Slashdot

Just days ahead of Microsoft's next Surface hardware event, Twitter user @Shadlow_Leak has posted what appears to be a leaked retail listing showing some key specs of a new Surface Pro device. From a report: According to the listing, the new convertible tablet appears to ditch USB-C and USB-A ports in favor of a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, and it also adds 11th-gen Intel Core processors, a 13-inch screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate, and a user-replaceable SSD like the ones in some other current Surface devices. The renders show a Surface with a design similar to the current Surface Pro 7, just with a notably larger screen and smaller bezels than the current Surface Pro 7. Take this with a larger grain of salt the "screens" in these press renders are often superimposed on the devices after the fact, and they've been known to get the screen size wrong. Still, a larger screen with smaller bezels lines up with other Surface Pro 8 rumors that have been circulating, as well as general design trends in the PC industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nation-state cyber-espionage group has gained access to the IT network of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Service (DHSS), the agency said last week. From a report: The attack, which is still being investigated, was discovered on May 2, earlier this year, by a security firm, which notified the agency. While the DHSS made the incident public on May 18 and published two updates in June and August, the agency did not reveal any details about the intrusion until last week, when it officially dispelled the rumor that this was a ransomware attack. Instead, the agency described the intruders as a "nation-state sponsored attacker" and "a highly sophisticated group known to conduct complex cyberattacks against organizations that include state governments and health care entities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Remember when gadget vendors Aukey, Mpow, RavPower, Vava, TaoTronics and Choetech started mysteriously disappearing from Amazon's online storefront, and it turned out Amazon had intentionally yanked them while vaguely gesturing to the sanctity of its user reviews? Turns out they were just the tip of the iceberg. Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts, the company confirms to The Verge. Amazon says that's the grand tally after five months of its global crackdown, and it's no longer being shy about why: a spokesperson tells us these 600 brands were banned for knowingly, repeatedly and significantly violating Amazon's policies, especially the ones around review abuse. The South China Morning Post reported the numbers earlier, citing an interview with an Amazon Asia VP on state-owned television.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has launched an investigation into the conduct of its legal representatives in India following a complaint from a whistleblower who alleged that one or more of the company's reps had bribed government officials, Indian news and analysis outlet the Morning Context reported on Monday. From a report: The company is investigating whether legal fees financed by it was used for bribing government officials, the report said, which cited unnamed sources and didn't identify the government officials. Amazon has placed Rahul Sundaram, a senior corporate counsel, on leave, the report added. In a statement to TechCrunch, an Amazon spokesperson said the company has "zero tolerance" for corruption, but didn't comment on the investigation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ellithligraw writes: Last month a Stanford research paper coauthored by dozens of Stanford researchers which terms some artificial intelligence models "foundations" is causing a debate over the future of AI. A new research facility is proposed at Stanford to study these so-called "models." Critics call these "foundations" will "mess up the discourse." The debate centers on what Wired calls "colossal neural networks and oceans of data."Some object to the limited capabilities and sometimes freakish behavior of these models; others warn of focusing too heavily on one way of making machines smarter. "I think the term 'foundation' is horribly wrong," Jitendra Malik, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies AI, told workshop attendees in a video discussion. Malik acknowledged that one type of model identified by the Stanford researchers — large language models that can answer questions or generate text from a prompt — has great practical use. But he said evolutionary biology suggests that language builds on other aspects of intelligence like interaction with the physical world. "These models are really castles in the air; they have no foundation whatsoever," Malik said. "The language we have in these models is not grounded, there is this fakeness, there is no real understanding...." Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor at Arizona State University [says] there is no clear path from these models to more general forms of AI... Emily M. Bender, a professor in the linguistics department at the University of Washington, says she worries that the idea of foundation models reflects a bias toward investing in the data-centric approach to AI favored by industry... "There are all of these other adjacent, really important fields that are just starved for funding," she says. "Before we throw money into the cloud, I would like to see money going into other disciplines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes the Record: An Irish man who ran a cheap dark web hosting service has been sentenced today to 27 years in prison for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material. Eric Eoin Marques, 36, from Dublin, operated the Freedom Hosting service between July 2008 and July 2013, when he was arrested following an FBI investigation. "The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material," the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques' sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement," officials said. Flashback to 2013:[T]he FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale... Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For 14 years Israel had wanted to kill Iran's chief military nuclear scientist and the father of its weapons program, who they suspected of leading Iran's quest to build nuclear weapons. Then last November "they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present" using a "souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun," according to the New York Times: (Thanks to Slashdot readers schwit1 and PolygamousRanchKid for sharing this story.)Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. It was also methodically picking off the experts thought to be leading Iran's nuclear weapons program. Since 2007, its agents had assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists worked directly for Fakhrizadeh on what Israeli intelligence officials said was a covert program to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the substantial technical challenges of making one small enough to fit atop one of Iran's long-range missiles. Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in charge of missile development and 16 members of his team. But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive... This time they were going to try something new. Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles. Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material in the truck bed was a 7.62 mm sniper machine gun... The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position, calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly touched the trigger. He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away... Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment... The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.The AI was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car's speed. Ultimately 15 bullets were fired in less than 60 seconds. None of them hit Fakhrizadeh's wife, who was seated just inches away. The whole remote-controlled apparatus "was smuggled into the country in small pieces over several months," reports the Jerusalem Post, "because, taken together, all of its components would have weighed around a full ton."One new detail in the report was that the explosives used to destroy evidence of the remote-gun partially failed, leaving enough of the gun intact for the Iranians to figure out what had happened... While all Israeli intelligence and defense officials still praise the assassination for setting back Iran's nuclear weapons program dramatically, 10 months later and with the Islamic Republic an estimated one month away from producing sufficient enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, the legacy of the operation is less clear... On the other hand, others say that even if Iran decides to move its uranium enrichment up to 90%, that is weaponized level, they still have to put together the other components of a nuclear weapon capability. These include tasks concerned with detonation and missile delivery. Fakhizadeh would have shone in these tasks and his loss will still be felt and slow down the ayatollahs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jyosim summarizes an article at EdSurge: edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT a decade ago as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online education providers, has agreed [in June] to sell its operations to a for-profit company, 2U. Exactly what that means is only now becoming clear, but many observers have noted that in the end, 2U bought a giant source of leads for students that it can upsell graduate degrees to from its partner colleges. But turning edX into a marketing vehicle is a far cry from the high-minded language used when the nonprofit was founded to bring education to underserved students around the world. In the article edX CEO and co-founder Anant Agarwal acknowledges there were tough questions after the initial announcement:But he says that the vast majority of college presidents, provosts and professors he's spoken with have been reassured by the details of the arrangement. He listed those details: that 2U has committed to continue the key mission of edX, including continuing to offer free versions of courses; that the sale price of $800 million will all go to a new nonprofit entity that will advance equity in education; that "not a single penny of the $800 million will [go] to either me or MIT or Harvard or the employees"; and that the open-source platform that edX courses run on, Open Edx, will be maintained by the new nonprofit rather than by 2U. But there are many critics of the deal. And the positive message of Agarwal and 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek doesn't square with some vocal protests of the arrangement. A dean of digital learning at MIT, Krishna Rajagopal, resigned in protest, telling