"Resuming launches after a mission failure two months ago, Rocket Lab successfully placed a small U.S. military research and development satellite into orbit Thursday following a fiery liftoff from New Zealand..." reports Spaceflight Now:Heading east from Mahia, the rocket's first stage burned its nine engines for about two-and-a-half minutes, followed by a six-minute firing of the second stage engine to reach a preliminary parking orbit. A kick stage deployed from the the Electron rocket's second stage... Rocket Lab, a California-based company founded in New Zealand, confirmed a good deployment of the U.S. military's small experimental Monolith spacecraft about 52 minutes after liftoff. "Payload deployed, flawless launch and mission by the team!" tweeted Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO. The mission was the 21st flight of a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle since 2017, and the eighth to carry a payload for a U.S. military or intelligence agency customer. It was also the first Rocket Lab mission since May 15, when an Electron rocket failed before reaching orbit with two commercial BlackSky Earth-imaging satellites... The May 15 mission was the third time an Electron rocket failed to reach orbit on 20 attempts since 2017.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding," reports the New York Times. (Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, had found copies of 13 of the deleted sequences on Google Cloud.) Though their deletion raised some suspicions, "An odd explanation has emerged, stemming from an editorial oversight by a scientific journal," reports the Times. "And the sequences have been uploaded into a different database, overseen by the Chinese government." The Times also notes that the researchers had already posted their early findings online in March 2020:That month, they also uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and submitted a paper describing their results to a scientific journal called Small. The paper was published in June 2020... [A] spokeswoman for the N.I.H. said that the authors of the study had requested in June 2020 that the sequences be withdrawn from the database. The authors informed the agency that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database... On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Dr. Bloom's report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper. On July 21, the disappearance of the sequences was brought up during a news conference in Beijing... According to a translation of the news conference by a journalist at the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the vice minister of China's National Health Commission, Dr. Zeng Yixin, said that the trouble arose when editors at Small deleted a paragraph in which the scientists described the sequences in the Sequence Read Archive. "Therefore, the researchers thought it was no longer necessary to store the data in the N.C.B.I. database," Dr. Zeng said, referring to the Sequence Read Archive, which is run by the N.I.H. An editor at Small, which specializes in science at the micro and nano scale and is based in Germany, confirmed his account. "The data availability statement was mistakenly deleted," the editor, Plamena Dogandzhiyski, wrote in an email. "We will issue a correction very shortly, which will clarify the error and include a link to the depository where the data is now hosted." The journal posted a formal correction to that effect on Thursday. While the researchers' first report had described their sequences as coming from patients "early in the epidemic," thus provoking intense curiosity, the sequences were, as promised, updated, to include a more specific date after they were published in the database, according to the Times. "They were taken from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University on January 30 — almost two months after the earliest reports of Covid-19 in China."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ABC News reports:A Boeing 747 pilot near Los Angeles reported Wednesday night another "possible jet pack man in sight." It's the latest in a string of mysterious jet pack sightings near the City of Angels since last year. "A Boeing 747 pilot reported seeing an object that might have resembled a jet pack 15 miles east of LAX at 5,000 feet altitude around 6:12 p.m. Wednesday," a spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration told ABC News. "Out of an abundance of caution, air traffic controllers alerted other pilots in the vicinity." Air traffic controllers could be heard directing pilots in the area to "use caution towards the jet pack." The FAA spokesperson said there were no "unusual objects" that had appeared on the radar around LAX around that time on Wednesday. "We were looking but we did not see Iron Man," one person said on the air traffic recording. "Unauthorized operators flying around airplanes, helicopters and airports is illegal and may be subject to fines and criminal charges, including jail time, the FAA says..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"GitHub has announced a partnership with the Stanford Law School to support developers facing takedown requests related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," reports VentureBeat:While the DMCA may be better known as a law for protecting copyrighted works such as movies and music, it also has provisions (17 U.S.C. 1201) that criminalize attempts to circumvent copyright-protection controls — this includes any software that might help anyone infringe DMCA regulations. However, as with the countless spurious takedown notices delivered to online content creators, open source coders too have often found themselves in the DMCA firing line with little option but to comply with the request even if they have done nothing wrong. The problem, ultimately, is that freelance coders or small developer teams often don't have the resources to fight DMCA requests, which puts the balance of power in the hands of deep-pocketed corporations that may wish to use DMCA to stifle innovation or competition. Thus, GitHub's new Developer Rights Fellowship — in conjunction with Stanford Law School's Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic — seeks to help developers put in such a position by offering them free legal support. The initiative follows some eight months after GitHub announced it was overhauling its Section 1201 claim review process in the wake of a takedown request made by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which had been widely criticized as an abuse of DMCA... [M]oving forward, whenever GitHub notifies a developer of a "valid takedown claim," it will present them with an option to request free independent legal counsel. The fellowship will also be charged with "researching, educating, and advocating on DMCA and other legal issues important for software innovation," GitHub's head of developer policy Mike Linksvayer said in a blog post, along with other related programs. Explaining their rationale, GitHub's blog post argues that currently "When developers looking to learn, tinker, or make beneficial tools face a takedown claim under Section 1201, it is often simpler and safer to just fold, removing code from public view and out of the common good. "At GitHub, we want to fix this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In iOS 14, Apple added a "privacy" section to the app store, requiring app developers to list the data they collect and how they use it. Google -- which was one of the biggest targets of Apple's privacy nutrition labels and delayed app updates for months to avoid complying with the policy -- is now aping the feature for Google Play. Google posted a demo of what the Google Play "Data privacy & security" section will look like, and it contains everything you'd expect if you've looked at the App Store lately. There's information on what data apps collect, whether or not the apps share the data with third parties, and how the data is stored. Developers can also explain what the data is used for and if data collection is required to use the app. The section also lists whether or not the collected data is encrypted, if the user can delete the data, and if the app follows Google's "Families" policy (meaning all the usual COPPA stuff). Google Play's privacy section will be mandatory for all developers in April 2022, and starting in October, Google says developers can start populating information in the Google Play Console "for review." Google also says that in April, all apps will need to supply a privacy policy, even if they don't collect any data. Apps that don't have an "approved" privacy section by April may have their app updates rejected or their app removed. Google says, "Developers are responsible for providing accurate and complete information in their safety section." All of this information is basically just running on the honor system, and on iOS, developers have already been caught faking their privacy labels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office on Friday denied protests from companies affiliated with Jeff Bezos that NASA wrongly awarded a lucrative astronaut lunar lander contract solely to Elon Musk's SpaceX. CNBC reports: "NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award ... the evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement's terms," GAO managing associate general counsel Kenneth Patton wrote in a statement. The GAO ruling backs the space agency's surprise announcement in April that NASA awarded SpaceX with a contract worth about $2.9 billion. SpaceX was competing with Blue Origin and Dynetics for what was expected to be two contracts, before NASA only awarded a single contract due to a lower-than-expected allocation for the program from Congress. NASA, in a statement, said that the GAO decision will allow the agency "to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the Moon in more than 50 years." "As soon as possible, NASA will provide an update on the way ahead for Artemis, the human landing system, and humanity's return to the Moon. We will continue to work with the Biden Administration and Congress to ensure funding for a robust and sustainable approach for the nation's return to the Moon in a collaborative effort with U.S. commercial partners," the U.S. space agency said. A Blue Origin spokesperson told CNBC that the company still believes "there were fundamental issues with NASA's decision, but the GAO wasn't able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction." "We'll continue to advocate for two immediate providers as we believe it is the right solution," Blue Origin said. "The Human Landing System program needs to have competition now instead of later -- that's the best solution for NASA and the best solution for our country."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Virtual contact during the pandemic made many over-60s feel lonelier and more depressed than no contact at all, new research has found. Many older people stayed in touch with family and friends during lockdown using the phone, video calls, and other forms of virtual contact. Zoom choirs, online book clubs and virtual bedtime stories with grandchildren helped many stave off isolation. But the study, among the first to comparatively assess social interactions across households and mental wellbeing during the pandemic, found many older people experienced a greater increase in loneliness and long-term mental health disorders as a result of the switch to online socializing than those who spent the pandemic on their own. The problem [said Dr Yang Hu of Lancaster University, who co-wrote the report, published on Monday in Frontiers in Sociology] was that older people unfamiliar with technology found it stressful to learn how to use it. But even those who were familiar with technology often found the extensive use of the medium over lockdown so stressful that it was more damaging to their mental health than simply coping with isolation and loneliness. "Extensive exposure to digital means of communication can also cause burnout. The results are very consistent," said Hu, who collected data from 5,148 people aged 60 or over in the UK and 1,391 in the US -- both before and during the pandemic. "It's not only loneliness that was made worse by virtual contact, but general mental health: these people were more depressed, more isolated and felt more unhappy as a direct result of their use of virtual contact," he said. "We need to have disaster preparedness," he said. "We need to equip older people with the digital capacity to be able to use technology for the next time a disaster like this comes around." Hu added: "Policymakers and practitioners need to take measures to pre-empt and mitigate the potential unintended implications of household-centerd pandemic responses for mental wellbeing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A previously undocumented Android-based remote access trojan (RAT) has been found to use screen recording features to steal sensitive information on the device, including banking credentials, and open the door for on-device fraud. The Hacker News reports: Dubbed "Vultur" due to its use of Virtual Network Computing (VNC)'s remote screen-sharing technology to gain full visibility on targeted users, the mobile malware was distributed via the official Google Play Store and masqueraded as an app named "Protection Guard," attracting over 5,000 installations. Banking and crypto-wallet apps from entities located in Italy, Australia, and Spain were the primary targets. "For the first time we are seeing an Android banking trojan that has screen recording and keylogging as the main strategy to harvest login credentials in an automated and scalable way," researchers from ThreatFabric said in a write-up shared with The Hacker News. "The actors chose to steer away from the common HTML overlay development we usually see in other Android banking Trojans: this approach usually requires a larger time and effort investment from the actors to create multiple overlays capable of tricking the user. Instead, they chose to simply record what is shown on the screen, effectively obtaining the same end result." Vultur [...] takes advantage of accessibility permissions to capture keystrokes and leverages VNC's screen recording feature to stealthily log all activities on the phone, thus obviating the need to register a new device and making it difficult for banks to detect fraud. What's more, the malware employs ngrok, a cross-platform utility used to expose local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels, to provide remote access to the VNC server running locally on the phone. Additionally, it also establishes connections with a command-and-control (C2) server to receive commands over Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), the results of which, including extracted data and screen captures, are then transmitted back to the server. ThreatFabric's investigation also connected Vultur with another well-known piece of malicious software named Brunhilda, a dropper that utilizes the Play Store to distribute different kinds of malware in what's called a "dropper-as-a-service" (DaaS) operation, citing overlaps in the source code and C2 infrastructure used to facilitate attacks. These ties, the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity services company said, indicate Brunhilda to be a privately operating threat actor that has its own dropper and proprietary RAT Vultur.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon delivery companies around the U.S. are instructing workers to bypass daily inspections intended to make sure vans are safe to drive. From a report: Amazon requires contracted delivery drivers to inspect their vehicles at the beginning and end of their shift as a safety precaution. But some drivers say they're pressured to ignore damage and complete the inspections as quickly as possible, so that delivery companies can avoid taking vans off the road. If delivery companies take a van off the road, they risk forfeiting valuable package routes and drivers may lose a shift. These inconsistent inspection practices undermine the company's public messaging around worker safety. They also highlight the tension that delivery partners face between ensuring drivers' safety and keeping up with Amazon's aggressive delivery quotas, which can stretch into hundreds of packages per day per driver. CNBC spoke to 10 current and former Amazon delivery drivers in Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Texas who discovered their vans had issues ranging from jammed doors and tires with little to no tread to busted backup cameras and broken mirrors. They say managers told them to ignore these problems and complete their deliveries as usual.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Open source packages downloaded an estimated 30,000 times from the PyPI open source repository contained malicious code that surreptitiously stole credit card data and login credentials and injected malicious code on infected machines, researchers said on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: In a post, researchers Andrey Polkovnichenko, Omer Kaspi, and Shachar Menashe of devops software vendor JFrog said they recently found eight packages in PyPI that carried out a range of malicious activity. Based on searches on https://pepy.tech, a site that provides download stats for Python packages, the researchers estimate the malicious packages were downloaded about 30,000 times. [...] Different packages from Thursday's haul carried out different kinds of nefarious activities. Six of them had three payloads, one for harvesting authentication cookies for Discord accounts, a second for extracting any passwords or payment card data stored by browsers, and the third for gathering information about the infected PC, such as IP addresses, computer name, and user name. The remaining two packages had malware that tries to connect to an attacker-designated IP address on TCP port 9009, and to then execute whatever Python code is available from the socket. It's not now known what the IP address was or if there was malware hosted on it. Like most novice Python malware, the packages used only a simple obfuscation such as from Base64 encoders. Karas told me that the first six packages had the ability to infect the developer computer but couldn't taint the code developers wrote with malware. "For both the pytagora and pytagora2 packages, which allows code execution on the machine they were installed, this would be possible." he said in a direct message. "After infecting the development machine, they would allow code execution and then a payload could be downloaded by the attacker that would modify the software projects under development. However, we don't have evidence that this was actually done."