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India and Singapore are working to link their digital payments systems to enable "instant, low-cost fund transfers," in a major push to disrupt the cross-border transactions between the two nations that amounts to over $1 billion each year. From a report: The project to link India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore's PayNow is targeted for operationalization by July 2022, both nation's central banks said on Tuesday. Users on either of the systems will be able to make transactions to one another without having to sign up to the second platform, the banks added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea's competition regulator on Tuesday announced it will fine Google 207.4 billion Korean won ($176.9 million) for allegedly using its dominant market position in the mobile operating system space to stifle competition. From a report: Google's Android operating system currently holds the lion's share of the smartphone market, ahead of Apple's iOS platform. The U.S. tech giant allegedly used its market position to block smartphone makers like Samsung from using operating systems developed by rivals, according to the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Yonhap News added that the regulator, which published its decision in Korean, said the tech giant required smartphone makers to agree to an "anti-fragmentation agreement (AFA)" when signing key contracts with Google over app store licenses and early access to the operating system. That agreement prevented device makers from installing modified versions of the Android operating system, known as "Android forks," on their handsets, Yonhap reported. The regulator alleged that Google's practice stifled innovation in the development of new operating systems for smartphones, the news site added. The KFTC has asked the tech giant to stop forcing companies to sign AFAs and ordered it to take corrective steps, according to Yonhap.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has pivoted on its server strategy in order to fight a supply-constrained AMD, reports DigiTimes. It's reportedly flooding the market with chips at discount pricing, rather than sticking to MSRP. From a report: While some reports point toward a relative normalization on AMD's CPU supply, AMD has two distinct disadvantages when compared to Intel: It has fewer revenue sources than its much bigger CPU rival, and AMD doesn't own the factories that produce its market-turning Zen chips. Intel, on the other hand, can leverage its vertical integration (meaning that development and manufacturing takes place in an almost entirely Intel-owned and managed supply chain), as well as its massive revenue advantage, to play with final client pricing. In other words, Intel pull a lot more levers to increase demand and (Intel hopes) attract would-be AMD clients back into the Intel fold. AMD has seemingly been making strides in server market penetration. As seen in renowned system distributor Puget Systems' statistics, AMD has risen from a 5% share in systems sold since June 2020, up to a dominating 60% as of June 2021. However, unserved demand means that companies looking to invest in their server infrastructure or who aim to deploy AMD chips in any major way sometimes can't wait for the chips to become available. And Intel is smartly making it more attractive for those companies to go back to the Intel fold, or to skip AMD in the first place.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. From a report: The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed -- seriously at times -- for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality. The boost comes in the form of $15m raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing. The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan -- and the hurdles are far from trivial -- the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content, including his claims that the only way he'll lose next year's elections is if the vote is rigged -- one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet. From a report: The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules, according to internet law experts and officials at tech companies. And they come at a precarious moment for Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro has used social media as a megaphone to build his political movement and make it to the president's office. Now, with polls showing he would lose the presidential elections if they were held today, he is using sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to try to undermine the legitimacy of the vote, following the playbook of his close ally, former President Donald J. Trump. On Tuesday, Mr. Bolsonaro repeated his claims about the election to thousands of supporters in two cities as part of nationwide demonstrations on Brazil's Independence Day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New research by Mozilla Fellows Odanga Madung and Brian Obilo reveals that Kenyan journalists, judges, and other members of civil society are facing coordinated disinformation campaigns on Twitter -- and that Twitter is doing very little to stop it. Highlights of the investigation include: Disinformation campaigns are a lucrative business. One interviewee revealed that disinformation influencers are paid roughly between $10 and $15 USD to participate in three campaigns per day. Payments are made directly to the influencers through the mobile money platform MPESA. Twitter's trending algorithm is amplifying these campaigns, and Twitter is placing ads amid all this misinformation. Eight of the 11 campaigns examined reached the trending section of Twitter. The campaigners we spoke to told us that this is their number one target, as it affords them the amplification they seek. These campaigns run like a well-oiled machine. One of the influencers who researchers spoke to explained a complex system of using Whatsapp groups to coordinate and synchronize tweets and messaging. Anonymous organizers use these groups to send influencers cash, content, and detailed instructions. These campaigns are increasingly targeting individuals. No longer focusing on just broad issues and events, disinformation campaigns are increasingly identifying and targeting individuals, like members of the Linda Katiba movement and the Kenyan judiciary. This work is also beginning to border on incitement and advocacy of hatred, which is against Kenyan Law. Verified accounts are complicit. One influencer we spoke to claimed that the people who own coveted "blue check" accounts will often rent them out for disinformation campaigns. These verified accounts can improve the campaign's chances of trending.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olympus said in a brief statement that it is "currently investigating a potential cybersecurity incident" affecting its European, Middle East and Africa computer network. From a report: "Upon detection of suspicious activity, we immediately mobilized a specialized response team including forensics experts, and we are currently working with the highest priority to resolve this issue. As part of the investigation, we have suspended data transfers in the affected systems and have informed the relevant external partners," the statement said. But according to a person with knowledge of the incident, Olympus is recovering from a ransomware attack that began in the early morning of September 8. The person shared details of the incident prior to Olympus acknowledging the incident on Saturday. A ransom note left behind on infected computers claimed to be from the BlackMatter ransomware group. "Your network is encrypted, and not currently operational," it reads. "If you pay, we will provide you the programs for decryption." The ransom note also included a web address to a site accessible only through the Tor Browser that's known to be used by BlackMatter to communicate with its victims. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, told TechCrunch that the site in the ransom note is associated with the BlackMatter group.