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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.

"Another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life," reports CNET:With its Martian Moons Exploration mission (or MMX), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth. When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze... [I]f the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space... Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life — or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos... Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu.... Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon's surface. "If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high," says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science... It's possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms.... With a planned sample return date of 2029, MMX would be the first time samples have been returned from the Martian sphere. While the space agency estimates just 0.1% of Phobos' soil likely originated on Mars, there's a chance MMX could bring back the first samples of the red planet to Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Suspected foreign hackers have breached nine organizations in the defense, energy, health care, technology and education sectors," reports CNN, citing their exclusive glimpse at findings from security firm Palo Alto Networks. At least one of the breached organizations is in the U.S., they add, and in cooperation with America's National Security Agency (or NSA), security researchers "are exposing an ongoing effort by these unidentified hackers to steal key data from U.S. defense contractors and other sensitive targets."It's the type of cyber espionage that security agencies in both the Biden and Trump administrations have aggressively sought to expose before it does too much damage. The goal in going public with the information is to warn other corporations that might be targeted and to burn the hackers' tools in the process... [T]he hackers have stolen passwords from some targeted organizations with a goal of maintaining long-term access to those networks, Ryan Olson, a senior Palo Alto Networks executive, told CNN. The intruders could then be well placed to intercept sensitive data sent over email or stored on computer systems until they are kicked out of the network. Olson said that the nine confirmed victims are the "tip of the spear" of the apparent spying campaign, and that he expects more victims to emerge. It's unclear who is responsible for the activity, but Palo Alto Networks said some of the attackers' tactics and tools overlap with those used by a suspected Chinese hacking group... Cybersecurity firm Mandiant earlier this year revealed that China-linked hackers had been exploiting a different software vulnerability to breach defense, financial and public sector organizations in the US and Europe.... In the activity revealed by Palo Alto Networks, the attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in software that corporations use to manage their network passwords. CISA and the FBI warned the public in September that hackers were exploiting the software flaw and urged organizations to update their systems. Days later, the hackers tracked by Palo Alto Networks scanned 370 computer servers running the software in the US alone, and then began to exploit the software. Olson encouraged organizations that use the Zoho software to update their systems and search for signs of a breach. Federal officials told CNN the revelation of the hacking activity is evidence of their close work with cybersecurity firms to stay on top of threats.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports:System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment. Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers they are working on their "own desktop". System76 engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Michael Murphy "mmstick" commented that System76 will be its own desktop. When further poked about that whether that means a fork from GNOME, the response was "No it is its own thing written in Rust." Word of System76 making their "own" desktop not based on GNOME does follow some recent friction between Pop!_OS and GNOME developers over their approach to theming and customizations. Or, as Murphy wrote (in response to a later comment):What are you expecting us to do? We have a desktop environment that is a collection of GNOME Shell extensions which break every GNOME Shell release. Either we move towards maintaining tens of thousands of lines of monkey patches, or we do it the right way and make the next step a fully fledged desktop environment equal to GNOME Shell. In other comments Murphy clarified that essentially the gist of it would be an independent/distro-agnostic desktop environment, and that they'd be "using tooling that already exists (mutter, kwin, wlroots), but implementing the surrounding shell in Rust from scratch..." And he added later that "We already do our best to follow freedesktop specifications with our software. So there's no reason to think we'd do otherwise." One of the most interesting exchanges happened when one long-time Reddit user questioned the need for another desktop. That user had posted, "Linux is great, choices are great, but our biggest problem is that in the pursuit of choices for the sake of choices we have a ton of projects that are 95% of the way to prime time readiness, but none that are fully there, because instead of fixing problems, everyone decides they just want to start over." Murphy responded: "You have it backwards. Choice is the best part about open source. None of us would be here today if people weren't brave enough to take the next step with a new solution to an existing problem..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors. Kolbe has been contributing to it since 2006. Last week he returned to the Signpost to share a cautionary tale. Its title? "A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life." Also a long-time Slashdot reader, Andreas Kolbe shares this summary with us:For more than two years, Wikipedia illustrated its article on New York serial killer Nathaniel White with the police photo of an African-American man from Florida who happened to have the same name. A Wikipedia user said he had found the picture on crimefeed.com, a "true crime" site associated with the Discovery Channel, which also used the same photo in a TV broadcast on the serial killer. During the two-and-a-half years the Wikipedia article showed the picture of the wrong man, it was viewed over 125,000 times, including nearly 12,000 times on the day the TV program ran. The man whose picture was used said he received threats to his person from people who assumed he really was the killer, and took to dressing incognito. His picture is now all over Google when people search for the serial killer. "Friends and family contacted Plaintiff concerning the broadcast and asking Plaintiff if he actually murdered people in the state of New York," adds a legal complaint the man eventually filed against the Wikimedia Foundation. "Plaintiff assured these friends and family that even though he acknowledged his criminal past, he never murdered anyone nor has he ever been to the state of New York...." Last month the legal director of the Wikimedia Foundation and a Legal Fellow co-authored a blog post pointing out the lawsuit "was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020." The blog post celebrates a judge's dismissal of the suit as "a victory for free knowledge," and acknowledges the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Our ability to maintain and grow the world's largest repository of free knowledge depends on robust legal immunity.... The Wikimedia Foundation applauds this ruling and remains committed to protecting global exchange of knowledge and freedom of expression across the internet." But the blog post also argued that "the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur." Andreas Kolbe disagrees. "The photo was in the article for over two years," Kolbe writes on Signpost. "For a man to have his face presented to the world as that of a serial killer on a top-20 website, for such a significant amount of time, can hardly be described as indicative of 'very effective' quality control on the part of the community."The picture was only removed after a press report pointed out that Wikipedia had the wrong picture. This means the deletion was in all likelihood reactive rather than "proactive"... The wrong photograph appears to have been removed by an unknown member of the public, an IP address that had never edited before and has not edited since. The volunteer community seems to have been completely unaware of the problem throughout... It would seem more appropriate - - to acknowledge that community processes failed Mr. White to a quite egregious degree, and- to alert the community to the fact that its quality control processes are in need of improvement.... Surely Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and community practices for sourcing images, in particular images used to imply responsibility for specific crimes, would benefit from some strengthening, to ensure they actually depict the correct individual. Pondering the dismissal of the lawsuit, Kolbe ultimately asks if there's a deeper moral question in a world where a man was "defamed on our global top-20 website with absolute impunity, without his having any realistic hope of redress for what happened to him."While to the best of my belief the error did not originate in Wikipedia, but was imported into Wikipedia from an unreliable external site, for more than two years any vigilante Googling Nathaniel White serial killer would have seen Mr. White's color picture prominently displayed in Google's knowledge graph panel (multiple copies of it still appear there at the time of writing). And along with it they would have found a prominent link to the serial killer's Wikipedia biography, again featuring Mr. White's image — providing what looked like encyclopedic confirmation that Mr. White of Florida was indeed guilty of sickening crimes... On the very day the picture was removed from the article here, a video about the serial killer was uploaded to YouTube — complete with Mr. White's picture, citing Wikipedia. At the time of writing, the video's title page with Mr. White's color picture is the top Google image result in searches for the serial killer. All in all, seven of Google's top-fifteen image search results for Nathaniel White serial killer today feature Mr. White's image. Only two black-and-white photos show what seems to have been the real killer. A comment on the Wikimedia Foundation blog adds, "What I'd much rather see is an acknowledgement that the community process failed Mr White to an extreme degree and that steps will be taken to prevent recurrence of such cases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet reports:JavaScript is now used by more than 16.4 million developers globally, says a survey of more than 19,000 coders — making it the world's most popular programming language "by a wide margin". SlashData's 21st State of the Developer Nation Report examined global software developer trends across 160 countries during Q3 2021, covering programming languages, tools, APIs, apps and technology segments, as well as attitudes of developers themselves... While not necessarily a surprise in itself — JavaScript has, after all, been the world's most-used language for a number of years now — SlashData found that upwards of 2.5 million developers had joined the JavaScript community in the past six months alone. That's the same as the entire user base of Swift; or, the combined communities of Rust and Ruby. The data for JavaScript also included language derivatives TypeScript and CoffeeScript. Python might not be a close second, but its popularity is impressive nonetheless: according to SlashData, the language is now used by some 11.3 million coders, primarily within data science and machine learning, and IoT applications. The brainchild of Guido van Rossum, Python's popularity has exploded in recent years, overtaking that of Java, which is currently used by 9.6m developers. Java remains a go-to for mobile and desktop apps, SlashData's survey found. According to SlashData, Python added 2.3m developers to its community in the past 12 months. "That's a 25% growth rate, one of the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 7M users," the report noted. "The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python's popularity. More than 70% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python. For perspective, only 17% use R, the other language often associated with data science." The survey concluded these are, in order, the 10 most popular programming languages:JavaScriptPythonJavaC/C++ [Yes, it lumps them together]PHPC#"Visual development tools"KotlinSwiftGoThe report also found that Rust, although coming in at #14, grew faster than any other language in the past 24 months, "nearly tripling in size from just 0.4M developers in Q3 2019 to 1.1M."