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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A London secondary school is trying to stop its pupils from using "basically" at the beginning of sentences and deploying phrases such as "oh my days" in a crackdown on "fillers" and "slang" in the classroom. Ark All Saints academy has produced lists of "banned" language which includes "he cut his eyes at me", which the Collins dictionary says originates in the Caribbean and means to look rudely at a person and then turn away sharply while closing one's eyes dismissively. Neither should they use "that's long," which can mean something that is boring or tedious, or "that's a neck" which indicates a comment or action is stupid. "Bare," "wow," "cuss" and "oh my God" are also out. The list -- which is intended to steer the language used in formal learning situations and exams rather than in the playground -- has drawn criticism from linguists who described it as "crude and shortsighted ... a disservice and discredit to young people." Teachers say it guides pupils to use language that fits more formal situations and helps them succeed. The school said the specific words and phrases on the list were selected because they were "showing up a lot in pupils' work" and it stressed the importance of pupils expressing themselves "clearly and accurately." Expressions that must not be used at the beginning of sentences include: "ermmm," "because," "no," "like," "say," "you see," "you know," and "basically." "The development of reading and speaking skills is a central part of what drives our school to help our students learn effectively and fulfil their potential in academic and non-academic ways," said Lucy Frame, the principal at the school in Camberwell, south-east London. "None of the words or phrases listed are banned from general use in our school or when our students are interacting socially. But this list is used in some formal learning settings to help students understand the importance of expressing themselves clearly and accurately, not least through written language in examinations." The intervention may reflect a widening gap between language that is accepted by examiners and that used day-to-day by pupils in some areas of the UK. External examiners have noted pupils nationwide using "unnecessarily rude and strident vocabulary" in weaker answers. Bridging the gap between what is normal language for pupils and what is acceptable for exams is a challenge for teachers. A 2019 survey of 2,100 tutors found that "slanglish" was the most common reason for English GCSE failures. Yet, as a subject of study, "code-switching/style-shifting, youth slang ... and use of accent and dialect" is increasingly of interest to English language A-level students, according to the AQA exam board. [...] Some fear such moves could alienate some pupils. Dr Marcello Giovanelli, a senior lecturer in English language and literature at Aston University, said: "Slang has always been at the forefront of linguistic innovation." He described "he cut his eyes at me" as a "wonderfully creative example" and said "dismissing students' home or own use of language may have negative effects on identity and confidence." Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London and the director of the Slang and New Language Archive, said: "It shouldn't be about good or bad language, it should be about appropriate language for the context." "You don't want to make them feel they have to reject the cultural aspects of their own language," said Dr Natalie Sharpling, who teaches applied linguistics at Warwick University. "We should celebrate the different ways language is being used and concentrate on the content of what is being said." Sharpling said she had observed an increasing trend in schools to police language and said "it would be a shame if it becomes a case of if you want to be successful, this is the way you have to speak."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People benefit from deep and meaningful conversations that help us forge connections with one another, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much others are interested in our lives and wrongly believe that deeper conversations will be more awkward and less enjoyable than they actually are, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Phys.Org reports: If connecting with others in deep and meaningful ways increases well-being, then why aren't people doing it more often in daily life? To answer that question, [researchers] designed a series of twelve experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. The researchers asked pairs of people -- mainly strangers -- to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. In some experiments, people received shallow or deep questions to discuss. Shallow questions included typical small-talk topics, such as, "What is the best TV show you've seen in the last month? Tell your partner about it" or "What do you think about the weather today?" while deep questions elicited more personal and intimate information, such as, "Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?" or "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future, or anything else, what would you want to know?" In other experiments, people generated their own deep and shallow conversation topics. Before the conversations, participants predicted how awkward they thought the conversations would be, how connected they thought they would feel to their conversation partner and how much they would enjoy the conversation. Afterward, they rated how awkward the conversations actually were, how connected they actually felt and how much enjoyment they actually experienced. Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be significantly more than those who discussed shallow questions. Deep conversations were also more enjoyable and led to a stronger sense of connection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A spacecraft bound for the planet Mercury will take a first look at the target tonight, when it makes its first-ever flyby of the small rocky world during an incredibly close encounter tonight. Space.com reports: The mission, called BepiColombo, is a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It is only the second mission in history sent to orbit Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet of the solar system. BepiColombo's flyby tonight (Oct. 1) will bring the spacecraft within just 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the surface of Mercury, the closest the probe will ever get to the planet during its mission. The first images from the encounter are expected to reach Earth early Saturday (Oct. 2) and will be the first close images of Mercury's scorched surface since the end of NASA's Messenger orbiter mission in 2015. BepiColombo will make its closest approach to Mercury at 7:34 p.m. EDT (2334 GMT) today (Oct.1), ESA said in a statement. The spacecraft will then continue on its winding trajectory around the sun. This close pass is one of nine gravity-assist flybys, maneuvers that use the gravity of celestial bodies to adjust a spacecraft's trajectory, that BepiColombo needs to perform before it can enter its target orbit around the planet. This flyby, however, will take the spacecraft even closer to the scorched planet's surface, than its ultimate scientific orbit of 300 to 930 miles (480 to 1,500 kilometers). The $750 million BepiColombo mission will be able to make measurements of the environment around the planet and take images with its black and white 'selfie' cameras, which provide a 1024 by 1024 pixel resolution (comparable to an early-2000s flip phone.) [...] After tonight's close pass, it will take four more flybys of Mercury by BepiColombo before the spacecraft is in the correct position to finally enter the planet's orbit, which is set to happen in 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An oral antiviral drug appears to cut the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 by roughly 50 percent in people newly diagnosed with the infection and at risk for severe disease, pharmaceutical company Merck announced Friday morning. The drug-maker and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, released top-line results of a Phase III trial, which the companies ended early given the positive results. The companies say they will apply for an Emergency Use Authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration as soon as possible. The trial enrolled people who had newly tested positive for a SARS-CoV-2 infection and had onset of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 symptoms within just the past five days of starting the trial. The enrollees also had to have at least one risk factor for a poor outcome, such as having obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or being age 60 or above. While some participants received a placebo and standard care, others took an oral dose of the drug every 12 hours for five days. After 29 days of follow-up, 53 out of 377 participants who received the placebo were hospitalized with COVID-19, and eight of those participants died. Among those who received the drug, only 28 of 385 were hospitalized and none of those patients died. Put another way, 7.3 percent of patients on the drug were either hospitalized or died compared with 14.1 percent in the placebo group. Merck also highlighted that the trial was global and that the drug appeared to work equally well against varying SARS-CoV-2 variants, including delta, gamma, and mu. The drug-maker noted that it had viral genetic data to identify variants from 40 percent of participants. The safety data was equally promising, with participants reporting similar numbers of drug-related adverse events between the placebo group than the drug group (11 percent and 12 percent, respectively). About 3.4 percent of people in the placebo group quit the study due to adverse events, while only 1.3 percent quit in the drug group. The drug at the center of these seemingly smashing results is dubbed molnupiravir -- a name inspired by that of Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. The idea is that the drug will strike down SARS-CoV-2, like a mighty blow from the god of thunder. In an interview with Stat news, Merck's head of research and development, Dean Li, said that the new data proves the drug's mythological force. "Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right [thing]... this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant." Molnupiravir is a small molecule that wallops the work of a viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, an enzyme critical for making copies of RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. [...] Molnupiravir delivers a precise blow to viral RNA polymerase by posing as a building block for RNA. In the body, molnupiravir is forged into a deceptive ribonucleoside that the polymerase unwittingly incorporates into new strands of viral RNA instead of cytidine. This is essentially lethal. Researchers call the effect a "viral error catastrophe," in which the rate of genetic mutations or errors exceeds a threshold compatible with the virus surviving.