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Google launched a beta app today that people with speech impairments can use as a voice assistant while contributing to a multiyear research effort to improve Google's speech recognition. From a report: The goal is to make Google Assistant, as well as other features that use speech to text and speech to speech, more inclusive of users with neurological conditions that affect their speech. The new app is called Project Relate, and volunteers can sign up at g.co/ProjectRelate. To be eligible to participate, volunteers need to be 18 or older and "have difficulty being understood by others." They'll also need a Google account and an Android phone using OS 8 or later. For now, it's only available to English speakers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They'll be tasked with recording 500 phrases, which should take between 30 to 90 minutes to record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of credit cards in America hit an all-time high of 520 million in the third quarter of this year, per the New York Fed's household debt and credit report, released Tuesday. From a report: There was a precipitous plunge of more than 100 million credit cards between 2008 and 2010, but we've now more than made up for that decline. Buy now, pay later companies like Affirm aren't included in this tally -- they're still too small to merit their own line in the report. Household debt now totals more than $15 trillion, of which $800 billion is in credit cards, and another $1.4 trillion is in auto loans. "Issuance to borrowers of all scores returned to, or even surpassed, pre-pandemic levels," wrote Fed researchers on the Liberty Street Economics blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India has declined to update its official climate goal at the United Nations climate negotiations, holding out for rich countries to first offer $1 trillion in climate finance by the end of the decade. From a report: The resistance from India stands in contrast to its surprise announcement on Nov. 1, just as COP26 negotiations got underway, that it would set an ambitious new goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2070. Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the talks in Glasgow, Scotland, with a decision to increase his nation's share of renewable electricity generation capacity alongside the long-term target to zero out carbon. At the same time, Modi demanded rich countries provide as much as $1 trillion in climate finance just for India -- far more than the $100 billion a year for all poor countries sought under previous deals. Until now, however, it wasn't clear whether India's demand came with a fixed timeline. Officials on Wednesday confirmed that India is seeking that sum by 2030 to fund the build out of renewables, energy storage, decarbonization of the industrial sector and defending infrastructure to a warming planet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple failed to persuade a federal judge to push back a December deadline to change the lucrative business model for its App Store while the iPhone maker's legal fight with Epic Games is appealed. Unless the iPhone maker wins a reprieve from an appeals court, it will soon have to start allowing developers to steer customers to payment methods outside the App Store, an overhaul the judge ordered in September that could cost the tech giant a few billion dollars annually. Apple asked U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers to put on hold a part of the injunction that said the company must undo its rule forbidding developers from using web links or other means within apps to inform consumers about payment methods outside the App Store. "Apple's motion is based on a selective reading of this court's findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction," Rogers said in an order Tuesday. "The motion is fundamentally flawed." "Apple believes no additional business changes should be required to take effect until all appeals in this case are resolved," the company said in a statement. While Apple largely won its showdown with Epic, the world's most valuable technology company isn't out of danger from challenges to its role as a gatekeeper to the digital economy. The iPhone maker continues to face a plethora of antitrust lawsuits in and outside the U.S seeking to open up the App Store to competition, monopolization enforcement investigations brought by federal and state agencies, and legislative bids to restrict its business practices. Bloomberg Intelligence has said that pressure on Apple to lower its App Store commissions on developers, which currently run as high as 30%, could squeeze revenue by $2 billion to $4 billion in a worst-case scenario.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City mayor-elect Eric Adams thinks that schools should add cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to the curriculum. CNBC reports: In an interview with CNN's "State of the Union," Eric Adams said that bitcoin is the "new way of paying for goods and services throughout the entire globe" and that schools "must" teach the technology behind it, as well as "this new way of thinking." "When I talked about blockchain and bitcoins, young people on the street stopped and asked me, 'What is that?'" Adams told CNN on Sunday. The mayor-elect did not specify whether he was referring to elementary, high school, or tertiary-level education. When asked whether he would encourage businesses in New York City to accept bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, Adams said that they were "going to look at it" and "tread carefully." "We are going to get it right," continued Adams. Since winning office last Tuesday, Adams has been talking a big game on cryptocurrency. Not only does he have dreams of putting the Big Apple on the blockchain, but he's said that he plans to take his first three paychecks in bitcoin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Camel Pilot writes: SpinLaunch is developing a launch system that uses kinetic energy as a cheap method to launch a projectile into orbit. They propose using a vacuum-sealed centrifuge spinning the projectile at near escape velocity speeds and releasing into orbit. A rocket engine would still be used to maneuver and position the satellite. They have built a 1/10th scale prototype in the New Mexican desert and have already launched test objects 10s of thousands of feet. In a recent interview, CEO Jonathan Yaney said: "I find that the more audacious and crazy the project is, the better off you are just working on it -- rather than being out there talking about it. We had to prove to ourselves that we could actually pull this off."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Just outside of Shiprock, New Mexico, on land belonging to the Navajo Nation, a Bitcoin mine owned and operated by a Canadian investment company consumes seven megawatts of power each month -- enough to power 19,600 homes. The operation is run by a firm called WestBlock Capital and mines between 23 and 25 bitcoins per month, equivalent to roughly $1.4 to $1.6 million USD, with a majority of its power coming from renewable solar energy. According to a press release from the mine's parent company, Luxxfolio, the mine accesses these resources "at significantly reduced cost in the bottom decile of global power costs." But all around the mine, Dine -- citizens of the Navajo Nation -- live without electricity or running water in their homes. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the nation's non-profit utility enterprise that initially partnered with Calgary, Alberta blockchain company WestBlock on the mine project, is working to connect more homes on the nation to basic utilities. A short documentary detailing the project by Bitcoin mining hosting company Compass was released last week, framing the mine as a means to achieve sovereignty and economic prosperity for the nation. But some Dine are bristling at the idea of a foreign Bitcoin mining company getting access to dirt cheap electricity while residents in Navajo Nation live without basic utilities like power and running water. Tyler Puente, who commented on a since-deleted Facebook post from Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez's Facebook page about the mine's groundbreaking ceremony that Navajo leadership are allowing outsiders to take advantage of Dine, told Motherboard that he sees the Bitcoin mine as a form of "financial colonialism." "I think Bitcoin companies prey on communities like my own," said Puente. "My perspective is that we're being used." To some Dine, WestBlock project resembles a form of crypto-colonialism, a term that describes the exploitation of lands and resources by cryptocurrency and blockchain interests, often under the guise of progressive or egalitarian rhetorics for the host communities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from the Miami Herald: A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines. Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls. From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel -- about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain "wartime scenarios," the Justice Department said. There was no allegation that any submarine hulls failed, but authorities said the Navy had incurred increased costs and maintenance to ensure they remain seaworthy. The government did not disclose which subs were affected. Thomas faces up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine when she is sentenced in February. However, the Justice Department said it would recommend a prison term at the low end of whatever the court determines is the standard sentencing range in her case. [...] Thomas' conduct came to light in 2017, when a metallurgist being groomed to replace her noticed suspicious test results and alerted their company, Kansas City-based Bradken Inc., which acquired the foundry in 2008. Bradken fired Thomas and initially disclosed its findings to the Navy, but then wrongfully suggested that the discrepancies were not the result of fraud. That hindered the Navy's investigation into the scope of the problem as well as its efforts to remediate the risks to its sailors, prosecutors said. In June 2020, the company agreed to pay $10.9 million in a deferred-prosecution agreement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from the BBC: Rolls-Royce has been backed by a consortium of private investors and the UK government to develop small nuclear reactors to generate cleaner energy. The creation of the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business was announced following a [195 million pound] cash injection from private firms and a [210 million pound] grant from the government. It is hoped the new company could create up to 40,000 jobs by 2050. However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear. Rolls-Royce SMR said one of its power stations would occupy about one tenth of the size of a conventional nuclear plant -- the equivalent footprint of two football pitches -- and power approximately one million homes. The firm said a plant would have the capacity to generate 470MW of power, which it added would be the same produced by more than 150 onshore wind turbines. Warren East, Rolls-Royce chief executive, said the company's SMR technology offered a "clean energy solution" which help tackle climate change. However, Paul Dorfman, chairman of the Nuclear Consulting Group think tank, told the BBC's Today program there was danger that the money spent on nuclear power would hit funding for other power sources. "If nuclear eats all the pies which it is looking to be doing we won't have enough money to do the kind of things we need to do which we know practically and technologically we can do now," he said. Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies and added there was "still no solution to dispose of the radioactive waste they leave behind and no consensus on where they should be located." "What's worse, there's not even a prototype in prospect anytime soon," he added. "The immediate deadline for action is sharp cuts in emissions by 2030, and small reactors will have no role in that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Disney+'s next major app update, coming to all devices later this week, continues the service's latest efforts to please nitpicky A/V obsessors with a new screen ratio format meant to fill more of your HDTV screen in a way that filmmakers originally intended. "IMAX Digital" is coming to all devices that support Disney+ starting this Friday as part of the service's "Disney+ Day" promotion. This "17.1:9" format will land exclusively on 13 Marvel Studios films to start, and the move coincides with the streaming premiere of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings -- a film that skipped Disney's experiment with simultaneous launches in theaters and on Disney+ earlier this year. When a film switches to an IMAX Digital ratio, the usual black bars that signify a wider-screen 21:9 ratio will be reduced, adding approximately 26 percent more image to your HDTV, all framed as originally intended. The full list of IMAX Digital-compatible films coming to Disney+ later this week include: Ant-Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America: Civil War, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Iron Man, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Thor: Ragnarok.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In case you missed it, Google officially ended support for its Bookmarks service on September 30, 2021. But fear not, you can still export your bookmarks if you haven't already. Long-time Slashdot reader GPS Pilot writes: Google has dropped support for yet another one of its services. If you're like me, you don't visit Google Bookmarks very often, so you're not aware that Google dropped support on September 30th, 2021. The service still had its uses -- like being able to access a collection of bookmarks across different browsers, or when you're using a strange computer. You can still export your Google bookmarks to alternative services that are "arguably better." Some Google Bookmarks alternatives include Saved, Raindrop, Pinboard, and Mozilla Pocket. Which bookmark manager is your favorite?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the weekend, the hacking group Fail0verflow claimed to have obtained PS5 root keys allow them to decrypt the console's firmware. "Additionally, Andy Nguyen (a security engineer at Google who's better known under his handle, theflow0) managed to access the PS5's debug settings menu on a retail PS5 over the weekend, too," adds The Verge. Is this the first steps towards jailbreaking Sony's latest console? The Verge's Chaim Gartenberg reports: The two exploits are particularly notable due to the level of access they theoretically give to the PS5's software. Decrypted firmware -- which is possible through Fail0verflow's keys -- would potentially allow for hackers to further reverse engineer the PS5 software and potentially develop the sorts of hacks that allowed for things like installing Linux, emulators, or even pirated games on past Sony consoles. For now, the two exploits won't result in much of a change for PS5 owners -- there's no sudden PS5 jailbreak available today, and neither Nguyen nor Fail0verflow have published the details of their respective hacks -- nor is it even clear if they ever will. Nguyen has already said that he has "no plans for disclosure" of his hack, while Wololo.net notes that Fail0verflow held off on publishing its PS4 hacks last console generation until Sony patched things, meaning that it's possible none of this will lead to concrete changes in the PS5 hacking scene.