Slashdot

An intelligence panel investigating the cause of a spate of mysterious incidents that have struck dozens of US officials across the globe has said that some of the episodes could "plausibly" have been caused by "pulsed electromagnetic energy" emitted by an external source, according to an executive summary of the panel's findings released Wednesday. CNN reports: But the panel stopped short of making a definitive determination, saying only that both electromagnetic energy and, in limited circumstances, ultrasound could explain the key symptoms -- highlighting the degree to which the murky illness known colloquially as "Havana Syndrome" has remained one of the intelligence community's most stubborn mysteries. "We've learned a lot," an intelligence official familiar with the panel's work told reporters, speaking on anonymity under terms set by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "While we don't have the specific mechanism for each case, what we do know is if you report quickly and promptly get medical care, most people are getting well." The scientific panel emphasized that the cases it studied were "genuine and compelling," noting that some incidents have affected multiple people in the same space and clinical samples from a few victims have shown signs of "cellular injury to the nervous system." An executive summary of the panel's work provided new details about how the government is categorizing cases as possible Havana Syndrome, a clinically vague illness that has long frustrated firm diagnosis because victims have suffered from such a diverse array of symptoms. Although officials declined to say how many cases the panel examined as part of its inquiry, they said they studied cases that met four "core characteristics": the acute onset of sounds or pressure, sometimes in only one ear or on one side of the head; simultaneous symptoms of vertigo, loss of balance and ear pain; "a strong sense of locality or directionality"; and the absence of any known environmental or medical conditions that could have caused the other symptoms. Both pulsed electromagnetic energy, "particularly in the radiofrequency range," and ultrasonic arrays could feasibly cause the four core symptoms, the panel found. Both could originate from "a concealable source." But ultrasound can't travel through walls, the panel found, "restricting its applicability to scenarios in which the source is near the target."Sources of radiofrequency energy, on the other hand, are known to exist, "could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements," the panel said. "Using nonstandard antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials." But intelligence officials familiar with the panel's work emphasized that important information gaps remained, forestalling them from reaching firmer conclusions. The experts panel also ruled out so-called psycho-social factors. They also ruled out "ionizing radiation, chemical and biological agents, infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound propagated over large distances, and bulk heating from electromagnetic energy." "The panel made seven recommendations, including developing better biomarkers that are 'more specific and more sensitive for diagnosis and triage' of cases," reports CNN. "It also recommended utilizing 'detectors' and obtaining 'devices to aid research.' Finally, officials urged swift action by medical officials whenever a case is reported, emphasizing that individuals who have been treated immediately after an event have improved."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've been watching any TV over the past few months, chances are you've seen Crypto.com's ad featuring Matt Damon. It's an expensive advertisement, complete with top-notch CGI and heady phrases like "History is filled with almosts" and "Fortune favors the brave." Jody Rosen dissects Damon's crypto push in a New York Times piece titled, "Why Is Matt Damon Shilling for Crypto? An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom Crypto.com hired as its "brand ambassador" in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a Crypto.com competitor in which they have an equity stake. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ("Crypto is here to stay"), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ("Buy low stay high!"). There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs -- digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles; their millions of admirers don't have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. [...] The cryptocurrency industry's marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. [...] Damon offers a particular kind of appeal to that demographic. His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen. In the ad, his words are high-flown -- all that stuff about history and bravery -- but they amount to a macho taunt: If you're a real man, you'll buy crypto. The bleakness of that pitch is startling. In recent weeks, while watching televised sports -- where the Crypto.com spot airs repeatedly, alongside commercials for other crypto platforms and an onslaught of ads for sports-gambling apps -- I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn: that we've sanctioned an economy in which tech start-ups compete, in broad daylight, to lure the vulnerable with get-rich-quick schemes. Yet what's most unsettling about the commercial is the pitch it doesn't make. Traditionally, an advertisement offers an affirmative case for its product, a vision of the fulfillment that will come if you wear those jeans or drive that truck. This ad doesn't bother. It shows a brief glimpse of a young couple locking eyes in a nightclub -- an insinuation, I guess, that crypto has sex appeal. But the ad builds inexorably toward that final shot of Mars, where Matt Damon's astronaut was marooned in a hit film and where Elon Musk, the world's second-richest man and a crypto enthusiast, says he plans to build a colony to survive the end of civilization on Earth. "We live in troubled times," writes Rosen in closing. "The young, in particular, may feel that they are peering over the edge, economically and existentially. This ad's message for them seems to be that the social compact is ruptured, that the old ideals of security and the good life no longer pertain." "What's left are moonshots, big swings, high-stakes gambles. You might bet a long-shot parlay or take a flier on Dogecoin. Maybe someday you'll hitch a ride on Elon Musk's shuttle bus to the Red Planet. The ad holds out the promise of 'fortune,' but what it's really selling is danger, the dark and desperate thrills of precarity itself -- because, after all, what else have we got? You could call it truth in advertising."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Alphabet shelved plans to build its own city and wound down the company in charge of the project, a group of former employees is carrying on its legacy. Bloomberg reports: Their startup, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners LLC, is pursuing ambitious infrastructure projects, including the construction of specialized roads for self-driving cars, a sprawling smart grid project and the implementation of technology to help cities build 5G wireless networks. On Wednesday, the company plans to announce it raised $400 million from StepStone Group Inc., a private-market investment firm whose focuses include infrastructure. The deal values the business, known as SIP, at $1.25 billion, said a person familiar with the terms who asked not to be identified because they're private. The idea for SIP came from Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city company that Google created in 2015. Sidewalk's flagship project was Quayside, a plan to develop a 12-acre site in Toronto to showcase various high-tech urban ideas. Building a city from scratch made sense as a way for Google's parent company to experiment with urban innovation, said Jonathan Winer, SIP's co-founder and co-chief executive officer. However, "There were a number of infrastructure systems that needed innovation now, not in 10 years," he said. In 2019, he and several other Sidewalk employees left to form SIP with a plan to build large, technically sophisticated projects. Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan funded the effort as its only investors. [...] SIP is set up in an unusual way for a startup, operating sometimes as a sort of venture capital firm and other times as an operator building projects itself. This allows it to pursue a wider range of projects, Winer said. Among them is a 40-mile highway between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, designed for autonomous and connected vehicles. Michigan's state government unveiled the plan in 2020, and Winer said the first stretch of road will open this year. He's in talks with other states about similar developments, he said. SIP has also invested $100 million a project in California that uses smart thermostats and plugs to compensate customers for reducing their energy use at times of high demand. Much of SIP's business involves working with governments. [...] In addition to being an investor, Alphabet is an active participant in several SIP projects. Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, is on the advisory board of the Michigan highway project. Google's Nest thermostats work with the California program. "We benefit tremendously from Alphabet's technology and insight," said Winer. "And sometimes that insight translates into some kind of business transaction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The government of El Salvador on Monday rejected a recommendation by the International Monetary Fund to drop Bitcoin as legal tender in the Central American country. ABC News reports: Treasury Minister Alejandro Zelaya angrily said that "no international organization is going to make us do anything, anything at all." Zelaya told a local television station that Bitcoin is an issue of "sovereignty." "Countries are sovereign nations and they take sovereign decisions about public policy," he said. The IMF recommended last week that El Salvador dissolve the $150 million trust fund it created when it made the cryptocurrency legal tender and return any of those unused funds to its treasury. The agency cited concerns about the volatility of Bitcoin prices, and the possibility of criminals using the cryptocurrency. After nearly doubling in value late last year, Bitcoin has plunged in value. Zelaya said El Salvador has complied with all financial transaction and money laundering rules.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The FBI has confirmed that it obtained NSO Group's powerful Pegasus spyware, suggesting that it bought access to the Israeli surveillance tool to "stay abreast of emerging technologies and tradecraft." In a statement released to the Guardian, the bureau said it had procured a "limited license" to access Pegasus for "product testing and evaluation only," and suggested that its evaluation of the tool partly related to security concerns if the spyware fell into the "wrong hands." The bureau also claimed it had never used Pegasus in support of any FBI investigation. "There was no operational use in support of any investigation, the FBI procured a limited license for product testing and evaluation only," it said. The statement marks a direct acknowledgment by the FBI that it acquired Pegasus, one of the world's most sophisticated hacking tools. [...] A person with close knowledge of the FBI deal, who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, claimed that it occurred after a "long process" of negotiations between US officials and NSO. It is claimed one disagreement centered on how much control NSO would retain over its software. The source claimed that NSO usually kept sensors on its technology so that the company could be alerted in Israel if the technology was moved by a government client. But the source claimed the FBI did not want the technology to be fitted with sensors that would have allowed NSO to track its physical location. The source also claimed that the FBI did not want NSO's own engineers to install the technology and did not want to integrate the spyware into its own systems. Ultimately, it is understood that NSO and the FBI agreed to keep the technology in a large container. The FBI was also concerned about possible "leakage" of any data to another foreign intelligence service, the source said. The source claimed the Pegasus license was acquired by the FBI using a financial "vehicle" that was not easily identified as being linked to the bureau. In the end, the source claimed, the FBI did not actually use Pegasus. "They weren't using it at all. Like, not even switching it on. But they kept paying for it, and they wanted to renew. It was a one-year test project and it cost about $5 million, and they renewed for another $4 million," the source claimed. "But they didn't use it." In response to the claims, the FBI said: "The FBI works diligently to stay abreast of emerging technologies and tradecraft -- not just to explore a potential legal use but also to combat crime and to protect both the American people and our civil liberties. That means we routinely identify, evaluate, and test technical solutions and problems for a variety of reasons, including possible operational and security concerns they might pose in the wrong hands. There was no operational use in support of any investigation, the FBI procured a limited license for product testing and evaluation only."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have discovered a captive asteroid shadowing Earth in its orbit. From a report: The asteroid, known as 2020 XL5, is only the second of its type ever seen, shepherded by Earth's gravity into an orbit that is locked in synchrony with our planet's. It has not shared our orbit for long -- a few centuries, probably. And it will not be there in the far future. Simulations indicate that 2020 XL5 will slip out of Earth's grasp within 4,000 years and head into the wider solar system. But its presence offers a tantalizing glimpse of what else might be out there in the local gravitational whirlpools. Some bits might date back to the beginning of the solar system -- shades of the building blocks that coalesced into our planet. "These objects are not as exotic as we think," said Toni Santana-Ros, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona in Spain and an author of a paper describing the discovery, which was published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost no corals on the planet will escape severe bleaching once global heating reaches 1.5C, according to a new study of the world's reefs. From a report: Reefs in areas currently regarded as cooler refuges will be overwhelmed at 1.5C of heating, and just 0.2% of reefs will escape at least one bleaching outbreak every decade, according to the research. The team of scientists from the University of Leeds, Texas Tech University and James Cook University used the latest climate model projections to confirm that 1.5C of global heating "will be catastrophic for coral reefs." Corals bleach when ocean temperatures are too high for too long. Algae that provide corals with much of their food and colour separate from the coral during heat stress. Severe bleaching can kill corals, but they can recover from milder outbreaks if there are several years with no further heatwaves. The world's oceans are heating due mostly to the burning of fossil fuels. The study comes as the world's biggest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Queensland coast, is on the verge of another mass coral bleaching event. In the study, the team analysed climate projections across all of the world's shallow-water coral reefs, which constitute the vast majority of reefs and provide habitat, tourism revenue and coastal protection. About 84% of the world's corals exist in areas that are expected to bleach less than once a decade and are regarded as "thermal refugia," the study said. But the analysis suggests at 1.5C of global heating, only 0.2% of the area covered by reefs is in water cool enough to avoid bleaching at least once every five years -- a frequency considered too short to allow corals to recover.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disappointed with the lack of US response to the Hermit Kingdom's attacks against US security researchers, one hacker took matters into his own hands. From a report For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea's strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites -- the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen -- intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un's government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country's networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom's digital connections to the outside world. Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government's hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks -- and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country. Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally -- and by the lack of any visible response from the US government. So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that they say is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities. MIT News: The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets. Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study. "We don't usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things," he says. "It has very unusual properties and we're very excited about that." The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material, which they describe in a paper appearing today in Nature. MIT postdoc Yuwen Zeng is the lead author of the study. {olymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers. These chains grow by adding new molecules onto their ends. Once formed, polymers can be shaped into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, using injection molding. Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost. However, in the new study, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ferrari NV, already an automaking icon in the real world, is now looking to bolster its brand also in the metaverse. From a report: The Italian maker of luxury cars has set up a department focusing on digital services that's exploring opportunities arising from the space that blends virtual reality, gaming and social media, Chief Executive Officer Benedetto Vigna said Wednesday. The push also includes technologies such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens. "It's important to look into new technologies that could help our brand," Vigna said during a conference call with analysts. Ferrari is working on new tech partnerships, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU is taking a "Europe First" approach to technological standardization. From a report: The European Commission on Wednesday presented a plan to bolster its influence in creating global technology standards, as the bloc currently risks falling behind in global standardization organizations, where tech giants, government regulators and experts gather to set rules for how emerging technology works -- everything from the internet to batteries, connected devices and beyond. Faced with the U.S.' market dominance and China's aggressive attempts to rewrite global rules, the EU wants to raise its game. "We need to make sure we're not just a standard-taker. We need to be a standard-setter," said Thierry Breton, the EU's industry commissioner. The new strategy comes at the start of a bumper year for standard-setting, which often happens out of the public eye, in industry-dominated groups packed with technical experts. Deals struck in organizations like the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) define how technology is implemented across the world. The ITU's flagship conference is scheduled for September in Budapest, when a new secretary-general will be named. Meanwhile, other international groups are working quickly to set standards for artificial intelligence, green technology and other major sectors, with companies and government officials tussling over which technologies will dominate the digital economy in the coming decade. The EU's plan follows its industrial strategy, released in March 2020, which already showed the bloc wants to set up competing policy initiatives to defend its companies against rivals from China and the U.S. that benefit from large-scale investment and subsidy schemes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: Microsoft has filed an amicus brief supporting Epic Games in its appeal against Apple, and argues that, "the potential antitrust issues stretch far beyond gaming." As Epic Games continues to file its appeal against the 2021 ruling that chiefly favored Apple, interested parties have been contributing supporting filings to the court. Notably, those have included US attorneys general, but now Microsoft has also joined in on the side of Epic Games. Microsoft's amicus filing included below, sets out what it describes as its own "unique -- and balanced -- perspective to the legal, economic, and technological issues this case implicates." As a firm which, like Apple, sells both hardware and software, Microsoft says it "has an interest" in supporting antitrust law. Describing what it calls Apple's "extraordinary gatekeeper power," Microsoft joins Epic Games in criticizing alleged errors in the original trial judge's conclusions. "Online commerce and interpersonal connection funnels significantly, and sometimes predominantly, through iOS devices," says Microsoft. "Few companies, perhaps none since AT&T... at the height of its telephone monopoly, have controlled the pipe through which such an enormous range of economic activity flows." To support its claim that the Epic Games vs Apple ruling has "potential antitrust issues [that] stretch far beyond gaming," Microsoft describes what else it sees as this "enormous range of economic activity." "Beyond app distribution and in-app payment solutions - the adjacent markets directly at issue in this case," says Microsoft's filing, "Apple offers mobile payments, music, movies and television, advertising, games, health tracking, web browsing, messaging, video chat, news, cloud storage, e-books, smart-home devices, wearables, and more besides."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says "writes computer programs at a competitive level." From a report: The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program achieved an "estimated rank" placing it within the top 54 percent of human coders. The result is a significant step forward for autonomous coding, says DeepMind, though AlphaCode's skills are not necessarily representative of the sort of programming tasks faced by the average coder. Oriol Vinyals, principal research scientist at DeepMind, told The Verge over email that the research was still in the early stages but that the results brought the company closer to creating a flexible problem-solving AI -- a program that can autonomously tackle coding challenges that are currently the domain of humans only. "In the longer-term, we're excited by [AlphaCode's] potential for helping programmers and non-programmers write code, improving productivity or creating new ways of making software," said Vinyals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lighthearted study of spring flowers' blooming times confirms that groundhog soothsaying is essentially a cute, furry coin flip. From a report: The idea behind Groundhog Day is as simple as it is eccentric. Every February 2 -- the halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox -- a bleary-eyed groundhog is hoisted from its burrow into the daylight in towns across the United States and Canada. If its human handler proclaims that the rodent sees its shadow (as Punxsutawney Phil did this year), then six more weeks of winter await; if it doesn't, spring will come early -- or so the tradition goes. Each year, the date's approach is met with gleeful anticipation and sometimes a rewatching of the movie that made the day globally famous. Each year, the groundhogs' "proclamations" are reported with mock seriousness. The occasional tongue-in-cheek assertion to the contrary -- for example, General Beauregard Lee from Jackson, Georgia, self-reports an accuracy rate of 99 percent -- few would make the case for groundhog divination as a substitute for long-range meteorology. To verify whether groundhogs might be weather soothsayers, a team of researchers from Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, decided to take a cold, hard look at the evidence. It was, admits lead author Alex Ross, a project that was born in the campus bar ("There were many conversations over many beers," he confesses to National Geographic), and given extra impetus by the boredom of a pandemic. But the result, which appeared in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society, is unquestionably the most comprehensive statistical analysis yet published of the accuracy of groundhog predictive abilities. [...] Not all groundhogs had equal forecasting powers. Punxsutawney Phil's predictions were correct 52 times out of 100, while three mascots -- Essex Ed from Essex, Connecticut; Chuckles from Manchester, Connecticut; and Stonewall Jackson from Wantage, New Jersey -- scored correctly more than 70 percent of the time. Conversely, Buckeye Chuck from Marion, Ohio; Dunkirk Dave (Dunkirk, New York); and Holland Huckleberry (Holland, Ohio) each had a less than 30 percent success rate. Punxsutawney Phil and Ontario's Wiarton Willie were the only groundhogs with more than 50 years of predictions on record. Of the newcomers, the worst performer was probably Winnipeg Willow, who made only four predictions, was wrong on three of them, and predicted a late spring in a year when it arrived 38 days earlier than average. "Even if certain groundhogs can occasionally predict the onset of spring better than others," the authors write, "there appears to be no clear prophet among the group evaluated here."