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The devastating heatwave that struck the Northwest US and southwest Canada in June was "the most extreme summer heatwave" ever recorded in North America, according to a new analysis from nonprofit research group Berkeley Earth. The Verge reports: Record temperatures in the region reached roughly 20 degrees Celsius (or 36 ÂF) hotter than average in June. Canada recorded its hottest temperature ever on June 29th when the village of Lytton in British Columbia reached an astonishing 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit). Typical temperatures there in June are closer to 20 to 30 degrees Celsius (68 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit). The consequences of that heat are staggering. Scorching temperatures fed wildfires, which burned down 90 percent of Lytton. There were at least 570 heat-related deaths in Canada and at least 194 in the US. Thousands more people wound up in emergency departments. For the entire Northern Hemisphere, it was the warmest June on record averaged across all land areas. Nearly 4 percent of the surface of the Earth hit record high average temperatures during the first half of 2021, according to the Berkeley Earth analysis. That's despite the cooling effect of a La Nina event. Looking at the first six months of the year, "Nowhere has been record cold," tweeted Berkeley Earth lead scientist Robert Rohde. Globally, the odds of more "record-shattering" heatwaves like the one that took such a huge toll in the US and Canada in June are likely on the rise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A cybersecurity company whose security researcher had once been harassed by Blizzard employees at a hacking conference charged the game developer a 50 percent "misogyny tax" when it sought a quote for security services, according to a new report from Waypoint. The researcher, Emily Mitchell, told Waypoint that she approached the Blizzard booth during the annual Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in 2015 to see if the major video game company had any open positions. Her shirt, which referenced [to] a security process known as "penetration testing," prompted two unnamed Blizzard employees to ask her questions laced with misogyny and sexual double entendre. "One of them asked me when was the last time I was personally penetrated, if I liked being penetrated, and how often I got penetrated," Mitchell said. "I was furious and felt humiliated, so I took the free swag and left." Two years later, Blizzard approached cybersecurity firm Sagitta HPC (now known as Terahash) to request a quote on one of Sagitta HPC's password-cracking boxes. Mitchell, who was Sagitta HPC's chief operating officer at the time, saw Blizzard's request and immediately remembered what occurred at Black Hat USA 2015. After learning of the incident from Mitchell, Sagitta HPC founder and chief executive officer Jeremi M. Gosney responded to Blizzard's inquiry with a lengthy message decrying her treatment at the hands of Blizzard's employees. "[R]ather than dismiss you and tell you that we will not do business with you, we'd like to give Blizzard the opportunity to redeem themselves," Gosney wrote. (He eventually shared the email on Twitter with Blizzard's name redacted.) "We are committed to combating inequality, and I am calling on Blizzard to do the same. As you may or may not know, today is International Women's Day. And in honor of this day, we are attaching a few conditions if Blizzard wishes to do business with us." These conditions included a 50 percent "misogyny tax" on any business Sagitta HPC did with Blizzard (to be used as a donation to three different organizations devoted to support girls and women in the tech industry), Blizzard becoming a Gold-level sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and a formal letter of apology from Blizzard executives to Mitchell in which they'd further dedicate themselves to supporting equality for women and sexual harassment training. [...] In 2017, the organizers of Black Hat USA, the Las Vegas hacking conference at which Mitchell was originally accosted, promised her that they would not allow Blizzard back as a sponsor for future events. As far as Kotaku can tell from historical information, neither Blizzard nor Activision have had a presence at the cybersecurity event since the year Blizzard staff harassed Mitchell. "Once this incident was reported to us, the Company began an investigation, promptly removed all unauthorized cameras, and notified the authorities," Activision Blizzard told Waypoint. "The authorities conducted a thorough investigation, with the full cooperation of the Company. As soon as the authorities and Company identified the perpetrator, he was terminated for his abhorrent conduct. The Company provided crisis counselors to employees, onsite and virtually, and increased security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On Wednesday, language learning app Duolingo reached a valuation of $6.5 billion after its shares surged nearly 40% in the company's Nasdaq debut. Reuters reports: Duolingo's stock opened at $141.4 per share, blowing past the initial public offering price (IPO) of $102 per share, which crossed the top end of its target range. The stock later pared some gains to trade at $130.92 in the afternoon. The company's flotation comes at a time of increased investor interest in the edtech space, after pandemic restrictions sent students and teachers from the classroom to the web. "Being a public company will allow us to operate at a higher level, and get going from the minor leagues to the major leagues," said Luis von Ahn, co-founder and chief executive officer of Duolingo. Following the IPO, the company will focus on improving its flagship app and getting more active users to switch to paying subscribers, von Ahn said. Duolingo offers courses in 40 languages to about 40 million monthly active users. The company also plans to expand more in Asia, its fastest growing region. Currently, Duolingo's largest market is the United States, home to 20% of its users and bringing in 45% of the company's revenue, von Ahn said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Forget the home office -- 45% of American teleworkers regularly work from a couch, 38% regularly work from bed and 20% often work outside, according to a study by the home improvement marketing firm CraftJack. Axios reports: People have spent an average of $268 trying to improve their remote work setups, but a whopping 50% still say the pain and discomfort of working from home is enough to send them back to the office. It's not enough for companies to provide stipends for teleworkers to buy ergonomic chairs or desks, Axios' Kia Kokalitcheva notes. Many people simply do not have the space allocated inside their homes for an office setup, and it can be too expensive to move to a bigger place.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labeled as Tcc+, is a tetraquark -- an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks from which matter is constructed. They combine to form hadrons, namely baryons, such as the proton and the neutron, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which are formed as quark-antiquark pairs. In recent years a number of so-called exotic hadrons -- particles with four or five quarks, instead of the conventional two or three -- have been found. Today's discovery is of a particularly unique exotic hadron, an exotic exotic hadron if you like. The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. Physicists call this "open charm" (in this case, "double open charm"). Particles containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark have "hidden charm" -- the charm quantum number for the whole particle adds up to zero, just like a positive and a negative electrical charge would do. Here the charm quantum number adds up to two, so it has twice the charm! The quark content of Tcc+, has other interesting features besides being open charm. It is the first particle to be found that belongs to a class of tetraquarks with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Such particles decay by transforming into a pair of mesons, each formed by one of the heavy quarks and one of the light antiquarks. According to some theoretical predictions, the mass of tetraquarks of this type should be very close to the sum of masses of the two mesons. Such proximity in mass makes the decay "difficult," resulting in a longer lifetime of the particle, and indeed Tcc+, is the longest-lived exotic hadron found to date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions. From a report: The new research builds upon what is known as the "social cost of carbon," a monetary figure placed upon the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide emissions, by assigning an expected death