Slashdot

The chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday called on Congress to give the agency more authority to better police cryptocurrency trading, lending and platforms, a "Wild West" he said is riddled with fraud and investor risk. Reuters reports: Gary Gensler said the crypto market involves many tokens which may be unregistered securities and leaves prices open to manipulation and millions of investors vulnerable to risks. "This asset class is rife with fraud, scams and abuse in certain applications," Gensler told a global conference. "We need additional Congressional authorities to prevent transactions, products and platforms from falling between regulatory cracks." The industry has been waiting with bated breath to see how Gensler, a Democratic appointee who took the SEC helm in April, will approach oversight of the market, which he has previously said should be brought within traditional financial regulation. On Tuesday, Gensler provided more insight on his thinking, saying he would like Congress to give the SEC the power to oversee cryptocurrency exchanges, which are not currently within the SEC's remit. He also called on lawmakers to give the SEC more power to oversee crypto lending, and platforms like peer-to-peer decentralized finance (DeFi) sites that allow lenders and borrowers to transact in cryptocurrencies without traditional banks. "If we don't address these issues, I worry a lot of people will be hurt."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Amazon illegally prohibited an employee from giving workers pro-union literature, confiscated that literature, and gave workers the impression that their organizing activity was being surveilled at the company's Staten Island fulfillment center in New York, according to National Labor Relations Board charges and other documentation reviewed by Motherboard. An NLRB investigation found that Amazon illegally prohibited Connor Spence, a Staten Island employee involved in union organizing, from distributing pro-union literature in a break room on May 16 -- and then confiscated the literature -- also in violation of U.S. labor law, according to evidence provided by the NLRB to the union's attorney. Connor Spence, a 25-year-old warehouse worker in Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, who filed the unfair labor practice charge, told Motherboard that on May 16, he was in the break room distributing leaflets about unions and copies of a notice that Amazon had to post in a Queens warehouse for violating workers' union rights, when an Amazon security guard approached him and told him he did not have permission to distribute the leaflets. "He took the union literature away and wouldn't give it back," Spence told Motherboard. "I filed the charge so that there's accountability in place that prevents them from doing this in the future." [...] "Amazon is very obviously anti-union. They cross the line a lot when it comes to stopping workers from unionizing," Spence said. "Unfortunately labor law isn't very strong in our country, but I'm hoping Amazon cares about its image and these stains on their record." "The finding comes on the same day as an NLRB officer in Alabama released a report recommending the rerun of a union election in an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama," adds Motherboard. "The NLRB's report on the Bessemer election found that Amazon illegally discouraged labor organizing, in part by pushing post office officials to install a mailbox outside the warehouse where workers were urged to drop their mail-in ballots, which an NLRB officer wrote 'destroyed the laboratory conditions and justifies a second election.'" "The NLRB investigation also found that Amazon illegally created the impression of surveillance of workers' organizing activity at JFK8 on May 24."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three-and-half months after launching the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, Apple is finally breaking it out from its iMac bundle. The accessory is now available as a standalone through Apple Stores and the company's site. From a report: There are two versions: the standard and a longer model with a numeric keypad (pretty much what the company offers with all of its Magic Keyboards), running $149 and $179, respectively. There's also a $99 version that keeps the new rounded, compact design, but drops the Touch ID in favor of a key that locks the system. But where's the fun in that? All of the models have keys devoted to Spotlight, Dictation, Do Not Disturb and Emoji.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, Apple rolled out three new graphics card modules for the Intel-based Mac Pro, all based on AMD's Radeon Pro W6000 series GPU. From a report: (Apple posted a Mac Pro performance white paper [PDF] to celebrate.) The new modules (in Apple's MPX format) come in three variants, with a Radeon Pro W6800X, two W6800X GPUs, and the W6900X. Each module also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 port to the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro supports two MPX modules, so you could pop in two of the dual-GPU modules to max out performance. They can connect using AMD's Infinity Fabric Link, which can connect up to four GPUs to communicate with one another via a super-fast connection with much more bandwidth than is available via the PCIe bus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RoccamOccam writes: For the sixth-year, Rust is the most loved language, while Python is the most wanted language for its fifth-year in Stack Overflow's 2021 survey of 80,000 developers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five social media giants failed to remove 84% of antisemitic posts in May and June -- and Facebook performed the worst despite announcing new rules to tackle the problem, a new report finds. Axios: The Center for Countering Digital Hatred (CCDH) notes in its study that it reported 714 posts containing "anti-Jewish hatred" to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and TikTok -- which were collectively viewed 7.3 million times. These "clearly violated" company policies, according to the CCDH. "As a result of their failure to enforce their own rules, social media platforms like Facebook have become safe places to spread racism and propaganda against Jews," states the report, titled "Failure to Act." Facebook removed 14 out of 129 posts reported to it (10.9%); Twitter removed 15 of 137 reports (11%); TikTok took down 22 of 119 posts reported (18.5%); Instagram acted in 52 of 277 of cases (18.8%) and YouTube pulled 11 of the 52 posts it was alerted to (21.2%). "Extremist anti-Jewish hate is not acted on: platforms failed to act on 80% of posts containing Holocaust denial, 74% of posts alleging the blood libel, 70% of racist caricatures of Jewish people and 70% of neo-Nazi posts," per a statement from the CCDH, a nongovernmental organization based in the U.S. and United Kingdom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has informed employees that it will require proof of vaccination for anyone entering a Microsoft building in the US starting in September. From a report: Employees who have a medical condition or a protected reason, such as religion, that prevents them from getting a vaccine can get a special accommodation. The company has also pushed its full office reopening date from September to "no earlier than October 4th, 2021."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The launch of Boeing's Starliner crew capsule on an unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station was scrubbed Tuesday because of an undisclosed technical issue. Mission managers told the launch team to recycle for another attempt Wednesday at 12:57 p.m. ET, weather permitting. From a report: The launching atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket initially was planned for last Friday, but NASA ordered a delay while Russian space station engineers resolved problems with a newly arrived laboratory module. Over the weekend, the Starliner launch was reset for Tuesday. Forecasters monitoring Florida's typically stormy summer afternoon weather predicted a 60% chance of acceptable conditions then lowered the odds to 50-50. The team pressed ahead with fueling, but around 10:30 a.m., Boeing confirmed a scrub, tweeting, "We're confirming today's #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch is scrubbed. More details soon." The Starliner flight marks a major milestone for Boeing and NASA as the agency transitions from hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fielding commercial crew ships built by Boeing and SpaceX. SpaceX, under a $2.6 billion NASA contract, launched its Crew Dragon spacecraft on a successful unpiloted test flight in 2019 and a piloted test flight last year. Since then, the California rocket builder has launched two operational flights to the space station carrying two long-duration crews to the outpost.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook is bulking up a team of artificial intelligence researchers, including a key hire from Microsoft, to study ways of analyzing encrypted data without decrypting it, the company confirmed to the Information. From the report: The research could allow Facebook to target ads based on encrypted messages on its WhatsApp messenger, or to encrypt the data it collects on billions of users without hurting its ad-targeting capabilities, outside experts say. Facebook is one of several technology giants, including cloud computing providers Microsoft, Amazon and Google, now researching an emerging field known as homomorphic encryption. Researchers hope the technology will allow companies to analyze personal information, including medical records and financial data, while keeping the information encrypted and protected from cybersecurity threats or, in Facebook's case, leaks to advertisers or other parties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Five months after he was carjacked while driving for Uber, resulting in thousands of dollars in damage to his car, David Morrow finally received an offer of assistance from the company: $1,000, the amount of his insurance deductible. But there was a catch -- Morrow would need to sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to not sue Uber, disparage the company, or talk any further about his carjacking or the details of his settlement. The offer came a day after The Markup approached Uber and Lyft about an investigation into more than 100 carjackings of ride-hail drivers, including the February attack on Morrow in Atlanta. But Morrow didn't take the offer. "I would be signing all my rights away," said Morrow, who's 71 and has completed almost 5,000 Uber rides. "I would have no recourse." In 2018, Uber's chief legal officer, Tony West, announced the company was dropping the mandatory arbitration agreements and confidentiality provisions it had with drivers, riders, and employees for individual claims of sexual assault or harassment. Lyft quickly followed suit. But in the case of driver carjackings, both Uber and Lyft still appear to be using the tactic. The Markup is aware of a Lyft driver who signed a nondisclosure agreement after being carjacked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activision Blizzard President J. Allen Brack is stepping down from the company after Blizzard was sued by the state of California last week for discriminating against women and fostering a "frat boy" culture that entailed sexual harassment and discrimination. He will be replaced by two executive vice presidents, who will serve as co-leaders. From a report: Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra, the former executive vice president of development and the former EVP and general manager of platform technology, respectively, will take the helm at Blizzard and share responsibility for development and operational accountability. The company is continuing to face an outpouring of stories of misconduct, and workers who organized a walkout have demanded a set of new rules for handling reports of sexism, harassment and discrimination.