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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Sam Shead: German technology and engineering group Bosch, which is the world's largest car-parts supplier, believes semiconductor supply chains in the automotive industry are no longer fit for purpose as the global chip shortage rages on. Harald Kroeger, a member of the Bosch management board, told CNBC's Annette Weisbach in an exclusive interview Monday that supply chains have buckled in the last year as demand for chips in everything from cars to PlayStation 5s and electric toothbrushes has surged worldwide. Coinciding with the surge in demand, several key semiconductor manufacturing sites were forced to halt production, Kroeger said. In February, a winter storm in Texas caused blackouts at NXP Semiconductors, which is a major provider of automotive and mobile phone chips. In March, there was a fire at a semiconductor plant in Japan operated by Renesas, one of the car industry's biggest chip suppliers. In August, factories in Malaysia have been abandoned as national lockdowns were introduced to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Volkswagen and BMW cut their production as they struggled to get the chips they needed to build their cars. These companies and semiconductor suppliers should now be looking to figure out how the chip supply chain can be improved, Kroeger said. "As a team, we need to sit together and ask, for the future operating system is there a better way to have longer lead times," he said. "I think what we need is more stock on some parts [of the supply chain] because some of those semiconductors need six months to be produced. You cannot run on a system [where] every two weeks you get an order. That doesn't work." Semiconductor supply chain issues have been quietly managed by the automotive in the past but now is a time for change, according to Kroeger, who believes demand is only going to increase with the rise of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. "Every car that gets smarter needs more semiconductors," Kroeger said. Electric cars need very powerful and efficient semiconductors in order to to get more range out of each kilowatt hour of battery, he added. Kroeger said he expects the chip shortage to extend "way into 2022" adding that he hopes demand remains stable. "We need to ramp up supplies so we can fulfill that demand," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pandemic has brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms. From a report: For the past two decades at Crystal Organic Farm in Newborn, Georgia, a typical Saturday morning involved Nicolas Donck and, later, his partner in farming and in life, Jeni Jarrard, getting up at 4AM, loading up the truck with tables and tent and coolers and bins of eggs, peppers, okra, melons, herbs, flowers, or whatever was good that week, driving the hour to Atlanta, and spending a day in whatever weather -- including sweltering heat, pouring rain, or bitter cold -- before hauling the hour back, happy from feeding their community the food they spent all week growing, but also exhausted, and just a few hundred bucks richer for it. Then the pandemic came, and it hit farms hard. Supply chains, customer bases, and in some cases labor were upended. Small and medium-sized independent farms that relied on restaurant wholesale lost huge percentages of their business overnight. Some local CSAs folded. Some farming operations went belly up. Others, however, found a new path online. Farmer-specific e-commerce apps and services -- among them, GrazeCart, Farmdrop, Farmigo, and GrownBy -- have cropped up in recent years, offering the direct-to-consumer sales, customizable CSAs, preorders and delivery that farmers markets haven't. When the pandemic began, this tech offered a new world of possibility. Donck and Jarrard were among the farmers who took the leap. When food distribution chains collapsed and people turned to local food, the pair made the snap decision to eliminate their old-school CSA program, lean into their relationships with two tech-based distribution platforms with which they'd already worked, and transition the rest of their business to sales and distribution platform Barn2Door. Now, late-pandemic farming looks like skipping the market, staying in bed for hours longer on Saturday, and enjoying a cup of coffee together -- all while quadrupling business by selling online. Does this ever-expanding landscape of food distribution tech make the job easy? Not in all ways, says Donck. "There's always room for improvement. For example, everybody wants cucumbers, but we don't have any right now," he says, lamenting the loss of a week's crop to a swarm of squash bugs. "[Our customers] will have to go somewhere else for those." But he and Jarrard agree, they don't intend to go back to the way things were before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Opponents of the Belarus government said they have pulled off an audacious hack that has compromised dozens of police and interior ministry databases as part of a broad effort to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko's regime. From a report: The Belarusian Cyber Partisans, as the hackers call themselves, have in recent weeks released portions of a huge data trove they say includes some of the country's most secret police and government databases. The information contains lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system, according to interviews with the hackers and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Among the pilfered documents are personal details about Lukashenko's inner circle and intelligence officers. In addition, there are mortality statistics indicating that thousands more people in Belarus died from Covid-19 than the government has publicly acknowledged, the documents suggest. In an interview and on social media, the hackers said they also sabotaged more than 240 surveillance cameras in Belarus and are preparing to shut down government computers with malicious software named X-App.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After facing criticism over the app's recent move to prohibit sexually explicit content starting in October, OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely pointed the finger at banks for the policy change. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times published on Tuesday, Stokely singled out a handful of banks for "unfair" treatment, saying they made it "difficult to pay our creators. The change in policy, we had no choice -- the short answer is banks," Stokely told the outlet about the move to ban pornography from OnlyFans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clip art of a rock just sold for 400 ether, or about $1.3 million, late Monday afternoon. The transaction marks the latest sale of EtherRock, a brand of crypto collectible that's been around since 2017 -- making it one of the oldest non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the block. From a report: EtherRock is, as the name implies, a JPEG of a cartoon rock, built and sold on the ethereum blockchain. There are only 100 out there, and that scarcity is part of what's driving up its value. So, what are these rock pics good for? According to the EtherRock website, "these virtual rocks serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be brought and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :)" Following this latest sale, the new price floor for an EtherRock NFT has been raised to $1.02 million. Two days ago, the cheapest rock went for $305,294. Two weeks ago, it was $97,716.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nasa is delaying a spacewalk at the International Space Station because of a medical issue involving one of its astronauts. From a report: Officials announced the postponement on Monday, less than 24 hours before Mark Vande Hei was supposed to float outside. Vande Hei was dealing with "a minor medical issue," officials said. It was not an emergency, they noted, but did not provide any further details. Vande Hei, 54, a retired army colonel, has been at the space station since April and is expected to remain there until next spring for a one-year mission. This is his second station stay.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is bringing its cloud gaming service to Xbox consoles later this year. From a report: The company announced Tuesday that Xbox Cloud Gaming, which lets players stream games rather than having to install them onto a device, would arrive on its new Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles as well as older Xbox One machines this holiday. American tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are betting on a future of video games beyond consoles, where subscription services and software will play a much greater role. Though Microsoft is still investing heavily in Xbox hardware, it's also putting a great deal of focus into Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that gives players access to a library of over 100 titles for about $15 a month. Cloud gaming, where games are hosted on remote servers and streamed to users over the internet, is a big part of Microsoft's strategy. The aim is to attract gamers to the Microsoft ecosystem through a range of different devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung South Africa has announced that it has activated a TV Block Function on all Samsung TV sets stolen during the looting, violence and unrest in parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng during July that saw TV sets stolen from Samsung warehouses. From a report: Samsung has activated TV Block on all Samsung television sets looted from its Cato Ridge distribution centre in KwaZulu-Natal since 11 July. Samsung's television block technology is already pre-loaded on all Samsung TV products and the company says that all sets taken unlawfully and stolen from Samsung warehouses are being blocked, rendering them useless. TV Block is a remote, security solution that detects if Samsung TV units have been unduly activated, and ensures that the television sets can only be used by the rightful owners with a valid proof of purchase. Samsung SA says that the aim of the technology is to mitigate against the creation of secondary markets linked to the sale of illegal goods, both in