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Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Phoronix reports: Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) have been around since Haswell for hardware transactional memory support and going off Intel's own past numbers can be around 40% faster in specific workloads or as much 4~5 times faster in database transaction benchmarks. TSX issues have been found in the past such as a possible side channel timing attack that could lead to KASLR being defeated and CVE-2019-11135 (TSX Async Abort) for an MDS-style flaw. Now in 2021 Intel is disabling TSX by default across multiple families of Intel CPUs from Skylake through Coffee Lake. [...] The Linux kernel is preparing for this microcode change as seen in the flow of new patches this morning for the 5.14 merge window. A memory ordering issue is what is reportedly leading Intel to now deprecate TSX on various processors. There is this Intel whitepaper (PDF) updated this month that outlines the problem at length. As noted in the revision history, the memory ordering issue has been known to Intel since at least before October 2018 but only now in June 2021 are they pushing out microcode updates to disable TSX by default. With forthcoming microcode updates will effectively deprecate TSX for all Skylake Xeon CPUs prior to Stepping 5 (including Xeon D and 1st Gen Xeon Scalable), all 6th Gen Xeon E3-1500m v5 / E3-1200 v5 Skylake processors, all 7th/8th Gen Core and Pentium Kaby/Coffee/Whiskey CPUs prior to 0x8 stepping, and all 8th/9th Gen Core/Pentium Coffee Lake CPUs prior to 0xC stepping will be affected. That ultimately spans from various Skylake steppings through Coffee Lake; it was with 10th Gen Comet Lake and Ice Lake where TSX/TSX-NI was subsequently removed. In addition to disabling TSX by default and force-aborting all RTM transactions by default, a new CPUID bit is being enumerated with the new microcode to indicate that the force aborting of RTM transactions. It's due to that new CPUID bit that the Linux kernel is seeing patches. Previously Linux and other operating systems applied a workaround for the TSX memory ordering issue but now when this feature is disabled, the kernel can drop said workaround. These patches are coming with the Linux 5.14 cycle and will likely be back-ported to stable too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Google stopped prioritizing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format in its Top News carousel last month. This means website owners no longer need to publish an extra set of pages written in the AMP format. Instead sites need to meet what Google calls "Core Web Vitals." This sounds like great news. As a long-time critic of Google AMP, I wish I could say that Google AMP is over and done with, but I'm not convinced. As I wrote years ago when it launched, Google's AMP is bad -- bad in a potentially web-destroying way. It's bad for how the web is built, it's bad for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Unfortunately, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals. [...] Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part. [...] Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right? Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it. As web developer Ethan Marcotte points out: "While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means." Currently it means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has "taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook shares posted their biggest intraday gain in two months after it won a dismissal of two antitrust cases, pushing its market value above $1 trillion for the first time. The social-media giant jumped as much as 4.4%, the most since April 29 after a judge granted Facebook's request to dismiss the complaints filed last year by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. Reader phalse phace writes: A federal court on Monday dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Facebook, dealing a major setback for the agency's complaint that could have resulted in Facebook divesting Instagram and WhatsApp. "Although the Court does not agree with all of Facebook's contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agency's complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed," reads the filing from U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims -- namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services." The court dismissed the complaint, not the case, meaning the FTC could file its complaint once again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Neowin: Microsoft today released the first-ever Windows 11 build to Insiders in the Dev channel, bringing build 22000.51. While most of the announced features made it to the build, there are a few missing ones such as support for Android apps. The firm also posted a few known issues for the release. In addition to the build, the company has also posted clarification about the confusion surrounding the minimum system requirements. The firm starts off by acknowledging that there has been confusion caused by the PC Health Check tool, something that was updated late last week after negative feedback from users about the lack of clarity on Windows 11 compatibility. It says that the tool was "not fully prepared to share the level of detail or accuracy you expected from us on why a Windows 10 PC doesn't meet upgrade requirements," which is why the company is taking down the tool to address the feedback, adding that the tool will be "back online" later in the fall, closer to the general availability of Windows 11. In a blog post, the company adds: [...] Using the principles above, we are confident that devices running on Intel 8th generation processors and AMD Zen 2 as well as Qualcomm 7 and 8 Series will meet our principles around security and reliability and minimum system requirements for Windows 11. As we release to Windows Insiders and partner with our OEMs, we will test to identify devices running on Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen 1 that may meet our principles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New research by two leading scientists says some dire warnings of environmental damage from technology are overstated. From a report: The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere. Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed. Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Those are the conclusions of a new analysis by Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet, two leading scientists in the field of technology, energy use and the environment. Both are former researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Mr. Koomey is now an independent analyst, and Mr. Masanet is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (Mr. Masanet receives research funding from Amazon.) They said their analysis, published earlier this month as a commentary article in Joule, a scientific journal, was not necessarily intended to be reassuring. Instead, they said, it is meant to inject a dose of reality into the public discussion of technology's impact on the environment. The surge in digital activity spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientists said, has fueled the debate and prompted dire warnings of environmental damage. They are concerned that wayward claims, often amplified by social media, could shape behavior and policy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alcohol is terrible for the human body, yet we've developed a strong taste for it, suggesting that it may bring other kinds of benefits. From a report: Alcoholic intoxication is an abnormal mental state characterized by reduced self-control and various degrees of euphoria or depression, brought about by the temporary impairment of a pretty big chunk of the brain. As the term suggests, it involves the ingestion of a chemical toxin, ethanol, which in small doses makes us happy, more sociable and better at thinking creatively and defusing conflicts. In progressively higher doses, it can lead to degraded motor coordination, slurred speech, violent arguments, maudlin expressions of love, inappropriate touching, injuries, blackouts, property damage and even karaoke. Why do we do it? Historically, scientists have written off our affinity for intoxication as an evolutionary mistake, a method that we've developed for tricking our biological reward system into releasing little shots of pleasure for no good reason. But this is not a satisfying explanation. It should puzzle us more than it does that humans have devoted so much ingenuity and effort to getting drunk. [...] If alcohol were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, evolution should have figured it out by now and put a firm end to this nonsense. Other vices can plausibly be seen as necessary appetites gone wrong, such as our taste for pornography or junk food. But alcohol is mind-bogglingly dangerous, both physiologically and socially. The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits. Evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature and genetics suggests what some of these benefits might be. For instance, the ancient and cross-cultural view of alcohol as a muse is supported by modern psychology: Our ability to think outside the box is enhanced by one or two drinks. This is why artists, poets and writers have long turned to drink. The name of the Anglo-Saxon god of artistic inspiration, Kvasir, literally means "strong ale." This is also why some modern companies that rely upon innovation, like Google, judiciously mix work with alcohol -- by, for instance, providing whiskey rooms where frustrated coders can relax and expand their minds when struggling with a challenging problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A mix-and-match approach to Covid vaccines -- using different brands of jab for first and second doses -- gives good protection against the pandemic virus, a UK study has found. From a report: The Com-Cov trial looked at the efficacy of either two doses of Pfizer, two of AstraZeneca, or one of them followed by the other. All combinations worked well, priming the immune system.This knowledge could offer flexibility for vaccine rollout, say experts. The trial results also hint that people who have already received two doses of AstraZeneca vaccine could have a stronger immune response if they were given a different jab as a booster if recommended in the autumn.The UK's deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, said there was no reason to change the current successful same dose vaccine schedules in the UK, however, given vaccines were in good supply and saving lives. But he says it might be something to look at in the future: "Mixing doses could provide us with even greater flexibility for a booster programme, while also supporting countries who have further to go with their vaccine rollouts, and who may be experiencing supply difficulties."