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: As part of the latest neurological breakthrough, researchers used a helmet that generates a magnetic field to shrink a deadly tumor by a third. The 53-year-old patient who underwent the treatment ultimately passed away due to an unrelated injury. But, an autopsy of his brain showed that the procedure had removed 31 percent of the tumor mass in a short time. The test marked the first noninvasive therapy for a deadly form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma. The helmet features three rotating magnets connected to a microprocessor-based electronic controller operated by a rechargeable battery. As part of the therapy, the patient wore the device for five weeks at a clinic and then at home with the help of his wife. The resulting magnetic field therapy created by the helmet was administered for two hours initially and then ramped up to a maximum of six hours per day. During the period, the patient's tumor mass and volume shrunk by nearly a third, with shrinkage appearing to correlate with the treatment dose. The inventors of the device -- which received FDA approval for compassionate use treatment -- claim it could one day help treat brain cancer without radiation or chemotherapy. "Our results... open a new world of non-invasive and nontoxic therapy...with many exciting possibilities for the future," said David S. Baskin, corresponding author and director of the Kenneth R. Peak Center for Brain and Pituitary Tumor Treatment in the Department of Neurosurgery at Houston Methodist Neurological Institute. Details of the procedure have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Oncology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some Facebook users are so desperate to retrieve their hacked accounts that they're buying Oculus VR headsets to get prioritized by customer service. NPR reports: When Marsala got hacked, she tried dialing Facebook's headquarters in Silicon Valley. But that number yields a recording that says, "Unfortunately we do not offer phone support at this time." Instead, Facebook tells users to report hacked accounts through its website. The site instructs them to upload a copy of a driver's license or passport to prove their identities. But the people NPR spoke with said they had trouble with every step of this automated process and wish Facebook would offer a way to reach a real person. "I sent these forms in morning, noon and night multiple times a day," Marsala said. "Nobody got back to me, not once."[...]Brandon Sherman of Nevada City, Calif., followed a tip he found on Reddit to get his hacked account back. "I ultimately broke down and bought a $300 Oculus Quest 2," he said. Oculus is a virtual reality company owned by Facebook but with its own customer support system. Sherman contacted Oculus with his headset's serial number and heard back right away. He plans to return the unopened device, and while he's glad the strategy worked, he doesn't think it's fair. "The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said. When McNamara, the Facebook user in Canada, first heard about the Oculus trick, she thought it was a joke. But she said, "Once I started thinking about it, all my memories, I really realized that I wanted to do whatever possible to get it back." So she, too, ordered an expensive gadget she never planned to use and returned it as soon as she got back into her Facebook account. (A warning to anyone thinking about trying this -- other Reddit users have said they tried contacting Oculus support but were unable to get their Facebook accounts restored. Also, last week Facebook said it was temporarily halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2, which retails starting at $299, because its foam lining caused skin irritation for some customers.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of Amazon's most anticipated originals to date, a yet-unnamed Lord of the Rings original series, will officially debut on Prime Video on Friday, September 2nd, 2022. The Verge reports: Along with a premiere date, Amazon Studios released an official first image from the forthcoming series, which will be set in Middle-earth's Second Age. The series will take place thousands of years before the events chronicled in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, and it will follow characters "both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth." The image release is tied to the series's production wrap after filming in New Zealand. Fans quickly speculated that the series will be set in Valinor, as the image depicts what appear to be the Two Trees. The untitled project is a huge investment by Amazon in its Prime Video streaming service. The series's first season alone reportedly cost around $465 million to produce. For context about what a massive creative undertaking this series has been for Amazon Studios, the final season of Game of Thrones was reported to have cost as much as $15 million per episode (though its budget was originally around $5 million per episode).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60-68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity. That finding comes from a white paper (PDF) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs). The study takes into account the carbon emissions that result from the various fuels (fossil fuels, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, and e-fuels), as well as the emissions that result from manufacturing and then recycling or disposing of vehicles and their various components. Bieker has also factored in real-world fuel or energy consumption -- something that is especially important when it comes to PHEVs, according to the report. Finally, the study accounts for the fact that energy production should become less carbon-intensive over time, based on stated government objectives. The life cycle emissions of battery EVs in Europe today at 66-69 percent lower than a comparable gasoline-powered car. China is at 37-45 percent fewer emissions for BEVs, and India shows 19-34 percent. As for fuel cell EVs (FCEVs), they "are only abut 26-40 percent less carbon-intensive than a comparable gasoline vehicle," notes Ars. "But if hydrogen was produced using renewable energy rather than steam reformation of natural gas, that number would jump to 76-80 percent -- even better than a BEV's numbers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French intelligence investigators have confirmed that Pegasus spyware has been found on the phones of three journalists, including a senior member of staff at the country's international television station France 24. Pegasus is the hacking software -- or spyware -- that is developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by NSO Group. The malware has the capability to infect billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems. It enables operators of the spyware to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones. The Guardian reports: It is the first time an independent and official authority has corroborated the findings of an international investigation by the Pegasus project -- a consortium of 17 media outlets, including the Guardian. Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit media organization, and Amnesty International initially had access to a leaked list of 50,000 numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of Israeli firm NSO Group since 2016, and shared access with their media partners. France's national agency for information systems security (Anssi) identified digital traces of NSO Group's hacking spyware on the television journalist's phone and relayed its findings to the Paris public prosecutor's office, which is overseeing the investigation into possible hacking. Anssi also found Pegasus on telephones belonging to Lenaig Bredoux, an investigative journalist at the French investigative website Mediapart, and the site's director, Edwy Plenel. Forbidden Stories believes at least 180 journalists worldwide may have been selected as people of interest in advance of possible surveillance by government clients of NSO. Le Monde reported that the France 24 journalist, based in Paris, had been selected for "eventually putting under surveillance." Police experts discovered the spyware had been used to target the journalist's phone three times: in May 2019, September 2020 and January 2021, the paper said. Bredoux told the Guardian that investigators had found traces of Pegasus spyware on both her and Plenel's mobile phones. She said the confirmation of long-held suspicions that they had been targeted contradicted the repeated denials of those who were believed to be behind the attempt to spy on them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Drive reports that US Northern Command recently completed a string of tests for Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), a combination of AI, cloud computing and sensors that could give the Pentagon the ability to predict events "days in advance," according to Command leader General Glen VanHerck. Engadget reports: The machine learning-based system observes changes in raw, real-time data that hint at possible trouble. If satellite imagery shows signs that a rival nation's submarine is preparing to leave port, for instance, the AI could flag that mobilization knowing the vessel will likely leave soon. Military analysts can take hours or even days to comb through this information -- GIDE technology could send an alert within "seconds," VanHerck said. The most recent dry run, GIDE 3, was the most expansive yet. It saw all 11 US commands and the broader Defense Department use a mix of military and civilian sensors to address scenarios where "contested logistics" (such as communications in the Panama Canal) might pose a problem. The technology involved wasn't strictly new, the General said, but the military "stitched everything together." The platform could be put into real-world use relatively soon. VanHerck believed the military was "ready to field" the software, and could validate it at the next Globally Integrated Exercise in spring 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Steam Survey numbers for July 2021, Steam on Linux hit a 1.0% marketshare, or a +0.14% increase over the month prior. Phoronix reports: This is the highest we have seen the Steam on Linux marketshare in a number of years and well off the lows prior to introducing Steam Play (Proton) since which point there has been the gradual increase in marketshare. Back when Steam on Linux first debuted there was around a 2% marketshare for Linux before gradually declining. Back when Steam first debuted for Linux, the overall Steam customer base was also much smaller than it is today. While many believe the Steam Survey is inaccurate or biased (or just buggy towards prompting Linux users to participate in the survey), these initial numbers for July are positive in hitting the 1.0% mark after largely floating around the 0.8~0.9% mark for most of the past three years. The Steam Deck isn't shipping until the end of the year so we'll see how the number fluctuates to that point.