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The price of bitcoin has come crashing below the $30,000 mark for the first time in a month. "At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is trading at $29,694.34," writes Paul Lilly via HotHardware. "That's down from around $31,000 yesterday, and less than half of where Bitcoin peaked at in April of this year, when it topped $60,000." From the report: Will it go back up? Probably, but for Bitcoin investors, there are definitely reasons to be cautious, outside of the normal volatility associated with cryptocurrencies. For one, China is cracking down on cryptocurrency in general. As such, crypto miners recently dumped a bunch of used GeForce RTX 3060 cards on eBay for relatively cheap (compared to what they had been selling for), as well as ASIC hardware, the latter of which is what Bitcoin miners use these days. But it's not just China. Malaysian police recently seized and then steamrolled 1,069 ASIC mining rigs after discovering that miners had illegally tapped into a power grid to steal electricity for their operations. Talk about sending a strong message. In addition, six people were arrested, jailed, and fined (but hey, at least they weren't steamrolled). Tighter regulations in various territories could affect Bitcoin's value, too. For example, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said lawmakers must "act quickly" to construct and adopt new rules on stablecoins. "Bringing together regulators will enable us to assess the potential benefits of stablecoins while mitigating risks they could pose to users, markets, or the financial system," Yellen said in a statement. "In light of the rapid growth in digital assets, it is important for the agencies to collaborate on the regulation of this sector and the development of any recommendations for new authorities." It's worth noting that other cryptocurrencies are down too. Dogecoin is down more than 5 percent to $0.16, while Ethereum dropped more than 3 percent to $1,755.99. Just over two months ago it was at nearly $3,900.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares a blog post from Stockfish announcing a lawsuit against ChessBase: The Stockfish project strongly believes in free and open-source software and data. Collaboration is what made this engine the strongest chess engine in the world. We license our software using the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPL) with the intent to guarantee all chess enthusiasts the freedom to use, share and change all versions of the program. Unfortunately, not everybody shares this vision of openness. We have come to realize that ChessBase concealed from their customers Stockfish as the true origin of key parts of their products (see also earlier blog posts by us and the joint Lichess, Leela Chess Zero, and Stockfish teams). Indeed, few customers know they obtained a modified version of Stockfish when they paid for Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 -- both Stockfish derivatives -- and they thus have good reason to be upset. [ChessBase released Fat Fritz 2, described on their website as the "new number 1" chess engine "with a massive new neural network, trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz." They advertise Fat Fritz 2 as using novel strong ideas compared to existing chess engines, but in reality Fat Fritz 2 is just Stockfish with a different neural network and minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.] ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights. These rights are explicit in the license and include access to the corresponding sources, and the right to reproduce, modify and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free. In the past four months, we, supported by a certified copyright and media law attorney in Germany, went through a long process to enforce our license. Even though we had our first successes, leading to a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6, we were unable to finalize our dispute out of court. Due to Chessbase's repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently. However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products. Thus, to enforce the consequences of the license termination, we have filed a lawsuit. This lawsuit is broadly supported by the team of maintainers and developers of Stockfish. We believe we have the evidence, the financial means and the determination to bring this lawsuit to a successful end. We will provide an update to this statement once significant progress has been made.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos has heard the complaints about billionaires like himself funneling their money into private rocket companies instead of donating to causes on Earth, and he doesn't disagree. In an interview with CNN ahead of his planned Tuesday morning space voyage in a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, Bezos was asked for his thoughts on critics who call the extraterrestrial flights "joyrides for the wealthy, and [who say] you should be spending your time and your money and energy trying to solve problems here on Earth." "Well, I say they are largely right," said Bezos, who Bloomberg estimates is worth $206 billion. "We have to do both. We have lots of problems here on Earth and we have to work on those." Bezos and fellow billionaires [...] have been characterized by critics as deaf to issues on the ground and too obsessed with making space more accessible when they could put their resources elsewhere. The 57-year-old Bezos, who earlier this month stepped down as CEO of Amazon, said it's important to "look to the future ... as a species and as a civilization." In his view, the work being done today will lay the foundation for future generations to work in space, which "will solve problems here on Earth." In an opinion piece for MSNBC, Talia Lavin views billionaires going to space through a more incendiary lens, writing: "What they seek to leave behind is a planet burning and flooding and full of the kind of small and ordinary suffering such fortunes could alleviate in an instant." The space program of the 1960s, which resulted in the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, "may have been mired in the bitter and petty rivalries of the Cold War, and limned by prejudice about who could excel," writes Lavin, "but it was a project funded and created by our government, an achievement held in common by the masses. No such common pride can be held in the launch of the titans of capital." "In this billionaire battle, there is no pretense at a sense of collective pride or communal achievement. Even the drumbeat of nationalism would be better than this obscene egotism, whose fumes are more putrid than rocket-jet emissions. It feels like a parody of hubris, and a colossal celebration of the social failure to moderate preposterous accumulations of wealth." Thoughts?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venmo announced it's removing its global social feed on Tuesday, the payment appâ(TM)s notorious feature that allows strangers to potentially view payments you make and receive on Venmo. From a report: Now Venmo's social elements will be limited to your actual friends on the app in the "friends feed" without you having to toggle any features in the app. The company buried the change in a blog post detailing an update to the Venmo app. [...] Until recently, Venmo also offered users no control over who saw their friends list within the app, which is potentially incriminating in an entirely separate way from seeing the content of a transaction. After Buzzfeed News discovered President Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle via the friends list, the company added additional privacy controls for the visibility of your Venmo contacts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's capabilities in artificial intelligence are "much closer than I thought" to catching up to the US, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Nikkei Asia, stressing that America would not succeed without a "very strong partnership with our Asian friends." From a report: In an online interview, Schmidt, now chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, said China was closing in on the US in certain areas of AI and quantum computing -- faster than his previous estimate of "a couple of years." That's a really, really big deal," he said. Schmidt stepped down as executive chair of Google parent Alphabet in 2018. He was nominated as the commission chair in 2019 to make AI-related policy recommendations to the US president and Congress. The commission's final report, released in March, warned that "if the United States does not act, it will probably lose its leadership position in AI to China in the next decade and become more vulnerable to a spectrum of AI-enabled threats from a host of state and non-state actors." To win the tech competition with China, the US had to maintain its lead in "strategic" areas such as AI, semiconductors, energy, quantum computing and synthetic biology, Schmidt said. And for that, he said, "we need much closer relationships with Japanese researchers, Japanese universities, Japanese government -- the same thing for South Koreans and same thing for Europeans."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France is looking into a news report that the phone of French President Emmanuel Macron may have been tapped on behalf of Morocco using spyware developed by Israel's NSO group, his office said Tuesday. From a report: A Moroccan surveillance agency attempted to access his private conversations in 2019, according to an international investigation cited by France Info, which took part in the project. Other heads of state and government members -- including about 15 French ministers or ex-ministers were also targeted -- the probe showed. Morocco has denied responsibility, France Info reported. The Pegasus spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, activists and business executives worldwide, according to the investigation led by the Paris-based not-for-profit Forbidden Stories, which relied on evidence extracted from the phones through forensic analysis by Amnesty International.