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATED: Earlier this week ZDNet reported that Facebook's parent company Meta "has granted the Kazakhstan government direct access to its content reporting system," as part of a joint agreement to work on removing content that is deemed harmful on social network platforms like Facebook and Instagram," with the agreement focusing on protecting children. But the Washington Post clarified tonight that in fact Kazakhstan's statement "was apparently released independent of Facebook."Meta spokesman Ben McConaghy said in an email that the company has "a dedicated online channel for governments around the world to report content to us that they believe violates local law." "We follow a consistent global process to assess individual requests — independent from any government — in line with Facebook's policies, local laws and international human rights standards," he added. "This process is the same in Kazakhstan as it is for other countries around the world." Here's ZDNet's original report:In a joint statement, the Ministry of Information and Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the social media giant said the agreement, which is the first of its kind in Central Asia, would help increase the efficiency and effectiveness to counter the spread of illegal content. Giving the Kazakhstan government access to its content reporting system will allow the government to report content that may violate Facebook's global content policy and local content laws in Kazakhstan, Facebook said. Under the agreement, both parties will also set up regular communication, including having an authorised representative from Facebook's regional office work with the Ministry on various policy issues. "Facebook is delighted to work with the government of Kazakhstan together, particularly in the aspect of online safety for children," Facebook regional public policy director George Chen said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Facebook parent company Meta has granted the Kazakhstan government direct access to its content reporting system," reports ZDNet, "as part of a joint agreement to work on removing content that is deemed harmful on social network platforms like Facebook and Instagram." The agreement's focus is on protecting children:In a joint statement, the Ministry of Information and Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the social media giant said the agreement, which is the first of its kind in Central Asia, would help increase the efficiency and effectiveness to counter the spread of illegal content. Giving the Kazakhstan government access to its content reporting system will allow the government to report content that may violate Facebook's global content policy and local content laws in Kazakhstan, Facebook said. Under the agreement, both parties will also set up regular communication, including having an authorised representative from Facebook's regional office work with the Ministry on various policy issues. "Facebook is delighted to work with the government of Kazakhstan together, particularly in the aspect of online safety for children," Facebook regional public policy director George Chen said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence," reports Time magazine:He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction... Schmidt: The visit to Google got him thinking. And when we started talking about this, Dr. Kissinger said that he is very worried that the impact that this collection of technologies will have on humans and their existence, and that the technologists are operating without the benefit of understanding their impact or history. And that, I think, is absolutely correct... Kissinger: [T]he technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It's a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason — the world in which I grew up — each evidence supports the other. With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don't know why. That's a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don't know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it.... Up to now humanity assumed that its technological progress was beneficial or manageable. We are saying that it can be hugely beneficial. It may be manageable, but there are aspects to the managing part of it that we haven't studied at all or sufficiently. I remain worried. I'm opposed to saying we therefore have to eliminate it. It's there now. One of the major points is that we think there should be created some philosophy to guide to the research. Time: Who would you suggest would make that philosophy? What's the next step? Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea. Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book. I think that the first thing is that this stuff is too powerful to be done by tech alone. It's also unlikely that it will just get regulated correctly. So you have to build a philosophy. I can't say it as well as Dr. Kissinger, but you need a philosophical framework, a set of understandings of where the limits of this technology should go. In my experience in science, the only way that happens is when you get the scientists and the policy people together in some form. This is true in biology, is true in recombinant DNA and so forth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes the aviation news site AVweb's report on a "Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin" and "Airworthiness Directive" being issued by America's aircraft-regulating Federal Aviation Administration "concerning the rollout of 5G cellular phone service in 46 major metropolitan areas of the U.S." (reportedly happening on December 5th).The actions are expected to limit the use of automated systems on aircraft that rely on radar altimeters (also called radio altimeters) and it's possible that flight delays and cancellations will result. Reuters also quoted a letter from FAA Deputy Administrator Bradley Mims that says the agency shares "the deep concern about the potential impact to aviation safety resulting from interference to radar altimeter performance from 5G network operations in the C band." In an auction of radio spectrum last year, the major telecoms paid a total of $78 billion in an FCC auction to get access to a thin slice of the finite range of available radio frequencies to carry 5G signals. Those signals will be in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz part of the so-called C-Band, which is apparently the sweet spot for carrying the data-heavy 5G signals. Radar altimeters operate in the 4.2-4.4 GHz frequency range (their sweet spot) and the fear is that the nearby powerful cell signals will cause interference for the avionics. The FCC approved the use of the spectrum for 5G saying "well-designed [radio altimeter] equipment should not ordinarily receive any significant interference (let alone harmful interference)." But aviation groups say the risk for thousands of aircraft is real and the FAA seems to agree.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A wild bear broke into a parked car looking for food. This set AI pundit Lance Eliot a-thinking...The AI driving system of a self-driving car is always intact. A parked self-driving car is immediately able to become a moving car.... If the self-driving car is making use of its object detection system, even though the autonomous vehicle is parked, the AI driving capability would be alerted at [a hypothetical] pending crash that is about to occur... Depending upon what the AI developers anticipated, the AI driving system might activate the self-driving car and attempt to quickly drive away from the converging human-driven car. For most makers of self-driving cars, this is an obscure "edge" case. But Eliot imagines a world where a self-driving car is parked next to a forest...The human hiker has left the autonomous vehicle and has trekked somewhere deep in the woods. A bear meanders into the parking lot, looking for a free meal. If the AI driving system is using its object detection features, the bear would likely be detected. When the bear decides to wander directly toward the self-driving car, the AI driving system might activate the autonomous vehicle and drive away from the bear. It is unclear if the bear will somehow divine that the self-driving car is capable of moving on its own accord... After a while, it seems plausible to suggest that bears will be concerned that those free meal containers (on wheels) seem to move away upon the bear approaching. This will possibly discourage some bears and they will steer clear of parked cars. Other bears might turn this into a game. Kind of hide-and-seek, of sorts. Approach a car, it moves away. Fun! Walk over to the car and see which way it goes next. A grand old time in the parking lot, that's for sure. And as long as we're telling shaggy bear stories...The odds are that self-driving cars will be designed differently on the interior than are conventional human-driven cars. For example, there is no need for a steering wheel and nor any need for the pedals. Those will no longer be included. The interior is opened up to allow for perhaps swiveling seats, possibly reclining seats so that you can sleep on a long journey inside a self-driving car. Given that type of interior, the bear is bound to find things a lot more comfortable inside a self-driving car than a conventional human-driven car. The next thing you know, bears will fall in love with self-driving cars, doing so because it is a quiet, spacious, and secure place to rest and relax. No need to worry about predators getting at the bear while relishing the plush and roomy interior.... A second question is whether the bears might figure out how to communicate with the AI driving system. You know, bears are pretty sharp. Perhaps a truly enterprising bear could convince the AI to take the bear for a cozy ride while inside the self-driving car. Don't be especially surprised if you start to see bears riding around in self-driving cars. And please remember, you heard about it here, first.