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Every jobseeker welcomes an invitation to a second interview, because it signals a company's interest. A third interview might feel even more positive, or even be the precursor to an offer. But what happens when the process drags on to a fourth, fifth or sixth round -- and it's not even clear how close you are to the 'final' interview? That's a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineering manager, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic. Five companies told him they had to delay hiring because of Covid-19 -- but only after he'd done the final round of interviews. Another three invited him for several rounds of interviews until it was time to make an offer, at which point they decided to promote internally. Then, he made it through three rounds of interviews for a director-level position at a company he really liked, only to receive an email to co-ordinate six more rounds. "When I responded to the internal HR, I even asked, 'Are these the final rounds?,'" he says. "The answer I got back was: 'We don't know yet.'" That's when Conley made the tough decision to pull out. He shared his experience in a LinkedIn post that's touched a nerve with fellow job-seekers, who've viewed it 2.6 million times as of this writing. Conley says he's received about 4,000 public comments of support, and "four times that in private comments" from those who feared being tracked by current or prospective employers. [...] In fact, the internet is awash with similar stories jobseekers who've become frustrated with companies -- particularly in the tech, finance and energy sectors -- turning the interview process into a marathon. That poses the question: how many rounds of interviews should it take for an employer to reasonably assess a candidate before the process veers into excess? And how long should candidates stick it out if there's no clear information on exactly how many hoops they'll have to jump through to stay in the running for a role? Google recently determined that four interviews was enough to make a hiring decision with 86% confidence, noting that there was a diminishing return on interviewer feedback thereafter. "John Sullivan, a Silicon Valley-based HR thought leader, says companies should nail down a hire-by date from the start of the recruitment process, because the best candidates only transition the job market briefly," reports the BBC. "According to a survey from global staffing firm Robert Half, 62% of US professionals say they lose interest in a job if they don't hear back from the employer within two weeks -- or 10 business days -- after the initial interview. That number jumps to 77% if there is no status update within three weeks. "Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Australian Court has decided that an artificial intelligence can be recognized as an inventor in a patent submission. The Register reports: In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia's Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation's Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can't be considered an inventor. Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human. As Beach's judgement puts it: "... in my view an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act. First, an inventor is an agent noun; an agent can be a person or thing that invents. Second, so to hold reflects the reality in terms of many otherwise patentable inventions where it cannot sensibly be said that a human is the inventor. Third, nothing in the Act dictates the contrary conclusion." The Justice also worried that the Commissioner of Patents' logic in rejecting Thaler's patent submissions was faulty. "On the Commissioner's logic, if you had a patentable invention but no human inventor, you could not apply for a patent," the judgement states. "Nothing in the Act justifies such a result." Justice Beach therefore sent Thaler's applications back to the Commissioner of Patents, with instructions to re-consider the reasons for their rejection. Thaler has filed patent applications around the world in the name of DABUS -- a Device for the Autonomous Boot-strapping of Unified Sentience. Among the items DABUS has invented are a food container and a light-emitting beacon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux. Phoronix reports: It's no secret that the ACPI CPUFreq driver code has at times been less than ideal on recent AMD processors with delivering less than expected performance/behavior with being slow to ramp up to a higher performance state or otherwise coming up short of disabling the power management functionality outright. AMD hasn't traditionally worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling code as much as Intel does to their P-State scaling driver and other areas of power management at large. AMD is ramping up efforts in these areas including around the Linux scheduler given their recent hiring spree while it now looks like thanks to the Steam Deck there is renewed interest in better optimizing the CPU frequency scaling under Linux. AMD and Valve have been working to improve the performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms running on Steam Play (Proton / Wine) and have spearheaded "[The ACPI CPUFreq driver] was not very performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms...a new CPU performance scaling design for AMD platform which has better performance per watt scaling on such as 3D game like Horizon Zero Dawn with VKD3D-Proton on Steam." AMD will be presenting more about this effort next month at XDC. It's quite possible this new effort is focused on ACPI CPPC support with the previously proposed AMD_CPUFreq. Back when Zen 2 launched in 2019, AMD did post patches for their new CPUFreq driver that leveraged ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls but the driver was never mainlined nor any further iterations of the patches posted. When inquiring about that work a few times since then, AMD has always said it's been basically due to resource constraints that it wasn't a focus at that time. Upstream kernel developers also voiced their preference to seeing AMD work to improve the generic ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver code rather than having another vendor-specific solution. It's also possible AMD has been working on better improvements around the now-default Schedutil governor for scheduler utilization data in making CPU frequency scaling decisions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The concept of a new media ecosystem that's non-profit, publicly funded and tech-infused is drawing interest in policy circles as a way to shift the power dynamics in today's information wars. Revamping the structure and role of public media could be part of the solution to shoring up local media, decentralizing the distribution of quality news, and constraining Big Tech platforms' amplification of harmful or false information. Congress in 1967 authorized federal operating money to broadcast stations through a new agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and what is now PBS launched down-the-middle national news programming and successful kids shows like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Sesame Street." NPR was born in 1971. Despite dust-ups over political interference of national programming and funding, hundreds of local community broadcast stations primarily received grants directly to choose which national programs to support. A new policy paper from the German Marshall Fund proposes a full revamp of the CPB to fund not just broadcast stations, but a wide range of digital platforms and potential content producers including independent journalists, local governments, nonprofits and educational institutions. The idea is to increase the diversity of local civic information, leaning on anchor institutions like libraries and colleges that communities trust. Beyond content, the plan calls for open protocol standards and APIs to let consumers mix and match the content they want from a wide variety of sources, rather than being at the mercy of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube algorithms. Data would be another crucial component. In order to operate, entities in the ecosystem would have to commit to basic data ethics and rules about how personal information is used.