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden plans to nominate Jonathan Kanter as head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter, the latest sign that the administration is preparing a broad crackdown on large technology companies. From the report: Kanter, who left one of the country's biggest law firms last year to start his own firm, is a long-time foe of Alphabet's Google, representing companies that have pushed antitrust enforcers to sue the search giant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aerospace companies have launched about 2,000 Internet satellites into orbit around Earth over the past 2 years, nearly doubling the number of active satellites. This has sparked concerns among astronomers and other skygazers, who worry about interference with observations of the night sky. From a report: Now, in what would be the biggest international step yet towards addressing these concerns, diplomats at a United Nations forum next month might discuss whether humanity has a right to 'dark and quiet skies.' The debate could initiate a framework for how scientists and the public would deal with the flood of new satellites -- with many more expected. Tens of thousands of satellites could be added to Earth orbit in the next few years to provide broadband Internet, if companies and governments build and launch all the networks, or 'megaconstellations,' they have publicly announced. The sheer number of these could mean that hundreds are visible all night long, affecting the sky like never before in human history. "These constellations are changing dramatically the way space has been used," says Piero Benvenuti, an astronomer at the University of Padua in Italy and a former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). He and other astronomers have been working through the IAU to raise international awareness of how the megaconstellations are affecting scientists and members of the public. They say the goal is not to pit astronomers against satellite companies, but to develop a vision of how to fairly use the shared realm of outer space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has called out apps made by Amazon, NetEase and Tiktok-owner ByteDance, as well as 142 other apps, for violating users' rights. From a report: Amazon's China app and NetEase's Dashen, an online community for gamers, have illegally collected user information, the ministry said in its latest list of problematic apps released on Monday. In addition, Douyin Lite, a version of TikTok's Chinese app made for lower-end phones, did not clearly display app information on the app store while Huya, a major live-streaming platform backed by Tencent Holdings, was found to have deceived, misled or forced users to turn on certain permissions, according to the ministry. Amazon said in an emailed statement that it will "continue to coordinate closely with the ministry to ensure we are meeting its requirements." Other app operators did not immediately reply to requests for comment. As part of the regular naming and shaming of Chinese apps by the central government, the MIIT has exerted its authority since 2019 with a total of 15 lists of problematic apps, including 6 so far this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another scorching summer heat wave was set to peak across portions of the western United States early this week, with air so dry that rain from thunderstorms evaporated before reaching the ground and smoke from wildfires delayed hundreds of flights at one of the region's largest airports. From a report: Temperatures reached the upper 90s and lower 100s in parts of the Northern Rockies on Monday, and forecasters warned of "dry thunderstorms," which bring lightning that can spark fires, but no rain to quench them. It was the fourth major heat wave to afflict parts of the West since early June, bringing dangerously hot temperatures and helping fuel the deepening drought and exploding wildfires across the region. An excessive heat warning was also in effect for parts of Montana and Wyoming through Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Glasgow, a town in northern Montana, hit 110 degrees on Monday, the Weather Service said. By 2:45 p.m. local time, Billings, toward the southern portion of the state, was officially hotter than Death Valley, Calif., at 110.4 degrees. Weather officials in Billings took advantage of the toasty temperatures and baked a batch of cookies on the dashboard of a car. "It may have taken 5 hours but we have fully baked cookies," they shared on Twitter. Lander, in central Wyoming, reached a record 100 degrees on Monday, according to the Weather Service. In 130 years, it was only the 21st day in Lander to reach triple digits. Parts of Idaho, including Boise and Twin Falls, saw much needed rain showers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox. From a report: The company's new Email Protection feature gives users a free "@duck.com" email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo's mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions. The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this week, I bought a month of Starz for a fraction of its typical asking price. Instead of paying $9 per month, I paid $3.24. Then I added a subscription to Spotify for $3.49, and a Disney Plus subscription for just $3. All told, my bill comes to about $10 per month for $28 worth of services. Those cut-rate subscriptions come courtesy of Together Price, a service that lets people rent out access to a share of their digital subscriptions. In exchange for a cut of each transaction, Together Price essentially serves as a marketplace for organized password sharing. The service, which started five years ago in Europe and has 80,000 paying customers, just launched in the U.S. last week. While Together Price isn't the first service to make password sharing easier, it's definitely the most brazen. Still, CEO Marco Taddei insists that the service is legal and that it technically honors each subscription's terms of use. He also believes the service is helping companies retain users that they'd otherwise lose. "We are targeting the very specific audience that needs to share," he says. "If [subscription providers] are not going to allow them do so so, they are going to drop the subscriptions." After signing up for Together Price, you can browse a "network" of users offering to share their subscriptions. Most major streaming video and music services are available, including Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Hulu, but sharing isn't limited to media. Some users are also peddling subscriptions to software tools such as Canva Pro and Surfshark VPN, and the site lets you set up custom subscriptions for pretty much anything by listing the service name, price, and sharing rules. For each service, you send a request to the subscription owner and submit credit card information to Together Price. Once the owner accepts the request, Together Price processes the payment, and you're allowed into a group where you can view login details and chat with the other members.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR: Wearing a cowboy hat under the West Texas morning sun, Jeff Bezos crossed the bridge to enter the capsule made by his company Blue Origin. He was accompanied by three others -- his brother Mark Bezos, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. Then the shuttle hatch closed and just before 9:15 a.m. ET, the four blasted into space on the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle. Bezos is the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space: Richard Branson rocketed there last week aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic. The date of the New Shepard's maiden launch is no accident: July 20 was the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Further reading: 'Mercury 13' pilot Wally Funk carried 60 years of history to space on Blue Origin flight.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata] along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something that is harder than conventional self-healing material, as reported by The Telegraph India. The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that aren't more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide, according to the experimental results which were published in the journal Science. Due to their molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals, a strong attractive force developed between two surfaces. Every time a fracture occurred, the attractive forces joined the pieces back again, without needing an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need. "Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystalline structure, that is favored in most electronics and optical applications," lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER said. "I can imagine applications for an everyday device," said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, a member of the team from IIT Kharagpur." Such materials could be used for mobile phone screens that will repair themselves if they fall and develop cracks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activations of iOS and Android devices are now evenly split in the United States, with little sign of movement toward either platform dominating over the past two years, according to data sourced by Consumer Research Intelligence Partners (CIRP). MacRumors reports: CIRP estimates that iOS and Android each had 50 percent of new smartphone activations in the year ending this quarter. iOS's share of new smartphone activations climbed from 2017 to 2020, but has now remained at its peak level for a second consecutive year. CIRP Partner and Co-Founder Josh Lowitz said that the finding is significant because for several years, Android smartphones "had a significant edge, with over 60 percent of customers opting for an Android phone in most quarters. In the past couple of years, though, iOS has closed the gap, and now splits the market with Android." Both Android and iOS users have had a high level of loyalty historically. Android loyalty has varied very slightly, in a narrow range of 90 to 93 percent in the past four years. iOS loyalty, on the other hand, has gradually increased over the past four years, from a low of 86 percent in early 2018 to 93 percent in the most recent quarter ending in June 2021. Loyalty and tendency to switch platforms may explain some of the change in the share of new smartphone activations, where iOS has gained loyalty in a market with a limited amount of switching.