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"Hackers have drained Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid of $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins," reports Forbes:The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced the compromise and said it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure "cold wallet" storage. The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals... Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million... Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple TV+ has released a nearly three-minute long trailer for its upcoming series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning."A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life... The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire... The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook," reads the first line of a first-quarter Content Transparency Report which Facebook later decided not to share with the public. They've now changed their mind, and released that report. The Hill summarizes its findings:Facebook said that an article about a doctor who passed away two weeks after getting a coronavirus vaccine was the [#1] top-performing link on the social media platform in the U.S. from January to March, according to a report released Saturday... [The Washington Post adds that this article "was promoted on Facebook by several anti-vaccine groups".] According to Facebook's report, the article was viewed over 53 million times... In addition, a website pushing coronavirus misinformation was one of the top 20 most visited sites on the platform, according to The Washington Post. Specifically, the Post calls that top-20 site "a right-wing anti-China publication that has promoted the violent QAnon conspiracy theories and misleading claims of voter fraud related to the 2020 election." Facebook had considered sharing the 100 most popular items in their newsfeed, the Post adds, but "The problem was that they feared what they might find..." The disclosure reflects the challenge of being open with the public at a time when the social network is being attacked by the White House as well as experts for fomenting the spread of health misinformation. Previously, the company had only shared how much covid-related misinformation it has removed, and has been careful not to acknowledge up to this point what role they've played in disseminating material that mislead the public about the virus and the vaccine. For months, executives have debated releasing both this report and other information, according to a person familiar with the company's thinking. In those debates, the conversations revolved around whether releasing certain data points were likely to help or hurt the company's already-battered public image. In numerous instances, the company held back on investigating information that appeared negative, the person said... Facebook's leadership has long felt that skepticism about any subject, including vaccines, should not be censored in a society that allows robust public debate... The challenge is that certain factual stories that might cast doubt on vaccines are often promoted and skewed by people and groups that are opposed to them. The result is that factual information can become part of an ideological campaign. Facebook has been slow to remove or block some of the leading anti-vaccine figures that spread such ideas. Some observations about Facebook's report: It only covers public content in a News Feed — so presumably it's failing to account for any misinformation that's shared only with a group's members.The report acknowledges that nearly 20% of posts in a News Feed come from a Group the user has joined. More than 1 in every 17 content views in the News Feed are recommended by Facebook's algorithms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker writes:Slackware, one of oldest Linux distributions, has just announced the long awaited version 15.0 RC1 is available for download from the usual mirrors. Here's the changelog. Phoronix points out it's been nearly a decade since Slackware 14Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the 30th birthday of Linux coming up, TechRepublic's Jack Wallen argues that its distros "are so much better today."I remember like it was yesterday. The very first time I booted into the Linux desktop. The distribution in question was Caldera Open Linux 1.0, which installed with kernel 2.0 and the desktop was Fvwm95... It was just unsightly. The colors were decidedly too Microsoftian, and it was all so ... clinical.... The Linux desktop has morphed from an ugly, awkward, and less-than-productive state, to an almost avant-garde work of art, into an elegant, productive and professional environment. All the while, it offered more choices than most users had time to consider. Even today, I could go back to Enlightenment, or opt for the likes of Pantheon, Budgie, KDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, i3, Gala, Windowmaker or numerous other takes on the desktop... If I were to go back in time and look over the shoulder at a younger me, I would probably see someone who loved the desktop he was using, but wished it could be a bit more productive. I would then whisper into his ear and say, "Give it time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNET reports:Using the same mRNA technology that broke the mold with effective COVID-19 vaccines, Moderna has developed two vaccines for HIV. The first phase of testing for both could begin as early as Thursday, according to a post on the National Institutes of Health website for clinical trials. Phase 1 of the vaccine trial will test the vaccines' safety, as well as measure immunity and antibody responses. If the vaccines prove to be safe, they'll need to go through additional testing for researchers to determine how effective they are... There were 37.7 million people living with HIV globally in 2020, according to United Nations data. "There's a pressing need for new ways to prevent infection from viruses like HIV and influenza that conventional vaccines have struggled to address and to treat rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year," writes a reporter at Axios. "Vaccines and therapies based on messenger RNA hold promise as a solution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A newly-enhanced edition of the original Quake has been officially revealed by Bethesda at QuakeCon 2021," reports GamesRadar+The updated edition of the classic 1996 first-person shooter is out right now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Nintendo Switch. There's updated visuals, online and local multiplayer, and new content available in the enhanced edition of Quake. Two expansions for the original game — The Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity — are included in all purchases, as are the Dimensions of the Past and the brand new Dimension of the Machine expansions, the latter two of which are developed by Wolfenstein studio MachineGames. "Those who own Quake on Steam or from the official Bethesda.net store can access the update for free," reports Ars Technica:The multi-platform release could be seen as positive news after Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, a move that generated worries about Microsoft/Bethesda exclusivity moving forward. For those who don't mind waiting, Limited Run Games will offer physical disc and card releases for the PS4 and Switch, respectively, including a pricey limited edition that comes in a box that looks like the in-game nail-gun ammo... According to a press release, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game will run at full 4K and 120 fps once a future update goes live.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A new island has been discovered near Iwo Jima," reports long-time Slashdot reader thephydes, "located around 1,200 kilometers [746 miles] south of Tokyo, after a submarine volcano began erupting late last week, the Japan Coast Guard said Monday." Japan Times reports:The new island is C-shaped with a diameter of approximately 1 kilometer [0.6 miles]. It was discovered after the volcano some 50 km south of Iwo Jima, part of the Ogasawara Islands in the Pacific Ocean, started erupting on Friday... New islands have been confirmed in the area in 1904, 1914 and 1986, with all of them having submerged due to erosion by waves and currents. The one found in 1986 sank after about two months, according to the coast guard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"There is no simple answer to this question," argues an article at EE Times. At least, not yet... Slashdot reader dkatana shares their report:For most industrial IoT applications, the question remains: Do I need 5G for my IoT connections? It depends on the connectivity, the devices, and many other factors. First, does the project need cellular connectivity? There are several wireless low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) using different radios that can be used without incurring the cost of cellular connections. Other wireless technologies such as LoRaWAN and Sigfox offer massive IoT connectivity for local and wide-area applications with low power consumption. For example, connecting hundreds or thousands of sensors in agriculture can be achieved over an existing Sigfox or LoRaWAN network. Those sensors usually do not require the bandwidth or enhanced security of cellular networks. Additionally, most cellular connections use licensed spectrum, which is additional cost carriers need to transfer to customers. One reason to invest in 5G connectivity for IoT is that operators are shutting down legacy 2G and 3G networks worldwide. In the past 30 years, hundreds of thousands of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices have been deployed using 2G networks. Those are utility meters, alarm systems, and basic sensors that use SMS and GPRS/EDGE for communication. In 2017, AT&T announced that they will start shutting down 2G networks to free up the spectrum for LTE and the upcoming 5G radios. Additionally, Verizon Wireless phased out its 2G CDMA network in the US at the end of 2020; Sprint sunsetted its 2G CDMA network in December of 2021; and T-Mobile plans to sunset its 2G network in December of 2022. The existing connections are now living on borrowed time. Like 2G, many carriers are eager to sunset older 3G networks so that they can repurpose that spectrum to support 4G LTE and 5G.