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Events in the genome of Welwitschia have given it the ability to survive in an unforgiving desert for thousands of years. From a report: The longest-lived leaves in the plant kingdom can be found only in the harsh, hyperarid desert that crosses the boundary between southern Angola and northern Namibia. A desert is not, of course, the most hospitable place for living things to grow anything, let alone leafy greens, but the Namib Desert -- the world's oldest with parts receiving less than two inches of precipitation a year -- is where Welwitschia calls home. In Afrikaans, the plant is named "tweeblaarkanniedood," which means "two leaves that cannot die." The naming is apt: Welwitschia grows only two leaves -- and continuously -- in a lifetime that can last millenniums. "Most plants develop a leaf, and that's it," said Andrew Leitch, a plant geneticist at Queen Mary University of London. "This plant can live thousands of years, and it never stops growing. When it does stop growing, it's dead." Some of the largest plants are believed to be over 3,000 years old, with two leaves steadily growing since the beginning of the Iron Age, when the Phoenician alphabet was invented and David was crowned King of Israel. By some accounts, Welwitschia is not much to look at. Its two fibrous leaves, buffeted by dry desert winds and fed on by thirsty animals, become shredded and curled over time, giving Welwitschia a distinctly octopus-like look. One 19th-century director of Kew Gardens in London remarked, "it is out of the question the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country and one of the ugliest." But since it was first discovered, Welwitschia has captivated biologists including Charles Darwin and the botanist Friedrich Welwitsch after whom the plant is named: It is said that when Welwitsch first came across the plant in 1859, "he could do nothing but kneel down on the burning soil and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination." In a study published last month in Nature Communications, researchers report some of the genetic secrets behind Welwitschia's unique shape, extreme longevity and profound resilience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recovery mission off Vietnam's coast showed how advances in technology have given new reach to the Pentagon's search for American war dead. From a report: On a July morning in 1967, two American B-52 bombers collided over the South China Sea as they approached a target in what was then South Vietnam. Seven crew members escaped, but rescue units from the Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard were unable to find six other men, including a navigator from New York, Maj. Paul A. Avolese. It wasn't until last year that scientists scanning the seafloor found one of the B-52s and recovered Major Avolese's remains. "It was very humbling to be diving a site that turned out as hallowed ground, and realizing that maybe we were in a position to help bring closure back to families that had been missing this lost aviator," said Eric J. Terrill, one of two divers who descended to the wreck. Scientists say the recovery highlights a shift in the Pentagon's ability to search for personnel still missing from the Vietnam War. For decades, such efforts have mainly focused on land in former conflict zones. But in this case, American investigators looked at an underwater site near Vietnam's long coastline, using high-tech robots. Their use of that technology is part of a larger trend. Robotic underwater and surface vehicles are "rapidly becoming indispensable tools for ocean science and exploration," said Rear Adm. Nancy Hann, who manages a fleet of nine aircraft and 16 research and survey vessels for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "They have proven to be a force multiplier when it comes to mapping the seafloor, locating and surveying wrecks and other sunken objects, and collecting data in places not easily accessed by ships and other vehicles," Admiral Hann said. One reason for the new focus on Vietnam's undersea crash sites is that many land-based leads have been exhausted, said Andrew Pietruszka, the lead archaeologist for Project Recover, a nonprofit organization. The group worked on the recent recovery mission with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or D.P.A.A., the arm of the Pentagon tasked with finding and returning fallen military personnel. "Over time, a lot of the really good land cases and sites they've already done, they've already processed them," said Mr. Pietruszka, a former forensic archaeologist for D.P.A.A. who now works for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. "Now the majority of sites that haven't been looked at are falling in that underwater realm," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers have attacked and shut down the IT systems of the company that manages COVID-19 vaccination appointments for the Lazio region surrounding Rome, the regional government said on Sunday. From a report: "A powerful hacker attack on the region's CED (database) is under way," the region said in a Facebook posting. It said all systems had been deactivated, including those of the region's health portal and vaccination network, and warned the inoculation programme could suffer a delay. "It is a very powerful hacker attack, very serious... everything is out. The whole regional CED is under attack," Lazio region's health manager Alessio D'Amato said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How much is your palm print worth? If you ask Amazon, it's about $10 in promotional credit if you enroll your palm prints in its checkout-free stores and link it to your Amazon account. From a report: Last year, Amazon introduced its new biometric palm print scanners, Amazon One, so customers can pay for goods in some stores by waving their palm prints over one of these scanners. By February, the company expanded its palm scanners to other Amazon grocery, book and 4-star stores across Seattle. Amazon has since expanded its biometric scanning technology to its stores across the U.S., including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas. The retail and cloud giant says its palm scanning hardware "captures the minute characteristics of your palm -- both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns -- to create your palm signature," which is then stored in the cloud and used to confirm your identity when youâ(TM)re in one of its stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a blockbuster deal that rocks the fintech world, Square announced today that it is acquiring Australian buy now, pay later giant Afterpay in a $29 billion all-stock deal. From a report: The purchase price is based on the closing price of Square common stock on July 30, which was $247.26. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, contingent upon certain closing conditions. It values Afterpay at more than 30% premium to its latest closing price of A$96.66. Square co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said in a statement that the two fintech behemoths "have a shared purpose." "We built our business to make the financial system more fair, accessible, and inclusive, and Afterpay has built a trusted brand aligned with those principles," he said in the statement. "Together, we can better connect our Cash App and Seller ecosystems to deliver even more compelling products and services for merchants and consumers, putting the power back in their hands." The combination of the two companies would create a payments giant unlike any other. Over the past 18 months, the buy now, pay later space has essentially exploded, appealing especially to younger generations drawn to the idea of not using credit cards or paying interest and instead opting for the installment loans, which have become ubiquitous online and in retail stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some protesters in Minnesota set a fire last year. But then the surveillance footage from that day "set off a nearly yearlong, international manhunt...involving multiple federal agencies and Mexican police. The pursuit also involved a facial recognition system made by a Chinese company that has been blacklisted by the U.S. government." The New York Times tells the story of the couple who was eventually arrested:Ms. Yousif gave birth while on the run, and was separated from her baby for four months by the authorities. To prosecutors, the pursuit of Mr. Felan, who was charged with arson, and Ms. Yousif, who was charged with helping him flee, was a routine response to a case of property destruction... But beyond the prosecutorial aftermath of the racial justice protests, the eight-month saga of a young Minnesota couple exposed an emerging global surveillance system that might one day find anyone, anywhere, the technology traveling easily over borders while civil liberties struggle to keep pace... They drove, heading south on Interstate 35, a highway that runs down the middle of the country, stretching from Duluth, Minn., on Lake Superior, to Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. They had made their way through Iowa and just hit the northern part of Missouri, 300 miles from Rochester, when police first caught up with them. A warrant had been issued for Mr. Felan's arrest, allowing the authorities to ping his cellphone to locate him. According to a court document, late on a Monday night, more than a week after the events in St. Paul, local police in rural western Missouri, who were asked to go where the phone was pinging, stopped a black S.U.V. registered to Mr. Felan. Ms. Yousif was driving, and said she didn't know where Mr. Felan was. The police let her go... Over the next week, police kept pinging the location of Mr. Felan's phone but kept missing him. According to a court document, he sent a message to his brother in Texas saying he was turning it off between messages, worried about being tracked; the couple eventually bought new phones... On a Friday night in mid-June 2020, a surveillance camera at a Holiday Inn outside San Antonio captured Ms. Yousif and Mr. Felan driving his mother's brown Toyota Camry into the hotel's parking lot. They got out of the car, walked outside the view of the camera and then disappeared... Later in Mexico, at a meeting with law enforcement officials in Coahuila, Federico Pérez Villoro, an investigative journalist, remembers meeting a government employee in charge of Mexico's first large-scale facial recognition system who'd said America's FBI had asked them for help finding people accused of terrorism. This is significant because they were using the Dahua surveillance system from China, that's partly state-owned and "blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2019...According to a notice in the Federal Register, Dahua's products were used in "China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance" against Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups." Ironically, in the end it wasn't the $30 million system that identified the couple, according to the U.S. Justice Department. It was somebody who'd contacted them directly to collect the $20,000 reward. "But the technology is spreading globally, in part because China is aggressively marketing it abroad, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Center for A.I. and Digital Policy, a nonprofit in Washington.... China is marketing mass surveillance technology to its trading partners in Africa, Asia and South America, he explained, pitching it as a way to minimize crime and promote public order in major metropolitan areas." In a 2019 report on video analytics, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that millions of surveillance cameras installed in recent decades are "waking up" thanks to automation, such as facial recognition technology, which allows them to not just record, but to analyze what is happening and flag what they see...