toll from the emissions that cause the climate crisis. The analysis draws upon several public health studies to conclude that for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature. This additional CO2 is equivalent to the current lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans. Adding a further 4m metric tons above last year's level, produced by the average US coal plant, will cost 904 lives worldwide by the end of the century, the research found. On a grander scale, eliminating planet-heating emissions by 2050 would save an expected 74 million lives around the world this century. The figures for expected deaths from the release of emissions aren't definitive and may well be "a vast underestimate" as they only account for heat-related mortality rather than deaths from flooding, storms, crop failures and other impacts that flow from the climate crisis, according to Daniel Bressler of Columbia University's Earth Institute, who wrote the paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China's breathtaking economic growth created cities ill-equipped to face extreme weather. Last week's dramatic floods showed that much will have to change. From a report: China's breakneck growth over the last four decades erected soaring cities where there had been hamlets and farmland. The cities lured factories, and the factories lured workers. The boom lifted hundreds of millions of people out of the poverty and rural hardship they once faced. Now those cities face the daunting new challenge of adapting to extreme weather caused by climate change, a possibility that few gave much thought to when the country began its extraordinary economic transformation. China's pell-mell, brisk urbanization has in some ways made the challenge harder to face. No one weather event can be immediately linked to climate change, but the storm that flooded Zhengzhou and other cities in central China last week, killing at least 69 as of Monday, reflects a global trend of extreme weather that has seen deadly flooding recently in Germany and Belgium, and severe heat and wildfires in Siberia. The flooding in China, which engulfed subway lines, washed away roads and cut off villages, also highlights the environmental vulnerabilities that accompanied the country's economic boom and could yet undermine it. China has always had floods, but as Kong Feng, then a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote in 2019, the flooding of cities across China in recent years is "a general manifestation of urban problems" in the country. The vast expansion of roads, subways and railways in cities that swelled almost overnight meant there were fewer places where rain could safely be absorbed -- disrupting what scientists call the natural hydrological cycle. Faith Chan, a professor of geology with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo in eastern China, said the country's cities -- and there are 93 with populations of more than a million -- modernized at a time when Chinese leaders made climate resiliency less of a priority than economic growth. "If they had a chance to build a city again, or to plan one, I think they would agree to make it more balanced," said Mr. Chan, who is also a visiting fellow at the Water@Leeds Research Institute of the University of Leeds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. agency leading the fight against Covid-19 gave up a crucial surveillance tool tracking the effectiveness of vaccines just as a troublesome new variant of the virus was emerging. From a report: While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped comprehensively tracking what are known as vaccine breakthrough cases in May, the consequences of that choice are only now beginning to show. At the time, the agency had identified only 10,262 cases across the U.S. where a fully vaccinated person had tested positive for Covid. Most people who got infected after vaccination showed few symptoms, and appeared to be at low risk of infecting others. But in the months since, the number of vaccine breakthrough cases has grown, as has the risk that they present. Further reading: 'The War Has Changed': Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta Infections Likely More Severe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google's quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine "time crystal" for the first time. From a report: A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy. "The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics," said co-author Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. That's the law that says disorder always increases. Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break "time-translation symmetry," the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time. The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don't change with time. The time crystal is the first "out-of-equilibrium" phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state. "This is just this completely new and exciting space that we're working in now," said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Several readers shared this story: Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly demanded to become Apple's CEO in a 2016 phone call with current Apple CEO Tim Cook, according to an upcoming book about Tesla. The story, shared by the Los Angeles Times, comes from Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by The Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins. As the book tells it, Cook suggested to Musk that Apple acquire Tesla, and Musk said he wanted to be CEO. Cook reportedly agreed, but Musk clarified that he wanted to be the CEO of Apple. "According to a former aide who heard (Musk's) retelling of the exchange," Cook said "Fuck you" before hanging up the phone. But Musk and Apple have both suggested that the conversation couldn't have happened because Musk and Cook have never spoken. Musk, in a tweet on Friday, flat out said that "Cook & I have never spoken or written to each other ever." He also said that he attempted to meet with Cook about Apple acquiring Tesla, a meeting that Cook refused. When asked for comment about the reported conversation, Apple pointed to remarks Cook made during an interview with The New York Times' Kara Swisher where he denied having ever spoken to Elon. "You know, I've never spoken to Elon, although I have great admiration and respect for the company he's built," Cook said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Epic, which sued Apple last year and has expressed concerns about the exorbitant fees the iPhone-maker charges on App Store (30% on each transaction on year 1 for apps that are not games and 15% on year 2 and beyond), has found a new backer in the court of public opinion: Elon Musk. In a tweet Friday, Musk likened Apple's App Store charges to "a de facto global tax on the Internet." He added, "Epic is right." Epic CEO Tim Sweeney added today: The Apple Tax is far more pernicious than many realize. "It only applies to digital goods accessible on iOS," they say -- but in the future all physical goods will have a digital presence, and Apple will tax and gatekeep world commerce. Apple must be stopped. Friday's remarks follows Musk sniping at Apple during an earnings call earlier this week. From that story: Apple's walled garden is facing scrutiny from lawmakers and other companies, including in an antitrust trial that took place earlier this year after it was sued by Epic Games over App Store fees and policies. "I think we do want to emphasize that our goal is to support the advent of sustainable energy," Musk said in response to a question about letting competitors use its charger network. "It is not to create a walled garden and use that to bludgeon our competitors which is used by some companies." Musk then faked a cough and said, "Apple."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Security researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing hacking campaign carried out by suspected Russian spies who are continuing to stage attacks amid U.S. pressure on the Kremlin to curtail its alleged cyber-intrusions. From a report: The California-based cybersecurity firm RiskIQ Inc. said in a report released on Friday that it had uncovered more than 30 command and control servers -- used by cybercriminals to send orders to compromised networks or receive stolen data -- associated with the state-sponsored hacking group, which is known as APT29 or Cozy Bear. The group is using the servers to deploy malicious software named WellMess, according to RiskIQ. APT stands for "advanced persistent threat," and is a term often used to describe state-sponsored hacking groups. In July last year, government agencies from the U.S., U.K., and Canada, said that APT29 was "almost certainly" part of the Russian intelligence services and accused it of hacking organizations involved in the development of the Covid-19 vaccine and stealing intellectual property. The same group was also allegedly involved in the 2016 hack on the Democratic National Committee and the breach of SolarWinds, which was disclosed last year, according to U.S. officials. The Russian embassy in Washington referred to an earlier statement, in which it