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global streaming giant Netflix lost a South Korean court case on Friday, in the world's first ruling over a dispute about whether over-the-top service providers should pay internet service companies for network usage. From a report: In April 2020, Netflix filed a complaint against SK Broadband, rejecting the Korean internet provider's demand that the streaming platform pay for network use in South Korea. The legal action has drawn attention because it marks the world's first legal conflict between an OTT platform and a broadband company. South Korea is one of the world's fast-growing OTT markets, where Netflix posted triple-digit earnings growth in 2020 from the year previous. On June 25, the Seoul Central District Court rejected the case brought forth by Netflix, while dismissing Netflix's claim that the OTT platform has no obligation to negotiate with SK Broadband over the network use charges. "It needs to be determined by negotiations between the parties involved whether or not some fees will be paid, or whether they enter an agreement in accordance with the principle of freedom of contract," the court ruling reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The most severe heat wave in the history of the Pacific Northwest is nearing its climax. The National Weather Service had predicted it would be "historic, dangerous, prolonged and unprecedented," and it is living up to its billing as it rewrites the record books. From a report: On Sunday, Portland, Ore., soared to its highest temperature in more than 80 years of record-keeping: 112 degrees. This new mark occurred just one day after hitting 108, which had broken the previous all-time record of 107. Seattle surged to 104 degrees Sunday, surpassing the old record of 103. The extraordinary heat swelled north of the international border as Canada saw its highest temperature recorded Sunday afternoon, when Lytton in British Columbia surged to 116 degrees. For perspective, that is just 1 degree from the all-time record in Las Vegas. While temperatures may have peaked Sunday afternoon in a few places, many were expected to turn even hotter on Monday or Tuesday, breaking all-time records (a number of which were initially broken Saturday and/or Sunday).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In early 2020, security researchers were baffled to discover that a ransomware gang had come up with an innovative trick that allowed it to run its payload inside virtual machines on infected hosts as a technical solution that bypassed security software. One year later, that technique has spread among the cybercrime underground and is now used by multiple ransomware operators. Initially seen with the Ragnar Locker gang in May 2020, the technique was also adopted by a Maze ransomware subgroup later in the year and has been recently spotted in attacks where the Conti and MountLocker ransomware strains were deployed. In hindsight, it should be no surprise that this technique is becoming more popular, as it has tangible benefits for any threat actor. The general idea behind such an attack is that a ransomware gang that has a small foothold on an infected host can download and install VM software. The ransomware gang will then start a VM instance, share the host computer's storage space with the VM, and then proceed to encrypt the victim's files from within the VM, where the host's antivirus software cannot reach and detect the ransomware during execution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contract drivers say algorithms terminate them by email -- even when they have done nothing wrong. From a report: Stephen Normandin spent almost four years racing around Phoenix delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon.com. Then one day, he received an automated email. The algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn't doing his job properly. The 63-year-old Army veteran was stunned. He'd been fired by a machine. Normandin says Amazon punished him for things beyond his control that prevented him from completing his deliveries, such as locked apartment complexes. He said he took the termination hard and, priding himself on a strong work ethic, recalled that during his military career he helped cook for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. "I'm an old-school kind of guy, and I give every job 110%," he said. "This really upset me because we're talking about my reputation. They say I didn't do the job when I know damn well I did." Normandin's experience is a twist on the decades-old prediction that robots will replace workers. At Amazon, machines are often the boss -- hiring, rating and firing millions of people with little or no human oversight. Amazon became the world's largest online retailer in part by outsourcing its sprawling operations to algorithms -- sets of computer instructions designed to solve specific problems. For years, the company has used algorithms to manage the millions of third-party merchants on its online marketplace, drawing complaints that sellers have been booted off after being falsely accused of selling counterfeit goods and jacking up prices. Increasingly, the company is ceding its human-resources operation to machines as well, using software not only to manage workers in its warehouses but to oversee contract drivers, independent delivery companies and even the performance of its office workers. People familiar with the strategy say Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos believes machines make decisions more quickly and accurately than people, reducing costs and giving Amazon a competitive advantage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abu Dhabi will use facial scanners to detect coronavirus infections at malls and airports starting Monday, after a trial of 20,000 people showed "a high degree of effectiveness." From a report: The technology can detect infections by measuring electromagnetic waves, which change when the RNA particles of the virus are present in the body, state-run WAM reported. The results showed 93.5 per cent sensitivity, reflecting the accuracy of identifying those infected. The scanner was developed by EDE Research Institute Abu Dhabi, a unit of International Holding. The United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is part, has one of the world's highest vaccination rates, but daily new cases have continued to hover around 2,000 since March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Organizations are beginning to develop, design, and manage their own AI-powered voice assistant systems independent of platforms such as Siri and Alexa," reports VentureBeat:The transition is being driven by the desire to manage the entirety of the user experience and integrate voice assistance into multiple business processes and brand environments, from call centers to stores. In a recent survey of 500 IT and business decision-makers in the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K., 28% of respondents said they were using voice technologies and 84% expect to be using them in the next year. To support the evolution, the Linux Foundation launched the Open Voice Network (OVN), an alliance advocating for the adoption of open standards across voice assistant apps in automobiles, smartphones, smart home devices, and more. With founding members Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, Deutsche Telekom, and others, the OVN's goal — much like Amazon's Voice Interoperability Initiative — is to standardize the development and use of voice assistant systems and conversational agents that use technologies including automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, advanced dialog management, and machine learning... It was first announced as the Open Voice Initiative in 2019, but expanded significantly as the COVID-19 pandemic spurred enterprises to embrace digital transformation. "Voice is expected to be a primary interface to the digital world, connecting users to billions of sites, smart environments and AI bots ... Key to enabling enterprise adoption of these capabilities and consumer comfort and familiarity is the implementation of open standards," Mike Dolan, SVP and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement. "The potential impact of voice on industries including commerce, transportation, healthcare, and entertainment is staggering and we're excited to bring it under the open governance model of the Linux foundation to grow the community and pave a way forward." Besides a focus on standards and technology-sharing, the group plans to collaborate with existing industry associations on regulatory/legislative issues — including data privacy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are some big announcements on DuckDuckGo's blog at SpreadPrivacy.com: "Our apps have been downloaded more than 50 million times over the last 12 months, more than all prior years combined... "Spurred by the increase in DuckDuckGo app usage, over the last 12 months our monthly search traffic increased 55% and we grew to become the #2 search engine on mobile in many countries including in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. (StatCounter/Wikipedia)." "We don't track our users so we can't say for sure how many we have, but based on market share estimates, download numbers, and national surveys, we believe there are between 70-100 million DuckDuckGo users." "We're excited to start rolling out additional privacy features to our all-in-one privacy bundle. In a few weeks, DuckDuckGo Email Protection will be available in beta which will give users more privacy without having to get a new inbox. Later this summer, app tracker blocking will be available in beta for Android devices, allowing users to block app trackers and providing more transparency on what's happening behind the scenes on their device. Before the end of the year, we also plan to release a brand-new desktop version of our existing mobile app which people can use as a primary browser."They're now pulling in over $100 million a year in revenue, "giving us the financial resources to continue growing rapidly," and at the end of 2020 they also landed a "mainly secondary investment" of over $100 million from a long list of investors (which included Tim Berners-Lee as well as Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor). One thing they're doing with their money is spreading the word about online privacy — by purchasing billboard, radio, and TV ads in 175 different markets across the U.S., with more marketing blitzes now planned soon for Europe and other countries around the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they're increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world," reports the Associated Press:Data compiled by four of the biggest tech companies shows that law enforcement requests for user information — phone calls, emails, texts, photos, shopping histories, driving routes and more — have more than tripled in the U.S. since 2015. Police are also increasingly savvy about covering their tracks so as not to alert suspects of their interest... In just the first half of 2020 — the most recent data available — Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft together fielded more than 112,000 data requests from local, state and federal officials. The companies agreed to hand over some data in 85% of those cases. Facebook, including its Instagram service, accounted for the largest number of disclosures. Consider Newport, a coastal city of 24,000 residents that attracts a flood of summer tourists. Fewer than 100 officers patrol the city — but they make multiple requests a week for online data from tech companies. That's because most crimes — from larceny and financial scams to a recent fatal house party stabbing at a vacation rental booked online — can be at least partly traced on the internet. Tech providers, especially social media