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new $500 million startup is now offering high-end apartments for short- and long-term rentals in America's "most vibrant, walkable neighborhoods". (And long-term renters can also avail themselves of its "turn-key homesharing program" to offset some of their rent.) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says it's "aimed mainly at tech workers, nomadic independent contractors and other folks whose work is no longer tied to a specific location."[A]menities might include workspaces offering private and collaborative office space. Inside the units themselves, residents might find work-from-home perks like adjustable height desks and ergonomic chairs. And let's not forget that work-life balance: Sentral buildings offer rooftop pools, outdoor kitchens and fire pits, gyms, photo booths, theaters, and more — as well as offering a plethora of curated events to its residents... The folks behind the idea are savvy: CEO Jon Slavet is formerly of WeWork and Rodan + Fields. Michael Curtis, formerly VP of Engineering at Airbnb is now a strategy advisor at Sentral... The price to lease at Sentral, given the amenities, isn't much higher than regular rent prices in the major cities it serves. The LIVE program offers designer-furnished homes for stays over 30 days starting at $2,500 a month. For comparison purposes, a studio in downtown Seattle listed on Craigslist (with none of the bling offered at Sentral) is asking $1,890 a month. Sentral operates now in seven cities: LA, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Miami. An Atlanta location is next up, with more growth planned. Sentral's press release calls them seven "vibrant gateway cities... a launchpad to explore the country's most exciting neighborhoods" (assisted by "a world-class onsite team that fosters a true sense of community").Sentral enables residents to live or visit stylish buildings in the nation's most coveted cities for any period of time, whether a night, a month, or multiple years. Qualifying residents can also monetize their homes through Sentral's managed homeshare program... From the city registration process to logistical details such as housekeeping, insurance, photography, contactless check-in, and around-the-clock service, Sentral's turn-key platform makes homesharing seamless for hosts, enhancing their financial freedom and fueling their ability to travel and explore. A recent tweet calls it "the future of living," while the company's new web site promises it offers "The comforts you crave + the freedom to travel." "There has been a massive shift to a 'work-from-anywhere' culture that is blurring the lines among home, work, and travel," argues CEO Jon Slavet in Sentral's press release. And the lavish press release ends by saying that the company "is creating a global community of modern adventurers with the freedom to monetize their homes, explore their passion for travel, and live life on their own terms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times tells the story of 17-year-old Ellie Zeiler, a TikTok creator with over 10 million followers, who received an email in June from Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency. "It said it was reaching out on behalf of another party: the White House."Would Ms. Zeiler, a high school senior who usually posts short fashion and lifestyle videos, be willing, the agency wondered, to participate in a White House-backed campaign encouraging her audience to get vaccinated against the coronavirus...? Ms. Zeiler quickly agreed, joining a broad, personality-driven campaign to confront an increasingly urgent challenge in the fight against the pandemic: vaccinating the youthful masses, who have the lowest inoculation rates of any eligible age group in the United States... To reach these young people, the White House has enlisted an eclectic army of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, all of them with enormous online audiences. State and local governments have begun similar campaigns, in some cases paying "local micro influencers" — those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers — up to $1,000 a month to promote Covid-19 vaccines to their fans. The efforts are in part a counterattack against a rising tide of vaccine misinformation that has flooded the internet, where anti-vaccine activists can be so vociferous that some young creators say they have chosen to remain silent on vaccines to avoid a politicized backlash... State and local governments have taken the same approach, though on a smaller scale and sometimes with financial incentives. In February, Colorado awarded a contract worth up to $16.4 million to the Denver-based Idea Marketing, which includes a program to pay creators in the state $400 to $1,000 a month to promote the vaccines... Posts by creators in the campaign carry a disclosure that reads "paid partnership with Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment...." Other places, including New Jersey, Oklahoma City County and Guildford County, N.C., as well as cities like San Jose, Calif., have worked with the digital marketing agency XOMAD, which identifies local influencers who can help broadcast public health information about the vaccines. In another article, the Times notes that articles blaming Bill Gates for the pandemic appeared on two local news sites (one in Atlanta, and one in Phoenix) that "along with dozens of radio and television stations, and podcasts aimed at local audiences...have also become powerful conduits for anti-vaccine messaging, researchers said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny," argues a new article from The Atlantic. But it also asks if there's now a case for another antitrust action — or if we're convinced instead that "The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don't you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here!"Right now, it's not illegal to be big. It's not illegal to be really big. In fact, it's not even illegal to be a monopoly. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you're just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it's just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who's to know what's a fair price if there isn't any competition? Nevertheless, here we are...) Yet if bigness alone is enough to draw scrutiny, Microsoft must draw it. Courts have disagreed on what size market share a product or company must own to be considered a monopoly, but the historical benchmark is about 75 percent. Estimates vary as to what percentage of computers run Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Gartner research puts it as high as 83 percent... Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share. If we're wondering whether crappy airline experiences are a competition problem, should the same question apply to crappy computer security? In fact, in areas where Microsoft faces strong competition, it's reverting to some of the behaviors that got it sued in the '90s — namely, bundling. Microsoft and Amazon are essentially a duopoly when it comes to cloud services... Microsoft offers its big business customers an "integrated ecosystem" of Windows, Office, and its back-end cloud services; some analysts even point to this as a reason to keep buying Microsoft stock. That's just smart business, right? Yes, unless you're at a disadvantage by not taking the bundle. Some customers have complained that Microsoft charges extra for some Windows licenses if you're not using its cloud-computing business, Azure... Microsoft does much more that we're happy to call "evil" when other companies are involved. It defied its own workers in favor of contracts with the Department of Defense; it's been quietly doing lots of business with China for decades, including letting Beijing censor results on its Bing search engine and developing AI that critics say can be used for surveillance and repression; it reportedly tried to sell facial-recognition technology to the DEA. So why does none of it stick? Well, partly because it's possible that Microsoft isn't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal perspective. Yet it's so big and so dominant and owns so much expensive physical infrastructure that hardly any company can compete with it. Is that illegal? Should it be? It's now the world's second largest tech company by market valuation — over $2 trillion and even ahead of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla (and behind only Apple). For the three months ended in June, Microsoft's net income rose 47% over the same period a year ago, according to TechCrunch, with a revenue for just those three months of $46.2 billion. The Atlantic argues Microsoft has successfully rebranded itself as nice and a little boring, while playing up the fact that it lost a decade in consumer markets like smartphones because it was distracted by its last antitrust lawsuit. Yet meanwhile it's acquired major tech brands like LinkedIn, Minecraft, Skype, and even attempted to buy TikTok, Pinterest, and Discord (as well as "almost two dozen game-development studios to beef up its Xbox offerings"). And of course, GitHub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoom has agreed to pay $85 million — and to bolster its security practices — to settle a lawsuit that had claimed Zoom violated users' privacy rights by sharing their personal data with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, and by failing to stop Zoombombing. Engadget reports:The preliminary settlement also requires tougher security measures, such as warning about participants with third-party apps and offering special privacy-oriented training to Zoom staff. Judge Lucy Koh said the company was largely protected against zoombombing claims thanks to the Communications Decency Act's Section 230 safeguards against liability for users' actions. The settlement could also lead to payouts if the lawsuit achieves a proposed class action status, but don't expect a windfall. Subscribers would receive a refund of either 15 percent or $25, whichever was larger, while everyone else would receive as much as $15. Lawyers intended to collect up to $21.25 million in legal costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Almost half of the packages in the official Python Package Index (PyPI) repository have at least one security issue," reports TechRadar, citing a new analysis by Finnish researchers, which even found five packages with more than a thousand issues each...The researchers used static analysis