South Africa and beyond its borders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations has published its first-ever public advisory detailing the modus operandi of a "ransomware affiliate." From a report: A relatively new term, a ransomware affiliate refers to a person or group who rents access to Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms, orchestrates intrusions into corporate networks, encrypt files with the "rented ransomware," and then earn a commission from successful extortions. Going by the name of OnePercent Group, the FBI said today this threat actor has been active since at least November 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Group has unveiled a 240 trillion won ($205 billion) expansion that will entail hiring 40,000 people over three years, a sprawling investment blueprint intended to build the South Korean conglomerate's lead in next-generation technologies. From a report: Samsung Electronics and affiliates like Samsung Biologics aim to lead research and spending in areas from telecommunications and robotics to corporate acquisitions. The country's largest conglomerate is setting aside 180 trillion won for its home country alone and now aims to hire another 10,000 people over the period, on top of 30,000 new jobs already planned, the group said in a statement. The envisioned spending includes expenditures outlined previously, such as Samsung Electronics' long-term goal of investing $151 billion through 2030 to delve deeper into advanced chipmaking. But the announcement comes days after Samsung scion Jay Y. Lee walked out of jail. The conglomerate's de facto leader, who was serving a sentence on graft charges, won release on parole just months ahead of South Korea's presidential election.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling -- not a tune, but the Spanish language. "Good whistlers can understand all the messages," says David Diaz Reyes, an independent ethnomusicologist and whistled-language researcher and teacher who lives in the islands. "We can say, 'And now I am making an interview with a Canadian guy.'" The locals are communicating in Silbo, one of the last vestiges of a much more widespread use of whistled languages. In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. To linguists, such adaptations are more than just a curiosity: By studying whistled languages, they hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech. Whistling may even provide a glimpse of one of the most dramatic leaps forward in human evolution: the origin of language itself. Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That's because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels -- louder than a car horn -- and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise. As a result, whistled speech can be understood up to 10 times as far away as ordinary shouting can, Meyer and others have found. That lets people communicate even when they cannot easily approach close enough to shout. On La Gomera, for example, a few traditional shepherds still whistle to one another across mountain valleys that could take hours to cross.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For months, Apple and Google have been fighting a bill in the South Korean legislature that they say could imperil their lucrative app store businesses. The companies have appealed directly to South Korean lawmakers, government officials and the public to try to block the legislation, which is expected to face a crucial vote this week. From a report: The companies have also turned to an unlikely ally, one that is also trying to quash their power: the United States government. A group funded by the companies has urged trade officials in Washington to push back on the legislation, arguing that targeting American firms could violate a joint trade agreement. The South Korean legislation would be the first law in the world to require companies that operate app stores to let users in Korea pay for in-app purchases using a variety of payment systems. It would also prohibit blocking developers from listing their products on other app stores. How the White House responds to this proposal poses an early test for the Biden administration: Will it defend tech companies facing antitrust scrutiny abroad while it applies that same scrutiny to the companies at home? Washington has a longstanding practice of opposing foreign laws that discriminate against American firms, sometimes even when doing so conflicts with domestic policy debates. But President Biden wants a consistent approach to his concerns about the tech giants' incredible power over commerce, communications and news. In July he signed an executive order to spur competition in the industry, and his top two antitrust appointees have long been vocal critics of the companies. The approach the White House chooses may have widespread implications for the industry, and for the shape of the internet around the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While critics allege YouTube puts profits over public safety, product head Neal Mohan insists that the Google-owned video site is working to be a better content moderator in part because it is good for business. From a report: Users spend billions of hours watching videos on YouTube, and the site's content recommendations shape how that time is spent. Facebook and Twitter tend to get more attention on content moderation, but YouTube remains an equally important information battleground. YouTube is announcing Monday that it now has two million people in its programs that enable creators to get paid. Mohan said a huge part of his focus is trying to find ways to make sure those who play by the rules are rewarded. "99.9% of creators are looking to do the right thing," Mohan told Axios, noting that YouTube has paid out $30 billion over the last three years. In addition to the 14-year-old program that shares ad money for popular videos, YouTube has also added ways for creators to sell merchandise or be directly compensated by users. YouTube still faces challenges in making sure it is the creators "doing the right thing" who are benefiting the most, rather than spreaders of viral misinformation. It's not just those getting paid by Google who can benefit from gaming the system. Creators with a large enough following can make money indirectly even if they've been "demonetized" -- removed from YouTube's own payment programs. In the "vast, vast majority of cases that's a good thing," Mohan said, though he acknowledges that it does create opportunities for some creators to profit from borderline content that doesn't meet YouTube's bar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist, written by Matthew Sparkes: Ant colonies can descend several meters underground, house millions of insects and last for decades, despite being made without the benefit of machinery and reinforcing material. The secrets of these impressive architectural structures are being revealed by three-dimensional X-ray imaging and computer simulations, and could be used to develop robotic mining machines. Jose Andrade at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues set up miniature ant colonies in a container holding 500 milliliters of soil and 15 western harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis). The position of every ant and every grain of soil was then captured by high-resolution X-ray scans every 10 minutes for 20 hours. The X-ray results gave researchers exact details about the shape of each tunnel and which grains were being removed to create it. The team then created a computer model using those scans to understand the forces acting upon the tunnels. The size, shape and orientation of every grain was recreated in the model and the direction and size of force on each grain could be calculated, including gravity, friction and cohesion caused by humidity. The model was accurate to the 0.07 millimeter resolution of the scanner. The results suggest that forces within the soil tend to wrap around the tunnel axis as ants excavate, forming what the team call "arches" in the soil that have a greater diameter than the tunnel itself. This reduces the load acting on the soil particles within the arches, where the ants are constructing their tunnel. As a result, the ants can easily remove these particles to extend the tunnel without causing cave-ins. The arches also make the tunnel stronger and more durable. "We had naively thought that ants perhaps were playing Jenga, that they were tapping, maybe they were wiggling grains, maybe they were even grabbing the grains of least resistance," says Andrade. He says it is now clear that the ants appear to know nothing about forces and show no signs of decision-making, but instead follow a very simple behavioral algorithm that has evolved over time. The ants tend to dig relatively straight tunnels that descend at the angle of repose -- the slope at which a granular material naturally forms mounds -- which was around 40 degrees in this case. They also pick exactly the right grains to remove to create a protective arch above. "In a remarkable way -- in a rather, you know, serendipitous way -- they've stumbled upon a technique for digging that is in line with the laws of physics, but incredibly efficient," says Andrade. The team believes that if the behavioral algorithm can be further analyzed and ultimately replicated, then it may find application in automated mining robots, either here on Earth or on other planetary bodies where the already risky business of mining would be even more dangerous for humans. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has announced that its long-delayed, live-action adaptation of the influential and popular classic anime series Cowboy Bebop will premiere on Friday, November 19. Ars Technica reports: The streaming service also released the first images from the show, giving fans some sense of what to expect from a live-action series based on an animated one famous for its visual flair. The images show actor John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) as the series' lead character, Spike Spiegel. The series will also star Alex Hassell (Suburbicon), Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage), among others. Andre Nemec will be the series showrunner. He previously worked as a writer and producer on sci-fi TV series Alias and Zoo, plus the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The director of the original anime series, Shinichiro Watanabe, is a consultant for the new show. Also returning from the anime is score composer Yoko Kanno. Cowboy Bebop originally premiered in 1998. It is a space western about a group of bounty hunters on a spaceship called the Bebop. It drew critical acclaim and became a cult hit thanks in part to its striking visual style and its strong thematic elements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michelle Starr writes via ScienceAlert: Gravity is the weird, mysterious glue that binds the Universe together, but that's not the limit of its charms. We can also leverage the way it warps space-time to see distant objects that would be otherwise much more difficult to make out. This is called gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein, and it's beautifully illustrated in a new release from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the center in the image is a shiny, near-perfect ring with what appear to be four bright spots threaded along it, looping around two more points with a golden glow. This is called an Einstein ring, and those bright dots are not six galaxies, but three: the two in the middle of the ring, and one quasar behind it, its light distorted and magnified as it passes through the gravitational field of the two foreground galaxies. Because the mass of the two foreground galaxies is so high, this causes a gravitational curvature of space-time around the pair. Any light that then travels through this space-time follows this curvature and enters our telescopes smeared and distorted -- but also magnified. [...] This, as it turns out, is a really useful tool for probing both the far and near reaches of the Universe. Anything with enough mass can act as a gravitational lens. That can mean one or two galaxies, as we see here, or even huge galaxy clusters, which produce a wonderful mess of smears of light from the many objects behind them. Astronomers peering into deep space can reconstruct these smears and replicated images to see in much finer detail the distant galaxies thus lensed. But that's not all gravitational lensing can do. The strength of a lens depends on the curvature of the gravitational field, which is directly related to the mass it's curving around. So gravitational lenses can allow us to weigh galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn can then help us find and map dark matter -- the mysterious, invisible source of mass that generates additional gravity that can't be explained by the stuff in the Universe we can actually detect. [...] You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the [...] image on ESA's website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers have developed a mathematical model that can predict the optimum exercise regime for building muscle. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used methods of theoretical biophysics to construct the model, which can tell how much a specific amount of exertion will cause a muscle to grow and how long it will take. The model could form the basis of a software product, where users could optimize their exercise regimes by entering a few details of their individual physiology. The results, reported in the Biophysical Journal, suggest that there is an optimal weight at which to do resistance training for each person and each muscle growth target. Muscles can only be near their maximal load for a very short time, and it is the load integrated over time which activates the cell signaling pathway that leads to synthesis of new muscle proteins. But below a certain value, the load is insufficient to cause much signaling, and exercise time would have to increase exponentially to compensate. The value of this critical load is likely to depend on the particular physiology of the individual. In 2018, the Cambridge researchers started a project on how the proteins in muscle filaments change under force. They found that main muscle constituents, actin and myosin, lack binding sites for signaling molecules, so it had to be the third-most abundant muscle component -- titin -- that was responsible for signaling the changes in applied force. Whenever part of a molecule is under tension for a sufficiently long time, it toggles into a different state, exposing a previously hidden region. If this region can then bind to a small molecule involved in cell signaling, it activates that molecule, generating a chemical signal chain. Titin is a giant protein, a large part of which is extended when a muscle is stretched, but a small part of the molecule is also under tension during muscle contraction. This part of titin contains the so-called titin kinase domain, which is the one that generates the chemical signal that affects muscle growth. The molecule will be more likely to open if it is under more force, or when kept under the same force for longer. Both conditions will increase the number of activated signaling molecules. These molecules then induce the synthesis of more messenger RNA, leading to production of new muscle proteins, and the cross-section of the muscle cell increases. This realization led to the current work. [The researchers] set out to constrict a mathematical model that could give quantitative predictions on muscle growth. They started with a simple model that kept track of titin molecules opening under force and starting the signaling cascade. They used microscopy data to determine the force-dependent probability that a titin kinase unit would open or close under force and activate a signaling molecule. They then made the model more complex by including additional information, such as metabolic energy exchange, as well as repetition length and recovery. The model was validated using past long-term studies on muscle hypertrophy. "Our model offers a physiological basis for the idea that muscle growth mainly occurs at 70% of the maximum load, which is the idea behind resistance training," said [one of the paper's authors]. "Below that, the opening rate of titin kinase drops precipitously and precludes mechanosensitive signaling from taking place. Above that, rapid exhaustion prevents a good outcome, which our model has quantitatively predicted." [...] The model also addresses the problem of muscle atrophy, which occurs during long periods of bed rest or for astronauts in microgravity, showing both how long can a muscle afford to remain inactive before starting to deteriorate, and what the optimal recovery regime could be.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney has filed a motion to have Scarlett Johansson's lawsuit against the company moved to private arbitration, the latest in the ongoing saga of her complaint against the company over Black Widow's streaming release. The Verge reports: Disney's lawyers filed the motion Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court on the grounds that Periwinkle Entertainment, which negotiated her deal, agreed that any claims related to her role in the Marvel film would be handled in confidential arbitration. But the motion also took several swipes at Johansson's complaint that argued Marvel, compelled by its parent company Disney, breached an agreement when Black Widow debuted on Disney Plus through Premier Access the same day that it premiered in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter earlier reported the motion. Johansson's complaint argued that the film's hybrid release cut into her potential earnings, as a simultaneous streaming release hampered the film's box office permanence and therefore impacted her bonuses. At issue is whether the film should have debuted as a theatrical exclusive. But according to Disney's motion, Periwinkle's contract with Marvel "does not mandate theatrical distribution -- let alone require that any such distribution be exclusive." Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised. Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised. Disney also provided updated figures on Black Window's performance, showing that it's continued to bring in big figures at both the box office and through early access rentals. As of August 15th, Black Widow has raked in more than $367 million in box office receipts worldwide and more than $125 million in streaming and download receipts, the motion stated, offering seldom-shared figures about the success of a hybrid release in both theaters as well as on a streaming service itself. Accounting for the $55 million the film pulled in on Premier Access and the $80 million in domestic box office receipts during its opening weekend, Black Widow's numbers surpassed the opening weekend figures of other Marvel films released pre-pandemic, the company argued, including Ant-Man and the Wasp and Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney's lawyers revealed in the motion that it served Periwinkle a demand for private arbitration on August 10th, a little over a week after Johansson's initial complaint was filed. The motion stated Periwinkle had yet to respond. Disney also reiterated its previous position that the complaint had "no merit." In a statement cited by The Hollywood Reporter, Johansson's attorney John Berlinski said that Disney "knows that Marvel's promises to give Black Widow a typical theatrical release "like its other films' had everything to do with guaranteeing that Disney wouldn't cannibalize box office receipts in order to boost Disney+ subscriptions. Yet that is exactly what happened -- and we look forward to presenting the overwhelming evidence that proves it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin's reserves to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds. CNBC reports: Digital currency company Circle had claimed its stablecoin, USD Coin, was backed 1:1 by actual dollars in a bank account. In July, it was revealed this was no longer the case, with Circle disclosing in an "attestation" from auditors Grant Thornton that cash made up just over 60% of USD Coin's reserves. The other 40% was backed by various forms of debt securities and bonds. Now, Circle says it's changing the makeup of USD Coin's reserves once again, with just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds underpinning the stablecoin. Centre, a consortium founded by Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase which developed the stablecoin, unveiled the change on Sunday. "Mindful of community sentiment, our commitment to trust and transparency, and an evolving regulatory landscape, Circle, with the support of Centre and Coinbase, has announced that it will now hold the USDC reserve entirely in cash and short duration US Treasuries," Centre said in a blog post. "These changes are being implemented expeditiously and will be reflected in future attestations by Grant Thornton."