platforms, offer a "treasure trove of information" that can help solve them, said Lt. Robert Salter, a supervising police detective in Newport. "Everything happens on Facebook," Salter said. "The amount of information you can get from people's conversations online — it's insane." As ordinary people have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech services to help manage their lives, American law enforcement officials have grown far more savvy about technology than they were five or six years ago, said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. That's created what Cohn calls "the golden age of government surveillance." Not only has it become far easier for police to trace the online trails left by suspects, they can also frequently hide their requests by obtaining gag orders from judges and magistrates. Those orders block Big Tech companies from notifying the target of a subpoena or warrant of law enforcement's interest in their information — contrary to the companies' stated policies... Nearly all big tech companies — from Amazon to rental sites like Airbnb, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and service providers like Verizon — now have teams to respond... Cohn says American law is still premised on the outdated idea that valuable data is stored at home — and can thus be protected by precluding home searches without a warrant. At the very least, Cohn suggests more tech companies should be using encryption technology to protect data access without the user's key. But Newport supervising police detective Lt. Robert Salter supplied his own answer for people worried about how police officers are requesting more and more data. "Don't commit crimes and don't use your computer and phones to do it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable," reports Phoronix:Linux 5.13 brings initial but still early support for the Apple M1 with basic support but not yet accelerated graphics and a lot more to iron out moving ahead. There are also new Linux 5.13 security features like the Landlock security module, Clang control flow integrity support, and optionally randomizing the kernel stack offset at each system call. There is also AMD fun this cycle around FreeSync HDMI support, initial Aldebaran bring-up, and more. Intel has more work on Alder Lake, a new cooling driver, and more discrete graphics bring-up. There are also other changes for Linux 5.13 around faster IO_uring, a generic USB display driver, and other new hardware enablement. "5.13 overall is actually fairly large," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, calling it "one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16,000 commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2,000 developers. But it's a "big all over" kind of thing, not somethingparticular that stands out as particularly unusual..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Virgin Galactic finally has the federal government's approval to start launching customers into space from New Mexico," reports ABC News:Richard Branson's rocketship company announced the Federal Aviation Administration's updated license on Friday. It's the final hurdle in Virgin Galactic's yearslong effort to send paying passengers on short space hops. The company is working toward three more space test flights this summer and early fall, before opening the rocketship's doors to paying customers. The original plans called for company engineers to launch next to evaluate equipment, followed by a flight with Branson and then a science mission by Italian Air Force officers. In the meantime, Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos earlier this month announced plans to ride his own rocket into space July 20 from Texas. Virgin Galactic officials acknowledged the growing chatter over whether Branson will try to beat Bezos into space. "Clearly, Sir Richard Branson's flight date has been subject to speculation for some time. At this time we do not have any further details on the upcoming flight dates," company spokeswoman Aleanna Crane wrote in an email... More than 600 people already have reserved a ride to space. Tickets initially cost $250,000, but the price is expected to go up once Virgin Galactic starts accepting reservations again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"China has released landing process footage from its Zhurong rover as well as video and sounds of the vehicle roving on Mars," reports Space News: Footage of the entry, descent and landing shows deployment of a supersonic disk-gap-band parachute, separation of the backshell, followed by powered descent, a hazard-avoidance hover phase, and landing... Video of the descent of the Zhurong rover from its landing platform, including sounds made by the vehicle's egress, was included in the release. The sounds were created by the metal on metal interaction of a rack and pinion system and recorded by Zhurong's climate station, which intends to capture sounds of Martian winds... The 240-kilogram Zhurong rover successfully landed in Utopia Planitia on May 14. The deployment took place late May 21 Eastern, following a week-long series of checks and analysis of the environment. The six-wheeled, solar-powered Zhurong has since covered 236 meters on the Martian surface. An undated panorama shows Zhurong and tracks leading back to the landing platform, along with surface and horizon features... The rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, China's first independent interplanetary mission. Consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020. It entered Mars orbit February 10. Zhurong is equipped with six science payloads, including a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument for analysing surface elements and minerals, panoramic and multispectral imagers, a climate station, magnetometer and a ground-penetrating radar. It aims to return data on potential water-ice deposits, weather, topography and geology, complementing science carried out by missions from other space agencies. The Tianwen-1 orbiter is currently in an 8.2-hour orbit, allowing a pass over Utopia Planitia once per sol to perform a data relay role. Zhurong has a primary mission and design lifetime of 90 sols (92 Earth days). It is currently unknown if Zhurong's mission will be extended beyond this. Engadget argues that this footage from Mars "is as much about bragging rights as anything. Zhurong is part of China's first truly independent mission to another planet, and the country no doubt wants to highlight its accomplishments in as much detail as possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Westland Real Estate Group patrols its 1,000-unit apartment complex in Las Vegas with "a conical, bulky, artificial intelligence-powered robot" standing just over 5 feet tall, according to NBC News. Manufactured by Knightscope, the robot is equipped with four internal cameras capturing a constant 360-degree view, and can also scan and record license plates (as well as the MAC addresses of cellphones).But is it doing any good?As more government agencies and private sector companies resort to robots to help fight crime, the verdict is out about how effective they are in actually reducing it. Knightscope, which experts say is the dominant player in this market, has cited little public evidence that its robots have reduced crime as the company deploys them everywhere from a Georgia shopping mall to an Arizona development to a Nevada casino. Knightscope's clients also don't know how much these security robots help. "Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?" Dena Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. "No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled." For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots "predict and prevent crime," without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim. "It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a "roving scarecrow." Additionally, the company does not provide specific, detailed examples of crimes that have been thwarted due to the robots. The robots are expensive — they're rented out at about $70,000-$80,000 a year — but growth has stalled for the two years since 2018, and over four years Knightscope's total clients actually dropped from 30 to just 23. (Expenses have now risen — partly because the company is now doubling its marketing budget.) There's also a thermal scanning feature, but Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University, still called these robots an "expensive version of security theater." And NBC News adds that KnightScope's been involved "in both tragic and comical episodes."In 2016, a K5 roaming around Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, hit a 16-month-old toddler, bruising his leg and running over his foot. The company apologized, calling it a "freakish accident," and invited the family to visit the company's nearby headquarters in Mountain View, which the family declined. The following year, another K5 robot slipped on steps adjacent to a fountain at the Washington Harbour development in Washington, D.C., falling into the water. In October 2019, a Huntington Park woman, Cogo Guebara, told NBC News that she tried reporting a fistfight by pressing an emergency alert button on the HP RoboCop itself, but to no avail. She learned later the emergency button was not yet connected to the police department itself... [The northern California city] Hayward dispatched its robot in a city parking garage in 2018. The following year, a man attacked and knocked over the robot. Despite having clear video and photographic evidence of the alleged crime, no one was arrested, according to Adam Kostrzak, the city's chief information officer. The city didn't renew its contract "due to the financial impact of Covid-19 in early 2020," the city's CIO tells NBC News. But the city had already spent over $137,000 on the robot over two years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jalopnik reports:A new United Kingdom-based study conducted by CarGurus confirms a trend that's been popping up lately: most drivers aren't confident in sharing the road with fully-autonomous vehicles. The site surveyed just over 1,000 automobile owners in the UK to understand their thoughts regarding self-driving cars, making sure to balance respondents by race, income, gender, and more. The study showed that, overall, 36 percent of respondents were concerned about the development of self-driving cars, with another 35 percent identifying as neutral and 30 percent as excited. 41 percent of respondents said they would not be comfortable in any self-driving car scenario, whether they were the one behind the wheel or they were sharing the road with autonomous delivery vehicles... Ultimately, CarGurus offers a few points that sum up the sentiment of the survey: - More people are concerned about autonomous vehicles than they are excited. It'll take more convincing and safety assurances to get people involved. - Most buyers would rather have driver assistance features but still be in charge. On the bright side, the study also found that people were at least excited about having a car that could steer into a parking spot by itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports:When Yahoo banned working from home in 2013, the reason was one often cited in corporate America: Being in the office is essential for spontaneous collaboration and innovation. "It is critical that we are all present in our offices," wrote Jacqueline Reses, then a Yahoo executive, in a staff memo. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings." Today, Ms. Reses, now chief executive of Post House Capital, an investment firm, has a different view. "Would I write that memo differently now?" she said. "Oh yeah." She still believes that collaboration can benefit from being together in person, but over the last year, people found new, better ways to work. As the pandemic winds down in the United States, however, many bosses are sounding a note similar to Ms. Reses' in 2013. "Innovation isn't always a planned activity," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. "It's bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had." Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home "doesn't work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn't work for culture." Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people... "There's credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation," said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. "But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever. All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality," he said.... Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn't find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another. The chief people officer at real estate marketplace Zillow believes this always-in-the-office culture is what's ultimately lead to problems like long hours, the lack of representation, and burnout, according to the New York Times, which notes Zillow, Salesforce, and Ford are now reconfiguring their offices with fewer rows of desks and more places for informal gatherings. "Some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Houston Chronicle reports:The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a "lawless no-man's-land" and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children. The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook's messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009. Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The majority wrote, "We do not understand Section 230 to 'create a lawless no-man's-land on the Internet' in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking... Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it," the opinion said. "Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking." The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction..... Annie McAdams, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a groundbreaking decision. This is the first case to beat Facebook on its argument that it had immunity under Section 230, she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports:Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities... Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention." Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country... As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin. The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports:Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus. And CoinDesk adds:Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.") But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? Slashdot reader Obipale shares the first clue from Engadget's report:Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore. Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail:Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP. Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal. Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning... At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your deviceRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an interesting report from Science Alert:Thunderstorms that roil across the Southern Great Plains of the US are amongst the strongest of such storms on Earth... Their intensity and frequency have been increasing, yet our best climate models still struggle to predict just how and when they'll arise. To help refine climate models for the Southern Great Plains, paleoclimatologist Christopher Maupin from Texas A&M University and colleagues used oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to track the ferocity of past storms. Water molecules based on elements wielding an additional neutron or two tend to require a little more energy to vaporize, and release more energy as they condense. This leaves a clear signature in the ratios of isotopes separated by rainfall under various conditions. By comparing the results of analyses taken today with historic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes found trapped by stalactites in Texan caves, the researchers developed an accurate picture of weather events in the past... Using another set of isotopes, this time measuring those of uranium and thorium, the team dated the stalactites and stalagmites to around the last Ice Age, 30-50 thousand years ago. Measuring the shifts in oxygen and hydrogen isotopes down their lengths allowed the researchers to see the storms cycled from weakly to strongly organized, roughly every thousand years. The more strongly organized the complex of storms becomes, the more intense and damaging they are. They discovered these changes in thunderstorm intensities coincided with well-known, abrupt shifts in global climate, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. The researchers also found these intensity increases coincide with a reduction in rain in southwestern US and greater atmospheric upwelling in the Santa Barbara Basin area. They believe the observed pattern suggests an increased frequency or intensity of the giant global atmospheric waves that drive the weather, called Rossby waves, may be providing the extra lift needed to fuel these greater storms. "Modern anthropogenic climate forcing has increasingly favored an amplification of these synoptic factors," the team wrote in their paper. "This work will help predict trends of storms in the future," explained geoscientist Courtney Schumacher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I sometimes talk about "the family of geeks" — how our shared experiences can bring us together. But if that's true, there's been a death in the family....Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period. The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53. Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19." But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus... When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...." Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week. Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet...As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws... [The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated." While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers. "These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every Sony PlayStation 3 ID out there was compromised, provoking bans of legit players on the network," Threatpost is reporting, calling it "just the latest in a shocking spike in attacks on unsuspecting gamers." tlhIngan (Slashdot user #30,335) shares Threatpost's report:Sony reportedly left a folder with every PS3 console ID online unsecured, and it was discovered and reported by a Spanish YouTuber with the handle "The WizWiki" in mid-April... Now, several weeks later, players on PlayStation Network message boards are complaining that they can't sign on and are receiving the error message 8071006. After enabling two-factor authentication (2FA), one player was able to sign back in without issue, according to posts on the PS3 subreddit, which includes a link to instructions on how to opt into 2FA on the PS3. It appears threat actors have started using the stolen PS3 console IDs for malicious purposes, causing the legitimate players to get banned... Sony has not responded to Threatpost's request for comment or confirmed a connection between the PS3 ID breach and player reports of being locked out of the platform... Sony is hardly the only gaming company leaking data like a sieve. A report from January found a half a million credentials stolen from the Top 25 gaming companies on caches of breached data for sale in criminal marketplaces. In June, the "Battle of the Galaxy" mobile game leaked 6 million gamer profiles, and attackers are working out how to use gaming platforms like Steam to host or deliver malware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports that this week the U.S. government "banned the import of solar panels and other goods made with materials produced by a Chinese company that it accused of using forced laborers from China's Xinjiang region, a move likely to complicate the U.S. push toward clean energy."U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a withhold release order Thursday barring silicon-based products from the company, Hoshine Silicon, which operates from plants in Xinjiang that have been connected to coercive state labor programs targeting Uyghurs and other minorities, as The Post reported on Thursday. The order could have widespread impact on the solar industry, which is dominated by Chinese suppliers that source materials from Hoshine, the world's largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, a key raw material in solar panels. "Almost the complete solar industry is affected by Hoshine," said Johannes Bernreuter, a research analyst in Germany who studies the solar supply chain... By banning only Hoshine imports, CBP stopped short of targeting Xinjiang producers of another key solar ingredient, polysilicon. Those producers have also been connected to coercive labor programs targeting Uyghurs. In a note to investors, Height Securities described the ban "as a substantive but measured first shot across the bow" by the Biden administration, "which needs solar industry support" as it tries to balance rooting out forced labor in U.S. supply chains and an environmental agenda... [I]ndustry experts said enforcement could be a challenge given the complexity of the solar supply chain and Hoshine's dominance in the industry. Hoshine has produced metallurgical-grade silicon for at least eight of the world's largest polysilicon makers, according to the company's public statements and annual reports. Analysts say that together these firms account for nearly all of the world's supply of solar-grade polysilicon. The move could also undermine U.S. hopes of cooperating with China on climate change, one of few areas of potential collaboration between the two countries increasingly at loggerheads over human rights and investigating the origin of the covid-19 pandemic... Industry experts say it would be safer for U.S. agents to assume all silicon products entering the United States from China contain at least some material sourced from Hoshine, whose metallurgical-grade silicon is used in a wide range of consumer products, including electronics, cars, chemicals and sealants... The import ban was the most prominent of several measures the Biden administration took Thursday against China's solar-product suppliers. The Commerce Department also added several Chinese polysilicon producers to an export black list, which bars U.S. entities from exporting technology or other goods to the firms without first obtaining a government license.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks.Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible. But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words... After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971. An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010. The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer. The message was deleted within 30 minutes. "Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Record reports:The Wikimedia Foundation has banned the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views. This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a report published earlier this month... This included: - Claiming that Hitler attacked Poland and started World War II after the Poles committed genocide against Germans. - Redefining a World War II concentration camp as a labor camp...- Pushing opinions that EU decision-making endangers Croatia's sovereignty.- Claiming that the EU had used propaganda to trick Croatian citizens into joining the European Union... Since 2013 the dubious edits had been spotted by users and the Croatian press, according to the article — but other Croatian Wikipedia editors failed, multiple times, to wrest away control of the site's moderation. "The Wikimedia Foundation got involved last year after it was discovered that the administrator of Croatian Wikipedia had been using sockpuppet accounts to manipulate discussions and staff elections on the site..."The Wikimedia Foundation's report on the abuses of this team also points to possibly similar far-right-based editing on Wikipedia's Serbian version as well. This is the second major Wikipedia scandal in the past year. In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found and banned a public relations firm that had created and used a network of sockpuppet accounts to edit the site on behalf of some of its customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Gregory Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor," Ars Technica reported in February. And this week, "The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.4," reports ZDNet. "It's an important milestone because it's the first Rocky Linux general availability release ever."Huge companies, including Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon, relied on CentOS, and they were reportedly not happy about RedHat's decision... It turns out that Kurtzer's decision has been a popular one. Besides quickly building up an army of hundreds of contributors for the project, Rocky Linux 8.4 - which follows the May 18 release of Red Hat's RHEL 8.4 - was downloaded at least 10,000 times within half a day of its release... "If we extrapolate the count to include our other mirrors we are probably at least 3-4x that (if not even way more)!" boasts Kurtzer in a LinkedIn post. "Lots of reports coming in of people and organizations already replacing their CentOS systems (and even other Linux distributions) with Rocky. The media is flying off the hook and business analysts also validating to me personally that Rocky Linux might soon be the most utilized Linux operating system used in enterprise and cloud!" Rocky Linux 8.4 took seven months for the newly formed community to release, and is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architecture hardware in various ISOs. "Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems," explains a blog post at RockyLinux.org, adding that free community support is available through the forums as well as live chat avaiable through IRC and Rocky Linux Mattermost. "Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ..." "Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that's who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you."Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It's a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles — embedded even within our repositories and ISOs — are immutable... This is just the beginning, and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is more than just Rocky Linux — it's a home for those that believe that open source isn't just a switch that can be toggled at will, and that projects that many rely on not be subject to the whims of a few. To this point, you can easily find all of our sources, our build infrastructure, Git repositories, and everything else anyone would need to fork our work and ensure that it continues if need be... When we announced our release candidate, we asked you to come build the next free, open, community enterprise operating system with us. Now we're asking you for more: join us as we build our community. They also thanked 11 sponsors and partners for contributing "resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Space.com reports:The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday. "The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it). Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...") The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe:The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers? I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories. This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bleeping Computer reports:Microsoft has now confirmed signing a malicious driver being distributed within gaming environments. This driver, called "Netfilter," is in fact a rootkit that was observed communicating with Chinese command-and-control IPs. G Data malware analyst Karsten Hahn first took notice of this event last week and was joined by the wider infosec community in tracing and analyzing the malicious drivers bearing the seal of Microsoft... This incident has once again exposed threats to software supply-chain security, except this time it stemmed from a weakness in Microsoft's code-signing process. G Data writes: We forwarded our findings to Microsoft who promptly added malware signatures to Windows Defender and are now conducting an internal investigation. At the time of writing it is still unknown how the driver could pass the signing process. In a Friday blog post, Microsoft said it was contacting other antivirus software vendors "so they can proactively deploy detections," but also emphasized the attack's limited scope:The actor's activity is limited to the gaming sector specifically in China and does not appear to target enterprise environments. We are not attributing this to a nation-state actor at this time. The actor's goal is to use the driver to spoof their geo-location to cheat the system and play from anywhere. The malware enables them to gain an advantage in games and possibly exploit other players by compromising their accounts through common tools like keyloggers. It's important to understand that the techniques used in this attack occur post exploitation, meaning an attacker must either have already gained administrative privileges in order to be able to run the installer to update the registry and install the malicious driver the next time the system boots or convince the user to do it on their behalf. We will be sharing an update on how we are refining our partner access policies, validation and the signing process to further enhance our protections. There are no actions customers should take other than follow security best practices and deploy Antivirus software such as Windows Defender for Endpoint.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short:In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself. Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)... [P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence. But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when ProPublica said they'd obtained the tax returns of some of America's richest people? Now they're reporting that Peter Thiel turned a small retirement account — the kind meant to help middle class investors — "into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank."Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned "confiscatory taxes." He's been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he's bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes. But Thiel doesn't need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account. Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall. To put that into perspective, here's how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108... What's more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.... While most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country's richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system. One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year... Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments. ProPublica argues Thiel's move alone "deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions." But he's not the only multi-millionaire they found stashing vast sums into untaxed accounts:Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway had $264.4 million at the end of 2018.Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich: $20.2 millionFormer Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer: $31.5 millionRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader thegarbz writes:While a lot of focus has been on the TPM requirements for Windows 11, Microsoft has since updated its documentation to provide a complete list of supported processors. At present the list includes only Intel 8th Generation Core processors or newer, and AMD Ryzen Zen+ processors or newer, effectively limiting Windows 11 to PC less than 4-5 years old. Notably absent from the list is the Intel Core i7-7820HQ, the processor used in Microsoft's current flagship $3500+ Surface Studio 2. This has prompted many threads on Reddit from users angry that their (in some cases very new) Surface PC is failing the Windows 11 upgrade check. The Verge confirms:Windows 11 will only support 8th Gen and newer Intel Core processors, alongside [Intel's 2016-era] Apollo Lake and newer Pentium and Celeron processors. That immediately rules out millions of existing Windows 10 devices from upgrading to Windows 11... Windows 11 will also only support AMD Ryzen 2000 and newer processors, and 2nd Gen or newer [AMD] EPYC chips. You can find the full list of supported processors on Microsoft's site... Originally, Microsoft noted that CPU generation requirements are a "soft floor" limit for the Windows 11 installer, which should have allowed some older CPUs to be able to install Windows 11 with a warning, but hours after we published this story, the company updated that page to explicitly require the list of chips above. Many Windows 10 users have been downloading Microsoft's PC Health App (available here) to see whether Windows 11 works on their systems, only to find it fails the check... This is the first significant shift in Windows hardware requirements since the release of Windows 8 back in 2012, and the CPU changes are understandably catching people by surprise. Microsoft is also requiring a front-facing camera for all Windows 11 devices except desktop PCs from January 2023 onwards. "In order to run Windows 11, devices must meet the hardware specifications," explains Microsoft's official compatibility page for Windows 11. "Devices that do not meet the hardware requirements cannot be upgraded to Windows 11."