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Imagine a universe where you could point a spaceship in one direction and eventually return to where you started. If our universe were a finite donut, then such movements would be possible and physicists could potentially measure its size. "We could say: Now we know the size of the universe," astrophysicist Thomas Buchert, of the University of Lyon, Astrophysical Research Center in France, told Live Science in an email. Examining light from the very early universe, Buchert and a team of astrophysicists have deduced that our cosmos may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in all three dimensions like a three-dimensional donut. Such a universe would be finite, and according to their results, our entire cosmos might only be about three to four times larger than the limits of the observable universe, about 45 billion light-years away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dish Network has agreed to pay AT&T at least $5 billion over 10 years for network access amid a feud between Dish and T-Mobile. Dish is in the early stages of building a 5G network and in the meantime is serving customers as a reseller using network capacity that it purchases from T-Mobile. But Dish and T-Mobile are fighting over T-Mobile's plan to shut down its 3G CDMA network earlier than it originally intended, with Dish accusing T-Mobile of anticompetitive behavior. Against that backdrop, Dish today announced "the signing of a transformative, long-term strategic Network Services Agreement with AT&T, making AT&T the primary network services partner for Dish MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] customers." The AT&T network capacity will serve customers on Dish's "retail wireless brands, including Boost Mobile, Ting Mobile, and Republic Wireless," Dish said. Dish also said the agreement will accelerate its "expansion of retail wireless distribution to rural markets where Dish provides satellite TV services" and that AT&T will provide transport and roaming services to support Dish's future 5G network. Dish revealed the $5 billion price in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that also notes that the roaming and transport services from AT&T will not be limited to areas where Dish doesn't build 5G infrastructure. The deal "provides Dish's retail wireless customers with voice and data roaming services throughout the US on the AT&T network and access to AT&T's network, even within the markets where Dish is deploying its own 5G network," Dish told the SEC. Today's deal between AT&T and Dish is nonexclusive, so Dish can use both T-Mobile and AT&T capacity to serve customers. But Dish's statement that AT&T will become the "primary" network provider for Dish MVNO customers shows that Dish is trying to minimize the use of T-Mobile's network. Dish's MVNO deal with T-Mobile lasts until 2027. As part of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger-and-divestment proceedings, Dish committed to the government that it would build a 5G network serving 70 percent of Americans by June 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report (PDF) from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) finds that installing rooftop solar panels and community solar systems to serve the equivalent of 30 million American homes would create 1.77 millions jobs and $69 billion electricity bill savings over the next five years. CleanTechnica reports: In addition to creating 1.77 million new solar jobs and reducing energy bills by $69 billion, the report found that enacting the 30 Million Solar Homes policies would over five years: Eliminate global warming air pollution equivalent to closing 48 coal-burning power plants or taking 42 million cars off the road for a year; Increase new solar capacity nationally by 151 GW; and Power the equivalent of 20 million households in marginalized communities with local solar. In the report, these economic and environmental benefits are broken down by state and congressional district. An interactive map further illustrates the local impacts of the 30 Million Solar Homes proposal and gives viewers an opportunity to share the report with their elected officials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A new production problem has surfaced with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, further delaying deliveries of the popular wide-body jets..." writes the Wall Street Journal. Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shares their report:Boeing halted handing over Dreamliners to airlines in late May, after federal air-safety regulators declined to approve the plane maker's proposed method of inspecting the jets for previously disclosed production defects. It was the second such pause in the past year... The Federal Aviation Administration said the newly discovered quality issue posed no immediate safety threat. While the agency will determine whether to require modifications to 787s already in service, the FAA said: "Boeing has committed to fix these airplanes before resuming deliveries..." The new problem surfaced on part of the aircraft known as the forward pressure bulkhead at the front of the plane, people familiar with the matter said. It involves the skin of the aircraft and is similar to a previously disclosed Dreamliner issue found elsewhere on the planes, one of these people said. It surfaced as part of the FAA's review of Boeing's quality checks on newly produced undelivered planes, this person said. The delivery pause has been another setback for the aerospace giant, which has been grappling with various problems in its commercial, defense and space programs in recent years. It is also choking off a key source of cash as Boeing tries to overcome twin crises that resulted from two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, and the Covid-19 pandemic's hit to aircraft demand. The new problem hasn't raised any immediate safety concerns, but engineers at Boeing and the FAA are trying to understand the defect's potential to cause premature fatigue on a key part of the aircraft's structure, people familiar with the matter said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column shares an update on Amazon's ongoing battle with scalable data search solution ElasticSearch:Earlier this year, AWS completed its fork of ElasticSearch with the first release of OpenSearch. If you haven't followed along, the whole affair was a bit of a tug of war between AWS and Elastic, with AWS eventually coming out seemingly on top. After Elastic changed the licensing on ElasticSearch in an attempt to prevent AWS from selling a service based on the then-open-source project, AWS forked the project to release OpenSearch under Apache 2.0, effectively preserving its open source status. Now, OpenSearch has reached 1.0, which AWS says not only "marks the first production-ready version of OpenSearch," but also introduces "multiple new enhancements," such as data streams, trace analytics span filtering, report scheduling and more. The 1.0 release also involved quite a bit of code cleanup, removing proprietary code and marks, and adds the ability to upgrade from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch as if you were performing a normal upgrade of ElasticSearch. If you're interested in learning where the project is going, head on over to the public roadmap to learn more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

200 miles east of Silicon Valley, "A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area," a real estate brokerage firm specializing in data analytics recently told Outside magazine. Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)... There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there. Just last year Sierra Sotheby's found more than 2,350 homes were sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion (up 86% from the $1.76 billion in 2019), according to the article, which calls the popular tele-working destination a "Zoom town." Now the region's heading into its summer tourist season — but "with a shorthanded workforce, businesses are unraveling," like the restaurant that simply closed for a week because "We literally do not have enough cooks to operate..."The evidence is showing up in the ways businesses are cutting back during the peak of the busiest time of year, a time when small business owners in Tahoe typically are trying to make as much money as possible so they can survive the slower times of year... While the hiring crisis spans far and wide across the nation, in Tahoe, the linchpin is housing. At Tahoe Dave's, Dave Wilderotter, the owner of Tahoe Dave's Skis and Boards, starts his employees at $20 an hour. Most of his employees make too much money to qualify for affordable housing. But they don't make enough money to pay Tahoe's rent prices, which have risen by 25% to 50% in the past year. Tahoe's workforce is disappearing because many of them cannot afford to live here any more... Making matters worse, Tahoe's already minimal long-term rental housing stock is getting eaten up by the very hot real estate market. Many landlords are selling homes they've been renting to local workers, leaving those tenants without many options... "This isn't just tourism that's being hit," says Alex Mourelatos, a business owner on Tahoe's North Shore who also serves on multiple boards for the North Tahoe Public Utility District and nonprofit groups. "It's every service industry. Every industry across people, dentistry, legal, everything, Planned Urban Developments, all the special districts, firemen, teachers, all of them." The hiring crisis has even affected critical services like public transportation. Bus drivers are so hard to come by that the Tahoe Transportation District made the unprecedented decision to shut down an entire bus route down the East Shore. The district had shuttles but no one to steer the wheel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine:When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana. "It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami. "We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Well before China decided to kick out all of its bitcoin miners, they were already leaving in droves, and new data from Cambridge University shows they were likely headed to the United States," reports CNBC:The U.S. has fast become the new darling of the bitcoin mining world. It is the second-biggest mining destination on the planet, accounting for nearly 17% of all the world's bitcoin miners as of April 2021. That's a 151% increase from September 2020. "For the last 18 months, we've had a serious growth of mining infrastructure in the U.S.," said Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific. "We've noticed a massive uptick in mining operations looking to relocate to North America, mostly in the U.S." This dataset doesn't include the mass mining exodus out of China, which led to half the world's miners dropping offline, and experts tell CNBC that the U.S. share of the mining market is likely even bigger than the numbers indicate... "500,000 formerly Chinese miner rigs are looking for homes in the U.S," said Marathon Digital's Fred Thiel. "If they are deployed, it would mean North America would have closer to 40% of global hashrate by the end of 2022." America's rising dominance is a simple case of luck meeting preparation. The U.S. has quietly been building up its hosting capacity for years... It also helps that the U.S. is also home to some of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet, many of which tend to be renewable. Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world's cheapest sources of power. Thiel expects most new miners relocating to North America to be powered by renewables, or gas that is offset by renewable energy credits. While Castle Island Ventures founding partner, Nic Carter, points out that U.S. mining isn't wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets. "The migration is definitely a net positive overall," he said. "Hashrate moving to the U.S., Canada, and Russia will mean much lower carbon intensity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"China conducted a clandestine first test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle Friday as a part of development of a reusable space transportation system," reports Space News: The vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Friday and later landed at an airport just over 800 kilometers away at Alxa League in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) announced. No images nor footage nor further information, such as altitude, flight duration or propulsion systems, were provided. The CASC release stated however that the vehicle uses integrated aviation and space technologies and indicates a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing profile. The test follows a September 2020 test flight of a "reusable experimental spacecraft". The spacecraft orbited for days, releasing a small transmitting payload and later deorbited and landed horizontally. The spacecraft is widely believed to be a reusable spaceplane concept, though no images have emerged. Giant space and defense contractor CASC also developed that vehicle and stated that the new vehicle tested Friday can be used as a first stage of a reusable space transportation system. The implication is that the two vehicles will be combined for a fully reusable space transportation system. The developments have not come out of the blue. China stated in 2017 that it aimed to test a reusable spaceplane in 2020... Chen Hongbo, from CASC's China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Science and Technology Daily (Chinese) in 2017 that the reusable spacecraft would be capable of carrying both crew and payloads... Chen stated the aim was full reusability, moving beyond partial reusability of Falcon 9-like launchers. The spaceplane, the development and testing of which is to be completed by 2030, should be capable of being reused more than 20 times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones lost access to her 400,000 followers on Twitter last month — which she'd been using to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for downplaying the severity of the state's Covid-19 crisis. Then Jones announced she'd be running for Congress. "This also means, under Desantis' recently signed social media law, I get to fine Twitter $250K per day until my account is restored starting July 1." Orlando Weekly reports:After a media frenzy, Jones deleted the post. She said she was attempting to point out Gov. Ron DeSantis's "hypocrisy" in writing a law that allowed political candidates to sue media companies that ban them, while still celebrating her Twitter suspension... The bit became real when she filed to run as an Independent in Florida's 1st congressional district on June 25... On her campaign website, she lists eight issues on her platform: protecting Florida's environmental systems, promoting government transparency, fighting for media accountability in disinformation, giving access to representatives, ensuring the district's veterans are taken care of, scrutinizing restrictive voting laws, funding science and research, and boosting support for all levels of education. Jones says there's still room for other issues on her platform, after she talks to more residents. Jones' GoFundMe account ("DefendScience") now directs visitors to her official campaign site if they want to make campaign contributions. (And the GoFundMe page also notes that her campaign has been endorsed by 90-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study on the Vietnam War.) But the last six weeks have been a wild ride for the data scientist: Last month Florida's Inspector General granted official whistleblower status to Jones.Six days later Twitter told Slashdot they'd "permanently suspended" Jones' account "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation."When Jones then created a new Twitter account for her campaign, "it was suspended within a day of its creation," Orlando Weekly reports.Jones created a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist". Yet since June 16th Instagram has also marked it as "unavailable," saying the link "may be broken, or the page may have been removed." (Since June 16th Instagram has not responded to Slashdot's request for an explanation.)Jones' GoFundMe page now refers visitors to an entirely different Instagram page.Yesterday the official coronavirus coordinator for the White House reported that one in five of America's Covid-19 cases this week have come from Florida.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Watson triumphed on the gameshow Jeopardy in 2011, its star scientist had to convince IBM that it wasn't a magic answer box, and "explained that Watson was engineered to identify word patterns and predict correct answers for the trivia game." The New York Times looks at what's happened in the decade since:Watson has not remade any industries. And it hasn't lifted IBM's fortunes. The company trails rivals that emerged as the leaders in cloud computing and A.I. — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. While the shares of those three have multiplied in value many times, IBM's stock price is down more than 10 percent since Watson's "Jeopardy!" triumph in 2011.... The company's missteps with Watson began with its early emphasis on big and difficult initiatives intended to generate both acclaim and sizable revenue for the company, according to many of the more than a dozen current and former IBM managers and scientists interviewed for this article... The company's top management, current and former IBM insiders noted, was dominated until recently by executives with backgrounds in services and sales rather than technology product experts. Product people, they say, might have better understood that Watson had been custom-built for a quiz show, a powerful but limited technology... IBM insists that its revised A.I. strategy — a pared-down, less world-changing ambition — is working... But the grand visions of the past are gone. Today, instead of being a shorthand for technological prowess, Watson stands out as a sobering example of the pitfalls of technological hype and hubris around A.I. The march of artificial intelligence through the mainstream economy, it turns out, will be more step-by-step evolution than cataclysmic revolution. One example: IBM technologists approached cancer medical centers, but "were frustrated by the complexity, messiness and gaps in the genetic data at the cancer center... At the end of last year, IBM discontinued Watson for Genomics, which grew out of the joint research with the University of North Carolina. It also shelved another cancer offering, Watson for Oncology, developed with another early collaborator, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center..."IBM continued to invest in the health industry, including billions on Watson Health, which was created as a separate business in 2015. That includes more than $4 billion to acquire companies with medical data, billing records and diagnostic images on hundreds of millions of patients. Much of that money, it seems clear, they are never going to get back. Now IBM is paring back Watson Health and reviewing the future of the business. One option being explored, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to sell off Watson Health... Many outside researchers long dismissed Watson as mainly a branding campaign. But recently, some of them say, the technology has made major strides... The business side of Watson also shows signs of life. Now, Watson is a collection of software tools that companies use to build A.I.-based applications — ones that mainly streamline and automate basic tasks in areas like accounting, payments, technology operations, marketing and customer service. It is workhorse artificial intelligence, and that is true of most A.I. in business today. A core Watson capability is natural language processing — the same ability that helped power the "Jeopardy!" win. That technology powers IBM's popular Watson Assistant, used by businesses to automate customer service inquiries... IBM says it has 40,000 Watson customers across 20 industries worldwide, more than double the number four years ago. Watson products and services are being used 140 million times a month, compared with a monthly rate of about 10 million two years ago, IBM says. Some of the big customers are in health, like Anthem, a large insurer, which uses Watson Assistant to automate customer inquiries. "Adoption is accelerating," Mr. Thomas said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday's California's lawmakers approved America's first state-funded guaranteed income program for both qualifying young adults who have recently left foster care and for pregnant women, reports CNBC.The votes — 36-0 in the Senate and 64-0 in the Assembly — showed bipartisan support for an idea that is gaining momentum across the country. Dozens of local programs have sprung up in recent years, including some that have been privately funded, making it easier for elected officials to sell the public on the idea. California's plan is taxpayer-funded, and could spur other states to follow its lead. "If you look at the stats for our foster youth, they are devastating," Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk said. "We should be doing all we can to lift these young people up." Local governments and organizations will apply for the money and run their programs. The state Department of Social Services will decide who gets funding. California lawmakers left it up to local officials to determine the size of the monthly payments, which generally range from $500 to $1,000 in existing programs around the country. The vote came on the same day millions of parents began receiving their first monthly payments under a temporary expansion of the federal child tax credit many view as a form of guaranteed income. "Now there is momentum, things are moving quickly," said Michael Tubbs, an advisor to California governor Gavin Newsom, who was a trailblazer when he instituted a guaranteed income program as mayor of Stockton. "The next stop is the federal government."