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to 9to5Mac, Apple has confirmed that it's already been scanning iCloud Mail for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), and has been doing so since 2019. It has not, however, been scanning iCloud Photos or iCloud backups, which sent the internet into a frenzy when it announced its intents to begin doing so. From the report: The clarification followed me querying a rather odd statement by the company's anti-fraud chief [Eric Friedman]: that Apple was "the greatest platform for distributing child porn." That immediately raised the question: If the company wasn't scanning iCloud photos, how could it know this? [...] Apple confirmed to me that it has been scanning outgoing and incoming iCloud Mail for CSAM attachments since 2019. Email is not encrypted, so scanning attachments as mail passes through Apple servers would be a trivial task. Apple also indicated that it was doing some limited scanning of other data, but would not tell me what that was, except to suggest that it was on a tiny scale. It did tell me that the "other data" does not include iCloud backups. Although Friedman's statement sounds definitive -- like it's based on hard data -- it's now looking likely that it wasn't. It's our understanding that the total number of reports Apple makes to CSAM each year is measured in the hundreds, meaning that email scanning would not provide any kind of evidence of a large-scale problem on Apple servers. The explanation probably lays in the fact that other cloud services were scanning photos for CSAM, and Apple wasn't. If other services were disabling accounts for uploading CSAM, and iCloud Photos wasn't (because the company wasn't scanning there), then the logical inference would be that more CSAM exists on Apple's platform than anywhere else. Friedman was probably doing nothing more than reaching that conclusion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News, written by Harriet Blair Rowan: In a significant twist that could reshape our understanding of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, death records now indicate the first COVID-related deaths in California and across the country occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than originally thought and before officials knew the virus was circulating here. A half dozen death certificates from that month in six different states -- California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin -- have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus's deadly path quickly reached far beyond coastal regions that were the country's early known hotspots. Up until now, the Feb. 6, 2020, death of San Jose's Patricia Dowd had been considered the country's first coronavirus fatality, although where and how she was infected remains unknown. Even less is known about what are now believed to be the country's earliest victims of the pandemic. The Bay Area News Group discovered evidence of them in provisional coronavirus death counts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) -- widely considered the definitive source for death data in the United States -- and confirmed the information through interviews with state and federal public health officials. But amid privacy concerns and fierce debate over pandemic policies, the names, precise locations and circumstances behind these deaths have not been publicly revealed. That is frustrating to some experts. The existence of January 2020 deaths would dramatically revise the timeline of COVID's arrival in the United States. China first announced a mysterious viral pneumonia in late December 2019, and reported the first death from the illness on Jan. 9, 2020. The U.S. originally recorded its first case in mid-January when a traveler tested positive after returning from Wuhan, China. The first deaths reported in the United States, in late February, were also tied to travel. In its current death count, which reflects the six newly-discovered fatalities, the NCHS now lists the country's first COVID death during the week of Jan. 5-11 -- the first full week of 2020. The agency is in the final stages of preparing its 2020 annual mortality report, a review and analysis of all deaths in the United States last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Payments technology company Visa announced Monday that it has bought a CryptoPunk as it enters into the world of non-fungible token (NFT) commerce. The Block reports: Visa bought CryptoPunk 7610, one of 3,840 female punks, for around $150,000 last week. CryptoPunks are considered the original NFTs, launched in 2017 by Larva Labs. These are a collection of 10,000 pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. Each CryptoPunk has its own personality and unique combination of features. "We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can chart and celebrate the past, present, and future of commerce," Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, told The Block in an interview. When asked why Visa added a CryptoPunk to the collection, Sheffield said CryptoPunks "pioneered the NFT technology and wave of NFT commerce," so Visa wanted to own a punk. He said the decision was less about the individual punk but more about CryptoPunks in general, given that it is a historical NFT project. Visa worked with Anchorage Digital to buy the CryptoPunk, meaning Anchorage facilitated the transaction and is custodying the NFT for Visa, said Sheffield. "We purchased it from Anchorage using fiat," he said. Visa first partnered with Anchorage earlier this year to settle payments in the USDC stablecoin on Ethereum. Visa believes NFTs will play an important role in the future of commerce. NFTs can help individual content creators and small and medium-sized businesses in new ways, said Sheffield. "NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce," he added. Sheffield compared NFTs with the early days of e-commerce, saying that e-commerce made it possible for a small business to sell online and reach customers worldwide. But they still have to produce and ship physical goods, which can have high upfront costs. So NFTs allow a small business to harness a public blockchain to create digital goods, which can be delivered instantly to a crypto wallet anywhere in the world, said Sheffield. "We can envision a future where a crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A plane has major damage after a York Regional Police (YRP) drone struck the aircraft at Toronto Buttonville Municipal Airport earlier this month. CTV News reports: On Aug. 10, a Canadian Flyers International Inc. Cessna plane was on a flight to the airport in Markham at an unknown time during the day. The small plane was about to land at the airport's runway when the pilot felt a jolt that "pushed them back on their seat," according to a report from Transport Canada issued this week. The pilot thought the plane hit a large bird and proceeded to land the plane, the report said. When the pilot exited the aircraft they saw a "major dent" on the left underside of the engine cowling and the airbox was also bent. No injuries were reported but the airplane suffered significant damage, including a propeller strike. A few hours after the incident, police confirmed that a YRP drone had struck the aircraft, according to the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai: A group of Apple workers has announced a campaign to improve working conditions within the company. On Monday, company employees launched a Twitter account called Apple Workers to gather stories from colleagues about workplace issues such as "persistent patterns of racism, sexism, inequity, discrimination, intimidation, suppression, coercion, abuse, unfair punishment, and unchecked privilege." The account links to a website that contains the campaign's announcement as well as a link to join it. "We've exhausted all internal avenues. We've talked with our leadership. We've gone to the People team. We've escalated through Business Conduct. Nothing has changed," the announcement read. "It's time to Think Different." "Connect with us to share your own experience, stay informed, or unite in solidarity with other current or former Apple workers. United, we can collaborate to iterate a healthier workplace," the announcement continued. "We are working together to craft a statement on our behalf, reflecting our stories and an outline of changes we expect to see Apple make." The site also links to a "Wage Transparency Survey," an initiative led by Cher Scarlett, an Apple employee who has recently organized an internal survey to find out if there are wage gaps inside the company. "Apple colleagues of all types -- we are gathering in solidarity to push Apple to change internally," Scarlett wrote on Twitter. The Apple employees are organizing in part on Discord channel, according to the person who runs the channel, who goes by Fudge. The person described themselves as a former Apple Authorized Service Providers employee, and asked to remain anonymous. Fudge said that the Discord channel has around 200 current and former employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A dangerous vulnerability in Realtek chipsets used in hundreds of thousands of smart devices from at least 65 vendors is currently under attack from a notorious DDoS botnet gang. From a report: The attacks started last week, according to a report from IoT security firm SAM, and began just three days after fellow security firm IoT Inspector published details about the vulnerability on its blog. Tracked as CVE-2021-35395, the vulnerability is part of four issues IoT Inspector researchers found in the software development kit (SDK) that ships with multiple Realtek chipsets (SoCs). These chips are manufactured by Realtek but are shipped to other companies, which then use them as the basic System-on-Chip (SoC) board for their own