colleagues in an email that he had "serious continuing reservations" about the proposed direction. IBL News reported this week that 2U CEO Paucek "asked edX partners to give his company a shot.""All we need is an opportunity to prove that the future of edX will grow; the brand will grow," he said during an interview with EdSurge.com... "You will see us begin to advertise edX outright and grow the learner base. And I think that'll be good for everybody." Paucek also mentioned plans to incorporate into edX's courses a 2U job placement tool (developed by a coding bootcamp 2U acquired) which charges businesses to reach prospective employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: With the release of LTO-9, just about every tape vendor has pushed its wares as a solution to the ransomware problem. After all, is there any backup technology that's more air-gapped? Tape IS great for backup — just not so much for recovery. Writing for eSecurity Planet, [CTO of Seagate Government Solutions] Henry Newman notes that not only is disk about 80% cheaper than LTO tape, but even an entry-level RAID card can restore data 6 times faster than tape. "Backup is not about backing up the data, but the time it takes to restore that data to meet your business requirements," writes Newman. "Tape drives are not striped, but disks generally are put into stripe groups," he writes. "With RAID controllers and/or software RAID methods, you can easily get many 10s of GB/sec of bandwidth to restore data from a single set of SAS connections. Doing that with tape is very expensive and requires architectural planning. So the bottom line is you can surely backup to tape and it is cost effective – for backup, that is. If you actually need to restore that data quickly, you have my best wishes." Tape may have a better bit error rate than disk, but disk can be architected in a way that removes that reliability advantage, he notes. "Tape vendors often state that the BER (bit error rate) of tape is far better than disk, which is 100% true, but you can make up for tape's advantage with RAID methods that check the reliability of your data and ensure that what you wrote is what you read. This has been the case with RAID since the early 1990s, with parity check on read to validate the data. With other ANSI standard techniques – which sadly are not used often enough – such as T10 PI/DIX you can achieve data integrity on a single device equal to or greater than tape. The net-net here is disk is far faster than tape, as there is native striping that has been in use at least since the 1980s with RAID methods, and disk can achieve equal data integrity to tape." "The most often overlooked part of data backup is the recovery part – the longer it takes to restore your data, the more damage it can do to your business," Newman writes. He concludes: "Yes, tape can be air gapped but so can disk. Does tape provide better protection against ransomware? Likely, but is it so much slower than disk that you can turn off your system and turn on when you need to. Does having slower restoration make tape a better defense against a ransomware attack? As far as I can see, the marketing claims made by tape vendors do not hold up to a rigorous engineering analysis. If you want to use tape, that is your choice and there might be good reasons, but disk-based backups can be air gapped just like tape, for lower cost and with a much faster recovery time. Why tape vendors are making claims such as this, I will leave it to readers to speculate." But Slashdot reader BAReFO0t takes the "tape" side of the argument. "Being slower does not equal it not working as a solution at all," they argue in a comment on the original submission — adding "Also, it's not even slower, since tape can just as easily be made into a RAID. You can flood ANY bus if you just use enough mirrors, no matter the medium." And a follow-up comment also defended tapes. "If tape meets the service level agreement and provides a reasonable risk mitigation from ransomware, then it's still a perfectly viable solution regardless of certain performance limitations. LTO development would have likely died long ago otherwise." But what do other Slashdot readers think? Share your own experiences and opinions in the comments. What offers a better ransomware backup solution: disk or tape?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"China fired a fresh regulatory shot at its tech giants on Monday," writes Reuters, "telling them to end a long-standing practice of blocking each other's links on their sites or face consequences."The comments, made by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) at a news briefing, mark the latest step in Beijing's broad regulatory crackdown that has ensnared sectors from technology to education and property and wiped billions of dollars off the market value of some of the country's largest companies. China's internet is dominated by a handful of technology giants which have historically blocked links and services by rivals on their platforms. Restricting normal access to internet links without proper reason "affects the user experience, damages the rights of users and disrupts market order," said MIIT spokesperson Zhao Zhiguo, adding that the ministry had received reports and complaints from users since it launched a review of industry practices in July. "At present we are guiding relevant companies to carry out self-examination and rectification," he said, citing instant messaging platforms as one of the first areas they were targeting. He did not specify what the consequences would be for companies that failed to abide by the new guidelines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Y'all a plane just crashed into all those houses," one eyewitness says in an online video. "People jumped out of the plane with parachutes." The two people — jumping from the 38-foot-long training plane — were both hospitalized, reports CNN:Police were notified of the crash...around 10:53 a.m. (11:53 am ET) and on arrival found one pilot who had ejected from the military training jet caught in power lines, Lake Worth Police Chief JT Manoushagian said during a Sunday afternoon news conference. Another pilot also ejected from the training jet and was found in a neighborhood nearby... None of the homes involved in the crash took a direct hit, said Fire Chief Ryan Arthur. A little bit of damage occurred to the areas around the homes, he said. "This incident could've been much worse knowing that this plane went down in a residential area here in Lake Worth," Arthur said. ABC News has more information:One of the occupants was burned by power lines and another landed in a tree as they parachuted to the ground, authorities said. One of the crew members was in critical condition, the other one was in serious condition, authorities said... WFAA-TV reported that the plane crashed in the backyard of a home, and no one on the ground was injured. Power was also knocked out to around 1,300 customers in the area. ABC News identifies the aircraft as a T45 Goshawk fighter jet trainer, a plane first developed in 1974 by McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace (before McDonnell Douglas's 1997 merger with Boeing). But Boeing.com notes they "delivered the 221st and final T-45 training jet to the Navy in November 2009."The company continued to support the T-45 fleet by providing engineering, logistics and support equipment in partnership with BAE Systems, the successor company to British Aerospace, which had supplied the aircraft's rear and center fuselage sections, wing assembly and vertical tail. On Aug. 26, 2010, Boeing joined the U.S. Navy at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida, to celebrate the Naval Air Training Command's one millionth flight-hour with the T-45 Goshawk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Anyone can be a banker these days," argues Reuters. All it takes it the right software:Global brands from Mercedes and Amazon to IKEA and Walmart are cutting out the traditional financial middleman and plugging in software from tech startups to offer customers everything from banking and credit to insurance. For established financial institutions, the warning signs are flashing. So-called embedded finance — a fancy term for companies integrating software to offer financial services — means Amazon can let customers "buy now pay later" when they check out and Mercedes drivers can get their cars to pay for their fuel. To be sure, banks are still behind most of the transactions but investors and analysts say the risk for traditional lenders is that they will get pushed further away from the front end of the finance chain. And that means they'll be further away from the mountains of data others are hoovering up about the preferences and behaviours of their customers — data that could be crucial in giving them an edge over banks in financial services... Accenture estimated in 2019 that new entrants to the payments market had amassed 8% of revenues globally — and that share has risen over the past year as the pandemic boosted digital payments and hit traditional payments, Alan McIntyre, senior banking industry director at Accenture, said. Now the focus is turning to lending, as well as complete off-the-shelf digital lenders with a variety of products businesses can pick and choose to embed in their processes... So far this year, investors have poured $4.25 billion into embedded finance startups, almost three times the amount in 2020, data provided to Reuters by PitchBook shows... "Big banks and insurers will lose out if they don't act quickly and work out where to play in this market," said Simon Torrance, founder of Embedded Finance & Super App Strategies. Several other retailers have announced plans this year to expand in financial services. Walmart launched a fintech startup with investment firm Ribbit Capital in January to develop financial products for its employees and customers while IKEA took a minority stake in BNPL firm Jifiti last month. Automakers such as Volkswagen's Audi and Tata's Jaguar Land Rover have experimented with embedding payment technology in their vehicles to take the hassle out of paying, besides Daimler's Mercedes. Some traditional banks are now working with the big tech companies, the article notes, with JPMorgan even buying 75% of Volkswagen's payments business. And it also points out the other thing that could protect their business from encroaching new startups: the possibility of new rules from financial regulators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oregon Health & Science University reported Friday that in the 45 days before September 14, five Oregonians had to be hospitalized "because they consumed a potent antiparasitic drug despite there being no clinical data supporting its use for COVID-19... "Two people were so severely ill that they had to be admitted to an intensive care unit."The Oregon Poison Center has managed 25 cases involving Oregonians intentionally