urged journalists to stop "sweeping accusations" and said it was confident that discussions with the U.S. related to cyberspace would "improve the security of the information infrastructure of our countries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China ordered more than two dozen technology firms to carry out internal inspections as part of a campaign to root out illegal online activity. From a report: The Ministry of Industry Information Technology on Friday told 25 of its largest internet and hardware companies including Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings to carry out internal reviews and rectify issues ranging from data security to consumer rights protections. The twin giants and 10 other firms were also asked separately on Wednesday to step up data security protections, including the export of key information, by the Internet Society of China, which was acting on behalf of MIIT. The meetings this week come after the internet industry regulator announced on Monday it was beginning a six-month campaign to crackdown on illegal online activity. Days later, it told Tencent and 13 other corporations to address problems related to pop-ups within their ads. The crackdown is the latest move by Beijing to rein in the country's internet leaders in areas from antitrust to data security and ride-hailing. Meituan, Xiaomi and ByteDance were among firms summoned to both meetings. On Friday, the MIIT ordered the companies to address eight types of problematic behavior including pop-ups, data collection and storage as well as the blocking of external links.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Alphabet's Google asked a federal judge to order Microsoft to hand over internal documents from certain executives that Google says it needs to defend a Justice Department's monopoly lawsuit. Google said in a court filing Thursday night in Washington that Microsoft refuses to search the files of 19 executives that are relevant to Google's defense. Microsoft is a key player in the Justice Department's lawsuit, which accuses Google of abusing its dominance in internet search. The government says Google illegally used its power in the market to thwart competitive threats from rivals like Microsoft's Bing search engine. "No third party is more central to this litigation than Microsoft," Google said in the filing. Microsoft countered in a separate filing that Google's request for documents is unreasonable and burdensome. Microsoft said it offered to collect documents from 27 individuals and that Google has proposed it provide information from an additional 28, for a total of 55. Further reading: Google and Microsoft End Their Five-Year Cease-Fire.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yasmeen Abutaleb, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Joel Achenbach, reporting at Washington Post: The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must "acknowledge the war has changed." The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation's top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus. The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold. It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant. "I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began," Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email. CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public. The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone -- vaccinated or not -- to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon has been issued with a fine of 746 million euros ($887 million) by a European privacy watchdog for breaching the bloc's data protection laws. From a report: The fine, disclosed by Amazon on Friday in a securities filing, was issued two weeks ago by Luxembourg's privacy regulator. The Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection said Amazon's processing of personal data did not comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. It has ordered Amazon to revise certain undisclosed business practices. Amazon, which has its European headquarters in Luxembourg, denied that there had been any kind of breach that would violate the GDPR rules. "Maintaining the security of our customers' information and their trust are top priorities," an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. "There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party," they added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: [R]esearchers from IBM and Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) say they've developed a program that can predict how the symptoms of a Parkinson's disease patient will progress in terms of both timing and severity. In The Lancet Digital Health journal, they claim the software could transform how doctors help patients manage their symptoms by allowing them to better predict how the disease will progress. The breakthrough wouldn't have been possible without the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative, a study the Michael J. Fox Foundation sponsored. IBM describes the dataset, which includes information on more than 1,400 individuals, as the "largest and most robust volume of longitudinal Parkinson's patient data to date" and says it allowed its AI model to map out complex symptom and progression patterns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kekke writes: "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s new foundry will produce 2-nanometer chips," reports Gizmodo. "Construction on the plant in Hsinchu, southwest from Taiwan's capital of Taipei, is expected to start as soon as early 2022. TSMC's 3nm tech is reportedly expected to be put into production in late 2022 -- meanwhile, Intel will be rolling out 7nm chips toward the end of 2022 and into 2023." Will Intel have a genie in the bottle or a rabbit in a hat? Doesn't seem so to me. On Tuesday, Intel unveiled a comeback plan designed to help it reclaim processor manufacturing leadership within four years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Derek Muller, creator of the science-themed YouTube channel Veritasium, won a $10,000 bet with UCLA physics professor Alexander Kusenko, who claimed that Muller's wind-driven land yacht couldn't travel faster than the wind without any additional power sources. After recruiting science stars Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye to help settle the debate, the professor eventually conceded that it was in fact possible. Insider reports: Created by Rick Cavallaro, a former aerospace engineer, Blackbird is unique because it can move directly downwind faster than the wind itself for a sustained period. Any sailor worth their salt can tell you that a boat can travel faster than the wind by cutting zigzag patterns; that's called tacking. But the idea that a vehicle can beat the breeze traveling straight downwind, no tacking involved, is controversial. "I knew this was a counterintuitive problem. To be perfectly honest with you, when I went out to pilot the craft, I didn't understand how it worked," Muller told Insider. Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said. "I said, 'Look, if you don't believe this, let's put some money on this,'" Muller said. He suggested a wager of $10,000, never imagining Kusenko would take it. But Kusenko agreed, and in the weeks that followed, they exchanged data and argued about Blackbird. They even brought in several of science's biggest names, including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to help decide who was right. In the end, Muller emerged victorious.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: On a normally peaceful residential road outside The Hague, the Dutch city that serves as seat of government, the whine of a hoisting crane and welding tools heralds a not-so-quiet housing revolution. Four workers standing above me on a scissor lift next to an apartment complex guide a thermally insulated facade 40 feet wide and one story tall into place against the existing wall. Its brickwork pattern of muted brown, grey and beige, and the triple glazed windows, perfectly fit the building's existing frame and openings. The original windows and the very old brick walls had allowed cold drafts inside, and warm interior air to escape, wasting much of the energy used to heat the building. The new facade is primarily fire-resistant expanded polystyrene -- essentially, hollow spheres that trap air to create a thick insulation layer -- faced with hardened clay and sculpted into hundreds of very thin rectangles known as "brick slips." This new building skin, prebuilt in a factory, was one of a dozen such facades to be attached to local buildings when I visited the suburb on a rainy day in early summer, each structure measured to millimeter precision. The installation is part of a concerted effort to transform energy-inefficient public housing into a set of ultralow-emission homes -- without having to open a wall or remake an attic. The building was being wrapped in the equivalent of a winter jacket -- or summer beer koozie -- avoiding the need to insert insulation inside dozens of walls, lofts and attics. A similarly premade, lightweight, highly insulating material, complete with solar panels, would be installed on the roof, too. The report notes that the average cost to retrofit a family home in the Netherlands is "about $94,000," but it's "comparable to the cost of other routine renovations that deliver no energy savings." "In one neighborhood in the city of Utrecht, more than a dozen houses and some 250 separate apartments retrofitted in 2019 saw their energy requirements fall from 225 kilowatt-hours per square meter to just 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter, on average. The remaining demand for energy was met with solar power."