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Cuban officials rallied tens of thousands of supporters in the streets on Saturday — nearly a week after they were stunned by the most widespread protests in decades," the Associated Press reports. President Miguel Díaz-Canel — accompanied by 90-year-old former President Raul Castro — "made an impassioned speech blaming unrest on the U.S. and its economic embargo, 'the blockade, aggression and terror... The enemy has returned to throw all it has at destroying the sacred unity and tranquility of the citizens.'""I think the government is just trying to signal to people that it understands their desperation and that it's going to try to alleviate some of the misery that they're experiencing. The problem is that the government just doesn't have much in the way of resources that it can devote to doing that," said William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba at the American University in the United States. Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Psiphon Inc's freely available internet censorship circumvention tool has helped nearly 1.4 million Cubans this week gain access to websites, the company said on Friday, after Cuba's government curbed access to popular social media and messaging platforms... Thousands of Cubans joined nationwide protests over shortages of basic goods, limits on civil liberties and the government's handling of a surge in COVID-19 infections on Sunday, the most significant unrest in decades in the communist-run country. Psiphon said 1.389 million users accessed the open web from Cuba through its network on Thursday, as well as 1.238 million as noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday. "Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working," Psiphon said in a statement. Psiphon said the roughly 1.4 million represents about 20% of Cuban internet users. Its open source circumvention tool can be downloaded from app stores like Google Play or Apple to "maximize your chances of bypassing censorship," according to the company. Canadian university researchers developed the software in 2007 to let users evade governmental internet firewalls. The censorship-circumvention tool — which combines VPN, SSH, and HTTP Proxy tools — has also been used in Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar, according to recent news reports. Bloomberg notes that the Toronto-based nonprofit Psiphon "has received funding from the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government nonprofit that aims to support global internet freedom technologies... "On Thursday, President Biden said the U.S. is examining whether it's able to restore internet access shut down by the Cuban government."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt," reports the Guardian, "after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to 'ethical concerns'."The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin — a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice — in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results... A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction... He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. "Humorously, this led to them changing 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' to 'extreme intense respiratory syndrome' on one occasion," Lawrence said. The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence... "In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19," Lawrence said. "According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four..." Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly... "The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records," Brown told the Guardian. "It's certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren't even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural..." Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that "this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there", and it appeared to him the data was "just totally faked". Meta-analyses incorporating the "just totally faked" data were then published in Oxford Academic's Open Forum Infectious Diseases and in the American Journal of Therapeutics. Meanwhile, the Guardian also notes a new (and peer-reviewed) paper that was just published last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Its finding? Iermectin is "not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Since Joe Biden took office [in January], about two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials in Vienna have reported experiencing mysterious afflictions similar to the Havana Syndrome," reports the New Yorker:U.S. officials say the number of possible new cases in the Austrian capital — long a nexus of U.S. and Russian espionage — is now greater than the number reported by officials in any city except for Havana itself, where the first cases were reported... The exact cause of the ailments in Vienna, which U.S. government agencies formally refer to as "anomalous health incidents" or "unexplained health incidents," remains unknown, but in response to the surge the C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies are redoubling their efforts to determine the cause, and to identify the culprit or culprits... The Havana Syndrome derives its name from the Cuban capital, where C.I.A. officers and State Department employees first reported experiencing strange sensations of sound and pressure in their heads in 2016 and 2017. Some of the patients said the sensations seemed to follow them around their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms in the Cuban capital. Some of the patients described feeling as though they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. Many of them suffered debilitating symptoms, from headaches and vertigo to vision problems. Specialists at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair used advanced MRIs to study the brains of forty of the original patients from Havana. They found no signs of physical impact to the patients' skulls — it was as if they had "a concussion without a concussion," one specialist told me — and the team detected signs of damage to their brains. Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted. But American intelligence analysts and operatives have so far been unable to find concrete evidence that would allow them to declare that either microwave radiation or the Russians were to blame. The article also points out that the CIA's director has privately called the incidents "attacks" rather than incidents or illnesses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seven years ago two Google engineers concluded, after four years of study that "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (The authors proposed a R&D portfolio pursuing "disruptive" solutions in hydro, wind, solar photovoltaics, and nuclear power, with one Slashdot reader asking "is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?") But the two engineers — still at Google — recently announced "we're happy to say that we got a few things wrong. In particular, renewable energy systems have come down in price faster than we expected, and adoption has surged beyond the predictions we cited in 2014." One of them told IEEE Spectrum "It's stunning how rapidly things have been moving since the first article was published,"Experts now have a better understanding of how a variety of technologies could be combined to prevent catastrophic climate change, the coauthors say. Many renewable-energy systems, for example, are already mature and just need to be scaled up. Some innovations need significant development, including new processes to produce steel and concrete, and geoengineering techniques to sequester carbon and temporarily reduce solar radiation. The one commonality among all these promising technologies, they conclude, is that engineers can make a difference on a planetary scale... Concerned about the pessimistic tone of most climate coverage, the authors argue that wise policies, market pressure, and human creativity can get the job done. "When you put the right incentives in place, you capture the ingenuity of the masses," says Fork. "All of us are smarter than any of us." The Google engineers acknowledge we've already seen a plunge in battery prices to lows not predicted until 2050. (Along with cheap natural gas prices, this cut America's coal consumption in half, lowering emissions.) And fossil fuel consumption has been reduced thanks to cheaper electric heat pumps and electric cars. Other suggestions from their article include: Cleaner air travel (including clean hydrogen-powered planes) New forms of nuclear power Climate policy (including carbon pricing strategies like carbon taxes) "So, engineers, let's get to work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared some fascinating photos and a report from Live Science. "This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently — even a view of its innards — when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean."Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque. The expedition crew reported two encounters with the glass octopus — an impressive count given that previously there was such limited footage of these clear cephalopods, scientists had to learn about them by studying chunks of them in the gut contents of their predators... During the expedition, which ended July 8, a crew of marine scientists discovered a handful of what are likely newfound marine animals on nine previously unexplored submarine mountains known as seamounts. The team also completed high-resolution seafloor mapping of more than 11,500 square miles (30,000 square km) around the archipelago and video recordings of five additional seamounts filmed by the underwater robot SuBastian, according to a statement. SuBastian also snagged footage of a whale shark (the largest living fish in the world) and a long-legged crab stealing a fish from another crab. The expedition sent SuBastian on 21 dives, enabling the robot to record more than 182 hours on the seafloor. The expedition was run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit operating foundation co-founded by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Beeftopia writes: Rust has two modes: its default, safe mode, and an unsafe mode. In its default, safe mode, Rust prevents memory errors, such as "use-after-free" errors. It also prevents "data races" which is unsynchronized access to shared memory. In its unsafe mode (via use of the "unsafe" block), in which some of its APIs are written, it allows the use of potentially unsafe C-style features. The key challenge in verifying Rust's safety claims is accounting for the interaction between its safe and unsafe code. This article from April's issue of Communications of the ACM provides an overview of Rust and investigates its safety claims. The article is co-authored by Ralf Jung, a prominent postdoctoral researcher in the 'Foundations of Programming' research group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. And (spoiler alert) Jung has just received one of two 'Honorable Mentions' for the 'Dissertation Award' of the 'Association for Computing Machinery' (ACM), reports a nonprofit site operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:In his dissertation, Ralf Jung now provides the first formal proof that the safety promises of Rust actually hold. "We were able to verify the safety of Rust's type system and thus show how Rust automatically and reliably prevents entire classes of programming errors," says Ralf Jung. In doing so, he also successfully addressed a special aspect of the programming language: "The so-called 'type safety' goes hand in hand with the fact that Rust imposes restrictions on the programmer and does not allow everything that the programmer wants to do. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to write an operation into the code that Rust would not accept because of its type safety," the computer scientist continues. "This is where a special feature of Rust comes into play: programmers can mark their code as 'unsafe' if they want to achieve something that contradicts the programming language's safety precautions. Together with international collaborators, including my thesis advisor Derek Dreyer, we developed a theoretical framework that allows us to prove that Rust's safety claims hold despite the possibility of writing 'unsafe' code," Jung says. This proof, called RustBelt, is complemented by Ralf Jung with a tool called Miri, with which 'unsafe' Rust code can be automatically tested for compliance with important rules of the Rust specification - a basic requirement for correctness and safety of this code. "While RustBelt was a great success, especially in academic circles, Miri is already established in industry as a tool for security testing of programs written in Rust," explains Ralf Jung....The ACM states: "Through Jung's leadership and active engagement with the Rust Unsafe Code Guidelines working group, his work has already had profound impact on the design of Rust and laid essential foundations for its future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America detonated the world's first nuclear device in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. On its 76th anniversary, U.S. president Biden issued a proclamation: Many brave men and women have risked their lives in service to our Nation, but few know the story of our "Atomic Veterans" — American military service members who participated in nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, served with United States military forces in or around Hiroshima and Nagasaki through mid-1946, or were held as prisoners of war in or near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. These veterans served at testing sites like the Bikini Atoll and witnessed the destructive power of nuclear weapons firsthand. On National Atomic Veterans Day, we recognize and honor the contributions of America's Atomic Veterans for their sacrifice and dedication to our Nation's security, and recommit to supporting our Atomic Veterans and educating ourselves on the role these patriots played in our national story. Atomic Veterans served our Nation with distinction, but their service came at a great cost. Many developed health conditions due to radiation exposure, yet because they were not able to discuss the nature of their service, they were unable to seek medical care or disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs for their illnesses. Decades later in 1996, the United States Congress repealed the Nuclear Radiation and Secrecy Agreements Act, allowing Atomic Veterans to tell their stories and file for benefits. By then, thousands of Atomic Veterans had died without their families knowing the true extent of their service. Our Nation has one truly sacred obligation: to properly prepare and equip our troops when we send them into harm's way, and to care for them and their families when they return from service. As Commander in Chief, I am committed to fulfilling our obligation to the Atomic Veterans and their families, and ensuring that all of our Nation's veterans have timely access to needed services, medical care, and benefits. On this National Atomic Veterans Day, our country remembers the service and sacrifices of Atomic Veterans. Their heroism and patriotism will never be forgotten and we always honor their bravery and devotion to duty. July 16, 2021 was named "National Atomic Veterans Day." The proclamation ended with a call on all Americans "to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities that honor our Nation's Atomic Veterans whose brave service and sacrifice played an important role in the defense of our Nation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace quotes NPR: Portions of the Amazon rainforest are now releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, disrupting an important balancing act that signals a worsening of the climate crisis, according to a new study. Findings from the nearly decade-long research project, published Wednesday in the journal Nature , suggest that deforestation and fire, among other factors, have dramatically undercut the Amazon's ability to absorb heat-trapping carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Researchers who routinely tested the atmosphere at four areas in Amazonia twice a month over a nine-year period found that not only are carbon emissions higher in the eastern areas of the rainforest than in the western areas, but that the southeastern area is putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs. The eastern Amazon is a hotspot of deforestation to facilitate logging and agriculture, including cattle ranches. In addition to deforestation and fires, the study says the rise in emissions from the Amazon has been accelerated by warming temperatures and "moisture stress" during the dry season. The eastern areas have less moisture than the west during already-difficult dry periods, which now have become drier and have lasted longer due to climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This week, a 22-year-old self-described Bitcoin millionaire introduced the Freedom Phone, a $499 device meant to be completely free from 'Big Tech's' censorship and influence," reports PC Magazine. "But it turns out the same smartphone is actually from China, and probably just a cheap knock-off."The Freedom Phone comes from Erik Finman, who unveiled the device earlier this week. He claims the product has everything Trump supporters could dream of, including an "uncensorable" app store, preinstalled conservative-friendly apps including Parler and Rumble, and even its own anti-surveillance operating system called FreedomOS... However, The Daily Beast noticed the Freedom Phone looks strikingly similar to a budget smartphone device from a Chinese vendor called Umidigi. The device is called the Umidigi A9 pro, and you can actually buy it over on the Chinese e-commerce site AliExpress starting at $119. Finman later told The Daily Beast that the Freedom Phone was indeed sourced from Umidigi, a company that's based in Shenzhen, China... An uncensorable app store opens the door for hackers and shady developers to circulate malware and data-collecting programs to users. We're also doubtful Freedom Phone has its own operating system if it can run apps such as Parler and Rumble, in addition to Signal, Telegram and Brave The Daily Beast adds this anecdote:The Freedom Phone's "Freedom OS" operating system is based on Google's Android operating system, according to Finman. But during a livestream video promoting the phone, right-wing activist Anna Khait was confused by her fans' basic questions about the phone. "Is it an Android?" Khait said. "I'm not really sure. No, it's a Freedom Phone." Gizmodo calls the phone's web site "radically vague on the details."There is no information about the phone's operating system, storage, camera, CPU, or RAM capabilities. It has a list of features, but there are no actual details about them. Instead, under each feature, there's merely a "Buy it now" button which redirects you to the site's shopping cart. The phone's hefty price, combined with the company's total lack of transparency, is ridiculous — essentially asking the buyer to cough up half a grand in exchange for, uh, something...! But Gizmodo also shares a philosophical thought:Before we get into the specifics of why this device probably sucks, let me just say that the desire to have a phone that is dedicated to protecting your autonomy and privacy is a reasonable one — and should be encouraged. That said, I don't think the Freedom Phone provides that. Actually, aside from its overt partisan bent, it's impossible to tell what kind of device this is because Finman and his acolytes haven't provided any information about it... The funny thing is, if Trump voters are looking for a way to get off the "Big Tech" grid, there's no need for them to buy this sketchy shit. There are actually entire subcultures within the phone industry dedicated to escaping the Android/iOS paradigm. You can wade into the de-Googled phone sector, for instance — where Android phones are sold that have ostensibly been refurbished to rid the devices of code that will "send your personal data" back to the tech giant. There's also the Linux-based Pinephone, which sells at a fraction of the Freedom Phone's cost (between $150 and $200), and is a favorite of those in the privacy community. All of these come with caveats, obviously, but the point is that there are much more transparent and affordable options than the Freedom Phone... It'd be nice if Americans could actually come together around the issue of privacy since it's an area where — regardless of political party — we're