misusing ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19 between Aug. 1 and Sept. 14... The Oregon Poison Center's recent cases involved a variety of symptoms, including mental confusion, balance issues, low blood pressure and seizure. The patients were in their 20s through their 80s, although most were older than 60. The cases were fairly evenly split between both men and women, and between people attempting to either prevent or treat COVID-19. Some cases involved individuals obtaining a prescription for either human or veterinary forms of the drug. Both the Food and Drug Administration and Merck, which makes ivermectin for human use, have announced there is no scientific data that supports its use for COVID-19. Neither the FDA nor the National Institutes of Health have endorsed its use for COVID-19, and OHSU doesn't recommend any use of ivermectin for COVID-19. They add that "The Oregon Poison Center strongly recommends the public only use scientifically proven and FDA-approved methods to combat the novel coronavirus." But there's also been more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses in other states, reports the Arizona Republic. Banner Health, a 50,000-employee health non-profit managing 30 hospitals in six states (and staffing a local poison control hotline) reports that their "Poison and Drug Information Center" received at least 30 calls this year, including 10 in August, and "at least seven cases have resulted in hospitalization, health system officials said.""That is the bare minimum. We expect that there are probably more adverse effects," said Dr. Daniel Brooks, medical director for Banner Health's Poison and Drug Information Center. "We are very concerned that people are using this medication inappropriately because we don't know what dose they are using. We don't even know what product they are getting their hands on..." ivermectin has side effects in up to 10% of people who are treated with it, Brooks said. Side effects can include diarrhea, confusion, nausea, vomiting, balance problems and blurred vision... "If they have side effects, then they could end up in the emergency department, further overwhelming the health system in Arizona and the rest of the United States and potentially getting COVID from sitting in a busy emergency department waiting room, or being admitted to the hospital because of ongoing nausea and vomiting." And even in the same state, other organizations also reported more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses. "The University of Arizona's Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, which has had 19 reports related to ivermectin so far this year, including eight who were hospitalized, center director Steve Dudley wrote in an email."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Pennsylvania newspaper tracked down Dr. Kenneth Brown — who wrote Merck's original research protocols in the 1980s for studying ivermectin as a "river blindness" treatment. They describe Brown as 85 years old, retired, and "proud of his association with Ivermectin."More than 4 billion doses of ivermectin (renamed Mectizan) have been administered globally in the effort to eliminate river blindness, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide. Historically, river blindness — transmitted by the bites of black flies that breed near rivers and streams — is prevalent in 36 countries in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. Brown saw firsthand in west Africa the miracle at work, often administered by local townspeople — who could neither read nor write — trained through Merck's donation program. "We want to celebrate Ivermectin for what it's done around the world," said Polly Ann Brown, Brown's wife. They asked how he feels about people "willing to bypass evidence...collected through traditional scientific studies" to try self-administering their own levels of the drug in home experiments seeking remedies for Covid-19. (The article notes that even the author of an often-cited Australian study that initially claimed a benefit from ivermectin has since said "[T]he potential repurposing plausibility if any is at present not very likely, because the antiviral concentrations would be attainable only after massive overdose.")Brown tracks questionable claims about medicines as a retirement job... The main thrust of many pushing the use of ivermectin [as an unproven Covid-19 treatment] goes something like this: Big pharma doesn't want the public to use ivermectin...because the pharmaceutical companies don't make vast sums of money on what is, essentially in the U.S., a horse dewormer. Billions of people — they will argue — have taken the drug safely. What they don't say, or don't know, is that ivermectin has been administered billions of times. But because ivermectin is not a one-and-done treatment (it has to be administered once annually) that's an exaggeration. And while it's been used for decades, there are no established safety protocols for its use as a COVID-19 treatment. The way Brown sees it, the affection for ivermectin rather than one of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. reveals an anti-science bias. Brown's advice? "Don't get your information or medical advice from Facebook or Instagram," Brown said. "No social media can be reliably accurate." Elsewhere in the article, Brown stresses that Ivermectin is "not magic..." "It is a danger to trust the dream we wish for rather than the science we have.'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Last week Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest chipmaker, which supplies chips to Apple, pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2050," reports the Guardian. "But decarbonizing the industry will be a big challenge."TSMC alone uses almost 5% of all Taiwan's electricity, according to figures from Greenpeace, predicted to rise to 7.2% in 2022, and it used about 63m tons of water in 2019. The company's water use became a controversial topic during Taiwan's drought this year, the country's worst in a half century, which pitted chipmakers against farmers. In the US, a single fab, Intel's 700-acre campus in Ocotillo, Arizona, produced nearly 15,000 tons of waste in the first three months of this year, about 60% of it hazardous. It also consumed 927m gallons of fresh water, enough to fill about 1,400 Olympic swimming pools, and used 561m kilowatt-hours of energy. Chip manufacturing, rather than energy consumption or hardware use, "accounts for most of the carbon output" from electronics devices, the Harvard researcher Udit Gupta and co-authors wrote in a 2020 paper.... [A]mid pressure from investors and electronics makers keen to report greener supply chains to customers, the semiconductor business has been ramping up action on tackling its climate footprint... Greater availability of renewable energy is helping chipmakers reduce their carbon footprint. Intel made a commitment to source 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, as did TSMC, but with a deadline of 2050. Energy consumption accounts for 62% of TSMC's emissions, said a company spokesperson, Nina Kao. The company signed a 20-year deal last year with the Danish energy firm Ørsted, buying all the energy from a 920-megawatt offshore windfarm Ørsted is building in the Taiwan Strait. The deal, which has been described as the world's largest corporate renewables purchase agreement, has benefits for TSMC, said Shashi Barla, renewables analyst at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. As well as guaranteeing a clean electricity supply, it pays a wholesale cost and removes itself from price shocks, "killing two birds with one stone", he said. TSMC's actions have the potential to influence the rest of the industry, said Clifton Fonstad, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, "other manufacturers are likely to follow its lead"... There is also innovation aimed at tackling the worst-polluting materials used in making semiconductors. The chip industry uses different gases during the production process, many of which have a significant climate impact. TSMC said it had implemented scrubbers and other facilities to treat gas emissions. But another route is replacing "dirtier" cleaning gases that clean the delicate tools in semiconductor manufacturing, said Michael Pittroff, a chemical engineer working on semiconductor gases at Solvay Special Chemicals. In industrial tests over the last six years with about a half dozen chipmaker clients, Pittroff said, he and his team had replaced more polluting gases with "cleaner" fluorine, with a lower global warming impact. Other companies target the gases that are used to etch patterns onto and clean the silicon surface of a wafer — the thin piece of material used to make semiconductors. Paris-based industrial gases company Air Liquide, for example, has come up with a line of alternative etching gases with lower global warming impacts... Some experts believe chipmakers will start to modify their processes to incorporate greener gases, especially if the big players make a move. "If TSMC switches, I am sure the others will," said Fonstad. "If TSMC doesn't, then other manufacturers may switch to show they are better than TSMC."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 31st annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at a special ceremony on September 9th, announced the magazine responsible for the event, the Annals of Improbable Research. But this week they made another announcement. "YouTube's notorious takedown algorithms are blocking the video of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony."We have so far been unable to find a human at YouTube who can fix that. We recommend that you watch the identical recording on Vimeo. Here's what triggered this: The ceremony includes bits of a recording (of tenor John McCormack singing "Funiculi, Funicula") made in the year 1914. YouTube's takedown algorithm claims that the following corporations all own the copyright to that audio recording that was MADE IN THE YEAR 1914: "SME, INgrooves (on behalf of Emerald); Wise Music Group, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, UMPG Publishing, PEDL, Kobalt Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Sony ATV Publishing, and 1 Music Rights Societies"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University," reports USA Today, "a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say. "The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made." Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report:"When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings... Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release. "This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners. "Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..."Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University," reports USA Today, "a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say. "The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made." Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report:"When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings... Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release. "This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners. "Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..."Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media may be bad for our health, argues long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher in the New York Times:In March of 2018, I interviewed Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, at the top of the company's San Francisco tower. He offered up an astonishing metaphor when I asked him for his take on the impact of social media companies. "Facebook is the new cigarettes," Benioff said. "It's addictive. It's not good for you." As it did with cigarette companies, "the government needs to step in," he added." The government needs to really regulate what's happening." At the time, I thought it was a flashy reach by an executive who often went out on verbal limbs to make brazen points. But today, after the latest series of investigations into the sketchy acts of the social media giant, Benioff seems like Nostradamus. In the past weeks, The Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files" — well reported pieces that rely on whistle-blowers who are now just tossing incriminating documents over the wall at a furious pace. The Journal's series includes: internal reports showing that Facebook was fully aware of Instagram's deleterious impact on the mental health of teen girls, while moving full steam ahead with an Instagram for Kids product; internal documents inferring that the company lied to its independent Oversight Board when it said it gave only a small amount of celebs, pols and other grandees a wide berth to break its rules on the platform while, in fact, the free pass was given to millions; and the latest revelation that Facebook makes people angry, in part because of futile efforts of its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, to stop the endless rage... [N]owadays the human race seems even more abhorrent, and in many more twisted and amplified ways, and it's because of Facebook, the biggest and least accountable communications and media platform in history.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop," writes PC Magazine. "No, really..."Walk into any school now, and you'll see millions of Linux machines. They're called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it's an amazing feat.... Linux found its real niche — not as a political statement about "free software," but as a practical way to enable capable, low-cost machines for millions... Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don't have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they're descended from Linus Torvalds' original work. Chromebooks are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys. IDC points out that Canalys' estimates of 12 million Chromebooks shipped in Q1 2021 are only a fraction of the 63 million notebooks sold that quarter, but once again, they're where the growth is. Much of that is driven by schools, where Chromebooks dominate now. Schoolkids don't generally need a million apps' worth of generic computing power. They need inexpensive, rugged ways to log into Google Classroom. Linux came to the rescue, enabling cheap, light, easy-to-manage PCs that don't have the Swiss Army Knife cruft of Windows or the premium price of Macs... One great thing about open-source hacker projects is that they can be taken in unexpected directions. Linux isn't controlled, so it can adapt, Darwinian-style. It was a little scurrying mammal in the time of the dinosaurs, and then the mobile-computing asteroid hit. Linux could evolve. Windows couldn't. When you're building something that fits in your hand and has to sip battery, you can't just keep throwing processors and storage at it. Microsoft had a tough time adapting its monstrous megakernel OS to the new, tiny world. But *nix platforms thrive there: Android (based on Linux) and iOS. "Android and Chrome water down the Linux philosophy," the article argues, "but they are Linux..." Does this make any long-time geeks feel vindicated? In the original submission wiredog (Slashdot reader #43,288) looks back to 1995, remembering that "my first Linux was RedHat 2.0 in the beige box, running the 0.95(?) kernel and the F Virtual Window Manager... "It came with 2 books, a CD, and a boot floppy disk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Foreign Policy magazine explores just what happened after El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal currency and launched its official government-approved bitcoin wallet Chivo:Chivo launched just after midnight on Sept. 7. The system started failing at three a.m. Server capacity was increased, and app installations were not re-enabled until 11:30 a.m. Transactions failed through the day; customer service lines were jammed; Chivo ATMs ran out of cash. Shortly after ten a.m., the price of bitcoin crashed by $10,000 in three minutes... After protests on Sept. 6, more than 1,000 people marched on the Legislative Assembly on Sept. 7, jumping barriers placed early that morning to keep them out. One group of protestors set some tires on fire. Opposition politicians attended the day's session in "No Bitcoin" shirts. The protests were not against bitcoin itself. People protested the forced acceptance, the complete lack of transparency from the government, and the dysfunctional Chivo payment system — "people are against how things are being done in the name of bitcoin," local businessman Patrick Murray said.... [T]he Bitcoin Law, and the disastrous launch of Chivo, has frightened the bond markets; El Salvador's sovereign debt dropped almost five cents in a single day, ending Sept. 7 trading at 87.6 cents on the dollar. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are already reluctant to supply further funding because of the Bitcoin Law... Traders were reluctant to accept bitcoin. "I'd rather lose the sale," one trader told La Prensa Grafica. Others didn't trust money they couldn't hold in their hands. Street vendors may not even have phones. Many of their customers are illiterate. Some government offices didn't accept bitcoin payments. Transfers from Chivo to bank accounts were not reliable. The Chivo ATMs didn't work well — one machine had a reported three successful cash withdrawals in a day. Even transfer of bitcoins in and out of Chivo had problems... "El Salvador's Bitcoin Law Is a Farce," blares the headline on the article, saying El Salvador's system "doesn't work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it." "Fears of criminals bringing in dirty bitcoins and exchanging them for clean dollars, draining the $150 million trust that was set up as a buffer between bitcoins and dollars, have not come to pass — because Chivo doesn't work well enough."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Watch the video here! "SpaceX safely returned its Crew Dragon spacecraft from orbit on Saturday, with the capsule carrying the four members of the Inspiration4 mission back to Earth after three days in space..." reports CNBC:"Thanks so much SpaceX, that was a heck of a ride for us and we're just getting started!" Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman said from the capsule after touching down. Elon Musk tweeted his congratulations to the crew shortly after splashdown. The historic private mission — which includes Isaacman, pilot Sian Proctor, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux and mission specialist Chris Sembroski — orbited the Earth at an altitude as high as 590 kilometers, which is above the International Space Station and the furthest humans have traveled above the surface in years. A free-flying spaceflight, the capsule did not dock with the ISS but instead circled the Earth independently at a rate of 15 orbits per day. Inspiration4 shared photos from the crew's time in orbit, giving a look at the expansive views from the spacecraft's "cupola" window. This is the third time SpaceX has returned astronauts from space, and the second time for this capsule — which previously flew the Crew-1 mission for NASA on a trip that returned in May.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Federal prosecutors plan to criminally charge a former Boeing Co. pilot they suspect of misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 Max," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter." Mark Forkner, who was Boeing's 737 Max chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, is likely to face prosecution in the coming weeks, these people said... Boeing BA, admitted in a criminal settlement reached with prosecutors earlier this year that two of its employees — unnamed in that agreement — conspired to defraud the FAA about 737 Max training issues in order to benefit themselves and the company. CBS News offers more details:It would, says the Journal, "be the first attempt to hold a Boeing employee accountable" for conduct before the two crashes. [Forkner] was the lead contact between the aviation giant and the Federal Aviation Administration over how pilots should be trained to fly the planes, the Journal said. According to documents published in early 2020, Forkner withheld details about the planes' faulty flight handling system known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — later blamed for both crashes — from regulators. The Journal said it wasn't clear what charges Forkner would face... A lawyer for Forkner, David Gerger, didn't respond to requests for comment Thursday from the Journal. Gerger has said in the past that Forkner, a pilot and Air Force veteran, wouldn't put pilots or passengers in danger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNET's Roadshow reports that a safety-oriented version of Boston Dynamics' headless dog-shaped robot "Spot" will begin patrolling a Kia plant in South Korea, "to survey industrial areas remotely and help identify issues before they happen."For example, Spot's new thermal camera and 3D lidar (courtesy of Hyundai's technology chest) can identify personnel near machinery with high temperatures. In this case, our robotic canine friend may be able to pinpoint a fire hazard before a human does. The robot can be controlled remotely by human operators as well, and send potential alarms for hazards and notify plant management of a situation. Hyundai also plans to have the robot accompany night patrols to create a safer environment. With new gadgetry attached to Spot, including the latest artificial intelligence that helps it understand if doors are open or closed, the automaker believes the robot can play a big part in security... All of Spot's new tasks are part of a pilot program so Hyundai can see if there's value in deploying additional Spot-based, robotic security dogs in other plants. Hyundai's motor group has released a slick video