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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early February a black box crammed with computer processors took a flight from California to Uganda. The squat, 4-foot-high box resembled a giant stereo amp. Once settled into place in Kampala, its job was to predict the weather better than anything the nation had used before (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The California startup that shipped the device, Atmo AI, plans by this summer to swap it out for a grander invention: a sleek, metallic supercomputer standing 8 feet tall and packing in 20 times more power. "It's meant to be the iPhone of global meteorology," says Alexander Levy, Atmo's co-founder and chief executive officer. That's a nod to Apple's design cred and market strategy: In many countries, consumers who'd never owned desktop computers bought smartphones in droves. Similarly, Atmo says, countries without the pricey supercomputers and data centers needed to make state-of-the-art weather forecasts -- effectively, every nation that's not a global superpower -- will pay for its cheaper device instead. For its first customer, though, the Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA), Atmo is sending its beta version, the plain black box. Prizing function over form seems wise for the urgent problem at hand. In recent years, Uganda has had landslides, floods, and a Biblical plague of locusts that devastated farms. The locusts came after sporadic drought and rain, stunning officials who didn't anticipate the swarms. "It became an eye-opener for us," says David Elweru, UNMA's acting executive director. Many nations facing such ravages lack the most modern tools to plan for the changing climate. Atmo says artificial intelligence programs are the answer. "Response begins with predictions," Levy says. "If we expect countries to react to events only after they've happened, we're dooming people to disaster and suffering." It's a novel approach. Meteorology poses considerable challenges for AI systems, and only a few weather authorities have experimented with it. Most countries haven't had the resources to try. Ugandan officials signed a multi-year deal with Atmo but declined to share the terms. The UNMA picked the startup partly because its device was "way, way cheaper" than alternatives, according to Stephen Kaboyo, an investor advising Atmo in Uganda. Kaboyo spoke by phone in February, Kampala's dry season, as rain pelted the city. "We haven't seen this before," he said of the weather. "Who knows what is going to happen in the next three seasons?" [...] Atmo reports that its early tests have doubled the accuracy scores of baseline forecasts in Southeast Asia, where the startup is pursuing contracts. Initial tests on the ground in Uganda correctly predicted rainfall when other systems didn't, according to UNMA officials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukraine's two leading suppliers of neon, which produce about half the world's supply of the key ingredient for making chips, have halted their operations as Moscow has sharpened its attack on the country, threatening to raise prices and aggravate the semiconductor shortage. CNN Business reports: Some 45%-54% of the world's semiconductor grade neon, critical for the lasers used to make chips, comes from two Ukrainian companies, Ingas and Cryoin, according to Reuters calculations based on figures from the companies and market research firm Techcet. Global neon consumption for chip production reached about 540 metric tons last year, Techcet estimates. Both firms have shuttered their operations, according to company representatives contacted by Reuters, as Russian troops have escalated their attacks on cities throughout Ukraine, killing civilians and destroying key infrastructure. The stoppage casts a cloud over the worldwide output of chips, already in short supply after the coronavirus pandemic drove up demand for cell phones, laptops and later cars, forcing some firms to scale back production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, the fate of the International Space Station, which has 15 partner nations and is the crown jewel of unity in space between NASA and Russia, has been up in the air (figuratively, of course). What we do know is that there are no plans to abandon NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the space station, despite a number of stories claiming otherwise. "Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule at the end of this month, landing in Kazakhstan," reports Ars Technica. "NASA officials are expected to be there to greet him and bring him back to the United States." Ars Technica sets the record straight and explains where these Russian "threats" originated: The source of this "news" appears to be a video published more than a week ago by a Kremlin-aligned publication, RIA Novosti. Roscosmos TV provided footage for the video, but in sharing it acknowledged that the video was a "joke." Now, this is an exceptionally poor joke given the tensions on Earth, but it is important to understand that sharing a video a week ago does not mean Russia is threatening to leave Vande Hei behind. Nothing has changed since the video was posted. Since the beginning of this crisis, NASA officials have said operations with Russian colleagues working on the space station have proceeded nominally. "Operations have not changed at all," one NASA source confirmed Friday. On Monday, NASA's manager of the International Space Program, Joel Montalbano, is scheduled to speak at a news conference about upcoming spacewalks. He likely will say something similar. Additionally, Vande Hei could not be abandoned. At present there are three other Americans living on board the International Space Station -- Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, and Thomas Marshburn. There is also an allied astronaut, Matthias Maurer, from Germany. NASA has its own transportation to and from the station, so Vande Hei can be assured of a safe ride home whenever NASA wants. The status of the ISS partnership is subject to change, of course. It could do so quite quickly. Russia is doing horrible things in Ukraine, and the Western world has responded with harsh sanctions. No one really knows whether Vladimir Putin will decide to end Russian participation in the International Space Station. Certainly, making it appear to a domestic audience that he was stranding a NASA astronaut in space might make him look "strong" to some Russian people. But there are simply no indications this will happen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wall Street Journal: It's time to Spring Forward again, as most of the U.S. shifts Sunday into daylight-saving time. If it were up to some lawmakers, the lost hour of sleep every March would be but a fixture of the past. The tradition of setting clocks forward in the spring and backward in the fall has been a source of debate and consternation for decades. Efforts to make daylight-saving time -- or, in some cases, standard time -- permanent have bubbled up in state houses over the years. But the bipartisan cause to stop the time changes has gained renewed momentum recently (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), with lawmakers citing studies identifying the negative effects of clock changes on people's health and the economy. Eighteen states have passed legislation or resolutions in the past four years making daylight-saving time permanent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2022, 28 states are weighing bills regarding the time changes, according to the group, which tracks state laws. The majority of the 68 measures seek to make daylight-saving time the permanent standard -- making the changes less likely to be swiftly enacted. Under current federal law, any state can choose to observe standard time year-round. But states can't move to follow daylight-saving time permanently without changes to federal law. A bipartisan group of senators, including Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.), reintroduced legislation in March 2021 to make daylight-saving time the year-round standard. The legislation would allow similar laws passed in states including Florida, Georgia, Delaware, Oregon and Louisiana to take effect. But the bill hasn't made much progress in the past year. "Switching in and out of daylight-saving time is outdated," Mr. Rubio said in a video message Thursday, renewing calls for action. "Let's just lock the clock once and