devices, with the Realtek SDK serving as a configurator and starting point for their own firmware. IoT Inspector said they found more than 200 different device models from at least 65 different vendors that had been built around these chips and were using the vulnerable SDK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has signed a deal with the Department of Defense to support a domestic commercial chip-building ecosystem. The chipmaker will lead the first phase of a program called Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C), which aims to bolster the domestic semiconductor supply chain. From a report: The chipmaker's recently launched division, Intel Foundry Services, will lead the program. As part of RAMP-C, Intel will partner with IBM, Cadence, Synopsys and others to establish a domestic commercial foundry ecosystem. Intel says the program was designed to create custom integrated circuits and commercial products required by the Department of Defense's systems. "The RAMP-C program will enable both commercial foundry customers and the Department of Defense to take advantage of Intel's significant investments in leading-edge process technologies," said Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services, in a statement. "Along with our customers and ecosystem partners, including IBM, Cadence, Synopsys and others, we will help bolster the domestic semiconductor supply chain and ensure the United States maintains leadership in both R&D and advanced manufacturing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than a thousand web apps mistakenly exposed 38 million records on the open internet, including data from a number of Covid-19 contact tracing platforms, vaccination sign-ups, job application portals, and employee databases. The data included a range of sensitive information, from people's phone numbers and home addresses to social security numbers and Covid-19 vaccination status. From a report: The incident affected major companies and organizations, including American Airlines, Ford, the transportation and logistics company J.B. Hunt, the Maryland Department of Health, the New York City Municipal Transportation Authority, and New York City public schools. And while the data exposures have since been addressed, they show how one bad configuration setting in a popular platform can have far-reaching consequences. The exposed data was all stored in Microsoft's Power Apps portal service, a development platform that makes it easy to create web or mobile apps for external use. If you need to spin up a vaccine appointment sign-up site quickly during, say, a pandemic, Power Apps portals can generate both the public-facing site and the data management backend. Beginning in May, researchers from the security firm Upguard began investigating a large number of Power Apps portals that publicly exposed data that should have been private -- including in some Power Apps that Microsoft made for its own purposes. None of the data is known to have been compromised, but the finding is significant still, as it reveals an oversight in the design of Power Apps portals that has since been fixed. In addition to managing internal databases and offering a foundation to develop apps, the Power Apps platform also provides ready-made application programming interfaces to interact with that data. But the Upguard researchers realized that when enabling these APIs, the platform defaulted to making the corresponding data publicly accessible. Enabling privacy settings was a manual process. As a result, many customers misconfigured their apps by leaving the insecure default.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Pay is apparently just as much a disaster internally as the app transition has been externally. From a report: That's the big takeaway from a recent Business Insider article detailing an exodus of executives from Google's payment division, lower-than-expected app adoption, and employees frustrated with the slow movement of the division. Business Insider spoke with ex-employees and learned that "dozens of employees and executives have left" the Google Payments team in recent months, including "at least seven leaders on the team with roles of director or vice president." The most prominent departure, of payments chief Caesar Sengupta, kicked off the exodus in April, and now employees are worried about another reorganization and even slower progress. Many rank-and-file team members have reportedly departed, too, with the story saying, "One former employee estimated that half the people working on the business-development team for Google Pay -- a group of about 40 people -- have left the company in recent months."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: A Razer Synapse zero-day vulnerability has been disclosed that allows you to gain Windows admin privileges simply by plugging in a Razer mouse or keyboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency said on Monday. From a report: Ethiopia has been engulfed since last year in an armed conflict pitting the federal government against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which controls the Tigray region in the country's north. Supporters of both sides have waged a parallel war of words on social media. The government wants its local platform to "replace" Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Zoom, the director general of the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), Shumete Gizaw, said. Shumete accused Facebook of deleting posts and user accounts which he said were "disseminating the true reality about Ethiopia." International human rights groups have criticized the Ethiopian government for unexplained shutdowns to social media services including Facebook and WhatsApp in the past year. The government has not commented on those shutdowns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. From a report: The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life. The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields. Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity. That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter. No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An excerpt from Slate's interview with law professor Michael Heller, who has co-written a book called 'Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives': Heller: Just to give you a concrete example, there's a guy named James Beach who was flying from Boston to Denver, and he had actually a little plastic clamp called a Knee Defender, which you can buy online. It's really very effective. You stick it on the seat in front of you, on the little tray table, and it keeps the seat in front of you from leaning back. On this particular flight, the woman in front of him tried to lean back. She couldn't; she realized what was wrong. She asked him to take them off. He didn't comply. She turned around and threw her water at him. The pilot did an emergency landing right away. They were taken off the flight. The plane went on to Denver an hour and 38 minutes late. But those little Knee Defenders turn out to reveal a tremendous amount about the ownership conflicts that are all through our lives. The woman in front is saying, "That space behind my seat, it's mine, because the little button reclines the seat." And the guy behind, like the kids in the playground, he's saying, "No, it was mine. I had it first, for my laptop," or "I possessed it first with my knees." So that wedge of space is an ownership battle, it turns out, between attachment and possession and first-in-time. When I talk to audiences about that conflict, I always poll them, and it's amazing to me that invariably half say the person in front is in the right, and half say the person in back is in the right. What's most amazing is how each side is just amazed that anybody else could have a different view. It feels and looks and seems so obvious, what's mine, the same way it is to toddlers on a playground. But that little conflict on the airplane seat is not just an accident, it turns out. It's deliberately engineered by the airlines so they can sell that same space twice. Most of us are just polite; we try to work it out, and that's true in all of the ownership conflicts we go through throughout our day, throughout our lives, in the Starbucks line, to line up at Disney World. Anywhere that we're trying to make something mine, our experience is being engineered and designed by some owner to shape our behavior. And on the airplane seat, the design is to get us to fight with each other instead of being mad at the airlines, to not realize that they're selling that same space twice. And what they're using is one of the most advanced tools of ownership design that Jim and I have uncovered in doing this work, which is what we call strategic ambiguity. Ownership is ambiguous a lot more often than people realize. And that ambiguity is really valuable, in this case to the airlines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla developers are putting the finishing touches on a new feature that will block insecure file downloads in Firefox. From a report: Called mixed content downloaded blocking, the feature works by blocking files downloads initiated from an encrypted HTTPS page but which actually take place via an unencrypted HTTP channel. The idea behind this feature is to prevent Firefox users from getting misled by the URL bar and think they're downloading a file securely via HTTPS when, in reality, the file could be tampered with by third parties while in transit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit user buba447 has created an iconic Simpsons TV with working dials that plays episodes of the long-running animated sitcom whenever it's turned on. From a report: The palm-sized TV was designed in Fusion 360 and printed using an Ender-3 Pro from Creality, according to its creator. Inside you'll find a tiny Raspberry Pi Zero running Jessie Lite connected to the 640x480 display. The top dial turns on the TV (actually, just the display and speaker) while the lower dial adjusts the volume. Its 32GB SD Card is loaded with 11 seasons of compressed episodes that play in random order. The whole thing is powered by a USB port with a cable running out the back.