showing the security robot in action. It ends with the words "Robotics for Humanity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Mozilla is running an experiment on 1% of the Firefox desktop population currently, which sets the default search engine to Bing in the web browser," reports Ghacks:[I]n most regions, it is Google Search. Mozilla and Google extended the search deal in 2020 for another three years. Google is paying Mozilla "between $400 and $450 million per year" so that its search engine is the default in Firefox in most regions. Google has been Firefox's default search engine since 2017, when Mozilla ended its search deal with Yahoo early. Firefox users may change the default search engine to one of the other engines that are included by default, or an engine that is not included but can be added... The study started on September 6 and it will run until early 2022, likely January 2022. About 1% of Firefox desktop users may notice that the default search engine is changed when the installation of Firefox is picked for the experiment. Tip: load about:studies in the Firefox address bar to list the studies that the browser us currently taking part in and has completed already. Firefox users who don't want to participate in studies can disable the preference "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" on about:preferences#privacy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to one measure, Python is potentially on the verge of becoming the most popular computer programming language," reports ZDNet, joining C and Java as the only other two languages to attain the #1 spot. Of course, it depends on who's making the list...Python has been snapping at the heels of Java and C for the past few years on the 20-year-old Tiobe index and recently knocked Java off the second spot to rival C. Tiobe, a software testing company, bases its rankings on searches for programming languages on popular websites and search engines. The Tiobe index is updated monthly, and it doesn't align with other language popularity rankings. For example, the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum has ranked Python as the most popular language since at least 2020, followed by Java, C, and JavaScript, while developer analyst RedMonk has JavaScript in top place, followed by Python and Java, and places C at tenth... "Python has never been so close to the number 1 position of the TIOBE index," writes Paul Jansen, chief of Tiobe software. "It only needs to bridge 0.16% to surpass C. This might happen any time now..." Python is hugely popular because of machine learning, but it has no place in mobile app development or web applications or development on mobile devices. It's also slow. Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, who works at Microsoft, recently conceded Python consumes too much memory and energy from hardware. He's working to improve Python's performance and reckons double is feasible... Tiobe's top 10 programming languages in September 2021 were C, Python, Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly language, PHP, and SQL. The top 20 languages also included Classic Visual Basic, Groovy, Ruby, Go, Swift, MATLAB, Fortran, R, Perl, and Delphi.Fortran's re-emergence as a top 20 language is notable. Just in July 2020, Tiobe ranked it as the 50th most popular language. But earlier this year, Fortran shot up to the 20th spot in Tiobe's index. Paul Jansen, chief of Tiobe software, also called out some other interesting moves in this month's calculation. "Assembly gained 1 position from #9 to #8, Ruby gained 2 positions from #15 to #13, and Go went up even 4 positions from #18 to #14."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that has shown promise in clearing HIV from mice is headed into human testing," reports Fierce Biotech:We don't like to throw the word "cure" around here. But Excision BioTherapeutics thinks the therapy could replace standard-of-care retroviral therapy, which keeps HIV from replicating but does not remove it from the body. That means patients stay on the treatment, which can cause serious side effects and affect quality of life. Now with the start of human testing, the real path to see if this new and lauded tech can accomplish this really begins. HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can't remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019... EBT-101 has since been tested in nonhuman primates, which showed it reached every tissue in the body where HIV reservoirs reside. Excision licensed the therapy from the universities with a goal of moving it into clinical trials. Now, the FDA is on board. The biotech plans to initiate a phase 1/2 clinical trial later this year, according to the statement. The technology used by Excision was licensed from the lab of famed CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UPI: According to a new study, published Friday in the journal Patterns, information and communications technology, or ICT for short, is responsible for a greater share of greenhouse gas emissions than previously estimated. When researchers at Lancaster University analyzed earlier attempts to calculate ICT's carbon footprint, they determined scientists had failed to account for the entire life-cycle and supply chain of ICT products and infrastructure. This would include, for example, the emissions produced by makers of ICT components, or the emissions linked with the disposal of ICT products. Scientists have previously pegged ICT's share of greenhouse gas emissions at between 1.8% and 2.8%. But the latest findings suggest global computing is more likely responsible for between 2.1% and 3.9% of greenhouse gas emissions. If the latest estimates are accurate, ICT would have a larger carbon footprint than the aviation industry, which is responsible for 2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

destinyland writes: A newly-released video at GNU.org shows an hour-long talk given by free software advocate Richard Stallman for the BigBlueBotton open source conference (which was held online last July). After a 14-minute clip from an earlier speech, Stallman answers questions from the audience — and the first question asked Stallman for his opinion about the AI Copilot [automated pair programming tool] developed for Microsoft's GitHub in collaboration with AI research and deployment company OpenAI. Stallman's response? There are many legal questions about Copilot whose answers I don't know, and maybe nobody knows. And it's likely some of theo depend on the country you're in [because of the copyright laws in those countries.] In the U.S. we won't be able to have reliable answers until there are court cases about it, and who knows how many years it'll take for those court cases to arise and be finally decided. So basically what we have is a gigantic amount of uncertainty. Now the next thing is, what about morally? What can I say morally about Copilot? Well the basic idea seems okay. Why shouldn't a program be able to give you hints like that? But there is one pitfall, which is that if you follow those hints, you might end up putting a substantial block of code copied from a GPL-covered program, written by someone else, or one hint after another after another after another — it adds up to a substantial amount of code, perhaps, with very little change, perhaps. And then you've infringed the GPL by releasing that code, unless your program is covered by the same versions — plural — of the GPL, in which case it would be permitted. But you might not even know that. Copilot might not tell you — it doesn't endeavor to inform you. So you're likely not to know. Which means Copilot is leading users — some of its users — into a pitfall. Well, they should fix it so it doesn't do that. But basically, what can you expect from GitHub? GitHub gives people inadequate advice about what it means to choose a license. They tell you you can choose GPL version 2 or GPL version 3. I think they don't tell you that really you could choose GPL version 2 only, or GPL version 2 or later, or GPL version 3 only, or GPL version 3 or later — and those are four different choices. They give users different permissions over the future. So it's important to make each program say clearly which choice covers it. And GitHub doesn't tell you how to do that. It doesn't tell you that you need to do that. Because the way you do that is with a licensed notice that is supposed to be in every source file. It's unreliable to put just one statement in a free program and say "This program is covered by such-and-such license." What happens if somebody copies one of the files into some other program which says it's covered by a different license? Now that program has been inaccurately mis-licensed, which is illegal and is going to mislead users. So any self-respecting — any repository that wants to be honest has to explain these things, not just tell people to make the licensing of each piece of code clear, but help users do so — make it easy. So GitHub has had this enormous problem for all of its existence, and Copilot has the similar — a basically, vaguely similar sort of problem, in the same area. It's not exactly the same problem. I don't think that copying a snippet of a few lines of code infringes any license. I think it's de minimus. But I'm not a lawyer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that a 2018 algorithm change at Facebook "rewarded outrage," according to Facebook's own internal memos. But the Journal says the memos showed "that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes," and that the memos "offer an unparalleled look at how much Facebook knows about the flaws in its platform and how it often lacks the will or the ability to address them."In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it... Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost "meaningful social interactions," or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email... Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the aim of the algorithm change was to strengthen bonds between users and to improve their well-being. Facebook would encourage people to interact more with friends and family and spend less time passively consuming professionally produced content, which research suggested was harmful to their mental health. Within the company, though, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect, the documents show. It was making Facebook's platform an angrier place. Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. "Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news," wrote a team of data scientists, flagging Mr. Peretti's complaints, in a memo reviewed by the Journal... They concluded that the new algorithm's heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made the angry voices louder. "Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares," researchers noted in internal memos. Some political parties in Europe told Facebook the algorithm had made them shift their policy positions so they resonated more on the platform, according to the documents. "Many parties, including those that have shifted to the negative, worry about the long term effects on democracy," read one internal Facebook report, which didn't name specific parties... Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company's other objective — making users engage more with Facebook.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader oumuamua writes that two U.S. nuclear plants owned by Exelon "were almost shutdown prematurely...but were saved at the last minute by the Illinois Senate."The Illinois Senate has approved a clean energy deal which includes a subsidy for Exelon to keep the Byron nuclear plant in operation, after the House passed it last week. The plan gives Exelon $694 million to keep the Byron and Dresden plants operational. Exelon had previously begun drawing down the Byron plant with an anticipated retirement date of Monday, September 13th, and had warned that once the nuclear fuel had been depleted, it could not be refueled after that date. Exelon said Monday that with the passage of the bill, it was preparing to refuel both plants. The company had actually intended to close the Byron plant for some time, according to an earlier article:In February of 2019, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Exelon said the plant is "showing increased signs of economic distress, which could lead to an early retirement, in a market that does not currently compensate them for their unique contribution to grid resiliency and their ability to produce large amounts of energy without carbon and air pollution." Exelon cited revenue shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of declining energy prices and energy rules that allow fossil fuel plants to make cheaper bids at energy auction. Or, as another article puts it, "Exelon says its Byron and Dresden stations are losing money." oumuamua adds that "With the urgency of the climate crisis more clear than ever, no nuclear plant should be closed prematurely while coal plants continue operation in the same state. Many celebrated the Senate move, however, others have criticized Exelon's actions."Exelon first started what we've dubbed the nuclear hostage crisis. It's a pattern where a utility will for whatever reasons threaten closure, which gets the workers very upset, then the local community whose tax base depends on it gets upset, they pressure their legislators, and then the legislators grant bailouts," said Dave Kraft, head of the Nuclear Energy Information Service. Kraft said rather than continuing to support nuclear energy, Illinois needs to redouble its commitment to wind and solar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: [R]esearchers in Finland are experimenting with growing coffee from plant cells in bioreactors. There are several reasons why it might make sense to have such an alternative, says Heiko Rischer, a research team leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the state-owned organization developing the coffee. "Conventional coffee production is notoriously associated with several problematic issues, such as unsustainable farming methods, exploitation, and land rights," he says. "Growing demand and climate change add to the problems." In Vietnam, for example, coffee production is driving deforestation. The researchers are using the same techniques to make coffee that others are using to make "lab-grown," or cultivated, meat. Coffee plant cells were cultured in the lab, and then placed in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium to grow. It's a little easier to grow coffee than something like beef. "The nutrient media for plant-cell cultures are much less complex, i.e., cheaper, than those for animal cells," Rischer says. "Scaling up is also easier because plant cells grow freely, suspended in the medium, while animal cells grow attached to surfaces." The process results in an off-white biomass that's dried into a powder, then roasted to a dark brown color that looks like coffee grounds. The scientists recently brewed their first cups of the lab-grown coffee, which they say tastes and smells like ordinary coffee. It's also possible to make different varieties. "Cell cultures of different coffee cultivars can be established, and the roasting process can be modified, in order to produce coffee with very different character," says Rischer. "The cultivation process can be modified in order to generate more or less of certain compounds, such as caffeine or flavors." The lab plans to work with companies that can commercialize the new process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors urged some owners of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars to park and store the vehicles at least 50 feet away from other cars to reduce the risk that a spontaneous fire could spread. Bloomberg reports: The Detroit automaker has recalled all of the roughly 142,000 Bolts sold since 2016 because the battery can catch on fire. GM has taken a $1.8 billion charge so far for the cost of the recall and has been buying cars back from some disgruntled owners. The company expects to recoup much of the cost from battery supplier LG Corp. The new advice is likely to rankle owners who are already limiting their use of the Bolt to avoid overheating the battery and risking a fire. The parking guidance -- recommending a distance of 50 feet from other parked cars -- is especially difficult for owners in urban areas. GM has confirmed 10 fires. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the agency has found 13 fires in Bolts, but the company hasn't confirmed the additional three are part of the current recall issue. The Bolt normally can go 259 miles on a charge, but that has been limited by GM's guidance to avoid a fire. The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90%, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining range. They're also advised to park their vehicles outside immediately after charging and not leave them charging indoors overnight. The company will be telling Bolt owners who are concerned about parking in public places that it recommends keeping 50 feet from other cars in garages and lots, spokesman Dan Flores said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) currently under construction in Cadarache, southern France, will see cost overruns and delays due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, its top official said on Friday. Euractiv reports: When the ITER project was launched in 2015, the schedule was to have the first plasma by the end of 2025 and full nuclear fusion by 2035, said Bernard Bigot, the director general of ITER. "We were on track until the end of 2019 but unfortunately, as you know, the world has been impacted by COVID-19," Bigot told journalists during an online press conference on Friday (17 September). As a result of the pandemic, factories were stopped and ships that took on average 45 days to deliver components from Korea took 90 days to arrive, he indicated. "While we were progressing on a monthly rate of nearly 0.7% on average during the last five years, last year in 2020 we were only able to achieve 0.35%," he explained. "So clearly, first plasma in 2025 is no longer technically achievable." The delay means the costs of ITER will also likely go over budget, because of "running costs that cannot be eliminated," Bigot explained, saying he was preparing a full review for the ITER Council in November 2022. That said, Bigot expressed confidence that with the COVID-19 crisis receding, "we will be able to keep to the real target," which is to attain full fusion power by 2035. [...] The goal of the experimental plant is to demonstrate that fusion power can be generated sustainably, and safely, on a commercial scale. "Fusion provides clean, reliable energy without carbon emissions," said a statement from the 35 ITER partners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Firefighters are swaddling giant sequoias in a flame-retardant foil in an effort to protect the ancient trees from wildfires that are raging through national parks in California, officials said. Three wildfires, named Colony, Paradise and Windy, were ignited by lightning on Sept. 9. Since then, they have scorched thousands of acres of steep terrain, bringing them to the foot of some of the world's oldest and largest trees in the Giant Sequoia National Monument of the Sequoia National Forest, and in Kings Canyon National Park in Central California. Park officials have been working to contain the spread of the fires using water and aerial drops of fire retardant. This week they also started wrapping some of the most well-known of the giant sequoias along the walking trail, including one called the General Sherman, in case the fires surge uphill into groves of giant sequoias. "It is like a big spool," said Mark Garrett, a spokesman for the fire incident team that is monitoring a set of fires known as the KNP Complex in the Sequoia groves and in Kings Canyon National Park. "They just unwrapped the roll and went around the base of the tree," he said. "If fire got into the giant forest, I would be pretty confident that grove is going to be fine." Mr. Garrett said they had to tailor the wrap to fit the General Sherman's girth. (The tree is more than 36 feet across at its base.) The wrapping went as high as six feet high or more, he estimated. So far, he could confirm only that the General Sherman, which is 275 feet tall, had been blanketed. Other well-known giants along the popular trail are also going to be wrapped with the laminate of foil and fiber, which firefighters also use to make their shelters. The firefighters are also clearing the terrain of undergrowth, essentially starving the flames by leaving them little to consume. But heavy smoke was hampering firefighting efforts, Mr. Garrett said. Last month, the U.S. Forest Service closed all of California's national forests to help "better provide public and firefighter safety due to the ongoing California wildfire crises."