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France will start building its first new nuclear reactors in decades as part of efforts to meet its promises to reduce planet-warming emissions, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: He spoke as climate negotiators in Glasgow debate how to speed up efforts against climate change, and amid concerns around Europe about recent spikes in energy prices and the continent's dependence on global gas and oil producers, including Russia. "To guarantee France's energy independence, to guarantee our country's electricity supply, and to reach our goals -- notably carbon neutrality in 2050 -- we will for the first time in decades revive the construction of nuclear reactors in our country, and continue to develop renewable energy," Macron said in a televised address. He did not give any details of the plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Portuguese parliament has passed new labour laws to give workers a healthier work-life balance and to attract "digital nomads" to the country. Employers could face penalties for contacting employees outside work hours, according to the new laws. The legislation, approved on Friday, comes following the expansion of home working after the coronavirus pandemic, according to Portugal's Socialist Party government. Under new rules, employers could be penalized for contacting employees after work and will be forced to pay for increased expenses as a result of working from home -- such as gas and electricity bills. Further rules will be implemented to aid employees at home, such as banning employers from monitoring their workers at home and ensuring workers must meet with their boss every two months to stop isolation. Not all legislation designed to help home workers passed through parliament, however. The so-called "Right to Disconnect" -- a law giving workers the ability to switch off work devices -- was not voted through.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid a heightened amount of scrutiny and tension surrounding the App Store and how users download and install apps on the iPhone, Apple CEO Tim Cook said today that customers who wish to sideload apps should consider purchasing an Android device as the experience offered by the iPhone maximizes their security and privacy. From a report: Speaking at The New York Times "DealBook" summit, Cook said that customers currently already have a choice between wanting a secure and protected platform or an ecosystem that allows for sideloading. "I think that people have that choice today, Andrew. If you want to sideload, you can buy an Android phone." Cook drew the comparison of sideloading to a carmaker selling a car without airbags or seatbelt, saying it would be "too risky." "I think that people have that choice today, Andrew, if you want to sideload, you can buy an Android phone. That choice exists when you go into the carrier shop. If that is important to you, then you should buy an Android phone. From our point of view, it would be like if I were an automobile manufacturer telling [a customer] not to put airbags and seat belts in the car. He would never think about doing this in today's time. It's just too risky to do that. And so it would not be an iPhone if it didn't maximize security and privacy," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is going head to head with Chromebooks with a new $249 Surface Laptop SE, its most affordable Surface yet. While the software giant has attempted to compete with the popularity of Chrome OS in US schools for years, the Surface Laptop SE is the company's first true Chromebook competitor. From a report: Surface Laptop SE will be sold exclusively to schools and students, starting at $249. It's part of a much broader effort with Windows 11 SE, a new student edition designed to compete with Chrome OS that will ship on a range of low-cost laptops in the coming months. Surface Laptop SE is every bit the low-cost Windows device you'd expect to see for $249. While it retains the same keyboard and trackpad found on Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go, the all-plastic body houses an 11.6-inch display running at just a 1366 x 768 resolution. This is the first 16:9 Surface device in more than seven years, after Microsoft switched to 3:2 for its Surface line with the Surface Pro 3 launch in 2014. The screen looks like the biggest drawback on this device, particularly as we weren't fans of the low-resolution screen (1536 x 1024) found on the $549 Surface Laptop Go. Lenovo's Chromebook Duet ships with a better 10.1-inch (1920 x 1200) display for the same $249 price as the Surface Laptop SE. Intel's Celeron N4020 or N4120 power the Surface Laptop SE, combined with 4GB / 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of eMMC storage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Treasury Department has in recent months expanded its digital surveillance powers, contracts provided to The Intercept reveal, turning to the controversial firm Babel Street, whose critics say it helps federal investigators buy their way around the Fourth Amendment. From a report: Two contracts obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Intercept by Tech Inquiry, a research and advocacy group, show that over the past four months, the Treasury acquired two powerful new data feeds from Babel Street: one for its sanctions enforcement branch, and one for the Internal Revenue Service. Both feeds enable government use of sensitive data collected by private corporations not subject to due process restrictions. Critics were particularly alarmed that the Treasury acquired access to location and other data harvested from smartphone apps; users are often unaware of how widely apps share such information. The first contract, dated July 15 at a cost of $154,982, is with Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, a quasi-intelligence wing responsible for enforcing economic sanctions against foreign regimes like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. A June report from New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice found that OFAC's vast enforcement powers require greater oversight from Congress. The report criticized the lack of legal limits on who OFAC can sanction, pointing out that this group includes American citizens within U.S. borders and foreigners without any government ties, and flagged the fact that OFAC is free to add people to sanctions lists even after sanctions are authorized -- people now potentially subject to surveillance by Locate X.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam Neumann on Tuesday spoke publicly for the first time since being ousted as CEO of WeWork more than two years ago, expressing "regret" for the employees who lost their jobs but not apologizing for making around $1 billion on his way out the door. From a report: "It was never my intention for the company not to succeed," Neumann offered while being interviewed at the New York Times DealBook Summit, saying he was slow to recognize that the markets in 2019 had shifted from valuing revenue growth to valuing profitability. His most common refrain was "lessons learned." More takeaways from the interview: Neumann said that WeWork's $47 billion valuation in 2019, bestowed upon it by SoftBank, "went to his head" and made him believe his management style was working. The company formally went public last month via SPAC and is currently valued at around $7 billion. When asked about rampant marijuana use at the company, Neumann replied: "We had a fun culture." Neumann declined to comment on an audience member's suggestion that he share some of his wealth with WeWork employees who either lost their jobs or whose stock options are underwater.