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal is launching its cryptocurrency service in the U.K. From a report: The U.S. online payments giant said Monday it would let British customers buy, hold and sell digital currencies, starting this week. It marks the the first international expansion of PayPal's crypto product, which first launched in the U.S. in October last year. "It has been doing really well in the U.S.," Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal's general manager for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies, told CNBC. "We expect it's going to do well in the U.K." PayPal's crypto feature lets customers buy or sell bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum or litecoin with as little as 1 pound. Users can also track crypto prices in real-time, and find educational content on the market. Like the U.S. version of the product, PayPal is relying on Paxos, a New York-regulated digital currency company, to enable crypto buying and selling in the U.K. PayPal said it has engaged with relevant U.K. regulators to launch the service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Covid-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech was granted a full approval by U.S. regulators, a move that is expected to help bolster the immunization drive amid a surge in infections caused by the delta variant. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration said in a statement on Monday that it had cleared the vaccine for the prevention of Covid-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older. It will be marketed under the Comirnaty. The vaccine continues to be available to people age 12 to 15 under an emergency-use authorization, the agency said. The approval is expected to boost confidence in the shot and is likely to open the door to more vaccine mandates among employers and businesses. It is also likely to solidify its future as a blockbuster for its makers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?" asks a headline at the New York Times. (Alternate URL here for a text-only version.) "A new trend that is coming into our animatronics is a level of intelligence," a senior Imagineering executive tells the Times, showing off Disney's sophisticated new three-foot animatronic of the Guardians of the Galaxy character Groot. "This guy represents our future. It's part of how we stay relevant." The animatronic Groot walked across the room to introduce himself to the Times' reporter.When I remained silent, his demeanor changed. His shoulders slumped, and he seemed to look at me with puppy dog eyes. "Don't be sad," I blurted out. He grinned and broke into a little dance before balancing on one foot with outstretched arms. It's just part of a larger initiative to upgrade the park's tech in a variety of different ways:There are animatronics at Disney World that have been doing the same herky-jerky thing on loop since Richard Nixon was president. In the meantime, the world's children have become technophiles, raised on apps (three million in the Google store), the Roblox online gaming universe and augmented reality Snapchat filters... In early June, Disney's animatronic technology took a sonic leap forward. The Disneyland Resort's newest ride, WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, features a "stuntronic" robot (outfitted in Spidey spandex) that performs elaborate aerial tricks, just like a stunt person. A catapult hurls the untethered machine 65 feet into the air, where it completes various feats (somersaults in one pass, an "epic flail" in another) while autonomously adjusting its trajectory to land in a hidden net... The Spider-Man robot — 95 pounds of microprocessors, 3-D printed plastic, gyroscopes, accelerometers, aluminum and other materials — took more than three years to develop. Disney declined to discuss the cost of the stuntronics endeavor, but the company easily invested millions of dollars... One of Disney's senior roboticists, Scott LaValley, came from Boston Dynamics, where he contributed to an early version of Atlas, a running and jumping machine that inspires "how did they do that" amazement — followed by dystopian dread. Disney said it had no plans to replace human performers... Rather, Disney's newest robotics initiative is about extreme Marvel and "Star Wars" characters — huge ones like the Incredible Hulk, tiny ones like Baby Yoda and swinging ones like Spider-Man — that are challenging to bring to life in a realistic way, especially outdoors.... The development of Groot — code-named Project Kiwi — is the latest example. He is a prototype for a small-scale, free-roaming robotic actor that can take on the role of any similarly sized Disney character.... Cameras and sensors will give these robots the ability to make on-the-fly choices about what to do and say. Custom software allows animators and engineers to design behaviors (happy, sad, sneaky) and convey emotion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its annual Architecture Day semiconductor event Thursday, Intel revealed new details about its powerful Ponte Vecchio chip for data centers, reports SiliconANGLE:Intel is looking to take on Nvidia Corp. in the AI silicon market with Ponte Vecchio, which the company describes as its most complex system-on-chip or SOC to date. Ponte Vecchio features some 100 billion transistors, nearly twice as many as Nvidia's flagship A100 data center graphics processing unit. The chip's 100 billion transistors are divided among no fewer than 47 individual processing modules made using five different manufacturing processes. Normally, an SOC's processing modules are arranged side by side in a flat two-dimensional design. Ponte Vecchio, however, stacks the modules on one another in a vertical, three-dimensional structure created using Intel's Foveros technology. The bulk of Ponte Vecchio's processing power comes from a set of modules aptly called the Compute Tiles. Each Compute Tile has eight Xe cores, GPU cores specifically optimized to run AI workloads. Every Xe core, in turn, consists of eight vector engines and eight matrix engines, processing modules specifically built to run the narrow set of mathematical operations that AI models use to turn data into insights... Intel shared early performance data about the chip in conjunction with the release of the technical details. According to the company, early Ponte Vecchio silicon has demonstrated performance of more than 45 teraflops, or about 45 trillion operations per second. The article adds that it achieved those speeds while processing 32-bit single-precision floating-point values floating point values — and that at least one customer has already signed up to use Ponte Vecchio.The Argonne National Laboratory will include Ponte Vecchio chips in its upcoming $500 million Aurora supercomputer. Aurora will provide one exaflop of performance when it becomes fully operational, the equivalent of a quintillion calculations per second.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New Yorker looks at Cerebras, a startup which has raised nearly half a billion dollars to build massive plate-sized chips targeted at AI applications — the largest computer chip in the world.In the end, said Cerebras's co-founder Andrew Feldman, the mega-chip design offers several advantages. Cores communicate faster when they're on the same chip: instead of being spread around a room, the computer's brain is now in a single skull. Big chips handle memory better, too. Typically, a small chip that's ready to process a file must first fetch it from a shared memory chip located elsewhere on its circuit board; only the most frequently used data might be cached closer to home... A typical, large computer chip might draw three hundred and fifty watts of power, but Cerebras's giant chip draws fifteen kilowatts — enough to run a small house. "Nobody ever delivered that much power to a chip," Feldman said. "Nobody ever had to cool a chip like that." In the end, three-quarters of the CS-1, the computer that Cerebras built around its WSE-1 chip, is dedicated to preventing the motherboard from melting. Most computers use fans to blow cool air over their processors, but the CS-1 uses water, which conducts heat better; connected to piping and sitting atop the silicon is a water-cooled plate, made of a custom copper alloy that won't expand too much when warmed, and polished to perfection so as not to scratch the chip. On most chips, data and power flow in through wires at the edges, in roughly the same way that they arrive at a suburban house; for the more metropolitan Wafer-Scale Engines, they needed to come in perpendicularly, from below. The engineers had to invent a new connecting material that could withstand the heat and stress of the mega-chip environment. "That took us more than a year," Feldman said... [I]n a rack in a data center, it takes up the same space as fifteen of the pizza-box-size machines powered by G.P.U.s. Custom-built machine-learning software works to assign tasks to the chip in the most efficient way possible, and even distributes work in order to prevent cold spots, so that the wafer doesn't crack.... According to Cerebras, the CS-1 is being used in several world-class labs — including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and E.P.C.C., the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh — as well as by pharmaceutical companies, industrial firms, and "military and intelligence customers." Earlier this year, in a blog post, an engineer at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca wrote that it had used a CS-1 to train a neural network that could extract information from research papers; the computer performed in two days what would take "a large cluster of G.P.U.s" two weeks. The U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory reported that its CS-1 solved a system of equations more than two hundred times faster than its supercomputer, while using "a fraction" of the power consumption. "To our knowledge, this is the first ever system capable of faster-than real-time simulation of millions of cells in realistic fluid-dynamics models," the researchers wrote. They concluded that, because of scaling inefficiencies, there could be no version of their supercomputer big enough to beat the CS-1.... Bronis de Supinski, the C.T.O. for Livermore Computing, told me that, in initial tests, the CS-1 had run neural networks about five times as fast per transistor as a cluster of G.P.U.s, and had accelerated network training even more. It all suggests one possible work-around for Moore's Law: optimizing chips for specific applications. "For now," Feldman tells the New Yorker, "progress will come through specialization."