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden will nominate Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya to be a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, people familiar with the matter told Axios. From a report: Bedoya, founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown, will bring a bevy of experience on privacy issues to the FTC's work on tech. If confirmed, Bedoya will solidify the Democratic majority at the FTC with current commissioner Rohit Chopra set to leave the agency as Biden's nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Bedoya previously was chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary privacy subcommittee and worked on issues including mobile location data and facial recognition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games filed a notice of appeal Sunday following a judge's decision in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers mostly sided with Apple, rejecting Epic's claims that the iPhone maker is a monopoly. She also didn't rule that Apple needs to restore Fortnite, Epic's hit game at the center of the lawsuit, to the App Store or Epic's Apple developer account. She also rejected the need for third-party App Stores and didn't force Apple to lower its App Store revenue cut of 15% to 30%. The judge, however, said that Apple has engaged in some anticompetitive conduct and she ordered the Cupertino, California-based technology giant to allow all app and game developers to steer consumers to outside payment methods on the web. All developers for the first time could be able to include a button in their apps to let users pay for transactions online, circumventing Apple's fees. She also ordered Epic to pay at least $4 million in damages to Apple for breach of contract, which included collecting payments outside of Apple's in-app-purchase system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla has quietly made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows recently. From a reporrt: While Microsoft offers a method to switch default browsers on Windows 10, it's more cumbersome than the simple one-click process to switch to Edge. This one-click process isn't officially available for anyone other than Microsoft, and Mozilla appears to have grown tired of the situation. In version 91 of Firefox, released on August 10th, Mozilla has reverse engineered the way Microsoft sets Edge as default in Windows 10, and enabled Firefox to quickly make itself the default. Before this change, Firefox users would be sent to the Settings part of Windows 10 to then have to select Firefox as a default browser and ignore Microsoft's plea to keep Edge. Mozilla's reverse engineering means you can now set Firefox as the default from within the browser, and it does all the work in the background with no additional prompts. This circumvents Microsoft's anti-hijacking protections that the company built into Windows 10 to ensure malware couldn't hijack default apps. Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major cryptocurrencies gave back their advances after Walmart denied having an agreement to use Litecoin for purchases. From a report: Litecoin -- which rose as much as 33% at one point -- erased all its gains. Bitcoin, the largest digital asset, was down 2.9% as of 10:24 a.m. in New York after earlier having advance roughly 4% on the news. Other digital assets also retreated, with Bitcoin Cash, Ether and EOS all declining. A Walmart spokesperson said the statement on Litecoin was "inauthentic." Meanwhile, a verified Litecoin Twitter account deleted a tweet that linked to a press release announcing the partnership.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A third of U.S. consumers who used "buy now, pay later" services have fallen behind on one or more payments, and 72% of those said their credit score declined, a new study published by personal finance company Credit Karma showed. From a report: The study, conducted by software firm Qualtrics, surveyed 1,044 adult consumers in the United States last month to measure their interest in buy now pay later (BNPL) and found 44% had used these services before. The usage figure was slightly up from a similar survey conducted by Credit Karma for Reuters in December, while missed payments was down from 38%. The latest survey found younger consumers were more likely to miss payments. More than half of Gen Z or millennial respondents -- those born between the early 1980s and mid-to-late 1990s-- said they had missed at least one payment. That compares with 22% of Gen X, who were born in the early 1960s to early 1980s, and 10% of Baby Boomers, those born between the mid-1940s and 1980. There has been a surge in usage of BNPL services, which allow consumers to easily split payments for purchases into installments. The boom in volumes by providers such as Klarna, Affirm, AfterPay and PayPal, has been driven in part by online shopping growth during the coronavirus pandemic. The explosive growth has led to more dealmaking and competition. Earlier this week PayPal announced it would acquire Japanese buy now, pay later firm Paidy, while last month rival Square agreed to acquire AfterPay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot has been following El Salvador's pioneering adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender last week. But by Friday Reuters was reporting that "For a fourth day in a row technical glitches have beset the Salvadoran government's bitcoin digital wallet Chivo, a setback that could discourage residents from signing up to the app promoted by President Nayib Bukele.Problems accessing the wallet, withdrawing money from ATMs, and data verification, as well as the government not depositing the $30 (€25) bonus Bukele promised all Chivo users were the most frequent issues, according to interviews with at least 10 users and user complaints posted on Twitter and Facebook. Melvin Vasquez, a 30-year-old tattoo artist, downloaded Chivo on Tuesday, when the Bitcoin law went into effect, but has since been unable to use it... User complaints were also stacking up in Apple's App Store and Alphabet's Google Play... [M]any of the very people sending or receiving dollars to El Salvador are mistrustful of Bitcoin. Some expressed fears of losing money, given the high volatility of the cryptocurrency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you're wandering around Singapore anytime soon, take some time to wave hi to your friendly neighborhood snitch bot," writes Gizmodo:Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) will be deploying two robots named "Xavier" that the agency says use cameras with a 360-degree field of vision and analytics software to detect "undesirable social behaviors" in real time. First reported by Business Insider, the robots are designed to detect activities such as public smoking, violation of pandemic restrictions (i.e., groups of more than five people), and illegally selling goods on the street. Other behaviors the agency said the robots can snitch on include the use of motorized vehicles or motorcycles on pedestrian walkways and "improperly parked bicycles."The Xavier robots roll around on a "patrol route pre-configured in advance by public officers," though they can deviate as necessary to avoid slamming into pedestrians or other obstacles. The plan is for the two robots to relay reports of such activity to a central police hub as well as confront violators directly with warning messages, with the first three weeks of deployment starting on Sept. 5 in Toa Payoh Central. The three weeks are a "trial period," reports ZDNet. But they also note that the program includes "an interactive dashboard where public officers can receive real-time information from and be able to monitor and control multiple robots simultaneously." One official said in a public statement that "The deployment of ground robots will help to augment our surveillance and enforcement resources." ZDNet offers some context:Seeing robots being used in Singapore is not uncommon. Last year, Singapore deployed Boston Dynamics' four-legged droids, dubbed Spot, to its parks, garden, and nature reserves to remind people about social distancing. A fleet of Lightstrike robots was then rolled out at one of Singapore's general hospitals in a bid to thoroughly disinfect hospital rooms of pathogens. More recently in May, the Singapore government launched a one-year trial of using autonomous robots to facilitate on-demand food and grocery deliveries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance collected its second rock sample this week — and Friday Caltech's Ken Farley, a project scientist for the mission, announced that they've learned something. "It's a big deal that the water was there a long time."The Perseverance science team already knew a lake once filled the crater; for how long has been more uncertain. The scientists couldn't dismiss the possibility that Jezero's lake was a "flash in the pan": floodwaters could have rapidly filled the impact crater and dried up in the space of 50 years, for example. But the level of alteration that scientists see in the rock that provided the core samples — as well as in the rock the team targeted on their first sample-acquisition attempt — suggests that groundwater was present for a long time. This groundwater could have been related to the lake that was once in Jezero, or it could have traveled through the rocks long after the lake had dried up. Though scientists still can't say whether any of the water that altered these rocks was present for tens of thousands or for millions of years, they feel more certain that it was there for long enough to make the area more welcoming to microscopic life in the past. And they discovered something interesting in