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Apple has delayed plans to roll out its child sexual abuse (CSAM) detection technology that it chaotically announced last month, citing feedback from customers and policy groups. From a report: That feedback, if you recall, has been largely negative. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week it had amassed more than 25,000 signatures from consumers. On top of that, close to 100 policy and rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, also called on Apple to abandon plans to roll out the technology. In a statement on Friday morning, Apple told TechCrunch: "Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter throx shares a report from Android Police: For months users of the three-year-old Pixel 3 series have been complaining of a common and dreadful problem: seemingly random shutdowns that completely lock their devices. The Pixel 3 and 3 XL have been plagued by the "EDL Mode" bug, which locks the device with no screen or button inputs and makes it more or less impossible to use. To date there's no clear solution to this problem, at least not one that's easily available to even advanced users. Google's official support channels are aware of the issue, and that it seems to be accelerating in terms of users in the last few months. But since more or less every Pixel 3 and 3 XL sold is out of warranty at this point, options are limited. You can start an official support ticket with Google and pay for a repair, or (as one volunteer on the Google support forums suggests) take it into an authorized repair shop to see if their Qualcomm tools can get the phone to wake up. At the time of writing there doesn't seem to be any indication of a user-accessible fix for the EDL issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Perseverance rover successfully drilled into a Martian rock on Thursday, creating an intact core sample that could one day be returned to Earth. But NASA wants better images to make sure the sample is safely in the tube before it's sealed up and stowed on the rover. So far, data sent back by the rover and initial images suggest an intact sample was inside the tube after Perseverance drilled into a rock selected by the mission's science team. After the initial images were taken, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for five one-second bursts to clear both of any residual material from outside of the tube. It's possible that this caused the sample to slide down further inside the tube. The next images taken after this were "inconclusive due to poor sunlight conditions," according to the agency. Perseverance will use its cameras to take more images under better lighting conditions before conducting the next steps of the sampling process. The extra step of taking additional images before sealing and stowing the sample tube was added after Perseverance attempted to drill into another rock target on August 5. During that attempt, the rock crumbled and there was no sample present in the tube once it was stowed. Perseverance is currently exploring the Citadelle location in Jezero Crater, which -- billions of years ago -- was once the site of an ancient lake. The rover's specific target was a rock called Rochette, which is about the size of a briefcase and is part of a half-mile ridgeline of rock outcrops and boulders. The mission team should receive more images of what's inside the sample tube by September 4. If images taken while the sun is at a better angle don't help the team determine whether a sample is present, the tube will be sealed and the rover will measure its volume. If Perseverance is able to successfully collect samples from Mars, they will be returned to Earth by future missions -- and they could reveal if microbial life ever existed on Mars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some scientists believe there is a ninth planet lurking out there in the inky blackness at the edge of the solar system. A new analysis (PDF) supports the notion that there's something out there, and it also narrows the region we need to search if we want to find the contentious Planet Nine. ExtremeTech reports: Astronomers started talking seriously about a ninth planet in 2016 when Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published a study detailing the unusual orbital behavior of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). These icy chunks of rock orbit the sun out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto might not be a planet anymore, but it was the first KBO ever discovered. According to the original study, the uneven distribution of orbits among KBOs points to the presence of a massive object in the outer solar system. All searches for this planet have come up empty, though. While some astronomers believe Planet Nine is a good explanation for KBO orbits, there has also been intense criticism of the study. Now, Brown and Batygin are back with a new analysis that aims to address some of those complaints. Chiefly, other scientists noted that it's difficult to observe KBOs, so many searches focus on the more convenient regions of the sky. Thus, we could simply be looking a biased data. The Planet Nine duo kept some of the original KBOs in the new data set, but it also includes new space rocks. They also discarded any object that appeared to be influenced by Neptune's gravity. The updated set of 11 KBOs still shows an unusual orbital distribution. The study claims there is just a 0.4 percent chance that these orbits are a coincidence. A greater than 99 percent chance that there is a massive object affecting KBOs sounds high, but it's actually lower than the chance assigned to Planet Nine in the original 2016 study. You could argue, of course, that this is a much more realistic number. Based on the new simulations, Batygin has created a "treasure map" of sorts that points the way to Planet Nine's most likely orbital arc. That expansive area crosses the luminous plane of the Milky Way, which might have helped Planet Nine hide from previous searches. This includes a chance in the expected orbit, bringing Planet Nine in closer to Earth. The original analysis estimated it has an orbital period of 18,500 Earth years, but now it's believed to be in the neighborhood of 7,400 Earth years. The pair believe we are only a few years away from spotting Planet Nine, and it may be the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon.com plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources, a move likely to renew debate about how much power tech companies should have to restrict free speech. Over the coming months, Amazon will hire a small group of people in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division to develop expertise and work with outside researchers to monitor for future threats, one of the sources familiar with the matter said. It could turn Amazon, the leading cloud service provider worldwide with 40% market share according to research firm Gartner, into one of the world's most powerful arbiters of content allowed on the internet, experts say. AWS already prohibits its services from being used in a variety of ways, such as illegal or fraudulent activity, to incite or threaten violence or promote child sexual exploitation and abuse, according to its acceptable use policy. Amazon first requests customers remove content violating its policies or have a system to moderate content. If Amazon cannot reach an acceptable agreement with the customer, it may take down the website. Amazon aims to develop an approach toward content issues that it and other cloud providers are more frequently confronting, such as determining when misinformation on a company's website reaches a scale that requires AWS action, the source said. The new team within AWS does not plan to sift through the vast amounts of content that companies host on the cloud, but will aim to get ahead of future threats, such as emerging extremist groups whose content could make it onto the AWS cloud, the source added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The US Federal Aviation Administration has grounded Virgin Galactic flights as it investigates how Sir Richard Branson's recent space flight drifted off course during its climb skyward," reports the BBC. The New Yorker first broke the news about Branson's flight veering off course in a piece published yesterday. Virgin Galactic has strongly disputed the article. From the BBC: The rocket plane Unity which carried Sir Richard into space landed safely and Virgin Galactic says it is co-operating with the FAA. In a short statement, the FAA said it was overseeing the Virgin Galactic investigation of its "July 11 SpaceShipTwo mishap that occurred over Spaceport America, New Mexico." "Virgin Galactic may not return the SpaceShipTwo vehicle to flight until the FAA approves the final mishap investigation report or determines the issues related to the mishap do not affect public safety," it added. In its statement issued before the FAA announcement, Virgin Galactic spoke of "misleading characterizations and conclusions" in the New Yorker article and vowed to push ahead with its flight program. Thursday saw it announce details of its next mission -- a research flight for the Italian Air Force. This was likely to be conducted at the end of September or in early October, a Virgin Galactic spokesperson told BBC News. And it now looks like the Unity's next mission is to be put on hold. [...] This is meant to take aloft three Italian nationals - Walter Villadei and Angelo Landolfi from the Italian Air Force; and Pantaleone Carlucci, an Italian national research council engineer. The three men plan to conduct 13 experiments during the flight, and in particular during those few minutes of weightlessness they'll experience at the top of Unity's climb. Under the plan, the Italians are to be supervised in the back of the rocket plane by Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, Beth Moses. If and when it happens, it will be her third mission to the edge of space. After this mission, Virgin Galactic is expected to enter an extended period of maintenance and upgrades for both Unity and its carrier/launch plane, known as Eve. If the schedule is not disrupted by the latest FAA ban, these vehicles are expected to resume space missions by the middle of next year. The company said one further test outing would be conducted before full commercial service began, probably in the second half of 2022. Some 600 individuals put down deposits a number of years ago to buy seat tickets costing $200,000-250,000. Tickets sales resumed last month with prices from $450,000 per seat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mina Hsiang will lead the U.S. Digital Service, the Office of Management and Budget told Axios Thursday, as the Biden administration beefs up its cadre of technological special forces tasked with solving problems across the federal government. From the report: Washington is preparing to spend trillions in infrastructure money allocated by the president's top-priority legislation, and building and tuning the digital systems for those programs will demand know-how. Hsiang will be the first woman and first Asian-American to be the administrator of USDS, which was launched in 2014 in the aftermath of the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov website. Hsiang is a USDS veteran from the Obama administration and worked on the HealthCare.gov rescue team. More recently, she helped the Biden administration with the launch of the Vaccines.gov website to help Americans find COVID-19 vaccines. She will fill the vacancy left by the April departure of Matt Cutts, the Google veteran who led the service from 2017. USDS teams are deployed for crisis work that needs a quick response -- such as assisting at the southern border or helping with the Afghanistan evacuation. They also help implement new programs like those created by the American Rescue Plan. "Government services -- and helping people access those services via many channels, including digitally -- are more critical now than ever," Hsiang told Axios. "The pandemic has been a catalyst to our country's collective awareness of this truth and has mobilized people to step up and act." Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a new program, the U.S. Digital Corps, aimed at bringing software engineers, data scientists and others into federal agencies for two-year fellowships.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybercrime and computer security reporter Brian Krebs tells the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email inboxes per day, and apparently does little else with this access except siphon gift card and customer loyalty program data that can be resold online. From the report: The data in this story come from a trusted source in the security industry who has visibility into a network of hacked machines that fraudsters in just about every corner of the Internet are using to anonymize their malicious Web traffic. For the past three years, the source -- we'll call him "Bill" to preserve his requested anonymity -- has been watching one group of threat actors that is mass-testing millions of usernames and passwords against the world's major email providers each day. Bill said he's not sure where the passwords are coming from, but he assumes they are tied to various databases for compromised websites that get posted to password cracking and hacking forums on a regular basis. Bill said this criminal group averages between five and ten million email authentication attempts daily, and comes away with anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 of working inbox credentials. In about half the cases the credentials are being checked via "IMAP," which is an email standard used by email software clients like Mozilla's Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook. With his visibility into the proxy network, Bill can see whether or not an authentication attempt succeeds based on the network response from the email provider (e.g. mail server responds "OK" = successful access). You might think that whoever is behind such a sprawling crime machine would use their access to blast out spam, or conduct targeted phishing attacks against each victim's contacts. But based on interactions that Bill has had with several large email providers so far, this crime gang merely uses custom, automated scripts that periodically log in and search each inbox for digital items of value that can easily be resold. And they seem particularly focused on stealing gift card data. "Sometimes they'll log in as much as two to three times a week for months at a time," Bill said. "These guys are looking for low-hanging fruit -- basically cash in your inbox. Whether it's related to hotel or airline rewards or just Amazon gift cards, after they successfully log in to the account their scripts start pilfering inboxes looking for things that could be of value." According to Bill, the fraudsters aren't downloading all of their victims' emails: That would quickly add up to a monstrous amount of data. Rather, they're using automated systems to log in to each inbox and search for a variety of domains and other terms related to companies that maintain loyalty and points programs, and/or issue gift cards and handle their fulfillment. Why go after hotel or airline rewards? Because these accounts can all be cleaned out and deposited onto a gift card number that can be resold quickly online for 80 percent of its value.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It looks like a Lightning cable, it works like a Lightning cable, and I can use it to connect my keyboard to my Mac. But it is actually a malicious cable that can record everything I type, including passwords, and wirelessly send that data to a hacker who could be more than a mile away. This is the new version of a series of penetration testing tools made by the security researcher known as MG. MG previously demoed an earlier version of the cables for Motherboard at the DEF CON hacking conference in 2019. Shortly after that, MG said he had successfully moved the cables into mass production, and cybersecurity vendor Hak5 started selling the cables. But the more recent cables come in new physical variations, including Lightning to USB-C, and include more capabilities for hackers to play with. "There were people who said that Type C cables were safe from this type of implant because there isn't enough space. So, clearly, I had to prove that wrong. :)," MG told Motherboard in an online chat. The OMG Cables, as they're called, work by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot itself that a hacker can connect to from their own device. From here, an interface in an ordinary web browser lets the hacker start recording keystrokes. The malicious implant itself takes up around half the length of the plastic shell, MG said. MG said that the new cables now have geofencing features, where a user can trigger or block the device's payloads based on the physical location of the cable. "It pairs well with the self-destruct feature if an OMG Cable leaves the scope of your engagement and you do not want your payloads leaking or being accidentally run against random computers," he said. "We tested this out in downtown Oakland and were able to trigger payloads at over 1 mile," he added. He said that the Type C cables allow the same sort of attacks to be carried out against smartphones and tablets. Various other improvements include being able to change keyboard mappings, the ability to forge the identity of specific USB devices, such as pretending to be a device that leverages a particular vulnerability on a system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting on Monday, General Motors will temporarily halt production at all but four of its North American factories due to chip supply constraints. Engadget reports: The halt in production will affect many of the automaker's most profitable vehicles, including the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. "During the downtime, we will repair and ship unfinished vehicles from many impacted plants, including Fort Wayne and Silao, to dealers to help meet the strong customer demand for our products," a spokesperson for GM told the Detroit Free Press. "Although the situation remains complex and very fluid, we remain confident in our team's ability to continue finding creative solutions to minimize the impact on our highest-demand and capacity-constrained vehicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo and AOL, formerly known as Verizon Media, have officially been acquired by their new owners and renamed as simply "Yahoo." The Verge reports: Verizon announced it was selling the properties to Apollo Global Management in May in a deal said to be worth $5 billion, around half of the nearly $9 billion the telecom giant originally paid for them, and a fraction of the hundreds of billions the two companies were worth at their peaks. Yahoo will now be run by CEO Guru Gowrappan, and will operate as a standalone company under Apollo Funds. Apollo is a private equity firm that owns assets like crafts retailer Michaels, Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. "The close of the deal heralds an exciting time of renewed opportunity for us as a standalone entity," Gowrappan said. "We anticipate that the coming months and years will bring fresh growth and innovation for Yahoo as a business and a brand, and we look forward to creating that future with our new partners."