for all and put all this stupidity behind us." [...] Lawmakers hoping to make daylight-saving time permanent say it would reduce car accidents, risks for heart attacks and reduce energy use. Some researchers, however, have questioned the role that time change plays in energy conservation and its correlation to negative health impacts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This winter's flu vaccine was a particularly bad match for the most common influenza strain in circulation, a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Gizmodo reports: Thankfully, the flu season was much milder than usual for the second year in a row, as ongoing covid-19 precautions likely blunted the spread of flu as well. The estimates come from the CDC's long-running surveillance program of people with suspected flu-like symptoms who visit various outpatient sites throughout the country. Overall, the odds of catching a case of confirmed flu were only slightly lower for vaccinated people, the researchers found. Against all flu strains detected at these sites, the vaccine was deemed to be 14% effective, as well as 16% effective at preventing cases of flu from A(H3N2) viruses, the predominant strain this winter. Numbers this low are far below the 50% threshold for a vaccine to be considered relatively useful, and they're not even high enough to reach statistical significance. In the words of the researchers, who published their results in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the vaccine "did not reduce the risk for outpatient respiratory illness caused by influenza A(H3N2) viruses that have predominated so far this season." Flu vaccines, even in a good year, are far from perfect. The strains of influenza virus that infect humans are constantly evolving, meaning that scientists have to try to predict what these strains will look like during the next flu season so that they can match them to the strains included in the vaccine (the vaccine will usually include four strains at a time). This guessing game often results in a vaccine that's around 50% to 60% effective, but sometimes, as is the case this year, the mismatch can get worse. It doesn't help that this year's main flu is H3N2, a subtype of flu already known for being harder to predict than others.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Landmark legislation that will drastically curtail tech companies' ability to stop employees from talking about mistreatment is headed to the governor's desk in Washington state. GeekWire reports: Last week, Washington legislators approved House Bill 1795 -- also called the Silenced No More Act -- in major victory for activists who have fought to limit non-disclosures and non-disparagement agreements. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Liz Berry (D-Seattle), makes it illegal for companies to ban employees from discussing "illegal acts of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour violations, and sexual assault." "This bill is about empowering workers," said Berry in a statement last week. "It is about giving workers a voice. Despite the progress we've made in recent years, too many workers are still forced to sign NDAs and settlement agreements that silence them. This bill will allow all survivors of inappropriate or illegal workplace misconduct to share their experiences if they choose to do so." NDAs have long been common practice at many large tech companies, and often state that employees will have to repay severance money or face other financial ramifications if they violate the agreement. Washington state will be the second state to ban these types of gag orders; California passed its own Silenced No More Act last year. There, the legislation passed despite vocal opposition from trade groups, which argued that employees could end up getting hurt if companies decide to limit severance payments, or to forgo them altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the latest updates from CNN, Ukraine's defense ministry claims Russia is planning to carry out "some sort of terrorist attack at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant" and blame Ukraine. The plant is currently without power and under Russian control. From the report: The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence claimed on its Facebook page Friday that "the available intelligence says Putin has ordered that his troops to prepare a terror attack at Chernobyl for which the Russian invaders will try to blame Ukraine." The directorate also repeated that the plant "remains completely disconnected from the monitoring systems run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)." The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence also alleged Friday that Russian forces had denied a Ukrainian repair team access to Chernobyl. It claimed without offering evidence that "Belarusian specialists" went there posing as nuclear power experts and that Russian saboteurs were arriving to set up a terror attack. The ministry claimed that "without receiving the desired result from the ground military operation and direct talks, Putin is ready to resort to nuclear blackmail of the international community." The IAEA said last week that it had not been able to re-establish communication with systems installed to monitor nuclear material and activities at either the Chernobyl or Zaporizhzhia plants following the loss of remote data transmissions from those systems. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said Thursday that the situation at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, occupied by the Russian forces, was degrading as the IAEA was losing "a significant amount of information" on safeguarding monitoring systems. However, he said he was "quite encouraged [...] on one important thing, is that Ukraine and Russian Federation want to work with us, they agree to work with us." "Both Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly claimed without substantiation that the other side is planning to provoke an incident involving nuclear, chemical or biological agents," notes CNN. On Wednesday, Russian's foreign ministry claimed that the U.S. operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, "an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv," reports Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will begin testing bidirectional charging in California with new pilot programs announced this week at General Motors and Ford. ["This will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer's home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E's electric supply," explains InsideEVs.] [...] General Motors might be late to the EV pickup party, but on Wednesday, it was first to announce that it is working with PG&E on vehicle-to-home technology. This summer, the two companies will begin lab tests with different GM EVs before starting to test vehicle-to-home connections at some customer homes. The two companies say they plan to open up to a larger customer trial by the end of this year. On Thursday, Ford and PG&E revealed similar plans at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. Few details have been made public so far, though we know that unlike in the GM pilot, PG&E will not be able to remotely operate the vehicle-to-home feature on demand. And unfortunately, neither the Ford Mustang Mach-E nor the e-Transit will be capable of bidirectional charging; it will just be the F-150 Lightning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that alleged REvil ransomware affiliate, Yaroslav Vasinskyi, was extradited to the United States last week to stand trial for the Kaseya cyberattack. BleepingComputer reports: Vasinkyi, a 22-year-old Ukrainian national, was arrested in November 2021 while entering Poland for his cybercrime activities as a REvil member. Vasinkyi is believed to be a REvil ransomware affiliate tasked to breach corporate networks worldwide, steal unencrypted data, and then encrypt all of the devices on the network. Shortly after Vasinkyi was arrested, the DOJ announced that he was responsible for the ransomware attack against Kaseya, a managed services provider, impacting thousands of companies worldwide. "In the alleged attack against Kaseya, Vasinskyi caused the deployment of malicious Sodinokibi/REvil code throughout a Kaseya product that caused the Kaseya production functionality to deploy REvil ransomware to "endpoints" on Kaseya customer networks," explained the U.S. DoJ announcement. "After the remote access to Kaseya