the rock samples: salts.These salts may have formed when groundwater flowed through and altered the original minerals in the rock, or more likely when liquid water evaporated, leaving the salts. The salt minerals in these first two rock cores may also have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water. If present, they could serve as microscopic time capsules, offering clues about the ancient climate and habitability of Mars. Salt minerals are also well-known on Earth for their ability to preserve signs of ancient life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tonight 71-year-old Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tweeted ten words: "A Private space company is starting up, unlike the others." The tweet also included the URL for a new video just uploaded tonight to YouTube about a company called Privateer. "Together we'll go far," says the narrator, later offering these thoughts on the people of our planet. "We are explorers. We are dreamers, risk-takers, engineers, and star gazers. We are human. And it's up to us to work together to do what is right and what is good." The video's tagline? "The sky is no longer the limit. The same tagline appears at Privateer.com, followed by two short sentences. "We are in stealth mode. We'll see you at AMOS in September 2021 in Maui, Hawaii." (With AMOS apparently, being the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference running from this Tuesday through Friday.) There's very little information about the company — although last month a 3D printing site reported Wozniak's company appeared to be using a printer for high-strength titanium — and suggested the company might have something to do with cleaning up space junk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports an interesting observation about America. "Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels." Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon shared their report:At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years... In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse. But numbers can be misleading. New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century."Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported... In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected," the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: "Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive." The Journal even reported that a former admissions officer at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon "said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become 'higher education's dirty little secret,' practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter." But even with more women in college, the Times argues that "The raw numbers don't take into account the varying value of college degrees." (And not just because "The female-to-male gender ratio is highest in for-profit colleges, which often overcharge students for worthless degrees.") "Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates..."Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don't pay well... The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Were Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos symptomatic of something larger? The BBC's North America tech reporter writes that in Silicon Valley, many believe that the story, "far from being an aberration — speaks of systemic problems with start-up culture."In Silicon Valley, hyping up your product — over-promising — isn't unusual, and Ms Holmes was clearly very good at it... She projected an unfaltering confidence that the technology would change the world. "It's baked in to the culture" said Margaret O'Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. "If you are a young start-up in development — with a barely existent product — a certain amount of swagger and hustle is expected and encouraged" she said. Particularly at an early stage, when a start-up is in its infancy, investors are often looking at people and ideas rather than substantive technology anyway. General wisdom holds that the technology will come with the right concept — and the right people to make it work. Ms Holmes was brilliant at selling that dream, exercising a very Silicon Valley practice: 'fake it until you make it'. Her problem was she couldn't make it work. Her lawyers have argued that Ms Holmes was merely a businesswoman who failed, but was not a fraudster. The problem in Silicon Valley is that the line between fraud and merely playing into the faking it culture is very thin. "Theranos was an early warning of a cultural shift in Silicon Valley that has allowed promoters and scoundrels to prosper," said tech venture capitalist Roger McNamee, who is critical of big tech and did not invest in Theranos. He believes that a culture of secrets and lies in Silicon Valley, a culture that allowed Theranos' tech to go un-analysed, is "absolutely endemic".... Secrecy is important for these companies to succeed — but that culture of secrecy can also be used as a smoke screen, particularly when even employees and investors don't understand or aren't given access to the technology itself. The reporter points out that like Theranos, "There are many Silicon Valley companies I've reported on that will not fully explain how their tech actually works. They claim to have 'proprietary' systems that cannot yet be revealed or peer-reviewed. "The system is based on trust, yet it is fundamentally at odds with a culture of 'faking it' and creates the perfect environment for Thernanos-type scandals, where claims that aren't true are left unchallenged."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes Engadget: Hold off on purchasing that iPhone mount for your motorbike. In a new Apple Support post first seen by MacRumors, the tech giant has warned that high amplitude vibrations, "specifically those generated by high-power motorcycle engines" transmitted through handlebars, can damage its phones' cameras. As the publication notes, that damage can be permanent. A simple Google search will surface posts over the past few years by users whose cameras were ruined after they mounted their iPhone on their bike, mostly so they can use it for navigation. MacRumors summarizes another Apple recommendation: for slower vehicles like mopeds and scooters "at least use a vibration-dampening mount to minimize the chances of any damage." Engadget's suggestion? "Just use another GPS device to make sure you don't ruin a device that costs hundreds to over a thousand dollars."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian tells the story of "a viral sensation in the global underworld," the high-security An0m phones, which launched with "a grassroots marketing campaign, identifying so-called influencers — 'well-known crime figures who wield significant power and influence over other criminal associates', according to a US indictment — within criminal subcultures." An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet. Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone's calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled... [U]sers could set an option to wipe the phone's data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker's voice. An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid... An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 — 19.37m of them — had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices. On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world.... Law enforcement agencies ultimately saw An0m as a creative workaround for unbreakable encryption, according to the Guardian. "Why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?" The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I first saw the news on the front page of Yahoo.com. But every American remembers where they were when they heard the news. "The World Trade Towers in new york were crashed into by 2 planes, one on each tower, 18 minutes apart," CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot. "Nobody really knows who did it, but the planes were big ones. "Normally I wouldn't consider posting this on Slashdot, but I'm making an exception this time because I can't get news through any of the conventional websites, and I assume I'm not alone." CmdrTaco later posted an update. "Both towers havecollapsed, pentagon hit by 3rd plane. Part of it has collapsed." It's 20 years later, and there's plenty of hindsight, recollections, and reflection around the web. But today back on the front page of Yahoo.com there's this remembrance from a U.S. airman who'd been dispatched to crash her plane into one of the hijacked jetliners:As the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were unfolding, then-Air Force Lt. Heather Penney was given a mission to intercept hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 before it reached Washington, D.C. The rookie F-16 pilot said she believed she would not come back from that mission. "[I remember] how crystal blue the skies were that day," she told ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis... "I had raised my hand and swore an oath to protect and defend our nation," she said. "If this was where the universe had placed me at this moment in time... that this was my purpose. Anyone who had been in our position would have been willing to do the same thing. "And the proof is in the pudding, because the passengers on Flight 93 did...." Flight 93 passengers attempted to retake the plane, and in the struggle, the aircraft crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. It was the only one of the four hijacked aircrafts that day that did not reach the terrorists' intended target.