to uncover the security issues in the open source packages, which they reason end up tainting software that use them. In total the research scanned through 197,000 packages and found more than 749,000 security issues in all... Explaining their methodology the researchers note that despite the inherent limitations of static analysis, they still found at least one security issue in about 46% of the packages in the repository. The paper reveals that of the issues identified, the maximum (442,373) are of low severity, while 227,426 are moderate severity issues. However, 11% of the flagged PyPI packages have 80,065 high severity issues. The Register supplies some context:Other surveys of this sort have come to similar conclusions about software package ecosystems. Last September, a group of IEEE researchers analyzed 6,673 actively used Node.js apps and found about 68 per cent depended on at least one vulnerable package... The situation is similar with package registries like Maven (for Java), NuGet (for .NET), RubyGems (for Ruby), CPAN (for Perl), and CRAN (for R). In a phone interview, Ee W. Durbin III, director of infrastructure at the Python Software Foundation, told The Register, "Things like this tend not to be very surprising. One of the most overlooked or misunderstood parts of PyPI as a service is that it's intended to be freely accessible, freely available, and freely usable. Because of that we don't make any guarantees about the things that are available there..." Durbin welcomed the work of the Finnish researchers because it makes people more aware of issues that are common among open package management systems and because it benefits the overall health of the Python community. "It's not something we ignore but it's also not something we historically have had the resources to take on," said Durbin. That may be less of an issue going forward. According to Durbin, there's been significantly more interest over the past year in supply chain security and what companies can do to improve the situation. For the Python community, that's translated into an effort to create a package vulnerability reporting API and the Python Advisory Database, a community-run repository of PyPI security advisories that's linked to the Google-spearheaded Open Vulnerability Database.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the start of the pandemic, remembers MIT Technology Review's senior editor for AI, the community "rushed to develop software that many believed would allow hospitals to diagnose or triage patients faster, bringing much-needed support to the front lines — in theory. "In the end, many hundreds of predictive tools were developed. None of them made a real difference, and some were potentially harmful."That's the damning conclusion of multiple studies published in the last few months. In June, the Turing Institute, the UK's national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against covid. This echoes the results of two major studies that assessed hundreds of predictive tools developed last year. Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies predictive tools, is lead author of one of them, a review in the British Medical Journal that is still being updated as new tools are released and existing ones tested. She and her colleagues have looked at 232 algorithms for diagnosing patients or predicting how sick those with the disease might get. They found that none of them were fit for clinical use. Just two have been singled out as being promising enough for future testing. "It's shocking," says Wynants. "I went into it with some worries, but this exceeded my fears." Wynants's study is backed up by another large review carried out by Derek Driggs, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues, and published in Nature Machine Intelligence. This team zoomed in on deep-learning models for diagnosing covid and predicting patient risk from medical images, such as chest x-rays and chest computer tomography (CT) scans. They looked at 415 published tools and, like Wynants and her colleagues, concluded that none were fit for clinical use. "This pandemic was a big test for AI and medicine," says Driggs, who is himself working on a machine-learning tool to help doctors during the pandemic. "It would have gone a long way to getting the public on our side," he says. "But I don't think we passed that test...." If there's an upside, it is that the pandemic has made it clear to many researchers that the way AI tools are built needs to change. "The pandemic has put problems in the spotlight that we've been dragging along for some time," says Wynants. The article suggests researchers collaborate on creating high-quality (and shared) data sets — possibly by creating a common data standard — and also disclose their ultimate models and training protocols for review and extension. "In a sense, this is an old problem with research. Academic researchers have few career incentives to share work or validate existing results. "To address this issue, the World Health Organization is considering an emergency data-sharing contract that would kick in during international health crises."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes the New York Times: Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn't be. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. Scientists led by Sunao Hasegawa from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 26, 2021 that two objects, called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, spotted in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter appear to have originated beyond Neptune. The discoveries could one day provide direct evidence of the chaos that existed in the early solar system. "If true it would be a huge deal," says Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, who was not involved in the research... "People have been talking about some fraction of asteroids coming from the Kuiper belt for quite a while now," said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist from Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the paper. He said the research "definitely takes a step" toward finding evidence to support that hypothesis. Not everyone is convinced just yet. Dr. Levison, who was also not involved in the paper, says objects should become less red as they approach the sun. "It seems to be inconsistent with our models," said Dr. Levison, who is the head of NASA's Lucy mission, which is scheduled to launch in October to study Jupiter's Trojans [asteroids captured in its orbit]. Michaël Marsset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author on the paper, agrees that it's not clear why they would be so red, but it is possibly related to how long it took them to become implanted into the asteroid belt. Some Trojans may also be as red, but haven't been found yet. To truly confirm the origin of 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, a spacecraft would likely need to visit them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It was pretty strange when Russia decided to announce last week that it had successfully run tests between June 15 and July 15 to show it could disconnect itself from the internet," writes an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.The tests seem to have gone largely unnoticed both in and outside of Russia, indicating that whatever entailed did not involve Russia actually disconnecting from the global internet... since that would be impossible to hide. Instead, the tests — and, most of all, the announcement about their success — seem to be intended as some kind of signal that Russia is no longer dependent on the rest of the world for its internet access. But it's not at all clear what that would even mean since Russia is clearly still dependent on people and companies in other countries for access to the online content and services they create and host — just as we all are... For the past two years, ever since implementing its "sovereign internet law" in 2019, Russia has been talking about establishing its own domestic internet that does not rely on any infrastructure or resources located outside the country. Presumably, the tests completed this summer are related to that goal of being able to operate a local internet within Russia that does not rely on the global Domain Name System to map websites to specific IP addresses. This is not actually a particularly ambitious goal — any country could operate its own domestic internet with its own local addressing system if it wanted to do so instead of connecting to the larger global internet... The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California San Diego maintains an Internet Outage Detection and Analysis tool that combines three data sets to identify internet outages around the world... The data sets for Russia from June 15 through July 15, the period of the supposed disconnection tests, shows few indications of any actual disconnection other than a period around July 5 when unsolicited traffic from Russia appears to have dropped off. Whatever Russia did this summer, it did not physically disconnect from the global internet. It doesn't even appear to have virtually disconnected from the global internet in any meaningful sense. Perhaps it shifted some of its critical infrastructure systems to rely more on domestic service providers and resources. Perhaps it created more local copies of the addressing system used to navigate the internet and tested its ability to rely on those. Perhaps it tested its ability to route online traffic within the country through certain chokepoints for purposes of better surveillance and monitoring. None of those are activities that would be immediately visible from outside the country and all of them would be in line with Russia's stated goals of relying less on internet infrastructure outside its borders and strengthening its ability to monitor online activity. But the goal of being completely independent of the rest of the world's internet infrastructure while still being able to access the global internet is a nonsensical and impossible one. Russia cannot both disconnect from the internet and still be able to use all of the online services and access all of the websites hosted and maintained by people in other parts of the world, as appears to have been the case during the monthlong period of testing... Being able to disconnect your country from the internet is not all that difficult — and certainly nothing to brag about. But announcing that you've successfully disconnected from the internet when it's patently clear that you haven't suggests both profound technical incompetence and a deep-seated uncertainty about what a domestic Russian internet would actually mean.