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that study that found that "blue" hydrogen (produced from natural gas using a carbon-capture technique) may be worse for the planet than coal? "That study was apparently a tipping point for Chris Jackson, who this week stepped down as chair of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association..." reports Ars Technica. Jackson wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation, "while there might not be a single 'right' answer, there are answers that are wrong."Jackson continues by saying that blue hydrogen is "at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use" which would derail goals that the country and the world have set for decarbonizing the economy. He takes particular issue with the fact that oil and gas companies have asked the UK government for decades of subsidies while also claiming that blue hydrogen will be inexpensive to produce. "If the false claims made by oil companies about the cost of blue hydrogen were true, their projects would make a profit by 2030," he told The Guardian. "Instead, they're asking taxpayers for billions in subsidies for the next 25 years. They should tell the government they don't need it. The fact that they don't tells you everything you need to know."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Law professor and legal commentator Jonathan H. Adler shares an update about a nonprofit group advocating for accountable government:The Cause of Action Institute sought to obtain the internet browsing histories of several government officials, including the Secretary of Agriculture and Director of the Office of Management and Budget, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A district court rejected their claim, concluding that browsing histories are not agency records under FOIA. Yesterday a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed. In Cause of Action Institute v. OMB, Judge Rao (joined by Judges Srinivasan and Sentelle) agreed with the district court that federal agencies do not exercise the requisite degree of control over internet browsing histories for the histories to constitute agency records subject to FOIA disclosure. As Judge Rao explained, the "agencies' retention and access policies for browsing histories, along with the fact they did not use any of the officials' browsing histories for any reason, lead to the conclusion that these documents are not agency records."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly half of the U.S. (47.5%) has migrated to IPv6, ranking the U.S. sixth in percentage of users who have migrated to the latest version of the Internet Protocol. That estimate is based on an analysis of data about Google users — which also finds that India leads the world, with a 61.67% adoption rate. Inside.com's developer newsletter reports: The figures come from the latest Google IPv6 Statistics data organized and ranked by BBC Radio and Music's Lead Technical Architect for his blog. Malaysia and French Guiana came in second and third, respectively... IPv6 is considered far more secure, faster, and powerful than its predecessor, IPv4, while offering more IP addresses. Test your IPv6 connectivity here. After third place there's a close three-way race, where the U.S. has dropped from the #4 position earlier this week. As of today the U.S. is now in 6th place... Fourth is France (48.38%) and Fifth is Taiwan (48.0%). Canada ranks #20 (36.59%) and the UK ranks #24 (33.27%).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies," reports the Guardian, "with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit..."As the chief of Stanford University's dual diagnosis addiction clinic (which caters to people with more than one disorder), Lembke has spent the past 25-plus years treating patients addicted to everything from heroin, gambling and sex to video games, Botox and ice baths... Her new book, Dopamine Nation, emphasises that we are now all addicts to a degree. She calls the smartphone the "modern-day hypodermic needle": we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet. Since the turn of the millennium, behavioural (as opposed to substance) addictions have soared. Every spare second is an opportunity to be stimulated... "We're seeing a huge explosion in the numbers of people struggling with minor addictions," says Lembke. That has consequences. Although we have endless founts of fun at our fingertips, "the data shows we're less and less happy," she says. Global depression rates have been climbing significantly in the past 30 years and, according to a World Happiness Report, people in high-income countries have become more unhappy over the past decade or so. We've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We're forever "interrupting ourselves", as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow. For many, the pandemic has exacerbated dependence on social media and other digital vices, as well as alcohol and drugs. Addiction is a spectrum disorder: it's not as simple as being an addict or not being an addict. It's deemed worthy of clinical care when it "significantly interferes" with someone's life and ability to function, but when it comes to minor digital attachments, the effect is pernicious. "It gets into philosophical questions: how is the time I'm spending on my phone in subtle ways affecting my ability to be a good parent, spouse or friend?" says Lembke. "I do believe there is a cost — one that I don't think we fully recognise because it's hard to [see it] when you're in it...." "It's very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress," says Lembke. "We're losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms." The solution, according to the article, is dopamine fasts — "the longer, the better...to reset our brain's pathways and gain perspective on how our dependency affects us," eventually attaining the lost art of moderation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the U.S. healthcare system, "hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services," reports the New York Times — citing an investigation into medical care costs at 60 major hospitals. This year the U.S. government ordered hospitals to publish complete lists of the prices they negotiate with private insurers, "and it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world's largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers." In fact America's government-run Medicare health insurance for senior citizens is negotiating much lower rates than the privately-insured patients are getting, the Times points out — sometimes paying just 10% of what the major health plans are paying. "In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all..."Until now, consumers had no way to know before they got the bill what prices they and their insurers would be paying. Some insurance companies have refused to provide the information when asked by patients and the employers that hired the companies to provide coverage. This secrecy has allowed hospitals to tell patients that they are getting "steep" discounts, while still charging them many times what a public program like Medicare is willing to pay. And it has left insurers with little incentive to negotiate well. The peculiar economics of health insurance also help keep prices high. Customers judge insurance plans based on whether their preferred doctors and hospitals are covered, making it hard for an insurer to walk away from a bad deal. The insurer also may not have a strong motivation to, given that the more that is spent on care, the more an insurance company can earn. Federal regulations limit insurers' profits to a percentage of the amount they spend on care. And in some plans involving large employers, insurers are not even using their own money. The employers pay the medical bills, and give insurers a cut of the costs in exchange for administering the plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom's Hardware reports:Based on revenue, Samsung Electronics has reclaimed the number one semiconductor manufacturer spot on the back of a strong Q2 2021, according to the latest IC Insight's The McClean Report, which investigates the state of the semiconductor industry in several areas. The South Korean company achieved a 19 percent increase in overall IC sales compared to Q1 2021, bringing in a total of $20.29 billion in the April-June period alone... On the other hand, Intel achieved a smaller three percent QoQ (Quarter-over-Quarter) increase that resulted in a cool $19.3 billion in chip sales. For reference, AMD, which is generally considered to have a competitive CPU portfolio compared to Intel, brought in a comparatively measly $3.85 billion... According to the present-day report, Samsung has achieved the top spot mainly due to ascending ASP (Average Sale Price) of NAND and DRAM, with the latter being a significant high-volume advantage over Intel, which doesn't produce RAM. Samsung had last been the top manufacturer back in Q3 2018 — again on the back of strong NAND and DRAM results in the midst of a market shortage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a 2015 video, PCMag's lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan showed off "One of the coolest phones at this year's CES." He's now written an article titled "How I Got Suckered by an (Alleged) $10M Phone Scam.The biggest mobile-phone mystery of the 2010s is finally coming to an ignominious end, as yesterday the U.S. attorney for Utah charged Chad Sayers, founder of entirely notional mobile phone firm Saygus, with conducting a $10 million fraud scheme. Saygus "had" a series of "phones" from 2009-2016 that existed as prototypes that the company took on trade shows and to press tours. There was never any real evidence of production runs. The U.S. Attorney now claims Sayers and associated took $10 million in investor money and lived on it without ever really planning to release a product. (I learned this via David Ruddock....) The phone kept just...not happening. Sayers' genius was that he produced just enough prototypes to show off and kept them in a constant state