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Recently, browsing leader Mozilla shared the result of an independent security audit on its VPN service," reports Fossbytes. "Upon inspection, a few vulnerabilities were discovered in the VPN, one of which was reportedly a major risk."In a blog post, Mozilla shared that Cure53, a Berlin-based cybersecurity firm, had identified and fixed the security vulnerabilities in its VPN... The most severe issue, labeled "FVP-02-014," made the user vulnerable to cross-site WebSocket hijacking. Moreover, the medium-risk vulnerabilities revolved around "VPN leak via captive portal detection" and "Auth code leak" by injecting the port. However, these sophisticated terms shouldn't worry you anymore as Cure53 has already addressed these weaknesses. There has also been no mention of any Mozilla VPN users falling victim to these either. The Firefox developer's public post that outlines the security flaws detected by the German firm provides users an insight into the potential risks of using a VPN. Moreover, these audits also help Mozilla iron out any issues that its one-year-old VPN service might have.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code," blares a headline in the New York Times, adding "That's Good News for Humans. (Alternate URL here.) The article begins with this remarkable story about Codex (the OpenAI software underlying GitHub Copilot):As soon as Tom Smith got his hands on Codex — a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs — he gave it a job interview. He asked if it could tackle the "coding challenges" that programmers often face when interviewing for big-money jobs at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. Could it write a program that replaces all the spaces in a sentence with dashes? Even better, could it write one that identifies invalid ZIP codes? It did both instantly, before completing several other tasks. "These are problems that would be tough for a lot of humans to solve, myself included, and it would type out the response in two seconds," said Mr. Smith, a seasoned programmer who oversees an A.I. start-up called Gado Images. "It was spooky to watch." Codex seemed like a technology that would soon replace human workers. As Mr. Smith continued testing the system, he realized that its skills extended well beyond a knack for answering canned interview questions. It could even translate from one programming language to another. Yet after several weeks working with this new technology, Mr. Smith believes it poses no threat to professional coders. In fact, like many other experts, he sees it as a tool that will end up boosting human productivity. It may even help a whole new generation of people learn the art of computers, by showing them how to write simple pieces of code, almost like a personal tutor. "This is a tool that can make a coder's life a lot easier," Mr. Smith said. The article ultimately concludes that Codex "extends what a machine can do, but it is another indication that the technology works best with humans at the controls." And Greg Brockman, chief technology officer of OpenAI, even tells the Times "AI is not playing out like anyone expected. It felt like it was going to do this job and that job, and everyone was trying to figure out which one would go first. Instead, it is replacing no jobs. But it is taking away the drudge work from all of them at once."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack," the site reports. Citing a new blog post from DDoS protection firm Qrator Labs, Krebs writes that "The assault came from 'Meris,' the same new botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer."A titanic and ongoing DDoS that hit Russian Internet search giant Yandex last week is estimated to have been launched by roughly 250,000 malware-infected devices globally, sending 21.8 million bogus requests-per-second. While last night's Meris attack on this site was far smaller than the recent Cloudflare DDoS, it was far larger than the Mirai DDoS attack in 2016 that held KrebsOnSecurity offline for nearly four days. The traffic deluge from Thursday's attack on this site was more than four times what Mirai threw at this site five years ago. This latest attack involved more than two million requests-per-second. By comparison, the 2016 Mirai DDoS generated approximately 450,000 requests-per-second. According to Qrator, which is working with Yandex on combating the attack, Meris appears to be made up of Internet routers produced by MikroTik. Qrator says the United States is home to the most number of MikroTik routers that are potentially vulnerable to compromise by Meris — with more than 42 percent of the world's MikroTik systems connected to the Internet (followed by China — 18.9 percent- and a long tail of one- and two-percent countries). It's not immediately clear which security vulnerabilities led to these estimated 250,000 MikroTik routers getting hacked by Meris. "The spectrum of RouterOS versions we see across this botnet varies from years old to recent," the company wrote. "The largest share belongs to the version of firmware previous to the current stable one." Krebs writes that the biggest contributor to the IoT botnet problem remains "a plethora of companies white-labeling [cheap] IoT devices that were never designed with security in mind and are often shipped to the customer in default-insecure states... "The good news is that over the past five years, large Internet infrastructure companies like Akamai, Cloudflare and Google (which protects this site with its Project Shield initiative) have heavily invested in ramping up their ability to withstand these outsized attacks..." One year earlier, back in 2015, Krebs had answered questions from Slashdot's readers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. state of Texas "has made it illegal for social media platforms to ban users 'based on their political viewpoints'," repots the BBC:Prominent Republican politicians have accused Facebook, Twitter and others of censoring conservative views... The social networks have all denied stifling conservative views. However, they do enforce terms of service which prohibit content such as incitement to violence and co-ordinated disinformation. "Social media websites have become our modern-day public square," said Texas governor Greg Abbott, after signing the bill into law on Thursday. "They are a place for healthy public debate where information should be able to flow freely...." The new law states social media platforms with more than 50 million users cannot ban people based on their political viewpoints. Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube are within its scope... The law is due to come in to force in December, but may face legal challenges. "Critics say the law does not respect the constitutional right of private businesses to decide what sort of content is allowed on their platforms," the BBC adds, with the president of NetChoice trade association arguing that the bill "would put the Texas government in charge of content policies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CIStud writes: Sonos announces price hikes for Arc, Amp, Roam, Sub, Five, One and One SL speakers citing chip shortage and supply chain. Sonos Arc's price is leaping by $100 from $799 to $899. Not every product will be seeing a large jump in price, as some products like the Sonos Roam are seeing increases of just $10. Other products receiving only small price increases include the Sonos One and Sonos One SL ($20 increase), while others are not seeing pricing changes whatsoever like the Sonos Move and Sonos Port. Speaking of the far-reaching impact of the global chip shortage, Google and Indian telecom operator Jio announced this week they are delaying the launch of their affordable smartphone aimed at 300 million users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Chinese authorities have banned all new video games from being released indefinitely, as the government attempts to tackle what it calls gaming addiction in the under-18s. The suspension was revealed at a meeting with game company Tencent. The ban was reportedly revealed during a meeting between Chinese gaming companies Tencent and the