endpoints was established, the ransomware was executed on those computers, which resulted in the encryption of data on computers of organizations around the world that used Kaseya software." Vasinskyi is facing the following charges: conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers; intentional damage to protected computers; and conspiracy to commit money laundering. "If convicted for all counts, Vasinskyi will be sentenced to a total of 115 years in prison," adds BleepingComputer. "Additionally, he will also forfeit all property and financial assets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fir Tree Capital Management, a $4 billion hedge fund, is shorting Tether as the largest stablecoin in crypto faces down scrutiny from regulators. Decrypt reports: According to clients of the firm and reported by Bloomberg, Fir Tree has constructed a way to short Tether in an "asymmetric trade." In other words, the risk is minimized and the potential to generate profit -- the firm's clients reportedly say -- remains high. The hedge fund is also reportedly betting that its decision could generate a profit within 12 months. The firm's concerns center around the stablecoin provider's $24 billion in high-yield commercial paper, which the firm also believes is linked to Chinese real estate developers. Chinese real estate has been facing down a debt of its own, led by China Evergrande Group, whose liabilities exceeded $300 billion in December 2021, when it missed a debt payment deadline. While Tether -- the company -- says it does not own any commercial paper linked to Evergrande, Bloomberg reports that Fir Tree expects some of the commercial paper Tether does own will lose value. Investors reportedly said this could cause a potentially large drop in the reserves held by Tether. Speaking to The Block last month on the financial risks posed by stablecoins, U.S. Congressman Warren Davidson called Tether "a time bomb." He added: "There isn't transparency or disclosure there. They acknowledge that they have commercial paper, but they don't disclose what exactly that is. That's where I think that a framework that compels disclosure does provide investor protection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards. Automakers and tech companies have faced significant hurdles to deploying automated driving system (ADS) vehicles without human controls because of safety standards written decades ago that assume people are in control. The rules revise (PDF) regulations that assume vehicles "will always have a driver's seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position." "For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually operated driving controls are logically unnecessary," the agency said. The new rules, which were first proposed in March 2020, emphasize automated vehicles must provide the same levels of occupant protection as human-driven vehicles. NHTSA's rule says children should not occupy what is traditionally known as the "driver's" position, given that the driver's seating position has not been designed to protect children in a crash, but if a child is in that seat, the car will not immediately be required to cease motion. NHTSA said existing regulations do not currently bar deploying automated vehicles as long as they have manual driving controls, and as it continues to consider changing other safety standards, manufacturers may still need to petition NHTSA for an exemption to sell their ADS-equipped vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dust off those plastic binders that lived in the back seat of your car and fire up the boombox, because compact discs are back. From a report: CD sales enjoyed year-over-year growth for the first time since 2004, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual sales report. Combined with the decade-long vinyl sales explosion, overall physical music sales grew for the first time since 1996. Physical music sales exploded to the tune of $1.65 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the RIAA data. CD sales grew to $584.2 million nationally last year, up more than $100 million from 2020. By comparison, 2021 vinyl sales increased to $1 billion annually, up from $643.9 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An investigation has uncovered a coordinated campaign to pay Russian TikTok influencers to post videos pushing pro-Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine. Vice News: Numerous campaigns have been coordinated in a secret Telegram channel that directs these influencers on what to say, where to capture videos, what hashtags to use, and when exactly to post the video. These campaigns were launched at the beginning of the invasion and have involved a number of the highest-profile influencers on TikTok, some of whom have over a million followers. And even though TikTok has banned new uploads from users located inside Russia, the campaigns have not stopped. The Telegram channel is run by an anonymous administrator who recruits social media influencers and told VICE News he was a journalist. The administrator lays out the requirements, such as minimum views required and the date and time the video needs to be posted. He also asks potential recruits to say how much money they demand per post. It remains unknown who is paying for the campaigns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, March 11, 2022, marks two years since covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. We've had lockdowns, vaccines, and arguments about how to move forward and live with this virus. We've watched the pandemic through numbers and data and memorials to the many lives lost, officially now over six million. It is likely this figure is a vast undercount. A study published in The Lancet this week estimated that the true number may be three times higher, at 18.2 million. Technology Review: And, in a statement marking the two-year anniversary, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned: "Although reported cases and deaths are declining globally, and several countries have lifted restrictions, the pandemic is far from over -- and it will not be over anywhere until it's over everywhere."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gaming giant Ubisoft has confirmed a cybersecurity incident that led to the mass-reset of company passwords, but has declined to say what the incident actually was. From a report: In a brief statement, Ubisoft said: "Last week, Ubisoft experienced a cyber security incident that caused temporary disruption to some of our games, systems, and services. Our IT teams are working with leading external experts to investigate the issue. As a precautionary measure we initiated a company-wide password reset. Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident," the statement said. The France-headquartered video game company is best known for its Assassin's Creed and Far Cry brands. According to the company's latest earnings report from October, Ubisoft had 117 million active players.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ordinary Russians face another major blow to their everyday lives due to the backlash to President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. On the same day, two major web-security companies have decided to quit selling to them, making Russians' internet use more vulnerable to Kremlin snooping, hacking and other cybercrimes. From a report: The departure of the two companies, Avast, a $6 billion antivirus provider based in the Czech Republic, and Utah-based website-certification firm DigiCert, will further isolate the country of 145 million people. "We are horrified at Russia's aggression against Ukraine, where the lives and livelihoods of innocent people are at severe risk, and where all freedoms have come under attack," Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek wrote on Thursday. Vlcek said the company was including Belarus in the withdrawal of services, and was continuing to pay the full salaries of employees in Russia and Ukraine, many of whom it was helping to relocate. "We do not take this decision lightly," Vlcek wrote. "We've offered our products in Russia for nearly 20 years and users in this country are an important part of our global community." While Avast joins other antivirus companies, including NortonLifeLock and ESET, in halting sales, Russians will still be able to get antivirus protection from Moscow-based Kaspersky and other providers within the country. The departure of DigiCert could prove more