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has released a new video explaining the complicated, hour-long process required for the Mars rover to take a selfie (which was actually a composite of 62 separate images stitched together). And meanwhile, CNN reports that its Ingenuity helicopter completed its eighth flight this week, "and even got a software update to fix an annoying issue that impacted some of its previous outings."On its latest outing, Ingenuity flew 525 feet (160 meters) to the south and southeast to a new airfield. This was the copter's third flight of the operations demo phase, in which Ingenuity is proving its usefulness as an aerial scout without interfering with the Perseverance rover's science mission — searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars... Ingenuity continues to do well, and the team is planning for more flights that will push its capabilities. And the helicopter is doing even better now that its troublesome "watchdog" software issue has been fixed. That was deployed before the eighth flight... Ingenuity is also due for a navigation computer software update that will fix the issue that occurred during the chopper's sixth flight. Images captured by the navigation camera, which feed into the helicopter's navigation computer, had timing delays. Those images help Ingenuity to track its location, among other critical factors during flight. When the incorrect times and images were associated, it caused the chopper to wobble in the air. Ingenuity was able to land safely, but the team wants to prevent the issue from happening again so the chopper doesn't spiral out of control. It's also why the helicopter didn't capture any color images during its last two flights.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Thelasko quotes the BBC:A project to preserve endangered Tasmanian devils on a small island has backfired after the predators killed seabirds in large numbers, a conservation group says. A small number of devils were shipped to Maria Island east of Tasmania, Australia, in 2012. The move aimed to protect the mammals from a deadly facial cancer that had driven them towards extinction. The devils have recovered since, but the island project has come at a cost... Citing a government survey, BirdLife Tasmania said a population of little penguins that numbered 3,000 breeding pairs in 2012 had disappeared from the island. "Losing 3,000 pairs of penguins from an island that is a national park that should be a refuge for this species basically is a major blow," said Dr Eric Woehler, a researcher for the group.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ran Balicer leads an expert Covid-19 advisory panel for the Israeli government. Friday he shared some troubling news with the Wall Street Journal:"The entrance of the Delta variant has changed the transmission dynamics," said Prof. Balicer, who is also the chief innovation officer for Israel's largest health-management organization, Clalit. About half of adults infected in the outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19 in Israel were fully inoculated. These so-called breakthrough cases — defined as positive Covid-19 test results received at least two weeks after patients receive their final vaccine dose — are broadly expected as the Pfizer vaccine is highly effective but not 100% foolproof, according to Mr. Balicer. Israeli health officials are optimistic that even if the variant does spread, evidence from countries such as the U.K. indicate the vaccine will prevent a large increase in severe illness and hospitalizations that plagued the country's health system in previous outbreaks. Israel has recorded only five severe cases in the past 10 days, Prof. Balicer said, but whether more will emerge is too early to tell.... Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the worrisome variant is now present in 85 countries. Several countries appear concerned that fully vaccinated people could still spread the Delta variant. Israel's government just reimposed safety measures (including an indoor-mask requirement), according to the Journal. And Sydney, Australia (the country's largest city, housing more than 5 million people) "will enter a hard two-week lockdown on Saturday night..." reports CNN, "as authorities try to contain a fast-spreading outbreak of the highly infectious Delta coronavirus variant."More than a million people in downtown Sydney and the city's eastern suburbs were already under lockdown due to the outbreak, but health authorities said they needed to expand that after more Covid-19 cases were recorded, with exposure sites increasing beyond the initial areas of concern. Meanwhile, CNBC reports:The World Health Organization on Friday urged fully vaccinated people to continue to wear masks, social distance and practice other Covid-19 pandemic safety measures as the highly contagious delta variant spreads rapidly across the globe. "People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses. They still need to protect themselves," Dr. Mariangela Simao, WHO assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products, said during a news briefing from the agency's Geneva headquarters. "Vaccine alone won't stop community transmission," Simao added. "People need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene ... the physical distance, avoid crowding. This still continues to be extremely important, even if you're vaccinated when you have a community transmission ongoing." CNN reports that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also "warned that there is a small chance a fully vaccinated person could still get infected if they're exposed.""Current data suggest that COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the United States offer protection against most variants currently spreading in the United States. However, some variants might cause illness in some people even after they are fully vaccinated," CDC spokesperson Jade Fulce told CNN in an email on Friday. While Covid-19 vaccines are effective, Fulce said no vaccine is "100% effective at preventing illness." And with millions of people getting vaccinated against the virus, some who are fully vaccinated "will still get sick if they are exposed," Fulce said. "However, people with breakthrough infections may get less severely ill or have a shorter illness than they would have if they had not been vaccinated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times notes that "record numbers of shareholder votes" are "pressing major, publicly traded petroleum companies to prepare for a zero-carbon world." And then they tell the story of two activist investors who attempted to pack Exxon Mobil's board of directors with a slate of climate-friendly nominees at its annual shareholder's meeting: It had been a bruising year for the industry, with oil prices trading negative last spring and record numbers of shareholder votes pressing major, publicly traded petroleum companies to prepare for a zero-carbon world. Just that morning, as the meeting was starting, the news broke that a Dutch court had declared that Shell must accelerate its emissions-reduction efforts. As Exxon Mobil's meeting was underway, so was Chevron's, and shareholders there voted in favor of a proposal to reduce the emissions generated by the company's product, which would call for a re-evaluation of the core business... [T]he core of [activist investor Charlie Penner's] argument rested on mobilizing shareholders with classic activist tactics: focusing on the company's financials, underscoring its flagging profitability and setting out an argument for how to raise the value of the company's stock by making smarter expenditures. He didn't aim to undercut the core business necessarily; rather than urging Exxon Mobil to give up all oil and gas, he wanted the company to practice what finance people like to call "capital discipline," which basically just means not spending prodigiously. He also reasoned that, given mounting pressure from society and governments to decarbonize the global economy, it would be strategically smarter for Exxon Mobil to be part of an energy transition, rather than letting itself be outstripped by other companies innovating to meet demand for low-carbon power... With plans to increase oil-and-gas production by 25 percent over the next five years, the company seemed out of step with the market. Profitability had already been slipping for a decade. Exxon Mobil earned the largest annual profit in U.S. history in 2008 and nearly eclipsed that record in 2012; last year it lost $22 billion. In part, the loss was due to a historic $19 billion write-down on the value of its assets. That assessment may still be too rosy; a whistle-blower reportedly told the Securities Exchange Commission in January that Exxon Mobil had overvalued its assets by at least $56 billion, in part by pressuring employees to inflate expectations about the drilling timelines in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, which remains the company's U.S. cash cow. (Exxon Mobil called the claims "demonstrably false....") Penner already sensed that Exxon Mobil was an industry outlier, more reluctant than others to recognize that if the world enacted the emissions reductions that its governments had committed to, there would be no viable business for a publicly traded oil company in 30 years... [Exxon Mobile] spent more than $35 million blanketing shareholders with appeals to reject the activists and stick with management... Just days before the proxy votes would be tallied, Exxon Mobil announced that it would add two more yet-unnamed directors, one with "climate experience" and one with experience in the energy industry. But the company's efforts at placating the activists fell short, and a week after the annual meeting, it became clear by how much; the company announced that Andy Karsner, the energy entrepreneur, had also been elected to the board, giving Engine No. 1's candidates a quarter of the seats. The small activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 holds just 0.02 percent of ExxonMobil's stock, points out the Washington Post, "but marshaled commanding support from investment managers, pensions funds and individual shareholders." The Times called their victory "shocking," and dubbed them "the little hedge fund taking down big oil."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers have found evidence that a coronavirus epidemic swept East Asia some 20,000 years ago and was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people alive today. The new study suggests that an ancient coronavirus plagued the region for many years, researchers say. The finding could have dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it's not brought under control soon through vaccination. "It should make us worry," said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. "What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations." Over generations, viruses drive enormous amounts of change in the human genome. A mutation that protects against a viral infection may well mean the difference between life and death, and it will be passed down to offspring. A lifesaving mutation, for example, might allow people to chop apart a virus's proteins. But viruses can evolve, too. Their proteins can change shape to overcome a host's defenses. And those changes might spur the host to evolve even more counteroffensives, leading to more mutations. When a random new mutation happens to provide resistance to a virus, it can swiftly become more common from one generation to the next. And other versions of that gene, in turn, become rarer. So if one version of a gene dominates all others in large groups of people, scientists know that is most likely a signature of rapid evolution in the past. In recent years, Dr. Enard and his colleagues have searched the human genome for these patterns of genetic variation in order to reconstruct the history of an array of viruses. When the pandemic struck, he wondered whether ancient coronaviruses had left a distinctive mark of their own. He and his colleagues compared the DNA of thousands of people across 26 different populations around the world, looking at a combination of genes known to be crucial for coronaviruses but not other kinds of pathogens. In East Asian populations, the scientists found that 42 of these genes had a dominant version. That was a strong signal that people in East Asia had adapted to an ancient coronavirus. But whatever happened in East Asia seemed to have been limited to that region. The scientists then tried to estimate how long ago East Asians had adapted to a coronavirus. They took advantage of the fact that once a dominant version of a gene starts being passed down through the generations, it can gain harmless random mutations. As more time passes, more of those mutations accumulate. Dr. Enard and his colleagues found that the 42 genes all had about the same number of mutations. That meant that they had all rapidly evolved at about the same time. "This is a signal we should absolutely not expect by chance," Dr. Enard said. They estimated that all of those genes evolved their antiviral mutations sometime between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago, most likely over the course of a few centuries. It's a surprising finding, since East Asians at the time were not living in dense communities but instead formed small bands of hunter-gatherers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