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Ransomware is driving developer interest in cybersecurity while the Internet of Things and games development has spurred more interest in 35-year-old programming language C++, according to O'Reilly Media's 2021 learning platform analysis. However, it could the case that developers are looking at some newer languages to give them the edge. O'Reilly, a developer-focused education content provider, creates an analysis of search terms and content modules consumed on its learning platform each year to reveal developer trends. Content usage is an aggregate measurement of "units viewed" across all forms, including online-training courses, books, videos, online conferences, and other products. The topic of cybersecurity has grown significantly on the platform, likely as a result of the high-profile ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, and software supply chain attacks on customers of SolarWinds and IT management firm Kaseya. Content usage on ransomware grew 270% over the past year, according to O'Reilly, while privacy grew 90%, identity was up 50%, and application security was up 45%. Developers building Internet of Things products and games are boosting interest in the C++ programming language. Software quality firm Tiobe has also noted a recent surge in interest in C++. While interest in C++ did see a noteworthy rise, Python and Java still dominate O'Reilly's platform usage. O'Reilly says it has seen usage of content about Mozilla-hatched Rust and Google-backed Go "growing rapidly." Both are popular for systems and infrastructure programming. Rust in particular is being used in place of C++ to help avoid memory-related security issues. It's being used at Microsoft, AWS and Google, and has been positioned as the second official language for the Linux kernel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX has rolled out a new, more powerful premium tier of its Starlink satellite internet service that's targeted at businesses and enterprise customers. From a report: The new product, which was added to the company's website Tuesday night, comes at five times the cost of the consumer-focused standard service: Starlink Premium requires a $500 fully refundable deposit, a $2,500 fee for the antenna and router, and service is $500 per month. The standard Starlink service, which launched in October 2020, has a $99 fully refundable deposit, a $499 hardware fee, and service is $99 per month. But Elon Musk's company touts improved hardware, faster service speeds and priority support for its premium customers. "Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses," the SpaceX website said. According to the Starlink website, the first premium deliveries will begin in the second quarter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI is launching roughly two China-related counterintelligence investigations about every 12 hours, Bureau director Christopher Wray told NBC News in an interview published this week. From a report: Wray is increasingly sounding the alarm on the threat posed by China's government even as Russian troops amass at Ukraine's border, indicating that he believes the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest threat to the economic security of the U.S. in the long term. "There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does," Wray said in his interview. Wray's comments build on his speech in California on Monday during which he said China's government was getting "more brazen" in economic espionage and other efforts to disrupt the U.S. In echoes of remarks he made in 2020, Wray said over 2,000 FBI investigations were "focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there's just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: NordVPN and Surfshark have finalized a merger agreement between the two VPN providers, the companies announced Wednesday. Though the specifics of the transaction aren't being released, the finalized merger agreement follows months of negotiations between the two companies that began in mid-2021, according to a joint press release issued by Surfshark and Nord Security, NordVPN's parent company. Surfshark and NordVPN had been rivals in the ultra-competitive market for VPNs (virtual private networks) prior to the merger, but are now joining forces to "solidify both companies' offerings in different market segments and diversify the geographical reach," according to the press release. More consumers have turned to VPNs in recent years to counter increasingly invasive digital tracking from search engines, ISPs and advertisers, as well as to circumvent local content restrictions and censorship. But the merger of two of the industry's top names -- both of which have long been among CNET's top VPN picks -- highlights the continued trend of consolidation in the VPN industry, which finds more brands under the umbrella of just three big companies -- Kape Technologies, Tesonet and Ziff Davis -- making it more important than ever to understand which entities are ultimately controlling the data sharing and privacy policies that underpin VPNs. The merger announcement follows the news just days ago that Surfshark was developed with the help of Tesonet, the same Lithuanian business incubator that helped NordVPN in its early days. While the Tesonet-NordVPN relationship was already known, the ties between Tesonet and Surfshark had been previously undisclosed. That changed last week after a report at Lithuanian news site Verslo zinios.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The startup Metronome "claims to have developed a billing and data infrastructure platform that is capable of 'reliably' processing data at scale so that usage-based companies can iterate on business models without code changes," reports TechCrunch. "It does this by providing businesses with real-time APIs for their customers' usage and billing data." From the report: Two former Dropbox employees -- Kevin Liu and Scott Woody -- who met at the company after selling their own respective startups founded Metronome in 2020. They came up with the concept after speaking with hundreds of companies that they say "shared the common pain of making usage-based billing work at scale." "This change we're seeing in the software market is mapped to the value of what a customer is getting out of the product," said Liu. "And that has all been accelerated by the market success of the likes of Twilio, Snowflake and AWS, who have proven just how successful those models can be." Metronome claims that its offering allows companies to "quickly and effortlessly launch, iterate and scale new business models with billing infrastructure that works at any size and stage," according to Liu. The key, the company claims, is that companies are able to avoid designing around billing limitations. Customers include Cockroach Labs, Starburst and Truework. A16z General Partner Martin Casado believes that the entire software industry is moving toward "more granular and expressive pricing models, starting with usage-based pricing." "Building a system to support that is an incredibly difficult technical challenge," he told TechCrunch via email. "Kevin and Scott have the background and appreciation for the problem, and have built the only system that can support the scale, correctness, and uptimes required to handle billing for leading software companies." The company "has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)," adds TechCrunch. "Presently, Metronome has 20 employees and plans to spend the bulk of its new capital toward hiring, particularly across its R&D and go to market teams."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An almost 500-mile long bolt of lightning that lit up the sky across three US states has set a new world record for longest flash, scientists have confirmed. The BBC reports: The lightning bolt, extended a total of 477.2 miles (768 km) and spread across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The previous record was 440.6 miles (709 km) and recorded in Brazil in 2018. Lightning rarely extends over 10 miles and usually lasts under a second. Another lightning flash recorded in 2020 -- in Uruguay and Argentina -- has also set a new record for duration at 17.1 seconds. The previous record was 16.7 seconds. According to the WMO, both records took place in areas prone to intense storms that produce 'megaflashes,' namely the Great Plains region of the United States and the La Plata basin of South America's southern cone. Previously accepted WMO 'lightning extremes' include a 1975 incident in which 21 people were killed by a single flash of a lightning as they huddled inside a tent in Zimbabwe. In another incident, 469 people were killed when lightning struck the Egyptian town of Dronka in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plenty of apps that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch when you initially log in to save you the trouble of launching your most commonly used apps yourself. Leaving this setting on can also allow apps to check for updates or launch more quickly when you start them for the first time. The difference for some of the preinstalled Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use the apps or not. Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts examining the resource usage of Windows 11's widgets, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge in a fresh install of Windows 11 (the Edge observations apply to Windows 10, too). Both Widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes in order to work—WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without launching Edge or using its user interface. Collectively, these processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory to work. The widget-related processes don't start unless you actually click the widgets button, though they remain in the background afterward, even if you're not actively viewing your widgets. But the Teams processes all launch automatically, whether you actually use Teams or not. Uninstalling Teams will prevent this from happening, but Niehaus points out that simply removing the Teams icon from Windows 11's Taskbar in the Taskbar settings is enough to keep these WebView2 processes from launching when you log in. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham also recommends disabling System Boost in the Edge settings if you don't use it as your default browser. Otherwise, it too will use a couple hundred megabytes of memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube topped Netflix in terms of quarterly revenue, with the Google-owned video platform delivering $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter reports: For fiscal 2021, YouTube delivered $28.8 billion in advertising revenue. In the same quarter a year earlier, YouTube delivered $6.9 billion in advertising revenue, underscoring the continued explosive growth of the platform. For comparison, Netflix delivered $7.7 billion in revenue in Q4 in 2021, compared to $6.6 billion a year earlier. Overall, Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported $75.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, and $257.6 billion for the year, with Google search advertising still making up the lions share of revenue. With regard to YouTube, the executives cited commerce as a potential growth area for YouTube, with CEO Sundar Pichai calling it "a whole other layer of opportunity." "Podcasts, gaming, learning, sports, across all of these areas we will take a vertical specific look and find out how we can support creators better," he said. "While pretty early, there is a lot of pilots under way," he added, noting that they were "super early" into testing how shopping could be baked into YouTube Shorts, its TikTok-esque shorts platform, which Pichai said now has more than 5 trillion views. The executives also called out YouTube's connected TV opportunity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cruise, the driverless spin-off from General Motors, said on Tuesday that it's about to offer public robot-taxi rides in its San Francisco hometown soon -- "within weeks, not months." In a first for San Francisco, Cruise's public rides will be fully driverless, with no back-up driver behind the wheel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: It has been giving rides to its own employees sans backup driver since November, and has been test-driving truly driverless cars here since December 2020. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing rides to some San Franciscans since August. [...] Cruise is now accepting applications from members of the public who want to hop into Poppy, Tostada or another of its self-driving Chevy Bolts. The company said it will pick names from the wait list in "weeks not months." Meanwhile it is already giving rides to some locals who were nominated by Cruise employees. Cruise's rides for the public will run from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. and will be in the city's northwest quadrant -- including Nob Hill, the Fillmore, the Panhandle, the Sunset and the Richmond. For now, the rides from both services are free. Neither Cruise nor any other robot car company has permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides, although Cruise applied for it in November.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

t0qer writes: So, I recently got an email that my [free edition G Suite subscription] will be going away soon (July 2022) and I'll have to subscribe for $6 per user per month. My domain is just my family last name and I have a few accounts for my immediate wife and kids. I'm not really sure if that's worth spending the money on for hosted email. I do use other parts of the suite (Drive, Sheets, and Docs) but I can happily use other products for that. Just wondering if any /.'ers are in the same boat and what they're thinking of moving to? As a recap, Google announced in mid-January that all "G Suite Legacy Free Edition" (now formally called Google Workspace) users will be required to start paying for Workspace this year. This decision generated a ton of backlash, even prompting a potential class-action lawsuit. Now, the company appears to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement by allowing legacy G Suite users the ability to migrate to free accounts. They're also "promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits," reports Ars Technica. Still, it may be time to switch to a different service... Some alternatives include Office 365 Business, Zoho Workplace, Bitrix24, and Rackspace. Do you have a favorite?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate could help make it easier for farmers [...] to repair their tractors independently. The legislation would require agriculture equipment manufacturers to make spare parts, instruction manuals and software codes publicly available, allowing farmers to fix devices by themselves or hire third-party mechanics of their own choosing. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said in an interview that he has heard from many farmers who reported that difficulties repairing equipment hurt their businesses. "We've got to figure out ways to empower farmers to make sure they can stay on the land. This is one of the ways to do it," Tester said. "I think that the more we can empower farmers to be able to control their own destiny, which is what this bill does, the safer food chains are going to be." Tester said farmers often reported that company-authorized repairs were costly and could be handled only by licensed technicians who may take days, or even weeks, to show up. That type of delay can have serious impacts on the delicate harvest cycle for planting and reaping crops. [...] The rules about farming equipment could help boost the wider "right to repair" movement, which has gained steam across the country in recent years. Consumer rights groups like U.S. PIRG, a federation of nonprofit public interest research groups, or PIRGs, say people have a fundamental right to control devices they already own, especially when they need to be fixed. Over the last few decades, they say, companies have made third-party repairs nearly impossible by locking software, writing prohibitive warranties or restricting spare parts. The Senate bill is the latest effort to tackle the issue in Congress, following similar legislation sponsored in the House last year by Rep. Joseph Morelle, D-N.Y. But unlike some of the other proposed laws, the Senate bill narrowly targets farmers, who have become one of the most vocal groups advocating for more repair regulations. Tester said: "I think when you get into other areas like cellphones and TVs and all that kind of stuff, it brings in all sorts of other issues that I am personally not as familiar with as agriculture. That's not to say that those other issues aren't really, really important. What it is to say is that I know this issue reasonably well, and I thought this is an issue that we need to deal with, and the sooner the better."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully. Tom's Hardware reports: Another revelation in the post is that Microsoft tracks how long PCs are connected to Windows Update, calling the statistics "Update Connectivity." The data is available to IT managers in the InTune app, a component of the Endpoint management suite. The post details Microsoft's attempts to figure out why some Windows devices aren't getting the latest quality and feature updates, and discovered that two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably. Microsoft's figures show that 50 percent of Windows devices left behind by Windows Update and running a build of Windows 10 that's no longer serviced do not spend enough time connected to have the patches downloaded and installed in the background. This figure drops to 25 percent for customers using a serviced build of the operating system that lags behind in security updates by 60 days or more. The goods news, as noted by Tom's Hardware, is that "Windows 11 updates are smaller than their Windows 10 counterparts due to improved compression [and] new Microsoft Graph APIs," which should help speed up the update process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Backblaze, a cloud storage service that's been running hundreds of thousands of storage drives to keep an eye on reliability, has issued its latest report. ZDNet summarizes the major findings: Over 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its pool of drives, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of thee, 3,760 are boot drives and 203,168 are data drives. There's a lot of information in the report to look at, but there are two standout parts from the report: - The oldest drive is the most reliable: 6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years) yet incredibly these also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11 percent.