Slashdot

Robert "Razerguy" Krakoff, the co-founder and former president of gaming hardware company Razer, died last week at the age of 81. Maybe you've never heard Krakoff's name, but it's possible you've been impacted by his far-reaching legacy. From a report: In 1999, Krakoff was behind the first-ever gaming mouse: the Razer Boomslang. Not only was it the foundation of Razer's now-massive lineup of gaming mice, it arguably jumpstarted the entire gaming peripheral industry. Below, you can see Krakoff himself in an ad promoting the Razer Boomslang mouse in 2002 -- alongside professional gamer Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, who signed a historic sponsorship deal with Razer long before the word "esports" entered the lexicon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips. From a report: The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings. Dr. Chatterjee, 43, was fired in March, shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in Nature, said four people familiar with the situation who were not permitted to speak openly on the matter. Google confirmed in a written statement that Dr. Chatterjee had been "terminated with cause." Google declined to elaborate about Dr. Chatterjee's dismissal, but it offered a full-throated defense of the research he criticized and of its unwillingness to publish his assessment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a category, mental health apps have worse privacy protections for users than most other types of apps, according to a new analysis from researchers at Mozilla. Prayer apps also had poor privacy standards, the team found. From a report: "The vast majority of mental health and prayer apps are exceptionally creepy," Jen Caltrider, the Mozilla *Privacy Not Included guide lead, said in a statement. "They track, share, and capitalize on users' most intimate personal thoughts and feelings, like moods, mental state, and biometric data." In the latest iteration of the guide, the team analyzed 32 mental health and prayer apps. Of those apps, 29 were given a "privacy not included" warning label, indicating that the team had concerns about how the app managed user data. The apps are designed for sensitive issues like mental health conditions, yet collect large amounts of personal data under vague privacy policies, the team said in the statement. Most apps also had poor security practices, letting users create accounts with weak passwords despite containing deeply personal information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brussels regulators have charged Apple with breaking EU competition law by abusing its dominant position in mobile payments to limit rivals' access to contactless technology. From a report: Antitrust investigators are concerned that the US tech group is preventing competitors from accessing "tap and go" chips or near-field communication (NFC) to benefit its own Apple Pay system, the European Commission said in a statement on Monday. Margrethe Vestager, the EU's executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said Brussels had "indications that Apple restricted third-party access to key technology necessary to develop rival mobile wallet solutions on Apple's devices." She added that the commission had "preliminarily found that Apple may have restricted competition, to the benefit of its own solution Apple Pay." If confirmed, "such a conduct would be illegal under our competition rules," Vestager said. The company could face fines worth up to 10 per cent of global turnover if the charges are upheld.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register noted this week that two "unofficial" Ubuntu remixes "came out on the same day as the official flavors." - Ubuntu Cinnamon (Linux Mint's flagship desktop environment) - Ubuntu Unity, a revival of what used to be the official Ubuntu desktop by Ubuntu team member Rudra B. Saraswat (described the Register as "a 12-year-old wunderkind")Ubuntu Cinnamon is the older of the two and first appeared in 2019, while Ubuntu Unity came out in May 2020, soon after the release of Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu Unity....has the macOS-like desktop that was Ubuntu's standard offering from 2011 until the company pensioned it off in 2017.... Ubuntu Unity is as free as Ubuntu itself, and the new remix continues to evolve. In 22.04, most of the GNOME-based accessory apps have been replaced with the MATE equivalents, such as the Pluma text editor and Atril document viewer. (A handful remain, such as the GNOME system monitor rather than the MATE one, but the differences are trivial.) The System Settings app is the original Unity one, and the Unity Tweaks app comes pre-installed.... The new "Jammy Jellyfish" version of Ubuntu Unity also adds support for Flatpak packages alongside Ubuntu's native Snap packages. To do this, it replaces Ubuntu's Software Store with version 41.5 of GNOME Software. Interestingly, this also supports Snap packages, so sometimes, when you search for a package, you might get multiple results: one for the OS-native DEB package, possibly one for a Flatpak, and maybe a Snap version too.... [I]f you dislike both the Unity and GNOME desktops and want something more Windows-like, but you don't mind GNOME's CSD windows, then Joshua Peisach's Ubuntu Cinnamon remix may appeal. Cinnamon is the default desktop of both Ubuntu-based Linux Mint and its Debian variant. Ubuntu Cinnamon combines the latest upstream version of Mint's Cinnamon desktop, 5.2.7, with the standard app selection of upstream Ubuntu. This means most of its apps lack menu bars, except for the Nemo file manager and LibreOffice. For these classic-style apps, the Ubuntu Cinnamon distro has tweaked the GNOME title-bar layout to be more Windows-like: minimize/maximize/close buttons at top right, and a window-management menu at top left.... Cinnamon's roots as a fork of GNOME 3 do offer a significant potential feature that MATE, Xfce and indeed Unity cannot do: fractional scaling. This is clearly labelled as an experimental feature, and in testing, we couldn't get it to work, so for now, this remains a theoretical advantage.... These caveats aside, though, Ubuntu Cinnamon is maturing nicely in the new version. While Ubuntu and Ubuntu Unity are now purple-toned, Ubuntu Cinnamon has switched to a restrained theme in shades of dark orange and brown, which reminded us of the tasteful earth-toned Ubuntu of the old GNOME 2 days... Both these desktops are X.11-based, so there's not a trace of Wayland in either distro. Both also benefit from having working 3D acceleration. Both remixes "are aiming for inclusion as official Ubuntu flavors," the article points out. But then again, "There are dozens of Ubuntu remixes and flavors out there. The official Ubuntu Derivatives page links to 30, and DistroWatch has more than five times as many, including many which are no longer maintained."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week saw the 36th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster -- which had occurred just days before the Soviet Union's annual May Day celebration in 1986 -- and featured lots of patriotic outdoor parades. At the time Lev Golinkin was a 6-year-old living less than 300 miles away in the Ukrainian town now called Kharkiv. Writing for CNN, Golinkin remembers that Moscow "had remained silent, refusing to admit anything had occurred until the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl was detected in Scandinavia on April 28, making it impossible to hide the catastrophe any longer." Even then, Golinkin remembers that they "grossly downpayed the issue...."On April 29, three days after the Chernobyl disaster, Moscow issued a terse television announcement informing citizens that a reactor was damaged and aid was being provided to those who required it. The announcement was less than 20 seconds The days and weeks that followed were filled with a torrent of rumors and innuendo swirling around living rooms across the USSR while Moscow continued to pile over the explosion with secrecy and obfuscation. The Politburo began to loosen up restrictions on freedom of speech, but the confusion remained. No one knew the truth, but everyone knew the Kremlin was lying -- and that was about the only certainty around... [T]here was no rationalizing away the radiation. Moscow's refusal to cancel May Day festivities exposed the hollow horror of the Soviet Union -- even the most faithful believers in communism realized they lived in a country that thrust millions of people into danger just so it could hold a parade. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev himself admitted Chernobyl -- which eroded faith in the Soviet system, poisoned vast tracts of land and cost billions to clean up -- contributed to the collapse of the USSR more than any other factor. Decades of Moscow's secrecy around the disaster makes it impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate of casuaties, and to this day, experts continue to guess and reassess the true impact of Chernobyl.... For nearly 70 years, the Soviets in Kremlin had generations of citizens tolerate bloodshed papered over by mendacity and propaganda. The same is happening today, during Moscow's savage war in Ukraine. The media formats may be somewhat different, but the lies continue... My family and I fled the Soviet Union in 1989. Watching the horrors in Ukraine unfold from America is surreal, in no small part because it feels like the intervening decades between the falls of communism and today have evaporated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28-year-old Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019. The Associated Press reports that at that point he'd been reading 4Chan for 14 years, according to his mother — since the age of 14. The year before, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018, namechecked 4Chan in a pre-attacked Facebook post. But the Guardian now adds another a story from nine days ago — when a 23-year-old shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammunition opened fire from his apartment in Washington D.C.Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username "Raymond Spencer" logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled "shool [sic] shooting". The newly published message contained a link — to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer's rifle.... Even as police stormed the apartment building where Spencer hid, with officers maneuvering past a surveillance camera that he had set up in the hallway and was monitoring, Spencer continued to post to the message board. "They're in the wrong part of the building right now searching," he posted at one point. A few minutes later: "Waiting for police to catch up with me." As he waited, Spencer logged on to Wikipedia to edit the entry for Edmund Burke School, which he had just opened fire on.... Police believe Spencer shot himself to death as officers breached his apartment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hot Hardware warns that on Tuesday, the Stable Channel for Chrome's desktop edition "had an update on April 26, 2022. That update includes 30 security fixes, some of them so bad that Google is urging all users to update immediately."The release notes for Google's Chrome v101.0.4951.41 for Windows, Mac, and Linux has a long list of bug fixes; you can view it here. However, there's also a key statement in that page. "Note: Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed...." Effectively the the non-developer translation of the quote above is that something so significant was found, the details are being kept hidden.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As an apparent reward for returning to the office, thousands of Google employees were treated to a private Lizzo concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre near Google's headquarters, reports CNBC:Google implemented a return-to-office policy starting in early April, requiring employees to go to physical facilities at least three days a week. Staffers pushed back on the mandate and the prospect of navigating traffic jams, after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth of the past 15 years.... Google had delayed its return plans on multiple occasions, due mostly to surges in Covid-19 case numbers. But this time, the company stuck to its reopening schedule. In the early days back, employees were greeted with marching bands on campus, as well as photo booths, celebratory food and visits from prominent politicians. "Thank you for being back!" Lizzo said. "Thank you for surviving! Google, we back, bitch!!" [...] She inserted the company's name into her popular song "Boys," changing the lyrics from "I heard you a freak, too" to "I heard you a freak, Google!" After two and a half years "of protecting others and ourselves but also being very disconnected," Lizzo told the crowd, "It's so incredible to see how connected we are right now!" CNBC reports. Someone in the crowd shouted back, "Propaganda! Propaganda!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a new metaverse project from the creators of the "Bored Apes Yacht Club" NFTs. Last night they held a "virtual land" sale, reports Bloomberg, raising nearly a third of a billion dollars. At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening:If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw. For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees. Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee." "Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees.... "Over $175 million was spent on gas alone." Mashable adds:An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone. As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through. Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees.... However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale. Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan — or more than the price of the deed itself."Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first." Three days ago Noah Grey created a Gofundme campaign headlined "I am losing my home in four days." "I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to doing this, but I have no choice."My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (May 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time....) I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.... [T]his was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation.... Noah's plea was retweeted by long-time geeks who remembered his contribution, including tech entrepreneur Anil Dash as well as the founder of Harvard's Nieman Lab. And a San Antonio newspaper reported on another response from Texas:Alex Mahan, the brand director of Lockheed Martin, wrote on Twitter: "I coded my first blog in 2000 with Greymatter. If it weren't for Noah, I might not have had a career in web development. He was always helpful and patient with my beginner questions back then. Please throw down some $ if you are able." Wil Wheaton himself apparently got involved. (Several people made donations along with the tagline #WilSentMe.) And with an average donation size of $95.87, a total of 1,073 people ultimately donated... $102,873. By the end of the day Friday, wearing a t-shirt that says 127.0.0.1, Noah Grey shared a tearful video on Twitter. "This has been the craziest, most emotionally overwhelming day of — of my life.... Oh my god, thank you. It hardly even feels like enough to say the words. But thank you so much. Everybody, oh my god... It may take me time to respond to all of this, but I will — I will.... I have never felt so seen. I have never felt so — I've never felt embraced by the internet before. "I've seen some say this feels like 'the Old Internet' in action...." Grey posted on Twitter this weekend. "But 20+ years ago I was still a struggling mentally-ill man who wanted to matter... and never dared let himself feel he *might* til now. I am shattered with gratitude."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia) "announced that it would no longer accept cryptocurrency donations," reports Mashable, saying the decision came after a three-month discussion period:Wikimedia said it would close its account with Bitpay, the crypto payment service provider which Wikimedia used to collect cryptocurrency donations.... The Wikimedia Foundation did say it would continue to monitor the situation, possibly keeping the door open to a future where it did accept crypto donations once again. For now, though, the critics of cryptocurrency and the broader Wiki community are victorious. Mashable notes Wikipedia own figures showing that for all of 2021, donations in cryptocurrency to Wikipedia barely totalled $130,000 — or just 0.08% of its revenue. And a long-time Wikipedia editor notes on Twitter that in a three-month request for comments "excluding new accounts and unregistered users," the final tally supporting the ban was 232 to 94 opposing it. (That is, 71.17% supported the ban.) "I'm really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation listened to the community's wishes on this issue," they tell Mashable, "and I'm really proud of my community for taking a principled stand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MacRumors reports that Apple has begun a staggered rollout of a new firmware update (which will go fully live to everyone on May 13.) Here's how Apple's describes how it will change the lost-device-tracking AirTags:"Currently, iOS users receiving an unwanted tracking alert can play a sound to help them find the unknown AirTag. We will be adjusting the tone sequence to use more of the loudest tones to make an unknown AirTag more easily findable." That'll make them easier to find — but some people have a different problem. This ZDNet reporter keeps getting notifications on their iPad trying to warn them about their own AirPod earbuds.The warning is totally erroneous. These are my AirPods Pro, which I have had for years now. I was able to verify they are mine by using the iPad to play a sound on the AirPods. Apple's technology doesn't know these are my own AirPods. The strange behavior began to appear in February. I am not alone in experiencing this annoying mistaken alert. Apple's AirPods support user forum shows several individuals in recent months with the same frustration... "It still happens several times a day. I'm getting annoyed. I get it on my phone and my iPad everytime I open the case and use my AirPods. I play the sound to be sure its really mine and it is indeed mine." There are numerous examples of this.... Users have also reported the problem with their AirTags not being recognized. "I get constant notifications that an air tag is near me, but it turns out it's my tags. Shouldn't my phone know the difference?" writes Joe Thomas 3 on February 8th.... It's worth noting that Apple has posted a note that promises "a series of updates that we plan to introduce later this year," which include something such as "precision finding" for AirTags, and "Refining unwanted tracking alert logic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN cites a local source imagining the surprise of the looters of a Ukranian farm equipment dealership who'd transported some heavy machines over 700 miles to Russia. "They realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely." CNN adds that "The equipment now appears to be languishing at a farm near Grozny."Over the past few weeks there's been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials — beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist. CNN has learned that the equipment was removed from an Agrotek dealership in Melitopol, which has been occupied by Russian forces since early March. Altogether it's valued at nearly $5 million. The combine harvesters alone are worth $300,000 each.... The contact said the process began with the seizure of two combine harvesters, a tractor and a seeder. Over the next few weeks, everything else was removed: in all 27 pieces of farm machinery. One of the flat-bed trucks used, and caught on camera, had a white "Z" painted on it and appeared to be a military truck. The contact said there were rival groups of Russian troops: some would come in the morning and some in the evening. Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked.... The end result? "After a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment — because it had been locked remotely."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Microsoft is testing a VPN-like service for its Edge browser, adding a new layer of security and privacy to the browsing experience. A recently-discovered support page on Microsoft's website details the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network" feature, which provides data encryption and prevents online tracking, courtesy of Cloudflare. While it isn't available yet, even if you have the latest Dev channel build, the Microsoft Edge Secure Network feature appears to be similar in nature to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service. This is essentially a proxy or VPN service, which encrypts your browsing data so that it's safe from prying eyes, including your ISP. It also keeps your location private, so you can use it to access geo-restricted websites, or content that's blocked in your country. Microsoft Edge's Secure Network mode will require you to be signed into your Microsoft account, and that's because the browser keeps track of how much data you've used in this mode. You get 1GB of free data per month, and that's tied to your Microsoft account. Most VPN services aren't free, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. Cloudflare itself doesn't keep any personally-identifiable user data, and any data related to browsing sessions is deleted every 25 hours. Information related to your data usage is also deleted at the end of each monthly period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. Phys.Org reports: This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world's most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level. [...] The project focuses on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a significant polymer found in most consumer packaging, including cookie containers, soda bottles, fruit and salad packaging, and certain fibers and textiles. It makes up 12% of all global waste. The enzyme was able to complete a "circular process" of breaking down the plastic into smaller parts (depolymerization) and then chemically putting it back together (repolymerization). In some cases, these plastics can be fully broken down to monomers in as little as 24 hours. Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low temperatures. Through this process, which included studying 51 different post-consumer plastic containers, five different polyester fibers and fabrics and water bottles all made from PET, the researchers proved the effectiveness of the enzyme, which they are calling FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase). [...] Up next, the team plans to work on scaling up enzyme production to prepare for industrial and environmental application. The researchers have filed a patent application for the technology and are eying several different uses. Cleaning up landfills and greening high waste-producing industries are the most obvious. But another key potential use is environmental remediation. The team is looking at a number of ways to get the enzymes out into the field to clean up polluted sites.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers in Japan have developed a new method for making 5-cm (2-in) wafers of diamond that could be used for quantum memory. The ultra-high purity of the diamond allows it to store a staggering amount of data -- the equivalent of one billion Blu-Ray discs. New Atlas reports: [R]esearchers at Saga University and Adamant Namiki Precision Jewelery Co. in Japan have developed a new method for manufacturing ultra-high purity diamond wafers that are big enough for practical use. With this technique, the team says the resulting diamond wafers measure 5 cm across, and have such immense data density that they can theoretically store the equivalent of a billion Blu-Ray discs. One Blu-Ray can store up to 25 GB (assuming it's single-layered), which would mean this diamond wafer should be able to store a whopping 25 exabytes (EB) of data. The company calls these wafers Kenzan Diamond. The key is that these diamonds have a nitrogen concentration of under three parts per billion (ppb), making them incredibly pure. The researchers say that these are the largest wafers with that level of purity -- most others only get to 4 mm2 (0.006 in2) at most. Achieving this requires a new manufacturing technique. Diamond wafers are made by growing the crystals on a substrate material, and that material is usually a flat surface. The problem is, the diamond can crack under the strain, degrading the quality. In the new process, the team made a relatively simple change -- the substrate surface was shaped like steps, which spreads the strain horizontally and prevents cracking. This allows them to make larger diamond wafers with higher purity. The team hopes to commercialize these diamond wafers in 2023, and in the meantime are already working towards doubling the diameter to 10 cm (4 in).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The sea changes are already happening. Earth's oceans are warmer than they were a century ago, sea levels are rising, and ocean waters are more acidic than they used to be, all because of human-created climate change. Global temperatures are expected rise even further in the coming decades, leaving researchers to wonder how these alterations will affect life on Earth -- and especially in the seas. But the oceans have been through major crises before -- including at least five mass extinctions -- and those events in the deep past can help outline what might happen in our near future. To better understand what trends to expect, Princeton University oceanographers Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch applied a scientific model used to predict the extent of a past mass extinction to estimate the consequences of current global warming. Their research, published today in Science, warns that failing to reduce fossil fuel emissions will set Earth's oceans on track for a mass extinction within the next 300 years. This potential disaster will have uneven consequences across the seas. While the temperatures of both the global climate and the oceans are rising, the consequences will differ from place to place. How ocean life at the North and South poles respond will be different than species in the tropics. Under the worst-case scenarios, the researchers found, extinctions in the oceans will likely mimic the die offs that have occurred during Earth's five mass extinctions as organisms struggle to find suitable habitat in warmer, likely oxygen-depleted waters. Ecosystems where oxygen levels in the water are already low, like in the tropical seas of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, are likely to be hit especially hard as seawater may lack the oxygen required to support the diverse creatures that live there. Polar seas, too, will likely see die offs as waters become too warm for cold-adapted species. The study does have some limitations, [...] including that it does not consider other factors affecting ocean biodiversity such as overfishing and pollution. Researchers also need more information about the metabolic requirements of many different ocean organisms. Nevertheless, the study makes a solid case that many marine species can't simply move to another place and changes in ocean warmth will make it much more difficult for many species to survive. The long view is especially needed. [...] Looking centuries into the future, the new study emphasizes that now is the time to forestall some of these possible consequences for our oceans. The global climate is expected to get about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. If emissions can be curbed and warming kept around this minimum, then these mass extinction scenarios can be avoided. [...] The study outlines two possible scenarios. Continued and unmitigated fossil fuel emissions will eventually recreate conditions of some of Earth's worst biological crises. If emission trends can be reversed, however, there is greater hope for the future of the ocean's ecosystems and biodiversity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a survey of 501 people conducted by insurance company Progressive, most people prefer the process of buying a car online than at dealerships. Autoblog reports: Based on the 251 people who completed a transaction entirely online or through a dealer web site, and the 250 who did solely face-to-face business, there are two big takeaways. The first is that online shopping, still a small percentage of overall car sales, is growing rapidly in acceptance and actual transactions. [...] The second takeaway is that millennials are a major part of the online sales growth. Overall, though, online shoppers expressed more joy with the process than showroom floor shoppers. Compared to 78% of buyers highly satisfied with buying a car online, only 58% of in-person shoppers registered the same pleasure. That carried through to trade-ins and financing as well. Eighty percent of online shoppers were highly satisfied with the trade-in process, versus 57% of dealership visitors; 70% of online shoppers gave the highest marks to the financing process as opposed to 53% of guests asked to "Step into the office" and wait while the salesperson conferred with the finance manager.