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"COVID-19 origin theorists could be right about a Chinese government cover-up," reports The Week, "but they might have their sights set in the wrong direction, an American virologist suggested to Bloomberg."When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans. The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets. A link between them would be "very intriguing," Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virology research associate at the University of Utah, told Bloomberg... [I]t seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face." The paper contains "meticulously collected data and photographic evidence supporting scientists' initial hypothesis — that the outbreak stemmed from infected wild animals..." according to Bloomberg's article. (Alternate URL here.)According to the report, which was published in June in the online journal Scientific Reports, minks, civets, raccoon dogs, and other mammals known to harbor coronaviruses were sold in plain sight for years in shops across the city, including the now infamous Huanan wet market, to which many of the earliest Covid cases were traced... [Researcher Xiao Xiao's] animal logs included masked palm civets and raccoon dogs — both involved in the 2003 SARS outbreak — and other species susceptible to coronavirus infections, such as bamboo rats, minks, and hog badgers. Of the 38 species Xiao documented, 31 were protected. Anyone caught violating China's wild animal conservation law faces fines and up to 15 years of imprisonment. But enforcement was lax, as evidenced by the fact that many of the Wuhan shops displayed their wares openly, "caged, stacked and in poor condition," Xiao observed in the report. Xiao estimated that 47,381 wild animals were sold in Wuhan over the survey period. Collaborating with four more scientists (including three from the University of Oxford), Xiao had submitted their manuscript to a journal for publication in February of 2020 — only to have it rejected. "Had the study been made public right away, the search for the origins of the virus might have taken a very different course..." Bloomberg writes:Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals.... As other nations began blaming the Chinese Communist Party for the pandemic, the government grew defensive. It may have been embarrassed that its citizens were still eating wild animals bought in wet markets — a well-known path for zoonotic disease transmission that China tried unsuccessfully to outlaw almost 20 years ago... Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, denied "wildlife wet markets" existed in the country...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What seemed like a small update has, for some, turned into a huge headache," reports ZDNet:Over on Apple's support forum, there are several threads from users complaining that iOS 14.7.1 broke their iPhones, causing a "no service" problem where users are unable to connect to cell service. Ther">e are similar threads on Apple's developer forums as well. While there doesn't seem to be a pattern to which phones are affected, I've seen reports of everything from the iPhone 6 to iPhone 12 affected, and the cause is clear — upgrading to iOS 14.7.1. "Users are saying that restarting the phone, removing the SIM, and even resetting network settings didn't help," according to 9to5Mac (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader antdude). Forbes reports the bug appears to happen when you lose your cellular connection and switch to WiFi calling, "so those living in areas with good reception may never see it. Of course, this scenario also helps to mask the scale of iPhones which might be affected."If you haven't upgraded to iOS 14.7.1 yet, this potentially crippling flaw could (understandably) put you off upgrading. The problem is that the release also contains a critical fix for a new zero-day security flaw...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In November GM recalled 69,000 of its "Bolt" electric cars after five reported fires and two minor injuries. Last month they issued a second recall "after at least two of the electric vehicles that were repaired for a previous problem erupted into flames," CNBC reported. And then Friday the company expanded that recall "due to potential fire risk."The recall expansion is expected to cost the automaker an additional $1 billion, bringing the total to $1.8 billion to replace potentially defective battery modules in the vehicles. GM said about 73,000 vehicles in the U.S. and Canada are being added to the recall from the 2019-2022 model years, including a recently launched larger version of the car called the Bolt EUV... The expanded recall now includes all Bolt EV models ever produced, casting a shadow over GM's first mainstream electric vehicle, as it attempts to transition to exclusively sell EVs by 2035... The expansion follows the companies finding that the batteries for these vehicles may have two manufacturing defects — a torn anode tab and folded separator — present in the same battery cell, which increases the risk of fire. GM has confirmed one fire in the new population of recalled vehicles. That's in addition to at least nine previous confirmed fires in the first round of vehicles that were recalled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Programmer Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a former employee at Loki Software, one of the first companies to port videogames from Microsoft Windows to Linux, according to his Wikipedia page. He's still hosting many Loki software projects at icculus.org, "as well as several new projects created by himself and others." He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement:I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game! You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem. A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader phalse phace tipped us off to a breaking story. Reuters reports:A California judge on Friday ruled that a 2020 ballot measure that exempted ride-share and food delivery drivers from a state labor law is unconstitutional as it infringed on the legislature's power to set standards at the workplace...which makes the entire ballot measure "unenforceable", Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch wrote in the ruling. Gig economy companies including Uber, Lyft, Doordash and Instacart were pushing to keep drivers' independent contractor status, albeit with additional benefits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, Facebook released a report about what content was most viewed by people in the US last quarter. It was the first time it had released such a report. But according to The New York Times, Facebook was working on a similar report for the first quarter of 2021 that it opted not to share because it might have reflected poorly on the company. The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the report, says that the most-viewed link in the first quarter had a headline that could promote COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, which has been an issue on the social media platform. The headline read, "A 'healthy' doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why." The article was published by The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times says. Facebook was working on releasing this report, but executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebook's CMO and VP of analytics, apparently "debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails" and ultimately decided not to publish it, The New York Times reported. "We considered making the report public earlier but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. Stone also clarified Schultz's opinion on if Facebook should release the report, saying that Schultz "advocated for putting out the report."