Slashdot

Japanese multinational conglomerate Fujifilm has been forced to shut down parts of its global network after falling victim to a suspected ransomware attack. From a report: The company, which is best known for its digital imaging products but also produces high-tech medical kit, including devices for rapid processing of COVID-19 tests, confirmed that its Tokyo headquarters was hit by a cyberattack on Tuesday evening. "Fujifilm Corporation is currently carrying out an investigation into possible unauthorized access to its server from outside of the company. As part of this investigation, the network is partially shut down and disconnected from external correspondence," the company said in a statement posted to its website. "We want to state what we understand as of now and the measures that the company has taken. In the late evening of June 1, 2021, we became aware of the possibility of a ransomware attack. As a result, we have taken measures to suspend all affected systems in coordination with our various global entities," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled today in a 6-3 vote to overturn a hacking-related conviction for a Georgia police officer, and by doing so, it also narrowed down the scope of the US' primary hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. From a report: The ruling, No. 19-783, comes in the Van Buren v. United States case of Nathan Van Buren, a former police sergeant in Cumming, Georgia, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison in May 2018 for taking a bribe of $5,000 to look up a license plate for a woman one of his informants met at a local strip club. Prosecutors charged Van Buren under the CFAA and argued that even if the police officer had been authorized to access the police database as part of his work duties, he "exceeded authorized access" when he performed a search against department internal policies. In subsequent appeals, Van Buren argued that the "exceeds authorized access" language in the CFAA was too broad and requested that the US Supreme Court rule on the matter, in a case the court decided to pick up and heard arguments last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon.com's Ring, long criticized for a cozy relationship with law enforcement, will start requiring the police to publicly request home security footage captured by the company's doorbells and cameras. From a report: Beginning next week, police departments that want Ring users to help with investigations will be required to make the requests in the company's Neighbors app. Previously, police officers emailed users in a dedicated portal. Ring, the leading maker of internet-connected doorbells, has put cameras on the front of millions of homes, selling residents peace of mind via smartphone. But for civil liberties groups, the cameras -- and their use by law enforcement agencies -- pose threats to Americans' privacy and civil rights. Ring has shown no signs of abandoning its relationship with the police, but in recent years has grown more transparent, publicly identifying law enforcement partners and, as of next week, letting all Neighbors users see what information is being requested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter unveiled its long-awaited subscription service, offering paying customers exclusive features for rescinding tweets and organizing posts as part of a push to ease the social network's dependence on advertising revenue. From a report: Dubbed Twitter Blue, the product will cost $2.99 a month for access to tools including the ability to "undo" a post before it goes out publicly, organize bookmarked tweets into folders, and more easily read long tweet threads. Subscribers will also get faster service for customer-support claims, can choose from new app colors and will have the ability to modify the Twitter app icon on iOS devices. The subscription model could help Twitter diversify its business at a time when the pandemic has underscored the risks of a heavy reliance on digital advertising. [...] The product suite is being pitched to the most prolific of Twitter's 200 million daily users, including journalists, social media managers and those who use the site as their primary news source, said Sara Beykpour, the product lead in charge of subscriptions. "Twitter Blue is aimed at customers who are our most engaged, our most passionate super users who really want to take their experience to the next level," said Beykpour, who declined to estimate the size of the target group. "There is something special about this cohort that we're really learning about."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's going to get harder for Android apps to track users who've opted out of receiving personalized ads, the Financial Times reports, after Google announced changes to how it'll handle the unique device identifiers that allow marketers to track them between apps. From a report: Starting later this year, Google is cutting off access to these "Advertising IDs" after a user opts out, and will show developers a "string of zeros" in its place. The news was announced in an email to Play Store developers, and Google has also updated its support page for Advertising IDs with the announcement. Google told developers the changes will "provide users with more control over their data, and help bolster security and privacy," the Financial Times reports. The change comes a few short months after Apple overhauled how advertising IDs