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: Microsoft plans on killing OneDrive support for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 starting on March 1, 2022. "In order to focus resources on new technologies and operating systems, and to provide users with the most up-to-date and secure experience, beginning January 1, 2022, updates will no longer be provided for the OneDrive desktop application on your personal Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 devices," Microsoft's Ankita Kirti writes in the announcement post. "Personal OneDrive desktop applications running on these operating systems will stop syncing to the cloud on March 1, 2022. [And] after March 1, 2022, your personal files will no longer sync."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced a new edition of Windows 11 designed specifically for the K-8 education sector, dubbed "Windows 11 SE." This new edition of Windows 11 is designed to address fundamental challenges that schools are facing day to day with improved performance, optimized resources, and simple to deploy and manage. From a report: Microsoft says Windows 11 SE has been optimized for education focused low-cost PCs, most of which start at the affordable price of $249 and are powered by low-end Intel and AMD chips. Windows 11 SE was designed with feedback from teachers and school IT admins in mind. Unlike normal Windows 11, Windows 11 SE comes pre-loaded with Microsoft Office out of the box, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and OneDrive, which can also be used offline as part of a Microsoft 365 license. Microsoft has also limited some of the multitasking features, including reducing the amount of apps that can be snapped on screen at once to just two; side by side. The Microsoft Store app is also disabled. Windows 11 SE also automatically runs apps in full-screen, which makes sense considering most Windows 11 SE PCs will feature small 11-inch displays. It also removes access to the "This PC" area in File Explorer by default, as it's an area most students don't need to access when working on school work. Windows 11 SE is "cloud backed" meaning it will mirror all your saved documents stored locally to the cloud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced a companion to a Senate bill that would let people use algorithm-free versions of tech platforms, according to a copy of the text shared exclusively with Axios. From the report: Recent revelations about Facebook's internal research findings have renewed lawmaker interest in bills that seek to give people more of a say in how algorithms shape their online experiences. The bill shows that anger over how platforms use their algorithms to target users with specialized content is a bipartisan issue with momentum on Capitol Hill. The algorithms that personalize content on social networks and other apps can make services addictive, violate users' privacy and promote extremism, critics and many lawmakers argue. Conservatives have also claimed that services deliberately censor their speech. The Filter Bubble Transparency Act would require internet platforms to let people use a version of their services where content selections are not driven by algorithms. It's sponsored by Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Burgess Owens (R-Utah). The Senate version of the bill, also bipartisan, is sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), an influential member of Republican leadership. Buck and Cicilline are the bipartisan duo responsible for passing six antitrust bills out of the House Judiciary committee in June. Buck and Thune plan to work together on tech and antitrust issues going forward, a Republican aide told Axios. That could boost the chances of such bills passing muster with Senate Republicans in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Group said on Tuesday it would invest about $500 million in a joint venture with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co that will build a $7 billion chip plant in Japan. From a report: Construction of the factory, which local media said last month would supply semiconductors to Sony's image sensor business, will begin in 2022, with production slated to begin at the end of 2024, the companies said in a press release. The decision marks a success for Japanese industry ministry officials, who want world No.1 contract chipmaker TSMC to build plants to supply chips to Japan's electronic device makers and auto companies as trade frictions between the United States and China threaten to disrupt supply chains and demand for the key component grows. "The fab (plant) is expected to directly create about 1,500 high-tech professional jobs and to have a monthly production capacity of 45,000 12-inch wafers," Sony and TSMC said. The plant will produce 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer chips to address strong global demand for speciality chip technologies, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Apple might not offer users a way to pay with cryptocurrency anytime soon, its leader has invested in it personally. From a report: Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said at the DealBook Online Summit on Tuesday that he has bought cryptocurrencies. "I think it's reasonable to own it as part of a diversified portfolio," Mr. Cook told DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin, quickly adding that he wasn't giving investment advice. He said he has done some research on crypto and has been interested in it for "a while." The revelation came as Mr. Cook said that Apple itself did not intend to join a growing number of big businesses incorporating crypto in their operations. Mr. Cook said, however, that Apple didn't plan to buy any Bitcoin with its roughly $200 billion in cash -- "I don't think people buy Apple stock to get exposure to crypto," he said -- and added that it had no plans to make crypto an accepted method of payment anytime soon. "It's not something we have immediate plans to do," he said. But never say never: Mr. Cook added, cryptically, "There are other things that we are definitely looking at."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Electric will split into three separate companies in a stunning breakup of the iconic manufacturer founded by Thomas Edison whose sprawling businesses once made it the world's most valuable company. The shares surged. From a report: GE will spin off its health care business in early 2023 and combine its renewable energy, fossil-fuel power and digital units into a single energy-focused entity that will be spun off a year later, the company said Tuesday. The remaining company will consist of GE Aviation, its jet-engine division. "What we're doing today is creating three outstanding investment-grade, global leaders in health care, aviation and energy," Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp said in an interview. "GE has led in these markets for a long time and today we're setting ourselves up for another century of leadership."