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union has joined the social network Mastodon, which has seen a staggering 30,000 new users after Elon Musk's bid for Twitter was accepted. PC Magazine reports: On Thursday, the European Commission said it had set up its own server, dubbed EU Voice, to join Mastodon's decentralized social network, also known as a "Fediverse." The effort is currently only a pilot, but it represents the EU's goal of supporting private and open-source software capable of rivaling mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On the same day, the European Commission also launched an account for PeerTube, another decentralized platform that revolves around video sharing. "With the pilot launch of EU Voice and EU Video, we aim to offer alternative social media platforms that prioritize individuals and their rights to privacy and data protection," said European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiorowski. "In concrete terms this means, for example, that EU Voice and EU Video do not rely on transfers of personal data to countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area; there are no advertisements on the platforms; and there is no profiling of individuals that may use the platforms," he added. "These measures, amongst others, give individuals the choice on and control over how their personal data is used."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Breaking Defense, the head of machine learning at Lyft, Craig Martell, has been named the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. From the report: The hiring of a Silicon Valley persona for the CDAO role is likely to be cheered by those in the defense community who have been calling for more technically-minded individuals to take leadership roles in the department. At the same time, Martell's lack of Pentagon experience -- he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military, but has never worked in the department's bureaucracy -- may pose challenges as he works to lead an office only months old. In an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense, Martell, who also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn, acknowledged both the benefits and risks of bringing in someone with his background. [...] As CDAO, Martell will be responsible for scaling up DoD's data, analytics and AI to enable quicker and more accurate decision-making and will also play an important role in the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts to connect sensors and shooters. "If we're going to be successful in achieving the goals, if we're going to be successful in being competitive with China, we have to figure out where the best mission value can be found first and that's going to have to drive what we build, what we design, the policies we come up with," Martell said. "I just want to guard against making sure that we don't do this in a vacuum, but we do it with real mission goals, real mission objectives in mind." His first order of business? Figuring out what needs to be done, and how to best use the $600 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars the CDAO's office was marked for in the Pentagon's most recent budget request. "So whenever I tackle a problem, whenever I go into a new organization, the first questions that I ask are: Do we have the right people? Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right tools to solve the visions [and] goals?" Martell said. To tackle that, Martell wants to identify the office's "marquee customers" and figure out what's "broken in terms of... people, platform, processes and tools" -- a process that could take anywhere from three to six months, he added. "We really want to be customer-driven here," Martell said. "We don't want to walk in and say if we build it, they'll come."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Qualcomm bought a chipmaking startup called Nuvia back in March of 2021, and later that year, the company said it would be using Nuvia's talent and technology to create high-performance custom-designed ARM chips to compete with Apple's processor designs. But if you're waiting for a truly high-performance Windows PC with anything other than an Intel or AMD chip in it, you'll still be waiting for a bit. Qualcomm CEO Christian Amon mentioned during the company's most recent earnings call that its high-performance chips were on track to land in consumer devices "in late 2023." Qualcomm still plans to sample chips to its partners later in 2022, a timeframe it has mentioned previously and has managed to stick to. A gap between sampling and mass production is typical, giving Qualcomm time to work out bugs and improve chip yields and PC manufacturers more time to design and build finished products that incorporate the chips. [...] Like Apple's processors, Nuvia's support the ARM instruction set but don't use off-the-shelf ARM Cortex CPU designs. These processor cores have been phenomenally successful in commodity SoCs that power everything from Android phones to smart TVs, and they helped popularize the practice of combining large, high-performance CPU cores and small, high-efficiency CPU cores together in the same design. But they rarely manage to top the performance charts, something that's especially noticeable when they're running x86 code on Windows with a performance penalty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even as it deals with continued supply constraints and consumers wary of inflation, Apple today reported the best March quarter in its history. The Verge reports: The company tallied $97.3 billion in revenue in Q2, up 9 percent over the year-ago quarter. That amounted to a profit of $25 billion, with earnings per share of $1.52. Apple set March quarter revenue records for its iPhone, Mac, and Wearables / Home / Accessories divisions. But the second quarter saw a slowdown in iPad sales, which were down slightly year over year. Apple's various services grew to a new high of 825 million subscribers, up 165 million from the total a year ago. The increase in iPhone revenue comes even after Apple noted that the year-ago Q2 saw very strong iPhone demand due to the iPhone 12 series launching a bit later in the fall than normal. New products released by Apple during the March quarter included the third-gen iPhone SE, green colors of the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, the powerful Mac Studio desktop, and the 5K Studio Display external monitor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization that offers free online tools to help students learn, is opening an online global high school in August 2022. "This full-time online school will combine the expertise of Khan Lab School, Schoolhouse.world, and ASU Prep Digital in a unique model based on the principles of the [...] founder of Khan Academy," says the company in a press release. "The core principles include mastery-based learning, personalization of each student's experience and learning together as a community." From the report: Each day will include a seminar where small student peer groups will have the opportunity to interact online and actively dive deep into society's most challenging questions with support from mentors and world-class learning guides. This inaugural class of 9th graders will work together solving real-world problems in a unique virtual school model that rewards curiosity, empowers agency and provides them with the skills and confidence needed to excel in college and careers. The organization is partnering with Arizona State University to make this initiative possible. Out-of-state students will need to pay tuition to attend, but Arizona residents will be able to attend for free. "Interested students will need to apply through ASU Prep Digital, the full-time online school," notes the press release. "The 2022-23 class is open to incoming 9th grade students with plans to expand the program to grades 9-12 the following year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: More than 55 countries and the United States announced their commitment Thursday to defending a free and open internet, agreeing to uphold digital human rights in response to rising authoritarianism in cyberspace. The agreement (PDF), known as the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, aims to forestall an emerging "splinternet" characterized by the growing repression of internet users in closed regimes such as Russia and China -- and the divergence of those countries from the internet's founding principles of universal access and unfettered information flow. Concerns about the internet's long-term trajectory have been amplified by the war in Ukraine, according to senior Biden administration officials, as Russia has moved to block western social media services and penalized the sharing of accurate information about the conflict. Many of the commitments outlined in the agreement reflect existing US policy initiatives, and the administration officials described the declaration as a way to organize and harmonize those efforts internationally. Under the agreement, countries have pledged not to abuse internet technologies for illegal surveillance; block content or websites in violation of so-called net neutrality principles; or use digital tools to undermine trust in elections. They agreed to support multilateral efforts against cybercrime, an issue that's grown in significance as businesses and governments alike have reeled in the face of devastating ransomware attacks. They committed to using only "trustworthy" network equipment, a nod to the spying risks the US and its allies have said are associated with Chinese vendors such as Huawei. And they joined together in reaffirming support for the decentralized, consensus-driven approach that for decades has underpinned decisions about how the internet should work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Edge could soon receive an integrated VPN service called the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network." The VPN (Virtual Private Network) service would work very similar to commercial VPN services, but it could be deeply integrated within the Microsoft Edge browser. From a report: The VPN service will be powered by Cloudflare. The company assures it permanently deletes the diagnostic and support data collected, every 25 hours.