S. technology giants. "If you're a consumer, what this measure means to you is cheaper prices, more innovation, better products and more consumer safeguards by opening the walled garden so that new entrants are willing and able to compete on values like privacy and children's safety," Blumenthal said during the hearing. Google and Apple "own the rails of the app economy, much as the railroad companies did at the start of the last century." Blumenthal estimated the value of the app store market at about $100 billion a year. The measure, S. 2710, would require Apple to let users install apps on their phones and other devices from sources on the web or alternative app stores, a process that's called sideloading. This provision would most impact Apple. While Google offers its Play Store on mobile devices, it doesn't bar users from downloading Android apps elsewhere. Sideloading, which Apple has said poses security risks for consumers, would allow apps to avoid Apple's commissions, which range from 15% to 30%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A true "metaverse" may not yet exist, but that hasn't stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores. From a report: According to new data shared today by Sensor Tower, there are now 552 mobile apps that include the term "metaverse" in their apps' titles or descriptions, in hopes of capturing consumer interest in this next evolution of the web. And many of the new additions were added in just the past few months, the firm notes. Across all global apps ranked apps on the App Store and Google Play, a total of 86 apps added references to the "metaverse" to their title or description between November 2021 and January 2022, Sensor Tower's data indicates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today announced a new version of Workspace, the company's productivity service that you probably still refer to as G Suite. With the new -- and free -- Google Workspace Essentials plan, Google wants to bring more business users onto the platform by offering them the basic Workspace productivity tools -- with the exception of Gmail. From a report: Until now, in order to use Workspace with a non-Google email address, you had to sign up for the $6/month/user Business Starter account after a 14-day trial. That paid plan is not going away, but all you now need to do is sign up with your work email and you're good to go. No credit card needed. The new free plan is essentially the existing entry-level Business Starter plan, but with a reduced storage quota of 15 GB (down from 30). Otherwise, though, you can use Google Meet with up to 100 users for up to 60 minutes in each call, get access to Spaces for work collaboration and Chat for gossiping about their co-workers. All of the standard tools like Sheets, Slides and Docs are also included, of course. Since you already have an email address from work, though, there's no Gmail included in this edition, which makes sense, given that it would be tough to send out emails with your work address from there, leading to all kinds of confusion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To make it harder for stalkers to abuse them, Apple included (and has since upgraded) several safety features that will alert someone to the presence of a nearby AirTag that's not their own, including an audible beep. But according to PCMag, one Etsy seller was, up until very recently, selling AirTags with the speaker physically disabled, raising privacy concerns once again. From a report: The AirTag, a small, easy-to-carry device about the size of a quarter, relies on Apple's Find My network which leverages millions of Apple devices to discreetly keep tabs on the location of the trackers and report that information back to each tag's registered user. The general idea behind the AirTag was that users could attach one to their keys, their backpack, or to other valuable items, and be able to quickly locate them if lost. To prevent their misuse, such as using an AirTag to track someone without their knowledge, iOS users would be eventually notified if a tracker registered to someone else was nearby, while Android users would have to rely on an audible beep that would start chirping three days after an AirTag was separated from its owner. The product was ripe for abuse -- a concern we emphasized in our initial review of the AirTags -- and a couple of months after their debut Apple addressed those concerns with promised updates that would see Android users getting similar notifications as iOS users when an AirTag was nearby through a new Tracker Detect app that allowed Android users to more easily spot the devices. And the timeframe for when the trackers would start beeping after being away from its registered owner was shortened to a "random time inside a window that lasts between 8 and 24 hours," according to a CNET report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration has formed a panel of senior administration officials and private-sector experts to investigate major national cybersecurity failures, and it will probe as its first case the recently discovered Log4j internet bug, officials said. From a report: The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said. Details of the board will be announced Thursday. The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments and other transportation accidents. The new panel's authority derives from an executive order that President Biden signed in May to improve federal cybersecurity defenses. The cyber board isn't an independent agency like the transportation board and will instead reside within the Department of Homeland Security. It will have 15 members -- three times as many as the full complement of the transportation board -- from government and the public sector who don't need to be confirmed by the Senate. It lacks subpoena power, unlike the transportation board. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the cyber board was intended to draw solutions to future problems from past cybersecurity crises, rather than casting blame where shortcomings are identified.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A top VR web browser is closing down. Today, Mozilla announced it's shutting down its Firefox Reality browser -- the four-year-old browser built for use in virtual reality environments. The technology had allowed users to access the web from within their VR headset, doing things like visiting URLs, performing searches, and browsing both the 2D and 3D internet using your VR hand controllers, instead of a mouse. From a report: Firefox Reality first launched in fall 2018 and has been available on Viveport, Oculus, Pico, and Hololens platforms through their various app stores. While capable of surfing the 2D web, the expectation was that users would largely use the new technology to browse and interact with the web's 3D content, like 360-degree panoramic images and videos, 3D models, and WebVR games, for example. But in an announcement published today, Mozilla says the browser will be removed from the stores where it's been available for download in the "coming weeks." Mozilla is instead directing users who still want to utilize a web browser in VR to Igalia's upcoming open-source browser, Wolvic, which is based on Firefox Reality's source code. This browser will be available for download starting next week, so users won't have to go without -- they'll just have to make the switch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.