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, cuttlefish appear able to recall the time and place of their meals -- and their capability doesn't decrease as they get older. Ars Technica reports: This latest study focuses on whether cuttlefish have some form of episodic memory -- the ability to recall unique past events with context about what happened, where it happened, and when it happened. Human beings develop this capability around age 4, and our episodic memory declines as we advance into old age. That's in contrast to "semantic memory," our ability to recall general learned knowledge without the context of space and time. Semantic learning in humans has been shown to remain relatively intact with advancing age. Cuttlefish lack a hippocampus, but they do have their own distinctive brain structure and organization, complete with a vertical lobe that shows similarities to the connectivity and function of the human hippocampus -- i.e., learning and memory. Past studies have shown that cuttlefish are sufficiently future-oriented that they can optimize foraging behavior and can remember details of what, where, and when from past forages -- hallmarks of episodic-like memory -- adjusting their strategy in response to changing prey conditions. But does that ability remain constant with age? [Co-author Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge] et al. developed a series of semantic and episodic memory tests for cuttlefish to explore that question. The relatively short life span of cuttlefish (about two years) makes them an excellent candidate for this research. For the experiments, Schnell and her colleagues used 24 common cuttlefish, half of which were young (between 10-12 months old) and half of which were old (22-24 months, apparently the equivalent of a human's 90 years). All had been reared from eggs at the Marine Biological Laboratory and were kept in individual tanks. The team first trained the cuttlefish to respond to visual cues (the waving of black and white flags) by marking specific locations in their respective tanks. As in Schnell's prior work on delayed gratification, the cuttlefish could choose their preferred prey -- in this case, either live grass shrimp or a piece of prawn meat of equal size. Over the next four weeks, the cuttlefish were taught that these two types of prey were available at specific locations (marked by the waving of the flags) after delays of either one hour (for the prawn meat) or three hours (for the preferred grass shrimp). The two feeding locations were unique for each day in order to ensure that the cuttlefish weren't merely learning a pattern. Surprisingly, Schnell et al. found that all the cuttlefish, regardless of age, were able to note which type of prey appeared first at each flagged location and were able to use that observation to figure out where to find their preferred prey at each subsequent feeding. Earlier this year, researchers found that cuttlefish could pass a cephalopod version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test: waiting a bit for their preferred prey rather than settling for a less desirable prey. "Cuttlefish also performed better in a subsequent learning test -- the first time such a link between self-control and intelligence has been found in a non-mammalian species," adds Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is preparing to launch an uncrewed cargo ship to its Tiangong "Heavenly palace" space station in preparation for the arrival of its second human crew this autumn. The Guardian reports: The Long March 7 rocket was delivered to the Wenchang space launch site in Hainan on 16 August, where it will undergo final assembly and testing. It will carry the Tianzhou 3 cargo ship into orbit sometime in mid to late September. Simultaneously, at the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert, the Shenzhou 13 mission is being readied to transport the crew of three astronauts. A launch is planned for October and the astronauts are expected to stay in orbit until April 2022. The flight plan of a cargo ship followed by an astronaut vehicle matches the pattern of the first crew from earlier this year. Those three astronauts are still on Tiangong. They arrived in June and are expected to return to Earth in September.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: India's drug regulator has approved the world's first DNA vaccine against Covid-19 for emergency use. The three-dose ZyCoV-D vaccine prevented symptomatic disease in 66% of those vaccinated, according to an interim study quoted by the vaccine maker Cadila Healthcare. The firm plans to make up to 120 million doses of India's second home-grown vaccine every year. Previous DNA vaccines have worked well in animals but not humans. Cadila Healthcare said it had conducted the largest clinical trial for the vaccine in India so far, involving 28,000 volunteers in more than 50 centers. This is also the first time, the firm claimed, a Covid-19 vaccine had been tested in young people in India -- 1,000 people belonging to the 12-18 age group. The jab was found to be "safe and very well tolerated" in this age group. DNA and RNA are building blocks of life. They are molecules that carry that genetic information which are passed on from parents to children. Like other vaccines, a DNA vaccine, once administered, teaches the body's immune system to fight the real virus. ZyCoV-D uses plasmids or small rings of DNA, that contain genetic information, to deliver the jab between two layers of the skin. The plasmids carry information to the cells to make the "spike protein," which the virus uses to latch on and enter human cells. ZyCov-D is also India's first needle-free Covid-19 jab. It is administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue. Scientists say DNA vaccines are relatively cheap, safe and stable. They can also be stored at higher temperatures -- 2 to 8C. Cadila Healthcare claims that their vaccine had shown "good stability" at 25C for at least three months -- this would help the vaccine to be transported and stored easily.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, Google has published the number of geofence warrants it's historically received from U.S. authorities, providing a rare glimpse into how frequently these controversial warrants are issued. ZDNet's Zack Whittaker reports: The figures, published Thursday, reveal that Google has received thousands of geofence warrants each quarter since 2018, and at times accounted for about one-quarter of all U.S. warrants that Google receives. The data shows that the vast majority of geofence warrants are obtained by local and state authorities, with federal law enforcement accounting for just 4% of all geofence warrants served on the technology giant. According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020. But the figures only provide a small glimpse into the volume of warrants received and did not break down how often it pushes back on overly broad requests. Geofence warrants are also known as "reverse-location" warrants, since they seek to identify people of interest who were in the near vicinity at the time a crime was committed. Police do this by asking a court to order Google, which stores vast amounts of location data to drive its advertising business, to turn over details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time, to help identify potential suspects. Google has long shied away from providing these figures, in part because geofence warrants are largely thought to be unique to Google. Law enforcement has long known that Google stores vast troves of location data on its users in a database called Sensorvault, first revealed by The New York Times in 2019. Google spokesperson Alex Krasov said in a statement: "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement. We developed a process specifically for these requests that is designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An explanation for Apple's controversial decision to begin scanning iPhones for CSAM has been found in a 2020 statement by Apple's anti-fraud chief. Eric Friedman stated, in so many words, that "we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn." The revelation does, however, raise the question: How could Apple have known this if it wasn't scanning iCloud accounts...? 9to5Mac reports: The iMessage thread was spotted by the Verge as it works its way through the internal emails, messages, and other materials handed over by Apple as part of the discovery process in the Epic Games lawsuit. Ironically, Friedman actually suggests that Facebook does a better job of detecting it than Apple did: "The spotlight at Facebook etc. is all on trust and safety (fake accounts, etc). In privacy, they suck. Our priorities are the inverse. Which is why we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn, etc." A fellow exec queries this, asking whether it can really be true: "Really? I mean, is there a lot of this in our ecosystem? I thought there were even more opportunities for bad actors on other file sharing systems." Friedman responds with the single word, "Yes." The document is unsurprisingly labeled "Highly confidential -- attorneys' eyes only." The stunning revelation may well be explained by the fact that iCloud photo storage is on by default, even if it's just the paltry 5GB the company gives everyone as standard. This means the service may be the most-used cloud service for photos -- in contrast to competing ones where users have to opt in. Apple has said that it has been looking at the CSAM problem for some time, and was trying to figure out a privacy-protecting way to detect it. It may well be this specific conversation that led the company to prioritize these efforts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The nation's six biggest names in the business (which Leichtman