work on iOS in an apparent attempt to compete with the new policy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The perpetrators of a ransomware attack that shut down some operations at the world's largest meat processor this week was a Russian-based cybercriminal group known for its attacks on prominent American companies, the F.B.I. said Wednesday. The group, known as REvil, is one of the most prolific of the roughly 40 ransomware organizations that cybersecurity experts track and has been identified as responsible for a coordinated strike against operations in almost two dozen Texas cities in 2019. The group is among dozens of ransomware groups that enjoy safe harbor in Russia, where they are rarely arrested or extradited for their crimes. REvil, which stands for Ransomware Evil, is known as a "ransomware as a service" organization, meaning it leases its ransomware to other criminals, even the technically inept. One of its previous affiliates was a group called DarkSide, which was responsible for the ransomware attack last month on Colonial Pipeline, a conduit for nearly half the gas and jet fuel to the East Coast. DarkSide is believed to have split off from REvil last year. REvil is considered one of the most sophisticated ransomware groups and has demanded as much as $50 million to recover data belonging to companies as prominent as Apple. Its attack on JBS, a Brazilian company that accounts for roughly a fifth of cattle and hog slaughter in the United States, temporarily shut down some operations at a time when prices were already surging for beef, poultry and pork. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, declined to say whether the U.S. government was planning to retaliate. "We're not taking any options off the table in terms of how we may respond, but of course there is an internal policy review process to consider that," she said. The administration is planning to bring up the issue with President Vladimir Putin of Russia when they meet in two weeks. "Responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals," she added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NortonLifelock has added the ability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency directly within its Norton 360 antivirus program as a way to "protect" users from malicious mining software. BleepingComputer reports: This new mining feature is called 'Norton Crypto' and will be rolling out tomorrow to Norton 360 users enrolled in Norton's early adopter program. When Norton Crypto is enabled, the software will use the device's graphics card (GPU) to mine for Ethereum, which will then be transferred into a Norton wallet hosted in the cloud. It is not clear if every device running Norton Crypto is mining independently or as part of a pool of users for a greater chance of earning rewards of Ethereum. As the difficulty of mining Ethereum by yourself is very high, Norton users will likely be pooled together for greater chances of mining a block. If Norton is operating a pool for this new feature, they may take a small fee of all mined Ethereum as is common among pool operators, making this new feature a revenue generator for the company. "As the crypto economy continues to become a more important part of our customers' lives, we want to empower them to mine cryptocurrency with Norton, a brand they trust," said Vincent Pilette, CEO of NortonLifeLock. "Norton Crypto is yet another innovative example of how we are expanding our Cyber Safety platform to protect our customers' ever-evolving digital lives."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Venus can no longer wait. NASA will send two new robotic missions to Earth's hothouse twin, the agency's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced this afternoon at his "State of NASA" speech here at the agency's headquarters. The missions, together costing up to $1 billion, mark NASA's first visit to the planet since the early 1990s, whereas nearby Mars has seen a host of robotic visitors. They're expected to launch by the decade's end. The scientific case for exploring Venus has long been strong. No planet has more to say about how Earth came to be. Mars is tiny and frozen, its heat and atmosphere largely lost to space long ago. Venus could host active volcanoes, and it may have once featured oceans and continents, which are critical to the evolution of life. Plate tectonics roughly like Earth's might have held sway there, or might be starting today, hidden under the clouds. Venus also proves by example that orbiting within a star's "habitable zone" doesn't guarantee a planet is suitable for life. Understanding how Venus's atmosphere went bad and turned into a runaway greenhouse, boiling away any oceans and baking the surface, could help astronomers studying other solar systems distinguish truly Earth-like exoplanets from our evil twins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The nations that make up the G7 have pumped billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than they have into clean energy since the Covid-19 pandemic, despite their promises of a green recovery. As the UK prepares to host the G7 summit, new analysis reveals that the countries attending committed $189 billion to support oil, coal and gas between January 2020 and March 2021. In comparison, the same countries -- the UK, US, Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan -- spent $147 billion on clean forms of energy. The support for fossil