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Researchers in Beijing have set a new quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) world record of 102.2 km (64 miles), smashing the previous mark of 18 km (11 miles), The Eurasian Times reported. Engadget reports: Transmission speeds were extremely slow at 0.54 bits per second, but still good enough for text message and phone call encryption over a distance of 30 km (19 miles), wrote research lead Long Guilu in Nature. The work could eventually lead to hack-proof communication, as any eavesdropping attempt on a quantum line can be instantly detected. QSDC uses the principal of entanglement to secure networks. Quantum physics dictates that entangled particles are linked, so that if you change the property of one by measuring it, the other will instantly change, too -- effectively making hacking impossible. In theory, the particles stay linked even if they're light-years apart, so such systems should work over great distances. The same research team set the previous fiber record, and devised a "novel design of physical system with a new protocol" to achieve the longer distance. They simplified it by eliminating the "complicated active compensation subsystem" used in the previous model. "This enables an ultra-low quantum bit error rate (QBER) and the long-term stability against environmental noises." As a result, the system can withstand much more so-called channel loss that makes it impossible to decode encrypted messages. That in turn allowed them to extend the fiber from 28.3km to the record 102.2 km distance. "The experiment shows that intercity quantum secure direct communication through the fiber is feasible with present-day technology," the team wrote in Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management would consider providing financing for a Twitter buyout in the form of preferred equity, sources say. CNBC reports: Apollo isn't interested in being part of a private equity consortium that would acquire the social media company, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Any financing Apollo provides would likely come in the form of preferred equity, one of the people said. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world's wealthiest person, offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion last week. Twitter's board is likely to reject that offer, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Still, sources of financing are considering their willingness to lend to Musk or another potential buyer, said the people. Twitter had negative cash flow last year, making it an unusual candidate for a leveraged buyout. On Friday, Twitter adopted a limited duration shareholder rights plan, often referred to as a "poison pill," in an effort to fend off a potential hostile takeover. The next day, Musk tweeted "Love Me Tender," suggesting he may make a tender offer to buy shares directly from Twitter shareholders. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey criticized the company's board on Sunday, saying the plots and coups that played out early on in the history of Twitter's board has "consistently been the dysfunction of the company." "Earlier, he responded to another tweet in the same thread," reports CNBC. "It quoted venture capitalist Fred Destin citing what he called a 'Silicon Valley proverb': 'Good boards don't create good companies, but a bad board will kill a company every time.' Dorsey responded, 'big facts.'" If the acquisition does get approved, Musk said he wouldn't compensate the Twitter board for serving. "Board salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds, so that's ~$3M/year saved right there," Musk said in a tweet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boris Johnson has been told his Downing Street office has been targeted with "multiple" suspected infections using Pegasus, the sophisticated hacking software that can turn a phone into a remote listening device, it was claimed on Monday. The Guardian reports: A report released by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said the United Arab Emirates was suspected of orchestrating spyware attacks on No 10 in 2020 and 2021. Pegasus is the hacking software -- or spyware -- developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli firm NSO Group. It has the capability to infect phones running either iOS or Android operating systems. Citizen Lab added there had also been suspected attacks on the Foreign Office over the same two years that were also associated with Pegasus operators linked to the UAE -- as well as India, Cyprus and Jordan. The researchers, considered among the world's leading experts in detecting digital attacks, announced they had taken the rare step of notifying Whitehall of the attack as it "believes that our actions can reduce harm." However, they were not able to identify the specific individuals within No 10 and the Foreign Office who are suspected of having been hacked. "The suspected infections relating to the FCO were associated with Pegasus operators that we link to the UAE, India, Cyprus and Jordan. The suspected infection at the UK prime minister's office was associated with a Pegasus operator we link to the UAE."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The average American received roughly 42 spam texts just in the month of March, according to new data from RoboKiller, an app that blocks spam calls and texts. Spammers like using text messages because of their high open rates -- and are now even mimicking targets' own phone numbers to get them to click malicious links, the New York Times reported. "Just like with robocalls, it's extremely easy to deploy [spam texts] in enormous volume and hide your identity," Will Maxson, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices, told Axios. "There's a large number of actors all over the world trying to squeeze spam into the network from almost an infinite number of entry points all the time." It's not just texts. Every form of spam is on the rise. There were more spam calls last month than in any of the previous six months, per YouMail's Robocall Index. Spam emails rose by 30% from 2020 to 2021, according to a January report from the Washington Post. There was an unprecedented increase in social media scams last year, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Many scams were related to bogus cryptocurrency investments. Experts attribute the sharp increase in spam to the pandemic. People's increased reliance on digital communications turned them into ready targets. The Federal Communications Commission saw a nearly 146% increase in the number of complaints about unwanted text messages in 2020. Americans reported losing $131 million to fraud schemes initiated by text in 2021, a jump over 50% from the year before, according to data from the FTC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citing an article from The Verge's Alex Heath, Fast Company breaks down "Meta's plan to shape the metaverse by building its own wildly ambitious augmented-reality hardware." From the report: eath's article, "Mark Zuckerberg's Augmented Reality," covers two codenamed products. "Project Nazere" is a high-end pair of AR glasses that don't require a smartphone, with the first version shipping in 2024, followed by upgraded ones in 2026 and 2028. Also due in 2024 is "Hypernova," a more economy-minded take on AR eyewear that does piggyback on a smartphone's connectivity and computing muscle. The piece is full of technical details, such as Nazere's use of custom waveguides and microLED projectors to fuse your view of the real with a digital overlay. Both Nazere and Hypernova will supposedly work with a wrist device that uses differential electromyography to detect electric neurons, allowing for input that feels akin to mind control. But along with all the specifics in Heath's story, what's also striking is its discussion of how these planned products roll up into Meta's highest-level goals. They are, of course, an extension of Mark Zuckerberg's hopes, dreams, and aspirations: "If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. 'Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses],' a former employee who worked on the project tells me. 'He wants it to be an iPhone moment.'" Everybody's entitled to their own definition of an "iPhone moment." Presumably, it involves a product of truly epoch-shifting impact -- not necessarily the first in its field but an unprecedented blockbuster that defines the category by bringing it to the masses. Something like, well, you know, the iPhone. For a tech CEO such as Zuckerberg, creating an iPhone moment isn't just about selling something enormously successful; it also provides full control over an ecosystem. That lets a company chart its own destiny in a way it can never do if it's building on someone else's platform. Zuckerberg has long been bugged by the fact that Facebook/Meta's products have historically sat atop environments operated by other companies, such as Apple and Google. I know this because he told me so himself...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Big scoop from Gizmodo today: 'Gizmodo has reviewed, redacted, and published more than two dozen leaked Facebook documents, the first of hundreds to come,'" writes Slashdot reader DevNull127. From the report: We have undertaken this project to help better inform the public about Facebook's role in a wide range of controversies, as well as to provide researchers with access to materials that we hope will advance general knowledge of social media's role in modern history's most troubling crises [...]. The documents will reveal to you, for instance, an internal analysis of the many groups that Facebook knew to be prolific sources of both voter suppression efforts and hate speech targeting its most marginalized users. The records show the company was privately aware of the growing fears among users of being exposed to election-related falsehoods. The papers show that Meta's own data pinpointed the account of then-President Trump as being principally responsible for a surge in reports concerning violations of its violence and incitement rules. Today's release is the first of a series of posts from Gizmodo to be published in tandem with legal and academic partners. Our goal is to minimize any costs to individuals' privacy and any furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest possible. Future releases will be added to this page, a directory, that will eventually offer our readers links all of the leaked internal documents we have published.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the Internet got a much better look at military facilities across Russia. Google Maps stopped obscuring the sensitive locations due to Russia's ongoing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the end of Google's censorship of Russia's bases on Twitter. Thanks to former US President Donald Trump, we know that the 0.5 m per pixel resolution available on Google Maps' satellite view is a far cry from the images available to the US government. But it will be invaluable to the growing mass of open source intelligence analysts. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the OSINT community on Twitter has been cataloging Russian losses by geolocating images of destroyed tanks, fighting vehicles, aircraft, and cruise missile attacks. Twitter users have already identified some interesting sights. Images taken of a Russian airbase at Lipetsk show partially disassembled MiG-31s (or perhaps MiG-25s). Another shows several Sukhoi fighter jets painted in patriotic colors, at least one of which is also missing its wings. Zhukovsky Airport near Moscow shows some oddities parked outside thanks to its role as a test flight center, including a Buran shuttle and a Sukhoi Su-47 technology demonstrator. UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the company hasn't changed anything with regard to blurring out sensitive sites in Russia, so perhaps none of us were looking closely until now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A senior official responsible for driving technological innovation at the U.S. Department of Defense has resigned, saying the Pentagon needs "structural change" and should behave more like SpaceX, Elon Musk's satellite company that has shaken up rocket launches. From a report: "We're falling behind the commercial base in key areas, so we've got to catch up," Preston Dunlap, the first person in the U.S. Department of Defense to fulfill the role of chief architect officer, told Bloomberg News in an interview. As a result the U.S. risked losing its technological edge against potential adversaries, he said. Dunlap, who handed in his resignation on Monday after three years in the post at the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Air Force, was responsible for pushing more technology into a $70 billion budget for research, development and acquisition. He plans to start a space software company focused on the nexus with satellites, data and artificial intelligence. The Pentagon was behind the domestic commercial sector in data, distributed computer processing, software, AI and cybersecurity, he said. "By the time the Government manages to produce something, it's too often obsolete," he said in a nine-page resignation statement he billed as a "playbook" to help guide the Pentagon, which he later made public on LinkedIn. "Much more must be done if DoD is going to regrow its thinning technological edge. Ironically as I'm writing this, I received notification that the phone lines are down at the Pentagon IT help desk. Phone lines are down? It's 2022, folks," he wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. From a report: The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from scraping personal information from users' public profiles. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year but was sent back to the Ninth Circuit for the original appeals court to re-review the case. In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law. The Ninth Circuit's decision is a major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the internet. Without a ruling in place, long-running projects to archive websites no longer online and using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been left in legal limbo. But there have been egregious cases of scraping that have sparked privacy and security concerns. Facial recognition startup Clearview AI claims to have scraped billions of social media profile photos, prompting several tech giants to file lawsuits against the startup. Several companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Venmo and Clubhouse have all had users' data scraped over the years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Silicon Valley startups are facing hard choices: Cut jobs now or risk incurring worse pain later. From a report: Following a hiring and funding boom in 2021, technology startups have started to lay off workers to conserve cash. In the past month alone, more than 2,000 employees have lost their jobs at half a dozen startups, including delivery company Gopuff and e-commerce software firm Fast, according to an analysis by The Information. More cuts are likely to come. Venture capitalists, concerned that startups won't be able to fundraise as readily as they did last year, say they have been pushing companies to reduce head count or slow hiring and potentially raise money at lower valuations. And professionals whose business booms when times get tough are seeing a rise in demand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beacon of Galaxy message could be sent into heart of Milky Way, where life is deemed most likely to exist. From a report: "Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed," the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, "if they're here, I want to know about them." Driven by the same mindset, a Nasa-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that it proposes to beam across the galaxy in the hope of making first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. The interstellar missive, known as the Beacon in the Galaxy, opens with simple principles for communication, some basic concepts in maths and physics, the constituents of DNA, and closes with information about humans, the Earth, and a return address should any distant recipients be minded to reply. The group of researchers, headed by Dr Jonathan Jiang at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical upgrades the binary message could be broadcast into the heart of the Milky Way by the Seti Institute's Allen Telescope Array in California and the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China. In a preliminary paper, which has not been peer reviewed, the scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the centre of the Milky Way -- a region deemed most promising for life to have emerged. "Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others -- and now has the means to do so," the scientists write. The message, if it ever leaves Earth, would not be the first. The Beacon in the Galaxy is loosely based on the Arecibo message sent in 1974 from an observatory of the same name in Puerto Rico. That targeted a cluster of stars about 25,000 light years away, so it will not arrive any time soon. Since then, a host of messages have been beamed into the heavens including an advert for Doritos and an invitation, written in Klingon, to a Klingon Opera in The Hague.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Amazon Appstore doesn't come with Windows 11 by default, but anyone in the US can download it by heading to the Microsoft Store on their device. It's as simple as installing any other native Windows app -- a good start for potentially getting users onboard. Unfortunately, it's unclear when it'll arrive for users in regions outside the US. You'll need an Amazon account to log in, of course, but the service itself is free. It might be easy to install, but I found browsing and using the service unsurprisingly mediocre. I'm testing this app store out on a souped-up gaming laptop, yet for some reason, the Appstore felt sluggish, taking seconds to load each page and dropping frames when the home screen banner was changing slides. The storefront itself is barebones, offering just two basic categories along the left-side panel and a basic search bar along the top. As for the app selection, it's as bad as you might've guessed from the jump. Forget Google apps, obviously -- they aren't on Fire Tablets, and they aren't here. TikTok has been predominantly featured on Microsoft's press images for the Appstore since it was announced, and for good reason: it's the only major social network with a listing. Forget Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter -- you're stuck with TikTok if you want to experience the social side of the web. Games don't fare much better. Looking at the top paid titles, I only recognized two names -- and that was because I knew the Nickelodeon properties they were based on -- not the games themselves. Free titles didn't fare much better; you'll find Subway Surfers and the Talking Tom series, but not much more. None of our favorite free-to-play titles appeared in a search: no Among Us, Call of Duty Mobile, or Roblox. Granted, you can fill all of these absences elsewhere on Windows 11. Many of these titles have versions on Steam or the web -- you don't need the Android version of Among Us to play on Windows. The same goes for those missing apps, from Google services to social networks to recipe apps and smart home controls. It's not hard to access Gmail these days, even if it's not in a dedicated app, and that all begs the question: why does this service even exist?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Chinese astronauts, also known as taikonauts, safely returned to Earth yesterday after spending six months aboard China's unfinished Tiangong space station, according to a report from Space.com. This is China's second crewed mission to Tiangong and its longest so far. From a report: The Shenzhou 13 spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia desert at 9:56AM local time on Saturday morning after departing from the space station's core Tianhe module about nine hours prior. The crew took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert last October and spent a total of 183 days on the space station. This mission is China's longest. In addition, taikonaut Wang Yaping made history as the first Chinese woman to visit the Tianhe space station and also became the first Chinese woman to conduct a spacewalk. Wang was accompanied by crewmate Ye Guangfu and commander Zhai Zhigang. The trio carried out a total of two spacewalks, performed various tests around the station, and held two live lectures for students watching from Earth. Shenzhou 13 is part of 11 missions China has planned to finish constructing the Tiangong space station. China first launched the Tianhe module in April 2021 and later sent three taikonauts to bring the station online. As noted by Space.com, the Shenzhou 14 crew is set to depart for the space station sometime in June. China plans on having the station finished by the end of the year, which will include the launch of two additional modules.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the wake of data privacy changes by mobile platforms last year, the enterprise tech world is suddenly very interested in customer-data platforms (CDPs). From a report: With Twilio's acquisition of Segment, Treasure Data's $234 million fundraise late last year and Salesforce's push into CDPs, the hot new buzzword is potentially a hot new market. "The way I think about [CDPs] is, it's trying to create a 360-degree view of each of your customers to help you more accurately identify what would most resonate with this customer," said Derek Zanutto, a general partner at CapitalG. The term first started appearing in mainstream conversations back in 2017. In short, CDPs are centralized places to store all the first-party data a company collects from its customers. "It's fundamentally a data platform that unifies the data, and processes it, and then activates the profiles across many channels," said Treasure Data CEO Kazuki Ohta. The key is not just collecting and storing that data, but making it available to use. The need for CDPs first arose as companies realized they had this data but didn't know what to do with it. "What we're seeing that a lot of brands do is effectively build a data lake or a master data management system, where there's a lot of data coming together potentially," said Ryan Fleisch, head of Product Marketing for Adobe's CDP. "But where a lot of brands are looking for further partnership is: How do I make sense of that data, activate it and make a decision off of it?" "The transformation of the data, the ability to personalize that customer information, I think is a key value prop of the customer data platform," said Twilio Segment Vice President Jodi Alperstein. "And really knowing that 360 view of the customer and really being able to identify them, and then be able to put it into action." It's also why CDPs are most commonly talked about in a marketing context, because it's the most natural extension of using data about customers. After Apple and Google restricted the use of third-party cookies in apps and on the web, marketers needed to find new sources of customer information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Push into the premium smartphone market is a 'life or death' battle for budget brand. From a report: In February, Xiaomi founder and chief executive Lei Jun threw down the gauntlet to Apple and Samsung, vowing to make his company China's top-selling premium brand in three years. "[It's] a war of life and death," Lei said in a post on Chinese social media site Weibo. Xiaomi, the world's second-largest smartphone vendor, is a master of reinvention, making everything from rice cookers to e-scooters. If all goes to plan, the company will roll out its electric vehicle in 2024, ahead of arch-rival Apple. But as Beijing's tech crackdown takes hold, Lei is facing the potential for greater regulation at a time companies around the world are suffering from a global chip shortage. As China works to bring Big Tech to heel, Xiaomi's Hong Kong-listed shares have fallen more than 50 per cent from a year ago to about HK$12 (US$1.50). Its growth momentum also hinges on whether it can fend off its domestic and international rivals, said analysts. [...] According to former and current employees and industry analysts, Xiaomi's biggest hurdle to realising its goals of overtaking Apple and Samsung is convincing consumers of its high-end pedigree. Xiaomi, launched in 2010, made a name for itself building a loyal community of "mi fen," Xiaomi fans who bought products for the specifications, such as more advanced processors, at a cheaper price. While it ranks third in overall sales in China, it only holds five per cent of the global premium market, in which phones are priced at more than $400. "It will be difficult to defeat Samsung and Apple," said a former