significant. DigiCert is one of the world's biggest providers of website certificates, which aim to prove that when a person visits a site it's owned by the entity they expected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House has been closely watching TikTok's rise as a dominant news source, leading to its decision to approach a select group of the platform's most influential names. From a report: This week, the administration began working with Gen Z For Change, a nonprofit advocacy group, to help identify top content creators on the platform to orchestrate a briefing aimed at answering questions about the conflict and the United States' role in it. The briefing was led by Matt Miller, a special adviser for communications at the White House National Security Council, and Psaki. The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, and in it, Biden officials stressed the power these creators had in communicating with their followers. "We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest," said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, "so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have categorised more than 80,000 plant species worldwide and found that most of them will "lose" in the face of humanity -- going extinct because people don't need them. From a report: This means that plant communities of the future will be hugely more homogenised than those of today, according to the paper published in the journal Plants, People, Planet. The findings, which paint a stark picture of the threat to biodiversity, cover less than 30% of all known plant species, and as such are a "wake-up call," say the researchers, highlighting the need for more work in this field. "We're actually beginning to quantify what's going to make it through the bottleneck of the Anthropocene, in terms of numbers," said John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the paper. "It's not the future, it's happening. The bottleneck is starting to happen right now. And I think that's part of the wake-up call that we are trying to give here. It's something we might be able to slow down a little bit, but it's happening."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok's national security clash with the U.S. government may be nearing its conclusion, without the sort of shareholder overhaul that was previously proposed. From a report: The social media company is in advanced talks with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to store all of its U.S. user information with Oracle, without Chinese owner ByteDance being able to access it, as first reported by Reuters and confirmed by Axios. Data sovereignty has been the core regulatory concern since this all began in mid-2020, at least for career staff. Certain political appointees of the Trump administration also expressed fears that the Chinese government could use TikTok to influence U.S. political or social sentiment, but content moderation seems outside the scope of current talks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly, makes it a bit more difficult to see your chronological feed. From a report: The design change, which lets you swipe between your Home (algorithmically served) and Latest (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced Thursday. To set it up, you tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner, and you'll see the option to pin your "Latest timeline," and if you select that, you'll see both "Home" and "Latest Tweets" tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you use pinned lists on the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS, and it's coming "soon" to Android and the web, Twitter says. To my great disappointment, however, I've found that after testing the feature, now I can't make the chronological feed the default. Instead, I can only have Home as my default or set up the two Home and Latest Tweets tabs and swap between them as needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency ATMs that allow people to buy and sell crypto are illegal in the UK, according to a letter made public on Friday by Britain's Financial Conduct Authority. From a report: That means anyone currently operating a Bitcoin ATM is doing so illegally and will have to stop, according to the government regulator. "Crypto ATMs offering cryptoasset exchange services in the UK must be registered with us and comply with UK Money Laundering Regulations," the Financial Conduct Authority announced on its website. "None of the cryptoasset firms registered with us have been approved to offer crypto ATM services, meaning that any of them operating in the UK are doing so illegally and consumers should not be using them," the FCA continued. It's unclear how many bitcoin ATMs may currently be in operation throughout Britain, though the online tracker Coin ATM Tracker claims there are currently 84 in the UK. The same website lists over 34,000 crypto ATMs in the U.S. alone, by far the largest number in the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Code Verify is a new browser extension from WhatsApp parent company Meta that aims to improve the security of WhatsApp's web version, the company has announced. From a report: The extension works by verifying that the contents of WhatsApp's web version haven't been tampered with. The aim is to make it a lot more difficult for a would-be attacker to compromise data or the privacy of WhatsApp's end-to-end encrypted messages when using the browser-based version of the service. The extension follows the launch of WhatsApp's multi-device beta last year. This aims to make using the messaging service from devices other than your primary phone easier and more seamless. Since the feature's launch, WhatsApp says it's seen an increase in people accessing its service through web browsers, which present new security challenges compared to an app. There's nothing particularly new about the security methods underpinning Code Verify. Ultimately it's just comparing a hash of the code running in your browser, with a hash held by trusted third-party Cloudflare.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian prosecutors have asked a court to ban Meta Platforms's Facebook and Instagram as "extremist," Interfax reported, the latest move in a growing crackdown on social networks. From a report: Authorities blocked access to Facebook last week under a new media law, but the "extremist" designation, if approved by a court, would effectively criminalize all of Meta's operations in Russia. The company's Instagram app would also be blocked. The move comes amid increasing tension between Moscow and U.S. tech companies. Earlier Friday, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, called on prosecutors to investigate Meta after Reuters reported that the company had temporarily eased internal restrictions on calling for violence against Russian soldiers due to the invasion of Ukraine. Russia has already banned certain social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, while tech companies have demonetized Russian state-sponsored media and blocked them in Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Consumer Reports wants the Federal Communications Commission to take a closer look at whether Internet service providers are complying with a US law that prohibits them from charging hardware rental fees when customers use their own equipment. In a filing submitted to the FCC this week, Consumer Reports said it asked members about their Internet bills and got over 350 responses, with some suggesting violations of either the letter or spirit of the law. "Some contain allegations that the law is being violated, whereas others state the new statute is being respected. Many more stories suggest that ISPs dissuade consumers from using their own equipment, typically by refusing to troubleshoot any service disruptions if consumers opt not to rent the ISP's devices. Such practices result in de facto situations where consumers feel pressured or forced to rent equipment that they would prefer to own instead," Consumer Reports told the FCC. Consumer Reports' filing came in response to the FCC asking for public comment on the implementation of the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which took effect in December 2020. In addition to price-transparency rules for TV service, the law prohibited TV and broadband providers from charging rental or lease fees when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." All the comments collected by Consumer Reports are available here. The FCC filing includes examples of complaints about AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Frontier, Windstream, and Cox, though the complaints weren't all about rental fees. In its call for public input, the FCC asked for comment on "the extent to which (if at all) subject entities continue to assess charges for equipment that are expressly prohibited by the statute." [...] Consumer Reports said its questions for members were "designed to measure whether or not ISPs were in compliance... and also to solicit consumer opinion on whether or not it was difficult to use consumer-owned equipment versus renting those devices from the provider. Notably, neither of the two cable industry trade associations mentioned this issue in any detail in their comments filed last month at the Commission." Consumer Reports said that some of the responses "suggest the statute is not being complied with as vigorously as Congress intended... These allegations merit further investigation by the Commission." Consumer Reports offered to share contact information for the customers with the FCC so it can investigate further.