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In late 1791 and early 1792, on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars, Queen Marie Antoinette engaged in a secret correspondence with her confidant and rumored lover, Swedish Count Axel von Fersen. Nearly 50 letters from that exchange survive at the French National Archives. But certain passages in 15 of the letters were unreadable, obscured by redactions made with swirls of dark ink. Now, researchers have revealed the words beneath 45 of these alterations using x-ray technology. They have also discovered the censor's identity: von Fersen, himself. The idea that von Fersen made the redactions is "a revelation," says Catriona Seth, a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. Historians had thought the letters were censored in the second half of the 19th century -- most likely by von Fersen's great-nephew -- to protect the writers' reputations. Now, she says, scholars will need to rethink the cover-up -- and the reasons behind it. The newly legible passages are largely sentimental, phrases like "made my heart happy," and "you that I love." Comments on politics and world events, meanwhile, remain uncensored. But even these seemingly intimate phrases don't definitively tell historians anything new about Marie Antoinette and von Fersen's relationship, Seth says. Scholars, she notes, already knew Marie Antoinette had "a very deep affection for him." Still, she adds, the letters offer "direct insight into the thoughts and feelings of Marie Antoinette." In the future, the techniques in this study could be used in combination with machine algorithms to automatically transcribe old texts, the researchers say, making it easier to understand these important documents -- and others like them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, the California DMV issued autonomous deployment permits to Cruise and Waymo, "which is a necessary step if the robotaxis are to charge passengers for their rides," reports The Verge. From the report: San Franciscans might have to be night owls to catch a Cruise; the DMV's authorization gives Cruise permission to operate on surface streets within a geofenced area of San Francisco between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am. Cruise's autonomous vehicles are allowed to operate in light rain and light fog, but they aren't allowed to exceed 30 mph (48 km/h). Waymo is allowed to operate over a wider area; the DMV's authorization is "within parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties." These robotaxis are also trusted to cope with light rain and light fog and are approved for speeds of up to 65 mph (105 km/h). Both AV developers have had permission to test (as opposed to commercially deploy) their vehicles on Californian roads. Waymo was allowed to begin road tests in 2014, and to conduct them without a safety driver from 2018. Meanwhile, Cruise got permission to begin road testing with safety drivers in 2015 and driverless testing in 2020. However, there are still Is to be dotted and Ts to be crossed before either Waymo or Cruise can actually properly begin operating real commercial robotaxi services. Approval from the DMV is necessary, but not sufficient, as the California Public Utilities Commission must also approve such a service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A Dutch supermarket chain says it will introduce 200 "chat registers" in its stores for customers who aren't in a hurry and want to have a chat during checkout. The initiative, announced by the popular supermarket chain Jumbo on Monday, is meant to combat loneliness -- especially in the country's elderly population. According to Statistics Netherlands, a government organization, 26 percent of Dutch people older than 15 feel at least moderately lonely. That proportion rises to 33 percent among those over 75. Jumbo piloted the first so-called chat register ("kletskassa" in Dutch) in 2019 and received positive reactions from customers. The decision comes as part of the government-sponsored "One Against Loneliness" program, which, among other things, established a 24/7 loneliness hotline. Jumbo also said it will "carefully consider areas where loneliness is a major issue" when choosing where to open the 200 chat registers in branches across the Netherlands and Belgium. Alongside the chat registers, it will also be opening an unspecified number of "cozy chat corners" where customers can have a cup of coffee and a chat, and will donate ingredients to Oma's Soep -- an initiative that brings the elderly together with university students to make soup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

skam240 writes: California has just become the first state to add Covid-19 vaccination to its list of required vaccines for in-school attendance. "The requirement will go into effect at the start of the term that follows the FDA's full approval for that grade group -- either January 1 or July 1," reports CNN, citing a release from Gov. Gavin Newsom's office. For grades 7-12 the requirement is expected to begin on July 1, 2022. Newsom's office said independent study is an option for unvaccinated students. "This will accelerate our effort to get this pandemic behind us," Newsom told CNN's Ana Cabrera minutes after making the announcement. "We already mandate 10 vaccines. In so many ways... it's probably the most predictable announcement." "I have four young kids. I can't take this anymore. I'm like most parents, I want to get this behind us, get this economy moving again, make sure our kids never have to worry about getting a call saying they can't go to school the next day because one of the kids or a staff member tested positive," the governor added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a statement released Thursday, Scarlett Johansson said she has resolved her legal dispute with Disney. "I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney," said Johansson. "I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come." The movie star filed the lawsuit against Disney in late July, alleging her contract was breached when the media giant released "Black Widow" on its Disney+ streaming service at the same time as its theatrical debut, thus negatively impacting her salary that was based in large part on the box-office performance of the film. Deadline reports: Unlike in their vitriolic filings and their shaming PR statements over the past few, Marvel-owner Disney had nothing but love today for the actor who brought Natasha Romanoff to life for them in nearly 10 separate films. I'm very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow, said Alan Bergman, Chairman, Disney Studios Content. "We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney's Tower of Terror." As is almost always the case in cases like this, neither side gave any indication of how much money was involved in the settlement. However, when all is said and done, the deal will run to more than $40 million, sources tell me. Accordingly, the funds will not be paid by Disney in a single lump sum, if you pick up the creative accounting I'm putting down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of Samsung filling up its stock apps with ads, the company is finally stopping that practice. As of today, Samsung Pay, Weather, and Health have officially stopped serving ads. 9to5Google reports: Users in the Samsung Community Forums found that ads had suddenly disappeared from the Samsung Pay app, and an investigation from the folks over at TizenHelp unearthed a comment from a Samsung employee that confirms some good news. As of today, October 1, Samsung has stopped serving ads to Samsung Pay and Samsung Health. Samsung has technically only confirmed this change in its home country, but we're seeing the changes in the United States as well. Notably, force stopping these apps seems to force the ads to be removed, just in case they're still live for you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: More than 6,000 Coinbase users had funds stolen from their accounts after hackers used a vulnerability in Coinbase's SMS-based two-factor authentication system to breach accounts. The intrusions took place earlier this year, between March and May, the exchange said in a data breach notification letter it has filed with US state attorney general offices. Coinbase said the attacks could exploit this bug only if they knew the victim's username and password. "While we are not able to determine conclusively how these third parties gained access to this information, this type of campaign typically involves phishing attacks or other social engineering techniques to trick a victim into unknowingly disclosing login credentials to a bad actor. "We have not found any evidence that these third parties obtained this information from Coinbase itself," the company said. Coinbase said it would reimburse all users who lost funds in these intrusions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House will convene a 30-country meeting this month to try to ramp up global efforts to address the threat of ransomware to economic and national security, President Joe Biden said in a statement shared exclusively with CNN. From a report: "Cyber threats affect the lives and livelihoods of American families and businesses," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement to CNN. Sullivan said the administration would "continue to build on our whole-of-government effort to deter and disrupt cyberattacks." The goal of the alliance will be "to accelerate our cooperation in combatting cybercrime, improving law enforcement collaboration, stemming the illicit use of cryptocurrency, and engaging on these issues diplomatically," Biden is set to announce Friday, according to the statement. The announcement follows a series of ransomware attacks on US