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Estonian officials said they arrested last week a local suspect who used a vulnerability to gain access to a government database and downloaded government ID photos for 286,438 Estonians. From a report: The attack took place earlier this month, and the suspect was arrested last week on July 23, Estonian police said in a press conference yesterday, July 28. The identity of the attacker was not disclosed, and he was only identified as a Tallinn-based male. Officials said the suspect discovered a vulnerability in a database managed by the Information System Authority (RIA), the Estonian government agency which manages the country's IT systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mexico's top security official said Wednesday that two previous administrations spent $61 million to buy Pegasus spyware that has been implicated in government surveillance of opponents and journalists around the world. PBS reports: Public Safety Secretary Rosa Icela Rodriguez said records had been found of 31 contracts signed during the administrations of President Felipe Calderon in 2006-2012 and President Enrique Pena Nieto in 2012-18. Some contracts may have been disguised as purchases of other equipment. The government said many of the contracts with the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group were signed with front companies, which are often used in Mexico to facilitate kickbacks or avoid taxes. Last week, the government's top anti-money laundering investigator said officials from the two previous administrations had spent about $300 million in government money to purchase spyware. But that figure may reflect all spyware and surveillance purchases, or may include yet-unidentified contracts. Santiago Nieto, the head of Mexico's Financial Intelligence Unit, said the bills for programs like the Pegasus spyware appear to have included excess payments that may have been channeled back to government officials as kickbacks. Nieto said the amounts paid, and the way they were paid, suggested government corruption in an already questionable telephone tapping program that targeted journalists, activists and opposition figures, who at the time included now President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his inner circle. The report notes that Mexico "had the largest list -- about 700 phone numbers -- among the thousands reportedly selected by NSO clients for potential surveillance."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Playdate, the portable, one-bit gaming system with an analog crank as a primary control option, won't be shipping to those who preordered the console anytime soon. According to CNET, "shipping has been delayed to some point in 2022." From the report: There's only one place you will be able to get yourself a Playdate. You'll need to head straight to the Playdate website, and be ready to pay $179 for the console. This price is for just the console, and not its Stereo Dock accessory or Pen, which can be ordered separately. The only accessory available right now is a $30 cover, which is only available in a bright purple. The prices and availability for these other accessories have not yet been announced. To avoid a PlayStation 5-style hunt for availability, the Playdate will not sell out. Instead, the ship date will be bumped incrementally back to match the company's ability to acquire the parts necessary to assemble the consoles. At the time this was last updated, shipping has been delayed to some point in 2022. Oddly enough, there is no set launch date for this console just yet. The Playdate is supposed to be shipping the first 20,000 units at some point in 2021. It's likely Panic will be giving more information on a shipping date in one of its video updates like the one we saw in June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
destinyland shares a report from CNN: An unusual and potentially dangerous situation unfolded Thursday at the International Space Station, as the newly-docked Russian Nauka module inadvertently fired its thrusters causing a "tug of war" with the space station and briefly pushing it out of position, according to NASA flight controllers. Nauka -- a long-delayed laboratory module that Russian space agency Roscosmos' launched to the International Space Station last week -- inadvertently fired its thrusters after docking with the International Space Station Thursday morning. NASA officials declared it a "spacecraft emergency" as the space station experienced a loss of attitude (the angle at which the ISS is supposed to remain oriented) control for nearly one hour, and ground controllers lost communications with the seven astronauts currently aboard the ISS for 11 minutes during the ordeal. A joint investigation between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos is now ongoing. "The incident also delayed the launch of the Boeing Starliner uncrewed test flight to the station, which had been set to launch on Friday," adds CNN. "NASA says the move allows the 'International Space Station team time to continue working checkouts of the newly arrived Roscosmos' Nauka module and to ensure the station will be ready for Starliner's arrival.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. unveiled a sodium-ion battery Thursday, a type of lower-density cell that uses cheaper raw materials than batteries made from lithium-ion metals. As well as a first generation of sodium batteries, the Ningde, Fujian-based company also launched a battery-pack solution that can integrate sodium-ion cells and lithium-ion cells into one case, compensating for the energy-density shortage of the former while preserving its advantages. "Sodium-ion batteries have unique advantages in low-temperature performance, fast charging and environmental adaptability," CATL Chairman Zeng Yuqun said. "Moreover, they're compatible and complementary with lithium-ion batteries. Diversified technical routes are an important guarantee for the long-term development of the industry." While China's CATL is the world's biggest battery maker, supplying Telsa and selling 34.1 gigawatt hours in the first half, up 234% year-on-year for a market share of 30%, like other manufacturers it has been hit by rising raw materials costs. The price of lithium carbonate, a core ingredient in most electric vehicle batteries, has doubled this year while the price of nickel, another key metal, is at a five-month high. Outside of their lower raw materials costs -- there are abundant sodium resources in the Earth's crust -- sodium-ion batteries have a few advantages. A long charging time won't cause battery damage and their chemical reaction is free of corrosivity. But their lower energy density tends to exclude them from powering passenger vehicles that require decent range, so they're mainly used for low-speed electric vehicles and low-end energy storage solutions. Notwithstanding, CATL said that through breakthroughs in R&D, its first-generation sodium-ion batteries have reached 160 watt-hours/kilogram, a measure of energy density of energy, and should exceed 200 Wh/kg in coming generations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
gollum123 shares a report from The New York Times: The 27 member states of the European Union altogether have now administered more coronavirus vaccine doses per 100 people than the United States, in another sign that inoculations across the bloc have maintained some speed throughout the summer, while they have stagnated for weeks in the United States. E.U. countries had administered 102.66 doses per 100 people as of Tuesday, while the United States had administered 102.44, according to the latest vaccination figures compiled by Our World in Data. This month, the European Union also overtook the United States in first injections; currently, 58 percent of people across the bloc have received a dose, compared with 56.5 percent in the United States. The latest figures provide a stark contrast with the early stages of the vaccination campaigns this year, when E.U. countries, facing a shortage of doses and delayed deliveries, looked in envy at the initially more successful efforts in the United States, Britain and Israel. But the European Union is now vaccinating its populations at a faster pace than most developed countries. More than 70 percent of adults in the bloc have now received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google's updated its inappropriate content policy to ban "compensated sexual relationships" -- i.e., sugar daddy or sugar dating apps. Ryne Hager writes via Android Police: If somehow you aren't familiar with the term, a "sugar daddy" is more than a caramel candy on a stick. In the more common vernacular, a sugar daddy is a person -- usually an older man, but you could have a "sugar mommy" or maybe a gender-neutral "sugar parent?" -- that spends or gives money in what is typically a transactional relationship, often for sexual favors. I don't judge, different people enjoy different things, and if all parties are consenting with full knowledge, I don't see how an arrangement like that really harms anyone. But, it seems Google does care, though the company is clear it's not objecting to the nature of the relationship, merely the fact that they're often sexual relationships with a perceived compensation basis, and the company has a blanket ban on sexual content -- at least partly ignoring the primary impulse for many customers behind more generalized dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, as well as many of the messages that even mainstream dating app users swap.