executive. "It does not play to Xiaomi's strengths, it doesn't have the brand power Apple and Samsung have, and they are not good at selling to people who don't care about specs." The company's phones have evolved. Xiaomi's 12 series phones, released in March and costing $749 for the most basic version, are designed to compete with Apple's $799 iPhone 13. As part of the launch, Xiaomi has pledged to open 20,000 more stores on top of the 10,000 they already have in China, and has changed the branding on its 12 series so they are no longer known by the "Mi" prefix that was the calling card of their previous hardware. But former company executives said the phones needed more than a name change. Xiaomi's previous attempts to break free of its budget image have ended in disappointment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arqit says its encryption system can't be broken by quantum computers, but former employees and people outside the company question the relevance of its technology. The Wall Street Journal: A U.K. cybersecurity startup rocketed to a multibillion-dollar valuation when it listed publicly last fall on the promise of making encryption technology that would protect the defense industry, corporations and consumers alike from the prying eyes of next-generation computer systems. Founder and Chief Executive David Williams told investors at the time that his company, Arqit Quantum had an "impressive backlog" of revenue and was ready "for hyperscale growth." But Arqit has given investors an overly optimistic view of its future revenue and the readiness and workability of its signature encryption system, according to former employees and other people familiar with the company, and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. While the company says it has a solution to a quantum-computing security challenge that U.S. intelligence last year said "could be devastating to national security systems and the nation," government cybersecurity experts in the U.S. and the U.K. have cast doubt on the utility of Arqit's system. Arqit's stock price reached its highest level to date of $38.06 on Nov. 30 and has since fallen, to $15.06 on April 14, amid a broad pullback of young tech stocks. When the company secured its Nasdaq listing last autumn, its revenue consisted of a handful of government grants and small research contracts, and its signature product was an early-stage prototype unable to encrypt anything in practical use, according to the people. The encryption technology the company hinges on -- a system to protect against next-generation quantum computers -- might never apply beyond niche uses, numerous people inside and outside the company warned, unless there were a major overhaul of internet protocols. Arqit disputed that its encryption system was only a prototype at the company's market debut. "This was a live production software release and not a demonstration or trial," said a company representative. "It was being used by enterprise customers on that day and subsequently for testing and integration purposes, because they need to build Arqit's software into their products."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Catalonia's regional leader accused the Spanish government on Monday of spying on its citizens after a rights group said his phone and dozens more belonging to Catalan pro-independence figures had been infected with spyware used by sovereign states. From a report: The Citizen Lab digital rights group found more than 60 people linked to the Catalan separatist movement, including several members of the European Parliament, other politicians, lawyers and activists, had been targeted with "Pegasus" spyware made by Israel's NSO Group after a failed independence bid. NSO, which markets the software as a law-enforcement tool, said Citizen Lab and Amnesty International, which was not involved in this investigation but has published previous studies about Pegasus, had produced inaccurate and unsubstantiated reports to target the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decentralized finance project Beanstalk Farms suffered one of the largest-ever flash-loan exploits on Sunday, sending its price tumbling. From a report: The credit-focused, Ethereum-based stablecoin protocol suffered a total loss of around $182 million and the attacker got away with around $80 million of crypto tokens, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield, which had flagged the incident on Twitter. The project's native token BEAN fell about 75% from its $1 peg against the dollar, pricing from CoinGecko showed. The protocol's creators disclosed their identities on Beanstalk's Discord server, and said that they were not involved in the attack. "We are not aware of the identity of the individuals who were involved. Like all other investors in Beanstalk, we lost all of our deposited assets in the Silo, which was substantial," the founders wrote. It isn't yet clear whether investors who lost funds will be reimbursed -- or if so, how and to what extent. Unlike traditional lending, which requires a loan to be secured with a collateral or credit checks, DeFi smart contracts allow users to borrow huge sums of stablecoins in what are known as flash loans, without any form of security. Flash loans, where the entire process of borrowing and returning the loan happens in a single transaction on the blockchain, are fairly popular among arbitrage traders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When college instructor Angela Dancey wants to decipher whether her first-year English students comprehend what she's trying to get across in class, their facial expressions and body language don't reveal much. "Even in an in-person class, students can be difficult to read. Typically, undergraduates don't communicate much through their faces, especially a lack of understanding," said Dancey, a senior lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dancey uses tried-and-true methods such as asking students to identify their "muddiest point" -- a concept or idea she said students still struggle with -- following a lecture or discussion. "I ask them to write it down, share it and we address it as a class for everyone's benefit," she said. But Intel and Classroom Technologies, which sells virtual school software called Class, think there might be a better way. The companies have partnered to integrate an AI-based technology developed by Intel with Class, which runs on top of Zoom. Intel claims its system can detect whether students are bored, distracted or confused by assessing their facial expressions and how they're interacting with educational content. "We can give the teacher additional insights to allow them to better communicate," said Michael Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Classroom Technologies, who said teachers have had trouble engaging with students in virtual classroom environments throughout the pandemic. His company plans to test Intel's student engagement analytics technology, which captures images of students' faces with a computer camera and computer vision technology and combines it with contextual information about what a student is working on at that moment to assess a student's state of understanding. Intel hopes to transform the technology into a product it can distribute more broadly, said Sinem Aslan, a research scientist at Intel, who helped develop the technology. "We are trying to enable one-on-one tutoring at scale," said Aslan, adding that the system is intended to help teachers recognize when students need help and to inform how they might alter educational materials based on how students interact with the educational content. "High levels of boredom will lead [students to] completely zone out of educational content," said Aslan. But critics argue that it is not possible to accurately determine whether someone is feeling bored, confused, happy or sad based on their facial expressions or other external signals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During a 92-minute presentation Wednesday on the state of the free software movement, Richard Stallman spoke at length on a wide variety of topics, including the need for freedom-respecting package systems. But Stallman also shared his deepest thoughts on a topic dear to the hearts of Slashdot readers: privacy and currency: I won't order from online stores, because I can't pay them . For one thing, the payment services require running non-free JavaScript... [And] to pay remotely you've got to do it by credit card, and that's tracking people, and I want to resist tracking too.... This is a really serious problem for society, that you can't order things remotely anonymously. But GNU Taler is part of the path to fixing that. You'll be able to get a Taler token from your bank, or a whole bunch of Taler tokens, and then you'll be able to use those to pay anonymously. Then if the store can send the thing you bought to a delivery box in your neighborhood, the store doesn't ever have to know who you are. But there's another issue Stallman touched on earlier in his talk: There is a proposed U.S. law called KOSA which would require mandatory age-verification of users -- which means mandatory identification of users, which is likely to mean via face recognition. And it would be in every commercial software application or electronic service that connects to the internet.... [It's] supposedly for protecting children. That's one of the favorite excuses for surveillance and repression: to protect the children. Whether it would actually protect anyone is dubious, but they hope that won't actually be checked.... You can always propose a completely useless method that will repress everyone.... So instead, Stallman suggests that age verification could be handled by.... GNU Taler: Suppose there's some sort of service which charges money, or even a tiny amount of money, and is only for people over 16, or people over 18 or whatever it is. Well, you could get from your bank a Taler token that says the person using this token is over 16. This bank has verified that.... So then the site only needs to insist on a 16-or-over Taler token, and your age is verified, but the site has no idea who you are. Unfortunately that won't help if user-identifying age-tracking systems are legislated now. The code of Taler works, but it's still being integrated with a bank so that people could actually start to use it with real businesses. Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks on cryptocurrencies and encryption, or jump ahead to... Can GNU Taler accounts be frozen? Why cryptocurrency shouldn't replace banking The problem with VPN apps - and how interoperable encryption could protect your freedomRead more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened when college admissions offices started ignoring the standardized test scores? NBC News asked college administrators like Jon Burdick, Cornell's vice provost for enrollment:When the health crisis closed testing sites in 2020, four of Cornell's undergraduate colleges decided to go test optional, meaning students could submit a test score if they thought it would help them, but didn't have to. Three of Cornell's colleges adopted test-blind policies, meaning admissions officers wouldn't look at any student's scores. The effects were immediate, Burdick said. Like many other colleges and universities, Cornell was inundated with applications — roughly 71,000 compared to 50,000 in a typical year. And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said. The university had always looked at many factors in making admissions decisions, and low test scores were never singularly disqualifying, Burdick said. But it became clear that students had been self-rejecting, deciding not to apply to places like Cornell because they thought their lower SAT scores meant they couldn't get in, he said. Other colleges also saw a similar surge in applications.... At Cornell, managing the surge in applications wasn't easy, Burdick said. The university hired several admissions officers and about a dozen part-time application readers — paid for in part by the additional application fees.... In the end, Cornell enrolled a more diverse class, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the share of first-generation college students. "It showed me that these students, given the opportunity, can show really impressive competitive credentials and get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated," Burdick said. Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole," reports Live Science:The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole. Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now.... Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies. "Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement. In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope. The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said. Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar.... [T]here are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Russian software developers are reporting that their GitHub accounts are being suspended without warning if they work for or previously worked for companies under U.S. sanctions, writes Bleeping Computer:According to Russian media outlets, the ban wave began on April 13 and didn't discriminate between companies and individuals. For example, the GitHub accounts of Sberbank Technology, Sberbank AI Lab, and the Alfa Bank Laboratory had their code repositories initially disabled and are now removed from the platform.... Personal accounts suspended on GitHub have their content wiped while all repositories become immediately out of reach, and the same applies to issues and pull requests. Habr.com [a Russian collaborative blog about IT] reports that some Russian developers contacted GitHub about the suspension and received an email titled 'GitHub and Trade Controls' that explained their account was disabled due to US sanctions. This email contains a link to a GitHub page explaining the company's policies regarding sanctions and trade controls, which explains how a user can appeal their suspension. This appeal form requires the individual to certify that they do not use their GitHub account on behalf of a sanctioned entity. A developer posted to Twitter saying that he could remove the suspension after filling out the form and that it was due to his previous employer being sanctioned. A GitHub blog post in March had promised to ensure the availability of open source services "to all, including developers in Russia." So Bleeping Computer contacted a GitHub spokesperson, who explained this weekend that while GitHub may be required to restrict some users to comply with U.S. laws, "We examine government sanctions thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law."According to this, the suspended private accounts are either affiliated, collaborating, or working with/for sanctioned entities. However, even those who previously worked for a sanctioned company appear to be suspended by mistake. This means that Russian users, in general, can suddenly find their projects wiped and accounts suspended, even if those projects have nothing to do with the sanctioned entities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A writer for The Drive reports that "Recently, I noticed a part that I made for my Honda Accord was removed from Printables, the newly rebranded 3D printing repository offered by Prusa. "There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it, but I didn't think anything else about it...until reports of a mass deletion started popping up on Reddit."All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle — a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand. "I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents." A Prusa employee responded to a post on the company's forums, noting that Honda sent a "huge legal document" that covered every model that the company wished to have deleted. The document reportedly included items that did not have Honda logos, but also specific items with certain shapes and dimensions — like a washer fluid reservoir cap, for example. A response from another employee was posted suggesting other sites that host 3D models were also sent a similar takedown notice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports on "an ironic effect" of efforts to remove books from libraries in America. "The more certain books are singled out, the more people want to read them." And for some U.S. teenagers, "banned book clubs, recent book banning attempts have been a springboard for wider discussions around censorship."The Banned Book Club at Firefly Bookstore [started by 8th grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh] read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" as its first pick. While the satirical novella, which makes a pointed critique of totalitarianism, isn't one of the books currently being challenged in the US, it was banned in the Soviet Union until its fall and was rejected for publication in the UK during its wartime alliance with the USSR. And it faced challenges in Florida in the '80s for being "pro-communist." That history made for some thought-provoking conversations. "It taught a lot because it had references to different forms of government that maybe some adults didn't like their kids reading about, even though it was run by pigs," Diffenbaugh said. "I really thought it shouldn't have been banned for those reasons, or at all." Teenagers at the Common Ground Teen Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, formed a banned book club soon after a Tennessee school district voted to remove "Maus" from an eighth grade curriculum. But while the graphic novel about the Holocaust was the catalyst for the club, says director Mary Jo Podgurski, the first title they chose to read was, fittingly, "Fahrenheit 451" — the 1953 dystopian novel about government censorship that itself has been challenged over the years. "Obviously this whole idea of taking away books that they wanted to read or that they thought they should read sparked a nerve in them," said Podgurski, an educator and counselor who oversees the Common Ground Teen Center.... Since reading "Fahrenheit 451," the club has also discussed "Animal Farm" and "1984," which has been challenged for its political themes and sexual content. So far, the young readers at the Common Ground Teen Center have been puzzled as to why those books were once deemed inappropriate. "I often wonder, do adults understand what kids have in their phones?" Podgurski said. "They have access to everything. Saying 'don't read this book' shows that you're not understanding teen culture. Young people have access to much information. What they need is an adult to help them process it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What can scientists learn by teaching two monkeys to play Pac-Man?" asks the South China Morning Post. "Quite a lot it seems, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences."A team of neuroscientists from the academy said they used the classic video game to look at the way the primates made decisions. The result was the first study of its kind to show that monkeys were capable of formulating strategies to simplify a sophisticated task, they said. "To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving," Yang Tianming, corresponding author of the study, said on Twitter. The results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife last month. The scientists used artificial intelligence to come up with a statistical model to find out whether the monkey's behaviour could be broken down into a set of strategies.... The monkeys were then trained to use a joystick to manoeuvre Pac-Man around a maze to collect snack pellets and avoid ghosts. The monkeys received fruit juice as a reward instead of earning points. Yang and his colleagues found the monkeys understood the basic elements of the game because they tended to choose the direction with the largest local reward and knew how to react to ghosts in different modes.... More importantly, the researchers found that the monkeys adopted a hierarchical solution for the Pac-Man game by using one dominant strategy and only focusing on a subset of game aspects at a time. The researchers said the study was significant because it was quantitative and examined complex tasks.... The study said the findings paved the way for further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sophisticated cognitive functions. Plus, teaching monkeys to play Pac-Man sounds like fun. Though I wonder how they feel about Donkey Kong....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the dusty California desert, U.S. Army trainers are already using lessons learned from Russia's war against Ukraine as they prepare soldiers for future fights against a major adversary such as Russia or China," reports the Associated Press. And their training scenarios include more than just a enemy willing to destroy a city with missiles and rockets. "The enemy force that controls the fictional town of Ujen is using a steady stream of social media posts to make false accusations against the American brigade preparing to attack." "I think right now the whole Army is really looking at what's happening in Ukraine and trying to learn lessons," said Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. Those lessons, she said, range from Russia's equipment and logistics troubles to communications and use of the internet. "The Russia-Ukraine experience is a very powerful illustration for our Army of how important the information domain is going to be," said Wormuth, who spent two days at the training center in the Mojave Desert watching an Army brigade wage war against the fictional "Denovian" forces. "We've been talking about that for about five years. But really seeing it and seeing the way Zelenskyy has been incredibly powerful.... This is a world war that the actual world can see and watch in real time.... " Army Col. Ian Palmer said the exercise is using more drones by the friendly and enemy forces, both for surveillance and attacks. So his forces are trying to use camouflage and tuck into the terrain to stay out of sight. "You know if you can be seen, you can be shot, where ever you are," he said. Down in the makeshift town, the opposition forces are confident they can hold off Palmer's brigade despite the size difference. The Denovians only have about 1,350 forces, but they are throwing everything they have at the brigade, from jamming and other electronic warfare to insurgency attacks and propaganda. The role-players have their phones ready to film and post quickly to social media. The Denovian forces want to portray the unit in the worst possible light, said Taylor, and constantly twist the narrative on social media so Palmer's troops realize they are in a battle for the truth. That's a challenge, he said, because "when I've got a bunch of casualties and I'm getting overrun on my left flank and my supply trains aren't where they need to be and I can't find the bulldozers, it's hard to think about something that someone said about me on Twitter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It was one of the most eagerly awaited scientific announcements of all time, and it pitted the world of faith against the world of rational thought, under the glare of the media," remembers the Guardian.So when cutting-edge carbon-14 tests found that the Shroud of Turin was a forgery, it seemed like the final chapter for a relic that had been revered for centuries as the cloth in which Christ's body had been wrapped when he supposedly rose from the dead at the first Easter almost 2,000 years ago. But one man — David Rolfe, a film-maker whose documentary The Silent Witness had brought the shroud into the public eye in modern times, and who had converted to Christianity as a result of his research — wasn't prepared to give up on it. He was convinced the carbon dating, carried out in 1988 under the direction of the British Museum and Oxford University, had been flawed. And now he claims he has the evidence to prove it. This week sees the release of a new film, Who Can He Be?, in which Rolfe argues that, far from the shroud being a definite dud, new discoveries in the past few years have again opened the question of its authenticity. So convinced is Rolfe that he's issuing a challenge worth $1m to the British Museum. "If ... they believe the shroud is a medieval forgery, I call on them to repeat the exercise, and create something similar today," he says.... The sample used for the tests, Rolfe argues in his new film, was too small and taken from a corner where the shroud was likely to have been repaired over the centuries.... When it comes to the carbon dating, he's certainly not alone in his scepticism. Barrie M Schwortz, a photographer who documented the shroud in 1978, says "murky" would be a good word to describe the events of 1988. "Today there are at least six peer-reviewed scientific articles that challenge the results of the carbon dating," he says. In his view, the players involved were in a hurry to get the job done, because they