fuels from seven of the world's richest nations included measures to remove or downgrade environmental regulations as well as direct funding of oil, gas and coal. The analysis from the development charity Tearfund, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Overseas Development Institute showed that the nations missed opportunities to make their response to the pandemic greener. In most cases, money provided for fossil fuel industries was given with no strings attached, rather than with conditions requiring a reduction in emissions or pollution. The analysis found that eight in every 10 dollars spent on non-renewable energy came without conditions. This included lifelines that were thrown to the aviation and car industries, which received $115 billion from the G7 countries. Of that money, 80% was given with no attempt to force the sectors to cut their emissions in return for the support. Only one in every 10 dollars committed to the Covid-19 response benefited the "cleanest" energies such as renewables and energy efficiency measures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Billionaire Bill Gates' advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower LLC and PacifiCorp have selected Wyoming to launch the first Natrium reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant, the state's governor said on Wednesday. Reuters reports: TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change. The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system's power output to 500 MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1 billion. Late last year the U.S. Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years into its ban from the US Government and, in turn, access to the Play Store on its Android-powered devices, Huawei is unveiling HarmonyOS. The platform is an alternative to Android that powers TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. 9to5Google reports: Announced at an event today, Huawei is positioning HarmonyOS as an operating system that can handle just about everything, from the smartphone in your pocket to IoT devices such as "power sockets and lamps." The company says the goal of the platform is to have one set of code that can be used across virtually any device, saying that it is not aware of "any other operating system in the world" that can cover such a wide range of devices. Leaning into this ability, Huawei developed a "Control Panel," which gives users the ability to connect multiple devices together, with the example of using the "music widget" to throw audio playback to nearby speakers or TVs. A "Super Device" widget shows icons for other nearby devices and enables a quick and easy pairing mode. On smartphones, the HarmonyOS homescreen can use a swipe-up gesture on apps developed for the platform to see a widget pulling information from that app. Those widgets, apparently, can also be used across devices because of the shared codebase Huawei says HarmonyOS offers. The homescreen can also intelligently add apps to a folder based on the category. Interestingly, Huawei says HarmonyOS devices will also be able to move running apps from one device to another, which is really neat and unique. Moving apps between devices apparently also works between watches and TVs, with a workout app being used on both simultaneously given as an example. A video calling app was also shown moving between devices. Huawei says that performance of HarmonyOS is "superior" to Android with EMUI, specifically calling out long-term use. While there are certainly new elements in HarmonyOS, it appears to be a "fork" of Android. The Verge spent time with the HarmonyOS-powered MatePad Pro and described the act of installing Android APKs as "though I was using an Android device." Visually, there are also a tremendous number of similarities between HarmonyOS and Android, though there are some distinct elements of Apple's iPad OS in the platform's tablet-optimized homescreen, seen below as Evan Blass posted to Twitter. Android Authority further described HarmonyOS as "ultimately a spin on Android 10" with a "slight rebrand." TechRadar said the software was "clearly" based on Android. These findings from the media appear to back up a previous report from ArsTechnica, which showed the developer preview as basically a clone of EMUI-skinned Android.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

smooth wombat writes: Problems at Amazon warehouses are well known, such as employees not having enough time to use the restroom (and getting docked pay for doing so) to insufficient protections during the pandemic, which lead to numerous deaths and nearly 20,000 infections (Note: the total number of infections is both Amazon and Whole Foods. Amazon declined to provide a break out of infections at each location). Now comes a union-backed study which indicates the number of injuries at Amazon warehouses is 80% higher than its competitors. The BBC reports: "This new study comes from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labour unions. It analysed workplace safety data reported to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2017 to 2020. It found that 'workers at Amazon warehouses are not only injured more frequently than in non-Amazon warehouses, they are also injured more severely.' Workers forced to take time off for injuries were absent for an average of 46.3 days, it said -- a week longer than the average across the warehouse industry. And compared to