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: Pixelglass Games and BitBeamCannon are working on new commercial Amiga games. Metro Siege is a 2-player beat 'em up for the Amiga 500 with 1 MB of Ram. You can watch a teaser trailer here. Alarcity is a shoot 'em up for the Amiga 1200 and Amiga CD32. You can watch an earlier campaign trailer here. If i.e. your classic Amiga broke down there's good news for you. The Amiga 500 mini (Essex Retro Gamer overview) is set to release in early 2022 It will be able to play Amiga 500, Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 games in WHDLoad format. It's available for pre-order at Amazon.com and local shops worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader FlatEric521 tipped us off to an interesting story (from the News Service of Florida):When police responded in 2018 to a call about a shattered window at a home in Orange County, they found a black Samsung smartphone near the broken window. A woman in the home identified the phone as belonging to an ex-boyfriend, Johnathan David Garcia, who was later charged with crimes including aggravated stalking. But more than three years after the shattered window, the Florida Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in the case and consider a decidedly 21st Century question: Should authorities be able to force Garcia to give them his passcode to the phone? Attorney General Ashley Moody's office appealed to the Supreme Court last year after the 5th District Court of Appeal ruled that requiring Garcia to turn over the passcode would violate his constitutional right against being forced to provide self-incriminating information... The case has drawn briefs from civil-liberties and defense-attorney groups, who contend that Garcia's rights under the U.S. Constitution's 5th Amendment would be threatened if he is required to provide the passcode. But Moody's office in a March brief warned of trouble for law enforcement if the Supreme Court sides with Garcia in an era when seemingly everybody has a cell phone. Police obtained a warrant to search Garcia's phone but could not do so without a passcode. "Modern encryption has shifted the balance between criminals and law enforcement in favor of crime by allowing criminals to hide evidence in areas the state physically cannot access," the brief said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this report from the New York Times about a "particularly unusual" star about 150 light-years away that's orbited by three planets:What's unusual is the inclinations of the outer two planets, HD 3167 c and d. Whereas in our solar system all the planets orbit in the same flat plane around the sun, these two are in polar orbits. That is, they go above and below their star's poles, rather than around the equator as Earth and the other planets in our system do. Now scientists have discovered the system is even weirder than they thought. Researchers measured the orbit of the innermost planet, HD 3167 b, for the first time — and it doesn't match the other two. It instead orbits in the star's flat plane, like planets in our solar system, and perpendicular to HD 3167 c and d. This star system is the first one known to act like this... The unusual configuration of HD 3167 highlights just how weird and wonderful other stars and their planets can be. "It puts in perspective again what we think we know about the formation of planetary systems," said Vincent Bourrier from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who led the discovery published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "Planets can evolve in really, really different ways."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft's new Loop collaboration app and components isn't the only new thing coming to Office," reports ZDNet:Microsoft is introducing what it calls a "set of natively integrated AI experiences" across Microsoft 365 that will go beyond the current AI capabilities already baked into some Office apps. These new AI experiences are branded "Context IQ." The first product that will get the Context IQ treatment is Microsoft Editor, which corrects grammar and spelling across documents, email, and the web. Context IQ will add predictive assistance to Editor. Via Context IQ, users will be prompted in Editor to consider certain files or documents when attaching or sharing files with colleagues. When users are scheduling meetings in Outlook email, Editor with Contex IQ will recommend times when participants are available. And when users tag someone using the @ symbol in a comment or email, Editor with Contex IQ will recommend specific people to tag based on people users most recently have interacted with or previously tagged. Editor with Context IQ also will be able to suggest autocompletion of pertinent information, like frequent flyer numbers or specific messages, when in Teams. Part of Context IQ is similar to the previously announced Cortana-powered capabilities like the Microsoft Scheduler service (formerly Calendar.help). But Context IQ also relies on the Microsoft Graph to figure out relevant connections pertaining to individual users. A Microsoft spokesperson explained to ZDNet that Context IQ "defines a set of integrated AI experiences across Microsoft 365 that predicts, seeks, and suggests information people might need in the flow of their work." Slashdot reader joshuark asks, "I wonder if they will bring back Clippy as the AI avatar?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why didn't the European Union drop its annual observation of Daylight Saving Time? ABC News reports:[I]n 2018, the European Parliament voted to end the practice after a poll of 4.8 million Europeans showed overwhelming support for scrapping it. Critics of the ritual have pointed to scientific studies showing the negative physical and psychological effects of switching back and forth to mark daylight saving time. "The time change will be abolished," the European Commission's then-president, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German public broadcaster ZDF in 2018. "People do not want to keep changing their watches." Although the decision was supposed to take effect in 2021, the coronavirus pandemic has delayed its implementation, pushing it to the bottom of the political agenda for many countries. The fate of daylight saving time in Europe remains unclear. Member states of the European Union are also struggling to agree on which time to adopt. "We agree on the time change, but we are stuck on whether to stay on summer or winter time," Karima Delli, a French member of the European Parliament, told French broadcaster BFM TV in 2019. "We have a real problem." While Germany is calling for summer time, Greece and Portugal want to keep switching between the two. Forcing all member states to implement the same time would be complicated, as some would get less daylight than others. So the European Commission, tasked with executing the decision from Parliament, has asked countries to align with their neighbors. But even that would be tricky. For instance, since the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union in 2020, the island nation is no longer concerned with the European Parliament's decision on daylight saving time. Yet neighboring Ireland, a European Union member state, will be impacted by a change to the current system, potentially complicating border crossings... Only about 70 countries in the world still observe daylight saving time, but many are reconsidering it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tonight 70 countries around the world set their clocks back an hour — including most of the United States, Canada, the EU and the UK. Yet "The practice has drawn complaints about its disruptive effects on sleep and schedules," reports UPI, adding that "The American Academy of Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time, citing growing research that shows its deleterious effects on health and safety."[U.S.] Lawmakers are also increasingly wondering whether Daylight Saving Time is a good idea. At least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in every state taking aim at Daylight Saving Time since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over the last four years, 19 states have passed similar legislation providing year-round daylight saving time if Congress allowed such changes. Members of Congress have introduced legislation making changes to Daylight Saving Time, to no avail. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (Democrat — Rhode Island), said in a video posted to Twitter on Friday that the upcoming switchover was one of his least favorite times of the year since it means darker afternoons. He touted his Sunshine Protection Act that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent. "We can do a lot better for daylight for everyone who is up in the afternoon," he said. Also supporting that change is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. "We're about to once again do this annual craziness of changing the clock, falling back, springing forward," Newsweek quotes him as saying. "Let's go to permanent daylight saving time. The overwhelming majority of members of Congress approve and support it. Let's get it done. Let's get it passed so that we never have to do this stupid change again." But currently in America it's the Department of Transportation which is in charge of the practice, reports USA Today, and the Department believes that the practice saves energy, prevents traffic accidents and curbs crime. So, as the Washington Post reports, "It's that time of the year again. We change the clocks back and we whine about it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A drone laden with explosives targeted the residence of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad early on Sunday," reports Reuters, "in what the Iraqi military called an attempted assassination, but said Kadhimi escaped unhurt."The attack, which security sources said injured several members of Kadhimi's personal protection, came after protests in the Iraqi capital over the result of a general election last month turned violent. The groups leading protests and complaints about the result of the October vote are heavily-armed Iran-backed militias which lost much of their parliamentary power in the election... No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Kadhimi's residence in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and foreign embassies... Security sources told Reuters that six members of Kadhimi's personal protection force stationed outside his residence had been injured.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Authorities were able to find a missing 16-year-old girl after she caught the attention of a driver by using hand gestures popularized on the social media platform TikTok," reports NBC News:According to the Laurel County Sheriff's Office in Kentucky, the girl was inside a silver-colored Toyota car when the driver saw her using hand signals known on TikTok "to represent violence at home — I need help — domestic violence." After recognizing what the signals meant and seeing that the teen "appeared to be in distress," the driver called 911, the sheriff's office said in a statement. The alert led to the arrest of 61-year-old James Herbert Brick of Cherokee, North Carolina, Thursday afternoon while driving near a Kentucky interstate. The teenager found inside the car Brick was driving had been reported missing by her parents in Asheville, North Carolina, Tuesday morning, Laurel County Sheriff John Root said in a statement. The girl also told authorities she had traveled with Brick through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, according to the statement....