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"YouTube has barred Sky News Australia from uploading new content for a week, saying it had breached rules on spreading Covid-19 misinformation," writes the BBC. Long-time Slashdot reader Hope Thelps shares their report:YouTube issued a "strike" under its three-strike policy, the last of which means permanent removal. It did not point to specific items but said it opposed material that "could cause real-world harm". The TV channel's digital editor said the decision was a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely. Sky News Australia is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and has 1.85 million YouTube subscribers. The ban could affect its revenue stream from Google. A YouTube statement said it had "clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance". A spokesperson told the Guardian it "did not allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19" or which encouraged people "to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus". Neither has been proven to be effective against Covid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Amazon now employs almost 1 million people in the U.S. — or 1 in every 169 workers," reports NBC News:Amazon has revealed for the first time the number of people it employs in the U.S., putting the figure at 950,000, according to the e-commerce giant's quarterly earnings call on Thursday. While the headcount was boosted by an additional 64,000 people hired in the second quarter, it does not include the thousands of contractors such as drivers whom Amazon depends on to run its Amazon Prime delivery operations... Globally, the company employs 1.3 million people. It is the second largest employer in the U.S., behind Walmart, which currently employees nearly 1.6 million people in the U.S. As of June, the national private sector workforce is roughly 161 million people, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means about 1 out of every 169 people in the country's workforce works for Amazon, while about 1 out of every 100 people in the U.S. workforce is employed by Walmart. The article also notes that since 2018 Amazon has been paying a $15-an-hour minimum for all employees — more than double the current U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 an hourRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader storagedude quotes eSecurityPlanet : The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) joined counterparts in the UK and Australia Wednesday to announce the top 30 vulnerabilities exploited since the start of the pandemic. The list, a joint effort with the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), details vulnerabilities — primarily Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) — "routinely exploited by malicious cyber actors in 2020 and those being widely exploited thus far in 2021." Many of the vulnerabilities are known ones for which patches exist, so they can typically be easily fixed. The agencies also recommended a centralized patch management system to prevent such oversights going forward. Most of the vulnerabilities targeted in 2020 were disclosed during the last two years. "Cyber actor exploitation of more recently disclosed software flaws in 2020 probably stems, in part, from the expansion of remote work options amid the COVID-19 pandemic," said a CISA statement. "The rapid shift and increased use of remote work options, such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and cloud-based environments, likely placed additional burden on cyber defenders struggling to maintain and keep pace with routine software patching." The vulnerabilities include a number of well publicized ones from major vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, Fortinet, VMware and others, so a good portion of the blame can be placed on those who just aren't being vigilant with patching.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Dave Knott quotes the BBC's Doctor Who site: Having been in charge of the TARDIS since filming for the Thirteenth Doctor began in 2017, Showrunner Chris Chibnall and the Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, have confirmed they will be moving on from the most famous police box on Earth. With a six-part Event Serial announced for the autumn, and two Specials already planned for 2022, BBC One has now asked for an additional final feature length adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor, to form a trio of Specials for 2022, before the Doctor regenerates once more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian:The UK's competition watchdog has imposed fines of more than £100m on the pharmaceutical company Advanz and its former private equity owners after it was found to have inflated the price of its thyroid tablets by up to 6,000%. An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that the private-equity backed pharmaceutical company charged "excessive and unfair prices" for liothyronine tablets, which are used to treat thyroid hormone deficiency. Advanz took advantage of limited competition in the market from 2007 to bring in sustained price hikes for the drug, often used by patients with depression and fatigue, of more than 6,000% in the space of 10 years, according to the investigation. The CMA said that between 2007 and 2017, the price paid by the National Health Service for liothyronine tablets rose from £4.46 to £258.19, a rise of almost 6,000%, while production costs remained broadly stable... Dr Andrea Coscelli, the CMA's chief executive, said: "Advanz's decision to ratchet up the price of liothyronine tablets and impose excessive and unfair prices for over eight years came at a huge cost to the NHS, and ultimately to UK taxpayers. "But that wasn't all. It also meant that people dealing with depression and extreme fatigue, as a result of their thyroid conditions, were told they could not continue to receive the most effective treatment for them due its increased price."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remote working seems like a boon to smaller cities, Reuters reports:About 30 per cent of remote workers plan on moving, according to two recent surveys: an April poll of 1,000 tech workers by nonprofit One America Works and a June survey of 1,006 national remote workers for MakeMyMove, focused on intentions for the next 18 months... [T]he numbers mean a lot for some towns and cities that have seen "brain drains" to larger metropolitan areas, said Prithwiraj Choudhury, associate professor at the Harvard Business School. But smaller cities are now also competing with big-tech recruiters, reports the Wall Street Journal:Some of the biggest names in tech aren't just allowing existing workers to relocate out of the Bay Area, they are also starting to hire in places they hadn't often recruited from before. The result is the most geographically distributed tech labor market to date. That's leading to above-market rates for workers in smaller hubs, forcing local companies to raise wages to keep up with the cost of living and fend off deeper-pocketed rivals from California.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tribune News Services says we're now experiencing the "hottest job market for tech workers since dot-com era"There's an air of desperation among tech employers this summer. Software talent, it seems, is in such high demand that companies are morphing how they hire. And workers are the ones with the power. Good and experienced tech workers are being treated like local celebrities — hounded by recruiters, courted by managers and bestowed a bevy of options before choosing their next boss... The demand has been attributed to all sorts of things. During the pandemic, businesses that had been slow to adopt enterprise software began rapidly catching up. A tidal wave of productivity software, conferencing and collaboration tools, and e-commerce tech flooded the world. The same was true for consumer tech, with video game development, entertainment tech and social platforms booming. Many of these jobs are going unfilled, as competition for new hires ramps up. Simultaneously, remote work became the status quo in the tech industry. Suddenly, software talent could pick and choose from a massive pool of job opportunities... To win a bid on a quality engineer, companies are offering things like flexible hours, sign-on bonuses and permanent remote work, the last of which has become a requirement for much of the workforce. Dice, a website and staffing firm that focuses on tech talent, published a report in June that found only 17% of technologists wanted to work in an office full time, while 59% wanted remote and hybrid approaches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you're homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii's capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don't have a fever," reports the Associated Press:That's just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility. The handful of police officials experimenting with the four-legged machines say they're just another tool, like existing drones and simple wheeled robots, to keep emergency responders out of harm's way as they scout for dangers. But privacy watchdogs â" the human kind â" warn that police are secretly rushing to buy the robots without setting safeguards against aggressive, invasive or dehumanizing uses. In Honolulu, the police department spent about $150,000 in federal pandemic relief money to buy their Spot from robotics firm Boston Dynamics for use at a government-run tent city near the airport. "Because these people are houseless it's considered OK to do that," said Jongwook Kim, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii. "At some point it will come out again for some different use after the pandemic is over." Acting Lt. Joseph O'Neal of the Honolulu Police Department's community outreach unit defended the robot's use in a media demonstration earlier this year. He said it has protected officers, shelter staff and residents by scanning body temperatures between meal times at a shelter where homeless people could quarantine and get tested for COVID-19. The robot is also used to remotely interview individuals who have tested positive. "We have not had a single person out there that said, 'That's scary, that's worrisome,'" O'Neal said. "We don't just walk around and arbitrarily scan people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes The Record:A Chinese cyber-espionage group known as APT31 (or Zirconium) has been seen hijacking home routers to form a proxy mesh around its server infrastructure in order to relay and disguise the origins of their attacks. In a security alert, the French National Cybersecurity Agency, also known as ANSSI (Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information), published a list of 161 IP addresses that have been hijacked by APT31 in recent