its largest retail competitor Walmart, Amazon's overall injury rate was more than double, at 6.5 per 100 employees compared with three." In response to the study, Amazon equated its workers to industrial athletes. "Just like an athlete who trains for an event, industrial athletes need to prepare their bodies to be able to perform their best at work," it warns. "Some positions will walk up to 13 miles a day... [others] will have a total of 20,000lb (9,072kg) lifted before they complete their shift," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom, used his nearly 20-year-old PayPal account to put his money where his mouth is. His primary use of the payment system was to fund servers to run Tor nodes, routing internet traffic in order to safeguard privacy and avoid country-level censorship. Now Brandt's PayPal account has been shut down, leaving many questions unanswered and showing how financial censorship can hurt the cause of internet freedom around the world. Brandt first discovered his PayPal account was restricted in March of 2021. Brandt reported to EFF: "I tried to make a payment to the hosting company for my server lease in Finland. My account wouldn't work. I went to my PayPal info page which displayed a large vertical banner announcing my permanent ban. They didn't attempt to inform me via email or phone -- just the banner." Brandt was unable to get the issue resolved directly through PayPal, and so he then reached out to EFF. [...] We found no evidence of wrongdoing that would warrant shutting down his account, and we communicated our concerns to PayPal. Given that the overwhelming majority of transactions on Brandt's account were payments for servers running Tor nodes, EFF is deeply concerned that Brandt's account was targeted for shut down specifically as a result of his activities supporting Tor. We reached out to PayPal for clarification, to urge them to reinstate Brandt's account, and to educate them about Tor and its value in promoting freedom and privacy globally. PayPal denied that the shutdown was related to the concerns about Tor, claiming only that "the situation has been determined appropriately" and refusing to offer a specific explanation. After several weeks, PayPal has still refused to reinstate Brandt's account. [...] EFF is calling on PayPal to do better by its customers, and that starts by embracing the Santa Clara principles [which attempt to guide companies in centering human rights in their decisions to ban users or take down content]. Specifically, we are calling on them to: publish a transparency report, provide meaningful notice to users, and adopt a meaningful appeal process. The Tor Project said in an email: "This is the first time we have heard about financial persecution for defending internet freedom in the Tor community. We're very concerned about PayPal's lack of transparency, and we urge them to reinstate this user's account. Running relays for the Tor network is a daily activity for thousands of volunteers and relay associations around the world. Without them, there is no Tor -- and without Tor, millions of users would not have access to the uncensored internet." Brandt says he's not backing down and is still committed to supporting the Tor network to pay for servers around the world using alternative means. "Tor is of critical importance for anyone requiring anonymity of location or person," says Brandt. "I'm talking about millions of people in China, Iran, Syria, Belarus, etc. that wish to communicate outside their country but have prohibitions against such activities. We need more incentives to add to the Tor project, not fewer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After teasing Windows 10's next UI refresh last week, Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that "the next generation of Windows" will be announced on June 24. CNBC reports: Windows, the dominant operating system for personal computers, is the source of 14% of total revenue for Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world. The company has pushed two updates each year to its Windows 10 operating system since it first became available in 2015. Nadella made the Windows remarks last week shortly after the company announced that it won't ship Windows 10X. That operating system was initially designed for dual-screen devices such as the Surface Neo, which has been delayed. The company is working on an update to Windows with the code name Sun Valley, that includes a more modern look, with rounded corners coming to components such as the Start menu. Microsoft could ship a revamp of its Windows app store, which would allow developers to use third-party commerce systems, alongside the Sun Valley update. The event will be held online at 11 a.m. ET, according to an invitation the company sent to reporters. Nadella will be there, along with Panos Panay, Microsoft's chief product officer, who has been the face of the company's Surface devices, the invitation said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMC announced today that it was creating AMC Investor Connect, "an innovative, proactive communication initiative that will put AMC in direct communication with its extraordinary base of enthusiastic and passionate individual shareholders to keep them up to date about important company information and to provide them with special offers." In other words, the company is embracing the meme stonk investors that have sent AMC shares to new highs. The Verge reports: This represents "a groundbreaking new approach" to communicating with retail investors, the company says. It's a shame they didn't put a bunch of rocket emojis in the announcement -- after all, there's no need to be coy. We all know exactly who AMC is speaking to, and if they sign up today, they're getting free popcorn. This is also, essentially, the opposite of what GameStop did, which was say absolutely nothing. You got the sense that maybe the exec team was nervous that anything they said might potentially be securities fraud. AMC, though, they've elected to really embrace the whole meme thing. I'm hoping there are more announcements where they get meme-ier. Like, retail investors get a free Lego rocket in the fourth quarter or something.