Research says accounts for about 95% of the market) collectively lost a little over 1.1 million customers during the three-month stretch ending in June, slowing down Q1's cord-cutting pace of more than 1.5 million, but continuing the bigger-picture cord-cutting cadence that's been a problem for the industry since 2014. Fool.com reports: AT&T led the way with its loss of 443,000 subscribers as its flagship platform DirecTV undergoes the major disruption of changing ownership hands, although the satellite-based service was bleeding customers well before the sale of DirecTV was even considered. No outfit gained subscribers, though, even including the better-established cable television brands like Comcast's Xfinity and Charter Communications' Spectrum. [...] Market research company eMarketer estimates the number of conventional cable customers in the U.S. will continue to slide at least through 2024 when the number of non-pay-TV households is likely to eclipse the number of pay-TV households. As was noted, though, people aren't spending less time in front of their television sets. They're just watching in a different way. Streaming is quickly becoming the preferred way of consuming video. [...] Last quarter, streaming services of all ilks added on the order of 44.7 million active users/subscribers. Take that number with a grain of salt for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which is it's a worldwide number and not just a U.S. figure. The other reason to not read too much into this number is it requires multiple streaming services to fully replace a canceled cable package. Recent data from Parks Associates indicates around half the U.S. households that have cut the cord now pay for four or more streaming options. Still, in that the United States remains the key market for most of these streaming brands -- like Disney+, Discovery+, Pluto TV, and HBO Max -- it's difficult to not connect the clear demise of conventional cable television with popularization of streaming alternatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google's ambitions in the car led to Android Auto being redesigned a couple of years ago, mostly to positive feedback. However, the version of Android Auto on phone screens was meant to shut down at the time and has been on life support ever since. Now, that version has stopped working for some users. The aptly named "Android Auto for Phone Screens" was launched in 2019 as Google was forced to delay Google Assistant Driving Mode. That feature, which finally started rolling out in 2020, continued into earlier this year, and has expanded since, was supposed to replace the experience on phone screens. At the time, Google called this app a "stopgap" for users who needed an in-car experience but lacked a vehicle compatible with Android Auto. In speaking with Google, we are able to confirm that Android Auto for Phone Screens is, indeed, shutting down with the release of Android 12. The experience will not be available for users on Android 12, but still on older versions of the OS. Google says that Assistant Driving Mode will be "the built-in mobile driving experience" on Android 12. Google's full statement follows: "Google Assistant driving mode is our next evolution of the mobile driving experience. For the people who use Android Auto in supported vehicles, that experience isn't going away. For those who use the on phone experience (Android Auto mobile app), they will be transitioned to Google Assistant driving mode. Starting with Android 12, Google Assistant driving mode will be the built-in mobile driving experience. We have no further details to share at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Darth Technoid shares a report from Electrek: At its AI Day, Tesla unveiled its Dojo supercomputer technology while flexing its growing in-house chip design talent. The automaker claims to have developed the fastest AI training machine in the world. For years now, Tesla has been teasing the development of a new supercomputer in-house optimized for neural net video training. Tesla is handling an insane amount of video data from its fleet of over 1 million vehicles, which it uses to train its neural nets. The automaker found itself unsatisfied with current hardware options to train its computer vision neural nets and believed it could do better internally. Over the last two years, CEO Elon Musk has been teasing the development of Tesla's own supercomputer called "Dojo." Last year, he even teased that Tesla's Dojo would have a capacity of over an exaflop, which is one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS. It could potentially makes Dojo the new most powerful supercomputer in the world. Ganesh Venkataramanan, Tesla's senior director of Autopilot hardware and the leader of the Dojo project, led the presentation. The engineer started by unveiling Dojo's D1 chip, which is using 7 nanometer technology and delivers breakthrough bandwidth and compute performance. Tesla designed the chip to "seamlessly connect without any glue to each other," and the automaker took advantage of that by connecting 500,000 nodes together. It adds the interface, power, and thermal management, and it results in what it calls a training tile. The result is a 9 PFlops training tile with 36TB per second of bandwight in a less than 1 cubic foot format. But now it still has to form a compute cluster using those training tiles in order to truly build the first Dojo supercomputer. Tesla hasn't put that system together yet, but CEO Elon Musk claimed that it will be operational next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of workers at the personal styling service Stitch Fix have quit their jobs after incoming CEO Elizabeth Spaulding announced earlier this month that employees would no longer be allowed to work any hours they choose, according to interviews with half a dozen former and current employees. BuzzFeed News reports: The changes to the company's scheduling policies led to an exodus of around a third of its stylists, part- and full-time employees who work from home selecting clothing items for customers. "It was a gut punch," said Kara Calagera, who used the extra income from Stitch Fix to pay her mortgage and car insurance. Keeping the job "wasn't feasible without the flexibility." For years, Stitch Fix has attracted employees who -- because they have part-time jobs, stay home with kids, or have a disability -- needed flexible, remote work. Until now, the company allowed employees who could provide their own computer and internet to work from home, some for as little as five hours per week, recommending and sending Stitch Fix clothing to customers at any time of day. But in an email sent to staff earlier this month, the company informed stylists that employees would now be required to work at least 20 hours per week on a set schedule during regular business hours; their log-on and log-off times would be tracked, and stylists would at least temporarily no longer be allowed to become full-time employees. Those who couldn't work within the new rules were offered a $1,000 bonus to quit, provided they agreed to sign a nondisclosure agreement that promised, among other things, they would not sue the company. Some employees, citing the company's expanding use of computer-generated clothing recommendations, said that the recent workforce reductions made them feel like their jobs have shifted from styling clients to training an algorithm that will replace them. Stitch Fix acknowledged that recent changes were inconvenient for some staffers but said the shift would help the company expand the variety of "styling services" it offers. "Our Stylists are instrumental in building relationships with clients and creating the highly personalized experience Stitch Fix is known for," a spokesperson said via email. But employees across the company are working together to track how many have quit since the August 2 announcement, connecting on social media and sharing internal staffing numbers in each region: a tally from earlier this week found that around 1,500 stylists had left following the policy change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Restore Privacy: A well-known threat actor with a long list of previous breaches is selling private data that was allegedly collected from 70 million AT&T customers. We analyzed the data and found it to include social security numbers, date of birth, and other private information. The hacker is asking $1 million for the entire database (direct sell) and has provided RestorePrivacy with exclusive information for this report. The threat actor goes by the name of ShinyHunters and was also behind other previous exploits that affected Microsoft, Tokopedia, Pixlr, Mashable, Minted, and more. The hacker posted the leak on an underground hacking forum earlier today, along with a sample of the data that we analyzed. AT&T has initially denied the breach in a statement to RestorePrivacy. The hacker has responded by saying, "they will keep denying until I leak everything." "Based on our investigation yesterday, the information that appeared in an internet chat room does not appear to have come from our systems," AT&T said in a statement. When pressed harder and asked specifically if there was no AT&T breach, the company said: "Based on our investigation, no, we don't believe this was a breach of AT&T systems." "Given this information did not come