critical infrastructure firms in recent months, including one that forced major US fuel supplier Colonial Pipeline to shut down for days. The first meeting of the multilateral initiative will be held virtually. It's part of a recurring effort to cut off revenue for ransomware groups and figure out ways to prosecute them, according to the White House. In bolstering US cybersecurity, "the Federal government needs the partnership of every American and every American company in these efforts," Biden added. Biden in June urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to crack down on cybercriminals operating from Russian soil, but US officials have been skeptical of Moscow's willingness to do so. After a brief period of quiet from some ransomware groups following the Biden-Putin meeting, hackers have claimed multiple US companies as victims in recent weeks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple, Google, Sony, Zoom, PayPal and several other tech companies as well as scores of banks have cautioned customers and partners in India to expect a surge in declined transactions as the world's second-largest internet market's central bank enforces a new directive for the way recurring payments are processed in the country. From a report: The Reserve Bank of India's directive, which goes into effect on Friday, requires banks, financial institutions and payment gateways to obtain additional approval for auto-renewables transactions worth over 5,000 Indian rupees ($67) from users by conducting notifications, e-mandates and Additional Factors of Authentication (AFA). The directive impacts all such transactions for debit cards as well as credit cards. The Reserve Bank of India said in the original circular in 2019, that the framework was designed to serve as "a risk mitigant and customer facilitation measure," adding that the issuer processing such transactions "shall send a pre-transaction notification to the customer, at least 24 hours prior to the actual charge by SMS or email, as per the customer's preferences."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is abandoning plans to pitch bank accounts to its users, marking a retreat from an effort to make the tech giant a bigger name in finance. The Wall Street Journal: The Alphabet unit announced almost two years ago that users of its Google Pay digital wallet would be able to sign up for enhanced checking accounts and debit cards at a handful of financial institutions large and small, including Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union. The new offerings, called Plex accounts, would sync with Google Pay, carry both Google and bank branding and provide a digital dashboard of where and how users spent and saved. Plex was billed as a new way to bank, with an emphasis on simplicity and financial wellness and without monthly or overdraft fees. The project was initially expected to debut in 2020. A series of missed deadlines, along with the April departure of the Google Pay executive who championed the project, prompted Google to pull the plug on Plex, people familiar with the matter said. A Google spokeswoman said the company would now focus primarily on "delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is launching Office 2021 on October 5th, and the company is finally detailing the features and pricing today. From a report: Office 2021 will be the next standalone version of Microsoft's Office suite, designed for businesses and consumers who want to avoid the subscription version of Office. Office Home and Student 2021 will be priced at $149.99 and include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac. Office Home and Business 2021 is priced at $249.99 and will include everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes. Office 2021 will include the collaboration features found in Microsoft 365 versions of Office, with real-time co-authoring, OneDrive support, and even Microsoft Teams integration. Office 2021 will also include the new Office design that has a refreshed ribbon interface, rounded corners, and a neutral color palette that all matches the UI changes in Windows 11.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

phalse phace writes: Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound Labs, just sent out a tweet pleading its users to return the $90.1 million in COMP tokens it accidentally deposited to user accounts. Users of the popular DeFi staking protocol received the platform's crypto tokens after a system upgrade went epically wrong. As an incentive, Leshner told users to "keep 10% as a white-hat. Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed." In another tweet Leshner explains what happened: "A few hours ago, Proposal 62 went into effect, updating the Comptroller contract, which distributes COMP to users of the protocol. The new Comptroller contract contains a bug, causing some users to receive far too much COMP. All supplied assets, borrowed assets, and positions are completely unaffected. Users don't have to worry about their funds; the only risk is that you (or another user) receives an unfairly large quantity of COMP."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mspohr writes: Some of America's most prominent companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are backing business groups that are fighting landmark climate legislation, despite their own promises to combat the climate crisis, a new analysis has found. A clutch of corporate lobby groups and organizations have mobilized to oppose the proposed $3.5tn budget bill put forward by Democrats, which contains unprecedented measures to drive down planet-heating gases. The reconciliation bill has been called the "the most significant climate action in our country's history" by Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate. Most large US corporations have expressed concern over the climate crisis or announced their own goals to cut greenhouse gases. Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest people, has said that the climate crisis is the "biggest threat to our planet" and the company he founded, Amazon, has created a pledge for businesses to cut their emissions to net zero by 2040. Microsoft has promised to be "carbon negative" within a decade from now and Disney is aiming to use only renewable-sourced electricity within the same timeframe. But these leading companies, and others, either support or actively steer the very lobby groups that are attempting to sink the bill that carries the weight of Joe Biden's ambitions to tackle the climate crisis, threatening one of the last major legislative efforts that will help decide whether parts of the world plunge into a new, barely livable climatic state.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm's content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday. From a report: The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic. Netflix said it will review SK Broadband's claim, and seek dialogue and explore ways in the meantime to work with SK Broadband to ensure customers are not affected. The popularity of the hit series "Squid Game" and other offerings have underscored Netflix's status as the country's second-largest data traffic generator after Google's YouTube, but the two are the only ones to not pay network usage fees, which other content providers such as Amazon, Apple and Facebook are paying, SK said. Netflix's data traffic handled by SK jumped 24 times from May 2018 to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second as of September, SK said, riding on the success of several Netflix productions from Korea including "Squid Game" and "D.P."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report finds that some of the country's most powerful utilities raked in millions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds last year -- while continuing to shut off service for households across the U.S. during the pandemic. Gizmodo: The report, released Thursday from the Center for Biological Diversity and BailoutWatch, takes a look at states with publicly available data on utility shutoffs. In the 17 states where there was available data on shutoffs, the report found that the 16 utilities operating in those states cut off electric services for their customers nearly 1 million times between February 2020 and June 2021. (For some context on shutoffs during a normal, non-pandemic year, the U.S. Census found that 1.2 million households in 50 states reported experiencing shutoffs within a three-month period of taking the survey in 2017, the latest Census Bureau data available on disconnections.) The offenses here are not shared by the utility industry equally; there are especially bad actors. The report highlights six utilities that were responsible for a jaw-dropping 94% of all shutoffs last year. NextEra, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Exelon, and DTE Energy make up what the authors call a "Hall of Shame." NextEra alone, the report found, accounted for more than half of all shutoffs. The analysis also examined financial documents, including proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before a company's shareholder meeting, to calculate how much money these 16 utilities received from the government as part of relief efforts during the pandemic. The CARES Act was originally designed to help struggling businesses pay workers, but utilities took advantage of corporate loopholes within the act that changed how big businesses could report taxes. (The CARES Act also disproportionately benefited oil and gas producers: BailoutWatch, one of the authors of this report, has also used financial documents to show how oil companies laid off thousands of people and yet still gave their CEOs raises during the pandemic, all the while taking handouts from the government.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Bloomberg report claiming 11 game developers have access to Nintendo Switch 4K development kits is sparking confusion about the existence of the rumored Nintendo Switch Pro. Axios: Bloomberg published a story yesterday in which it says that employees at the game companies, including Zynga, claim to have the dev kits. That system wouldn't be out until at least late next year, Bloomberg reports. Nintendo has disavowed the report on Twitter, saying that it has "no plans for any new model other than Nintendo Switch -- OLED Model." The report "falsely claims that Nintendo is supplying tools to drive game development for a Nintendo Switch with 4K support," Nintendo said. "To ensure correct understanding among our investors and customers, we want to clarify that this report is not true." A Zynga spokesperson told Axios that the company "does not have a 4K developer kit from Nintendo."