University of Oxford scientists are trialing giving Ivermectin to people with Covid symptoms to see if it can keep them out of hospital. The BBC reports: The Principle study will compare those given the drug to patients receiving the usual NHS care. The drug has become controversial after being promoted for use across Latin America and in South Africa, despite being so far unproven. Previous studies of Ivermectin have generally been small or low quality. Most commonly used to treat parasitic infections such as river blindness, spread by flies, Ivermectin has also been shown to kill viruses in petri dishes in the lab -- although, at much higher doses than would usually be prescribed to people. Dr Aurora Baluja, an anaesthesiologist and critical care doctor, said Ivermectin was often being given in parts of the world where there are high incidences of parasitic infections. Covid patients who are also fighting a parasitic disease at the same time would be likely to fare worse and that might explains some of its seemingly positive effect. Though there have been some early "promising" results from small and observational studies, Principle joint chief investigator Prof Richard Hobbs said it would be "premature" to recommend Ivermectin for Covid. [...] The Oxford team said they had selected Ivermectin to be included in the trial because it was "readily available globally" and known to be relatively safe (although, like most things, it can be toxic at very high doses). People aged 18-64 with an underlying health condition or experiencing breathlessness, and anyone aged 65 or over, can sign up to the Principle study within 14 days of having Covid symptoms or receiving a positive test. "All in all, though, the most compelling reports of ivermectin's effects seem to come from the smallest and least controlled samples (all the way down to anecdotal results) while the larger and more well-controlled trials tend to produce equivocal evidence at best," writes Derek Lowe, a medical chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry. "My current opinion is pretty much exactly that of the WHO guidance: I do not think that the current evidence is strong enough to say that ivermectin is a useful therapy for coronavirus patients. I know that there are quite a few studies out there in the literature, but they suffer from various combinations of small sample size, poor trial design, not enough data reported, and (in many cases) inconclusive statistics." Should people on their deathbeds be allowed to try anything to save themselves? Should the entire world be allowed to practice self-care on a grand scale? These are some of the questions American author, journalist, and podcaster Matt Taibbi poses in an article via Substack. He argues that ivermectin "has become hostage to a larger global fight between populists and anti-populists."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patrick Klepek writes via Motherboard: Few role-playing experiences are as beloved as the original Final Fantasy games, which is why Square Enix announcing a new brand it's calling Pixel Remasters for the first six games was greeted with equal parts shock and horror. For every brilliant reinvention, like last year's Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you have these nightmarish updates to classics like Final Fantasy 6 that are so abjectly awful to look at that fans created mods to try and replace the visuals. It's not really clear what Square Enix wants to accomplish with these Pixel Remasters, but what's abundantly clear is that Square Enix intends to revisit the visuals across each 2D game. The new sprites aren't massive departures from the originals, but they're different, and it's led to speculation about whether the company is going to address a longstanding issue with older games being released on fancy new televisions and computer monitors. I've always loved the way video games looked -- fuzzy and crunchy -- on those humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family rooms. What I didn't know until earlier this year, however, was the science behind it all. It's not just that high-definition displays provide a crisper look at art made in earlier eras of video games, but that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT, and when that art is viewed on a modern, non-CRT display, you're actually losing some intended detail. [...] The problem is many people will never experience it in real-life, and so filters and similar technologies are essentially forms of emulation for television tech. More than 705 million CRT TVs have been sold in the United States since 1980, and the vast majority of these environmentally unfriendly devices are in the process of being broken down and recycled. That process will take years. But more practically, nobody is making CRT TVs anymore, and as the existing supply naturally breaks down, it falls to hobbyists to keep them ticking. No great shock to learn that Starkweather isn't a huge fan of Square Enix's approach for the Pixel Remasters, partially because it risks erasing the work of the original artists. One solution that Starkweather proposes is Square Enix spending time on a refined CRT filter. "Filters are simply filters and they change visuals without having any artistic intention behind," said renowned pixel artist Thomas Feichtmeir. "I have not yet seen any CRT filter implemented in a game which truly simulated a realistic CRT experience." While naive folks like myself learned about CRT through a Twitter account, Feichtmeir had a similar realization years ago. At home, Feichtmeir had a CRT monitor next to an LCD laptop, and as he transferred his dawn pixels from one to the other, it dawned upon him that they looked different. He noticed a similar issue playing games re-released on modern displays. "If you make a piece of pixel art on a LCD and you put it on a CRT," he said, "it's the equivalent of taking one of your articles, putting it through Google Translate and to expect that the other language it comes out [with] will have perfect meaning and grammar. A whole field of 'localization' exists for writing and in the game industry to address those issues." Though Feichtmeir has no specific insight into what Square Enix is or isn't planning for its Pixel Remasters series, watching what's been released gave him pause on the CRT theory. "Considering the couple of screenshots and snippets we saw in the presentation, I would not say any of it really accounts for the gap between CRT and LCDs," he said. "We still can see a lot of techniques which theoretically should stay on a CRT -- like overly dithered textures or just color optimized battle backgrounds. The biggest change are the characters, where they basically removed the volumetric shading in exchange for a dark outlined flat style. In my eyes this just changes the style to something which does not feel close to the original. And I think what a remaster should deliver on is to recreate the feeling how the original game felt."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft said on Friday an attacker had won access to one of its customer-service agents and then used information from that to launch hacking attempts against customers. The company said it had found the compromise during its response to hacks by a team it identifies as responsible for earlier major breaches at SolarWinds and Microsoft. Microsoft said it had warned the affected customers. "A sophisticated Nation-State associated actor that Microsoft identifies as NOBELLIUM accessed Microsoft customer support tools to review information regarding your Microsoft Services subscriptions," the warning reads in part. The U.S. government has publicly attributed the earlier attacks to the Russian government, which denies involvement. After commenting on a broader phishing campaign that it said had compromised a small number of entities, Microsoft said it had also found the breach of its own agent, who it said had limited powers. The agent could see billing contact information and what services the customers pay for, among other things. "The actor used this information in some cases to launch highly-targeted attacks as part of their broader campaign," Microsoft said. Microsoft warned affected customers to be careful about communications to their billing contacts and consider changing those usernames and email addresses, as well as barring old usernames from logging in. Microsoft said it was aware of three entities that had been compromised in the phishing campaign. It did not immediately clarify whether any had been among those whose data was viewed through the support agent, or if the agent had been tricked by the broader campaign. Microsoft did not say whether the agent was at a contractor or a direct employee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease emerge in a person is accurate enough to be rolled out as a screening test, according to scientists. The Guardian reports: The test, which is also being piloted by NHS England in the autumn, is aimed at people at higher risk of the disease including patients aged 50 or older. It is able to identify many types of the disease that are difficult to diagnose in the early stages such as head and neck, ovarian, pancreatic, esophageal and some blood cancers. Scientists said their findings, published in the journal Annals of Oncology, show that the test accurately detects cancer often before any signs or symptoms appear, while having a very low false positive rate. The test, developed by US-based company Grail, looks for chemical changes in fragments of genetic code "cell-free DNA (cfDNA)" that leak from tumors into the bloodstream. The Guardian first reported on the test last year and how it had been developed using a machine learning algorithm a type of artificial intelligence. It works by examining