authorities. Neither company has commented on the suspension, which has not yet been given an end date. The suspension comes as part of a wider bid by the Chinese Communist Party to crack down on gaming addiction amongst children. Just last month, the Chinese government banned under-18s from playing online games for more than three hours per week, and restricted weekend play between 8PM and 9PM. Online gaming companies are required to enforce the ban, which came after state media labelled videogames "spiritual opium" and "electronic drugs" a few weeks prior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese hackers have breached the internal networks of at least ten Indonesian government ministries and agencies, including computers from Indonesia's primary intelligence service, the Badan Intelijen Negara (BIN). From a report: The intrusion, discovered by Insikt Group, the threat research division of Recorded Future, has been linked to Mustang Panda, a Chinese threat actor known for its cyber-espionage campaigns targeting the Southeast Asian region. Insikt researchers first discovered this campaign in April this year, when they detected PlugX malware command and control (C&C) servers, operated by the Mustang Panda group, communicating with hosts inside the networks of the Indonesian government. These communications were later traced back to at least March 2021. The intrusion point and delivery method of the malware are still unclear.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Gurman, reporting on Friday's ruling in Apple and Epic lawsuit: So how much does Apple stand to lose? That all comes down to how many developers try to bypass its payment system. Loup Venture's Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher, put the range at $1 billion to $4 billion, depending on how many developers take advantage of the new policy. Apple depicted the ruling as a victory, signaling that it's not too worried about the financial impact. "The court has affirmed what we've known all along: The App Store is not in violation of antitrust law" and "success is not illegal," Apple said in a statement. Kate Adams, the iPhone maker's general counsel, called the ruling a "resounding victory" that "underscores the merit" of its business. Apple's adversary in the trial -- Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite -- also contended that the judge sided with Apple. This "isn't a win for developers or for consumers," Epic Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney said on Twitter. [...] Apple made about $3.8 billion in U.S. revenue from games in 2020, most of which came from in-app purchases, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. But even if the ruling ends up costing Apple a few billion dollars a year, that's still a small fraction of its total revenue. In fiscal 2021 alone, the company is estimated to bring in more than $360 billion, meaning the change won't make or break its overall financial performance. And many developers may choose to stick to Apple's payment system so they don't have to build their own web payment platform. More concerns were shared by the EFF in a thread on Twitter. "Disappointingly, a court found that Apple is not a monopolist in mobile gaming or in-app transactions, so its App Store commissions don't violate antitrust law. One bright spot: the court found Apple's gag rules on app developers violate California law... "The court's opinion spells out many serious problems with today's mobile app ecosystem, such as false tensions between user choice and user privacy. Congress can help with real antitrust reform and new legal tools, and shouldn't let Apple's privacywashing derail that work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research shows there is a 'sweet spot' and subjective wellbeing drops off after about five hours. The Guardian: The lesson of Goldilocks, that one can have too much of a good thing, even when it comes to the size of a chair, has applied in fields from astrobiology to economics. Now, it seems it may even govern our free time. Researchers have found that while levels of subjective wellbeing initially rise as free time increases, the trend does not necessarily hold for very high levels of leisure. "The sweet spot is a moderate amount of free time," said Dr Marissa Sharif, a co-author of the study from the University of Pennsylvania. "We found that having too much time was associated with lower subjective wellbeing due to a lacking sense of productivity and purpose." Writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sharif and colleagues reported how they analysed results from two large-scale surveys, involving a combined total of more than 35,000 participants. One was the American Time Use Survey, which was carried out between 2012 and 2013 and asked participants what they had done in the past 24 hours. After crowdsourcing opinions on which activities would be equated with leisure time and then calculating this time for participants, the team found that while subjective wellbeing rose with the amount of free time up to about two hours, it began to drop once it exceeded five hours. Meanwhile data from the National Study of the Changing Workforce, carried out between 1992 and 2008, revealed that beyond a certain point, having more free time was no longer linked to greater subjective wellbeing, but it did not dip -- possibly because few of the participants reported having more than five hours of free time a day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January -- just minutes before President Trump left office -- has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses. New submitter echo123 shares a report: The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market. Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April. And now it's done. Kind of. On Tuesday, the Pentagon made a technical announcement -- visible mainly to network administrators around the world -- saying it was resuming control of the 175 million IP addresses and directing the traffic to its own servers. On Friday the Pentagon told The Post that the pilot program, which it previously had characterized as a cybersecurity measure designed to detect unspecified "vulnerabilities" and "prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space," was over. Parts of the Internet once managed by Global Resource Systems, the Pentagon said, now were being overseen by the Department of Defense Information Network, known by the acronym DODIN and part of U.S. Cyber Command, based at Fort Meade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lack of communication, confusion about payments and long delays have security researchers fed up with Apple's bug bounty program. The Washington Post: Hoping to discover hidden weaknesses, Apple for five years now has invited hackers to break into its services and its iconic phones and laptops, offering up to $1 million to learn of its most serious security flaws. [...] But many who are familiar with the program say Apple is slow to fix reported bugs and does not always pay hackers what they believe they're owed. Ultimately, they say, Apple's insular culture has hurt the program and created a blind spot on security. "It's a bug bounty program where the house always wins," said Katie Moussouris, CEO and founder of Luta Security, which worked with the Defense Department to set up its first bug bounty program. She said Apple's bad reputation in the security industry will lead to "less secure products for their customers and more cost down the line." Apple said its program, launched in 2016, is a work in progress. Until 2019, the program was not officially opened to the public, although researchers say the program was never exclusive. [...] In interviews with more than two dozen security researchers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements, the approaches taken by Apple's rivals were held up for comparison. Facebook, Microsoft and Google publicize their programs and highlight security researchers who receive bounties in blog posts and leader boards. They hold conferences and provide resources to encourage a broad international audience to participate. And most of them pay more money each year than Apple, which is at times the world's most valuable company. Microsoft paid $13.6 million in the 12-month period beginning July 2020. Google paid $6.7 million in 2020. Apple spent $3.7 million last year, Krstic said in his statement. He said that number is likely to increase this year. Payment amounts aren't the only measure of success, however. The best programs support open conversations between the hackers and the companies. Apple, already known for being tight-lipped, limits communication and feedback on why it chooses to pay or not pay for a bug, according to security researchers who have submitted bugs to the bounty program and a former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Apple also has a massive backlog