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission is planning to ban payment for order flow, paralleling potential U.S. moves to stem a practice that hit the headlines during the meme-stock mania. From a report: A forthcoming review of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive will include a ban amid other measures to increase transparency, such as a consolidated tape of information about transactions, people familiar with the matter said. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is separately weighing a ban on payment for order flow, in which trading firms pay retail brokerages to execute their trades. Regulators are concerned that video-game like prompts have encouraged excessive trading on app-based brokerages that fueled a explosive surge in value for GameStop Corp. and other stocks this year. While the day-trading frenzy is far more muted in Europe than the U.S., the practice of zero-commission trading is starting to cross the Atlantic. That prompted the bloc's markets watchdog to warn firms and investors in July of the risks arising from payment for order flow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its fall 2021 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia unveiled Riva Custom Voice, a new toolkit that the company claims can enable customers to create custom, "human-like" voices with only 30 minutes of speech recording data. From a report: According to Nvidia, businesses can use Riva Custom Voice to develop a virtual assistant with a unique voice, while call centers and developers can leverage it to launch brand voices and apps to support people with speech and language disabilities. Brand voices like Progressive's Flo are often tasked with recording phone trees and elearning scripts in corporate training video series. For companies, the costs can add up -- one source pegs the average hourly rate for voice actors at $39.63, plus additional fees for interactive voice response (IVR) prompts. Synthesization could boost actors' productivity by cutting down on the need for additional recordings, potentially freeing the actors up to pursue more creative work -- and saving businesses money in the process. For example, Progressive used AI to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot with the voice of Stephanie Courtney, who plays Flo. KFC in Canada built a voice in a Southern U.S. English accent for the chain's ambassador, Colonel Sanders, in the company's Amazon Alexa app. Duolingo is employing AI to create voices for characters in its language learning apps. And National Australia Bank has deployed an AI-powered Australian English voice for the customers who call into its contact centers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks. Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill. On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report (PDF) recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule (PDF) that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice. Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"[N]ow, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO's crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-years into the saga, the U.S. District Court of Utah has finally put a period to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit," writes ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. From the report: According to the Court, since: "All claims and counterclaims in this matter, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and for good cause appearing, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the parties' Motion is GRANTED. All claims and counterclaims in this action, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and are DISMISSED with prejudice and on the merits. The parties shall bear their own respective costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees. The Clerk is directed to close the action." Finally! Earlier, the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, which has been overseeing SCO's bankruptcy had announced that the TSG Group, which represents SCO's debtors, has settled with IBM and resolved all the remaining claims between TSG and IBM: "Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee [TLD], on behalf of the Estates [IBM], of $14,250,000." In return, TLD gives up all rights and interests in all litigation claims pending or that may be asserted in the future against IBM and Red Hat, and any allegations that Linux violates SCO's Unix intellectual property. "While we're one step closer, the SCO lawsuits still live on just like one of those Halloween monsters that just won't die," concludes Vaughan-Nichols, noting the lawsuit Xinuos filed against IBM and Red Hat in March for allegedly copying their software code for its server operating systems. "But, in this go-around, there aren't many people in the audience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In yet another shift away from its traditional hardware business, Huawei has sold its x86 server unit to a state-owned Chinese firm. Light Reading reports: China company registration data confirms that the sale to Henan Information Industry Investment Co. Ltd., owned by the Henan provincial government, concluded on November 5. The size of the transaction has not been disclosed. Huawei's server business, like its once high-flying handset division, has been hit badly by US sanctions, which prevent it from obtaining the Intel chips that power 90% of the world's servers. The vendor flagged the possibility of a sale at a company event six weeks ago. Eric Xu, one of Huawei's three co-chairmen, acknowledged the server unit had "encountered difficulties" and said Huawei was in discussions with some potential investors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Unsealed emails reveal the role baby-powder maker Johnson & Johnson played in a report that an industry group submitted to U.S. regulators deciding whether to keep warnings off talc-based products linked to cancer. The emails -- unsealed in the state of Mississippi's lawsuit against J&J over its refusal to add a safety warning -- show J&J and its talc supplier chose the scientists hired by their trade association, the Personal Care Products Council, to write the 2009 report assessing talc-based powders' health risks. They also show the researchers changed the final version of their report at the companies' behest. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it relied in part on the report in its decision to forgo a warning for the product. The emails among executives of J&J and Rio Tinto Minerals, its supplier at the time, provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of dealings between companies and their industry group that successfully fended off a cancer warning on talc-based powders for nearly 40 years. Now, almost 39,000 users and their families are suing J&J, most claiming their ovarian cancers and those of loved ones were linked to asbestos, the potent carcinogen in the products pulled from U.S. and Canadian shelves in May 2020. Dependence on industry data creates a situation that's ripe for lobbyists to exert pressure on the FDA. The unsealed emails pull back the curtain on how such efforts get launched, who pays for them, and who has a hand in delivering the final product to regulators. While the practice of companies having a say in industry group submissions to the FDA isn't new or illegal, the emails reveal just how involved J&J got in a report meant to assess product safety -- down to selecting individual scientists to produce it and having them write an executive summary. J&J denied any wrongdoing in its decision not to acknowledge its input to the report that the PCPC lobbying group sent to the FDA. [...] FDA officials acknowledged they weighed the PCPC's response to the citizens' petitions demanding a warning for talc-based powders before finding there was "inconclusive evidence" the mineral caused ovarian and other forms of cancer. "The FDA reviewed and considered all of the information submitted to us in the two petitions, the comments received in response to the petitions, and additional scientific information," said Tara Rabin, a spokeswoman.