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK ISP Sky Broadband is monitoring the IP addresses of servers suspected of streaming pirated content to subscribers and supplying that data to an anti-piracy company working with the Premier League. That inside knowledge is then processed and used to create blocklists used by the country's leading ISPs, to prevent subscribers from watching pirated events. An anonymous reader shares the report from Torrent Freak: In recent weeks, an anonymous source shared a small trove of information relating to the systems used to find, positively identity, and then ultimately block pirate streams at ISPs. According to the documents, the module related to the Premier League work is codenamed 'RedBeard.' The activity appears to start during the week football matches or PPV events take place. A set of scripts at anti-piracy company Friend MTS are tasked with producing lists of IP addresses that are suspected of being connected to copyright infringement. These addresses are subsequently dumped to Amazon S3 buckets and the data is used by ISPs to block access to infringing video streams, the documents indicate. During actual event scanning, content is either manually or fingerprint matched, with IP addresses extracted from DNS information related to hostnames in media URLs, load balancers, and servers hosting Electronic Program Guides (EPG), all of which are used by unlicensed IPTV services. The big question then is how the Premier League's anti-piracy partner discovers the initial server IP addresses that it subsequently puts forward for ISP blocking. According to documents reviewed by TF, information comes from three sources -- the anti-piracy company's regular monitoring (which identifies IP addresses and their /24 range), manually entered IP addresses (IP addresses and ports), and a third, potentially more intriguing source -- ISPs themselves. The document revealing this information is not dated but other documents in the batch reference dates in 2021. At the time of publishing date, the document indicates that ISP cooperation is currently limited to Sky Broadband only. TorrentFreak asked Friend MTS if that remains the case or whether additional ISPs are now involved. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document's publication, the Sky 'Top Talker' threshold for the Premier League's 'RedBeard' module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly. Torrent Freak goes on to note that the Premier League is "seeking cooperation from additional ISPs too." "In summary, it appears that Sky subscribers aren't being directly monitored per se, but the servers they draw most bandwidth from are being noted by Sky and that data is being forwarded for anti-piracy enforcement," the report adds. "This means that Sky subscribers' piracy habits are directly providing information to support Premier League, Matchroom Boxing, and Queensbury Promotions blocking efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will start asking for permission to enable Personalized Ads in iOS 15, the company's method of serving relevant ads in the App Store and Apple News by analyzing what you read, purchase, and search for on your device. From a report: The company used to collect that information by default, but now it plans to ask for permission. Apple required other developers to seek users' permission with the debut of App Tracking Transparency, so it seems like it's showing that it will hold itself to a similar standard. The Personalized Ads pop-up should show up when you open the App Store if you're running the most recent iOS 15 beta. In the pop-up, Apple writes that the ads will help you discover relevant apps, products, and services while protecting your privacy by using "device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Alibaba Group will invest 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) by 2025 in support of "common prosperity," it said, becoming the latest corporate giant to pledge support for the initiative driven by President Xi Jinping. From a report: Beijing has been encouraging companies to share wealth as part of the effort to ease inequality in the world's second-largest economy. Other companies that have made similar announcements include Tencent Holdings, which also pledged 100 billion yuan, and Geely Automobile. The government-backed Zhejiang News website said Alibaba's funds will go towards areas such as subsidies for small and medium-sized enterprises and improving insurance protection for gig economy workers such as couriers and ride-hailing drivers. It will also set up a 20 billion yuan "common prosperity development fund", the newspaper said, with Alibaba confirming the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first AR/VR headset that Apple has been in development will need to be wirelessly tethered to an iPhone or another Apple device to unlock full functionality, reports The Information. MacRumors: It will be similar to the WiFi-only version of the Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone connection to work. The headset is meant to wirelessly communicate with another Apple device, which will handle most of the powerful computing. According to The Information, Apple recently completed work on the 5-nanometer custom chips that are set to be used in the headset, and that's where the connectivity detail comes from. Apple has completed the key system on a chip (SoC) that will power the headset, along with two additional chips. All three chips have hit the tape-out stage, so work on the physical design has wrapped up and it's now time for trial production.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ASUS has just four letters to sell you on its latest creator-focused notebooks: OLED. From a report: The company is bringing OLED screens to all of its new models, a move meant to differentiate them in the increasingly crowded PC market. Compared to traditional LCD screens, OLED offers deeper blacks levels, vastly better contrast, and more responsiveness. Even today, as LCDs have evolved to be brighter and faster, OLED offers a more pronounced visual "pop." We've been seeing notebooks with OLED for years, like on the XPS 15 and ZenBook, but they've typically been positioned as a premium feature for select models. Now ASUS is trying to make its name synonymous with OLED, so much so that it's bringing it to new mid-range notebooks like the VivoBook Pro 14X and 16X. It's also touting the first 16-inch 4K OLED HDR screens on notebooks across several models: the ProArt Studiobook Pro, ProArt Studiobook and the Vivobook Pro. Befitting its name, you can expect to see the fastest hardware on the market in the StudioBook Pro 16 OLED (starting at $2,500). It'll be powered by H-series Ryzen 5000 processors, 3rd-gen Intel Xeon chips and NVIDIA's professional-grade RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs. And if you don't need all of that power, there's also the Studiobook 16 OLED ($2,000), which has the same Ryzen chips, Intel Core i7 CPUs and either RTX 3070 or 3060 graphics. Both notebooks will be equipped with 4K OLED HDR screens that reach up to 550 nits and cover 100 percent of DCI-P3 color gamut. They'll also sport ASUS Dial, a new rotary accessory located at the top of their trackpads, offering similar functionality to Microsoft's forgotten Surface Dial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp didn't fully explain to Europeans how it uses their data as called for by EU privacy law, Ireland's Data Protection Commission said on Thursday. The regulator hit the messaging app with a fine of 225 million euros, about $267 million. From a report: Partly at issue is how WhatsApp share information with parent company Facebook, according to the commission. The decision brings an end to a GDPR inquiry the privacy regulator started in December 2018. WhatsApp said it disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal. "We have worked to ensure the information we provide is transparent and comprehensive and will continue to do so," a WhatsApp spokesperson said via email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An anonymous reader Days before Christmas in 2015, Juniper Networks alerted users that it had been breached. In a brief statement, the company said it had discovered "unauthorized code" in one of its network security products, allowing hackers to decipher encrypted communications and gain high-level access to customers' computer systems. Further details were scant, but Juniper made clear the implications were serious: It urged users to download a software update "with the highest priority." More than five years later, the breach of Juniper's network remains an enduring mystery in computer security, an attack on America's software supply chain that potentially exposed highly sensitive customers including telecommunications companies and U.S. military agencies to years of spying before the company issued a patch. Those intruders haven't yet been publicly identified, and if there were any victims other than Juniper, they haven't surfaced to date. But one crucial detail about the incident has long been known -- uncovered by independent researchers days after Juniper's alert in 2015 -- and continues to raise questions about the methods U.S. intelligence agencies use to monitor foreign adversaries. The Juniper product that was targeted, a popular firewall device called NetScreen, included an algorithm written by the National Security Agency. Security researchers have suggested that the algorithm contained an intentional flaw -- otherwise known as a backdoor -- that American spies could have used to eavesdrop on the communications of Juniper's overseas customers. NSA declined to address allegations about the algorithm. Juniper's breach remains important -- and the subject of continued questions from Congress -- because it highlights the perils of governments inserting backdoors in technology products. "As government agencies and misguided politicians continue to push for backdoors into our personal devices, policymakers and the American people need a full understanding of how backdoors will be exploited by our adversaries," Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a statement to Bloomberg. He demanded answers in the last year from Juniper and from the NSA about the incident, in letters signed by 10 or more members of Congress.