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: Nearly two decades ago, fishers discovered an odd occurrence off the coast of Oregon. They were pulling up pots of dead or lethargic crabs. At first they suspected a chemical spill or a red tide. But instead, they learned, dangerously low levels of dissolved oxygen in the ocean water were to blame. The crabs had suffocated. These swaths of hypoxic areas have surfaced every summer on Pacific Northwest shores since it was first recorded in 2002. They are spurred by naturally occurring coastal upwellings and algae blooms, exacerbated by climate change, said Francis Chan, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University. Akin to fire season, hypoxia season arrived earlier this year -- the earliest start in 20 years, according to Chan. But unlike wildfire, or other visible climate emergencies, it's gone largely unrecognized. "It's kind of a silent problem happening out there," said Chan. "This year, I can look out and see trees with one side burnt because of the heat wave. As I'm driving on McKenzie highway, I can see Mount Jefferson has no snow on it. But when you drive out to the ocean, it looks exactly the same as last summer." Typically, hypoxic conditions haven't arrived to the nearshore until mid-June or July. This year hypoxic conditions were reported in April with the upwelling season beginning in March. To get a sense of why an early beginning to the upwelling season is concerning, Chan compared it to the summer drought season. "Say we expected rainfall lasting until March but the rain stops in February. That's all the water we have. We have to last until next year." Similarly, if upwelling starts a month earlier than usual, the amount of oxygen, already low, has to last until the fall when storms promote mixing which adds oxygen back into the system. Chan said as of late September this year, upwelling is still occurring and low levels of oxygen are still persisting. Climate change is playing a role in worsening oxygen levels. Simply put, warmer water holds less oxygen because the oxygen molecules are moving faster and are more likely to escape from the surface. A little more complicated, climate change is altering the structure of the oceans as the warmer upper layer is more buoyant than the cooler, deeper, already oxygen-poor ocean layer. The warmer upper layer keeps the deeper layer from "taking a breath," explained Chan. On a global scale, the oceans are already losing oxygen. Take this and add local factors like coastal upwelling and phytoplankton bloom decomposition off Washington and Oregon coasts, and you have a system with severely low oxygen levels. [...] There are no records of reoccurring low-oxygen levels like scientists have observed since 2002, despite over 50 years of oceanic monitoring.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the recent release of iOS 15, Apple appears to have made some changes to Siri functionality that have removed features relied on by low vision and blind iPhone users. MacRumors reports: Several Siri commands that provide details on phone calls, voicemails, and sending emails no longer appear to be working. The following commands used to be functional, but have recently been removed: Do I have any voicemails?, Play my voicemail messages, Check my call history, Check my recent calls, Who called me?, Send an email, and Send an email to [person]. Over the last two weeks, we've received several emails from iPhone users who are missing this key Siri functionality, or their relatives who are attempting to help them navigate the changes. The Siri feature removals have also been documented on the AppleVis forums for blind and low vision users of Apple products. Asking Siri to provide details on recent phone calls or voicemails results in the following response: "I can't help with that, but you can ask me to open the Phone app." Asking about email garners a similar response about Siri being unable to help. It's worth noting that it's still possible to ask Siri to play the most recent voicemail message that's available, or a voicemail from a specific person, but Siri will not read out a list of all the available voicemails. The Siri commands seem to have disappeared when iOS 15 was released, but iOS 14 users are also not able to use them anymore so it's not an issue tied to iOS 15.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence can tell whether it is going to rain in the next two hours, research suggests. The BBC reports: Scientists at Google-owned London AI lab DeepMind and the University of Exeter partnered with the Met Office to build the so-called nowcasting system. Traditional methods use complex equations and often forecast for only between six hours and two weeks' time. The AI system can make more accurate short-term predictions, including for critical storms and floods. The system learned how to identify common patterns of rainfall, using UK radar maps from 2016 to 2018, was tested on maps from 2019 and found, by 50 Met Office meteorologists, to be accurate in 89% of cases. The research, published in the journal Nature, found: "Meteorologists significantly preferred the [AI] approach to competing methods."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: Some former OnlyFans support staff employees still had access to users' data -- including sensitive financial and personal information -- even after they stopped working for the company used by sex workers to sell nudes and porn videos. According to a former OnlyFans employee who asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation, some ex-employees still had access to Zendesk, a popular customer service software used by many companies including OnlyFans, to track and respond to customer support tickets, long after leaving the company. OnlyFans uses Zendesk to respond to both users who post content and those who just pay to view that content. According to the source and OnlyFans users who spoke to Motherboard, depending on what a user is seeking help with, support tickets may contain their credit card information, drivers' licenses, passports, full names, addresses, bank statements, how much they have earned on OnlyFans or spent, Know Your Customer (KYC) selfies where the creator holds up an ID next to their face for verification, and model release forms. "It's a shame that they have this large company and feel they can play with people's lives like this," the former employee said. "There are already so many things they are in trouble for and privacy should not be one of them. Everyone on that platform, especially sex workers, need to have their information be safe and it isn't."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Noises linked to mysterious injuries among US diplomats in Cuba were most likely caused by crickets -- not microwave weapons -- according to a declassified scientific review commissioned by the US State Department and obtained by BuzzFeed News. The State Department report was written by the JASON advisory group, an elite scientific board that has reviewed US national security concerns since the Cold War. It was completed in November of 2018, two years after dozens of US diplomats in Cuba and their families reported hearing buzzing noises and then experiencing puzzling neurological injuries, including pain, vertigo, and difficulty concentrating. Originally classified as "secret," the report concluded that the sounds accompanying at least eight of the original 21 Havana syndrome incidents were "most likely" caused by insects. That same scientific review also judged it "highly unlikely" that microwaves or ultrasound beams -- now widely proposed by US government officials to explain the injuries -- were involved in the incidents. And though the report didn't definitively conclude what caused the injuries themselves, it found that "psychogenic" mass psychology effects may have played a role. "No plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects," the JASON report concluded. "We believe the recorded sounds are mechanical or biological in origin, rather than electronic. The most likely source is the Indies short-tailed cricket." The report's findings fly in the face of a medical report commissioned by the State Department and published by a National Academies of Sciences panel last year, which found that microwaves were the "most plausible" cause of the symptoms. That panel was not provided with the JASON report as part of its assessment, the NAS told BuzzFeed News.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have demonstrated that someone could use a stolen, unlocked iPhone to pay for thousands of dollars of goods or services, no authentication needed. Threatpost reports: An attacker who steals a locked iPhone can use a stored Visa card to make contactless payments worth up to thousands of dollars without unlocking the phone, researchers are warning. The problem is due to unpatched vulnerabilities in both the Apple Pay and Visa systems, according to an academic team from the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey, backed by the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). But Visa, for its part, said that Apple Pay payments are secure and that any real-world attacks would be difficult to carry out. The team explained that fraudulent tap-and-go payments at card readers can be made using any iPhone that has a Visa card set up in "Express Transit" mode. Express Transit allows commuters around the world, including those riding the New York City subway, the Chicago El and the London Underground, to tap their phones on a reader to pay their fares without unlocking their devices. "An attacker only needs a stolen, powered-on iPhone," according to a writeup (PDF) published this week. "The transactions could also be relayed from an iPhone inside someone's bag, without their knowledge. The attacker needs no assistance from the merchant." This attack is made possible by a combination of flaws in both Apple Pay and Visa's systems, the academic team noted. "The details of this vulnerability have been disclosed to Apple (Oct 2020) and to Visa (May 2021)," according to the writeup. "Both parties acknowledge the seriousness of the vulnerability, but have not come to an agreement on which party should implement a fix." "Variations of