from us, we can't speculate on where it came from or whether it is valid," they added. The hacker says they're willing to reach "an agreement" with AT&T to remove the data from sale. The possible breach of AT&T follows a T-Mobile hack from earlier this week, which impacts 40 million records of former and prospective customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greenland just experienced another massive melt event this year. But this time, something unusual happened. It also rained at the summit of the ice sheet, [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] nearly two miles above sea level. From a report: Around 6 a.m. Saturday, staff at the National Science Foundation's Summit Station woke up to raindrops and water beads condensed on the station's windows. Rain occasionally falls on the ice sheet, but no staff member recalls rain -- even a light drizzle -- ever occurring at the summit before. "Basically, the entire day of Saturday, it was raining every hour that [staff] was making weather observations," said Zoe Courville, a research engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. "And that's the first time that's been observed happening at the station." The rain coincided with warmer temperatures that caused extensive melting across the ice sheet. Some areas were more than 18 degrees Celsius warmer than the average temperature. At the summit, temperatures peaked at 33 degrees Fahrenheit -- within a degree above freezing. The melt extent peaked at 337,000 square miles on Saturday, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was slightly smaller than the melting event that occurred this summer on July 28, which covered 340,000 square miles of the ice sheet, but it is still significant. Only 2012 and 2021 had multiple melt events covering more than 309,000 square miles in a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a system that would scan iPhone and iPad photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The announcement sparked a civil liberties firestorm, and Apple's own employees have been expressing alarm. The company insists reservations about the system are rooted in "misunderstandings." We disagree. We wrote the only peer-reviewed publication on how to build a system like Apple's -- and we concluded the technology was dangerous. We're not concerned because we misunderstand how Apple's system works. The problem is, we understand exactly how it works. Our research project began two years ago, as an experimental system to identify CSAM in end-to-end-encrypted online services. As security researchers, we know the value of end-to-end encryption, which protects data from third-party access. But we're also horrified that CSAM is proliferating on encrypted platforms. And we worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM. We sought to explore a possible middle ground, where online services could identify harmful content while otherwise preserving end-to-end encryption. The concept was straightforward: If someone shared material that matched a database of known harmful content, the service would be alerted. If a person shared innocent content, the service would learn nothing. People couldn't read the database or learn whether content matched, since that information could reveal law enforcement methods and help criminals evade detection. But we encountered a glaring problem. Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn't restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser. About the authors of this report: Jonathan Mayer is an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. He previously served as technology counsel to then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris and as chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau. Anunay Kulshrestha is a graduate researcher at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy and a PhD candidate in the department of computer science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you're working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. From a report: The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar's settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day's dates. Available work locations include "Office," "Home," "Unspecified," or "Somewhere else." According to Google, the option is being added so it's "easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations in a hybrid workplace." It follows a surge in the popularity of home and hybrid working due to the pandemic. This has meant employees increasingly have to keep track not just of people's working hours, but also their location, when planning in-person meetings and other events. Google Calendar's new feature should help here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's planned $40 billion takeover of chipmaker Arm should get a longer antitrust probe, British regulators warned after rejecting potential concessions. From a report: In the first reaction on the deal from a major antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement that it was concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much control over semiconductors used in data center services, smart devices and gaming consoles. Lengthy regulatory reviews can add risk to closing a deal that looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months. Nvidia's move to buy Arm from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. initially raised antitrust concerns from rivals and customers such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google over how Nvidia might control Arm's licenses for essential chip technology. U.K. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden must still decide whether the CMA should open an in-depth probe. Dowden is also separately weighing whether the deal should be blocked over potential risks to national security. The U.K. is leaning toward a veto, according to a person familiar with the matter earlier this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly unredacted sections of Epic's antitrust complaint against Google reveal new details on the lengths to which Google went to undermine third-party app stores on the Android platform. From a report: According to the new text, starting in 2019, Google ran a "Premier Device Program" that gave Android phone makers a greater share of search revenue than they would normally receive. In exchange, the OEMs agreed to ship their devices without any third-party app stores preinstalled. Specifically, they followed a rule that prohibited "apps with APK install privileges" without Google's approval, leaving the Play Store as the only built-in digital marketplace for software. As noted by Leah Nylen, products that qualified as a Premier Device would receive a 12 percent share of Google search revenue compared to the 8 percent they'd normally earn. Google sweetened the deal further for companies like LG and Motorola, offering them between 3 and 6 percent of what customers spent in the Google Play Store on their devices. "Google's Premier Device Program was not publicly known, and was not known to Epic, before Google recently began producing relevant documents in this litigation," Epic's lawyers wrote in the complaint. "Google has sought to conceal its most restrictive anticompetitive conduct by, among other things, including in the agreements themselves a provision restricting signatories from making 'any public statement regarding [the] Agreement without the other party's prior written approval.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has passed a personal data protection law, state media Xinhua reports. TechCrunch: The law, called the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), is set to take effect on November 1. It was proposed last year -- signalling an intent by China's communist leaders to crack down on unscrupulous data collection in the commercial sphere by putting legal restrictions on user data collection. The new law requires app makers to offer users options over how their information is or isn't used, such as the ability not to be targeted for marketing purposes or to have marketing based on personal characteristics, according to Xinhua. It also places requirements on data processors to obtain consent from individuals in order to be able to process sensitive types of data such as biometrics, medical and health data, financial information and location data. While apps that illegally process user data risk having their service suspended or terminated. Any Western companies doing business in China which involves processing citizens' personal data must grapple with the law's extraterritorial jurisdiction -- meaning foreign companies will face regulatory requirements such as the need to assign local representatives and report to supervisory agencies in China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Eating fructose appears to alter cells in the digestive tract in a way that enables it to take in more nutrients, according to a preclinical study from investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. These changes could help to explain the well-known link between rising fructose consumption around the world and increased rates of obesity and certain cancers. The research, published August 18 in Nature, focused on the effect of a high-fructose diet on villi, the thin, hairlike structures that line the inside of the small