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says it's expanding the types of personal information that it'll remove from search results to cover things like your physical address, phone number, and passwords. From a report:: Before now, the feature mostly covered info that would let someone steal your identity or money -- now, you can ask Google to stop showing certain URLs that point to info that could lead someone to your house or give them access to your accounts. According to a blog post, Google's giving people the new options because "the internet is always evolving" and its search engine giving out your phone number or home address can be both jarring and dangerous. Here's a list of what kinds of info Google may remove, with the new additions in bold (h/t to the Wayback Machine for making the old list accessible): Confidential government identification (ID) numbers like U.S. Social Security Number, Argentine Single Tax Identification Number, etc, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, images of handwritten signatures, images of ID docs, highly personal, restricted, and official records, like medical records (used to read "confidential personal medical records"), personal contact info (physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses), and confidential login credentials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Was you or were you having your tea, dinner or supper last night? Before it, were you feeling clammish, clemmed, starving, hungry, leary or just plain clempt? Are you still whanging in Yorkshire? Haining in Somerset? Hocksing in Cambridgeshire? Hoying in Durham? Pegging in Cheshire? Pelting in Northamptonshire? Yarking in Leicestershire? Or do you throw now? How do you pronounce scone? Researchers from the University of Leeds are interested in answers to all such questions as they embark on a heritage project to help explore and preserve England's dialects. Details have been announced of how the university plans to use its prized archive of English life and language that was gathered by Leeds University fieldworkers in the 1950s and 1960s. The results remain the most famous and complete survey of dialects in England. The university said it was making its extensive library of English dialects accessible to the public through the launch of The Great Big Dialect Hunt. It said researchers would be searching for "new phrases and expressions to bring the archive into the 21st century and preserve today's language for future generations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK households could save an average of $183 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests. From a report: These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby. The figures are based on research conducted on appliances in 2019 but have been updated by British Gas to reflect recent price increases. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) said consumers need to consider which devices they leave switched on.It estimates households would save around $68.5 per year by switching off all their devices when not in use. The organisation, which promotes sustainability and energy efficiency, did not give exact details of how it came to this figure."Stats or prices related to individual appliances depend on several factors, including model, functionality and individual usage," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year. The Guardian: Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company's flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company's vast array of augmented reality services, such as the "lenses" that are used by millions of people every day. [...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meet Pixy, Snap's little flying companion. Pixy is a mini drone that can act as a camera sidekick when you can't ask someone to take a video of you. It'll be available in the U.S. and in France for $229.99. From a report: "Today, we're taking the power and magic of the Snap Camera -- the spontaneity, the joy, and the freedom -- to new heights. A new camera to match the limitless potential of your imagination. Meet Pixy, the world's friendliest flying camera. It's a pocket-sized, free-flying sidekick for adventures big and small," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said during the Snap Partner Summit keynote. Pixy isn't your average drone as there is no controller and no SD card. It feels like the company has optimized the device so that it's easy to pick up and get started. There's a button to activate the device and a camera dial to select the flying mode. Pixy captures 2.7k videos and 12MP photos. It's very lightweight as it only weighs 101g with the replaceable battery. On a single charge, you can capture five to eight flights.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said this week that it mitigated one of the largest volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that has been recorded to date. From a report: Cloudflare said it detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack earlier this month -- making it one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record. Volumetric DDoS attacks differ from traditional bandwidth DDoS attacks where attackers attempt to exhaust and clog up the victim's internet connection bandwidth. Instead, attackers focus on sending as many junk HTTP requests to a victim's server in order to take up precious server CPU and RAM and prevent legitimate users from using targeted sites. Cloudflare previously announced that it stopped the largest DDoS attack on record in August 2021, when it mitigated a 17.2 million HTTP requests/second (rps) attack, a figure that the company described as almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack that was ever reported in the public domain. Earlier this month, the company said it stopped an attack targeting a company in the cryptocurrency space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter on Thursday reported mixed first-quarter earnings, missing Wall Street expectations on revenue but adding users. It also admitted to over-counting some monetizable daily active users between Q1 2019 and Q4 2021. From a report: Analysts were expecting the tech giant to post weak results, given that its board finalized a takeover deal with Elon Musk earlier this week. This could be Twitter's last earnings report as a publicly traded company. The company brought in $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, just shy of analyst estimates. Other ad-supported tech giants also missed Q1 revenue expectations in response to macroeconomic headwinds impacting the ad market. Twitter also said it accidentally over-counted the number of monetizable daily active users because of a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between them. It counted those two separate accounts as two users for more than three years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ex-Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt says he's invested "a little bit" of money into cryptocurrencies -- but for him, the most interesting part of blockchain isn't virtual currency. It's Web3. From a report: "A new model [of the internet] where you as an individual [can] control your identity, and where you don't have a centralized manager, is very powerful. It's very seductive and it's very decentralized," Schmidt, 67, tells CNBC Make It. "I remember that feeling when I was 25 that decentralized would be everything." [...] Schmidt says his interest in Web3 involves a concept called "tokenomics," which refers to the specific supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrencies. Schmidt also notes that Web3 could come with new models for content ownership and new ways of compensating people. "[Web3's] economics are interesting. The platforms are interesting and the use patterns are interesting," Schmidt says. "[It] doesn't work yet, but it will." For Schmidt, part of the problem with today's blockchain technology -- specifically referencing bitcoin as an example -- is that the majority of time people spend on those systems is dedicated to "making sure that nobody's attacking them ... they're incredibly wasteful."