of bugs that it hasn't fixed, according to the former employee and a current employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of an NDA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the SolarWinds Russian hacking operation has dozens of corporate executives fearful information unearthed in the expanding probe will expose them to liability, Reuters reported Friday, citing six people familiar with the inquiry. From the report: The SEC is asking companies to turn over records into "any other" data breach or ransomware attack since October 2019 if they downloaded a bugged network-management software update from SolarWinds, which delivers products used across corporate America, according to details of the letters shared with Reuters. People familiar with the inquiry say the requests may reveal numerous unreported cyber incidents unrelated to the Russian espionage campaign, giving the SEC a rare level of insight into previously unknown incidents that the companies likely never intended to disclose. "I've never seen anything like this," said a consultant who works with dozens of publicly traded companies that recently received the request. "What companies are concerned about is they don't know how the SEC will use this information. And most companies have had unreported breaches since then." The consultant spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his experience. The requests are voluntary, and companies are obliged to disclose anything material to investors. But the fact the inquiries comes from the SEC's enforcement staff could raise the prospect of investigations and steep penalties if companies fail to disclose breaches or did not have the appropriate controls in place to deal with past attacks, four attorneys who regularly handle SEC cases said. Further reading: What it was like inside Microsoft during the worst cyberattack in history.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company realized months ago that it could be running afoul of pay laws in a number of countries but has been slow to fix the problem, according to internal documents. From a report: In December, a group of Google managers responsible for overseeing thousands of its temporary staff members discovered the company had been underpaying some of those workers for years. The gap in so-called benchmark rates between what it paid full-time employees and temporary workers doing similar work had widened significantly, according to internal company emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times. This was especially problematic in countries with so-called pay parity laws requiring the company to pay temporary workers the same wages as full-time employees in similar positions. But Google's lapse had gone undetected outside the company. The managers worried that fixing the shortfall by suddenly lifting hourly rates by 20 percent to 30 percent would call attention to the problem and invite negative publicity to a company already criticized for creating a two-tier work force of generously compensated full-time employees and less expensive temps and contractors who are easy to hire and fire. So Google landed on a fix that wouldn't call as much attention to the problem: It decided to apply the correct rates for only new hires starting in 2021 but held off on more expensive, wholesale changes, according to company emails reviewed by The Times. Alan Barry, a Google compliance manager based in Ireland, wrote in an email to colleagues that adjusting the rates for all of its temps was the correct move from a "compliance perspective." However, doing so might increase the likelihood that its current temporary staff members could "connect the dots" about the reason behind the pay bump and place the staffing agencies who supply and pay the workers in "a difficult position, legally and ethically." "The cost is significant and it would give rise to a flurry of noise/frustration," Mr. Barry wrote. "I'm also not keen to invite the charge that we've allowed this situation to persist for so long that the correction required is significant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp said on Friday it will give its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat backups to the cloud, taking a significant step to put a lid on one of the tricky ways private communication between individuals on the app can be compromised. From a report: The Facebook-owned service has end-to-end encrypted chats between users for more than a decade. But users have had no option but to store their chat backup to their cloud -- iCloud on iPhones and Google Drive on Android -- in an unencrypted format. [...] Now WhatsApp says it is patching this weak link in the system. The company said it has devised a system to enable WhatsApp users on Android and iOS to lock their chat backups with encryption keys. WhatsApp says it will offer users two ways to encrypt their cloud backups, and the feature is optional. In the "coming weeks," users on WhatsApp will see an option to generate a 64-digit encryption key to lock their chat backups in the cloud. Users can store the encryption key offline or in a password manager of their choice, or they can create a password that backs up their encryption key in a cloud-based "backup key vault" that WhatsApp has developed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PCGamer reports: Microsoft continues to double down on its assertion that the Windows 11 system requirements are absolutely necessary, and this whole TPM 2.0 schtick is vital for the safety of you, your PC, and maybe even the world. Okay, I made that last bit up, but the big M is sticking to its guns and has released another video backing its decision on excluding a whole lot of hardware that was fine with Windows 10. The latest claim is that you're going to see fewer blue screens of death -- or maybe black screens of death -- because of the new system requirements, citing a "99.8% crash-free experience in the [Windows 11] preview." Look, there's still a part of us that feels at some point in the future, maybe the distant future, Microsoft will turn around and say 'You know, what? We don't mind what processor you use with Windows 11,' but for right now this is where we're at. You need a modern CPU for Windows 11 for security and reliability. And maybe a little performance. "So the requirement for Intel 8th Gen and AMD Ryzen 2000-series, and newer, chipsets does definitely contribute to performance," states Microsoft VP Steve Dispensa in the recent video. "But the main rationale here is actually the balanced security with performance. Security is at the core of these requirements." He does point to differences in how Windows 11 prioritises apps running in the foreground window. With the system running at 90% CPU load, it's still possible to get a responsive experience opening and using foreground apps thanks to these prioritisations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma. "My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. judge on Friday issued a ruling in "Fortnite" creator Epic Games' antitrust lawsuit against Apple's App Store, labelling Apple's conduct in enforcing anti-steering restrictions as anticompetitive. From a report: The case may determine whether Apple is allowed to retain control over what apps appear on its iPhones and whether it is allowed to charge commissions to developers. The Verge adds: Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers issued a permanent injunction in the Epic v. Apple case on Friday morning, handing a major setback to Apple's App Store model. Under the new order, Apple is: "permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report:These are still early days for quantum computing, far too soon to talk about domain-specific quantum systems. But if there are areas hungrier than ever for what quantum is best at -- dense optimization problems at scale -- the future cannot arrive fast enough. More specifically, the golden grail for quantum computing -- the "traveling salesman" problem -- could revolutionize the transportation industry in particular, in addition to the world's largest retailers dependent on accurate shipping data. Quantum capabilities in this arena are so critical that the first production quantum systems at scale could be purpose-designed and optimized simply for this type of problem. While these days we don't think of Amazon's delivery aspects much since the carriers are so often the focus, the combined capability of vast search coupled with near-real-time delivery dates matched to location took Amazon years to get right -- and was a billion-plus dollar effort in compute time. Peter Chapman says "infinite compute" can be brought to bear to refine the entire process that happens the moment you search for "USB drive" on Amazon, confirm your shipping location, and select only products that arrive tomorrow. The density of calculations required -- pulling from warehouse availability