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After the U.S. Copyright Office's once-every-three-years review of allowed exemptions, "We have some good news to share...." reads a new announcement this week from the Free Software Foundation:The FSF was one of several activist organizations pushing for exemptions to the anticircumvention rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that make breaking Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) illegal, even for ethical and legitimate purposes. We helped bring public awareness to a process that is too often only a conversation between lawyers and bureaucrats. As of late last week, there are now multiple new exemptions that will help ease some of the acute abuse DRM inflicts on users. However, the main lesson to be learned here is that we should and must keep pushing. Individual, specific exemptions are not enough. The entire anticircumvention law needs to be repealed. We want to thank the 230 individuals who co-signed their names to our comments supporting exemptions across the board. We should take this as a sign that even though it can be difficult, anti-DRM activism yields practical results. Section 1201 is one of the most nefarious sections of the DMCA. The provisions contained in 1201 impose legal penalties against anyone trying to circumvent the DRM on their software and devices or, in other words, anyone who tries to control that software or device themselves instead of leaving it up to its corporate overlords.... It takes the hard work of hundreds to secure the anticircumvention use exemptions we already have, and even more work to eke out a few more. Yet thanks to the support of citizens, activists, and researchers around the world, the U.S. Copyright Office has approved a few more, while at the same time demonstrating the DMCA's serious flaws. In coverage of the new round of anticircumvention exemptions we've seen so far, something that stands out is the U.S. Copyright Office's approval for blind users to break the digital restrictions preventing any ebooks from being processed through a screen reader. At least at first glance, it looks like a big win for all of us concerned with user freedom, but a closer look shows something more sinister, as the U.S. Copyright Office refused to make this exemption permanent. The message this sends to all user freedom activists, but especially the visually impaired among us, is: "we're giving you this now because it would seem inhumane otherwise, but we hope that you'll forget to fight for it later so we can allow corporations to keep on restricting you...." [P]articipating organizations have been able to make progress on other important exemptions, whether that's the right to install free software on wireless routers or the right to repair dedicated devices like game consoles. It's the coalescing of groups like these that is "chipping away" at Section 1201. At the same time, it's telling that we're forced to fight tooth and nail for the meager exemptions we're granted, even with such a broad base of support. The corporations who have a vested interest in the DMCA and Congress itself are content with the status quo, but we shouldn't be content with patches on a broken system. Incremental progress against Section 1201 is of course a good thing, but we shouldn't lose sight of our goal as user freedom activists: a complete repeal of Section 1201, and all other laws that codify or mandate DRM. The Defective by Design campaign takes a radical stance when it comes to DRM and the laws that support it. We believe that they should not exist at all, under any circumstance, and we need your help to support this mission....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Talking at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Arm CEO Simon Segars said this chip-supply crisis was the worst he'd ever seen (according to an EE Times article shared by Slashdot reader dkatana):The most important thing to do to get out of the woods in this situation and minimize similar ones in the future, he argued, is to improve collaboration between all players in the ecosystem. "We need better collaboration across all players in the supply chain. So, make sure we understand the bottlenecks and build resilience into this supply chain in a steady state that works okay. But when you get an event and obviously the pandemic was a Black Swan event, like no other, it froze things off the hillside, and it's very hard to recover." Segars is optimistic that current and future investments would ease the supply chain in the short term, but he is also cautious about not creating huge expectations. "About $2 billion a week is going to be spent for the next couple of years to add capacity and build new facilities. And that's going to add about 50 percent additional capacity over the next five years...." Segars predicted next year's Christmas might be much better for gift givers, but that consumers might still consider starting shopping early. And prices might not come down for a while. What is essential, Segars said, is to be patient, collaborate and invest. "Where are we going to be next Christmas? I expect these supply chain constraints to be a little better, but [they] won't be completely fixed because this isn't a short-term problem with a short-term solution. Billions of dollars are going to need to be spent in the coming years. And the decisions that we make today are going to affect the supply of this life, critical materials, semiconductors, over the next decade. "Will we get this right? Will we spend enough? We spent too much, but we accidentally break the industries? That remains to be seen. That is the challenge that the industry is stepping up to" he added. "And in collaboration, across suppliers and customers and governments, we absolutely have to get it right!" Segars also pointed out that it's hard to expand wafer production because there's so many different chemicals involved. "I mean virtually the whole periodic table that is used in making semiconductors. You need industrial style, very pure chemicals to feed into these factories downstream... So you need much more than just a chip factory to address these supply chain issues."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So how exactly did the universe come into existence? "A recent astronomical measurement recorded in a laboratory at the South Pole is causing scientists to revisit their theories..." writes Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory:In the intervening decades [since 1929], observations have only strengthened the case for the Big Bang theory, but they have also made it clear that the theory is incomplete. For instance, in its earliest incarnation, the Big Bang couldn't explain why the universe was so uniform. Astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere who looked deep into space see the same thing on average as ones that live in the Southern Hemisphere. Traditional Big Bang theory predicts that there should be small differences in temperature, clumpiness of large clusters of galaxies and other properties. But both sides look the same. However, in 1980, physicist Alan Guth proposed an extension to the theory that could reconcile some of the inconsistencies between theory and observation, including the unexpected uniformity. His extension is called cosmic inflation theory and it claims that in the first moments of the birth of the universe it expanded faster than the speed of light.... However, if inflation is true, we should be able to prove it. Although the universe was once glowing hot, the expansion of the universe has cooled it off and that glow has morphed into microwaves that astronomers have been able to detect since 1964. This relic of the Big Bang is called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. Inflation theory predicts that the microwaves of the CMB should be polarized... The CMB can be polarized in two ways: B-modes, which are swirly patterns, and E-modes, which are more of a straight-line pattern. And, if inflation theory is correct, we'd expect to see some mix of B-modes and E-modes, while if it isn't correct — in other words, if the expansion of the universe did not happen as quickly as the theory suggests — researchers should only see E-modes... Astronomers used a telescope facility called BICEP-3 (short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) to study the CMB and its polarization. The telescope's South Pole location, with its altitude of nearly two miles above sea level and incredibly dry air, is an ideal place to conduct this kind of research. BICEP-3 scientists combined their data with measurements at other facilities and found no indication of B-modes originating from the CMB. If B-modes are present in the CMB, they are very small. So, does that mean that the theory of inflation must be thrown out? No, although the data has disproved some of the simpler theories of inflation, it isn't sensitive enough to rule out the more complex versions. Still, the failure to observe CMB B-modes is unsettling, causing some scientists to go back to the drawing board.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya," writes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Slashdot reader DanDrollette (who is also the deputy editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) shares their report on "The secret history of the world's largest nuclear detonation, coming to light after 60 years."Slung below the plane's belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus — the largest and most powerful bomb ever created. At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. A cameraman watching from the island recalled: A fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle...! Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was "as if the Earth was killed." Decades later, the weapon would be given the name it is most commonly known by today: Tsar Bomba, meaning "emperor bomb...." at 50 megatons, it was more than 3,300 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that killed at least 70,000 people in Hiroshima, and more than 40 times as powerful as the largest nuclear bomb in the US arsenal today. Its single test represents about one tenth of the total yield of all nuclear weapons ever tested by all nations... Within two years, though, the Soviet Union and the United States would sign and ratify the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, and the 50-megaton bomb would fall into relative obscurity. Drollette notes that "The United States dismissed the gigantic Tsar Bomba as a stunt, but behind the scenes it was working to build a 'superbomb' of its own." The article argues there a lesson for our times in the 1961 episode, calling it "a potent example of how nationalism, fear, and high-technology can combine in a fashion that is ultimately dangerous, wasteful, and pointless."