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, demolition began on the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic building designed by Kisho Kurokawa. Still, in many ways, Kurokawa's dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present. From a report: The building at the time was in a conspicuous state of disrepair. Its concrete surface was pockmarked; many of the circular windows were papered over. Last year, after more than a decade of back-and-forth over the building's fate, the owners' association agreed to sell the towers to a consortium of real-estate firms, and earlier this month news came that demolition of the structure had finally begun. Recent photos posted by a preservationist initiative on Facebook show that its base now half gone; the hundred and forty-four capsules float above the construction, bereft and doomed. The future that Kurokawa and the Metabolism movement imagined didn't come to pass, yet in many ways their dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present. Metabolism officially launched with a manifesto, in 1960, as Japanese cities were being reconceptualized after the destruction of the Second World War. Part of a new postwar generation of architects, Metabolism's founders -- among them Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Fumihiko Maki -- were driven, as Kurokawa wrote in his 1977 book, "Metabolism in Architecture," by "traumatic images of events that took place when we were in our formative childhood years." Born in 1934, in Aichi Prefecture, Kurokawa was the son of an architect whose style he described as "ultra-nationalistic." In his own studies, he was drawn first to Kyoto University, for its sociological approach to architecture, then to Tokyo University, where he studied under the modernist architect Kenzo Tange, who worked after the war on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. But Kurokawa was more interested in looking forward. "I felt that it was important to let the destroyed be and to create a new Japan," he wrote. [...] The Nakagin capsules suggest a kind of utopian urban life style. Their paucity of space and equipment meant that activities typically done at home, like eating and socializing, would instead be conducted out on the street. The Nakagin capsules were not full-time residences but pieds-a-terre for suburban businessmen or miniature studios for artists and designers. The individual capsules were pre-assembled, then transported to the site and plugged in to the towers' central cores. Each unit -- two and a half metres by four metres by two and a half metres, dimensions that, Kurokawa noted, are the same as those of a traditional teahouse -- contained a corner bathroom fit for an airplane, a fold-down desk, integrated lamps, and a bed stretching from wall to wall. Televisions, stereos, and tape decks could also be included at the buyer's discretion. [...] In some ways, Kurokawa's vision of a domestic architecture that prioritized mobility and flexibility proved prophetic. The capsules were the original micro-apartments, an ancestor to today's capsule hotels, and a forebear of the shared, temporary spaces of Airbnb.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Atmospheric analog to ocean's acoustic channel could be used to monitor eruptions and bombs. From a report: About 1 kilometer under the sea lies a sound tunnel that carries the cries of whales and the clamor of submarines across great distances. Ever since scientists discovered this Sound Fixing and Ranging (SOFAR) channel in the 1940s, they've suspected a similar conduit exists in the atmosphere. But few have bothered to look for it, aside from one top-secret Cold War operation. Now, by listening to distant rocket launches with solar-powered balloons, researchers say they have finally detected hints of an aerial sound channel, although it does not seem to function as simply or reliably as the ocean SOFAR. If confirmed, the atmospheric SOFAR may pave the way for a network of aerial receivers that could help researchers detect remote explosions from volcanoes, bombs, and other sources that emit infrasound -- acoustic waves below the frequency of human hearing. "It would help enormously to have those [detectors] up there," says William Wilcock, a marine seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Although seismic sensors in the ground pick up most of the planet's biggest bangs, "some areas of the Earth are covered very well and others aren't." In the ocean, the SOFAR channel is bounded by layers of warmer, lighter water above and cooler, denser water below. Sound waves, which travel at their slowest at this depth, get trapped inside the channel, bouncing off the surrounding layers like a bowling ball guided by bumpers. Researchers rely on the SOFAR channel to monitor earthquakes and eruptions under the sea floor -- and even to measure ocean temperatures rising from global warming. After geophysicist Maurice Ewing discovered the SOFAR channel in 1944, he set out to find an analogous layer in the sky. At an altitude of between 10 and 20 kilometers is the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere (where weather occurs), and the stratosphere. Like the marine SOFAR, the tropopause represents a cold region, where sound waves should travel slower and farther. An acoustic waveguide in the atmosphere, Ewing reasoned, would allow the U.S. Air Force to listen for nuclear weapon tests detonated by the Soviet Union. He instigated a top-secret experiment, code-named Project Mogul, that sent up hot air balloons equipped with infrasound microphones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. National Security Agency has re-awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon Web Services after it was forced to review the contract. From a report: Code-named WildandStormy, the contract was initially awarded to AWS in August. Because the deal concerns national security, the full details are not known but it's believed to be part of the NSAâ(TM)s attempt to modernize its primary classified data repository. The repository itself is thought to be a data fusion environment into which the agency aggregates much of the intelligence information it collects. The stumbling block to AWS being awarded the contract came in October when the Government Accountability Office called on the NSA to reevaluate the proposals submitted by AWS and Microsoft Corp. after Microsoft challenged the awarding of the contract to AWS. The GAO said at the time that it "found certain aspects of the agency's evaluation to be unreasonable and, in light thereof, recommended that NSA reevaluate the proposals consistent with the decision and make a new source selection determination." In December, it was revealed that the GAO had ruled that the NSA improperly assessed technical proposals from Microsoft "in a way that was inconsistent with the terms of the solicitation." The GAO also recommended that the NSA reevaluate the proposal and potentially make a new source selection. The NSA did reevaluate the proposals and decided to re-award the contract to AWS anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For most of the world, the common practice of "rooting" or "jailbreaking" a phone allows the device's owner to install apps and software tweaks that break the restrictions of Apple's or Google's operating systems. For a growing number of North Koreans, on the other hand, the same form of hacking allows them to break out of a far more expansive system of control -- one that seeks to extend to every aspect of their lives and minds. On Wednesday, the North Korea-focused human rights organization Lumen and Martyn Williams, a researcher at the Stimson Center think tank's North Korea -- focused 38 North project, together released a report on the state of smartphones and telecommunications in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a country that restricts its citizens' access to information and the internet more tightly than any other in the world. The report details how millions of government-approved, Android-based smartphones now permeate North Korean society, though with digital restrictions that prevent their users from downloading any app or even any file not officially sanctioned by the state. But within that regime of digital repression, the report also offers a glimpse of an unlikely new group: North Korean jailbreakers capable of hacking those smartphones to secretly regain control of them and unlock a world of forbidden foreign content. Learning anything about the details of subversive activity in North Korea -- digital or otherwise -- is notoriously difficult, given the Hermit Kingdom's nearly airtight information controls. Lumen's findings on North Korean jailbreaking are based on interviews with just two defectors from the country. But Williams says the two escapees both independently described hacking their phones and those of other North Koreans, roughly corroborating each others' telling. Other North Korea -- focused researchers who have interviewed defectors say they've heard similar stories. Both jailbreakers interviewed by Lumen and Williams said they hacked their phones -- government-approved, Chinese-made, midrange Android phones known as the Pyongyang 2423 and 2413 -- primarily so that they could use the devices to watch foreign media and install apps that weren't approved by the government. Their hacking was designed to circumvent a government-created version of Android on those phones, which has for years included a certificate system that requires any file downloaded to the device to be "signed" with a cryptographic signature from government authorities, or else it's immediately and automatically deleted. Both jailbreakers say they were able to remove that certificate authentication scheme from phones, allowing them to install forbidden apps, such as games, as well as foreign media like South Korean films, TV shows, and ebooks that North Koreans have sought to access for decades despite draconian government