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan will create a scheme to subsidize construction of domestic chip factories with a new plant planned by Taiwan's TSMC likely to be the first recipient, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday. Reuters reports: The government will set aside several hundreds of billion yen under this year's supplementary budget to create a pool of funds at NEDO, a state-run body promoting research and development on energy and industrial technology, the paper said. Companies will be eligible for the subsidies on condition they ramp up chip production in times of short supply, the Nikkei said without citing sources. The government is likely to subsidise up to half of TSMC's estimated 1-trillion-yen ($8.82 billion) investment for building a chip plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, the Nikkei said. The plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, is expected to produce semiconductors for automobiles, camera image sensors and other products which have been hit by a global chip shortage, and is likely to start operations by 2024, the paper said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Friday, a transparency activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) posted a 1.8-terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website. "DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that her group doesn't know the identity of the source who shared the data and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given," reports Wired. "The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure." Techdirt reports: The DDoS release shows law enforcement agencies aren't just deploying choppers to keep an eye on suspects in motion. They're also using them to engage in extended surveillance of people suspected of nothing, hovering over large gatherings and deploying infrared cameras to peer inside of buildings just for the fuck of it. Putting your stuff in the cloud means opening up additional attack vectors for those seeking your secrets. That appears to be the root source of this new leak. What a time to be alive!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Computershack shares a report from the BBC: A global police operation has dealt a devastating blow to one of the most prolific cyber-crime gangs in history. The co-ordinated action against the REvil gang was announced on Monday by Romanian police, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Europol. The raid, which took place both on and offline, led to the arrests of two alleged hackers in Romania and one accused cyber-criminal from Ukraine. REvil has been blamed for major hacks on global businesses in recent years. The US also announced that it had successfully retrieved more than $6 million in cryptocurrency from the gang in a so-called 'claw back' hacking operation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: US-based Nvidia partner EVGA has reported that a shipment of GPUs it was sending to a distribution centre has been stolen from a truck. A forum post by EVGA product manager Jacob Freeman states "PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that on October 29, 2021, a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards was stolen from a truck en route from San Francisco to our Southern California distribution center." "These graphics cards are in high demand and each has an estimated retail value starting at $329.99 up to $1959.99 MSRP." Which probably explains the motivation for the crime -- either someone hopes to resell them or a crypto-miner has just built a cut-price rig. Freeman's post doesn't say how many GPUs were stolen, or if the truck was carrying anything else. He did, however, warn that buying stolen property is a crime, as is "concealing selling or withholding" purloined goods. He then appears to lay a trap of sorts by pointing out that attempts to register products that aren't stolen will succeed on this page which requires registration. Crooks are probably smart enough to use fake details when registering. Are they also smart enough to use a VPN and/or Tor to hide their tracks? EVGA has created the email address stopRTX30theft@evga.com in an attempt to find the culprits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, briefly hit a market cap of $2 trillion. The Verge reports: The tech behemoth's market cap is currently at a comfortable $1.98 trillion, but crept over the $2 trillion mark midday Monday, later closing out at $2,987.03 per share. Alphabet's market cap has just about doubled from $1 trillion since January 2020. [...] Alphabet nearly joined Apple and Microsoft as one of three US-based companies that are part of the exclusive $2 trillion club.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robinhoood was hacked last week by someone who socially engineered a customer service representative to gain access to the email addresses of more than 5 million customers, the full names of 2 million other customers, and other data from a much smaller group of customers, the company said in a blog post published Monday. The hacker then allegedly attempted to extort the company. Motherboard reports: "The unauthorized party socially engineered a customer support employee by phone and obtained access to certain customer support systems," Robinhood wrote in the blog post. "At this time, we understand that the unauthorized party obtained a list of email addresses for approximately five million people, and full names for a different group of approximately two million people." "We also believe that for a more limited number of people -- approximately 310 in total -- additional personal information, including name, date of birth, and zip code, was exposed, with a subset of approximately 10 customers having more extensive account details revealed," it added. "We are in the process of making appropriate disclosures to affected people." Robinhood wrote that "the attack has been contained and we believe that no Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers were exposed and that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident.âRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last evening the web was alive with angry players who couldn't play their games due to an unexpected error. While the situation is still not completely clear, it appears that someone allowed a domain used by Denuvo's anti-piracy technology to expire, meaning that players of some big games couldn't enjoy what they had paid for. [...] According to Alex Buckland, the DRM provider for all of the affected games had let a key domain expire, rendering the system inoperable. Following the failure to renew, the domain then went into a grace period but when that expired too, it appears to have been removed from DNS records. This meant that the domain would not resolve to an IP address, effectively breaking the system. To solve the problem, some users on Steam posted up tutorials for players to modify their Windows HOSTS file to point to the last known IP address for the domain. This appeared to do the trick but obviously, such drastic measures shouldn't be needed to play a game that has been legally purchased -- especially those that are single-player only.