the DNA that is shed by tumors and found circulating in the blood. More specifically, it focuses on chemical changes to this DNA, known as methylation patterns. Now the latest study has revealed the test has an impressively high level of accuracy. Scientists analyzed the performance of the test in 2,823 people with the disease and 1,254 people without. It correctly identified when cancer was present in 51.5% of cases, across all stages of the disease, and wrongly detected cancer in only 0.5% of cases. In solid tumors that do not have any screening options "such as esophageal, liver and pancreatic cancers" the ability to generate a positive test result was twice as high (65.6%) as that for solid tumors that do have screening options such as breast, bowel, cervical and prostate cancers. Meanwhile, the overall ability to generate a positive test result in cancers of the blood, such as lymphoma and myeloma, was 55.1%. The test correctly also identified the tissue in which the cancer was located in the body in 88.7% of cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The New York Times, citing a highly anticipated UFO report released on Friday, "The government still has no explanation for nearly all of the scores of unidentified aerial phenomena reported over almost two decades and investigated by a Pentagon task force, [...] a result that is likely to fuel theories of otherworldly visitations." From the report: A total of 143 reports gathered since 2004 remain unexplained, the document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Of those, 21 reports of unknown phenomena, involving 18 episodes, possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations. But, the report said, more rigorous analysis of those episodes is needed. There is no evidence that any of the episodes involve secret American weapons programs, unknown technology from Russia or China or extraterrestrial visitations. But the government report did not rule out those explanations. The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions, announcing that the available reporting is "largely inconclusive" and noting that limited and inconsistent data created a challenge in evaluating the phenomena. The report said the number of sightings was too limited for a detailed pattern analysis. While they clustered around military training or testing grounds, the report found that that could be the result of collection bias or the presence of cutting-edge sensors in those areas. Government officials outlined a plan to develop, if additional funding is available, a better program to observe and collect data on future unexplained phenomena. [...] The government intends to update Congress within 90 days on efforts to develop an improved collection strategy and what officials are calling a technical road map to develop technology to better observe the phenomena, senior government officials told reporters on Friday. Officials said they would provide lawmakers with periodical updates beyond that.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former TikTok employees say ByteDance, the social media app's Chinese parent company, has access to TikTok's American user data and is closely involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. CNBC reports: A former TikTok recruiter remembers that her hours were supposed to be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., but more often than not, she found herself working double shifts. That's because the company's Beijing-based ByteDance executives were heavily involved in TikTok's decision-making, she said, and expected the company's California employees to be available at all hours of the day. TikTok employees, she said, were expected to restart their day and work during Chinese business hours to answer their ByteDance counterparts' questions. This recruiter, along with four other former employees, told CNBC they're concerned about the popular social media app's Chinese parent company, which they say has access to American user data and is actively involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. These people asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the company. The former employees who spoke to CNBC said the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance were so blurry as to be almost non-existent. Most notably, one employee said that ByteDance employees are able to access U.S. user data. This was highlighted in a situation where an American employee working on TikTok needed to get a list of global users, including Americans, who searched for or interacted with a specific type of content -- that means users who searched for a specific term or hashtag or liked a particular category of videos. This employee had to reach out to a data team in China in order to access that information. The data the employee received included users' specific IDs, and they could pull up whatever information TikTok had about those users. This type of situation was confirmed as a common occurrence by a second employee. TikTok downplayed the importance of this access. But one cybersecurity expert said it could expose users to information requests by the Chinese government. Direction and approvals for all kinds of decision-making, whether it be minor contracts or key strategies, come from ByteDance's leadership, which is based in China. This results in employees working late hours after long days so they can join meetings with their Beijing counterparts. TikTok's dependence on ByteDance extends to its technology. Former employees said that nearly 100% of TikTok's product development is led by Chinese ByteDance employees. The lines are so indistinct that multiple employees described having email addresses for both companies. One employee said that recruiters often find themselves looking for candidates for roles at both companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"With just over half of the U.S. population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and two-thirds having received one dose, a clear and unambiguous trend has emerged," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "Not only have deaths plunged from approximately 3,400 per day in January to roughly 300 per day now, 98% to 99% of all COVID-19 deaths are now from people who aren't vaccinated." MarketWatch reports: An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that "breakthrough" infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's about 0.1%. And only about 150 of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths in May were in fully vaccinated people. That translates to about 0.8%, or five deaths per day on average. The preventable deaths will continue, experts predict, with unvaccinated pockets of the nation experiencing outbreaks in the fall and winter. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said modeling suggests the nation will hit 1,000 deaths per day again next year. In Arkansas, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, with only about 33% of the population fully protected, cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising. "It is sad to see someone go to the hospital or die when it can be prevented," Gov. Asa Hutchinson tweeted as he urged people to get their shots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Famed software engineer Miguel de Icaza confirmed on Twitter that you will be able to sideload Android APKs in Windows 11. Android Authority reports: Yesterday, Microsoft surprised us all by announcing that Windows 11 will support native Android app installation. Using the Microsoft Store, you'll be able to search for, install, and use Android apps right on your PC. This is possible through an integration of the Amazon App Store. However, a big question loomed over the announcement: would you be able to sideload Android APKs on Windows 11? Sideloading apps would allow you to install Android programs from outside the Microsoft Store, which would give you a much larger potential library. It seems the answer to that question is "yes," at least according to famed engineer Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is responsible for numerous software projects, including GNOME, and currently works at Microsoft. However, his Twitter bio explicitly says "Working at Microsoft, not speaking for them," so we need to take this news with some skepticism. Of course, it's not quite clear how sideloading Android APKs on Windows 11 will work. Will you be able to simply download an APK as you would an EXE, double-click it, and install it? Or will there be some sort of workaround protocol? We'll need to wait to see how this develops.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, security researchers and cybercriminals have hacked ATMs by using all possible avenues to their innards, from opening a front panel and sticking a thumb drive into a USB port to drilling a hole that exposes internal wiring. Now, one researcher has found a collection of bugs that allow him to hack ATMs -- along with a wide variety of point-of-sale terminals -- in a new way: with a wave of his phone over a contactless credit card reader. Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has spent the last year digging up and reporting vulnerabilities in the so-called near-field communications reader chips used in millions of ATMs and point-of-sale systems worldwide. NFC systems are what let you wave a credit card over a reader -- rather than swipe or insert it -- to make a payment or extract money from a cash machine. You can find them on countless retail store and restaurant counters, vending machines, taxis, and parking meters around the globe. Now Rodriguez has built an Android app that allows his smartphone to mimic those credit card radio communications and exploit flaws in the NFC systems' firmware. With a wave of his phone, he can exploit a variety of bugs to crash point-of-sale devices, hack them to collect and transmit credit card data, invisibly change the value of transactions, and even lock the devices while displaying a ransomware message. Rodriguez says he can even force at least one brand of ATMs to dispense cash -- though that "jackpotting" hack only works in combination with additional bugs he says he has found in the ATMs' software. He declined to specify or disclose those flaws publicly due to nondisclosure agreements with the ATM vendors. "You can modify the firmware and change the price to one dollar, for instance, even when the screen shows that you're paying 50 dollars. You can make the device useless, or install a kind of ransomware. There are a lot of possibilities here," says Rodriguez of the point-of-sale attacks he discovered. "If you chain the attack and also send a special payload to an ATM's computer, you can jackpot the ATM -- like cash out, just by tapping your phone." Rodriguez says he alerted the affected vendors -- which include ID Tech, Ingenico, Verifone, Crane Payment Innovations, BBPOS, Nexgo, and the unnamed ATM vendor -- to his findings between seven months and a year ago. Even so, he warns that the sheer number of affected systems and the fact that many point-of-sale terminals and ATMs don't regularly receive software updates -- and in many cases require physical access to update -- mean that many of those devices likely remain vulnerable. "Patching so many hundreds of thousands of ATMs physically, it's something that would require a lot of time," Rodriguez says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.