contactless-fraud schemes have been studied in laboratory settings for more than a decade and have proven to be impractical to execute at scale in the real world," Visa said in a statement to the BBC, adding that its fraud-detection systems would flag any suspicious transactions. Apple meanwhile shifted the responsibility to Visa and told the outlet, "We take any threat to users' security very seriously. This is a concern with a Visa system, but Visa does not believe this kind of fraud is likely to take place in the real world given the multiple layers of security in place. In the unlikely event that an unauthorized payment does occur, Visa has made it clear that their cardholders are protected by Visa's zero-liability policy." The researchers say users can protect themselves by not using Visa as a transport card in Apple Pay, and if they do, by remotely wiping the device if lost or stolen. The bug does not affect other types of payment cards or payment systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carmaker Opel, which is part of the Stellantis group, said on Thursday it will close one of its plants in Germany until at least the end of the year due to chip shortages. Reuters reports: Production at the Eisenach plant, which makes internal combustion engine and hybrid electric cars, should start again in 2022, although an Opel spokesperson could not specify a date. Some 1,300 workers employed at the plant will be temporarily laid off, Opel said, with a separate plant in France picking up some of the production. Stellantis has halted production at other plants, including in Europe and Canada, forecasting that it would make 1.4 million fewer vehicles this year due to the chip shortage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter thegreatnick writes: The next generation of Fairphone -- an attempt to make an ethical smartphone -- has been announced with the Fairphone 4. The base specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G SoC, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage (upgradeable to 8GB and 256GB). On the front, you'll get a 6.3-inch, 2340x1080 LCD display with slimmer bezels (compared to the Fairphone 3 design) and a teardrop notch for the 25-megapixel front camera. The 3,905mAh battery is Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.1 compatible, so if you have a compatible USB-C charger (not included in the box to reduce waste) you can take the battery from 0-50% in 30 minutes. The phone ships with Android 11 and has a side-mounted fingerprint reader in the power button, a MicroSD slot, and the option for dual-SIM usage via one physical nanoSIM and an eSIM. Continuing Fairphone's progress in making a "fair" supply chain -- both ethically-clean raw materials and paying workers a fair wage -- it also describes the 4 as "e-waste neutral." This is a neat way of summing up the idea that the company will recycle one device for every Fairphone 4 it sells. In addition, Fairphone can boast that it now uses 70% "fair" materials inside the handset, including FairTrade Gold and Silver, aluminum from ASI-certified vendors, and a backplate made from 100% post-consumer recycled polycarbonate. In an upgrade to previous models, the Fairphone 4 has dual cameras, though it loses the headphone jack. The company says this was to achieve an IP54 waterproof rating (light splashes) -- a first for the Fairphone brand. It's also been announced that it will come with an industry-leading 5-year warranty and aims to get 6 years of software updates for the phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a ZDNet article, written by Liam Tung: [A] survey has come up with another reason why your engineers might want to quit -- their fellow developers' terrible code. Software engineers have long struggled with 'technical debt' created by past coding practices that might have been clever but also were undocumented and exotic. At a high level, technical debt is the price paid by supporting legacy systems rather than overhauling them or implementing a better, new system. The term can span everything from a major IT implementation, such as a core banking system that requires a decade of bug fixes, to the choice of programming language to build backend systems. In the latter case, subsequent language updates can require today's developers to rewrite old code written by long-gone developers who wrote under different conditions and who might not have documented what they did and why they did it. That's a big problem for companies that have millions of lines of code written in a language. Stepsize, a firm that focuses on technical debt by tracking development issues in major code editors such as VS Code, conducted a fairly small survey of 200 software engineers to find out why they leave their jobs. The company said that 51% of engineers in its survey have considered leaving or left a job because of technical debt. Of that group who feel irked by technical debt issues, some 20% said that type of debt is the main reason they left a company. The results should be taken in context: the company's key selling point is trying to solve technical debt challenges that organizations face, but at the same time, technical debt could be one area worthy of attention considering how hard it is to hire and retain software engineers. Technical debt, or 'code quality and codebase health', was the fourth most important issue cited by respondents. Salary still trumped it, with 82% citing it as one of the "most important factors" when interviewing for a new role. The survey allowed respondents to choose several primary factors. "Technical challenges and growth opportunities" was the second priority, with 75% choosing it as the one of the most important factors. Some 68% of respondents said remote work was the most important actor, while 62% put said 'code quality and codebase health' was one of those prime factors. Slashdot reader ellithligraw first shared the report, adding: "Yet another reason developers are quitting... to escape the technical debt, or schlock code, or code rot. COBOL anyone?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloud contact center software company Five9 and video calling software maker Zoom said Thursday they will not go forward with Zoom's plan to acquire Five9 for $14.7 billion. From a report: Five9 shares fell 2% in extended trading following the statement from the companies, which said the acquisition didn't receive enough votes from Five9 shareholders. A branch of the U.S. Department of Justice was reviewing the deal out of concern of potential foreign participation, according to a letter dated Aug. 27, that was sent to the Federal Communications Commission. But Zoom said last week, when news of the review was reported, that it still expected the deal to close in the first half of 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok, the world's most downloaded app with over 1 billion monthly active users, has lined up its own NFT drop. The company's first-ever NFT collection "leverages content from some of its top creators, including Lil Nas X, Grimes, Bella Poarch, Rudy Willingham and Gary Vaynerchuk," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The release of one-of-one and limited edition NFTs seems to be focused on generating buzz among the existing NFT community rather than exposing users inside the app to non-fungible tokens. The company is side-stepping blockchain energy concerns by placing their NFTs on a dedicated site powered by Immutable X, a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum which says that NFTs traded using it are "100% carbon neutral." The drop starts October 6 with a collection from Lil Nas X and will continue on through the end of the month. Why is TikTok getting into the world of NFTs to begin with? TikTok has a fairly precise answer for that on its drop site: "Inspired by the creativity and innovation of the TikTok creator community, TikTok is exploring the world of NFTs as a new creator empowerment tool. NFTs are a new way for creators to be recognized and rewarded for their content and for fans to own culturally-significant moments on TikTok. The creation that happens on TikTok helps drive culture and start trends that impact society. TikTok will bring something unique and groundbreaking to the NFT landscape by curating some of these cultural milestones and pairing them with prominent NFT artists."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telegram-powered bots are being utilized to steal the one-time passwords required in two-factor authentication (2FA) security. From a report: The ransomware threat is growing: What needs to happen to stop attacks getting worse? On Wednesday, researchers from Intel 471 said that they have seen an "uptick" in the number of these services provided in the web's underground, and over the past few months, it appears the variety of 2FA circumvention solutions is expanding -- with bots becoming a firm favorite. [...] While 2FA can improve upon the use of passwords alone to protect our accounts, threat actors were quick to develop methods to intercept OTP, such as through malware or social engineering. According to Intel 471, since June, a number of 2FA-circumventing services are abusing the Telegram messaging service. Telegram is either being used to create and manage bots or as a 'customer support' channel host for cybercriminals running these types of operations. "In these support channels, users often share their success while using the bot, often walking away with thousands of dollars from victim accounts," the researchers say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A former communications executive at Blue Origin and 20 other current and former employees have written a blistering essay about the company's culture, citing safety concerns, sexist attitudes, and a lack of commitment to the planet's future. "In our experience, Blue Origin's culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs," the essay authors write. "That's not the world we should be creating here on Earth, and certainly not as our springboard to a better one." Published Thursday on the Lioness website, the essay is signed publicly by only Alexandra Abrams, who led employee communications for the company until she was terminated in 2019. The other signatories, a majority of whom were engineers, declined to publicly disclose their names because they did not want to jeopardize employment at Blue Origin or harm their prospects in the aerospace industry for other jobs. At times, the