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Thursday, a coalition of 48 civil rights and advocacy groups organized by Athena asked the Federal Trade Commission to exercise its rulemaking authority by banning corporate facial surveillance technology, banning continuous corporate surveillance of public spaces, and protecting the public from data abuse. "The harms caused by this widespread, unregulated corporate surveillance pose a direct threat to the public at large, especially for Black and brown people most often criminalized using surveillance," the coalition wrote in an open letter. "Given these dangers, we're calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to use its rulemaking authority to ban corporate use of facial surveillance technology, ban continuous surveillance in places of public accommodation, and stop industry-wide data abuse." While a number of firms offer networked surveillance devices to try and make homes "smart," the coalition uses Amazon as a case study into how dangerous corporate surveillance can become (and the sorts of abuses that can emerge) when in the hands of a dominant and anti-competitive firm. From Amazon's Ring -- which has rolled out networked surveillance doorbells and car cameras that continuously surveil public and private spaces -- to Alexa, Echo, or Sidewalk, the company has launched numerous products and services to try and convince consumers to generate as much data as possible for the company to eventually capitalize on. "Pervasive surveillance entrenches Amazon's monopoly. The corporation's unprecedented data collection feeds development of new and existing artificial intelligence products, further entrenching and enhancing its monopoly power," the coalition letter argues. From this nexus of monopolistic power and unchallenged power, the coalition draws a long list of abuses committed by Amazon that have harmed consumers, communities, and total bystanders. Ring's surveillance devices have been hacked multiple times, have leaked owners' Wi-Fi passwords, and shared locations over the Neighbors App. Vulnerabilities in Alexa risked revealing personally identifiable information, and all this takes place within the context of a lack of transparency around security protocols that force consumers to opt out of surveillance conducted without their consent. On Ring's Neighbors App, racial profiling has been gamified to encourage and escalate surveillance of "suspicious" people. The company collects personal information on children -- a potential violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act -- but has also seen the adoption of its various surveillance devices increase in schools, libraries, and communities across the country. Paired with Amazon's development of deeply biased facial surveillance technology and its partnerships with the police and fire departments of over 2,000 cities, the group argues the potential for abuse outstrips a threshold anyone should be comfortable with. "This type of surveillance is illegal under the FTC Act in Section 5 and in particular the section that talks about unfair and deceptive practices," said Jane Chung, the Big Tech Accountability Advocate at Public CItizen, in an interview. "There's a list of three things that have to be true in order for a practice to be unfair and deceptive according to the FTC. Number 1: it has to cause substantial injury. Number 2: the injury can't be avoidable. And number 3: the injury isn't outweighed by benefits." "Rulemaking is needed to stop widespread systematic surveillance, discrimination, lax security, tracking of individuals, and the sharing of data. While Amazon's smart home ecosystem, facial surveillance technology, and e-learning devices provide a good case study, these rules must extend beyond this one technology corporation to include any entity collecting, using, selling, and/or sharing personal data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Weight lifting was one of just nine sports at the first Olympics in 1896, but its days on the summer program may be numbered. From a report: After decades of rampant doping, bribery, vote-rigging and corruption at weight lifting's highest levels, the International Olympic Committee finally took action last year by threatening to drop the sport from the Games in the coming months if the International Weightlifting Federation does not introduce a host of fixes, including rigorous drug testing measures and governance reforms. The prognosis is not good. The leaders of the weight lifting federation failed during a key vote on June 30 to get the support needed to pass a new constitution aimed at addressing concerns from the Olympic committee. Delegates from the United States, Germany and China, among others, could not persuade their counterparts from the former Soviet republics, Latin America and other "old guard" weight lifting nations that would be hurt by tighter antidoping measures. If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors. Already, the I.O.C. had reduced the number of lifters in Tokyo to 196 from 260 during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. The number will be cut again, to 120, at the Paris Games in 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Black Widow has a new enemy: the Walt Disney. From a report: Scarlett Johansson, star of the latest Marvel movie "Black Widow," filed a lawsuit Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court against Disney, alleging her contract was breached when the media giant released the film on its Disney+ streaming service at the same time as its theatrical debut. Ms. Johansson said in the suit that her agreement with Disney's Marvel Entertainment guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release, and her salary was based in large part on the box-office performance of the film. "Disney intentionally induced Marvel's breach of the agreement, without justification, in order to prevent Ms. Johansson from realizing the full benefit of her bargain with Marvel," the suit said. The suit could be a bellwether for the entertainment industry. Major media companies are prioritizing their streaming services in pursuit of growth, and are increasingly putting their high-value content on those platforms. Those changes have significant financial implications for actors and producers, who want to ensure that growth in streaming doesn't come at their expense.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook's next hardware launch will be its long-awaited Ray-Ban 'smart glasses,' CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on an earnings call this week. When exactly the glasses will arrive is unclear. We least heard they were launching some time in 2021, but the pandemic has changed a lot of companies' plans, and Zuckerberg did not comment on a time frame. From a report: "Looking ahead here, the next product release will be the launch of our first smart glasses from Ray-Ban in partnership with EssilorLuxottica," said the Facebook CEO. "The glasses have their iconic form factor, and they let you do some pretty neat things." We don't know what those "neat things" are, though Facebook has previously confirmed that the glasses will not have an integrated display and are not classified as an augmented reality device. Will they be able to make voice calls? Will they have access to a smart assistant? It's not clear. Though without an integrated display, they will presumably rely on a paired smartphone app for controls, similar to Snap Spectacles or Amazon's Echo Frames.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The White House announced Wednesday that its "once-in-a-generation investment in our infrastructure" would include a part dedicated to improving Americans' access to the internet. From a report: Later, the Senate passed a critical test vote by 67-32, suggesting possible passage of the entire infrastructure bill in the coming days. "This bipartisan deal is the most important investment in public transit in American history and the most important investment in rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago," President Joe Biden said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "It will deliver high speed internet to every American." Neither precise details of the broadband section nor the text of the whole bill has been released yet. The White House said in a related statement that a $65 billion investment for broadband, out of $550 billion in new spending, would ensure that "every American has access to reliable high-speed internet," comparing it to the electrification of the country a century ago. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department, published a comprehensive interactive online map last month. The document shows how poorer, more rural and tribal areas generally don't have affordable broadband access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Nikola's founder and former executive chairman, Trevor Milton, and charged the former executive three counts of fraud, the company confirmed. The grand jury charged Milton with two counts of securities fraud and wire fraud while allegedly lying about "nearly all aspects of the business." From a report: "Today's government actions are against Mr. Milton individually, and not against the company," a Nikola spokesperson said in a statement. "Nikola has cooperated with the government throughout the course of its inquiry. We remain committed to our previously announced milestones and timelines and are focused on delivering Nikola Tre battery-electric trucks later this year from the company's manufacturing facilities." The US Attorney's Office in Manhattan did not immediately return Roadshow's request for comment, but CNBC reports that Milton surrendered to authorities and will appear in court later today. Milton resigned as executive chairman of Nikola last September following an in-depth financial investigation report from Hindenburg Research. Hindenberg confirmed it took a short position on the company's stock when revealing numerous allegations against the company, including a number of falsehoods Milton presented.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Security researchers have discovered a novel piece of Android malware that uses the VNC technology to record and broadcast a victim's smartphone activity, allowing threat actors to collect keyboard presses and app passwords. From a report: First spotted in March 2021 by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, this new piece of malware, named Vultur, is a departure from other Android malware strains that usually rely on fake login screens floating on top of legitimate apps to collect a victim's credentials. Instead, Vultur opens a VNC server on the infected phone, and broadcasts screen captures to an attacker command and control server, where the Vultur operator extracts passwords for desired apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LinkedIn will allow most employees to opt for full-time remote work as offices gradually reopen, Chief People Officer Teuila Hanson told Reuters. From the report: This new policy from Microsoft's professional social networking site is a reversal of the company's initial indication last October that employees would be expected to work from an office 50% of the time, when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions lift. The updated policy, offering employees the flexibility to work remotely full-time or work at an office part-time, will apply to LinkedIn's global workforce of more than 16,000 employees. "We anticipate that we'll definitely see more remote employees than what we saw prior to the pandemic," Hanson said in a Wednesday interview ahead of the announcement, adding that some jobs would require in-office work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More than 90 chief executive officers, including those at Apple, Amazon and Facebook on Thursday urged Congress to pass a law offering a citizenship path to young immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. From a report: In a letter to President Joe Biden and congressional leaders, the executives said thousands of the immigrants -- known as Dreamers -- are "valued employees at our companies," but a federal judge's recent ruling against a program protecting them "throws into chaos" their ability to live and work legally in the U.S. "Securing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers not only is the right thing to do, but is a huge economic benefit to the United States," the CEOs wrote in the letter. "The latest court ruling makes it all the more urgent that Congress take up and pass a legislative solution right away." The letter seeks to increase pressure on Republicans in Congress who are likely to oppose Democrats' efforts to pass the measure allowing for legal status for as many as 8 million undocumented immigrants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine fell from 96 percent to 84 percent over six months, according to data released on Wednesday. The preprint study funded by the companies determined that the vaccine's effectiveness reached a high point of 96.2 percent within two months after the second dose. But the efficacy "declined gradually" to 83.7 percent within six months, with an average decrease of about 6 percent every two months. But even with the slip in efficacy, the data indicates the vaccine offers protection six months later. The ongoing study with more than 44,000 participants across the Americas and Europe determined the vaccine was overall 91.1 percent effective, after 81 cases emerged among the vaccinated and 873 among those who received the placebo. The efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease including hospitalizations remained high, at 97 percent. Researchers will continue to observe participants of the study up to two years and combined with "real-world" data "will determine whether a booster is likely to be beneficial after a longer interval." If the efficacy continued to decrease at the current rate, it could fall below 50 percent within 18 months, suggesting that booster shots could be needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon's Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The Verge reports: The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all. As Good e-Reader first noted in June, newer Kindle devices with 4G support should be fine, but for older devices that shipped with support for 3G and Wi-Fi like the Kindle Keyboard (3rd generation), Kindle Touch (4th generation), Kindle Paperwhite (4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th generation), Kindle Voyage (7th generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th generation), users will be stuck with Wi-Fi only. In its email announcement, Amazon stresses that you can still enjoy the content you already own and have downloaded on these devices, you just won't be able to download new books from the Kindle Store unless you're doing it over Wi-Fi. Things get more complicated for Amazon's older Kindles, like the Kindle (1st and 2nd generation), and the Kindle DX (2nd generation). Since those devices relied solely on 2G or 3G internet connectivity, once the networks are shut down, the only way to get new content onto your device will be through an old-fashioned micro-USB cable. For customers affected by the shutdown, Amazon is offering a modest promotional credit (NEWKINDLE50) through August 15th for $50 towards a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, along with $15 in-store credit for ebooks. While arguably the company could do more to help affected customers (perhaps by replacing older devices entirely) this issue is largely out of Amazon's hands.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins has spotted the first detection of light from behind a black hole. Phys.Org reports: "Any light that goes into that black hole doesn't come out, so we shouldn't be able to see anything that's behind the black hole," said Wilkins, who is a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It is another strange characteristic of the black hole, however, that makes this observation possible. "The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself," Wilkins explained. The strange discovery, detailed in a paper published July 28 in Nature, is the first direct observation of light from behind a black hole -- a scenario that was predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but never confirmed, until now. "Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," said Roger Blandford, a co-author of the paper who is the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Stanford and SLAC professor of physics and particle physics. The original motivation behind this research was to learn more about a mysterious feature of certain black holes, called a corona. Material falling into a supermassive black hole powers the brightest continuous sources of light in the universe, and as it does so, forms a corona around the black hole. This light -- which is X-ray light -- can be analyzed to map and characterize a black hole. [...] As Wilkins took a closer look to investigate the origin of the flares, he saw a series of smaller flashes. These, the researchers determined, are the same X-ray flares but reflected from the back of the disk -- a first glimpse at the far side of a black hole. [...] The mission to characterize and understand coronas continues and will require more observation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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