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hecate Energy's plans for a 500-acre solar farm in upstate New York were cut by 50% "after facing an outcry from some in the community who feared the installation would mar the bucolic setting," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)The Copake fight mirrors similar battles raging across the country in rural areas like Lake County, Oregon; Clinton County, Ohio; and Troy, Texas. Developers say industrial-scale solar farms are needed to meet the nation's goals to mitigate the rise of climate change, but locals are fighting back against what they see as an encroachment on their pastoral settings, the loss of agricultural land and a decline in property values. Until recently, most farms were built in the West, where abundant sunshine powers industrial-scale solar arrays and installations were farther away from sight lines. But now, with federal and state governments committing to a reduction in fossil fuels, joined by corporate giants like Amazon and Microsoft, the industry is seeking solar installations in areas where the calculus is more complicated... Improvements in the capabilities of the panels — including the development of so-called bifacial panels that capture the sun on both sides of a panel — allow for greater electricity generation in fewer panels, meaning a smaller footprint. Nonetheless, finding appropriate sites with sufficient sunlight, proximity to the grid and up-to-date infrastructure is challenging. Approximately 0.5 percent of U.S. land would need to be covered with solar panels to achieve the decarbonization goals proposed by the Biden administration in April, according to a study by the Energy Department. Urban settings usually lack enough space for significant projects; as a result, 90 percent of the suitable land sits in rural areas. But even rural land is not entirely suitable. It needs to be in proximity to the electricity infrastructure that can add more power. The grade of land matters: Steeper slopes can be less efficient in the energy captured than flatter land. And wetlands are usually protected by federal or state law. More important, development depends on owners willing to lease their property often for decades over the objection of neighbors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peloton, the makers of an internet-connected exercise bike, saw their stock price drop 35% overnight on Thursday, reports CNBC. "At least four Wall Street investment firms downgraded the stock following Peloton's dismal fiscal first-quarter financial report... Peloton's stock has fallen 63% year to date." The company had cut its annual revenue forecast — by $1 billion — and lowered its projections for both profit margins and paying subscribers. Bloomberg reports: At best, Peloton currently expects to have 3.45 million connected fitness subscriptions by the end of the fiscal year. It had previously called for 3.63 million. And gross profit margin will be 32%, compared with an earlier forecast of 34%. All that will add up to a loss of as much as $475 million, excluding some items.... On a more upbeat note, the company hinted that it plans to launch new products in the coming weeks and months. Peloton has been working on a rowing machine and a heart-rate monitor that attaches to a wearer's arm, Bloomberg News has reported. The article suggests Peloton's business was hurt by the end of lockdowns, supply-chain constraints, and the cost of freight. But they also point out another factor. "Like several other companies, Peloton also blamed Apple Inc.'s ad-related privacy changes, which have made it more difficult to target shoppers based on their interests." Apple's new Ad Tracking Transparency feature (or "ATT") now first asks users to deny or allow apps to track their activity for the targeted advertising which had apparently been boosting Peloton's business. And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) tipped us off to a larger trend, since Gizmodo reports that Peloton "isn't the only company that has pointed accusingly at Apple lately."When reporting its third quarter earnings at the end of October, Facebook (now called Meta) — which depends on targeted ads for almost 98% of its revenue — said that ATT had decreased the accuracy of its ad targeting. The feature also increased "the cost of driving outcomes" for advertisers, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained, and made it harder to measure those outcomes. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said. On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that ATT had cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year. That's an 87% increase year over year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Defense's internet-defending Cyber Command teamed with "a foreign government" in two operations which shut down a major overseas ransomware group by hijacking its servers, reports the Washington Post. Several U.S. officials told the Post the operation left the ransomware gang's leaders "too frightened of identification and arrest to stay in business." "Domains hijacked from REvil," wrote 0_neday, an REvil leader, on a Russian-language forum popular with cyber criminals, on October 17.... "The server was compromised," he wrote hours later, "and they are looking for me." And then: "Good luck everyone, I'm taking off." Soon after, REvil ceased operations, such as recruitment of affiliates, ransom negotiations and distribution of malware. The Washington Post previously reported that REvil's servers ["reachable only through Tor"] had been hacked in the summer, permitting the FBI to have access. The compromise allowed the FBI, working with the foreign partner, to gain access to the servers and private keys, officials said. The bureau was then able to share that information last month with the U.S. Cyber Command, enabling the hijacking, they said... Cyber Command leader, General Paul Nakasone, said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that while he wouldn't comment on specific operations, "we bring our best people together ... the really good thinkers" to brainstorm ways to "get after folks" conducting ransomware attacks and other malign activities. "I'm pleased with the progress we've made," he said, "and we've got a lot more to do." The group's departure may be temporary. Ransomware gangs have been known to go underground, regroup and reappear, sometimes under a new name. But the recent development suggests that ransomware crews can be influenced — even temporarily — to cease operations if they fear they will be outed and arrested, analysts say. "The latest voluntary disappearance of REvil highlights the powerful psychological impact of having these villains believe that they are being hunted and that their identities will be revealed," said Dmitri Alperovitch, executive chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and a cyber expert. "U.S. and allied governments should proudly acknowledge these cyber operations and make it clear that no ransomware criminal will be safe from the long reach of their militaries and law enforcement agencies...." Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Dmitry Smilyanets believes "REvil as a brand is done." And meanwhile, an anonymous Slashdot reader shares the news that German investigators "have identified a deep-pocketed, big-spending Russian billionaire whom they suspect of being a core member of the REvil ransomware gang," according to Threatpost."He lolls around on yachts, wears a luxury watch with a Bitcoin address engraved on its dial, and is suspected of buying it all with money he made as a core member of the REvil ransomware gang."The showy billionaire goes by "Nikolay K." on social media, and German police are hoping he'll cruise out of Russia on his next vacation — preferably, to a country with a cooperation agreement with Germany so they can arrest him. In case he decides to kick back somewhere other than sunny Crimea, they've got an arrest warrant waiting for him.... According to Reuters, which broke the news about last week's law enforcement move against the gang, REvil's also behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, as opposed to a culprit presumed to be a ransomware group named DarkSide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It has never been more difficult to be a software developer than it is today," says Nigel Simpson, a former director of enterprise technology strategy at Walt Disney. And they're not the only one who thinks so, writes the U.K. Group editor of InfoWorld:"Complexity kills," Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft veteran Ray Ozzie famously wrote in a 2005 internal memo. "It sucks the life out of developers; it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test; it introduces security challenges; and it causes user and administrator frustration." If Ozzie thought things were complicated back then, you can't help but wonder what he would make of the complexity software developers face in the cloud-native era. The shift from building applications in a monolithic architecture hosted on a server you could go and touch, to breaking them down into multiple microservices, packaged up into containers, orchestrated with Kubernetes, and hosted in a distributed cloud environment, marks a clear jump in the level of complexity of our software. Add to that expectations of feature-rich, consumer-grade experiences, which are secure and resilient by design, and never has more been asked of developers. "There is a clear increase in complexity when you move to such a pervasive microservices environment," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels during the AWS Summit in 2019. "Was it easier in the days when everything was in a monolith? Yes, for some parts definitely." Or, as his colleague, head of devops product marketing at AWS, Emily Freeman, said in 2021, modern software development is "a study in entropy, and it is not getting any more simple." On the other hand, complex technologies have never been easier to consume off the shelf, often through a single API — from basic libraries and frameworks, to image recognition capabilities or even whole payments stacks. Simply assemble and build your business logic on top. But is it really that simple? The article also cites a critical 2020 blog post by RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "The process of application development is simply too fragmented at this point," O'Grady wrote. "The days of every enterprise architecture being three-tier, every database being relational, and every business application being written in Java and deployed to an application server are over. "The single most defining characteristic of today's infrastructure is that there is no single defining characteristic. It's diverse to a fault."