all collectively getting screwed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Anthony Di Iorio, a co-founder of the Ethereum network, says he's done with the cryptocurrency world, partially because of personal safety concerns," reports Bloomberg, in a story shared by Slashdot reader tekram:Di Iorio, 48, has had a security team since 2017, with someone traveling with or meeting him wherever he goes. In coming weeks, he plans to sell Decentral Inc. [maker of Jaxx, a digital asset wallet], and refocus on philanthropy and other ventures not related to crypto. The Canadian expects to sever ties in time with other startups he is involved with, and doesn't plan on funding any more blockchain projects. "It's got a risk profile that I am not too enthused about," said Di Iorio, who declined to disclose his cryptocurrency holdings or net worth. "I don't feel necessarily safe in this space. If I was focused on larger problems, I think I'd be safer..." He was also for a time chief digital officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange. In February 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth was as high as $1 billion. Ether's price has more than doubled since then. Bloomberg points out that Di lorio's net worth was estimated in 2018 at $1 billion — and that since then Ether's price has more than doubled, with the token holding a total market capitalization around $225 billion (second only to bitcoin). Bloomberg also notes that Di lorio is involved in Project Arrow, a company building a zero-emission self-driving car. Di Iorio plans to sell Decentral Inc for equity, not cryptocurrency, telling Bloomberg that "I want to diversify to not being a crypto guy, but being a guy tackling complex problems... "I will incorporate crypto when needed, but a lot of times, it's not. It's really a small percentage of what the world needs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The White House escalated its fight against vaccine misinformation on Friday, with President Biden directly criticizing Facebook and other platforms for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread -- and consequently raising the ongoing death toll from the deadly pandemic. Asked for a message to platforms like Facebook, Biden replied, "They're killing people ... the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of the president's comments. The full exchange is embedded [here]. "We will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts," said a Facebook spokesperson. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine." "The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives," the spokesperson continued. "Period."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virginia will use $700 million in American Rescue Plan funding to expedite broadband buildouts in underserved communities throughout the state, Governor Ralph Northam announced on Friday. Virginia is only one of the states across the country that plans to use that money to build faster internet infrastructure. Engadget reports: With the investment, Virginia says it's on track to become one of the first states in the US to achieve universal broadband access. An estimated 233,500 homes and businesses throughout the Commonwealth fall under what the Federal Communications Commission would consider an underserved location. They don't have an internet connection that can achieve download speeds of 25Mbps down. The state estimates the additional funding will allow it to connect those places to faster internet by the end of 2024, instead of 2028, as previously planned. What's more, the "majority" of those connections will be completed within the next 18 months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient supernova explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays -- mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium -- to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphere -- and life. In a flurry of studies and speculation, astronomers have sketched out their potential effects, including a depleted ozone layer, cancer-causing particles, wildfires, and a cooling of the climate that could have helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago. Most paleontologists are yet to be convinced, but astronomers argue that such supernovae could explain some extinction events that lack customary triggers like volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Protecting the coasts in the United States from the impacts of climate change comes with a hefty price tag. But new research shows that using sea walls to safeguard land can just make the rising tides a problem somewhere else. The paper, published in PNAS, looks into the effect of erecting sea walls in one location and what that means for other places along the coast. Using the San Francisco Bay as a case study, it also assesses the economic impacts of flood scenarios in the nonprotected regions. According to the paper, defending individual parcels of the shore can increase flooding elsewhere by as much as 36 million cubic meters. This can result in $723 million in damages for a single flooding event in the most dire situations -- costs can even exceed the damages that would have resulted otherwise in the protected region. Robert Griffin, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth's School of Marine Science and Technology, decided to look into what happens to unprotected areas. Griffin and his team combined hydrodynamic and economic modeling to investigate flood damages in the San Francisco Bay under a variety of different scenarios -- with different parts of the shore protected by walls with different lengths, for instance. (For the sake of the experiment, the sea walls were modeled as being infinitely high.) The team focused on problems brought on by tidal events, rather than storms, and broke the results down by amount of sea-level rise: 50 cm, 100 cm, 150 cm, and 200 cm above 2010 levels. The study "can be useful in a variety of outcomes through time," Griffin told Ars, adding that the 200 cm scenario is close to the high end of current projections for the year 2100. "Displacement effects relate to the morphology of the land. Places that are low-lying, and valleys, can potentially accommodate more water in a tidal flooding scenario. If you block those places in the case of a flood, those waters go elsewhere. If those other places aren't also similarly defended, then it can increase the damages on those places," Griffin said. For example, if you protect the Napa-Sonoma shoreline, the Santa Clara Valley and San Leandro in the South Bay can expect to experience $82 million and $70 million in flooding damages, respectively, with a sea-level rise of 200 cm. San Rafael would also be hit with an additional $53 million in damages in the case of a flood. On the positive side of things, protecting parts of the South Bay could lead to small but widespread damage reductions. Protecting Alameda, for instance, could reduce flood damages in areas south of there, including San Lorenzo and Newark. It would also cut down damages on the opposite side of the shoreline, near Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, the paper notes. Though the modeling done in this research focuses on the San Francisco Bay, Griffin noted that other parts of the world's coasts could see similar effects. Further, around 468 million people live close to bays and estuaries, according to the paper. Considering sea walls are already in place along many coasts, these displaced damages could already be happening -- though potentially to a lesser extent than if the sea level reached the paper's more dire levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists at Google have taken an important step toward protecting delicate information in their nascent quantum computer from errors that can obliterate it. The researchers can't yet compensate for all types of errors -- a necessary step toward building a full-fledged quantum computer -- but others say they're poised to achieve that goal. Working with chains of up to 11 data qubits, Google researchers have now been able to preserve a logical qubit for a time that increases exponentially with the number of physical qubits, they report today in Nature. By spreading a single qubit's state over up to 11 data qubits, they reduced the chances of an error after 50 microseconds from 40% to 0.2%. Other groups have demonstrated similar error corrections schemes, but the new work is the first to demonstrate the exponential suppression of errors, says Julian Kelly, a physicist at Google and senior author on the paper. Such exponential suppression suggests developers may eventually be able to maintain a logical qubit indefinitely by spreading it over about 1000 physical qubits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hikers looking to summit Scotland's highest mountain and other peaks in the area are being sent up "potentially fatal" routes by Google Maps, the region's mountaineering organizations have warned. CNN reports: The John Muir Trust said Thursday that growing numbers of people using Google Maps to navigate up Ben Nevis risk being directed via a route that is "highly dangerous, even for experienced climbers." Ben Nevis, a popular tourist destination, is the highest mountain in the British Isles, standing at 1,345 meters (4,413 feet). Although thousands summit it annually, climbing the peak is not without risks and deaths have been recorded on the mountain as recently as this year. "The problem is that Google Maps directs some visitors to the Upper Falls car park, presumably because it is the closest car park to the summit," John Muir Trust's Nevis Conservation Officer Nathan Berrie said in a statement. "But this is NOT the correct route and we often come across groups of inexperienced walkers heading towards Steall Falls or up the south slopes of Ben Nevis believing it is the route to the summit," Berrie added. Mountaineering Scotland also warned that a route suggested by Google Maps was "potentially fatal." "For those new to hill walking, it would seem perfectly logical to check out Google Maps for information on how to get to your chosen mountain," Heather Morning, Mountaineering Scotland's mountain safety adviser explained in a statement."But when you input Ben Nevis and click on the 'car' icon, up pops a map of your route, taking you to the car park at the head of Glen Nevis, followed by a dotted line appearing to show a route to the summit." Morning said that "even the most experienced mountaineer would have difficulty following this route. The line goes through very steep, rocky, and pathless terrain where even in good visibility it would be challenging to find a safe line. Add in low cloud and rain and the suggested Google line is potentially fatal." She also added that Google Maps suggested other routes which would direct users towards "life threatening terrain" when they sought to navigate the country's other high peaks, including the 1,062-meter An Teallach. "For An Teallach in the northwest, a 'walking' route was input into the search engine and the line offered would take people over a cliff," she warned. A spokesperson for Google said the company was looking into the complaints. "We built Google Maps with safety and reliability in mind, and are working quickly to investigate the routing issue on Ben Nevis and surrounding areas," the spokesperson said in an email. "In addition to using authoritative data and high definition imagery to update the map, we encourage local organizations to provide geographic information about roads and routes through our Geo Data Upload tool."