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Amazon will no longer test most job applicants for marijuana use in the latest sign of America's changing relationship with pot. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., also says it now backs legalizing marijuana nationwide. "In the past, like many employers, we've disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use," the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. "However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we've changed course." With the shift in policy, the only job candidates Amazon will screen for marijuana are those applying for positions regulated by the Department of Transportation -- a category that includes delivery truck drivers and operators of heavy machinery. The company says it will handle marijuana the same way it deals with alcohol -- and it will still test for all drugs and alcohol after any accidents or other incidents. Amazon is also acting on the political level, throwing its weight behind the push to legalize marijuana in the U.S. and expunge criminal records for nonviolent marijuana-related convictions. The company says its public policy team "will be actively supporting" the MORE Act -- the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act -- a move that adds momentum to legislation that was reintroduced in Congress on Friday. The MORE Act would remove marijuana from the list of drugs in the federal Controlled Substances Act, making its status similar to alcohol and tobacco. It would also tax cannabis products, directing some of that money toward investments in communities that have been harmed by marijuana's criminalization. "We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law," Amazon said in a statement about its support for legal marijuana.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 41-year-old man in China's eastern province of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with a rare strain of bird flu known as H10N3, Beijing's National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday. From a report: Many different strains of bird flu are present in China and some sporadically infect people, usually those working with poultry. There is no indication that H10N3 can spread easily in humans. The man, a resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized on April 28 and diagnosed with H10N3 on May 28, the health commission said. It did not give details on how the man was infected. His condition is now stable and he is ready to be discharged. Investigation of his close contacts found no other cases, the NHC said. No other cases of human infection with H10N3 have been reported globally, it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is losing one of its strongest champions of the web. Alex Russell, who has led the Fugu project to make web apps as powerful as those running on Google's Android or Apple's iOS software, is leaving the company on Wednesday. From a report: Russell announced his departure on Twitter. He's not quitting in anger or being pushed out. But after 12 years at Google pushing his vision for a more powerful web, "I need some time off," he said in an interview. Russell has been an outspoken advocate for the web, using Chrome's dominant position to help test and introduce new abilities that let programmers build interactive apps on the web, not just relatively static websites. Project Fugu embodies this effort, as does the broader progressive web app, or PWA, movement that lets you install and launch web apps more like those that run natively on smartphones and PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A ransomware attack has caused delays and disruptions at Steamship Authority, the largest ferry service in Massachusetts, and has disrupted ferry transports between mainland US and the Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket islands. From a report: The attack took place earlier today, according to a series of tweets posted on the company's official Twitter account. Steamship Authority said the incident impacted its land-based IT systems and that ships are not impacted. "There is no impact to the safety of vessel operations, as the issue does not affect radar or GPS functionality," a Steamship Authority spokesperson said. "Scheduled trips to both islands continue to operate, although customers may experience some delays during the ticketing process. Customers are currently unable to book or change vehicle reservations online or by phone. Existing vehicle reservations will be honored at Authority terminals, and rescheduling and cancellation fees will be waived," it added. The company has asked travelers to come prepared with cash on hand as "availability of credit card systems to process vehicle and passenger tickets, as well as parking lot fees, is limited."