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Health Organization advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in the country's public health laboratories to prevent "any potential spills" that would spread disease among the population, the agency told Reuters on Thursday. From the report: Biosecurity experts say Russia's movement of troops into Ukraine and bombardment of its cities have raised the risk of an escape of disease-causing pathogens, should any of those facilities be damaged. Like many other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting both animals and humans including, most recently, COVID-19. Its labs have received support from the United States, the European Union and the WHO. In response to questions from Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia's invasion, the WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs for several years to promote security practices that help prevent "accidental or deliberate release of pathogens." "As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills," the WHO, a United Nations agency, said. The WHO would not say when it had made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine's laboratories. The agency also did not answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed. On Wednesday, Russian's foreign ministry claimed that the U.S. operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, "an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv," reports Reuters. A spokesperson for the ministry went on to claim that Russian forces unearthed documents in Ukraine that showed "an emergency attempt to erase evidence of military biological programs" by destroying lab samples. Not only has Ukraine denied these allegations, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby called them "laughable" and suggested Moscow could be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI software can help historians interpret and date ancient texts by reconstructing works destroyed over time, according to a new paper published in Nature. The Register reports: A team of computer scientists and experts in classical studies led by DeepMind and Ca' Foscari University of Venice trained a transformer-based neural network to restore inscriptions written in ancient Greek between 7th century BC and 5th century AD. The model, named "Ithaca" after the home of legendary Greek king Odysseus, can also estimate when the text was written and where it might have originated. By recovering fragments of text on broken pieces of pottery or blurry scripts, for example, researchers can begin translating them and learn more about ancient civilizations. [...] Why ancient Greek? The researchers said the variable content and available context in the Greek epigraphic record made it an "excellent challenge" for language processing, plus the large body of (digitized) written texts that is currently available -- essential for training the model. First, the text needs to be transcribed by scanning an image of an old object or script. The text is then fed into Ithaca for analysis. It works by predicting lost or blurry characters to restore words as outputs. The software generates and ranks a list of its top predictions; epigraphists can then scroll through them and judge whether the model's guesses seem accurate or not. The best results are reached when human and machine work together. When experts worked alone, they were 25 per cent accurate at piecing together ancient artefacts, but when they collaborated with Ithaca the accuracy level jumped up to 72 per cent. Ithaca's performance on its own is about 62 per cent, for comparison. It's also 71 per cent at pinpointing the location of where the text was written, and can date works to within 30 years of their creation between 800BC and 800AD. Ithaca was trained on over 63,000 Greek inscriptions containing over three million words from The Packard Humanities Institute's Searchable Greek Inscriptions public dataset. The team masked portions of the text and tasked the model with filling in the blanks. Ithaca analyses other words in a given sentence for context when generating characters. [...] DeepMind is now adjusting its model to adapt to other types of old writing systems, like Akkadian developed in Mesopotamia, Demotic from ancient Egypt, to Mayan originating from Central America and ancient Hebrew.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A company that plans to drill deeper into Earth than ever before, creating holes that would extend a record-shattering 12 miles under our planet's surface, has raised a total of $63 million since its launch in 2020. Most recently, Quaise Energy, a startup that aims to revolutionize the geothermal energy market, secured $40 million in series A funding in February, reports Axios. The goal of these super-deep holes is to access a limitless amount of renewable energy from the heat deep inside Earth. "This funding round brings us closer to providing clean, renewable baseload energy," said Carlos Araque, CEO and co-founder of Quaise Energy, according to BusinessWire. "Our technology allows us to access energy anywhere in the world, at a scale far greater than wind and solar, enabling future generations to thrive in a world powered with abundant clean energy." Geothermal energy has a low profile compared to other renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro, but Quaise believes it is "at the core of an energy-independent world," according to the company's website. This form of energy is among the oldest power sources harnessed by humans, but it only accounts for about 0.4 percent of net energy production in the United States, which is the world's biggest geothermal producer. Quaise, which is a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intends to pioneer this technology using vacuum tubes known as gyrotrons that shoot millimeter-wave light beams, powered by electrons in a strong magnetic field. Using these devices, the company plans to burn almost twice as far into Earth as the deepest holes ever made, such as Russia's Kola Superdeep Borehole or Qatar's Al Shaheen oil well, both of which extend for about 7.5 miles. Gyrotrons are powerful enough to heat plasma in nuclear fusion experiments, making them an ideal tool to probe unprecedented depths of some 12 miles, where subterranean rocks roil at temperatures of about 500C (930F). Water pumped into this searing environment would instantly vaporize as steam that could be efficiently converted to electricity. Araque and his team at Quaise plan to funnel their seed money into prototype technologies within the next few years. By 2028, the company aspires to retrofit coal-fueled power plants into geothermal energy hotspots, reports ScienceAlert. The process of drilling out these super-deep holes would take a few months, but once the setup is complete, they could provide limitless energy to a region for up to a century, according to Araque.