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While vocal app developers accused Apple last week of spinning a lawsuit settlement into an App Store change that was barely a change at all, the company appears to be making a true, if small concession today: Apple says it will let developers of "reader" apps (think Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon's Kindle app) directly link their customers to their own sign-up website, where they could potentially skirt Apple's in-app payment system (and its 30 percent cut) entirely, in those cases where they haven't already. From a report: In a press release, Apple claims that the move will close an investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), and that it'll only apply to those sorts of "reader" apps right now -- a category that was originally designed by Apple to placate companies like Netflix and Hulu by allowing them to let users simply sign into their existing account instead of signing up for a new subscription via the App Store (and having to pay Apple's fees). The JFTC has confirmed the agreement in a press release of its own, saying that the move by Apple "would eliminate the suspected violation of the Antimonopoly Act." The commission, which has been investigating Apple since 2016, says the company has pledged to report on the status of app review transparency once a year for the next three years. According to the JFTC, Apple proposed changing its app review guidelines in response to the investigation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Locast has announced that it is suspending its TV streaming service starting today, following a court ruling earlier this week in a lawsuit from ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, which jointly sued the nonprofit service shortly after it launched. From a report: "As a non-profit, Locast was designed from the very beginning to operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law, but in response to the court's recent rulings, with which we respectfully disagree, we are hereby suspending operations, effective immediately," an email to Locast users sent out this morning reads. Locast was launched in 2019 as an internet-based alternative to over-the-air television, rebroadcasting local, free over-the-air signals over the internet to users in those areas. Unlike Aereo, a similar service that was shut down after a lawsuit ruled it was violating copyright by rebroadcasting over-the-air networks online, Locast relied on a loophole, using its status as a nonprofit to retransmit broadcasts. Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued (2019).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, eight Indian banks announced that they are rolling out -- or about to roll out -- a system called Account Aggregator to enable consumers to consolidate all their financial data in one place. From a report: The objective of Account Aggregator (AA) is to aggregate all financial information of an individual, said M Rajeshwar Rao, Deputy Governor of India's central bank -- Reserve Bank of India -- at a virtual event Thursday. The new system makes it possible for banks, tax authorities, insurers, and other finance firms to aggregate data of customers -- who have provided their consent -- to get better understanding about their potential customers, make informed decisions and ensure smoother transactions. Users who provide consent -- and it only takes a few taps to do so -- will be able to share their financial information from one Account Aggregator participant to another through a centralized API-based repository. Users get to decide for how long they wish their data to be shared with a particular Account Aggregator participant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Europe's top court has struck what could be a mortal blow to the practice of zero rating -- where mobile operators exempt data associated with specific services, such as Spotify or Facebook, from counting towards users' overall data caps. From a report: In a Thursday ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against the German providers Vodafone and Telekom, saying their "zero tariff" options broke the EU's net-neutrality law -- legislation designed to ensure that operators treat Internet traffic equally, without favoring certain online providers due to commercial considerations. This is not the first time the court has weighed in on the topic, but the ruling is its most definitive repudiation of the practice of zero rating.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission has unanimously voted to ban the spyware maker SpyFone and its chief executive Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry, the first order of its kind, after the agency accused the company of harvesting mobile data on thousands of people and leaving it on the open internet. From a report: The agency said SpyFone "secretly harvested and shared data on people's physical movements, phone use, and online activities through a hidden device hack," allowing the spyware purchaser to "see the device's live location and view the device user's emails and video chats." SpyFone is one of many so-called "stalkerware" apps that are marketed under the guise of parental control but are often used by spouses to spy on their partners. The spyware works by being surreptitiously installed on someone's phone, often without their permission, to steal their messages, photos, web browsing history, and real-time location data. The FTC also charged that the spyware maker exposed victims to additional security risks because the spyware runs at the "root" level of the phone, which allows the spyware to access off-limits parts of the device's operating system. A premium version of the app included a keylogger and "live screen viewing," the FTC says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes. [...] Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn't readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process "functionalization." The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact. The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimeter-by-3.5-centimeter sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression -- an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep -- was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators. The findings have been published in the journal Matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A team of researchers with AMD have filed a patent application that looks toward a more efficient and reliable quantum computing architecture, thanks to a conventional multi-SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) approach. Tom's Hardware reports: According to the application, AMD is researching a system that aims to use quantum teleportation to increase a quantum system's reliability, while simultaneously reducing the number of qubits necessary for a given calculation. The aim is to both alleviate scaling problems and calculation errors stemming from system instability. The AMD patent, titled "Look Ahead Teleportation for Reliable Computation in Multi-SIMD Quantum Processor," aims to improve quantum stability, scalability, and performance in novel, more efficient ways. It describes a quantum architecture based on quantum processing regions: areas of the chip that hold or can hold qubits, lying in wait for their turn on the processing pipeline. AMD's approach aims to improve on existing quantum architectures by actually reducing the number of qubits needed to perform complex calculations -- via the science fiction-esque concept of quantum teleportation. AMD's design aims to teleport qubits across regions, enabling workloads that would theoretically require in-order execution to become capable of being processed in an out-of-order philosophy. As a quick refresher, in-order execution features dependencies between one instruction and the next, meaning that a workload has to be processed sequentially, with later steps dependent on the previous step being fully processed and its result being known before the chip can move ahead with the computation. As you may imagine, there are chip resources (in this case, qubits) that sit idle until it's their time to perform the next calculation step. On the other hand, Out-of-order execution analyzes a given workload, figures out which parts of it are dependent on previous results and which are not, and executes every step of the instruction that doesn't require a previous result, thus improving performance via increased parallelism. AMD's patent also includes a look-ahead processor embedded into the architecture, tasked to analyze the input workload, predict what steps can be tackled in parallel (and those that can't), and appropriately distribute the workload across qubits, using a quantum teleporting technique to deliver them to the required quantum processing, SIMD-based region. How this quantum teleportation occurs isn't described in the patent -- it looks like AMD is playing its cards close to its chest on this one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicholas Schmidle writes via the New Yorker: On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship's console. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, traveling more than twice the speed of sound. But it was veering off course, and the light was a warning to the pilots that their flight path was too shallow and the nose of the ship was insufficiently vertical. If they didn't fix it, they risked a perilous emergency landing in the desert on their descent. [...] Virgin Galactic's space vehicle is unique among its competitors. Whereas SpaceX and Blue Origin operate traditional, vertical-launch rockets that are automated by engineers, Virgin Galactic uses a piloted, winged rocket ship. Every test flight is crewed, which makes each one a matter of life and death. The success of Virgin Galactic's program, therefore, will ultimately depend on its pilots, high-calibre but nonetheless fallible, making the right decisions and adjustments in specific moments -- like when a yellow caution light comes on. Alerts on the console can be triggered by any number of issues. On the July 11th flight, with Branson on board, it was a trajectory problem, or what's known as the "entry glide cone." The ship uses rocket power to get into space, but glides back to Earth and lands on a runway, like the space shuttle would do. This method, mimicking water circling a drain, enables a controlled descent. But the ship must begin its descent within a specified, imaginary "cone" to have enough glide energy to reach its destination. The pilots basically weren't flying steeply enough. Not only was the ship's trajectory endangering the mission, it was also imperiling the ship's chances of staying inside its mandated airspace. The rocket motor on Virgin Galactic's ship is programmed to burn for a minute. On July 11th, it had a few more seconds to go when a red light also appeared on the console: an entry glide-cone warning. This was a big deal. I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission -- Dave Mackay, a former Virgin Atlantic pilot and veteran of the U.K.'s Royal Air Force, and Mike Masucci, a retired Air Force pilot -- and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning. C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and nasa astronaut, said that a yellow light should "scare the shit out of you," because "when it turns red it's gonna be too late." Masucci was less concerned about the yellow light but said, "Red should scare the crap out of you." Based on pilot procedures, Mackay and Masucci had basically two options: implement immediate corrective action, or abort the rocket motor. According to multiple sources in the company, the safest way to respond to the warning would have been to abort. (A Virgin Galactic spokesperson disputed this contention.) Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson's hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space. Mackay and Masucci did not abort. Whether or not their decision was motivated by programmatic pressures and the hopes of their billionaire bankroller sitting in the back remains unclear. Virgin Galactic officials told me that the firm's top priority is the safety of its crew and passengers. Branson, however, is known for his flamboyance and showmanship. [...] Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely. But data retrieved from Flightradar24 shows the vehicle flying outside its designated airspace. An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic "deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance" and that an "investigation is ongoing." Virgin Galactic described the July 11th flight as "a safe and successful test flight that adhered to our flight procedures and training protocols." The statement added, "When the vehicle encountered high altitude winds which changed the trajectory, the pilots and systems monitored the trajectory to ensure it remained within mission parameters. Our pilots responded appropriately to these changing flight conditions exactly as they have been trained and in strict accordance with our established procedures."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: A 23-year-old student in Germany can shrink and enlarge his pupils on demand, according to a new case report -- a feat that was previously thought to be impossible. Two tiny opposing muscles in the eye act as puppeteers of each pupil (the dark center of the eye), dilating or enlarging them in a dark environment to let in more light and constricting them in a bright environment to limit the amount of light that flows in. This process was thought to be completely automatic; when you step into a dark room, you don't have to consciously tell your pupils to change size. Pupils can also change size in response to other factors, such as increases in arousal. It was previously known that some people can change their pupil size at will, but by using indirect methods. [N]o one thought it was possible to change pupil size by directly controlling it like a muscle -- that is, until a student of psychology at Ulm University in Germany contacted Strauch after taking one of his courses. (Strauch was previously a doctoral student at Ulm University). When he was about 15 or 16 years old, the young man -- identified in the case report by his initials, D.W. -- realized that he could change the size of his pupils. "I showed a friend that I can 'tremble' with my eyeballs, and he noticed that my pupils became small," D.W. told Strauch and his colleagues at Ulm University. But D.W. didn't notice that he had this ability until he played computer games for long periods of time. "Constricting the pupil feels like gripping, tensing something; making it larger feels like fully releasing, relaxing the eye," D.W. told the researchers. Through a series of tests, the researchers confirmed that D.W. indeed had this ability -- and they found no indication that he was changing the size of his pupils indirectly. In one test, the researchers measured the electrical properties of the skin by applying voltage to test whether he was aroused by increased mental effort, which also might have increased his pupil size indirectly. Without using any indirect method, D.W. could dilate his pupils up to 0.09 inches (2.4 millimeters) in diameter and constrict them to 0.03 inches (0.88 mm) in diameter. What's more, even at the closest point an object can be for the eye to still see it in focus, in which the pupil is already "maximally" constricted, D.W. could voluntarily constrict his pupil even more. By doing this, D.W. improved his focus and could see objects clearly nearly two times closer to his face than he could if he wasn't controlling his pupil size. Using a type of brain scan known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found increased activation of certain parts of the brain involved in volition, or the ability to decide and do something out of free will. The researchers can't say for sure that D.W. was directly controlling his pupils, but from their many tests, they did not find any evidence that he was using indirect strategies. The findings were published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivermectin is making the rounds again online after Joe Rogan casually mentioned he took the drug after testing positive for COVID-19. Some researchers claim it helps treat symptoms of the virus; others, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have yet to make that determination. "While there are approved uses for ivermectin in people and animals, it is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19," the FDA says in a FAQ. So where did this drug come from and why have people been using it to try and treat COVID-19? WFAA, an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to Dallas, Texas, helps answer those questions: In the 1970s, Japanese biochemist Satoshi Omura discovered the avermectin family of compounds, which are a series of drugs used to treat parasites and insect pests. Ivermectin is one of these drugs. Ivermectin has a mixture of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It was modified and first introduced as medicine in 1981. It soon became registered around the world to treat parasitic worms in cattle, sheep, and other animals. It can be taken as a pill or applied to the skin depending on why it's needed. By 1988, ivermectin was approved as a medical treatment in humans. This "wonder drug," as many called it, was prescribed to treat illnesses, which include head lice, scabies, river blindness (onchocerciasis), strongyloidiasis, trichuriasis, ascariasis, and lymphatic filariasis. Since its discovery, ivermectin has been used by more than 700 million people in the world specifically to treat river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, according to a National Institutes of Health study. A medical study led by Dr. Ahmed Elgazzar in Egypt was published in November 2020. It said that hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who received this antiparasitic drug improved more quickly and had a better chance of staying alive. It was retracted in July. Multiple medical agencies -- including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- have been unable to find any evidence this drug helps with COVID-19. The CDC put out a press release in August, making clear that ivermectin is not authorized or approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19. In that same CDC press release, health experts also warned about the dangers that can come from taking ivermectin incorrectly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired. BleepingComputer reports: According to court documents, the defendant worked remotely as a part-time employee for the credit union until May 19, 2021, when she was fired. Even though a credit union employee asked the bank's information technology support firm to disable Barile's remote access credentials, that access was not removed. Two days later, on May 21, Barile logged on for roughly 40 minutes. The defendant deleted over 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories during that time, totaling roughly 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the bank's share drive. The wiped included files related to customers' mortgage loan applications and the financial institution's anti-ransomware protection software. Besides deleting documents with customer and company data, Barile also opened various confidential Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union. Five days later, on May 26, she also told a friend via text messages how she was able to destroy thousands of documents on her former employer's servers, saying, "They didn't revoke my access so I deleted p drift lol. [..] I deleted their shared network documents." Although the New York credit union had backups of some of the data deleted by the defendant, it still had to spend more than $10,000 to restore the destroyed data following Barile's unauthorized intrusion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter's latest beta update introduces support for providing content creators with Bitcoin tips using the "Tip Jar" feature that Twitter introduced earlier this year. MacRumors reports: Bitcoin isn't yet available to select as a tip option for beta users, but code in the beta suggests that Twitter is in the process of rolling it out. When the Tip Jar was first introduced, Twitter allowed users to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo links to their Twitter profile, but soon, there will be a Bitcoin option. Details in the latest Twitter beta indicate that users will be directed through a Bitcoin tutorial that includes details on the Bitcoin Lightning Network and custodial and non-custodial Bitcoin wallets. Twitter gives Strike, Blue Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi as examples of custodial wallets and Muun, Breez, Phoenix and Zap as examples of non-custodial wallets. Twitter also informs users that a Strike account is required. "We use Strike to generate Bitcoin Lightning invoices so you'll need to connect your account to accept Bitcoin tips" reads the text.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Chaldean42 shares a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, September 1st, a number of channels on Twitch will go dark as streamers participate in #ADayOffTwitch, a walkout designed to bring attention to the ongoing hate and harassment that's plagued the platform for the last several weeks. [...] A Day Off Twitch was born out of the #TwitchDoBetter movement, a hashtag created by streamers affected by the hate raids that have exploded across Twitch in recent weeks. Though the action of bombing a streamer's chat with racist, sexist, transphobic, and generally abusive messages is not new, the phenomenon has seen a dramatic increase, thanks to users employing bots to overwhelm chats with hundreds of automatically generated messages. In response to what they thought was Twitch's slow response to the abuse, streamer RekitRaven created the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag to urge the Amazon-owned streaming platform to deploy better tools to stem the tide of harassment. Twitch has promised that fixes are forthcoming, but in the meantime, streamers are left to contend against the hate raids with community-developed tools and resources. [...] The responses to A Day Off Twitch have been varied, even among its supporters. Because of Twitch's endemic hold on the streaming community, it's just not feasible for some smaller streamers, arguably the population most affected by hate raids, to take a day off. For some creators, Twitch is their only means of income. Users trying to make or maintain affiliate or partner status -- designations that grant creators access to many different methods of monetization -- could jeopardize their finances or the health of their channel by taking even one day off. There are also contractual obligations like advertising deals or partnerships that prevent streamers from skipping a day. Other streamers oppose A Day Off Twitch for more philosophical reasons. To them, the people behind these hate raids are working to bully marginalized streamers off the platform, and taking a day off is giving them exactly what they want. Continuing to stream and speaking out against the abuse is therefore the best way to counter trolls who might not otherwise face repercussions for their actions. A spokesperson for Twitch told The Verge, "We support our streamers' rights to express themselves and bring attention to important issues across our service. No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for, and we are working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Slate: Enrolling more students at one of America's best public universities might be bad for the environment. That's the conclusion of California Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman, who on Aug. 23 ordered the University of California-Berkeley to temporarily freeze the number of students it admits every year under the California Environmental Quality Act, putting crowded classrooms in the same category as heavy infrastructure like highways and airports. "Further increases in student enrollment above the current enrollment level at UC-Berkeley could result in an adverse change or alteration of the physical environment," the judge wrote (PDF). How'd we get here? Under California law, universities are periodically required to prepare a long-term development plan that includes enrollment forecasts and an environmental impact study. In 2005, UCâ"Berkeley produced one projecting that its headcount would stabilize at about 33,500 students. Instead, the school ended up enrolling more than 42,000 by 2020, with plans to admit more still in the years to come. The university didn't think that welcoming more students to campus required it to perform a whole new environmental review. But a state appeals court in San Francisco disagreed in 2020, ruling (PDF) that increasing enrollment counted as a "project" that needed to be evaluated under the CEQA, just like building a stadium or dorm would be. In doing so, the judges sided with a local community group, Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods, which sued UC-Berkeley in 2019 and set the stage for last week's lower court decision officially hitting pause on the school's enrollment ambitions. California's flagship public university must now assess the ecological cost of its student body at once.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shortly after announcing Windows 11's October 5 release date, Microsoft began booting Windows Insider preview PCs with unsupported hardware out of Windows 11 testing. PCWorld reports: [T]he day that Microsoft announced Windows 11's release date, Windows Insiders on unsupported PCs began receiving a message telling them they're no longer eligible for the Windows 11 Insider program, as seen in BetaWiki's tweet above and confirmed by BleepingComputer. Unsupported Insider PCs need to go back to Windows 10 to continue participating in the program (and presumably continue to receive updates). While the move isn't a surprise, the timing is, as Microsoft previously stated that Windows Insiders with non-compatible hardware would be able to continue to run Windows 11 until it was "generally available." Most PCs released or built over the last three years will run Windows 11 without issue, however.