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: Microsoft is preparing a couple of little updates that may curb employee rulebreaking enthusiasm. Yes, this news again comes courtesy of Microsoft's roadmap service, where Redmond prepares you for the joys to come. This time, there are a couple of joys. The first is headlined: "Microsoft 365 compliance center: Insider risk management -- Increased visibility on browsers." It all sounded wonderful until you those last four words, didn't it? For this is the roadmap for administrators. And when you give a kindly administrator "increased visibility on browsers," you can feel sure this means an elevated level of surveillance of what employees are typing into those browsers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Justice Department has charged a suspect from Ukraine and a Russian national over a July ransomware attack on an American company, according to indictments made in court filings on Monday, and has seized $6 million in ransom payments. From a report: The latest U.S. actions follow a slew of measures taken to combat ransomware that earlier this year hit big companies, including Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, and crippled fuel delivery for several days in the U.S. Southeast. Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a Ukrainian national arrested in Poland last month, will face U.S. charges for deploying ransomware known as REvil, which has been used in hacks that have cost U.S. firms millions of dollars, the court filing showed. REvil gained notoriety as the Russian group behind the ransomware attack against meatpacker JBS SA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American social media giant Reddit may soon convert users' karma points into Ethereum-based (ERC-20) tokens and onboard 500 million new crypto users in the process, according to a newly hired Reddit engineer. From a report: A series of tweets made by Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlights Reddit's efforts to improve user interaction through various cryptocurrency initiatives. As Cointelegraph reported in July 2021, the platform had launched its own layer-two rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points, named Community Points.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google parent Alphabet rallied Monday to breach $2 trillion in market value for the first time, fueled by a rebound in spending on digital ads and growth in its cloud business. From a report: Its Class A shares gained as much as 1.2% to a record high, with the stock extending a recent rally to a fifth session. Alphabet is the top performer this year among the five biggest U.S. tech stocks by sales, with a 70% advance fueled largely by the growth in Google's advertising business. The share-price gain puts the company in an exclusive club alongside Apple and Microsoft, the latter of which also reached the $2 trillion milestone this year. The Google parent hit $1 trillion in value for the first time in January 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has decided to ban access to Flightradar24, a real-time commercial aircraft flight-tracking service that provides equipment to volunteers to collect aviation data. A Chinese national security agency in 2020 discovered that a citizen with the surname Li had signed up to receive the equipment from Flightradar24 and track aircraft. From a report: CCTV reported that Beijing Municipal National Security Bureau found data-sharing poses a security threat to military aircraft. It added that security agencies seized the equipment given to volunteers by Flightradar24. Chinascope recently told you that China's Ministry of State Security declassified an investigation into the theft of Chinese airlines' data by a foreign spy agency. It is unclear if the Flightradar24 case and that are related.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On November 8, Microsoft made generally available to users worldwide its latest versions of Visual Studio and .NET. Users can download Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 starting today. From a report: Visual Studio 2022 is the first release of a 64-bit version of Visual Studio. By making Visual Studio 64-bit, officials said that they expect the release to better use all system resources, especially when working with more complex solutions over longer periods. According to Microsoft, during early VS 2022 testing, customers were able to run the VS IDE for days, even with solutions containing 700 or more projects. Visual Studio 2022 also includes a number of edits and debug improvements. It also provides Hot Reload, which allows developers to edit their source code while their apps are running in Visual Studio 2022 and from the .NET CLI. , It also has Live Preview capabilities and cross-platform testing on Linux, among other new and improved features. Visual Studio 2022 is available for immediate download. The release notes for Visual Studio 2022 v.17 are here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. From a report: An international team of scientists have made 35 new observations of gravitational waves, which brings the total number of detections since 2015 to 90. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, created by massive cosmic events -- such as pairs of black holes smashing together -- up to billions of light years away. Waves from these cataclysmic collisions were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) observatory in the US and the Virgo instrument in Italy between November 2019 and March 2020. The first detection of gravitational waves, announced in 2016, confirmed a prediction Albert Einstein made a century earlier based on his general theory of relativity. Monash University researcher Shanika Galaudage, a collaborator in the Australian branch of the project known as OzGrav, described gravitational waves as a game-changing "new window into the universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beloved by moodboard aficionados and wedding planners alike, the platform is hated by rank-and-file web surfers. It's not that it doesn't have its purpose; it's just that it intrudes on the search experience of pretty much everyone who doesn't want to use it. From a report: More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account. And it's managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. And it's all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers. Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn't cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, "If you're not paying for it, you are the product.'" Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An investor group led by buyout firms Advent International, Permira Advisers and others agreed to take McAfee private in a deal that values the cybersecurity software maker at more than $14 billion including debt. From a report: The private equity consortium will pay $26 a share in cash, according to a statement Monday. Crosspoint Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIC Pvt Ltd. and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority are also part of the group of buyers. The purchase price represents a premium of about 23% over McAfee's closing share price of $21.21 on Nov. 4, the day before Bloomberg News first reported details of the potential deal. The shares were up less than 1% Monday morning in New York to $25.55. McAfee has total debt of about $4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Founded by cybersecurity entrepreneur John McAfee in 1987, the company was a pioneer in developing antivirus software for personal computers. McAfee left in 1994, and was found dead in a Spanish prison cell in June this year, hours after Spain's National Court approved his extradition to the U.S. over multiple tax fraud charges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese officials said last week that a foreign intelligence agency hacked several of its airlines in 2020 and stole passenger travel records. From a report: The hacking campaign was disclosed last week by officials from the Ministry of State Security, China's civilian intelligence, security, and secret police agency. The hacking campaign was discovered after one of China's airlines reported a security breach to MSS officials in January 2020. Investigators said they linked the hacks to a custom trojan that the attackers used to exfiltrate passenger details and other data from this first target. A subsequent investigation found other airlines compromised in the same way. "After an in-depth investigation, it was confirmed that the attacks were carefully planned and secretly carried out by an overseas spy intelligence agency," the MSS said in a press release distributed via state news channels last Monday. The MSS did not formally attribute the attack to any foreign agency or country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stockholm's official app was a disaster. So annoyed parents built their own open source version -- ignoring warnings that it might be illegal. From a report: Commissioned in 2013, Skolplattform was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier -- acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that's made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent. The only problem? It doesn't work. The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system -- its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating. On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting firm Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the words "Skrota Skolplattformen" -- loosely translated as "trash the school platform." He joked he should wear the hat when he picks his children up from school. Weeks later, wearing that very hat, he decided to take matters into his own hands. "From my own frustration, I just started to create my own app," Landgren says. He wrote to city officials asking to see the Skolplattform's API documents. While waiting for a response, he logged into his account and tried to work out whether the system could be reverse-engineered. In just a few hours, he had created something that worked. "I had information on my screen from the school platform," he says. "And then I started building an API on top of their lousy API." The work started at the end of November 2020, just days after Stockholm's Board of Education was hit with a 4 million SEK GDPR fine for "serious shortcomings" in the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Sweden's data regulator, had found serious flaws in the platform that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of parents, children, and teachers. In some cases, people's personal information could be accessed from Google searches. (The flaws have since been fixed and the fine reduced on appeal.) In the weeks that followed, Landgren teamed up with fellow developers and parents Johan Obrink and Erik Hellman, and the trio hatched a plan. They would create an open source version of the Skolplattform and release it as an app that could be used by frustrated parents across Stockholm. Building on Landgren's earlier work, the team opened Chrome's developer tools, logged into the Skolplattform, and wrote down all the URLs and payloads. They took the code, which called the platform's private API and built packages so it could run on a phone -- essentially creating a layer on top of the existing, glitchy Skolplattform. The result was the Oppna Skolplattformen, or Open School Platform. The app was released on February 12, 2021, and all of its code is published under an open source license on GitHub. Anyone can take or use the code, with very few limitations on what they can do with it. If the city wanted to use any of the code, it could. But rather than welcome it with open arms, city officials reacted with indignation. Even before the app was released, the City of Stockholm warned Landgren that it might be illegal. In the eight months that followed, Stockholms Stad, or the City of Stockholm, attempted to derail and shut down the open source app. It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people's personal information. Officials reported the app to data protection authorities and, Landgren claims, tweaked the official system's underlying code to stop the spin-off from operating at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So apparently three Stanford professors are offering some tough-love to young people in the tech community. Mehran Sahami first worked at Google when it was still a startup (recruited to the company by Sergey Brin). Currently a Stanford CS professor, Sahami explained in 2019 that "I want students who engage in the endeavor of building technology to think more broadly about what are the implications of the things that they're developing — how do they impact other people? I think we'll all be better off." Now Sahami has teamed up with two more Stanford professors to write a book calling for "a mature reckoning with the realization that the powerful technologies dominating our lives encode within them a set of values that we had no role in choosing and that we often do not even see..." At a virtual event at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the three professors discussed their new book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot — and thoughtfully and succinctly distilled their basic argument. "The System Error that we're describing is a function of an optimization mindset that is embedded in computer science, and that's embedded in technology," says political scientist Jeremy Weinstein (one of the book's co-authors). "This mindset basically ignores the competing values that need to be 'refereed' as new products are designed. It's also embedded in the structure of the venture capital industry that's driving the growth of Silicon Valley and the growth of these companies, that prioritizes scale before we even understand anything about the impacts of technology in society. And of course it reflects the path that's been paved for these tech companies to market dominance by a government that's largely been in retreat from exercising any oversight." Sahami thinks our technological landscape should have a protective infrastructure like the one regulating our roads and highways. "It's not a free-for all where the ultimate policy is 'If you were worried about driving safely then don't drive.'" Instead there's lanes and traffic lights and speed bumps — an entire safe-driving infrastructure which arrived through regulation." Or (as their political science professor/co-author Rob Reich tells the site), "Massive system problems should not be framed as choices that can be made by individual consumers." Sahami also thinks breaking up big tech monopolies would just leaves smaller "less equipped" companies to deal with the same problems — but that positive changes in behavior might instead come from government scrutiny. But Reich also wants to see professional ethics (like the kind that are well-established in biomedical fields). "In the book we point the way forward on a number of different fronts about how to accelerate that..." And he argues that at colleges, just one computing-ethics class isn't enough. "Ethics must be embedded through the entire curriculum."Read more of this story at Slashdot.