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries "unfriendly" to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia's huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald's that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a "priority watch list" for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission. The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. "It's just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world," Gerben said. Russia's decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality. The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia's Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering "removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted," according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would "mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries," Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald's, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is updating the default "Messages" app to include a number of new features, such as the ability to handle iMessage "Tapbacks." TechCrunch reports: Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction -- like love, laughter, confusion or excitement -- will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it's the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. [...] Android's interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the "heart" reaction on Android becomes the "face with the heart eyes" emoji. And the iMessage's exclamation mark reaction becomes the "face with the open mouth" emoji. Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn't support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) filed by Left Field Holdings, a Florida franchisee of Lime Fresh Mexican restaurants, said Google has been creating illegitimate digital "storefronts" for restaurants and deceiving users into thinking that the restaurants approved them. The lawsuit says Google takes a cut from the delivery sites for orders made through the storefronts, and in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them. Left Field said restaurants are charged up to 30% of each order in fees by delivery sites, and therefore see "little (if any)" profits from them. Google never received permission to sell the restaurants' food, designed the storefronts to look like they were restaurant-appproved, and placed a large "Order Online" button under restaurant search results to lure users to its storefronts, according to Left Field. [...] The lawsuit accuses Google of deceiving customers and violating federal trademark law starting in 2019. It asks for an undisclosed amount of money damages on behalf of Left Field and similarly affected restaurant owners and a ban on Google's alleged misuse of their trade names. In response to the lawsuit, a Google spokesperson said that the "Order Online" feature is meant to "connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from," and that it lets restaurants "indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released what it says is 800GB of data from a section of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government body responsible for censorship in the country. On Distributed Denial of Secrets' website, the organization describes the data as coming from a hack and says that Anonymous claimed responsibility. Roskomnadzor is the agency that has in recent days announced a block of Facebook and other websites in the country as the war in Ukraine intensifies. Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of Bashkortostan is in the west of the country. Motherboard found references to the Republic of Bashkortostan in some of the released files. The data is split into two main categories: a series of over 360,000 files totalling in at 526.9GB and which date up to as recently as March 5, and then two databases that are 290.6GB in size, according to Distributed Denial of Secrets' website. "The source, a part of Anonymous, urgently felt the Russian people should have access to information about their government. They also expressed their opposition to the Russian people being cut off from independent media and the outside world," wrote DDoSecrets on its website, as highlighted by Forbes. "We will soon be releasing the raw data while we look for solutions to extracting the data. One appears to be a legal research database that was, according to the file timestamp, last modified in 2020. The other appears to be a database for HR procedures." Given the size of the leak and timing, they note "it's always possible that something could be modified or planted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Niantic is acquiring 8th Wall, a company that helps developers make web-based augmented reality apps, in what it says is its "largest acquisition to date." The Verge reports: The acquisition will help boost Niantic's Lightship developer platform and to help developers "realize their visions for AR in the real-world metaverse," Niantic's Brian McClendon said in a blog post. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, and when asked, Niantic spokesperson Jen Stratton said the details were confidential. [...] [G]iven the acquisition announced Thursday, it seems that Niantic still believes in the potential for augmented reality apps and is aiming to make it easier for developers to make them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers' viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law. Variety reports: A class action law firm, Bursor & Fisher, filed the suit in federal court in New York on behalf of two HBO Max subscribers, Angel McDaniel and Constance Simon. The suit alleges that HBO provides Facebook with customer lists, which allows Facebook to match customers' viewing habits with their Facebook profiles. The suit alleges that HBO never receives consent from subscribers to do this, thereby violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. The act was passed in 1988, after a reporter obtained Robert Bork's rental history from a video store. The lawsuit argues that HBO knows that Facebook can combine such data because HBO is a major advertiser on Facebook, and it in fact uses that information to retarget Facebook ads to its own subscribers. HBO Max has a privacy policy on its website, in which it discloses that it and its partners use cookies to deliver personalized ads, among other purposes. But the VPPA requires that subscribers give separate consent to share their video viewing history. "In other words," the lawsuit states, "a standard privacy policy will not suffice."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: DuckDuckGo is now down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation in response to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, but some critics say the change amounts to censorship. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced the down-ranking on Twitter. "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create," he wrote in the tweet, which included the hashtag StandWithUkraine. "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation," he added. Weinberg didn't elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work. [...] Weinberg was quick to defend the decision, saying it was necessary to provide relevant search results over disinformation. Not everyone is a fan of the decision. "So you are censoring your users? DDG now decides what is or isn't misinformation? This decision should be left to the user," wrote one user on Twitter. "You've got that magic 'disinformation finder' eh?" wrote another user. "You're just sure you're going to only downrank things that are wrong?" Others referenced DuckDuckGo's commitment to "unbiased search."