bans. In another Orwellian measure, Pyongyang phones' government-created operating system takes screenshots of the device at random intervals, the two defectors say -- a surveillance feature designed to instill a sense that the user is always being monitored. The images from those screenshots are then kept in an inaccessible portion of the phone's storage, where they can't be viewed or deleted. Jailbreaking the phones also allowed the two defectors to access and wipe those surveillance screenshots, they say. The two hackers told Lumen they used their jailbreaking skills to remove restrictions from friends' phones, as well. They said they also knew of people who would jailbreak phones as a commercial service, though often for purposes that had less to do with information freedom than more mundane motives. Some users wanted to install a certain screensaver on their phone, for instance, or wipe the phone's surveillance screenshots merely to free up storage before selling the phone secondhand. As for how the jailbreaking was done, the report says both jailbreakers "described attaching phones to a Windows PC via a USB cable to install a jailbreaking tool." "One mentioned that the Pyongyang 2423's software included a vulnerability that allowed programs to be installed in a hidden directory. The hacker says they exploited that quirk to install a jailbreaking program they'd downloaded while working abroad in China and then smuggled back into North Korea." The other hacker might've obtained his jailbreaking tool in a computer science group at Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung University where he attended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Register reports Microsoft fixed a Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes," writes Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "So much for the express lane at check-out." From the report: A fresh Windows 11 patch slipped out overnight as an optional update, but contains an impressively long list of fixes for Microsoft's flagship operating system. One bug addressed in KB5012643 could leave Point of Sale terminals hanging for up to 40 minutes during startup. Microsoft stated, "We fixed an issue that delays OS startup by approximately 40 minutes." "Microsoft described the fixes as 'improvements' [and chose to highlight the fact that temperature would now be displayed on top of the weather icon on the taskbar]," added Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "[Y]eah, Windows 11 is great as a PoS."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications. Science News reports: These "nucleobases" -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of all life on Earth. Whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or instead formed in a warm soup of earthly chemistry is still not known. But the discovery adds to evidence that suggests life's precursors originally came from space, the researchers say. Scientists have detected bits of adenine, guanine and other organic compounds in meteorites since the 1960s. Researchers have also seen hints of uracil, but cytosine and thymine remained elusive, until now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Is polio making a comeback? The world has spent billions of dollars over the last 15 years in an effort to wipe out the virus through vaccination efforts -- with encouraging results. Rates plunged from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just several dozen by 2016. But in recent years, polio incidence has started to inch back up. The reason has to do with the type of vaccine used in many parts of the world, primarily in low- and middle-income countries. While the United States and other Western countries inject an inactivated virus that poses no risk of spread and are now polio-free, other countries rely on an oral vaccine. It's cheap, it's easy to administer and two or more doses confer lifelong immunity. But it's made with living, weakened virus. And that poses a problem. Those who've been immunized with live virus can shed it in their stool, which can then spread through sewage in places with poor sanitation. If the virus stays weak, it can even expose the unvaccinated to polio and give them immunity. But if it mutates and regains virulence, someone who isn't vaccinated can become sick with vaccine-derived polio after contact with the contaminated wastewater. And now countries that had previously eradicated polio in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia are seeing new outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio. One reason for this rise in cases, say polio experts, is that gaps in immunization in recent years have created more opportunities for the unvaccinated to become infected. "Vaccination campaigns have been certainly affected by the pandemic," says Raul Andino, a virologist at University of California, San Francisco. [...] The composition of the oral vaccine has also been a factor. In 2016, eyeing an uptick in vaccine-derived polio, global health officials altered the composition of the oral vaccine. Previously, the vaccine protected against all three types of wild polio -- the virus that circulates naturally in the environment. Then they withdrew one of those types -- the one that was leading to most of the vaccine-derived cases but whose wild form had been successfully eradicated. Only there was a development that hadn't been anticipated. Vaccine-derived poliovirus of that type was still in circulation from earlier iterations of the oral vaccine -- and now with the reformulated vaccine, increasing numbers of people who were no longer vaccinated against it. So there was further spread. Thankfully, a new kind of vaccine being rolled out is showing promise. "The novel vaccine still contains a weakened version of the virus, but it's been hobbled even further," reports NPR. "The researchers tweaked the virus so that it has to accumulate more mutations to become virulent and has a harder time amassing those mutations. For example, they've altered the polymerase, one of the key enzymes responsible for introducing mutations, reducing its ability to mix and match genes from different viruses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. MIT News reports: This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to. To achieve these properties, the researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only three basic steps and can be scaled up to produce ultrathin loudspeakers large enough to cover the inside of an automobile or to wallpaper a room. A typical loudspeaker found in headphones or an audio system uses electric current inputs that pass through a coil of wire that generates a magnetic field, which moves a speaker membrane, that moves the air above it, that makes the sound we hear. By contrast, the new loudspeaker simplifies the speaker design by using a thin film of a shaped piezoelectric material that moves when voltage is applied over it, which moves the air above it and generates sound. [...] They tested their thin-film loudspeaker by mounting it to a wall 30 centimeters from a microphone to measure the sound pressure level, recorded in decibels. When 25 volts of electricity were passed through the device at 1 kilohertz (a rate of 1,000 cycles per second), the speaker produced high-quality sound at conversational levels of 66 decibels. At 10 kilohertz, the sound pressure level increased to 86 decibels, about the same volume level as city traffic. The energy-efficient device only requires about 100 milliwatts of power per square meter of speaker area. By contrast, an average home speaker might consume more than 1 watt of power to generate similar sound pressure at a comparable distance. The researchers showed the speaker in action, playing "We Are the Champions" by Queen. You can listen to it here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Central African Republic (CAR) has approved Bitcoin as legal tender -- just the second country to do so. The BBC reports: CAR is one of the world's poorest countries, but is rich in diamonds, gold and uranium. It has been wracked by conflict for decades and is a close Russian ally, with mercenaries from the Wagner Group helping fight rebel forces. Lawmakers voted unanimously to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, said a statement from the CAR presidency. The move puts CAR "on the map of the world's boldest and most visionary countries", it said. El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency in September 2021 - a move criticized by many economists, including the International Monetary Fund, which said it increased the risk of financial instability. Others have raised fears that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could make it easier for criminals to launder money, and that they are environmentally damaging because they use so much electricity to generate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, the world's largest plant for making silicon carbide chips was opened in central New York. Nikkei Asia reports: The $1 billion, 63,000 sq. meter fabrication plant, or "fab," will be the first of its kind to make 200mm silicon carbide wafers, according to [North Carolina-based Wolfspeed]. Silicon carbide, or SiC, is an alternative to traditional silicon that is gaining popularity due to its energy efficiency when transferring power, something especially useful in electric vehicle manufacturing. Ahead of the fab opening, Wolfspeed announced a partnership with luxury EV maker Lucid Motors. It also has agreements with General Motors and China's Yutong Group to supply silicon carbide chips for their electric vehicles. The U.S. share of modern semiconductor manufacturing capacity has declined to 12% from 37% in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a group that has lobbied for the CHIPS Act. This trend, the group says, is largely due to a lack of government investment compared to other nations. [...] In New York, there are hopes that other plants will cluster around the Wolfspeed fab. Wolfspeed received $500 million in construction subsidies from New York as the state seeks to expand its semiconductor manufacturing industry, which has generated nearly $6 billion a year in economic impact and over 34,000 jobs, according to [New York Gov. Kathy Hochul]. The grand opening of a modern manufacturing facility has a special resonance in central New York. The fab stands in the Mohawk Valley, an area along the Erie Canal that was once filled with traditional industry but long ago slid into an economic decline that has defined the region in recent times. So far the Wolfspeed facility has created 265 jobs, with a goal of over 600 new jobs by 2029, according to the company. The site sits directly across from a campus of SUNY Polytechnic Institute, New York's public polytechnic college, and Wolfspeed has given the school $250,000 to help train potential future employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Social media platform Mastodon, often seen as an alternative to Twitter, gained nearly 30,000 new users on the day that Elon Musk bought Twitter. On Tuesday a Mastodon domain became unresponsive. Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's CEO, later told Motherboard in an email that there were performance issues. "I'm sorry I couldn't have responded sooner," he wrote. "I was working all day on fixing performance issues on the Mastodon servers I operate due to the influx of new and returning users following Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk." Rochko added that Mastodon has seen an increase of 41,287 active users, including both returning users and new users. When breaking that figure down by just new users, 28,391 new people have joined Mastodon in the past day, Rochko said. Mastodon is a piece of open-source software that people can use as a base to create their own social networks. Although its appearance is similar to Twitter, it also differs from Twitter in the sense that Twitter is a single social network people sign up for. When it comes to the social network side of things, Mastodon holds more similarities with Discord, in that users have to find specific Mastodon instances to join. Those looking to create their own Mastodon instance also have to host it themselves, a step that may alienate many non-technical users. Donald Trump's social media site, Truth Social, is based on Mastodon and was recently called out by the company for failing to provide the source code for the site built on top of it. Two weeks later, the social media site quietly acknowledged Mastodon in a dedicated section labeled "open source." In regard to the matter, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said: "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free." Twitter did confirm some fluctuations in follower counts after Musk's deal was made official, although they said they were organic in nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. The Register reports: In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion. The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all. "Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended," the Pentagon oversight body wrote in an audit [PDF] report this month. In other words, the Army hasn't yet fully determined if or how service members will find these HoloLens headsets valuable in the field. Although the heavily redacted report did not reveal soldiers' responses to the prototype testing, it said feedback from surveys showed "both positive and negative user acceptance." The Army plans to purchase 121,500 IVAS units from Microsoft while admitting that "if soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it," the report disclosed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal is shuttering its San Francisco office as it evaluates its global office footprint. TechCrunch reports: Multiple sources say the payments giant is closing its San Francisco office on 425 Market St. which housed its Xoom business unit. PayPal acquired Xoom, which is focused on online money transfer technology and services, in 2015. A person familiar with internal happenings at the company said the employees that worked out of that office will work virtually with the ability to work from the company's headquarters office in San Jose. It is unclear how many employees are affected by the decision. An individual who commented on a post on the topic on the anonymous professional network, Blind, speculated that the reason behind the move could be San Francisco's Prop C, which levied a tax upon any San Francisco business that earns more than $50 million in gross receipts. Proceeds are to be directed toward housing and services in an attempt to address the city's challenges with homelessness.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Vulnerabilities recently discovered by Microsoft make it easy for people with a toehold on many Linux desktop systems to quickly gain root system rights -- the latest elevation of privileges flaw to come to light in the open source OS. [...] Nimbuspwn, as Microsoft has named the EoP threat, is two vulnerabilities that reside in the networkd-dispatcher, a component in many Linux distributions that dispatch network status changes and can run various scripts to respond to a new status. When a machine boots, networkd-dispatcher runs as root. [...] A hacker with minimal access to a vulnerable desktop can chain together exploits for these vulnerabilities that give full root access. [The step-by-step exploit flow can be found in the article. The researcher also was able to gain persistent root access using the exploit flow to create a backdoor.] The proof-of-concept exploit works only when it can use the "org.freedesktop.network1" bus name. The researcher found several environments where this happens, including Linux Mint, in which the systemd-networkd by default doesn't own the org.freedodesktop.network1 bus name at boot. The researcher also found several processes that run as the systemd-network user, which is permitted to use the bus name required to run arbitrary code from world-writable locations. The vulnerable processes include several gpgv plugins, which are launched when apt-get installs or upgrades, and the Erlang Port Mapper Daemon, which allows running arbitrary code under some scenarios. The vulnerability has been patched, although it's unclear which version of Linux the patch is in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major technology companies have been duped into providing sensitive personal information about their customers in response to fraudulent legal requests, and the data has been used to harass and even sexually extort minors, according to four federal law enforcement officials and two industry investigators. Bloomberg: The companies that have complied with the bogus requests include Meta, Apple, Alphabet's Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord, according to three of the people. All of the people requested anonymity to speak frankly about the devious new brand of online crime that involves underage victims. The fraudulently obtained data has been used to target specific women and minors, and in some cases to pressure them into creating and sharing sexually explicit material and to retaliate against them if they refuse, according to the six people. The tactic is considered by law enforcement and other investigators to be the newest criminal tool to obtain personally identifiable information that can be used not only for financial gain but to extort and harass innocent victims. It is particularly unsettling since the attackers are successfully impersonating law enforcement officers. The tactic is impossible for victims to protect against, as the best way to avoid it would be to not have an account on the targeted service, according to the people. It's not clear how often the fraudulent data requests have been used to sexually extort minors. Law enforcement and the technology companies are still trying to assess the scope of the problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency companies said they remain unsure of U.S. regulations governing products that allow customers to earn interest on holdings instead of trading them, months after such an interest-bearing product drew a $100 million fine from a federal regulator and state governments. From a report: In February, New Jersey crypto company BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million in a landmark settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and state authorities who said its interest-bearing product qualifies as a security and should have been registered. Still, many digital asset companies providing such products said this month the rules remain unclear to them and they are uncertain when they should register such offerings, which are growing more popular and which many firms launched within the last year. Most firms have tried to structure the interest-bearing products to avoid the need to register them with the SEC, a process that takes time and entails ongoing disclosure and reporting obligations. That effort might set them up for a clash with the agency as it increases scrutiny of the crypto industry. BlockFi plans to offer an alternative yield product, which it said it would register first. The company and the SEC said the deal should provide a roadmap for other companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.