to planes, trains, and automobiles and their various routes through your own hometown -- is staggering. "It's the ultimate traveling salesman problem," he laughs. Chapman should know what this takes because he led the development of many of the technologies that became the fast, reliable Amazon Prime service. As director of engineering, his team of 240 engineers took Amazon from requiring customers to search and select a product and wait until checkout to find out how long delivery would take. "That meant a lot of abandoned carts and a bad user experience," he says. With global products, shipping routes, customers, carriers, product availability and warehouse locations, the order was so tall, it took rearchitecting Amazon infrastructure to do it at reasonable enough scale. "There is a practical limit to the computational resources you can apply to this, even at Amazon. We could easily consume 100x the compute but Amazon couldn't afford it," Chapman says. "There is infinite need for compute for this problem so we had to find the right tradeoffs in optimization and find what you can get for a certain amount of money spent -- and we're talking billions here. Our goal was to make sure it wasn't $20 billion." He adds that the cost of these systems were growing faster than the top line of Amazon's sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Food-delivery companies DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats have sued New York City over a legislation to license food-delivery apps and to permanently cap commissions they can charge restaurants. From a report: The three food-delivery companies filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York late on Thursday. The companies are seeking an injunction that would prevent New York from enforcing the fee-cap ordinance adopted last month, as well as unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial. The New York City Council approved in August a legislation which limits the amount that food-delivery companies can charge restaurants to use their platforms and requires them to obtain operating licenses that are valid for two years. read more "Those permanent price controls will harm not only Plaintiffs, but also the revitalization of the very local restaurants that the City claims to serve," the companies said in the lawsuit filed on Thursday. The suit argues that the legislation is unconstitutional because "it interferes with freely negotiated contracts between platforms and restaurants by changing and dictating the economic terms on which a dynamic industry operates."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is shelving its plans to fully reopen its US offices next month. From a report: The software giant had planned to reopen its headquarters on October 4th, but the ongoing uncertainty of COVID-19 and the spike in cases has forced the company to delay its back to the office push. Microsoft isn't providing a new date to employees, though.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon said Thursday it will offer to pay 100% of college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees. From a report: The e-commerce giant is following the lead of other large U.S. companies who are dangling perks like education benefits or more pay to woo workers in a tight job market. Starting in January 2022, Amazon said it will cover the cost of college tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly employees in its operations network after 90 days of employment. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, GEDs and English as a second language certifications for employees. Operations workers include employees in Amazon's sprawling network of warehouses and distribution centers. The benefit will apply to hundreds of education institutions across the country, Amazon said. Amazon previously offered to pay for 95% of tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly associates through its career choice program. Rival retailers, including Walmart and Target, have also beefed up their education benefits in recent months. Target in August rolled out a program that covers the cost of associate and undergraduate degrees at select schools. Walmart in July said it would pay 100% of college tuition and books costs for associates of Walmart and Sam's Club.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Payment services company Mastercard has acquired blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace to bolster its own cyber security tools and to better comply with crypto regulatory guidelines, according to an announcement on Thursday. The amount offered for the acquisition remains undisclosed. From a report: "With the rapid growth of the digital asset ecosystem comes the need to ensure it is trusted and safe," said Ajay Bhalla, president of Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard, in the statement. "Our aim is to build upon the complementary capabilities of Mastercard and CipherTrace to do just this." In addition to gathering data in the crypto space, CipherTrace publishes yearly reports about the trends in the crypto ecosystem and has built compliance tools for decentralized exchanges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook announced their long-awaited foray into the smart glasses space Thursday morning, launching the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses in partnership with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. From a report: The svelte frames are some of the most low-profile yet available to consumers and will allow users to snap photos and videos with the two onboard 5 MP cameras, listen to music with in-frame speakers and take phone calls. The glasses need to be connected to an iOS or Android device for full functionality, though users can take and store hundreds of photos or dozens of videos on the glasses before transferring media to their phones via Facebook's new View app. The twin cameras will allow users to add 3D effects to their photos and videos once they upload them to the app. The lightweight glasses weigh less than 50 grams and come with a leather hardshell charging case. The battery lift is advertised as "all-day" which TechCrunch found to be accurate during our review of the frames. Users will be able to control the glasses with a couple physical buttons including a "capture" button to record media and an on-off switch. A touch pad on the right arm of the glasses will allow users to perform functions like swiping to adjust the volume or answering a phone call. An onboard white LED will glow to indicate to the people around the wearer that a video is being recorded. The glasses will start at $299, with polarized and transition lens options coming in at a higher price point.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The well-known three-arrows symbol doesn't necessarily mean that a product is actually recyclable. A new bill would limit the products allowed to feature the mark. From a report: The triangular "chasing arrows" recycling symbol is everywhere: On disposable cups. On shower curtains. On children's toys. What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable. It's false advertising, critics say, and as a result, countless tons of non-recyclable garbage are thrown in the recycling bin each year, choking the recycling system. Late on Wednesday, California took steps toward becoming the first state to change that. A bill passed by the state's assembly would ban companies from using the arrows symbol unless they can prove the material is in fact recycled in most California communities, and is used to make new products. "It's a basic truth-in-advertising concept," said California State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat and the bill's lead sponsor. "We have a lot of people who are dutifully putting materials into the recycling bins that have the recycling symbols on them, thinking that they're going to be recycled, but actually, they're heading straight to the landfill," he said. The measure, which is expected to clear the State Senate later this week and be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is part of a nascent effort across the country to fix a recycling system that has long been broken. Though materials like paper or metals are widely recycled, less than 10 percent of plastic consumed in the United States is recycled, according to the most recent estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, most plastic is incinerated or dumped in landfills, with the exception of some types of resins, like the kind used for bottled water or soda. For years, the United States also shipped much of its plastic waste overseas, choking local rivers and streams. A global convention now bans most trade in plastic waste, though U.S. waste exports have not completely ceased. This summer, Maine and Oregon passed laws overhauling their states' recycling systems by requiring corporations to pay for the