- Newer drives are also doing really well: 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91 percent, respectively. Backblaze had also been experiencing problems with the 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that following a firmware update the reliability of these drives has improved dramatically. Further reading: Seagate HDDs Top and Bottom Backblaze's 2021 Failure Rates Data (Tom's Hardware)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The recent stock rout is rattling the multitrillion-dollar market for startups after a long run of record investments, nosebleed valuations and rapid-fire deal-making. From a report: Venture capitalists say a significant reset in investment behavior is beginning to take hold that is poised to reduce initial public offerings, leave some companies short of funding and crimp valuations. Investors say several large startup backers are cutting back their investments, curtailing a flow that sprayed at full blast for most of the pandemic, particularly for older, more mature startups. And venture firms say they are advising their companies to prepare to conserve cash in a tougher funding environment. Tiger Global Management, one of the most prolific startup investors of the last two years, in recent weeks has been renegotiating investments that had been under discussion for numerous companies, reducing the valuations, people familiar with the deals said. Venture capitalists say other investors are doing the same. Dbt Labs, a fast-expanding business-software company, recently scaled back its fundraising plans. It struck a deal with investors for a funding round that values the Philadelphia-based company around $4 billion, down from the more than $6 billion it initially negotiated, according to people familiar with the deal. Jared Carmel, managing partner at Manhattan Venture Partners, a startup investor and adviser to venture-backed companies and their shareholders, said he watched prices for certain stock purchases of some private companies fall 10% in the past month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Israel is accelerating the roll-out of laser-based interceptors as part of a plan to surround itself with such technologies and reduce the high costs currently incurred when shooting down aerial threats, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday. Lifting the veil on prototype interceptors that would use lasers to super-heat incoming drones or the kinds of rockets favored by Iran-backed guerrillas, Israeli defense officials predicted last June such systems would be ready for action in 2025. But Bennett announced a dramatically shortened timeline. "Within a year already the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will bring into action a laser-based interception system, first experimentally, and later operationally, first in the south, then in other places," he said in a speech. "And this will enable us, as the years advance, to surround Israel with a wall of lasers which will protect us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats," he told Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. The laser system would be an addition to Israel's current air defenses based on Iron Dome, David's Sling and Arrow -- systems that launch interceptor missiles costing tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars each. "The equation will be overturned -- they will invest much, and we little," Bennett said. "If we can intercept a missile or rocket with an electrical pulse that costs a few dollars, we will essentially neutralize the ring of fire that Iran has set up ... This new generation of air defense can also serve our friends in the region, who are also exposed to grave threats from Iran and its proxies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tally includes broken vases, dislocated shoulders, injured girlfriends; "Why don't you go to the gym like a normal person?" WSJ: A few hours after Toby Robicelli first strapped on the $300 virtual-reality headset he got for Christmas, the Baltimore teenager, who was playing a shooter game called "Superhot VR," lost his balance and fractured his kneecap. "We set it up around 2:00," said Toby's mother, Allison Robicelli, of the tech gadget, "and by 8:00 we were on our way to the ER." She fainted when she saw his leg, she said, and Toby, 14, is now using crutches. Sales of VR headsets rose more than 70% last year from 2020, according to International Data Corp., to 7.9 million units. Demand is driven in part by rising hype around the metaverse, a term proponents use to describe a future 3-D version of the internet, comprising virtual worlds where people will get together to work, learn and play. With interest in the devices growing, so is their reputation for being a source of pain and embarrassment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Block Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey criticized Meta Platforms' failed cryptocurrency project, Diem, saying the company's time would have been better spent focused on advancing Bitcoin. From a report: Dorsey said Tuesday that Meta's approach to Diem, a proposed cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra that came to an unceremonious end this week, wasn't open enough. Instead, Dorsey says Meta was too focused on driving people to its own suite of products, like WhatsApp and Instagram. "They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook -- probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons -- but there were also some reasons that would indicate trying to get more and more people onto the Facebook ecosystem," Dorsey said Tuesday at the MicroStrategy World conference. "They did that instead of using an open protocol and standard like Bitcoin. Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time," he added. "Those two years or three years, or however long it's been, could have been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world, which would also benefit their Messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're in the midst of an energy transition. Renewable power and electric vehicles are getting cheaper, the grid is getting greener, and oil and gas companies are getting nervous. That's why the fossil fuel giants are looking towards petrochemicals, and plastics in particular, as their next major growth market. From a report: "Plastics is the Plan B for the fossil fuel industry," said Judith Enck, Founder and President of the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics. Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, are set to drive nearly half of oil demand growth by midcentury, according to the International Energy Agency. That outpaces even hard-to-decarbonize sectors like aviation and shipping. "Every company who is currently engaged in producing plastic, if you look at their capital budgets for the next two to three years, they're all talking about expansion plans," said Ramesh Ramachandran, CEO of No Plastic Waste, an initiative from the Mindaroo Foundation that's working to create a market-based approach to a circular plastics economy. Yet much of the developed world is already awash in plastics. So fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are relying on emerging economies in Asia and Africa to drive growth. Alan Gelder of Wood Mackenzie forecasts that every year through 2050, there will be 10 million metric tons of growth in the market for petrochemicals, which are used to make plastics and other products. He says much of that will be shipped overseas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A whistleblower has alleged that an executive at NSO Group offered a US-based mobile security company "bags of cash" in exchange for access to a global signalling network used to track individuals through their mobile phone, according to a complaint that was made to the US Department of Justice. The Guardian: The allegation, which dates back to 2017 and was made by a former mobile security executive named Gary Miller, was disclosed to federal authorities and to the US congressman Ted Lieu, who said he conducted his own due diligence on the claim and found it "highly disturbing." Details of the allegation by Miller were then sent in a letter by Lieu to the Department of Justice. "The privacy implications to Americans and national security implications to America of NSO Group accessing mobile operator signalling networks are vast and alarming," Lieu wrote in his letter. The letter was shared with the Guardian and other media partners on the Pegasus project, a media consortium led by the Paris-based Forbidden Stories that has investigated NSO and published a series of stories about how governments around the world have used the company's spyware to target activists, journalists, and lawyers, among others.