wanted to get carbon dating on the map. "Those tests made it a household name, and today it's used widely in archaeology," he says.... The British Museum is less willing to get involved this time around. "Any current questions about the shroud would be best put to those who currently care for it in the royal chapel of the cathedral of Turin," a spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After three attempts to complete a critical fueling test of the Space Launch System rocket, NASA has decided to take a break," reports Ars Technica:On Saturday night the space agency announced plans to roll the large SLS rocket from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center to the Vehicle Assembly Building in the coming days. This marks a notable step back for the program, which has tried since April 1 to complete a "wet dress rehearsal" test, during which the rocket is fueled and brought to within 10 seconds of launch. The decision comes after three tries during the last two weeks. Each fueling attempt was scuttled by one or more technical issues with the rocket, its mobile launch tower, or ground systems that supply propellants and gases. During the most recent attempt, on Thursday April 14, NASA succeeded in loading 49 percent of the core-stage liquid oxygen fuel tank and 5 percent of the liquid hydrogen tank. [NASA reports that the team ended the test after "observing a liquid hydrogen leak on the tail service mast umbilical."] While this represents progress, it did not include the most dynamic portion of the test, during which the rocket is fully fueled and pressurized; and it, the ground systems, and computer systems are put into a terminal countdown when every variable is closely monitored. NASA had hoped to complete this wet dress rehearsal test to work out the kinks in the complicated launch system so that, when the rocket is rolled out later this year for its actual launch, the countdown will proceed fairly smoothly. NASA said that its contractors, as well as its agency's, will use the next several weeks to address problems that cropped up during the fueling tests when the SLS rocket returns to the large Vehicle Assembly Building. For example, gaseous nitrogen system supplier Air Liquide will upgrade its capabilities. NASA will also replace a faulty check valve on the upper stage of the rocket, as well as fix a leak on the mobile launch tower's "tail service mast umbilical," a 10-meter-tall structure that provides propellant and electricity lines to the rocket on the pad.... Still, NASA seems confident that it will get through this painful teething process for the SLS rocket: a program that is now 11 years old and in which NASA has invested more than $30 billion in the rocket and ground systems now being tested. "There's no doubt in my mind that we will finish this test campaign, and we will listen to the hardware, and the data will lead us to the next step," Blackwell-Thompson said Friday. "And we will take the appropriate steps, and we will launch this vehicle. I don't know exactly what that date is, but there's no doubt in my mind that we'll finish the test campaign, and we will be ready to go fly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Activision Blizzard is cooperating with federal investigations into trading by friends of its chief executive shortly before the gaming company disclosed its sale to Microsoft Corp, it said in a securities filing on Friday. It received requests for information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and received a subpoena from a Department of Justice grand jury, the maker of "Call of Duty" said in an amended proxy filing. The requests "appear to relate to their respective investigations into trading by third parties – including persons known to Activision Blizzard's CEO – in securities prior to the announcement of the proposed transaction," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week 69-year-old Richard Stallman gave a 92-minute presentation on the state of the free software movement. Stallman covered numerous topics, but also added as an aside at one point: Ubuntu of course is a non-free distro, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone use it. Some important packages are now distributed only through their non-freedom-respecting package system, and not as Debian packages. So it's even harder than before to get any freedom out of an Ubuntu installation. But Stallman also sees a larger issue: Another area where we have problems is there are several languages which come with a package library -- basically people post packages in them. And that might be fine if they had a good criterion for the licensing of the libraries people upload into those sites -- but they're not developed by free software activists, and they don't have such a criterion. There are non-free packages in those libraries too. Now, some of them make it possible to find out whether a library is free. Some of them, it's difficult. Sometimes -- yeah, you could probably look at the source code and see what licenses are in it, and then you could look up those licenses in GNU.org/licenses/license-list.html and see if all those licenses are free... The problem is, they don't help you. At the very least they should make it easy to say, "Show me only the free packages." And then, "Show me only the GPL-compatible packages, because I'm writing a GPL-covered program, and I can't use the libraries that are not GPL compatible. And I certainly won't ever think of using a non-free library." They're not interested in helping people move forward in freedom. And so we need people to write front-ends for those package archives, which will show only the freely-licensed packages, and which can be asked to show which ones are GPL-compatible, or show only those. This way they will be usable easily by the free software community. If you like one of the languages that has this problem, please show your appreciation for that language by reconciling its use with maintaining freedom. And this leads Stallman to a related setback for the free software movement: the containers themselves that are packaging some programs with the libraries they need: The old way of doing this was you would make sure that your program said which versions of libraries it was compiled to work with, and in the source code you'd use something like Autoconf so that it could work with the various library versions. And this way you could build the program for a wide variety of free operating systems and versions of them. Well, that's some work, so some developers, they release a free program -- not all of them release free programs, but some of them do release free programs -- using containers. And the container has one set of libraries in it. And how do you really know what's in there? It's not straightforward to verify that all the libraries in the container are free, and a lot of people won't realize that they should even think about it. So the use of containers, as they are implemented nowadays by people who are not free software activists and are not particularly concerned with this question, is an obstacle to verifying that you're installing free software. Well, maybe some of these container systems could be improved, or maybe another one could be designed to solve these problems. If a container packaging system were designed by people who care about freedom, they might find good ways to satisfy this goal, as well as others. So it's something you could possibly work on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A headline at Hot Hardware calls it "a sexy Linux laptop with deep learning chops... being pitched as the world's most powerful laptop for machine learning workloads." And here's how Ars Technica describes the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook (announced Tuesday):Made in collaboration with Lambda, the Linux-based clamshell focuses on deep-learning development. Lambda, which has been around since 2012, is a deep-learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense and "97 percent of the top research universities in the US," according to the company's announcement. Lambda's offerings include GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances that train neural networks for various use cases, including self-driving cars, cancer detection, and drug discovery. Dubbed "The Deep Learning Laptop," the Tensorbook has an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q (16GB) and targets machine-learning engineers, especially those who lack a laptop with a discrete GPU and thus have to share a remote machine's resources, which negatively affects development.... "When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues," Lambda co-founder and CEO Stephen Balaban said in a statement, noting that the laptop comes with PyTorch and TensorFlow for quickly training and demoing models from a local GUI interface without SSH. Lambda isn't a laptop maker, so it recruited Razer to build the machine.... While there are more powerful laptops available, the Tensorbook stands out because of its software package and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS. The Verge writes:While Razer currently offers faster CPU, GPU and screens in today's Blade lineup, it's not necessarily a bad deal if you love the design, considering how pricey Razer's laptops can be. But we've generally found that Razer's thin machines run quite hot in our reviews, and the Blade in question was no exception even with a quarter of the memory and a less powerful RTX 3060 GPU. Lambda's FAQ page does not address heat as of today. Lambda is clearly aiming this one at prospective MacBook Pro buyers, and I don't just say that because of the silver tones. The primary hardware comparison the company touts is a 4x speedup over Apple's M1 Max in a 16-inch MacBook Pro when running TensorFlow. Specifically, Lambda's web site claims the new laptop "delivers model training performance up to 4x faster than Apple's M1 Max, and up to 10x faster than Google Colab instances." And it credits this to the laptop's use of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q 16GB GPU, adding that NVIDIA GPUs "are the industry standard for parallel processing, ensuring leading performance and compatibility with all machine learning frameworks and tools." "It looks like a fine package and machine, but pricing starts at $3,499," notes Hot Hardware, adding "There's a $500 up-charge to have it configured to dual-boot Windows 10." The Verge speculates on what this might portend for the future. "Perhaps the recently renewed interest in Linux gaming, driven by the Steam Deck, will push Razer to consider Linux for its own core products as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader wired_parrot writes:After the Ukrainian army captured one of Russia's Orlan-10 unmanned aerial vehicles, they decided to do a teardown of it. Their findings show a remarkable amount of jerry-rigged installations using off the shelf components, including the use of a Canon DSLR camera as the main image capturing sensor. Petapixel notes it's a camera first launched in 2015 "with a retail price of $750 but which is currently worth about $300 to $400 on the used market... The camera is mounted to a board with a hook-and-loop fastener strip (commonly referred to as Velcro)." The Ukranian Ministry of Defense posted a video showing one of one of its soldiers exploring the alleged Russian drone, and Petapixel shares more details and some screen grabs:The soldier notes how surprisingly low-tech the military drone is — observers quickly pointed out that certain aspects of it are more reminiscent of a hobbyist RC airplane project than a high-tech piece of military spying technology.... On the top of the drone, the fuel tank's cap suggests that it may have been made from some kind of plastic water bottle. Various parts of the drone are also fixed together with some kind of duct tape.