of pre-sale... "DEFENDANT failed to disclose that device certification with Verizon expired in 2013 and was never renewed," the Department of Justice notes. A new version of the phone then popped up again in 2015, this one supposedly covered in Kevlar with 320GB of storage. Sayers flogged that prototype until early 2016, at which point he said it was coming "next month." The Department of Justice says: "Between April 7, 2015 and January 10, 2017, DEFENDANT made at least 26 public statements on Twitter that its phone would be shipping 'this month,' 'this week,' or was otherwise launching, when in fact, it has never launched...." Sayers kept going on press tours and buying expensive trade-show booths with prototypes of phones that would never hit the market, drumming up enough gullible mainstream press coverage (myself included) to presumably attract a continual stream of investors with his claim of being the next big thing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"With the latest wave of return-to-office delays from Covid-19, some companies are considering a new possibility: Offices may be closed for nearly two years," reports the Wall Street Journal. "That is raising concerns among executives that the longer people stay at home, the harder or more disruptive it could be to eventually bring them back."Many employees developed new routines during the pandemic, swapping commuting for exercise or blocking hours for uninterrupted work. Even staffers who once bristled at doing their jobs outside of an office have come to embrace the flexibility and productivity of at-home life over the past 18 months, many say. Surveys have shown that enthusiasm for remote work has only increased as the pandemic has stretched on. "If you have a little blip, people go back to the old way. Well, this ain't a blip," said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., whose company has benefited from the work-from-home boom. He predicts hybrid and remote work will remain the norm for months and years to come. "There is no going back...." [W]hat many have concluded over time is that their companies can operate largely effectively while remote, executives and workers say... As more time passes until offices reopen, it could become difficult to convince existing employees to willingly upend their new lives and return to pre-pandemic schedules in offices, executives say. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Lyft have now all postponed the return to their U.S. workplaces until 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's climate crisis is making hurricanes more potent, reports CNN:The proportion of high-intensity hurricanes has increased due to warmer global temperatures, according to a UN climate report released earlier this month. Scientists have also found that the storms are more likely to stall and lead to devastating rainfall and they last longer after making landfall. "We have good confidence that greenhouse warming increases the maximum wind intensity that tropical cyclones can achieve," Jim Kossin, senior scientist with the Climate Service, an organization that provides climate risk modeling and analytics to governments and businesses, told CNN. "This, in turn, allows for the strongest hurricanes — which are the ones that create the most risk by far — to become even stronger." Scientists like Kossin have observed that, globally, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories — 3, 4 and 5 — in recent decades, a trend that's expected to continue as global average temperature increases... A 2020 study published in the journal Nature also found storms are moving farther inland than they did five decades ago.... For every fraction of a degree the planet warms, according to the UN report, rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the long-running TV show Doctor Who, aliens known as time lords derived their power from the captured heart of a black hole, which provided energy for their planet and time travel technology," writes Science magazine. "The idea has merit, according to a new study." Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes their report: Researchers have shown that highly advanced alien civilizations could theoretically build megastructures called Dyson spheres around black holes to harness their energy, which can be 100,000 times that of our Sun. The work could even give us a way to detect the existence of these extraterrestrial societies... Black holes are typically thought of as consumers rather than producers of energy. Yet their huge gravitational fields can generate power through several theoretical processes. These include the radiation emitted from the accumulation of gas around the hole, the spinning "accretion" disk of matter slowly falling toward the event horizon, the relativistic jets of matter and energy that shoot out along the hole's axis of rotation, and Hawking radiation—a theoretical way that black holes can lose mass, releasing energy in the process. From their calculations, researchers concluded that the accretion disk, surrounding gas, and jets of black holes can all serve as viable energy sources. In fact, the energy from the accretion disk alone of a stellar black hole of 20 solar masses could provide the same amount of power as Dyson spheres around 100,000 stars, the team will report next month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Were a supermassive black hole harnessed, the energy it could provide might be 1 million times larger still. If such technology is at work, there may be a way to spot it. According to the researchers, the waste heat signal from a so-called "hot" Dyson sphere—one somehow capable of surviving temperatures in excess of 3000 kelvin, above the melting point of known metals—around a stellar mass black hole in the Milky Way would be detectible at ultraviolet wavelengths. Such signals might be found in the data from various telescopes, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"ShotSpotter" is an AI-powered tool that claims it can detect the sound of gunshots. To install it can cost up to $95,000 per square mile — every year — reports the Associated Press. There's just one problem. "The algorithm that analyzes sounds to distinguish gunshots from other noises has never been peer reviewed by outside academics or experts.""The concern about ShotSpotter being used as direct evidence is that there are simply no studies out there to establish the validity or the reliability of the technology. Nothing," said Tania Brief, a staff attorney at The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that seeks to reverse wrongful convictions. A 2011 study commissioned by the company found that dumpsters, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, fireworks, construction, trash pickup and church bells have all triggered false positive alerts, mistaking these sounds for gunshots. ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark said the company is constantly improving its audio classifications, but the system still logs a small percentage of false positives. In the past, these false alerts — and lack of alerts — have prompted cities from Charlotte, North Carolina, to San Antonio, Texas, to end their ShotSpotter contracts, the AP found. And the potential for problems isn't just hypothetical. Just ask 65-year-old Michael Williams:Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man from the neighborhood who asked him for a ride during a night of unrest over police brutality in May... "I kept trying to figure out, how can they get away with using the technology like that against me?" said Williams, speaking publicly for the first time about his ordeal. "That's not fair." Williams sat behind bars for nearly a year before a judge dismissed the case against him last month at the request of prosecutors, who said they had insufficient evidence. Williams' experience highlights the real-world impacts of society's growing reliance on algorithms to help make consequential decisions about many aspects of public life... ShotSpotter evidence has increasingly been admitted in court cases around the country, now totaling some 200. ShotSpotter's website says it's "a leader in precision policing technology solutions" that helps stop gun violence by using "sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence" to classify 14 million sounds in its proprietary database as gunshots or something else. But an Associated Press investigation, based on a review of thousands of internal documents, emails, presentations and confidential contracts, along with interviews with dozens of public defenders in communities where ShotSpotter has been deployed, has identified a number of serious flaws in using ShotSpotter as evidentiary support for prosecutors. AP's investigation found the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots. Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter's employees have been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants. Judges in a number of cases have thrown out the evidence... The company's methods for identifying gunshots aren't always guided solely by the technology. ShotSpotter employees can, and often do, change the source of sounds picked up by its sensors after listening to audio recordings, introducing the possibility of human bias into the gunshot detection algorithm. Employees can and do modify the location or number of shots fired at the request of police, according to court records. And in the past, city dispatchers or police themselves could also make some of these changes. Three more eye-popping details from the AP's 4,000-word exposé"One study published in April in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Health examined ShotSpotter in 68 large, metropolitan counties from 1999 to 2016, the largest review to date. It found that the technology didn't reduce gun violence or increase community safety..." "Forensic tools such as DNA and ballistics evidence used by prosecutors have had their methodologies examined in painstaking detail for decades, but ShotSpotter claims its software is proprietary, and won't release its algorithm..." "In 2018, it acquired a predictive policing company called HunchLab, which integrates its AI models with ShotSpotter's gunshot detection data to purportedly predict crime before it happens."Read more of this story at Slashdot.