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VanMoof says it's now "the most funded e-bike company in the world," after raising a total of $182 million in the last two years. The Verge reports: The company claims to have almost 200,000 bikes on the road currently, with the goal of getting 10 million people on VanMoof e-bikes in the next five years. Such aggressive expansion goals require significant capital. VanMoof's new funding round has been earmarked to expand production and to "reinvent the way in which hardware and software components are made," according to a blog post announcing the new investment round. More specifically, VanMoof co-founder Taco Carlier tells The Verge in a phone interview that most of the funds will go towards R&D, "having more people on the hardware and software development in order to improve the quality and reliability of the bike." For comparison, RadPower, the largest e-bike maker in the US, raised $150 million earlier this year, adding to the $25 million it garnered the year prior. Investors are pouring money into electric bike makers in the hope of capitalizing on the global e-bike market which is expected to be worth almost $50 billion by 2028. In March 2021, e-bikes already represented 17 percent of all bicycle sales in Europe, and accounted for more than 50 percent of all new bike sales in countries like Germany and the Netherlands.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CD Projekt is working on a first expansion of Cyberpunk 2077, Chief Executive Adam Kicinski said after the Polish video games maker reported a first-half beat on its net profit. From a report: Cyberpunk 2077, featuring Hollywood star Keanu Reeves, was one of last year's most anticipated games, but after a bug-ridden start it was kept off Sony's (6758.T) PlayStation Store for six months, only returning in June. CD Projekt did not give an update on how many units of Cyberpunk it had sold in the first half of 2021, but company officials told a conference call that the game was the leading source of revenue in the period. Along with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk drove CD Projekt's revenue 29% higher in the first half of the year to 470.6 million zlotys ($124 million). CD Projekt said its net profit was 105 million zlotys, which was 28% lower compared to last year but above the 71 million expected by analysts. The planned Cyberpunk expansion would involve a charge to gamers, similar to the ones released for The Witcher, board member Michal Nowakowski said during Wednesday's call. "When we talk about expansions then we talk about bigger things," he said, while declining to give a specific timing for its release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter redmid17 writes: A week after allowing anti-vaccine subreddits to remain and a day after hundreds of large subreddits went silence in protest of the decision, Reddit banned the largest anti-vaccine subreddit , r/NoNewNormal, for brigading, which is sending forum members to other subs to push agendas. "Antivaxxers in Reddit's NoNewNormal community, named after the idea that there's a mysterious global cabal trying enact a 'new normal' of compliance and using COVID as a cover story, had been brigading communities like r/Aww, dedicated to pictures of cute dogs and kids," writes NBC News reporter Ben Collins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday. "Amazon's track record amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind," SpaceX told the FCC in its filing. Approving Amazon's request would hurt consumers by denying them "access to faster-moving competition," SpaceX said. Amazon last week urged the FCC to reject an update to SpaceX's Starlink plan because it "proposes two different configurations for the nearly 30,000 satellites of its Gen2 System, each of which arranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters." Amazon contends that the SpaceX request violates a rule requiring applications to be complete and have no internal inconsistencies. Amazon's request would prevent the commission from seeking public comment on SpaceX's application, SpaceX said. "The commission should recognize this gambit for the obstructionist tactic that it is, reject Amazon's request, and quickly put the amendment out for public comment," SpaceX said. The public-comment process will allow "any issues [to] be fully vetted," SpaceX said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations -- as well as insights into the nature of time itself. Natalie Wolchover, writing for Quanta Magazine: [...] Over the past five years, through studies of the simplest conceivable clocks, the researchers have discovered the fundamental limits of timekeeping. They've mapped out new relationships between accuracy, information, complexity, energy and entropy -- the quantity whose incessant rise in the universe is closely associated with the arrow of time. These relationships were purely theoretical until this spring, when the experimental physicist Natalia Ares and her team at the University of Oxford reported measurements of a nanoscale clock that strongly support the new thermodynamic theory. Nicole Yunger Halpern, a quantum thermodynamicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the recent clock work, called it "foundational." She thinks the findings could lead to the design of optimally efficient, autonomous quantum clocks for controlling operations in future quantum computers and nanorobots. The new perspective on clocks has already provided fresh fodder for discussions of time itself. "This line of work does grapple, in a fundamental way, with the role of time in quantum theory," Yunger Halpern said. Gerard Milburn, a quantum theorist at the University of Queensland in Australia who wrote a review paper last year about the research on clock thermodynamics, said, "I don't think people appreciate just how fundamental it is."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet-grooming company Cloudflare has revealed that it was unable to put Intel inside its new home-brew servers, because they just used too much energy. A Tuesday post by platform operations engineer Chris Howells reveals that Cloudflare has been working on designs for an eleventh-generation server since mid-2020. jaa101 writes: "We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server -- that's enormous." Fatally enormous -- Cloudflare's evaluation saw it adopt AMD's 64-core Epyc 7713 for the servers it deploys to over 200 edge locations around the world. Power savings also influenced a decision to go from three disks to two in the new design. A pair of 1.92TB Samsung drives replaced the three of the Korean giant's 960GB units found in previous designs. The net gain was a terabyte of capacity, and six fewer watts of power consumption. Howellls's post also reveals that testing produced data showing that equipping its servers with 512GB of RAM did not produce enough of a performance boost to justify the expense. The company has therefore settled on 384GB of memory, but did jump from DDR4-2933 to DDR4-3200 as the slight cost increase delivered a justifiable performance boost.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American workers in manufacturing plants and distribution centres have long worried that their employers would find ways to replace them with robots and artificial intelligence, but the Covid-19 crisis has brought that threat to service workers, too. Businesses are increasingly turning to automated tools for customer service tasks long done by low-wage staff. But rather than robots, it is the ubiquitous QR matrix bar codes that are replacing humans [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. Financial Times: Many restaurants have begun to experiment with QR codes and order management systems such as Toast that allow diners to order food to their table from their phones instead of with human servers. Grocery stores have increased their investments in self-checkout kiosks that replace human cashiers, and more convenience stores including Circle K are experimenting with the computer vision technology pioneered by Amazon Go to allow customers to make purchases without standing in a checkout line at all. The shifts mean that some of the 1.7m leisure and hospitality jobs and 270,000 retail jobs the US economy has lost since its February 2020 high are unlikely to return.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter debuted a new product called Safety Mode that will automatically block users who are being aggressive or hateful toward another person in an effort to help reduce harassment. From a report: The social networking company said it will use automated technology to look at the content of a tweet and "the relationship between the Tweet author and replier" to determine if a block is warranted. Twitter previously introduced the feature during an Analyst Day presentation in February. If the company detects that one user is "using potentially harmful language -- such as insults or hateful remarks -- or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions," it will automatically block the offending user on behalf of the targeted person, Twitter said Wednesday in a blog post. Automatic blocks last for seven days. The goal is to stop "overwhelming and unwelcome interactions that can interrupt" a user's experience, the company said in the post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new version of the classic Atari game "Centipede" will be released for consoles and PC in late September under the name "Centipede: Recharged" and sporting a more futuristic look. From a report: The game's lead developer, Adam Nickerson, first partnered with Atari for last year's "Missile Command: Recharged," which revamped another classic in a similar style. Nickerson tells Axios he first connected with Atari after discovering an email in his spam folder from an Atari official who liked his work. Atari showed him a list of franchises they had the rights to. He went with "Missile Command" first because he used to be obsessed with it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon.com