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn't stop them from being featured on Russian state TV. ProPublica: Researchers at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account. The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub. "The reason that it's so effective is because you don't actually have to convince someone that it's true. It's sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust," said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. "In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As daily life gets more expensive, workers are having a harder time making ends meet. From a report: While wage growth is high by historical standards, it isn't keeping up with the increased cost of living, which is growing at the fastest annual pace in about four decades. "Wages are up 5.1% over the past year, which is trailing the pace of inflation," said Bankrate.com senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick. "Indeed, surging prices are stealing the show on the minds of consumers." When wages rise at a slower pace than inflation, those paychecks won't go as far at the grocery store and at the gas pump -- two areas of the budget that are getting particularly squeezed. At the start of 2022, 64% of the U.S. population was living paycheck to paycheck, up from 61% in December and just shy of the high of 65% in 2020, according to a LendingClub report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has created its own trusted TLS certificate authority (CA) to solve website access problems that have been piling up after sanctions prevent certificate renewals. From a report: The sanctions imposed by western companies and governments are preventing Russian sites from renewing existing TLS certificates, causing browsers to block access to sites with expired certificates. [...] The Russian state has envisioned a solution in a domestic certificate authority for the independent issuing and renewal of TLS certificates. "It will replace the foreign security certificate if it is revoked or expires. The Ministry of Digital Development will provide a free domestic analogue. The service is provided to legal entities -- site owners upon request within 5 working days," explains the Russian public services portal, Gosuslugi (translated). However, for new Certificate Authorities (CA) to be trusted by web browsers, they first needed to be vetted by various companies, which can take a long time. Currently, the only web browsers that recognize Russia's new CA as trustworthy are the Russia-based Yandex browser and Atom products, so Russian users are told to use these instead of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: Two separate lawsuits against American University and George Washington University have new life after an appeals court revived cases that allege both institutions violated contractual obligations to students when they shifted to online instruction in early 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic [Qureshi v. American University, No. 21-7064 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022); Shaffer v. George Washington University, No. 21-7040 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 8, 2022)]. At the core of the issue is the refusal of both universities to refund students' tuition and fees. The plaintiffs allege that both universities had a contractual commitment to provide in-person education and should have offered at least partial tuition and fee refunds for students forced into online classes. Plaintiffs in both cases are seeking class action status for their lawsuits. The lawsuits against American University and GWU are just two among dozens of similar suits filed by students and families since 2020, which have had various outcomes in courts across the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve shipped its $400 handheld gaming console, the Steam Deck, before all its promised features were ready -- but one of the biggest is now here. From a report: You can now install Windows 10 on a Steam Deck and actually expect it to work because Valve has just released the all-important GPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth drivers you'll need to download and play games. Importantly, you'll need to wipe a Steam Deck to do this, there's no dual-boot yet, and Valve says you can only install Windows 10 since the Steam Deck's current BIOS apparently doesn't include firmware TPM support (which Microsoft infamously requires for Windows 11). Speakers and headphone jack don't work yet as there are no audio drivers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly discovered fossilized vampire squid has been named after the US president, Joe Biden, a team of paleontologists has announced. From a report: The Syllipsimopodi bideni, which has been described as an "incredibly rare" fossil, was first dug up in Montana and then donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988. But it sat untouched in a drawer for decades until a scientist pulled it out for a closer look. Speaking to the New York Times, Christopher Whalen, a paleontologist from New York's American Museum of Natural History, said he first noticed the squid's preserved arms and saw small suckers in the rock. "This was sitting in a museum since the 80s and no one realized it was important," said Whalen. "We chanced on that importance because I happened to notice the arm suckers." The Syllipsimopodi bideni drifted across oceans nearly 328m years ago. According to Whalen, it is the oldest known ancestor of vampyropods, a group that includes vampire squids and octopuses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse. "Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft appears to be adding a tabbed interface to the top of File Explorer, as Insiders testing the latest Windows 11 preview build have discovered the feature in a hidden state. From a report: First spotted by Windows Insider Rafael Rivera on Twitter, once enabled, tabs will appear along the top of the File Explorer app, allowing users to have multiple folders open in one window. Tabs in File Explorer has been a highly requested feature among the Windows community for years at this point. Microsoft almost delivered the feature via its canceled "Sets" UX, which saw the introduction of tabs in every app window, including File Explorer. But when Sets was killed off, so was the idea of tabs in File Explorer. But now, Tabs in File Explorer appears to be making a return, and it works exactly like you'd expect. This feature is yet to be officially announced by Microsoft, and since this is currently only in the Dev Channel, it's possible that Microsoft could cancel the feature before it ships, though we think that's unlikely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Goldman Sachs said it plans to close its operations in Russia, the first major Wall Street bank to leave in response to the nation's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: "Goldman Sachs is winding down its business in Russia in compliance with regulatory and licensing requirements," the company said Thursday in an emailed statement. "We are focused on supporting our clients across the globe in managing or closing out pre-existing obligations in the market and ensuring the well-being of our people." The Wall Street powerhouse has maintained a presence in Russia in recent years, but the country doesn't amount to a meaningful portion of its global banking business. At the end of 2021, the firm's total credit exposure to Russia was $650 million, most of which was tied to non-sovereign counterparties or borrowers. While Goldman is exiting Russia, the firm is still trading corporate debt tied to the country without the bank itself making wagers on price movements, a representative said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has confirmed that the brand new Studio Display will work when connected to PCs, but critical new features of the display will not carry over and the experience will be lacking compared to using the display with a Mac. MacRumors adds: Features that require macOS, such as True Tone, will not work when connected to PCs. When connected to a PC, the webcam in the Studio Display will work as a normal webcam, but Center Stage does require macOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2018, an international team of scientists announced a startling discovery: Buried beneath the thick ice of the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland is an impact crater 31 kilometers wide -- not as big as the crater from the dinosaur-killing impact 66 million years ago, but perhaps still big enough to mess with the climate. Scientists were especially excited by hints in the crater and the surrounding ice that the Hiawatha strike was recent -- perhaps within the past 100,000 years, when humans might have been around to witness it. But now, using dates gleaned from tiny mineral crystals in rocks shocked by the impact, the same team says the strike is much, much older. The researchers say it occurred 58 million years ago, a warm time when vast forests covered Greenland -- and humanity was not yet even a glimmer in evolution's eye. Kurt Kjaer, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and a co-author of the new study, says the new date is at odds with the team's initial impression, gleaned from ice-penetrating radar. "But this is the way science works and should work," he says. The date is a blow to a group of scientists that for more than a decade has advanced a controversial hypothesis that the Younger Dryas, a drastic, 1000-year cooling about 12,800 years ago, was triggered when a comet struck Earth. They had seized on the first Hiawatha paper as a smoking gun: The crater seemed about the right age, and it was in the right place -- near a region of the North Atlantic Ocean that heavily influences Northern Hemisphere climate. Now, says Brandon Johnson, a co-author and impact modeler at Purdue University, West Lafayette, "It's probably safe to put the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis back to rest for a while."