intestine. Villi expand the surface area of the gut and help the body to absorb nutrients, including dietary fats, from food as it passes through the digestive tract. The study found that mice that were fed diets that included fructose had villi that were 25 percent to 40 percent longer than those of mice that were not fed fructose. Additionally, the increase in villus length was associated with increased nutrient absorption, weight gain and fat accumulation in the animals. After observing that the villi were longer, the team wanted to determine whether those villi were functioning differently. So they put mice into three groups: a normal low-fat diet, a high-fat diet, and a high-fat diet with added fructose. Not only did the mice in the third group develop longer villi, but they became more obese than the mice receiving the high-fat diet without fructose. The researchers took a closer look at the changes in metabolism and found that a specific metabolite of fructose, called fructose-1-phosphate, was accumulating at high levels. This metabolite interacted with a glucose-metabolizing enzyme called pyruvate kinase, to alter cell metabolism and promote villus survival and elongation. When pyruvate kinase or the enzyme that makes fructose-1-phospate were removed, fructose had no effect on villus length. Previous animal studies have suggested that this metabolite of fructose also aids in tumor growth. From an evolutionary standpoint, the findings make sense. "In mammals, especially hibernating mammals in temperate climates, you have fructose being very available in the fall months when the fruit is ripe," said one of the researchers. "Eating a lot of fructose may help these animals to absorb and convert more nutrients to fat, which they need to get through the winter." Humans, on the other hand, did not evolve to eat the amount of fructose they consume now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Temple writes via MIT Technology Review: In 1987, dozens of nations adopted the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals used in refrigerants, solvents, and other industrial products that were breaking down Earth's protective ozone layer. It was a landmark achievement, the most successful example of nations pulling together in the face of a complex, collective threat to the environment. Three decades later, the atmospheric ozone layer is slowly recovering, preventing additional levels of ultraviolet radiation that cause cancer, eye damage, and other health problems. But the virtues of the agreement, ultimately ratified by every country, are more widespread than its impact on the ozone hole. Many of those chemicals are also powerful greenhouse gases. So as a major side benefit, their reduction over the last three decades has already eased warming and could cut as much as 1C off worldwide average temperatures by 2050. Now, a new study in Nature highlights yet another crucial, if inadvertent, bonus: reducing the strain that ultraviolet radiation from the sun puts on plants, inhibiting photosynthesis and slowing growth. The Montreal Protocol avoided "a catastrophic collapse of forests and croplands" that would have added hundreds of billions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, Anna Harper, a senior lecturer in climate science at the University of Exeter and a coauthor of the paper, said in an email. The Nature paper, published August 18, found that if production of ozone-depleting substances had continued ticking up 3% each year, the additional UV radiation would have curtailed the growth of trees, grasses, ferns, flowers, and crops across the globe. The world's plants would absorb less carbon dioxide, releasing as much as 645 billion tons of carbon from the land to the atmosphere this century. That could drive global warming up to 1C higher over the same period. It would also have devastating effects on agricultural yields and food supplies around the globe. The impact of rising CFCs levels on plants, plus their direct warming effect in the atmosphere, could have pushed temperatures around 2.5C higher this century, the researchers found. That would all come on top of the already dire warming projections for 2100.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times, written by Tara Parker-Pope: Covid precautions have turned many parts of our world into a giant salad bar, with plastic barriers separating sales clerks from shoppers, dividing customers at nail salons and shielding students from their classmates. Intuition tells us a plastic shield would be protective against germs. But scientists who study aerosols, air flow and ventilation say that much of the time, the barriers don't help and probably give people a false sense of security. And sometimes the barriers can make things worse. Research suggests that in some instances, a barrier protecting a clerk behind a checkout counter may redirect the germs to another worker or customer. Rows of clear plastic shields, like those you might find in a nail salon or classroom, can also impede normal air flow and ventilation. Under normal conditions in stores, classrooms and offices, exhaled breath particles disperse, carried by air currents and, depending on the ventilation system, are replaced by fresh air roughly every 15 to 30 minutes. But erecting plastic barriers can change air flow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation and create "dead zones," where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated. There are some situations in which the clear shields might be protective, but it depends on a number of variables. The barriers can stop big droplets ejected during coughs and sneezes from splattering on others, which is why buffets and salad bars often are equipped with transparent sneeze guards above the food. But Covid-19 spreads largely through unseen aerosol particles. While there isn't much real-world research on the impact of transparent barriers and the risk of disease, scientists in the United States and Britain have begun to study the issue, and the findings are not reassuring. A study published in June and led by researchers from Johns Hopkins, for example, showed that desk screens in classrooms were associated with an increased risk of coronavirus infection. In a Massachusetts school district, researchers found (PDF) that plexiglass dividers with side walls in the main office were impeding air flow. A study looking at schools in Georgia found that desk barriers had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus compared with ventilation improvements and masking. Before the pandemic, a study published in 2014 found that office cubicle dividers were among the factors that may have contributed to disease transmission during a tuberculosis outbreak in Australia. British researchers have conducted modeling studies simulating what happens when a person on one side of a barrier -- like a customer in a store -- exhales particles while speaking or coughing under various ventilation conditions. The screen is more effective when the person coughs, because the larger particles have greater momentum and hit the barrier. But when a person speaks, the screen doesn't trap the exhaled particles -- which just float around it. While the store clerk may avoid an immediate and direct hit, the particles are still in the room, posing a risk to the clerk and others who may inhale the contaminated air. [...] While further research is needed to determine the effect of adding transparent shields around school or office desks, all the aerosol experts interviewed agreed that desk shields were unlikely to help and were likely to interfere with the normal ventilation of the room. Depending on the conditions, the plastic shields could cause viral particles to accumulate in the room. The report did mention a study (PDF) by researchers with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati that tested different sized transparent barriers in an isolation room using a cough simulator. It found that "under the right conditions, taller shields, above 'cough height,' stopped about 70 percent of the particles from reaching the particle counter on the other side, which is where the store or salon worker would be sitting or standing." However, the research was conducted under highly controlled conditions and took place in an isolation room with consistent ventilation rates that didn't "accurately reflect all real-world situations," according to the study's authors. It also "didn't consider that workers and customers move around, that other people could be in the room breathing the redirected particles and that many stores and classrooms have several stations with acrylic barriers, not just one, that impede normal air flow."