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former EA and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Now, according to a recent datamine, the streaming giant may be forming a partnership with PlayStation to bring some of the biggest PlayStation brands to Netflix. IGN reports: Reported by VGC, dataminer Steve Moser appears to have uncovered PlayStation brand imagery and content in the Netflix app code. Moser shared the information via a tweet, including images of both the Ghost of Tsushima box art and some PS5 controllers. It's unclear exactly what this means for Netflix, but if there is a burgeoning partnership between Netflix and PlayStation, it could see Ghost of Tsushima content come to the streaming service in some form. Moser suggests that the gaming section of Netflix currently has the codename 'Shark', and the placement of PlayStation IP within that suggests a collaborative approach. This wouldn't be the first major deal between Sony and Netflix, as the two companies agreed a deal earlier this year that means movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment will come to Netflix first after their theatrical run. [...] Given that many first-party PlayStation games are narrative-driven adventure games with a focus on cinematic stories, it makes sense to try and adopt games like Ghost of Tsushima and the last of us into movies and TV. Whilst PlayStation already has a games streaming service, PlayStation Now, it could also potentially be looking to push gaming content beyond the PlayStation console ecosystem, as Microsoft has done with Xbox Game Pass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: LG's futuristic rollable TV has arrived. The LG Signature OLED R TV is now available in the US for $100,000 -- costing roughly 50 times more than your average 4K OLED TV. But this isn't your average TV. It has a thin, flexible 65-inch OLED screen. The "wow factor" is the TV's ability to roll down into its housing unit when you're not watching a movie or playing a video game in 4K. It also comes with a sound system with Dolby Atmos and Sound Pro, and has Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in for voice control. The TV has three viewing modes: LG calls them "full view," "zero view" and "line view." In full view, the TV is completely unrolled from the base. In zero view, it's wrapped back up, letting you take advantage of just the Dolby Atmos speaker. In line view, part of the TV is unrolled, roughly a quarter of the screen. This unrolled section could show a clock, the weather or photos. If you're interested in purchasing this TV, LG requires you to contact a representative in your region via their website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Covid cases are rising in all 50 US states as the Delta variant spreads coast to coast, news outlets reported on Friday , and with less than half the US population fully vaccinated, public health chiefs warned of an "extraordinary surge." Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a White House briefing: "This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated." The Guardian reports: Walensky said the US was seeing an average of 26,000 new coronavirus cases a day -- a seven-day average that is 70% higher than last week. Hospitalizations and deaths are also seeing increases -- about 36% and 26%, respectively, with Walensky noting this was another "critical moment" in the outbreak. "We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well," she said. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases official, said there had been an "extraordinary surge" in the Delta variant of Covid-19 -- which is more transmissible -- around the world, including in the US. Jeff Zients, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus team, confirmed that unvaccinated Americans "account for virtually all recent Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths." Four states that are currently seeing high increases in Covid-19 cases have accounted for over 40% of the total Covid cases seen in the country this past week, Zients said. One in five cases occurred in Florida, in which about 50% of the state is fully vaccinated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi was the second-largest smartphone maker in the second quarter, overtaking Apple, according to analyst firm Canalys. CNBC reports: Xiaomi had a 17% share of global smartphone shipments, ahead of Apple's 14% and behind Samsung's 19%. "Xiaomi is growing its overseas business rapidly," Canalys research manager Ben Stanton said in a press release, noting shipments increased 300% year on year in Latin America and 50% in Western Europe. The Chinese smartphone maker posted year-on-year smartphone shipment growth of 83% versus 15% for Samsung and 1% for Apple. Stanton noted, however, that Xiaomi phones are still skewed toward the mass market, with the average selling price of its handsets 75% cheaper than Apple's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Microsoft now has its very own, honest-to-goodness general-purpose Linux distribution: Common Base Linux, (CBL)-Mariner. And, just like any Linux distro, you can download it and run it yourself. Microsoft didn't make a big fuss about releasing CBL-Mariner. It quietly released the code on GitHub and anyone can use it. Indeed, Juan Manuel Rey, a Microsoft Senior Program Manager for Azure VMware, recently published a guide on how to build an ISO CBL-Mariner image. Before this, if you were a Linux expert, with a spot of work you could run it, but now, thanks to Rey, anyone with a bit of Linux skill can do it. CBL-Mariner is not a Linux desktop. Like Azure Sphere, Microsoft's first specialized Linux distro, which is used for securing edge computing services, it's a server-side Linux. This Microsoft-branded Linux is an internal Linux distribution. It's meant for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. Its main job is to provide a consistent Linux platform for these devices and services. Just like Fedora is to Red Hat, it keeps Microsoft on Linux's cutting edge. CBL-Mariner is built around the idea that you only need a small common core set of packages to address the needs of cloud and edge services. If you need more, CBL-Mariner also makes it easy to layer on additional packages on top of its common core. Once that's done, its simple build system easily enables you to create RPM packages from SPEC and source files. Or, you can also use it to create ISOs or Virtual hard disk (VHD) images. As you'd expect the basic CBL-Mariner is a very lightweight Linux. You can use it as a container or a container host. With its limited size also comes a minimal attack surface. This also makes it easy to deploy security patches to it via RPM. Its designers make a particular point of delivering the latest security patches and fixes to its users. For more about its security features see CBL-Mariner's GitHub security features list. Like any other Linux distro, CBL-Mariner is built on the shoulders of giants. Microsoft credits VMware's Photon OS Project, a secure Linux, The Fedora Project, Linux from Scratch -- a guide to building Linux from source, the OpenMamba distro, and, yes, even GNU and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). To try it for yourself, you'll build it on Ubuntu 18.04. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you couldn't build it on any Ubuntu Linux distro from 18.04 on up. I did it on my Ubuntu 20.04.2 desktop. You'll also need the latest version of the Go language and Docker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States on Friday took a new stab at Russia's cybersecurity industry, restricting trade with four information technology firms and two other entities over "aggressive and harmful" activities -- including digital espionage -- that Washington blames on the Russian government. From a report: A Commerce Department posting said the six entities were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in April, which targeted companies in the technology sector that support Russian intelligence services. Their addition to the Commerce Department's blacklist means U.S. companies cannot sell to them without licenses, which are seldom granted. The announcement follows April's sanctions, which were aimed at punishing Moscow for hacking, interfering in last year's U.S. election, poisoning Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and other alleged malign actions - allegations the Kremlin denies. They come as the United States is responding to a drumbeat of digital intrusions blamed on Russian government-backed spies and a spate of increasingly disruptive ransomware outbreaks blamed on Russian cybercriminals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pocket Casts has a new owner. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and recently purchased Tumblr, announced today that it's acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcast app. The blog post announcing the purchase didn't offer much in the way of a preview, but it did tease potential future integrations. From a report: "As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new)," the post states. "We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts." Pocket Casts launched in 2010 and sold to NPR and a group of other public media groups eight years later. It's been well-received, particularly from sites like The Verge, because it's available across platforms. It started monetizing through a program called Pocket Casts Plus, which charges users a monthly subscription fee for features like desktop app access and a standalone Apple Watch app, in 2019.Read more of this story at Slashdot.