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Late Friday night U.S. Congressmen passed a long-awaited Bipartisan Infrastructure bill. "The infrastructure package contains $550 billion in entirely new investments, including money for electric-car charging stations and zero-emission school buses," reports the Washington Post. "The spending is mostly paid for — without raising taxes. The bulk of the funding comes from repurposing unspent coronavirus relief money and tightening enforcement on reporting gains from cryptocurrency investments." An additional $65 billion will fund broadband Internet, with new statements on the White House web site hailing the bill as "a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation's infrastructure and competitiveness" and "the largest investment in public transit in U.S. history." This Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will rebuild America's roads, bridges and rails, expand access to clean drinking water, ensure every American has access to high-speed internet, tackle the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and invest in communities that have too often been left behind. The legislation will help ease inflationary pressures and strengthen supply chains by making long overdue improvements for our nation's ports, airports, rail, and roads. It will drive the creation of good-paying union jobs and grow the economy sustainably and equitably so that everyone gets ahead for decades to come. Combined with the President's Build Back Framework, it will add on average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years. Or, as U.S. president Biden said in his own statement, the newly-passed bill "will create millions of jobs, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st Century." To address the climate crisis, the legislation "will upgrade our power infrastructure, by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy, while lowering costs," according to the White House's statement. "And it will fund new programs to support the development, demonstration, and deployment of cutting-edge clean energy technologies to accelerate our transition to a zero-emission economy." More specifics from the White House: "Millions of Americans feel the effects of climate change each year when their roads wash out, power goes down, or schools get flooded. Last year alone, the United States faced 22 extreme weather and climate-related disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each — a cumulative price tag of nearly $100 billion.... The legislation makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks, with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, floods and wildfires, in addition to a major investment in weatherization. The legislation is the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history.""In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle — sources of blight and pollution. Proximity to a Superfund site can lead to elevated levels of lead in children's blood. The bill will invest $21 billion clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells..." "U.S. market share of plug-in EV sales is only one-third the size of the Chinese EV market. That needs to change. The legislation will invest $7.5 billion to build out a national network of EV chargers in the United States. This is a critical step in the President's strategy to fight the climate crisis and it will create good U.S. manufacturing jobs. The legislation will provide funding for deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work, and shop. This investment will support the President's goal of building a nationwide network of 500,000 EV chargers to accelerate the adoption of EVs, reduce emissions, improve air quality, and create good-paying jobs across the country.""Broadband internet is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected. Yet, by one definition, more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds — a particular problem in rural communities throughout the country... The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will deliver $65 billion to help ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet through a historic investment in broadband infrastructure deployment. The legislation will also help lower prices for internet service and help close the digital divide, so that more Americans can afford internet access...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Green Market Report: Exclusively-natural psychedelic drug discovery company Filament Health Corp. received authorization from the FDA authorization to initiate the first clinical trial using naturally-sourced psychedelic substances. The news caused the stock to jump over 11% in early trading. The company said that this approval is the first for the direct administration of psilocin rather than its prodrug psilocybin and will administer Filament's three proprietary botanical drug candidates. The phase 1 trial is led by the Translational Psychedelic Research Program (TrPR) at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The phase 1 trial has been designed to include 20 healthy subjects and will examine the effects of Filament's three proprietary botanical drug candidates: PEX010 (oral psilocybin), PEX020 (oral psilocin), and PEX030 (sublingual psilocin). As a result of the need for psilocybin to convert into psilocin before becoming active in the human body, the direct administration of psilocin may yield several therapeutic benefits such as faster onset time, greater consistency, increased bioavailability, and lessened side effects. These potential attributes are being studied in the authorized trial. In addition, psilocin is an ideal candidate for sublingual delivery because of the bypassing of the gut, where the conversion to psilocybin is thought to primarily occur. To date, synthetic manufacturers have been unable to produce a stable formulation of psilocin and enter it into a clinical trial. "We are excited to announce this milestone as validation of our ability to cultivate variable psychedelic biomass and transform it into pharmaceutical-grade drug candidates," said Chief Executive Officer, Benjamin Lightburn. "Our innovative technology has allowed us to create IP-protected botanical drug candidates of oral psilocin, sublingual psilocin, and oral psilocybin, and to enter them into an FDA-approved natural psychedelic clinical trial. Our candidates enjoy significant IP protection, unlike most other psychedelics currently under clinical investigation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SolarWinds investors have sued the software company's directors, alleging they knew about and failed to monitor cybersecurity risks to the company ahead of a breach that created a vulnerability in thousands of its customers' systems. Reuters reports: The lawsuit filed in Delaware on Thursday appears to be the first based on records shareholders demanded from the company after Reuters reported last December that malicious code inserted into one of the company's software updates left U.S. government agencies and companies exposed. The lawsuit names a mix of current and former directors as defendants. Led by a Missouri pension fund, the investors allege that the board failed to implement procedures to monitor cybersecurity risks, such as requiring the company's management to report on those risks regularly. They are seeking damages on behalf of the company and to reform the company's policies on cybersecurity oversight.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they'll be able to unlock it at some point in the future. MIT Technology Review reports: The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines -- including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets. While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now. Faced with this "harvest now and decrypt later" strategy, officials are trying to develop and deploy new encryption algorithms to protect secrets against an emerging class of powerful machines. That includes the Department of Homeland Security, which says it is leading a long and difficult transition to what is known as post-quantum cryptography. [...] DHS recently released a road map for the transition, beginning with a call to catalogue the most sensitive data, both inside the government and in the business world. [Tim Maurer, who advises the secretary of homeland security on cybersecurity and emerging technology] says this is a vital first step "to see which sectors are already doing that, and which need assistance or awareness to make sure they take action now." The US, through NIST, has been holding a contest since 2016 that aims to produce the first quantum-computer-proof algorithms by 2024 [...]. As more organizations begin to consider the looming threat, a small and energetic industry has sprouted up, with companies already selling products that promise post-quantum cryptography. But DHS officials have explicitly warned against purchasing them, because there is still no consensus about how such systems will need to work. "No," the department stated unequivocally in a document (PDF) released last month. "Organizations should wait until strong, standardized commercial solutions are available that implement the upcoming NIST recommendations to ensure interoperability as well as solutions that are strongly vetted and globally acceptable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A tweak to the iPhone's repairability that has been long prophesied and feared has finally come to pass, giving staggering new urgency for legislation that makes repair more accessible: The iPhone 13's screen cannot be replaced without special software controlled by Apple. This is a devastating blow to independent repair shops, who make the vast majority of their money doing screen replacements, and, specifically, make the vast majority of their money doing iPhone screen replacements. According to iFixit, replacing the screen on an iPhone 13 disables Face ID functionality. That's because the screen itself is paired to a small microcontroller attached to the display. Replacing a cracked screen with a new screen will disable this pairing, thus breaking a core piece of functionality in the phone. An authorized Apple repair tech can pair a new screen to an iPhone with the click of a few buttons using proprietary Apple tech. Everyone else will have a much harder time. "It is still possible to change a screen on an iPhone 13," notes Motherboard. "The difference is that in order to do so now, this microcontroller needs to be removed from the broken screen and resoldered onto the new screen (after the existing microcontroller on that screen is removed). Doing this requires microsoldering, which requires the use of a microscope and a highly skilled technician." In an email to Motherboard, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said: "This is a clear case of a manufacturer using their power to prevent competition and monopolize an industry. Society loses: small repair shops will wither and fade away and consumers will be left with no choice but to pay top dollar for repairs or replace their device."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A modified consumer drone was used in an attack on an electrical substation in the US last year, according to a report from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center. New Scientist reports: The report, which is being circulated to law enforcement agencies in the US, highlights the incident at a substation in Pennsylvania last year as the first known use of a drone to target energy infrastructure in the US. The location isn't specifically identified, but the drone crashed without causing damage. The drone was modified with a trailing tether supporting a length of copper wire. If the wire had come into contact with high-voltage equipment it could have caused a short circuit, equipment failures and possibly fires. Electrical substations are normally protected by fences and other barriers, but Zak Kallenborn at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism in Maryland says these may not be sufficient against drones. [...] Counter-drone jammers are deployed at some locations but cannot defend every electrical substation, due to both cost and limitations on where they can be used. Kallenborn notes that while such drones only carry a tiny payload compared to a car bomb, they can cause a disproportionate amount of damage by targeting vulnerable spots. "Critical infrastructure owners and operators need to identify critical, sensitive components where small charges can cause significant harm to the facility's operation," says Kallenborn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A week on from its Connect conference, Meta is moving ahead with rebranding the Oculus Quest 2 as the Meta Quest 2. UploadVR reports: In last week's keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is