attacks against French organizations. French officials said that APT31's proxy botnet was used to perform both reconnaissance operations against their targets, but also to carry out the attacks themselves. The attacks started at the beginning of 2021 and are still ongoing... The Record understands that APT31 used proxy meshes made of home routers as a way to scan the internet and then launch and disguise its attacks against Exchange email servers earlier this year; however, the technique was also used for other operations as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub's new "Copilot" tool (created by Microsoft and OpenAI) shares the autocompletion suggestions of an AI trained on code repositories. But can that violate the original coder's license? Now the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is calling for a closer look at these and many other issues... "We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective," they wrote in a blog post this week, arguing that Copilot "requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned." "However, Copilot raises many other questions which require deeper examination..."The Free Software Foundation has received numerous inquiries about our position on these questions. We can see that Copilot's use of freely licensed software has many implications for an incredibly large portion of the free software community. Developers want to know whether training a neural network on their software can really be considered fair use. Others who may be interested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elements copied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyright infringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work. With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software. We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem. We will provide a monetary reward of $500 for the papers we publish.They add that the following questions are of particular interest: Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot? Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL? If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL? If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work? Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training? Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright? Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In January America's federal Justice Department said there was no evidence that Russian hackers behind the massive SolarWinds breach had accessed classified systems, remembers the Associated Press. But today?The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said 27 U.S. Attorney offices had at least one employee's email account compromised during the hacking campaign. The Justice Department said in a statement that it believes the accounts were compromised from May 7 to Dec. 27, 2020. Such a timeframe is notable because the SolarWinds campaign, which infiltrated dozens of private-sector companies and think tanks as well as at least nine U.S. government agencies, was first discovered and publicized in mid-December... Jennifer Rodgers, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, said office emails frequently contained all sorts of sensitive information, including case strategy discussions and names of confidential informants, when she was a federal prosecutor in New York. "I don't remember ever having someone bring me a document instead of emailing it to me because of security concerns," she said, noting exceptions for classified materials... The Associated Press previously reported that SolarWinds hackers had gained access to email accounts belonging to the then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and members of the department's cybersecurity staff...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mogster quotes :Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winning physicist whose work helped link two of the four fundamental forces, has died at the age of 88, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) announced Saturday (July 24). HIs work was foundational to the Standard Model, the overarching physics theory that describes how subatomic particles behave. His seminal work was a slim, three-page paper published in 1967 in the journal Physical Review Letters and entitled "A Model of Leptons." In it, he predicted how subatomic particles known as W, Z and the famous Higgs boson should behave — years before those particles were detected experimentally, according to a statement from UT Austin. The paper also helped unify the electromagnetic force and the weak force and predicted that so-called "neutral weak currents" governed how particles would interact, according to the statement. In 1979, Weinberg and physicists Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam earned the Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Throughout his life, Weinberg would continue his search for a unified theory that would unite all four forces, according to the statement. Weinberg also wrote a book called "The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe" — in 1977.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"America reported 122,000 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, the highest single-day spike since February," reports Business Insider. But when it comes to anti-Covid measures like vaccine mandates, America's technology companies have been "decisive trend setters," according to the New York Times' On Tech newsletter. (Alternate URL)Last year, some high-profile tech companies were relatively early to close their corporate offices as coronavirus outbreaks started in the United States, and they continued to pay many hourly workers who couldn't do their jobs remotely. Those actions from companies including Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter probably helped save lives in the Bay Area and perhaps beyond. Now many of the same tech companies — along with schools and universities, health care institutions and some government employers in the United States — have started to announce vaccine mandates for staff, the resumption of requirements to wear masks, delayed reopenings of offices or on-site workplace vaccinations to help slow the latest wave of infections. America's tech companies, which deserve criticism for misusing their power, also should get credit for using their power to take decisive action in response to virus risks. Those steps helped make it palatable for other organizations to follow. And in some cases, tech companies have acted more quickly in response to health threats and communicated about them more effectively than federal or local government leaders. Disney, the world's largest entertainment company, is also requiring all salaried and nonunion hourly employees in the U.S. to be fully vaccinated, according to the Washington Post.Walmart, the nation's largest private employer at almost 1.6 million employees, announced all of its corporate staff members and regional managers would need to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 4. Though the mandate does not apply to store and warehouse staffers, which make up the bulk of the company's workforce, Walmart is offering a $150 bonus as incentive for those unvaccinated employees to get inoculated... While companies are pushing for vaccinations, they must contend with employees who are seeking exceptions for medical or religious reasons. Walmart said in a statement that while a "small percentage" of employees are unable to be vaccinated due to such reasons, those workers "must follow all social distancing standards, wear a mask while working, and receive weekly Covid-19 testing provided by Walmart...." The news comes after corporate giants Google, Facebook and Uber announced their own vaccine mandates for employees this week. Companies such as Apple, Twitter, Lyft and the New York Times said they are delaying their return to the office due to the rising cases. More examples from CNN:BlackRock the world's largest asset manager, is currently allowing only vaccinated employees to return to the officeMorgan Stanley's New York office is banning all unvaccinated staff and clients from entering its headquarters.Luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue is requiring that all employees be vaccinated.All new hires and current employees of the Washington Post will be required to demonstrate proof of full Covid-19 vaccinations.As of August 2, all employees working in Lyft's offices are required to be vaccinatedIf Uber employees want to come back to the office, they must be fully vaccinatedRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"Dallas-based Texas Instruments' latest generation of calculators is getting a modern-day update with the addition of programming language Python," reports the Dallas Morning News:The goal is to expand students' ability to explore science, technology, engineering and math through the device that's all-but-required in the nation's high schools and colleges... Though most of the company's $14 billion in annual revenue comes from semiconductors, its graphing calculator remains its most recognized consumer product. This latest TI-84 model, priced between $120 to $160 depending on the retailer, was made to accommodate the increasing importance of programming in the modern world. Judging by photos in their press release, an "alpha" key maps the calculator's keys to the letters of the alphabet (indicated with yellow letters above each key). One page on its web site also mentions "Menu selections" that "help students with discovery and syntax." (And the site confirms the calculator will "display expressions, symbols and fractions just as you write them.") There's even a file manager that "gives quick access to Python programs you have saved on your calculator. From here, you can create, edit, run and manage your files." And one page also mentions something called TI Connect CE software application, which "connects your computer and graphing calculator so they can talk to each other. Use it to transfer data, update your operating system, download calculator software applications or take screenshots of your graphing calculator." I'm sure Slashdot's readers have some fond memories of their first calculator. But these new models have a full-color screen and a rechargeable battery that can last up to a month on a single charge. And Texas Instruments seems to think they could even replace computers in the classroom. "By adding Python to the calculators many students are already familiar with and use in class, we are making programming more accessible and approachable for all students," their press release argues, "eliminating the need for teachers to reserve separate computer labs to teach these important skills.Read more of this story at Slashdot.