essay is shocking in its candor. Many of the essay's authors said they would not feel safe flying on a Blue Origin vehicle. And the anecdotes of sexism and an unhealthy work culture are vivid. "Former and current employees have had experiences they could only describe as dehumanizing, and are terrified of the potential consequences for speaking out against the wealthiest man on the planet," the authors write. "Others have experienced periods of suicidal thoughts after having their passion for space manipulated in such a toxic environment. One senior program leader with decades in the aerospace and defense industry said working at Blue Origin was the worst experience of her life." After publication of the essay, Ars spoke with several current and former employees who have provided reliable information in the past about the company. Although it is clear the essay was a product of disgruntled workers, these sources agreed that there were elements of truth in the essay. For these sources, the withering criticism of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, and his hand-picked chief executive, Bob Smith, rang especially true. The essay authors write, "Professional dissent at Blue Origin is actively stifled. Smith personally told one of us to not make it easy for employees to ask questions at company town halls -- one of the only available forums for live, open discussion." These town halls are typically moderated so that employees cannot directly ask questions of Smith. In one infamous exchange, there were apparently so few substantive questions Smith was willing to answer that the moderator resorted to asking Smith what his favorite ice cream was. "Sorbet," Smith answered. Another example of unwelcome management tactics cited in the essay was Bezos' decision, after the Supreme Court ruling in the Epic Systems arbitration case, to force employees to sign away their right to resolve employment disputes in court. Sources confirmed to Ars that they were indeed faced with the choice of signing such an onerous contract or realizing they would eventually have to leave Blue Origin. It seemed grossly unfair. In response, Blue Origin said in a statement: "Ms. Abrams was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations. Blue Origin has no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct." Abrams disputes those claims, saying that she never received any warnings, verbal or written, from management issues involving federal export control regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Choosing the correct USB-C charger and cable for you laptop is about as fun as visiting the dentist, but new logos released today should go a long way toward making easier. PCWorld: The USB Implementers Forum group that oversees the USB standard has released logos that easily indicate whether a cable or charger can hit the new 240 watt rating. Previous USB-C chargers and cables were rated to hit 65 watts or 100 watts but a new version of USB Power Delivery released this May has pushed the limit to an impressive 240 watts. Obviously, that means if you're looking for a 240 watt aftermarket charger for a new gaming laptop that supports it, you want one. With the new USB-C logos, all you have to do is look for a Certified USB Charger 240W logo with a lightning bolt like the one from the chart above. The other component you may need is a 240 watt USB-C cable, so consumers need only look for Certified USB Charger 240W with a cable in its logo. Both logos also can also be paired with USB 40Gbps bits to indicate if the cable is certified to support USB4's 40Gbps speed. The higher output 240 watt power range is a welcome addition to USB-C as it should allow laptop makers to bringing universal USB-C charging to far more powerful laptops, including gaming laptops with discrete graphics chips -- something that was out of reach of the previous USB-C chargers, cables, and ports. In fact, we found that we probably wouldn't want to use a small USB-C charger in a gaming laptop with today's technology. With 240 watt USB-C charger, we'd probably change our mind. The problem, of course, is that the USB-IF is an organization that certifies cables, chargers, and USB-C brick a brats, but it's not mandatory. This has lead to small brand and no-name manufacturers getting the spec wrong in the past. The good news is the cables from companies that actually obtain certifications correctly should work correctly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare, which has a network of data centers in 250 locations around the world, announced its first dalliance with infrastructure services today, an upcoming cloud storage offering called R2. From a report: Company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says that the idea for moving into storage as a service came from the same place as other ideas the company has turned into products. It was something they needed in-house and that led to them building it for themselves, before offering it to customers too. "When we build products, the reason that we end up building them is usually because we need them ourselves," Prince told me. He said that the storage component grew out of the need to store object components like images on the company's network. Once they built it, and they looked around at the cloud storage landscape, they decided that it would make sense to offer it as a product to customers too. [...] The R2 name is a little swipe at Amazon's S3 storage product and obviously a play on the name. The difference, according to Prince, is that they have found a way to reduce storage costs by up to 10% by eliminating egress fees. Cloudflare plans to price storage at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. That compares with S3 pricing that starts at $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3's margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data I would like for free -- in either direction. That's not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives. In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3's margin is R2's opportunity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court of California has thrown out Oracle's appeal against a decision to award $3 billion damages to HPE in a case which dates back a decade and relates to Big Red's commitment to develop on Itanium hardware. From a report:On Wednesday, the court denied a review of Oracle's appeal against a summary judgement, apparently without comment or any written dissents. The decision follows a ruling made in the California Court of Appeal that affirmed HPE's $3.14bn win for alleged contract violation, stating that an agreement between the firms had created a legal obligation for Oracle to support software on HPE's Itanium server. The case hinged on the companies' statements that they had a "longstanding strategic relationship" and a "mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers." The agreement stated that Oracle, for its part, "will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms" while HPE "will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware." The ruling reads: "We conclude that the second sentence, moreover, does more than declare an aspiration or intent to continue working together, as Oracle claims. It commits the parties to continue the actions specified (Oracle offering its product suite and HP supporting the products)," as it had done previously.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the SAS 2021 security conference today, analysts from security firm Kaspersky Lab published details about a new Chinese cyber-espionage group that has been targeting high-profile entities across South East Asia since at least July 2020. From a report: Named GhostEmperor, Kaspersky said the group uses highly sophisticated tools and is often focused on gaining and keeping long-term access to its victims through the use of a powerful rootkit that can even work on the latest versions of Windows 10 operating systems. "We observed that the underlying actor managed to remain under the radar for months," Kaspersky researchers explained today. The entry point for GhostEmperor's hacks were public-facing servers. Kaspersky believes the group used exploits for Apache, Oracle, and Microsoft Exchange servers to breach a target's perimeter network and then pivoted to more sensitive systems inside the victim's network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

slack_justyb writes: As previously reported the web host Epik was hacked by a group identifying themselves with the group Anonymous. However, in the most recent leaks from this group the scale of data that was stolen is becoming apparent, and signs point to a wholesale theft of data with no stone left unturned. We're told the dump is a 70GB archive of files and "several bootable disk images of assorted systems" that represent Epik's server infrastructure. Journalist Steve Monacelli, who broke the news of the first data release, said the latest leak expands to 300GB. "This leak appears to be fully bootable disk images of Epik servers, including a wide range of passwords and API tokens," he added.WhiskeyNeon, a Texas-based hacker and cybersecurity expert who reviewed the file structure of the leak, told the Daily Dot how the disk images represented Epik's entire server infrastructure. "Files are one thing, but a virtual machine disk image allows you to boot up the company's entire server on your own," he said. "We usually see breaches with database dumps, documents, configuration files, etc. In this case, we are talking about the entire server image, with all the programs and files required to host the application it is serving." Daily Dot brings some word on Epik CEO Rob Monster response to the latest news:Epik CEO Rob Monster, who did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Dot, would go on to hold a more than four hour long live video conference online to address the initial hack. The meeting would see Monster break out into prayer numerous times, make attempts to vanquish demons, and warn viewers that their hard drives could burst into flames due to "curses" placed on the hacked data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Across the world, a natural-gas shortage is starting to bite. Prices of power in Germany and France have soared by around 40% in the past two weeks. In many countries, including Britain and Spain, governments are rushing through emergency measures to protect consumers. Economist: Factories are being temporarily switched