the new corporate company name for Facebook. Almost all individual services under the company's umbrella, including Whatapp, Instagram and the actual Facebook social platform itself will keep their names. But, just after the keynote, Meta's Andrew Bosworth revealed that the Oculus brand covering VR products and services would start to be switched out with Meta branding. Bosworth explained that "you'll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time." Turns out "over time" was just over a week -- the Meta Quest 2 branding is already featured prominently in a new blog post on the official Oculus webpage. Confused yet? The post outlines a new installation at Downtown Disney District at the Disneyland Resort showcasing Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy's Edge on the "Meta Quest 2." Promotional art for the installation seen above also carries the Meta Quest 2 logo despite the fact that the Oculus icon is front and center of the art. Unfortunately, we can't make out if the logo on the Quest headset itself is for Oculus or Meta. But if you try and buy a Quest 2 at the top of the same page, it's still branded as the Oculus Quest 2 for now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One cybersecurity expert says the cyberattack on the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system may be the worst in Canadian history, and has implications for national security. CBC News reports: David Shipley, the CEO of a cybersecurity firm in Fredericton, said he's seen similar breaches before, but usually on a smaller scale. "We've never seen a health-network takedown this large, ever," Shipley said in an interview with CBC News. "The severity of this is what really sets it apart." Discovered on Saturday morning, the cyberattack has delayed thousands of appointments and procedures this week, including almost all non-emergency appointments in the Eastern Health region. After refusing to confirm the cause of the disruption for days, Health Minister John Haggie said Wednesday the system has been victim of a cyberattack. Sources have told CBC News the security breach is a ransomware attack, a type of crime in which hackers gain control of a system and hand back the reins only when a ransom has been paid. [...] Shipley said he normally argues against giving in to ransom demands but the provincial government might have to pay up in this instance since lives are at stake. The government has not confirmed there has been a ransom demand. On Thursday morning, staff at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's were told the system used to manage patient health and financial information at the hospital is back online. The system -- called Meditech -- only has information from before last weekend, and will need to be updated. It isn't yet clear what the restoration of the system will mean for services at the hospital, or if the system is back online in other parts of the province.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Electronic monitoring of home workers by companies is rising sharply, a survey suggests. The government is being urged to toughen the rules -- and ban most webcam use. "It was creepy," says Chris. "One of my managers was watching people's personal computers to monitor what we were doing at home -- all the time, not just when we were working. It was a bizarre way to carry on." When the first lockdown started, the firm that employed Chris -- a 31-year-old engineer from Sheffield -- sent most of its staff home. They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations. "We didn't mind," says Chris, "but I found loads of screens switched on one day when I came in to the office, and everybody's desktops were there, on display. "One of the managers wasn't just looking at our work. He could see exactly what we were doing all the time -- what we were watching on YouTube, that kind of thing." Chris, who changed companies after he found out one of his managers was monitoring his home activities, thinks "excessive" surveillance is counter-productive. "My productivity didn't go down when I started working from home," he says, "and when I knew what was happening it made me more nervous. A lot of the time in my job is spent designing things on paper, away from the screen, so that doesn't register if someone is simply looking at what's going on on my desktop. It probably looked to that guy like I was downstairs watching Netflix or something, but I wasn't. It's a very blunt, depersonalizing way of trying to ensure people behave in the way a company wants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Intel is gearing up to go to a war with Nvidia," writes Slashdot reader labloke11. "They have their OneAPI and their GPU. It will be interesting... For me, I like competition." Phoronix reports: While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration. Similar to NVIDIA bringing CUDA and their accelerated GPU support to WSL2 as well as similar efforts by AMD on the Radeon side, Intel and Microsoft are now having Intel graphics compute working within the Linux confines on Windows 11 or Windows 10 21'H2. Hardware-accelerated oneAPI Level Zero, OpenVINO, and OpenCL on Intel graphics hardware can now be enjoyed within the WSL2 environment when using the latest updates and drivers. Like with the rest of the WSL2 stack and capabilities from other GPU vendors, this is at a near-native level of performance. More information can be found via the Microsoft Command Line blog and Intel blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A flagship framework used by Google and scores of other advertisers for gathering claimed consent from web users for creepy ad targeting looks set to be found in breach of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). TechCrunch reports: A year ago the IAB Europe's self-styled Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) was found to fail to comply with GDPR principles of transparency, fairness and accountability, and the lawfulness of processing in a preliminary report by the investigatory division of the Belgian data protection authority. The complaint then moved to the litigation chamber of the DPA -- and a whole year passed without a decision being issued, in keeping with the glacial pace of privacy enforcement against adtech in the region. But the authority is now in the process of finalizing a draft ruling, according to a press statement put out by the IAB Europe today. And the verdict it's expecting is that the TCF breaches the GDPR. It will also find that the IAB Europe is itself in breach. Oopsy. The online advertising industry body looks to be seeking to get ahead of a nuclear finding of non-compliance, writing that the DPA "will apparently identify infringements of the GDPR by IAB Europe," and trying to further spin the finding as "fixable" within six months (it doesn't say how, however) -- while simultaneously implying the breach finding may not itself be fixed because other EU DPAs still need to weigh in on the decision as part of the GDPR's standard cooperation procedure (which applies to cross-border complaints). In terms of timing, a final verdict on the investigation is still likely months off -- and may not emerge 'til deep into 2022. Appeals are also almost inevitable. But the tracking industry's problems are starting to look, well, appropriately sticky. In the short term, the IAB says it expects a draft ruling to be shared by Belgium with other EU DPAs in the next two to three weeks -- at which point they get 30 days to review it and potentially file objections. If DPAs don't agree with the lead authority's finding and can't agree among themselves, the European Data Protection Board may need to step in and take a binding decision -- such as happened in another cross-border case against WhatsApp (which led to a $267 million fine, a larger penalty that the lead DPA in that case had originally proposed).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Intel has posted a release that the hybrid CPU core architecture on Alder Lake can be incompatible with certain games, specifically some protected by the anti-piracy DRM software from Denuvo. This was confirmed in our review of the Core i9-12900K when we tried to run the hit AAA Ubisoft title Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, part of our processor benchmark suite. The game would crash halfway through the test run, or simply not boot in at all. The errors occur because Denuvo's DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called "Performance-cores" and "Efficiency-cores" (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.) Intel was originally mum on which specific games were affected, making it unclear the scale of the problem; the company cited "32" in pre-release briefings to the tech press. Whether these would be marginal titles or blockbusters we did not know, as hundreds of games use the Denuvo DRM scheme. But on Thursday, the company published a list of every PC title known to it that has incompatibility issues with Alder Lake. It spans 51 games, including For Honor, Mortal Kombat 11, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as well as the Assassin's Creed: Valhalla game we observed the issue on. Intel says it is working with game developers to roll out a software fix, although the company notes that some of the affected DRM-protected titles can run fine, so long as your PC is on Windows 11. In the meantime, the company says it has come up with a workaround that can run any of the affected games on Alder Lake. But it'll do so by placing the efficiency cores on standby. "According to Intel, 22 of the games won't work on Alder Lake under both Windows 10 and Windows 11," adds PCMag. "[T]he remaining 29 titles [...] will suffer incompatibility problems, but only when run on Windows 10. So owners can also solve the issue by updating their PCs to Windows 11 or using the Scroll Lock workaround if available."