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by Ars Tecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: The Biden administration is restoring California's authority to set its own rules on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, pickups and SUVs, a move that rolls back a Trump-era decision and puts California at the forefront of combatting climate change in the U.S. The decision reinstates a Clean Air Act waiver that allows California to adopt stronger fuel economy standards than those of the federal government and set the precedent for the rest of the country on how to mitigate vehicle emissions. The state's past ability to control vehicle emissions led to some innovative strategies in the auto industry, such as catalytic converters, which convert toxic gases and pollutants in exhaust gas into less-toxic pollutants, as well as 'check engine' lights. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted California's tighter standards. Under the Clean Air Act, the state has the ability to receive permission from the federal government to set its own rules on tailpipe standards that help lower emissions from gas-powered vehicles. California established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the country in 1966. The Trump administration in 2019 revoked California's authority to regulate its own air quality, arguing that it wouldn't allow "political agendas in a single state" to set national policy. That decision was part of a broader rollback of Obama-era vehicle emissions standards and climate change regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Microsoft Azure has nosed ahead of AWS in the public cloud adoption stakes, according to a report from IT Management outfit Flexera. The 2022 State of the Cloud Report survey will have brought smiles to the teams at Redmond and Amazon, and less cheer to Oracle's cloud crew, which continued to languish in fourth place behind Google. The key takeaway on the Azure front is its leadership with enterprise users, with 80 percent of respondents adopting Microsoft's public cloud, up from 76 percent the previous year. This was just ahead of AWS, which claimed a 77 percent adoption rate, down from 79 percent a year earlier. Some way behind was Google, with 48 percent, followed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which tumbled to 27 percent from 32 percent a year ago. The report indicates Azure is ahead of AWS for breadth of adoption, although Google has the highest percentage for experimentation (at 23 percent). There was some cause for optimism at Oracle with the highest percentage (12 percent) planning to use its cloud, meaning there is every chance its showing in the survey could improve in the coming years. "AWS is still leading the SMB public cloud pack, although it still experienced a slight drop in adoption rate, from 72 percent to 69 percent while Azure jumped from 48 percent to 59 percent," notes The Register. "Oracle also saw strong growth, nearly doubling its adoption rate from 15 percent to 28 percent year on year." The survey also reported an increase in wasted cloud spend. According to The Register, "respondents estimated their organizations wasted 32 percent of the cloud spend this time around, up from 30 percent the previous year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are preparing to open the first tube that one of the astronauts on the Apollo missions hammered into the surface of the moon. As NPR reports, it's "remained tightly sealed all these years since that 1972 Apollo 17 mission -- the last time humans set foot on the moon." From the report: The unsealed tube from that mission was opened in 2019. The layers of lunar soil had been preserved, and the sample offered insight into subjects like landslides in airless places. Because the sample being opened now has been sealed, it may contain something in addition to rocks and soil: gas. The tube could contain substances known as volatiles, which evaporate at normal temperatures, such as water ice and carbon dioxide. The materials at the bottom of the tube were extremely cold at the time they were collected. The amount of these gases in the sample is expected to be very low, so scientists are using a special device called a manifold, designed by a team at Washington University in St. Louis, to extract and collect the gas. Another tool was developed at the European Space Agency (ESA) to pierce the sample and capture the gases as they escape. Scientists there have called that tool the "Apollo can opener." The careful process of opening and capturing has begun, and so far, so good: the seal on the inner sample tube seems to be intact. Now, the piercing process is underway, with that special "can opener" ready to trap whatever gases might come out. If there are gases in the sample, scientists will be able to use modern mass spectrometry technology to identify them. (Mass spectrometry is a tool for analyzing and measuring molecules.) The gas could also be divided into tiny samples for other researchers to study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: An extinct rat that once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean may have put the kibosh on scientists' dreams of resurrecting more famous extinct animals like the woolly mammoth. The Christmas Island rat disappeared just over 100 years ago, but researchers now say even its detailed genome isn't complete enough to bring it back to life. The work "shows both how wonderfully close -- and yet -- how devastatingly far" scientists are from being able to bring back extinct species by genetically transforming a close relative in what's called "de-extinction," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study. [...] To bring back an extinct species, scientists would first need to sequence its genome, then edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Next comes the challenge of making embryos with the revised genome and bringing them to term in a living surrogate mother. So far, scientists have sequenced the genomes of about 20 extinct species, including a cave bear, passenger pigeon, and several types of mammoths and moas. But no one has yet reported re-creating the extinct genome in a living relative. In the new study, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, thought it best to start small. "If we want to try something so crazy, why not start with a simple model," he reasoned. So, he, Jian-Qing Lin, a molecular biologist at Shantou University, and their colleagues, focused on the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), which disappeared by 1908 from that island, located about 1200 kilometers west of Australia. This species "should be a dreamy candidate for de-extinction," McCauley says, given its close relationship with the Norway rat, a well-studied lab animal with a complete genome sequence that scientists already know how to modify. Gilbert and Lin extracted DNA from the skins of two preserved Christmas Island rats and sequenced it many times over to get as much of the genome as possible. They achieved more than 60 times' coverage of it. Old DNA only survives in small fragments, so the team used the genome of the Norway rat as a reference to piece together as much as possible of the vanished rat's genome. Comparing the two genomes revealed almost 5% of the Christmas Island rat's genome was still missing, Lin, Gilbert, and their colleagues report today in Current Biology. The lost sequences included bits of about 2500 of the rat's estimated 34,000 genes. "I was surprised," Gilbert says. The recovered DNA included the genes for the Christmas Island rat's characteristic rounded ears, for example, but important immune system and olfaction genes were either missing or incomplete. The work "really highlights the difficulties, maybe even the ridiculousness, of [de-extinction] efforts," says Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos. Others researchers like Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, says that the missing 5% of an extinct animal's genome likely won't affect how the transformed animal looks or behaves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.