cost of recycling their packaging. In Oregon, the law included plans to establish a task force that would evaluate "misleading or confusing claims" related to recycling. Legislation is pending in New York that would, among other things, ban products from displaying misleading claims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is officially in the TV set business. From a report: After years of selling Fire TV devices that plug into third-party HDTVs and teaming with TV makers for Fire TV-based products, the ecommerce giant is rolling out the first-ever Amazon-built TVs: the Amazon Fire TV Omni Series ($410 and up), which provides hands-free Alexa voice navigation, and the value-priced 4-Series smart TV line ($370 and up). They're set to ship in October. In addition, Amazon is baking in new features to the overall Fire TV platform, including bringing TikTok content to the platform in the U.S. and Canada; letting users access Netflix's shuffle-mode feature via Alexa; and being able to ask Alexa for movie or TV show recommendations. The company also is bowing the new Fire TV Stick 4K Max ($55), which it says is more powerful than the prior-generation model and is Amazon's first streaming media player to launch with Energy Star certification and Wi-Fi 6 support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Long Island man was charged on Wednesday with using his position as an I.T. supervisor for Suffolk County to mine cryptocurrency from government offices, costing the county thousands of dollars in electricity. Prosecutors said that Christopher Naples, 42, of Mattituck, L.I., had hidden 46 specialized devices used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in six rooms in the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead, including underneath floorboards and inside an unused electrical panel. Mr. Naples was charged with public corruption, grand larceny, computer trespass and official misconduct. If convicted of the top charge, he could face up to 15 years in prison. Mr. Naples had admitted that the devices belonged to him and that he had been operating them for at least several months before the district attorney's office was alerted to the scheme. Prosecutors said that at least 10 of Mr. Naples's machines had been running since February, costing Suffolk County more than $6,000. [...] [G]iven that 36 more machines had been discovered, it was likely that Mr. Naples had cost the county thousands more. [...] [O]ne room in which Mr. Naples had placed the devices had critically important computer servers and other equipment for the entire county, and that the temperature in that room in which the devices were placed had dropped 20 degrees shortly after they were disabled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This month, Amazon will open a $21 million state-of-the-art warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico, that abuts a housing settlement made of cardboard, tarp, and wood scraps along the Tijuana River, less than three miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Motherboard reports: In recent days, images of the shiny, new warehouse complex emblazoned with a giant blue Amazon logo -- and its impoverished environs with its unpaved roads and cardboard roofs have gone viral on social media, a stark display of globalization. The images have drawn comparisons to dystopian science fiction. Amazon's founder and chairman Jeff Bezos, who recently travelled in a rocket to outer space (and then thanked his workers for making that possible), is the world's wealthiest person. Marisa Vano, a spokesperson for Amazon, said, "Since our arrival in Mexico, Amazon has created more than 15,000 jobs throughout the country, creating employment opportunities with competitive salaries and benefits for all of our employees. Our wages and benefits strengthen local communities, and these investments help these areas to grow and to build better futures." Amazon, which is steadily spreading its reach across the globe, has been busy scaling up operations in Mexico and throughout Latin America over the past several years. The Mexican outlet Proceso reported that the mayor of Tijuana has said that the new warehouse will speed up delivery times for Amazon goods within the Mexico border city and in nearby cities. Amazon Prime membership allows for unlimited two-day shipping throughout much of Mexico.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Astronomers have detected a strange, repeating radio signal near the center of the Milky Way, and it's unlike any other energy signature ever studied. According to a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the preprint server arXiv, the energy source is extremely finicky, appearing bright in the radio spectrum for weeks at a time and then completely vanishing within a day. This behavior doesn't quite fit the profile of any known type of celestial body, the researchers wrote in their study, and thus may represent "a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging." The radio source -- known as ASKAP J173608.2321635 -- was detected with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback. In an ASKAP survey taken between April 2019 and August 2020, the strange signal appeared 13 times, never lasting in the sky for more than a few weeks, the researchers wrote. This radio source is highly variable, appearing and disappearing with no predictable schedule, and doesn't seem to appear in any other radio telescope data prior to the ASKAP survey. When the researchers tried to match the energy source with observations from other telescopes -- including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, as well as the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile, which can pick up near-infrared wavelengths -- the signal disappeared entirely. With no apparent emissions in any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is a radio ghost that seems to defy explanation. Prior surveys have detected low-mass stars that periodically flare up with radio energy, but those flaring stars typically have X-ray counterparts, the researchers wrote. That makes a stellar source unlikely here. Dead stars, like pulsars and magnetars (two types of ultradense, collapsed stars), are also unlikely explanations, the team wrote. The report goes on to say that the closest match is a mysterious class of object known as a galactic center radio transient (GCRT), a rapidly glowing radio source that brightens and decays near the Milky Way's center, usually over the course of a few hours. "So far, only three GCRTs have been confirmed, and all of them appear and disappear much more quickly than this new ASKAP object does," reports Live Science. "However, the few known GCRTs do shine with a similar brightness as the mysterious signal, and their radio flare-ups are never accompanied by X-rays."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Researchers have completed a comprehensive online map of the world's coral reefs by using more than 2 million satellite images from across the globe. The Allen Coral Atlas, named after late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will act as a reference for reef conservation, marine planning and coral science as researchers try to save these fragile ecosystems that are being lost to climate change. The group announced completion of the atlas Wednesday and said it is the first global, high-resolution map of its kind. It gives users the ability to see detailed information about local reefs, including different types of submarine structure like sand, rocks, seagrass and, of course, coral. The maps, which include areas up to 50 feet (15 meters) deep, are being used to inform policy decisions about marine protected areas, spatial planning for infrastructure such as docks and seawalls and upcoming coral restoration projects. "Our biggest contribution in this achievement is that we have a uniform mapping of the entire coral reef biome," said Greg Asner, managing director of the Atlas and director of Arizona State University's Center for Global Discovery and Conservation. Asner said they relied on a network of hundreds of field contributors who gave them local information about reefs so that they could program their satellites and software to focus on the right areas. "And that lets us bring the playing field up to a level where decisions can be made at a bigger scale because so far decisions have been super localized," Asner said. "If you don't know what you've got more uniformly, how would the U.N. ever play a real role? How would a government that has an archipelago with 500 islands make a uniform decision?" The atlas also includes a coral bleaching monitor to check for corals that are stressed due to global warming and other factors. Asner said about three quarters of the world's reefs had not previously been mapped in this kind of in-depth way, and many not at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.