off, from aluminium smelters in Mexico to fertiliser plants in Britain. Markets are frantic. One trader says it is like the global financial crisis for commodities. Even in America, the world's biggest natural-gas producer, lobby groups are calling on the government to limit exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the price of which has climbed to $25 per million British thermal units (mBTU), up by two-thirds in the past month. In one sense the crisis has fiendishly complex causes, with a mosaic of factors from geopolitics to precautionary hoarding in Asia sending prices higher. Viewed from a different perspective, however, its causes are simple: an energy market with only thin safety buffers has become acutely sensitive to disruptions. And subdued investment in fossil fuels may mean higher volatility is here to stay. The shortfall has taken almost everyone by surprise. In 2019 there was plenty of gas on the international market, thanks to new LNG plants coming online in America (see chart). When the covid pandemic struck and lockdown constrained demand, much of the excess gas went into storage in Europe. That came in handy last winter, which was particularly cold in northern Asia and Europe. The freeze pushed up demand for heating. In Asia gas prices quadrupled in three months. Buyers, such as national gas companies, looked to the LNG market to fill out supply. Many Europe-destined cargoes were diverted to Asia. Europe, by contrast, drew down on its reserves. Prices there only inched up. This year odd weather has featured again. A hot summer has added to booming gas demand in Asia. The region accounts for almost three-quarters of global LNG imports, according to AllianceBernstein, a financial firm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Microsoft and LinkedIn leadership on Thursday questioning why LinkedIn censored the profiles of U.S. journalists from the company's China-based platform this week, according to a letter obtained by Axios. From a report: LinkedIn -- which is owned by Microsoft -- notified several U.S. journalists this week, including Axios' Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, that their accounts will no longer be viewable in China due to "prohibited content" on their profile. In addition to Allen-Ebrahimian, affected journalists include VICE News' Melissa Chan and freelance reporter Greg Bruno. All three have reported on human rights abuses in China. "I am deeply concerned that an American company is actively censoring American journalists on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," Scott said in the letter addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. "Members of the media report information that is critical to helping Americans, including members of Congress, understand the scope of Communist China's abuses, especially its abuses against and surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang," the senator continued. "The censorship of these journalists raises serious questions about Microsoft's intentions and its commitment to standing up against Communist China's horrific human rights abuses and repeated attacks against democracy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google called on European Union judges to cut or cancel a "staggering" 4.3 billion euro ($5 billion) antitrust fine because the search giant never intended to harm rivals. From a report: The company "could not have known its conduct was an abuse" when it struck contracts with Android mobile phone makers that required them to take its search and web-browser apps, Google lawyer Genevra Forwood told the EU's General Court in Luxembourg. The search-giant's power over mobile phones is the focus of a week-long court hearing. Google's lawyers are arguing that the European Commission blundered by demanding changes to allegedly anti-competitive contracts with suppliers of phones running its Android operating system -- the engine room for the vast majority of mobile devices in the region. At the very least the court should "dial down" the fine, an EU record, because it was wrongly based on advertising revenue from Google's home page that isn't directly linked to Android phones at the heart of the EU's decision, Forwood said. The European Commission's lawyer, Anthony Dawes, scoffed at Google's plea, saying the fine was a mere 4.5% of the company's revenue in 2017, well below a 10% cap.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You probably don't know Paul Weedon by name, but you've probably seen him get punched in the face. He is the man behind the "I can't believe you've done this" meme, an old, viral video in which he talks to the camera for a few seconds before someone off camera sucker-punches him mid-sentence. It's a canonical internet video that has spread far and wide since Weedon uploaded it to YouTube 14 years ago, and for reasons that he doesn't understand, yesterday YouTube decided to remove it, citing its violence policies. Weedon has tried appealing YouTube's decision, but the company denied his request. "I got an email from YouTube late last night informing me that it had been taken down because it had violated their 'violent or graphic content' policy, which seemed a bit mad after all this time,â Weedon told Motherboard. "I'd maybe understand it if the video was new, but it's been on YouTube for over a decade. At that point you'd have thought they'd have flagged that there was an issue with it and dealt with it." Weedon said he has no idea why the video was removed now, but he's not worried about it disappearing from the internet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of Microsoft's games business told The Wrap that a shortage of chips wasn't the only thing stopping the company getting as many Xbox Series X/S consoles onto store shelves as it would like. From a report: "I think it's probably too isolated to talk about it as just a chip problem," he said. "When I think about, what does it mean to get the parts necessary to build a console today, and then get it to the markets where the demand is, there are multiple kind of pinch points in that process. And I think regretfully it's going to be with us for months and months, definitely through the end of this calendar year and into the next calendar year. The thing that's most disappointing is just the fan disappointment," Spencer continued. "People really want this new generation of consoles -- they're good consoles, both from us and the other platform holders -- and they want the new functionality. We're working hard to bring them to market but it's going to be a challenge that we'll work through for quite a while."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports: Alphabet's Loon was a stratospheric moonshot that saw the company fly high-altitude balloons to provide cellular network coverage to target areas. The project broke a lot of new ground, including developing technology that enabled balloons to navigate autonomously and stay in one area for long stretches of time, but ultimately came to an end. Now, Alphabet is divvying up the Loon assets, many of which are being either made available to others in the industry for free -- or handed over to key partners and strategic investors. SoftBank is one company that walks away with some intellectual property; the Japanese telecommunication giant gets around 200 of Loon's patents related to stratospheric communications, service, operations and aircraft, which it says it will put to use developing its own High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) business. SoftBank was an erstwhile partner of Loon's, having founded the 'HAPS Alliance' to further the industry. SoftBank's own HAPS business focused on autonomous gliders, but it adapted its communications payloads to work on Loon's balloons, too. SoftBank is also an investor in Loon, having put $125 million in the Alphabet company in 2019. The other company to get a windfall of sorts out of Loon's closure is Raven, another partner and a company that focuses on the manufacture of the high altitude balloons that the Alphabet moonshot operated. It picks up patents related specifically to balloon manufacturing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The ivory-billed woodpecker, which birders have been seeking in the bayous of Arkansas, is gone forever, according to federal officials. So is the Bachman's warbler, a yellow-breasted songbird that once migrated between the Southeastern United States and Cuba. The song of the Kauai O'o, a Hawaiian forest bird, exists only on recordings. And there is no longer any hope for several types of freshwater mussels that once filtered streams and rivers from Georgia to Illinois. In all, 22 animals and one plant should be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, federal wildlife officials announced on Wednesday. "Each of these 23 species represents a permanent loss to our nation's natural heritage and to global biodiversity," said Bridget Fahey, who oversees species classification for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "And it's a sobering reminder that extinction is a consequence of human-caused environmental change." The extinctions include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a bat and a plant. Many of them were likely extinct, or almost so, by the time the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, officials and advocates said, so perhaps no amount of conservation would have been able to save them. "The Endangered Species Act wasn't passed in time to save most of these species," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group. "It's a tragedy." Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act, "54 species in the United States have been removed from the endangered list because their populations recovered, while another 48 have improved enough to move from endangered to threatened," adds the report. "So far, 11 listed species have been declared extinct."