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US and the EU made a joint pledge on Friday to cut global methane emissions by almost a third in the next decade, in what climate experts hailed as one of the most significant steps yet towards fulfilling the Paris climate agreement. The Guardian reports: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, about 80 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and emissions have been rising in recent years. Natural gas production and fracking, meat production and other forms of agriculture are among the chief sources. The pact between the US and the EU sets a target of cutting at least 30% from global methane emissions, based on 2020 levels, by 2030. If adopted around the world, this would reduce global heating by 0.2C by the 2040s, compared with likely temperature rises by then. The world is now about 1.2C hotter now than in pre-industrial times. The UN published a report on Friday that found current pledges on emissions from national governments would result in an increase of 16% in emissions in 2030 compared with 2010 levels, whereas scientists warn that emissions must fall by 45% in that period to stay within 1.5C. The OECD also published a report on Friday showing that climate finance -- funding from private and public sources that flows from the rich world to developing countries, to help them cut emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather -- was falling about $20 billion short of a longstanding target of $100 billion a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Generic User Account writes: Under plans unveiled by ministers today, it will once again become legal for market stalls, shops, and supermarkets to sell their goods using only Britain's traditional weighing system. "A document titled 'Brexit opportunities: regulatory reforms' includes plans to permit the voluntary printing of the crown stamp on pint glasses and review the EU ban on markings and sales in pounds and ounces, with legislation set to come 'in due course,'" reports The Independent. Weights and measures inspector Pippa Musgrave tweeted: "The UK agreed, when it signed the OIML [International Organization of Legal Metrology] in 1856 to move to a single system of measurement. Metric measures have been lawful in the UK since 1875. Are you proposing the UK leaves the OIML treaty?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will use personal driving data to determine whether owners who have paid for its controversial "Full Self-Driving" software can access the latest beta version that promises more automated driving functions. TechCrunch reports: Musk tweeted late Thursday night that the FSD Beta v10.0.1 software update, which has already been pushed out to a group of select owners, will become more widely available starting September 24. Owners who have paid for FSD, which currently costs $10,000, will be offered access to the beta software through a "beta request button." Drivers who select the beta software will be asked for permission to access their driving behavior using Tesla's insurance calculator, Musk wrote in a tweet. "If driving behavior is good for seven days, beta access will be granted," Musk wrote. The latest FSD Beta is supposed to automate driving on highways and city streets. However, this is still a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires the driver to pay attention, have their hands on the wheel and take control at all times. Recent videos posted showing owners' experiences with this beta software provide a mixed picture of its capability. In some videos, the vehicles handle city driving; in many others, drivers are seen taking control due to missed turns, being too close to the curb, failure to creep forward and, in one case, veering off suddenly toward pedestrians.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers have found a new and surprisingly simple method for bypassing facial recognition software using makeup patterns. A new study from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that software-generated makeup patterns can be used to consistently bypass state-of-the-art facial recognition software, with digitally and physically-applied makeup fooling some systems with a success rate as high as 98 percent. In their experiment, the researchers defined their 20 participants as blacklisted individuals so their identification would be flagged by the system. They then used a selfie app called YouCam Makeup to digitally apply makeup to the facial images according to the heatmap which targets the most identifiable regions of the face. A makeup artist then emulated the digital makeup onto the participants using natural-looking makeup in order to test the target model's ability to identify them in a realistic situation. The researchers tested the attack method in a simulated real-world scenario in which participants wearing the makeup walked through a hallway to see whether they would be detected by a facial recognition system. The hallway was equipped with two live cameras that streamed to the MTCNN face detector while evaluating the system's ability to identify the participant. The experiment saw 100 percent success in the digital experiments on both the FaceNet model and the LResNet model, according to the paper. In the physical experiments, the participants were detected in 47.6 percent of the frames if they weren't wearing any makeup and 33.7 percent of the frames if they wore randomly applied makeup. Using the researchers' method of applying makeup to the highly identifiable parts of the attacker's face, they were only recognized in 1.2 percent of the frames.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man who the Department of Justice says unlocked AT&T customers' phones for a fee was sentenced to 12 years in prison, in what the judge called "a terrible cybercrime over an extended period," which allegedly continued even after authorities were on to the scheme. The Verge reports: According to a news release from the DOJ, in 2012, Muhammad Fahd, a citizen of Pakistan and Grenada, contacted an AT&T employee via Facebook and offered the employee "significant sums of money" to help him secretly unlock AT&T phones, freeing the customers from any installment agreement payments and from AT&T's service. Fahd used the alias Frank Zhang, according to the DOJ, and persuaded the AT&T employee to recruit other employees at its call center in Bothell, Washington, to help with the elaborate scheme. Fahd instructed the AT&T employees to set up fake businesses and phony bank accounts to receive payments, and to create fictitious invoices for deposits into the fake accounts to create the appearance that money exchanged as part of the scheme was payment for legitimate services. In 2013, however, AT&T put into place a new unlocking system which made it harder for Fahd's crew to unlock phones' unique IMEI numbers, so according to the DOJ he hired a developer to design malware that could be installed on AT&T's computer system. This allegedly allowed him to unlock more phones, and do so more efficiently. The AT&T employees working with Fahd helped him access information about its systems and other employees' credentials, allowing his developer to tailor the malware more precisely, the DOJ said. A forensic analysis by AT&T showed Fahd and his helpers fraudulently unlocked more than 1.9 million phones, costing the company more than $200 million. Fahd was arrested in Hong Kong in 2018 and extradited to the US in 2019. He pleaded guilty in September 2020 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rolls-Royce's "Spirit of Innovation" all-electric airplane completed a 15 minute flight, marking "the beginning of an intensive flight-testing phase in which we will be collecting valuable performance data on the aircraft's electrical power and propulsion system," the company announced. Engadget reports: Rolls Royce said the one-seat airplane has "the most power-dense battery pack every assembled for an aircraft." The aircraft uses (PDF) a 6,000 cell battery pack with a three-motor powertrain that currently delivers 400kW (500-plus horsepower), and Rolls-Royce said the aircraft will eventually achieve speeds of over 300 MPH. The flight comes about a year after the originally scheduled takeoff and about six months after taxi trials. Rolls-Royce is also developing an air taxi with manufacturer Tecnam, with the aim of delivering an "all-electric passenger aircraft for the commuter market," according to the companies. It has previously teamed with Siemens and Airbus on another e-plane concept. The project was half funded by the Aerospace Technology Institute and UK government, with the aim of eventually creating all-electric passenger planes. "This is not only about breaking a world record; the advanced battery and propulsion technology developed for this program has exciting applications for the Urban Air Mobility market and can help make 'jet zero' a reality," said Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced plans today to port its Permission Auto-Reset feature from Android 11 to older versions of its mobile operating system, as far back as Android 6. From a report: Launched last fall, the Permission Auto-Reset feature works by automatically withdrawing user permissions from an app that hasn't been opened and used for a few months. "Starting in December 2021, we are expanding this [feature] to billions more devices," Google said today. "This feature will automatically be enabled on devices with Google Play services that are running Android 6.0 (API level 23) or higher." Exempt from this new feature will be device admin apps and enterprise apps where the permissions have been fixed through a general enterprise policy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple and Google removed an app meant to coordinate protest voting in this weekend's Russian elections from the country on Friday, a blow to the opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin and a display of Silicon Valley's limits when it comes to resisting crackdowns on dissent around the world. From a report: The decisions came after Russian authorities, which claim the app is illegal, threatened to prosecute local employees of Apple and Google -- a sharp escalation in the Kremlin's campaign to rein in the country's largely uncensored internet. A person familiar with Google's decision said the authorities had named specific individuals who would face prosecution, prompting it to remove the app. The person declined to be identified for fear of angering the Russian government. Google has more than 100 employees in the country. Apple did not respond to phone calls, emails or text messages seeking comment. The app was created and promoted by allies of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who were hoping to use it to consolidate the opposition vote in each of Russia's 225 electoral districts. It disappeared from the two technology platforms just as voting got underway in the three-day parliamentary election, in which Mr. Putin's United Russia party -- in a carefully stage-managed system -- holds a commanding advantage. Mr. Navalny's team reacted with outrage to the decision, suggesting the companies had made a damaging concession to the Russians. "Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship," an aide to Mr. Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, said on Twitter. "Russia's authoritarian government and propaganda will be thrilled." The decisions also drew harsh condemnation from free-speech activists in the West. "The companies are in a really difficult position but they have put themselves there," David Kaye, a former United Nations official responsible for investigating freedom of expression issues, said in an interview. "They are de facto carrying out an element of Russian repression. Whether it's justifiable or not, it's complicity and the companies need to explain it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: An influential Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Friday resoundingly rejected a plan to administer booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine to the general public, saying they needed more data. The panel, however, could still recommend the shots for other populations. Scientists continued debating the need for a third dose of the vaccines for people 65 and older and other vulnerable populations after their initial vote. "It's likely beneficial, in my opinion, for the elderly, and may eventually be indicated for the general population. I just don't think we're there yet in terms of the data," Dr. Ofer Levy, a vaccine and infectious disease specialist at Boston Children's Hospital, said after voting against the original proposal. The final tally failed 16-2. In a paper published days before the advisory committee meeting, a leading group of scientists said available data showed vaccine protection against severe disease persists, even as the effectiveness against mild disease wanes over time. The authors, including two high-ranking FDA officials and multiple scientists from the World Health Organization, argued Monday in the medical journal The Lancet that widely distributing booster shots to the general public is not appropriate at this time. In outlining plans last month to start distributing boosters as early as next week, administration officials cited three CDC studies that showed the vaccines' protection against Covid diminished over several months. Senior health officials said at the time they worried protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death "could" diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout. Before the vote, some committee members said they were concerned that there wasn't enough data to make a recommendation, while others argued third shots should be limited to certain groups, such as people over age 60 who are known to be at higher risk of severe disease. Some members raised concerns about the risk of myocarditis in younger people, saying more research is needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hackers associated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous say they have leaked gigabytes of data from Epik, a web host and domain registrar that provides services to far-right sites like Gab, Parler and 8chan, which found refuge in Epik after they were booted from mainstream platforms. In a statement attached to a torrent file of the dumped data this week, the group said the 180 gigabytes amounts to a "decade's worth" of company data, including "all that's needed to trace actual ownership and management" of the company. The group claimed to have customer payment histories, domain purchases and transfers, and passwords, credentials and employee mailboxes. The cache of stolen data also contains files from the company's internal web servers, and databases that contain customer records for domains that are registered with Epik. The hackers did not say how they obtained the breached data or when the hack took place, but timestamps on the most recent files suggest the hack likely happened in late February. Epik initially told reporters it was unaware of a breach, but an email sent out by founder and chief executive Robert Monster on Wednesday alerted users to an "alleged security incident." TechCrunch has since learned that Epik was warned of a critical security flaw weeks before its breach. Security researcher Corben Leo contacted Epik's chief executive Monster over LinkedIn in January about a security vulnerability on the web host's website. Leo asked if the company had a bug bounty or a way to report the vulnerability. LinkedIn showed Monster had read the message but did not respond.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An American cybersecurity company was behind a 2016 iPhone hack sold to a group of mercenaries and used by the United Arab Emirates. From a report: When the United Arab Emirates paid over $1.3 million for a powerful and stealthy iPhone hacking tool in 2016, the monarchy's spies -- and the American mercenary hackers they hired -- put it to immediate use. The tool exploited a flaw in Apple's iMessage app to enable hackers to completely take over a victim's iPhone. It was used against hundreds of targets in a vast campaign of surveillance and espionage whose victims included geopolitical rivals, dissidents, and human rights activists. Documents filed by the US Justice Department on Tuesday detail how the sale was facilitated by a group of American mercenaries working for Abu Dhabi, without legal permission from Washington to do so. But the case documents do not reveal who sold the powerful iPhone exploit to the Emiratis. Two sources with knowledge of the matter have confirmed to MIT Technology Review that the exploit was developed and sold by an American firm named Accuvant. It merged several years ago with another security firm, and what remains is now part of a larger company called Optiv. News of the sale sheds new light on the exploit industry as well as the role played by American companies and mercenaries in the proliferation of powerful hacking capabilities around the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

States on Friday took action against Celsius Network, accusing the company, which purports to be one of the world's largest cryptocurrency lenders, of offering residents unregistered securities. From a report: Texas filed a notice seeking a hearing to determine whether to issue a cease and desist order against the company. The action means Celsius will have to show why it shouldn't be ordered to stop offering its products to state residents. The hearing is scheduled for February 14. Separately, New Jersey ordered Celsius to stop offering some of its products, which it also described as unregistered securities, effective November 1. The moves against Celsius come on the heels of similar actions against New Jersey-based competitor BlockFi taken by states including New Jersey, Texas and others in July, and in the week after Coinbase Global Inc. disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had threatened to sue it if it offered its own yield product to depositors. Celsius had more than $24 billion in "community assets" at the beginning of September, the company said, which would make it one of the world's largest crypto lenders and interest-account providers, if not the largest. The company offers customers a yield of nearly 9% for deposits of U.S.-dollar stablecoins, such as Tether and USD Coin, as much as 6.2% for Bitcoin, and varying rates of interest on other cryptocurrencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan signaled changes are on the way in how the agency scrutinizes acquisitions after revealing the results of a study of a decade's worth of Big Tech company deals that weren't reported to the agency. From a report: Tech's business ecosystem is built on giant companies buying up small startups, but the message from the antitrust agency this week could chill mergers and acquisitions in the sector. The FTC reviewed 616 transactions valued at $1 million or more between 2010 and 2019 that were not reported to antitrust authorities by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. 94 of the transactions actually exceeded the dollar size threshold that would require companies to report a deal. The deals may have qualified for other regulatory exemptions.79% of transactions used deferred or contingent compensation to founders and key employees, and nearly 77% involved non-compete clauses. 36% of the transactions involved assuming some amount of debt or liabilities. In a statement, Khan said the report shows that loopholes may be "unjustifiably enabling deals to fly under the radar."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New insights into the end-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago. From a report: The end-Permian mass extinction was a big deal. It was the largest mass extinction event ever and occurred 252 million years ago. A whopping 90 percent of all marine species and around 70 percent of their terrestrial kin were killed off. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to look into this massive, world-changing event. The end-Permian mass extinction was coincident with mass eruptions in the Siberian Traps, and some potential scenarios include volcanism driving acid rain, volcanism triggering the burning of coal (which released greenhouses gases into the atmosphere), and a reduction in the availability of oxygen in the ocean, among others. However, a new paper relies on previously unused data and modeling to dig into the matter. In all, the study found that 36,000 gigatons of carbon -- mostly from volcanic sources -- were released into the atmosphere over a relatively short span of 15,000 years. This period also saw the global average temperature rise a staggering amount, from 25C to 40C. While researchers previously explored volcanism and carbon as potential causes for the massive extinction, this work provides more insight into the event, said Wolfram Kurschner, a geologist at the University of Oslo and one of the authors of the paper. "Until now, it was really difficult to quantify the amount of CO2 that was released to the atmosphere," Kurschner told Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cosmologists have found signs that a second type of dark energy -- the ubiquitous but enigmatic substance that is pushing the current Universe's expansion to accelerate -- might have existed in the first 300,000 years after the Big Bang. From a report: Two separate studies -- both posted on the arXiv preprint server in the past week -- have detected a tentative first trace of this 'early dark energy' in data collected between 2013 and 2016 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. If the findings are confirmed, they could help to solve a long-standing conundrum surrounding data about the early Universe, which seem to be incompatible with the rate of cosmic expansion measured today. But the data are preliminary and don't show definitively whether this form of dark energy really existed. "There are a number of reasons to be careful to take this as a discovery of new physics," says Silvia Galli, a cosmologist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. The authors of both preprints -- one posted by the ACT team, and the other by an independent group -- admit that the data are not yet strong enough to detect early dark energy with high confidence. But they say that further observations from the ACT and another observatory, the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, could provide a more stringent test soon. "If this really is true -- if the early Universe really did feature early dark energy -- then we should see a strong signal," says Colin Hill, a co-author of the ACT team's paper who is a cosmologist at Columbia University in New York City.Read more of this story at Slashdot.