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A new survey claims Windows 11 adoption is so low it's actually less popular than the 20-year-old Windows XP," reports PC Magazine:The survey comes from an IT management provider called Lansweeper. Through its own software products, the company scanned 10 million Windows devices this month to determine which OS they were using. The results found that only 1.44% of the devices had Windows 11 installed, which is lower than the 1.71% for Windows XP. In contrast, Windows 10 maintains a dominant share at 80.34%. Although Windows 11's adoption is low at 1.44%, the number actually went up almost three times from 0.52% back in January. It's also important to note that other surveys have found much higher Windows 11 adoption numbers. Last month, the app advertising platform AdDuplex found Windows 11 usage was at 19.4%, although this represented a mere 0.1% growth from the previous month. Meanwhile, the Steam hardware survey from Valve estimates Windows 11 usage has reached 16.8%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The U.S. Space Command announced this week that it determined a 2014 meteor hit that hit Earth was from outside the solar system," reports CBS News. "The meteor streaked across the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea three years earlier than what was believed to be the first confirmed interstellar object detected entering our solar system." After Oumuamua was spotted in 2017, the interstellar comet Borisov appeared in 2019 — discovered in Crimea, Ukraine at a "personal observatory" built by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov" But CBS notes that despite their theory about a first interstellar meteor in 2014, the two Harvard astronomers — Dr. Amir Siraj and Dr. Abraham Loeb — "had trouble getting their paper published, because they used classified information from the government." Specifically, data from a classified U.S. government satellite designed to detect foreign missiles...The meteor was unusual because of its very high speed and unusual direction — which suggested it came from interstellar space.... Any space object traveling more than about 42 kilometers per second may come from interstellar space. The data showed the 2014 Manus Island fireball hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 45 kilometers per second, which was "very promising" in identifying it as interstellar, Siraj said.... After more research and help from other scientists, including classified information from the government about the accuracy or level of precision of the data, Siraj and Loeb determined with 99.999% certainty the object was interstellar. But their paper on the finding was being turned down, because the pair only had a private conversation with an anonymous U.S. government employee to confirm the accuracy of the data. "We had thought this was a lost cause," Dr. Siraj told the New York Times — which couldn't resist adding that "it turned out, the truth was out there."Last month, the U.S. Space Command released a memo to NASA scientists that stated the data from the missile warning satellites' sensors "was sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory" for the meteor. The publication of the memo was the culmination of a three-year effort by Siraj and a well-known Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb. Many scientists, including those at NASA, say that the military still has not released enough data to confirm the interstellar origins of the space rock, and a spokesperson said Space Command would defer to other authorities on the question. But it wasn't the only information about meteors to be released. The military also handed NASA decades of secret military data on the brightness of hundreds of other fireballs, or bolides. "It's an unusual degree of visibility of a set of data coming from that world," said Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, who worked on the data release. "We're in this renewed period of excitement and activity in space programs generally, and in the midst of that, I think thoughtful leaders in multiple places said, 'you know, now is a good time to do this.'" The Times notes that data from classified military satellites "could also aid NASA in its federally assigned role as defender of planet Earth from killer asteroids. And that is the goal of a new agreement with the U.S. Space Force that aims to help NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office better understand what happens when space rocks reach the atmosphere."Sharing sensitive military satellite data with astronomers has led to significant scientific discoveries in the past. A group of satellites deployed in the 1960s by the United States to detect covert detonations of nuclear weapons on Earth accidentally became the key instruments used to make the first detection of extraterrestrial gamma ray bursts. The bursts showed up on the satellites, code-named Vela, as single bursts of energy, confusing analysts at Los Alamos who later declassified the data in a 1973 paper that spurred academic debate about the bursts' origins.... A core reason for Space Force's increasing ties with NASA has centered on the agency's congressional mandate to detect nearly all asteroids that could threaten the Earth. When NASA signed an agreement in 2020 to strengthen ties with Space Force, the agency acknowledged it had fallen behind in its asteroid-tracking efforts and would need Pentagon resources to carry out its planetary defense mission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub issued a security alert Friday. GitHub's chief security officer wrote that on Tuesday, "GitHub Security began an investigation that uncovered evidence that an attacker abused stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis-CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including npm..." We do not believe the attacker obtained these tokens via a compromise of GitHub or its systems, because the tokens in question are not stored by GitHub in their original, usable formats. Following immediate investigation, we disclosed our findings to Heroku and Travis-CI on April 13 and 14... Looking across the entire GitHub platform, we have high confidence that compromised OAuth user tokens from Heroku and Travis-CI-maintained OAuth applications were stolen and abused to download private repositories belonging to dozens of victim organizations that were using these apps. Our analysis of other behavior by the threat actor suggests that the actors may be mining the downloaded private repository contents, to which the stolen OAuth token had access, for secrets that could be used to pivot into other infrastructure. We are sharing this today as we believe the attacks may be ongoing and action is required for customers to protect themselves. The initial detection related to this campaign occurred on April 12 when GitHub Security identified unauthorized access to our npm production infrastructure using a compromised AWS API key. Based on subsequent analysis, we believe this API key was obtained by the attacker when they downloaded a set of private npm repositories using a stolen OAuth token from one of the two affected third-party OAuth applications described above. Upon discovering the broader theft of third-party OAuth tokens not stored by GitHub or npm on the evening of April 13, we immediately took action to protect GitHub and npm by revoking tokens associated with GitHub and npm's internal use of these compromised applications. We believe that the two impacts to npm are unauthorized access to, and downloading of, the private repositories in the npm organization on GitHub.com and potential access to the npm packages as they exist in AWS S3 storage. At this point, we assess that the attacker did not modify any packages or gain access to any user account data or credentials. We are still working to understand whether the attacker viewed or downloaded private packages. npm uses completely separate infrastructure from GitHub.com; GitHub was not affected in this original attack. Though investigation continues, we have found no evidence that other GitHub-owned private repos were cloned by the attacker using stolen third-party OAuth tokens. Once GitHub identified stolen third-party OAuth tokens affecting GitHub users, GitHub took immediate steps to respond and protect users. GitHub contacted Heroku and Travis-CI to request that they initiate their own security investigations, revoke all OAuth user tokens associated with the affected applications, and begin work to notify their own users.... GitHub is currently working to identify and notify all of the known-affected victim users and organizations that we discovered through our analysis across GitHub.com. These customers will receive a notification email from GitHub with additional details and next steps to assist in their own response within the next 72 hours.If you do not receive a notification, you and/or your organization have not been identified as affected. You should, however, periodically review what OAuth applications you've authorized or are authorized to access your organization and prune anything that's no longer needed.You can also review your organization audit logs and user account security logs for unexpected or anomalous activity.... The security and trustworthiness of GitHub, npm, and the broader developer ecosystem is our highest priority. Our investigation is ongoing, and we will update this blog, and our communications with affected customers, as we learn more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business, argues in the Atlantic that social-media platforms "trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting." But that was just the beginning. He now believes this ultimately fueled a viral dynamic leading to "the continual chipping-away of trust" in a democracy which "depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions."The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens' trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).... Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth — with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together. In the last 10 years, the article argues, the general public — at least in America — became "uniquely stupid." And he's not just speaking about the political right and left, but within both factions, "as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families." The article quotes former CIA analyst Martin Gurri's comment in 2019 that the digital revolution has highly fragmented the public into hostile shards that are "mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another." The article concludes that by now U.S. politics has entered a phase where truth "cannot achieve widespread adherence" and thus "nothing really means anything anymore--at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree." It even contemplates the idea of "highly believable" disinformation generated by AI, possibly by geopolitical adversaries, ultimately evolving into what the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory has described as "an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality." But then the article also suggests possible reforms:The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the "Share" function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this...don't stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true. Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. Banks and other industries have "know your customer" rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same.... This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms.... Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable. In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers. The members of Gen Z--those born in and after 1997--bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.... Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it. More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision... The article closes with its own note of hope — and a call to action:In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Stallman celebrated his 69th birthday last month. And Wednesday, he gave a 92-minute presentation called "The State of the Free Software Movement." Stallman began by thanking everyone who's contributed to free software, and encouraged others who want to help to visit gnu.org/help. "The Free Software movement is universal, and morally should not exclude anyone. Because even though there are crimes that should be punished, cutting off someone from contributing to free software punishes the world. Not that person." And then he began by noting some things that have gotten better in the free software movement, including big improvements in projects like GNU Emacs when displaying external packages. (And in addition, "GNU Health now has a hospital management facility, which should make it applicable to a lot more medical organizations so they can switch to free software. And [Skype alternative] GNU Jami got a big upgrade.") What's getting worse? Well, the libre-booted machines that we have are getting older and scarcer. Finding a way to support something new is difficult, because Intel and AMD are both designing their hardware to subjugate people. If they were basically haters of the public, it would be hard for them to do it much worse than they're doing. And Macintoshes are moving towards being jails, like the iMonsters. It's getting harder for users to install even their own programs to run them. And this of course should be illegal. It should be illegal to sell a computer that doesn't let users install software of their own from source code. And probably shouldn't allow the computer to stop you from installing binaries that you get from others either, even though it's true in cases like that, you're doing it at your own risk. But tying people down, strapping them into their chairs so that they can't do anything that hurts themselves -- makes things worse, not better. There are other systems where you can find ways to trust people, that don't depend on being under the power of a giant company. We've seen problems sometimes where supported old hardware gets de-supported because somebody doesn't think it's important any more — it's so old, how could that matter? But there are reasons...why old hardware sometimes remains very important, and people who aren't thinking about this issue might not realize that... Stallman also had some advice for students required by their schools to use non-free software like Zoom for their remote learning. "If you have to use a non-free program, there's one last thing... which is to say in each class session, 'I am bitterly ashamed of the fact that I'm using Zoom for this class.' Just that. It's a few seconds. But say it each time.... And over time, the fact that this is really important to you will sink in." And then halfway through, Stallman began taking questions from the audience... Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks, or jump ahead to... How far should copyright law go? That NPM package that deleted files in Russia Does the free software world need more videogames? Stallman's upcoming manual for 'GNU C' Free Software's role in protecting our planet's environmentRead more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports that "Editing a tweet using Twitter's upcoming edit button could leave a digital trace of your tweet's history, according to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong."In a tweet, Manchun Wong explains that the edit function appears to have an "immutable" quality, which means Twitter may create an entirely new tweet when one is edited, all while preserving the previous versions of that tweet. "Looks like Twitter's approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit," Manchun Wong says. As Manchun Wong notes, it's unclear how a tweet's edit history will appear to users, or if it will at all. But if Twitter does decide to make tweet history public, it could be a way to address concerns over potential abuse of the feature, as some critics believe it could be used to alter the public record and mislead users. But in the end, it's two entirely separate questions. Will Twitter's edit functionality preserve a tweet's history online? And should it?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week the Voice of America news service shared a story that begins with exclusive photos from a nuclear lab "from which a Ukrainian official says Russian troops stole radioactive material that could be harmful if mishandled...."It is housed in a building run by a state agency managing the exclusion zone around Chernobyl's nearby decommissioned nuclear power plant, where a 1986 explosion caused the world's worst nuclear accident. The director of the agency, Evgen Kramarenko, provided the laboratory photos to VOA, saying he took them on an April 5 visit, five days after Russian troops withdrew from Chernobyl.... "We have a laboratory that had a big quantity of radioactive instruments that are used to calibrate our radiation dosimeters," Kramarenko told VOA. A dosimeter is a safety device, typically worn by individuals as a badge, that measures exposure to ionizing radiation, including nuclear radiation. The agency's dosimeters are calibrated using small metallic containers of radioactive material made by Ukrainian state enterprise USIE Izotop, which displays a photo of them on its website. "Most of those calibration instruments were stolen. They look like coins. If the Russian soldiers carry them around, it's very dangerous for them," Kramarenko said.... In a Saturday Facebook post, Kramarenko's agency said occupying Russian troops stole samples of fuel-containing materials from the lab in addition to the radioactive calibration instruments. The agency said it was possible that the Russians threw away the items elsewhere in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, but that a likelier scenario is that they kept items as "souvenirs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The nonprofit online news site Virginia Mercury investigated their state police departments' "real-time location warrants," which are "addressed to telephone companies, ordering them to regularly ping a customers' phone for its GPS location and share the results with police."Public records requests submitted to a sampling of 18 police departments around the state found officers used the technique to conduct more than 7,000 days worth of surveillance in 2020. Court records show the tracking efforts spanned cases ranging from high-profile murders to minor larcenies.... Seven departments responded that they did not have any relevant billing records, indicating they don't use the technique. Only one of the departments surveyed, Alexandria, indicated it had an internal policy governing how their officers use cellphone tracking, but a copy of the document provided by the city was entirely redacted.... Drug investigations accounted for more than 60 percent of the search warrants taken out in the two jurisdictions. Larcenies were the second most frequent category. Major crimes like murders, rapes and abductions made up a fraction of the tracking requests, accounting for just under 25 of the nearly 400 warrants filed in the jurisdictions that year. America's Supreme Court "ruled that warrantless cellphone tracking is unconstitutional back in 2012," the article points out — but in practice those warrants aren't hard to get. "Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is 'relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed'.... There's been limited public discussion or awareness of the kinds of tracking warrants the judiciary is approving.""I don't think people know that their cell phones can be converted to tracking devices by police with no notice," said Steve Benjamin, a criminal defense lawyer in Richmond who said he's recently noticed an uptick in cases in which officers employed the technique. "And the reality of modern life is everyone has their phone on them during the day and on their nightstand at night. ... It's as if the police tagged them with a chip under their skin, and people have no idea how easily this is accomplished." The case for these phone-tracking warrants? The executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police tells the site that physical surveillance ofen requires too many resources — and that cellphone tracking is safer. "It may be considered an intrusive way of gathering data on someone, but it's certainly less dangerous than physical tracking."A spokesperson for the Chesterfield County police department [responsible for 64% of the state's tracking] argued that "We exist to preserve human life and protect the vulnerable, and we will use all lawful tools at our disposal to do so." And they added that such "continued robust enforcement efforts" were a part of the reason that the county's still-rising number of fatal drug overdoses had not risen more.The site also obtained bills from four major US cellphone carriers, and reported how much they were charging police for providing their cellphone-tracking services:"T-Mobile charged $30 per day, which comes to $900 per month of tracking.""AT&T charged a monthly service fee of $100 and an additional $25 per day the service is utilized, which comes to $850 per 30 days of tracking...""Verizon calls the service 'periodic location updates,' charging $5 per day on top of a monthly service fee of $100, which comes to $200 per 30 days of tracking.""Sprint offered the cheapest prices to report locations back to law enforcement, charging a flat fee of $100 per month." Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Covid-19 pandemic "would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner," writes Bill Gates, in a guest essay Friday in the New York Times. This ultimately would've reduced fatalities — "and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did." But note that Gates said "treatment" — not vaccine. Gates believes most people in the public health community had expected an effective treatment would appear before vaccines became available.Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Safe, effective Covid vaccines were available within a year — a historic feat — but treatments that could keep large numbers of people out of the hospital were surprisingly slow out of the gate.... In late 2021, a few of their efforts paid off — not as soon as would have been ideal, but still in time to have a big impact. Merck and its partners developed an antiviral called molnupiravir, which was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. Soon after, another oral antiviral, Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, also proved to be very effective, reducing the risk of severe illness or death by nearly 90 percent among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. These drugs are useful tools for combating the pandemic, but they arrived much later than they should have and, for many, they are still difficult to access.... It's a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. We're lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn't, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population.... With good therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death could drop significantly, and countries could decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. What's more, imagine how people's lives would change if we're able to take the next step by linking testing and treatment. Anyone with early symptoms that might indicate Covid (or any other viral disease) could walk into a pharmacy or clinic anywhere in the world, get tested and, if positive for the virus, walk out with antivirals to take at home.... In short, although therapeutics didn't rescue us from Covid, they hold a lot of promise for saving lives and preventing future outbreaks from crippling health systems. But to make the most of that promise, the world needs to invest in the research and systems we'll need to find treatments much faster. That's why my foundation has supported a therapeutics accelerator at Duke University, but broader initiatives will be necessary to make lasting change. This will require substantial investment to bring together academia, industry and the latest software tools. But if we succeed, the next time the world faces an outbreak, we'll save millions more lives. Gates offers several specific recommendations — including "investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens." And...With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's now possible to use computers to identify weak spots on pathogens that we already know about, and we'll be able to do the same when new pathogens arise. These technologies are also speeding up the search for new compounds that will attack those weak spots.With adequate funding, various groups could take the most promising new compounds through Phase 1 studies even before there's an epidemic, or at least have several leads that can be turned into a product quickly once we know what the target looks like.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian officials "have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow's invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families," reports the Washington Post. Ukraine's IT Army (taking direction from Ukraine's government) "says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses."The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war. But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin's war machine. The West's solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers' parents, she said, is "classic psychological warfare" and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts. "If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, 'Oh, my God, that's barbaric,' " she said. "And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: 'Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?' " Clearview AI's chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge. Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several "'oh, wow' moments" as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan. Some of them are using Clearview's mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others have logged in for training while stationed at a checkpoint or out on patrol, the night sky visible behind their faces. "They're so enthusiastic," Ton-That said. "Their energy is really high. They say they're going to win, every call...." About 10% of Clearview's database came from Russia's biggest social network, the Post learns from Clearview's chief executive, ""making it a potentially useful tool for battlefield scans."Ukrainian agencies, Ton-That said, have used the app to confirm the identities of people at military checkpoints and to check whether a Ukrainian is a possible Russian infiltrator or saboteur. He argued that the system could deter Russian soldiers from committing war crimes, for fear of being identified, and said the Ukrainians are considering using the tool to verify the identities of Ukrainian refugees and their hosts as they flee for safety.... Beyond scanning corpses, Ukraine also is using facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers caught on camera looting Ukrainian homes and storefronts, an official with Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry told The Post. Mykhailo Fedorov, the head of that ministry, this month shared on Twitter and Instagram the name, hometown and personal photo of a man he said was recorded shipping hundreds of pounds of looted clothes from a Belarus post office to his home in eastern Russia. "Our technology will find all of them," he wrote. The article asks what happens if software makes a mistake in its identification — but Clearview's chief executive argues their tool is accurateTon-That said the company's sole ambition is to help defend a besieged country. But he also acknowledged the war has helped provide a "good example for other parts of the U.S. government to see how these use cases work." "This is a new war," he said. And the Ukrainians are "very creative with what they've been able to do." Thanks to Slashdot readers fbobraga and schwit1 for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Cryptocurrency has changed the game of cybercrime," argues Vice's Christian Devolu, in a new episode of their video series CRYPTOLAND. "Hackers and cybergangs have been locking down the data of large corporations, police departments, and even hospitals, and demanding ransom — and guess what they're asking for? Cryptocurrency!" In short, argues an article accompanying the episode, cryptocurrency "gave birth to the ransomware epidemic." Slashdot reader em1ly shares one highlight from the video: The team visits a school district in Missouri ["just one of around 1,000 U.S. schools hacked last year with ransomware"] that was the victim of a ransomware attack. ["Luckily, the school's backups were not impacted...."] Another interesting observation from the article:When ransom payments do happen, companies like Chainalysis can track the Bitcoin through the blockchain, identifying the hackers' wallets and collaborating with law enforcement in an attempt to recover the funds or identify the hackers themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under "false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the "true nature" of the school's financial interest in students' success. "I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn -- about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally," Bruner said in a press release. "I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me." Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit. After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school's job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students' success -- specifically by "falsely representing" that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Headline says it all," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81. "Lots of people have been looking forward to this Kickstarter for the Unihertz Titan Slim, but it is easily the thickest phone of 2022." Neowin's Dean Howell reacts to an unboxing video of Unihertz's Titan Slim, the successor to last year's Titan Pocket physical keyboard-equipped BlackBerry clone, writing: While Blackberry refugees have been clamoring for new PKB devices, they've been asking for them to be thin and sleek like the Blackberry of yesterday. We thought that's what we were getting with the announcement of the Titan Slim, but after yesterday's unboxing video by Adam over at TechOdyssey we know that's not the case at all. [...] Normally he would show how it compares to other devices, and I think this go 'round he was reticent to compare it directly to the Titan Pocket because if he did it would confirm what I think is true; the Titan Slim is not slim at all and it's every bit as think as the Titan Pocket. The drama doesn't end there I'm afraid. There is a review embargo on this device, so there are a lot of details Adam didn't talk about, like performance characteristics. [...] New year, new phone, new CPU right? Wrong. I wondered what CPU the Titan Slim would ship with and it took less than a minute to figure out. I went over to Geekbench and found it had already been tested. Unfortunately, the Titan Slim will ship with the same CPU as last year's Titan Pocket. What's worse is the Helio P70 in the Titan Slim is comparable at best to the then-mid-range Snapdragon 660 of the 2018 Key2.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes making a brand-new type of box requires outside-the-box thinking, which is exactly what Spartan chemists used to create an eight-atom, magnetic cube. Phys.Org reports: Part of what made the researchers' idea so wild was their choice to work with starting ingredients that are notoriously finicky in the chemistry community. One ingredient is a group of elements referred to as lanthanides, which occupy a special row toward the bottom of the periodic table of elements. The other is the metallic element bismuth, which doesn't typically get too much attention (although some may recognize it from its role in bright pink antacids such as Pepto Bismol). By finding a way to combine the bismuth with a lanthanide element -- notably terbium or dysprosium -- they created a molecule with permanent magnetic features. It's the same magnetism found in bar magnets and hard disk drives, but at a much smaller scale. The small scale of molecular magnets offers technological opportunities, such as improving the storage capacity of magnetic hard drives. There are also emerging applications where conventional magnets may simply be too large to contribute, such as in processors for quantum computers. The first single-molecule magnet was discovered about 30 years ago and, since then, researchers have been seeking new varieties with different physical and chemical attributes. They've also been working to develop more creative chemical approaches to make the magnets. The molecule itself, though, looks simple, belying the complexity of the process required to make it. The top and bottom of the molecule are capped with rings of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Each ring is linked to a lanthanide that forms a cube with the bismuth atoms. The researchers published their findings in the journal Chem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California, which aims to have a carbon-free power grid within 25 years, got a short glimpse of that possibility earlier this month. The state's main grid ran on more than 97% renewable energy at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday April 3, breaking a previous record of 96.4% that was set just a week earlier, the California Independent System Operator said Thursday in a statement. While these all-time highs are for a brief time, they solidly demonstrate the advances being made to reliably achieve California's clean energy goals," said California ISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in the statement. Power production from the sun and wind typically peak in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the angle of the sun allowing for an extended period of strong solar production, the grid operator said. While hitting the new renewable record is remarkable, the state has found itself scrambling for power supplies during the past two summers as it has added more intermittent sources and retired natural-gas plants for environmental reasons. California has set a target to have a zero-carbon power system by 2045.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's controversial App Tracking Transparency feature available in iOS 14.5 is expected to have a significant impact on Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and YouTube in 2022. According to a report by Lotame, big tech platforms' revenue could drop by almost $16 billion. 9to5Mac reports: For those who don't remember, ATT requires that applications ask permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. For example, when you open the Facebook app, you'll see a prompt that says the app would like to track you across other apps and services. There will be two options from which to choose: "Ask App not to Track" or "Allow." Talking about Facebook, Lotame's report shows that Zuckerberg's company will take the biggest hit as the privacy changes will cost it $12.8 billion in revenue: "The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute,' said Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer at Lotame. 'To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boffins at two US universities have found that muting popular native video-conferencing apps fails to disable device microphones -- and that these apps have the ability to access audio data when muted, or actually do so. The research is described in a paper titled, "Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing App." The Register reports: Among the apps studied -- Zoom (Enterprise), Slack, Microsoft Teams/Skype, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, BlueJeans, WhereBy, GoToMeeting, Jitsi Meet, and Discord -- most presented only limited or theoretical privacy concerns. The researchers found that all of these apps had the ability to capture audio when the mic is muted but most did not take advantage of this capability. One, however, was found to be taking measurements from audio signals even when the mic was supposedly off. "We discovered that all of the apps in our study could actively query (i.e., retrieve raw audio) the microphone when the user is muted," the paper says. "Interestingly, in both Windows and macOS, we found that Cisco Webex queries the microphone regardless of the status of the mute button." They found that Webex, every minute or so, sends network packets "containing audio-derived telemetry data to its servers, even when the microphone was muted." This telemetry data is not recorded sound but an audio-derived value that corresponds with the volume level of background activities. Nonetheless, the data proved sufficient for the researchers to construct an 82 per cent accurate background activity classifier to analyze the transmission and infer the likely activity among six possibilities -- e.g. cooking, cleaning, typing, etc. -- in the room where the app is active. Worse still from a security standpoint, while other apps encrypted their outgoing data stream before sending it to the operating system's socket interface, Webex did not. "Only in Webex were we able to intercept plaintext immediately before it is passed to the Windows network socket API," the paper says, noting that the app's monitoring behavior is inconsistent with the Webex privacy policy. The app's privacy policy states Cisco Webex Meetings does not "monitor or interfere with you your [sic] meeting traffic or content." After the researchers reached out about their findings, Cisco altered Webex so it no longer transmits microphone telemetry data. "Cisco is aware of this report, and thanks the researchers for notifying us about their research," said a Cisco spokesperson. "Webex uses microphone telemetry data to tell a user they are muted, referred to as the 'mute notification' feature. Cisco takes the security of its products very seriously, and this is not a vulnerability in Webex."Read more of this story at Slashdot.