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google will finally start rolling out the Gmail redesign it first showed off last year. The company is calling the interface in the update the "integrated view" because the goal is to integrate Google's latest messaging service, Google Chat (a Slack competitor and the successor to Hangouts) and Google Meet (a Zoom competitor) into Gmail. From a report: The main section will remain mostly the same, but there are plenty of changes coming to Gmail's navigation sidebar. Currently, the Gmail sidebar houses the sections you would expect, like the Inbox, Drafts, Trash, and your list of labels. The redesign will add a second, new higher-level navigation panel to the left side of the page, letting users jump between Gmail, Google Chat, Spaces (Google Chat group chats), and Google Meet. Besides the four app-navigation options, the new sidebar also has a stack of icons at the bottom, and it's not entirely clear what they are. They look like chat profile pictures, so they could be either active chats or starred contacts. Since no one has tried this interface yet, we don't know many details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A South African woman suffering from inadequately treated HIV, and who harbored Covid-19 for nine months saw the respiratory virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, according to a study. From a report: Once the 22-year-old adhered to the anti-retroviral medication used to treat HIV and her immune system strengthened she was able to overcome the Covid-19 infection within six to nine weeks, the study, led by scientists from Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal showed. The research has not been peer reviewed. The study adds to evidence that Covid-19 may mutate rapidly when harbored by immunosuppressed individuals, such as those not taking medication to treat HIV, and this may lead to the development of new variants. The beta variant, which the patient in the study was infected with, was discovered in South Africa, as was omicron. "This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants," the scientists said, stressing that it was still a hypothesis. "Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is rolling out new updates to its mobile and desktop VPN offerings, the company announced on Tuesday. From a report: With the launch of Mozilla VPN 2.7, the company is bringing one of Firefox's popular add-ons, Multi-Account Containers, to the desktop platform and also introducing a multi-hop feature to the Android and iOS version of the VPN service. Firefox's Multi-Account Containers allow users to separate different parts of their online activities, such as work, shopping and banking. Instead of having to open a new window or different browser to check your work email, you can isolate that activity in a container tab, which prevents other sites from tracking your activity across the web. The company says combining the add-on with Mozilla's VPN adds an extra layer of protection to users' compartmentalized browsing activity and also adds extra protection to their locational information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How to analyse data without revealing their secrets? From a report: Data are valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be. Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable. A lot of commercial data are similarly sequestered. For example, firms have more granular and timely information on the economy than governments can obtain from surveys. But such intelligence would be useful to rivals. If companies could be certain it would remain secret, they might be more willing to make it available to officialdom. A range of novel data-processing techniques might make such sharing possible. These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development. But they are about to get a boost from a project launched by the United Nations' statistics division. The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome. The first such effort, which actually began last summer, before the PETs Lab's formal inauguration, analysed import and export data from national statistical offices in America, Britain, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, to look for anomalies. Those could be a result of fraud, of faulty record keeping or of innocuous re-exporting. For the pilot scheme, the researchers used categories already in the public domain -- in this case international trade in things such as wood pulp and clocks. They thus hoped to show that the system would work, before applying it to information where confidentiality matters. They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data. That is mathematically complex, but possible. The findings are then sent back to the original inquirer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species. From a report: Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38 million trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them. The study found there are about 14% more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis. "It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests," said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US. "Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece." Despite being among the largest and most widespread organisms, there are still thousands of trees to be discovered, with 40% of unknown species believed to be in South America, according to the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Some of these undocumented species would probably have been known to indigenous communities but some, in the most inaccessible regions, may have never been found before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Federal Trade Commission will undertake an antitrust review of Microsoft's proposed acquisition of scandal-plagued video game giant Activision Blizzard, reported Bloomberg on Monday. CNET: Microsoft last month announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal valued at $68.7 billion. The deal, expected to close within the next 18 months, would make Microsoft the world's third-largest video game maker and give it control of popular franchises including the war simulation series Call of Duty and the fantasy behemoth World of Warcraft. The FTC will reportedly oversee the review instead of the Justice Department, which also has authority over antitrust enforcement. It review will look at whether combining Microsoft, which makes Xbox consoles, and Activision Blizzard could harm competition by limiting rivals' access to major games, according to Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany is planning to bolster its semiconductor industry after the government thwarted the takeover of a local supplier, raising questions about the country's technology strategy. From a report: Chancellor Olaf Scholz's administration is working on programs to invest in the chip sector, which the government considers central to Germany's energy shift, according to a government official. With the approval process in its final days, Economy Minister Robert Habeck met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels last week to ensure that plans to invest billions of euros in cleaner technologies would pass state-aid scrutiny, said the official, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. Germany's new government derailed GlobalWafers Co's $5 billion takeover of Munich-based Siltronic AG by allowing a Monday deadline to grant approval to lapse without a decision, despite reviewing the deal for more than a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is widely rolling out a new Google Messages feature to beta users that allows the Android messaging app to correctly interpret emoji reactions sent from the iOS Messages app, 9to5Google reports. From a report: The feature appears to be live in version 20220121_02_RC00 of the app, according to Droid-Life, but not for every user. Although it didn't work on every phone we tried, we were able to get it working on an Oppo Find X3 Pro, which is more than can be said for when the feature initially started appearing last November. The feature fixes a long-standing issue that can affect SMS chats between iPhone and Android users. When an iPhone user reacts to an Android message with emoji, the Android user typically sees this reaction sent as an entirely separate text message, resulting in confusion and lots of unnecessary clutter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: Income from the the transfer of any virtual assets will be taxed at 30%, the nation's finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Tuesday. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, she also proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. "No deduction in respect of any expenditure or allowance shall be allowed while computing such income except cost of acquisition. Further, loss from transfer of digital asset cannot be set off against any other income," she said in one of New Delhi's most remarkable tech and business-focused federal budgets. "Gift of virtual digital asset is also proposed to be taxed at the hand of the recipient."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DARPA has announced a new initiative called the Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which will look to develop a practical, super-accurate optical atomic clock that is robust and small enough to fit inside a military aircraft, warship, or field vehicle. New Atlas reports: Ignoring a lot of technical details, a conventional atomic clock works by using a beam of microwaves to measure the frequency of the target atoms, but by replacing the microwaves with light, the accuracy is boosted by a factor of 100. In fact, such optical clocks are so accurate that the most advanced wouldn't gain or lose a second through the entire lifespan of the universe. Such optical atomic clocks have been built, but they're still huge, delicate, room-filling machines that aren't practical for military application. The goal of DARPA's ROCKn program is to study the basic physics of the principle behind the optical clock and find a way to make optical atomic clocks with low size, weight, and power (SWaP). Not only that, they will be more precise and accurate than current state-of-the-art atomic clocks. To do this, ROCKn will first look to produce a robust, high-precision small portable optical clock that can maintain picosecond accuracy for 100 seconds at a time. This clock would be small enough to install in a fighter jet or satellite and tough enough to withstand the temperatures, acceleration, and vibrational noise of such an environment. The second stage will aim to create a larger transportable version that can be used in a Navy ship or field unit that is accurate to a nanosecond for up to 30 days without an outside GPS signal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: One of the world's largest publishers of academic papers said it adds a unique fingerprint to every PDF users download in an attempt to prevent ransomware, not to prevent piracy. Elsevier defended the practice after an independent researcher discovered the existence of the unique fingerprints and shared their findings on Twitter last week. "The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers -- there is no metadata, PII [Personal Identifying Information] or personal data captured by these," an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. "Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry." When asked what risks he was referring to, the spokesperson sent a list of links to news articles about ransomware. However, Elsevier has a long history of pursuing people who pirate or share its paywalled academic articles. [...] It's unclear exactly how fingerprinting every PDF downloaded could actually prevent ransomware. Jonny Saunders, a neuroscience PhD candidate at University of Oregon, who discovered the practice, said he believes Elsevier is trying to surveil its users and prevent people from sharing research without paying the company. "The subtext there is pretty loud to me," Saunders told Motherboard in an online chat. "Those breaches/ransoms are really a pretext for saying 'universities need to lock down accounts so people can't skim PDFs. When you have stuff that you don't want other people to give away for free, you want some way of finding out who is giving it away, right?" "Saying that the unique identifiers *themselves* don't contain PII is a semantic dodge: the way identifiers like these work is to be able to match them later with other identifying information stored at the time of download like browser fingerprint, institutional credentials, etc," Saunders added. "Justifying them as a tool to protect against ransomware is a straightforward admission that these codes are intended to identify the downloader: how would they help if not by identifying the compromised account or system?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world's first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom's Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company's 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which "only" top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE's monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website $110 for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font. The Register reports: The decision, by Landgericht Munchen's third civil chamber in Munich, found that the website, by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, passed the unidentified plaintiff's IP address to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason for doing so. And that violates Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That is to say, when the plaintiff visited the website, the page made the user's browser fetch a font from Google Fonts to use for some text, and this disclosed the netizen's IP address to the US internet giant. This kind of hot-linking is normal with Google Fonts; the issue here is that the visitor apparently didn't give permission for their IP address to be shared. The website could have avoided this drama by self-hosting the font, if possible. The decision says IP addresses represent personal data because it's theoretically possible to identify the person associated with an IP address, and that it's irrelevant whether the website or Google has actually done so. The ruling directs the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of 250,000 euros for each violation, or up to six months in prison, for continued improper use of Google Fonts. Google Fonts is widely deployed -- the Google Fonts API is used by about 50m websites. The API allows websites to style text with Google Fonts stored on remote servers -- Google's or a CDN's -- that get fetched as the page loads. Google Fonts can be self-hosted to avoid running afoul of EU rules and the ruling explicitly cites this possibility to assert that relying on Google-hosted Google Fonts is not defensible under the law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter's algorithm amplifies their opponents' voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS. The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their experiences. It wouldn't have been possible to study such a large number of users that way. Instead, a computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. [...] The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources. Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176%). In acknowledgement of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum. To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets. Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum. This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets. The authors of the study point out that the algorithms "might be influenced by the way different political groups operate," notes The Conversation. "So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eighty-four percent of app developers support an antitrust bill aimed at curtailing the market power of Apple's and Google's app stores, according to a poll (PDF) from the Coalition for App Fairness released Monday. The Hill reports: The industry group for app developers is pushing Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that would block app stores from favoring their own in-house apps in searches, requiring developers to use their payment systems and preventing users from downloading apps from third-party stores. Developers surveyed by the group complained about exorbitant fees charged by the largest app stores -- Apple charges a 30 percent commission on app store sales for large developers -- and expressed how they'd experienced difficulty getting their apps featured or accepted by app stores. Just 13 percent of app developers surveyed oppose the bill. [...] The poll, conducted by ClearPath Strategies, surveyed 190 app developers in 11 states between December 2021 and January 2022. The margin of error is plus or minus 7.11 percentage points. "The evidence is clear -- app developers want the Open App Markets Act to pass so that they can have the opportunity to compete in a fair digital marketplace," Meghan DiMuzio, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, said in a statement. "For too long, developers have been harmed by gatekeepers' monopolistic practices, and consumers have suffered from less choice and innovation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.