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a tweet from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the brokerage firm is planning to purchase more than $500 million worth of cryptocurrency on its balance sheet. It's also going to be investing 10% of all future profits in crypto. The Block reports: "I expect this percentage to keep growing over time as this crypto economy matures," Armstrong said. A blog penned by Coinbase's chief financial officer Alesia Haas indicated that the purchase would include Ethereum as well as other assets tied to the decentralized financial world. "We have committed to invest $500M of our cash and cash equivalents," Haas wrote. "We will become the first publicly traded company to hold Ethereum, Proof of Stake assets, DeFi tokens, and many other crypto assets supported for trading on our platform, in addition to Bitcoin, on our balance sheet," she added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Tesla's AI Day event, Elon Musk revealed a humanoid robot called Tesla Bot that utilizes the same artificial intelligence that powers the company's autonomous vehicles. CNET reports: Musk revealed few details about the Slenderman-looking Tesla Bot outside of a few PowerPoint slides but reiterated some of his beliefs about human labor. "They can use all of the same tools that we use in the car," Musk noted, suggesting the robot could be told to "go to the store and get ... the following groceries." A prototype would likely be ready next year, Musk said. "It's intended to be friendly," Musk joked, "and navigate through a world built for humans."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Twitter, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay shared a teaser video for "the beautifully redesigned Paint app," with the promise that Windows Insider Program members would be able to start testing the app for themselves in the near future. PCMag reports: The video is light on details -- which isn't all that surprising given that eight seconds of its 18-second runtime are devoted to the intro and outro -- but it does show off a new user interface with dark mode support that matches other Windows 11 apps. Windows Central also noticed something missing from Paint's new interface: An option to edit the current file in Paint 3D. Could this mean that Paint has emerged victorious from the 4-year-long battle that's raged between the competing apps? The conflict began when Microsoft released Paint 3D alongside the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, then announced just a few months later that it was planning to deprecate the original Paint with the Fall Creators Update. Many feared that would be the end of Paint, but Microsoft later clarified that it was simply moving the app to the Windows Store instead of bundling it with Windows 10. It then decided to continue shipping it with the operating system anyway. It seemed like Paint and Paint 3D would coexist indefinitely. That changed again in March when Microsoft stopped bundling Paint 3D with Windows 10 and moved it to the Microsoft Store instead. The tables had finally turned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dom Hofmann, one of Vine's founders, has a new project called Supdrive. He calls it an "on-chain fantasy game console" that plays classic-style games with NFTs acting as a sort of virtual cartridge. The Verge reports: In a Discord set up for Supdrive, Hofmann wrote that the games will be NFTs, running on virtual firmware. The fact that games will be released as NFTs means that there will only be so many "editions" or copies available. Hofmann also says that each copy of a given game will be unique, with players getting different color palettes, difficulty levels, and more. Hofmann compares Supdrive to another blockchain project, Art Blocks, while describing it, which may give us an idea of what it'll actually be like. The gist of Art Blocks is that it lets creators make programs to procedurally generate art, which is then stored on the blockchain. The programs will always create the same art for a given seed, but changing the seed changes what the art ends up looking like (Minecraft players may be familiar with this sort of system). Then, people buy NFTs for an Art Block project, which will contain a seed, letting them generate that art. This seems to fit well with what Hofmann is describing, where an on-chain console will play unique games. The details, though, like how exactly it will work, how many copies of each game will be available, and how much they'll cost, are all to be announced. Hofmann's post does say that the plan is to let the community develop games for the Supdrive, if the project ends up working out. He also plans on upgrading the console's abilities, allowing for more advanced games (the initial set of games will be "old-school arcade style"). The first game, made by Hofmann, is called Origin. Supdrive also has a sort of meta game, with its users being split up into Pokemon-esque Red, Green, and Blue teams. Hofmann's announcement post says that which team you're on could have an effect on the game you're playing. For now, though, the different color teams are mostly memeing at each other in the Discord. In the Discord chat, Hofmann said he was aiming for an October launch for the project. He's also said that he'll be doing updates "every week or so" leading up to the launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three of every five voters in Oregon and Washington support a regional, high-speed rail line, according to a poll released by proponents of a proposed high-speed rail system to carry passengers from Eugene, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C. GeekWire reports: The survey, conducted by California-based FM3 and released by rail-advocacy coalition Fast Forward Cascadia, shows that 43% of voters surveyed from the two states strongly support high-speed rail and another 19% somewhat support it. Conversely, a total of 27% either strongly oppose or somewhat oppose a new high-speed rail project. Rachel Smith, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, said the polling indicates the necessary political support for additional modes of mass transportation in the Pacific Northwest. Broady, Northwest voters appear highly concerned about traffic, transportation infrastructure, and climate. And they see high-speed rail as a partial solution to those issues, the data indicates. In 2019, Microsoft gave $223,667 to study the possibility of building a high-speed rail line connecting Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, and Portland, bringing the company's total donation to study the feasibility of the idea to $573,667. If completed, trains would hit speeds of 250 mph and carry up to 3.3 million passengers annually in the Pacific Northwest, according to one initial study. A study completed in 2018 estimated the project cost would range from $24 billion to $42 billion. Rachel Smith said with the federal government currently willing to pour billions of dollars into Washington's infrastructure with the new legislation approved by the U.S. Senate, the time to push a project along is now. "There are significant resources becoming available," she said. "The (decisions) we make now we wish we could have made 20 years ago." Smith said the backers of the Cascadia line have closely analyzed mistakes made by the other projects and have a good accounting of the potential pitfalls. "We have confidence we can deliver on this project," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future. Gazing into their crystal ball, the researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business. They believe that this approach could result in greater lending to borrowers who would potentially be denied by traditional financial institutions. At its heart, the paper is trying to wrestle with the dawning notion that the institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers. The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack. [...] But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It's black boxes all the way down. The researchers acknowledge that there will be privacy and policy concerns related to incorporating this kind of soft-data into credit analysis. And they do little to explain how this might work in practice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon will soon open its own department stores, with a focus on apparel, electronics and household goods. The Seattle Times reports: The first stores are expected to be located in Ohio and California and will be about 30,000 square feet in size, which would be smaller than the typical department store, the Journal reported. The e-commerce giant, which last year had $386 billion in sales, has been expanding into physical retail in recent years, opening grocery stores, book shops and specialty pop-ups around the country. Analysts say its latest foray -- while unexpected -- provides an opportunity to reach customers in a new way. "More stores bolster Amazon's whole ecosystem and flywheel," said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, a research and consulting firm that tracks the retail market. "They also allow Amazon to gather data and to understand consumer preferences better -- understanding that can, in turn, be used to improve the whole proposition." Traditional department stores, he noted, have been declining for years because of a "failure of innovate and adapt." Stores such as Macy's, J.C. Penney and Kohl's, which made up about 15% of retail sales in 1985, now account for less than 3%, Saunders said. The pandemic has created new challenges for the nation's department stores, tipping a number of storied chains, including Neiman Marcus, J.C. Penney and Lord & Taylor into bankruptcy. Nearly 200 department stores have permanently closed since last year, and another 800 -- or about half the country's remaining mall-based locations -- are expected to shutter by the end of 2025, according to commercial real estate firm Green Street. But for Amazon, this could be an opportunity to shake things up: Its 30,000-square-foot department stores would be about one-third the size of a traditional mall anchor, mirroring plans by many of the country's retailers to open smaller, more easily-accessible stores. "If it gets rolled out in a serious way, it is very bad news for traditional department stores," Saunders said. "The lack of innovation by traditional department stores means their defenses are very weak so the last thing they need is to fend off a new invader to their space." "The move makes sense," says Bloomberg Intelligence senior retail analyst Poonam Goyal. "It'll extend Amazon's reach beyond Amazon Go, Whole Foods and Kohl's while also opening up more distribution points. At 30,000 square feet, the locations will be more appealing than traditional on-mall department stores that are three times bigger. Off-mall strip centers could be sought, given their better traffic profile."