has a solution for a potentially crippling shortage of delivery drivers: Recruit pot smokers. From a report: The company is advising its delivery partners -- the mom and pops that operate the ubiquitous blue Amazon vans -- to prominently advertise that they don't screen applicants for marijuana use, according to correspondence reviewed by Bloomberg and interviews with four business owners. Doing so can boost the number of job applicants by as much as 400%, Amazon says in one message, without explaining how it came up with the statistic. Conversely, the company says, screening for marijuana cuts the prospective worker pool by up to 30%. One delivery partner, who stopped screening applicants at Amazon's behest, says marijuana was the prevailing reason most people failed drug tests. Now that she's only testing for drugs like opiates and amphetamines, more drivers pass. Other delivery companies are continuing to screen applicants, concerned about the insurance and liability implications in the many states where weed use remains illegal. They also worry that ending drug testing might prompt some drivers to toke up before going out on a route. "If one of my drivers crashes and kills someone and tests positive for marijuana, that's my problem, not Amazon's," said one, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue because Amazon discourages delivery company owners from speaking to the media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A government bill to create new police powers to spy on criminal suspects online, disrupt their data and take over their accounts has been passed with the support of Labor. From a repoort: The identify and disrupt bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, despite concerns about the low bar of who can authorise a warrant, and that the government failed to implement all the safeguards recommended by the bipartisan joint committee on intelligence and security. The bill creates three new types of warrants to enable the AFP and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to modify and delete data, take over accounts and spy on Australians in networks suspected of committing crimes. Earlier in August, the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security -- (PJCIS) chaired by the Liberal senator James Paterson -- made a series of recommendations to improve oversight and safeguards. On Tuesday, the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, introduced amendments to implement some of the proposed safeguards, including a sunset clause so the new powers would expire after five years and stronger criteria to issue warrants. Andrews said the amendments would mean data disruption warrants would need to be "reasonably necessary and proportionate" and data disruption and account takeover warrants would need to specify the types of activities proposed to be carried out. The media would also gain some extra protection, with the addition of a "public interest test for data disruption warrants, network activity warrants and account takeover warrants where an investigation of an unauthorised disclosure offence is in relation to a person working in a professional capacity as a journalist," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's plan to digitize your wallet is slowly taking shape. What started with boarding passes and venue tickets later became credit cards, subway tickets, and student IDs. Next on Apple's list to digitize are driver's licenses and state IDs, which it plans to support in its iOS 15 update expected out later this year. From a report: But to get there it needs help from state governments, since it's the states that issue driver's licenses and other forms of state identification, and every state issues IDs differently. Apple said today it has so far secured two states, Arizona and Georgia, to bring digital driver's license and state IDs. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, but a timeline for rolling out wasn't given. Apple said in June that it would begin supporting digital licenses and IDs, and that the TSA would be the first agency to begin accepting a digital license from an iPhone at several airports, since only a state ID is required for traveling by air domestically within the United States. The TSA will allow you to present your digital wallet by tapping it on an identity reader. Apple says the feature is secure and doesn't require handing over or unlocking your phone. The digital license and ID data is stored on your iPhone but a driver's license must be verified by the participating state. That has to happen at scale and speed to support millions of drivers and travelers while preventing fake IDs from making it through. The goal of digitizing licenses and IDs is convenience, rather than fixing a problem. But the move hasn't exactly drawn confidence from privacy experts, who bemoan Apple's lack of transparency about how it built this technology and what it ultimately gets out of it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The legendary "Doge" meme from 2010, which portrays a shiba inu dog named Kabosu and inspired the creation of cryptocurrency dogecoin, sold for $4 million as an NFT, or non-fungible token, in June. From a report: To some, that may seem like a lot of money to pay to own a jpeg, but the "Doge" meme has generated a massive online community, and dogecoin is now a top cryptocurrency by market value, with fans including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. Though most investors couldn't afford a multimillion-dollar price tag for the "Doge" meme NFT, anyone will now have an opportunity to own a piece of it for as little as less than $1. That's because PleasrDAO, the collective that bought the "Doge" meme NFT, is selling fractional ownership of it, starting on Wednesday. Here's how it works. Through a platform called Fractional.art, PleasrDAO has "fractionalized" the NFT -- as a result, the NFT is represented by billions of ERC-20 tokens, which are standard for creating and issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. In this case, PleasrDAO has called the tokens DOG. Investors can then buy as many or as few DOG tokens as they can afford on Fractional.art and on decentralized exchange Miso. How many tokens an investor buys will determine their ownership stake in the "Doge" meme NFT, though PleasrDAO will retain majority ownership.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is previewing Visual Studio Code for the Web, a code editor that runs entirely in the browser. The Register: The post introducing the new service was put up yesterday but is returning "page not found" at the time of writing, so possibly was published prematurely. But it is expected to return soon, since the technology looks the same as that already introduced by Microsoft-owned GitHub as the web-based editor. The difference is that GitHub's version only works in a GitHub repository, where it is opened by pressing the dot key. By contrast, Microsoft stated: "Everyone can use VS Code for the Web for free at https://vscode.dev to quickly open and browse source code hosted on GitHub and on your local machine (and soon on Azure Repos), and make and commit lightweight changes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon.com is planning to hire 55,000 people for corporate and technology roles globally in the coming months, Chief Executive Andy Jassy told Reuters. From the report: That's equal to more than a third of Google's headcount as of June 30, and close to all of Facebook's. Jassy, in his first press interview since he ascended to Amazon's top post in July, said the company needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, the cloud and advertising, among other businesses. He said the company's new bet to launch satellites into orbit to widen broadband access, called Project Kuiper, would require a lot of new hires, too. With Amazon's annual job fair scheduled to begin Sept. 15, Jassy hopes now is a good time for recruiting. "There are so many jobs during the pandemic that have been displaced or have been altered, and there are so many people who are thinking about different and new jobs," said Jassy, who cited a U.S. survey from PwC that 65% of workers wanted a new gig.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks software, is in talks to buy email marketing firm Mailchimp for more than $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. No final decision has been made and discussions could fall through, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn't public. Another buyer could also emerge for the company and others are interested, they added. The deal would unite two providers of services for small businesses. Intuit has offered QuickBooks accounting software to clients for decades, supplementing it with services such as Credit Karma, which it acquired last year. Mailchimp is focused on digital marketing services, including social advertising, so-called shoppable links and automation products. [...] If talks are successful, it would be the largest deal to date for Intuit, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

koavf shares a blog post from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Nesting Module. This module introduces the ability to nest one style rule inside another, with the selector of the child rule relative to the selector of the parent rule. This increases the modularity and maintainability of CSS stylesheets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.