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A serious bug in the iOS 15 Messages app can cause some saved photos to be deleted, according to multiple complaints reported by MacRumors readers and Twitter users. From the report: If you save a photo from a Messages thread and then go on to delete that thread, the next time an iCloud Backup is performed, the photo will disappear. Even though the image is saved to your personal iCloud Photo Library, it appears to still be linked to the Messages app in "iOS 15," and saving it does not persist through the deletion of the thread and an "iCloud" backup. This is a concern because most users keep the "iCloud" Backup feature enabled and it's something that happens automatically. If you're someone who regularly deletes message threads, if there's a photo that you want to keep, you won't be able to keep it with "iCloud" Backup turned on. To replicate this bug, the following steps must be taken:1. Save a photo from a Messages conversation to your Camera Roll.2. Check to see that the photo has been saved.3. Delete the Messages conversation the photo came from. The photo will still be in your "iCloud Photo Library" at this point.4. Perform an "iCloud" Backup, and the photo disappears.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virgin Galactic is cleared to resume flights of its SpaceShipTwo space plane, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Wednesday, after capping a safety investigation into issues that came up during the company's July flight carrying its founder Richard Branson. During that mission, SpaceShipTwo strayed from its designated airspace on its descent from space, and Virgin Galactic didn't tell the FAA about it when it was supposed to. The Verge reports: With the investigation now closed, the FAA required Virgin Galactic to make changes "on how it communicates to the FAA during flight operations to keep the public safe," it said in a statement. Virgin Galactic said that includes "updated calculations to expand the protected airspace for future flights" and "additional steps into the Company's flight procedures to ensure real-time mission notifications to FAA Air Traffic Control." Another change: "Updated calculations to expand the protected airspace for future flights," the company said. "We appreciate the FAA's thorough review of this inquiry. Our test flight program is specifically designed to continually improve our processes and procedures," Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement. "The updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Carlene Knight's vision was so bad that she couldn't even maneuver around the call center where she works using her cane. But that's changed as a result of volunteering for a landmark medical experiment. Her vision has improved enough for her to make out doorways, navigate hallways, spot objects and even see colors. Knight is one of seven patients with a rare eye disease who volunteered to let doctors modify their DNA by injecting the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR directly into cells that are still in their bodies. Knight and [another volunteer in the experiment, Michael Kalberer] gave NPR exclusive interviews about their experience. This is the first time researchers worked with CRISPR this way. Earlier experiments had removed cells from patients' bodies, edited them in the lab and then infused the modified cells back into the patients. [...] CRISPR is already showing promise for treating devastating blood disorders such as sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. And doctors are trying to use it to treat cancer. But those experiments involve taking cells out of the body, editing them in the lab, and then infusing them back into patients. That's impossible for diseases like [Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA], because cells from the retina can't be removed and then put back into the eye. So doctors genetically modified a harmless virus to ferry the CRISPR gene editor and infused billions of the modified viruses into the retinas of Knight's left eye and Kalberer's right eye, as well as one eye of five other patients. The procedure was done on only one eye just in case something went wrong. The doctors hope to treat the patients' other eye after the research is complete. Once the CRISPR was inside the cells of the retinas, the hope was that it would cut out the genetic mutation causing the disease, restoring vision by reactivating the dormant cells. The procedure didn't work for all of the patients, who have been followed for between three and nine months. The reasons it didn't work might have been because their dose was too low or perhaps because their vision was too damaged. But Kalberer, who got the lowest dose, and one volunteer who got a higher dose, began reporting improvement starting at about four to six weeks after the procedure. Knight and one other patient who received a higher dose improved enough to show improvement on a battery of tests that included navigating a maze. For two others, it's too soon to tell. None of the patients have regained normal vision -- far from it. But the improvements are already making a difference to patients, the researchers say. And no significant side effects have occurred. Many more patients will have to be treated and followed for much longer to make sure the treatment is safe and know just how much this might be helping.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our burning planet. Ars Technica reports: The first is a new "fire" layer in the main map view, which will let you view the exact boundaries of a wildfire just as easily as you can look up the current traffic patterns. Google has done fire information before as part of the "crisis response" website, but with climate change making "Fire Season" a yearly occurrence in dry areas like Australia and the Western U.S., wildfires will now be a top-level Maps feature. Google says the new fire level will bring "all of Google's wildfire information together" in an easy interface. In the US, it will also pull in data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and the company says it wants to expand fire detail with other government agencies, starting with Australia in "the coming months." Wildfire boundaries should be updated on an hourly basis, and Google says you'll be able to tap on a fire to see information from local governments, like "emergency websites, phone numbers for help and information, and evacuation details. When available, you can also see important details about the fire, such as its containment, how many acres have burned, and when all this information was last reported." The fire layout is rolling out to Android this week, with iOS and desktop coming in October. Google also announced it's going to expand the Tree Canopy tool it launched in 2020. This Google Maps tool combines Google's plethora of aerial imagery with computer vision AI to generate a map that shows tree cover in cities. Today's announced expansion will increase the Tree Canopy imagery from 15 cities to 100 cities worldwide. Google wants city planners to use the Tree Canopy tool to combat the phenomena of urban heat islands, where miles of asphalt and a dearth of shade from trees can cause cities to be significantly hotter than the surrounding areas. Google says heat islands "disproportionately impact lower-income communities and contribute to a number of public health concerns -- from poor air quality to dehydration. With Tree Canopy data, local governments have free access to insights about where to plant trees to increase shade, reduce heat and mitigate these adverse effects."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ahmed Elgammal, Professor and Director of the Art & AI Lab at Rutgers University, writes via The Conversation: When Ludwig von Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his Ninth Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his Tenth Symphony but, due to deteriorating health, wasn't able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches. Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what could have been. His notes teased at some magnificent reward, albeit one that seemed forever out of reach. Now, thanks to the work of a team of music historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists, Beethoven's vision will come to life. I presided over the artificial intelligence side of the project, leading a group of scientists at the creative AI startup Playform AI that taught a machine both Beethoven's entire body of work and his creative process. A full recording of Beethoven's 10th Symphony is set to be released on Oct. 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere performance scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany -- the culmination of a two-year-plus effort.[...]The AI side of the project -- my side -- found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks. First, and most fundamentally, we needed to figure out how to take a short phrase, or even just a motif, and use it to develop a longer, more complicated musical structure, just as Beethoven would have done. For example, the machine had to learn how Beethoven constructed the Fifth Symphony out of a basic four-note motif. Four notes famously serve as the basis for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Next, because the continuation of a phrase also needs to follow a certain musical form, whether it's a scherzo, trio or fugue, the AI needed to learn Beethoven's process for developing these forms. The to-do list grew: We had to teach the AI how to take a melodic line and harmonize it. The AI needed to learn how to bridge two sections of music together. And we realized the AI had to be able to compose a coda, which is a segment that brings a section of a piece of music to its conclusion. Finally, once we had a full composition, the AI was going to have to figure out how to orchestrate it, which involves assigning different instruments for different parts. And it had to pull off these tasks in the way Beethoven might do so. In November 2019, the team met in person again -- this time, in Bonn, at the Beethoven House Museum, where the composer was born and raised. This meeting was the litmus test for determining whether AI could complete this project. We printed musical scores that had been developed by AI and built off the sketches from Beethoven's 10th. A pianist performed in a small concert hall in the museum before a group of journalists, music scholars and Beethoven experts. We challenged the audience to determine where Beethoven's phrases ended and where the AI extrapolation began. They couldn't. The success of these tests told us we were on the right track. But these were just a couple of minutes of music. There was still much more work to do. At every point, Beethoven's genius loomed, challenging us to do better. As the project evolved, the AI did as well. Over the ensuing 18 months, we constructed and orchestrated two entire movements of more than 20 minutes apiece.Read more of this story at Slashdot.