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage. The BBC reports: The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further. Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage. Until now, Toyota had managed to avoid doing the same, with the exception of extending summer shutdowns by a week in France the Czech Republic and Turkey. New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago. The decision to reduce output now has been precipitated by the resurgence of coronavirus cases across Asia hitting supplies. The company will make some cuts in August at its plants in Japan and elsewhere. The bulk of the cuts -- 360,000 -- will come in September and affect factories in Asia and the US. The aim for Toyota as a whole is to make up for any lost volume by the end of 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business. The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they're consistent with OnlyFans' policy, the company said Thursday. The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company. "In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and the continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines," OnlyFans said. OnlyFans has attracted more than 130 million users by giving online creators a platform to charge their fans for photos and videos. Many of its most-popular creators post nude photos and videos, and it has been praised for giving sex workers a safer place to do their jobs. But sex work still has a stigma. And OnlyFans is trying to raise money from outside investors at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure. "These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers," says OnlyFans in a statement. "We will be sharing more details in the coming days and we will actively support and guide our creators through this change in content guidelines..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's first customer delivery of "green steel" produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer. From a report: The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel. Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU's plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company -- despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed "Games Futures." From a report: The "need-to-know" document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed "the world's largest games platform." Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays -- all tied together by Google services and a "low-cost universal portable game controller" that gamers can pair with any device, even a TV.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. From a report: Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020. Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine's plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him money. To help sell the idea that he really could help people make bets, Levine reportedly played a recording of casino sounds while he was on calls with victims (which he made using a Las Vegas phone number). Levine came under investigation by the FBI, but was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost. He eventually ended up in Poland, where he was arrested in 2008. There was, however, a legal battle over whether he could be extradited to the US, which continued until late 2011. By the time Polish courts had decided that he could be extradited, Levine had already slipped away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those who don't think Zoom meetings are a good enough substitute for the real thing, Facebook has another idea: a virtual reality app that lets you and your coworkers feel like you're sitting around a table in a conference room. From a report: On Thursday, Facebook unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a free app for users of its Oculus Quest 2 headset, a device that starts at $299. The app stands out as the company's most ambitious effort yet to enable groups to socialize in VR and move the still niche medium beyond entertainment uses such as gaming. Workrooms allows up to 16 VR headset users to meet in a virtual conference room, with each of them represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears as just an upper body floating slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 participants in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video callers who appear in a grid-like flat screen inside the virtual meeting room. Headset-wearing meeting participants can use their actual fingers and hands to gesticulate in VR, and their avatars' mouths appear to move in lifelike ways while they speak. A virtual whiteboard lets people share pictures or make presentations."The pandemic in the last 18 months has only given us greater confidence in the importance of this as a technology," Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, said while addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people on Tuesday. He said Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok's plans to collect biometric identifiers from its users has prompted concern among U.S. lawmakers, who are demanding the company reveal exactly what information it collects and what it plans to do with that data. From a report: In a letter sent earlier this month addressed to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune, (R-SD) say they are "alarmed" by the recent change to TikTok's privacy policy, which allows the company to "automatically collect biometric data, including certain physical and behavioral characteristics from video content posted by its users." TechCrunch first reported details of the new privacy policy back in June, when TikTok said it will seek "required permissions" to collect "faceprints and voiceprints" where required by law, but failed to elaborate on whether it's considering federal law, states laws, or both (only a handful of U.S. states have biometric privacy laws, including Illinois, Washington, California, Texas and New York). Klobuchar and Thune's letter asks TikTok to explicitly explain what constitutes a "faceprint" and "voiceprint," as well as to explain how this data will be used and how long it will be retained. The senators also quizzed TikTok on whether any data is gathered for users under the age of 18; whether it makes any inferences about its users based on the biometric data it collects; and to provide a list of all third parties that have access to the data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter on Thursday urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children's messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse. From a report: "Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children," the groups wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. The largest campaign to date over an encryption issue at a single company was organized by the U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). Some overseas signatories in particular are worried about the impact of the changes in nations with different legal systems, including some already hosting heated fights over encryption and privacy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. antitrust officials on Thursday refiled their monopoly lawsuit against Facebook, seeking to salvage the landmark case that a judge threw out in June. From a report: The Federal Trade Commission filed the new complaint in federal court in Washington, alleging that Facebook violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp in order to eliminate them as competitors. The agency is trying to revive the case after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in June dismissed it, saying the agency failed to provide enough detail to support its claim that Facebook has a monopoly in the social-media market. Boasberg had given the FTC 30 days to fix the error and refile, and the commission won an extension until Aug. 19. The Facebook case, first filed in December, presents an early test for FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was named head of the agency in June by President Joe Biden. Khan is a leading advocate for taking a more forceful antitrust stance against companies and is already taking steps to bolster the agency's authority. Facebook is seeking to bar Khan from participating in the case, arguing that her academic writing about the company and her work on the House antitrust panel, which investigated Facebook and other tech platforms, showed she is biased.Read more of this story at Slashdot.