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite the efforts of delegates at this month's climate summit in Glasgow, the world is still careening toward potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. Now, some countries and corporations are turning to new technologies to pull carbon out of the air. From a report: Today, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a bold new plan to make those technologies, called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, cost-effective and scalable with the launch of a new "Carbon Negative Shot" initiative. Through this initiative, the agency seeks to bring the cost of CDR down dramatically this decade -- to less than $100 a ton -- so that it can be deployed at a big enough scale to remove "gigatons," or billions of tons, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That is a hell of a lot of CO2 pollution. Sequestering one gigaton of carbon dioxide would amount to removing the pollution of about 250 million vehicles -- the US's entire light-duty fleet -- in one year, according to the DOE. With CDR technologies still in pretty early stages of development, there are significant hurdles to overcome before the DOE can do so. CDR is a suite of strategies aimed at drawing down CO2 to keep it from trapping heat in the atmosphere. Nature can do some of that for us -- trees and plants pull CO2 out of the air. There's also "direct air capture" technology that mimics that process using carbon-sucking machines, but it has yet to be deployed at a large scale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's Kuiper Systems asked U.S. regulators for permission to launch another 4,538 satellites that would bolster its constellation as it competes with Elon Musk's SpaceX for broadband-from-space customers. From a report: The additions would bring Kuiper's constellation to 7,774 satellites, the company said in a filing Thursday with the Federal Communications Commission. The companies are joining a rush to offer internet service from orbits near the Earth, spurred in a part by decreasing launch costs. Low orbits offer minimal lag time for data to bounce between a user on the ground and the spacecraft. Kuiper's request was among nine applications, submitted under an FCC deadline, that requested authorization for a total of more than 35,000 spacecraft. That's more than seven times the number aloft today. Those figures don't include nearly 30,000 additional satellites proposed by segment leader SpaceX, which already has launched more than 1,700 of its Starlink spacecraft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Marine Corps and Japan's Maritime Self Defense Force made history last month with an epic flight that relaunched Japan's carrier aviation program. From a report: The flight involving the Japanese aircraft carrier Izumo and American F-35B fighter jets marked the first time Japan has operated an aircraft carrier since 1945. Japan was one of the first pioneering naval aviation powers, but its involvement in World War II saw the destruction of nearly its entire fleet battle force -- particularly the carriers. The flight took place on October 3 in the Pacific Ocean. Two F-35B Joint Strike Fighters operating from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni took off from mainland Japan, refueled in midair, and then landed on the ship JS Izumo. The F-35Bs landed vertically on Izumo's flight deck and then performed a rolling takeoff. [...] In December 1941, Japan operated the largest and best-trained carrier force in the world. Japan was heavily reliant on its navy for power projection and took a natural liking to the concept of operating planes from ships. The Imperial Japanese Navy built the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, Hosho, in 1922. (Other countries, including the United States, built early carriers by using the hulls of other types of ships.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of preventive measures have brought Europe to a "critical point" in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said, with cases again at near-record levels and 500,000 more deaths forecast by February. From a report: Hans Kluge, the WHO's Europe director, said all 53 countries in the region were facing "a real threat of Covid-19 resurgence or already fighting it" and urged governments to reimpose or continue with social and public health measures. "We are, once again, at the epicentre," he said. "With a widespread resurgence of the virus, I am asking every health authority to carefully reconsider easing or lifting measures at this moment." He said that even in countries with high vaccination rates, immunisation could only do so much. "The message has always been: do it all," Kluge said. "Vaccines are doing what was promised: preventing severe forms of the disease and especially mortality ... But they are our most powerful asset only if used alongside public health and social measures." Catherine Smallwood, WHO Europe's senior emergency officer, said countries that had mostly lifted preventive measures had experienced a surge in infections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

About half of the world's fossil fuel assets will be worthless by 2036 under a net zero transition, according to research. From a report: Countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer but early movers will profit; the study finds that renewables and freed-up investment will more than make up for the losses to the global economy. It highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave $11tn-$14tn in so-called stranded assets -- infrastructure, property and investments where the value has fallen so steeply they must be written off. The lead author, Jean-Francois Mercure of the University of Exeter, said the shift to clean energy would benefit the world economy overall, but it would need to be handled carefully to prevent regional pockets of misery and possible global instability. "In a worst-case scenario, people will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise that what they own is worthless. Then we could see a financial crisis on the scale of 2008," he said, warning oil capitals such as Houston could suffer the same fate as Detroit after the decline of the US car industry unless the transition is carefully managed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two U.S. senators have introduced bipartisan legislation that seeks to make it harder for Amazon and other tech giants to make acquisitions. From a report: The office of Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, said on Friday that she and Republican Tom Cotton had introduced a bill targeting such companies as Alphabet's Google and Facebook. The bill would make it easier for the government to stop deals it believes break antitrust law by requiring the companies to prove to a judge that the deals are good for competition, and therefore legal. A similar bill, introduced by Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries and others, has been approved in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and awaits a vote by the full House. Traditionally it is up to the government in antitrust enforcement to show a particular transaction would cause prices to rise or is illegal for other reasons. "We're increasingly seeing companies choose to buy their rivals rather than compete," Klobuchar said in a statement. "This bipartisan legislation will put an end to those anticompetitive acquisitions by making it more difficult for dominant digital platforms to eliminate their competitors and enhance the platform's market power."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform, which all seek to keep users coming back, the documents show. A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform. Facebook shut down the team in late 2019. A company spokeswoman said Facebook in recent months has begun formulating a new effort to address what it calls problematic use alongside other well-being concerns, such as body image and mental health. The company has been public about its desire to address these problems, said Dani Lever, the spokeswoman, in a statement. Some people have struggles with other technologies, including television and smartphones, she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kroger said a press release announcing plans to begin accepting Bitcoin Cash was fraudulent, marking the latest apparent scam tying a major retailer to cryptocurrency. From a report: The statement appeared early Friday on PRNewswire, a service used by many large companies to make official announcements. Kroger's investor-relations website automatically picked up the release, the grocer said. Media organizations including Bloomberg News published the information, and Bitcoin Cash briefly spiked about 5%. "This communication was fraudulent and is unfounded and should be disregarded," Kroger said. The episode recalled a similar scam less than two months ago involving Walmart. In that situation, a fake statement went out on a separate wire service, GlobeNewswire, saying the retail giant would begin accepting the cryptocurrency Litecoin. The fake news release set off a short-lived surge of more than 30% in Litecoin before Walmart said the information was false and the statement was taken down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The suit, filed by the now defunct photo start-up Phhhoto, accused the social network of stalling on a deal and then putting it out of business. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, downloaded a popular new app, Phhhoto, on Aug. 8, 2014, and took a selfie. Other Facebook executives and product managers soon followed suit. The social network then made overtures to integrate Phhhoto. But the interest of Facebook's top executives in Phhhoto was just a show, according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday in the Eastern District of New York by the start-up, which is now defunct. Instead, Facebook simply wanted to squash the competition, according to the suit, which accused the company of antitrust violations. In the suit, Phhhoto's founders -- Champ Bennett, Omar Elsayed and Russell Armand -- claim that after Mr. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives downloaded their app and approached them about a partnership, no deal materialized. Facebook instead launched a competing product that mirrored Phhhoto's features. Facebook also suppressed Phhhoto's content within its photo-sharing app, Instagram, the suit says. Phhhoto is represented by Gary L. Reback, a well-known lawyer. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback persuaded the Justice Department to sue Microsoft for violating antitrust laws, a case that Microsoft ultimately settled in 2001. Phhhoto's suit seeks unspecified monetary damages from Facebook. The lawsuit stands out because of Mr. Zuckerberg's personal involvement, Mr. Reback said in an interview. He called Mr. Zuckerberg "the monopolist's C.E.O" and said the Facebook founder had engaged in "anticompetitive conduct to an extent not seen since Bill Gates," one of the founders of Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Information today shared alleged details about future Apple silicon chips that will succeed the first-generation M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips, which are manufactured based on Apple chipmaking partner TSMC's 5nm process. MacRumors adds: The report claims that Apple and TSMC plan to manufacture second-generation Apple silicon chips using an enhanced version of TSMC's 5nm process, and the chips will apparently contain two dies, which can allow for more cores. These chips will likely be used in the next MacBook Pro models and other Mac desktops, the report says. Apple is planning a "much bigger leap" with its third-generation chips, some of which will be manufactured with TSMC's 3nm process and have up to four dies, which the report says could translate into the chips having up to 40 compute cores. For comparison, the M1 chip has an 8-core CPU and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips have 10-core CPUs, while Apple's high-end Mac Pro tower can be configured with up to a 28-core Intel Xeon W processor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pfizer's oral antiviral drug was found to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 by 89%, according to interim results from a mid-to-late-stage study announced by the company on Friday. From a report: Antiviral drugs can be a key pandemic-fighting tool, as not everyone will get vaccinated against the virus and it may take years to fully inoculate people in certain countries -- particularly given current gaps in global vaccine supplies. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement that these findings from the phase 2/3 study marked "a real game-changer in the global efforts to halt the devastation of this pandemic." Pfizer's antiviral pill, PAXLOVID (PF-07321332), was developed specifically to treat COVID-19, by blocking activity of the main enzyme the virus needs to multiply. This was co-administered with a low dose of ritonavir, which is widely used in combination treatments for HIV infection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.