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security researcher Gabi Cirlig's findings, verified for Forbes by two other independent researchers, reveal that on both Android and iOS versions of UC Browser, every website a user visits, regardless of whether they're in incognito mode or not, is sent to servers owned by UCWeb. From a report: Cirlig said IP addresses -- which could be used to get a user's rough location down to the town or neighborhood of the user -- were also being sent to Alibaba-controlled servers. Those servers were registered in China and carried the .cn Chinese domain name extension, but were hosted in the U.S. An ID number is also assigned to each user, meaning their activity across different websites could effectively be monitored by the Chinese company, though it's not currently clear just what Alibaba and its subsidiary are doing with the data. "This could easily fingerprint users and tie them back to their real personas," Cirlig wrote in a blog post handed to Forbes ahead of publication on Tuesday. Cirlig was able to uncover the problem by reverse engineering some encrypted data he spotted being sent back to Beijing. Once the key had been cracked, he was able to see that every time he visited a website, it was being encrypted and transmitted back to the Alibaba company. On Apple's iOS, he didn't even need to reverse engineer the encryption because there effectively was none on the device (though it was encrypted when in transit). "This kind of tracking is done on purpose without any regard for user privacy," Cirlig told Forbes. When compared to Google's own Chrome browser, for instance, it does not transfer user web browsing habits when in incognito. Cirlig said he'd looked at other major browsers and found none did the same as UC Browser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Apple job listing has mentioned "homeOS," an otherwise never-before heard of Apple operating system, ahead of WWDC next week. From a report: Spotted by developer Javier Lacort, the Apple job listing for a Senior iOS Engineer in Apple Music explicitly mentions "homeOS" on two occasions, alongside Apple's other operating systems including iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Interestingly, the job listing mentions homeOS as a "mobile platform," seemingly highlighting it as more akin to iOS and watchOS than systems like macOS and tvOS, but it is not clear why that would be the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prosus said it struck a $1.8 billion deal to acquire Stack Overflow, an online community for software developers, in a bet on growing demand for online tech learning. From a report: Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says. Prosus, one of Europe's most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus' biggest acquisitions. Prosus invests globally across a range of online platforms focused on areas such as food delivery, classifieds and fintech. It also maintains a more than $200 billion holding in Tencent. Prosus' parent company, Naspers, acquired the Tencent stake in 2001 for $34 million. Official press release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E-commerce firm Etsy announced Wednesday that it is buying the secondhand fashion app Depop for $1.62 billion. From a report: Founded in the U.K. in 2011, Depop lets people buy and sell used clothes through its online marketplace. The company has attracted a predominantly younger audience thanks to its social media savvy and messaging on environmental and ethical shopping. Depop boasts approximately 30 million registered users across 150 countries. Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said the company was "thrilled" to be adding what it believes to be the "resale home for Gen Z consumers" to Etsy. "Depop is a vibrant, two-sided marketplace with a passionate community, a highly-differentiated offering of unique items, and we believe significant potential to further scale," Silverman said in a statement Wednesday. "We see significant opportunities for shared expertise and growth synergies across what will now be a tremendous 'house of brands' portfolio of individually distinct, and very special, ecommerce brands."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two men accused of spying for China went on trial Tuesday in Warsaw -- a Chinese citizen who is a former sales director of Huawei in Poland and a Polish cybersecurity expert. The men, Weijing Wang and Piotr Durbajlo, have both pleaded not guilty. At the start of Tuesday's session in Poland's capital, a prosecutor requested that the trial be held in secret because of the classified nature of some of the evidence. Defense lawyers objected, saying the nature of the charges requires that the proceedings be transparent. Both Wang, speaking in fluent Polish, and Durbajlo said they wanted an open trial. But after a brief recess, the three-judge panel announced the proceedings would be held behind closed doors, citing state interests, and journalists were told to leave. Wang and Durbajlo were arrested by Polish authorities in January 2019 and accused of spying for China under the cover of seeking business deals for Chinese technology company Huawei.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has lost multiple top managers of its self-driving car team in recent months, a sign of attrition at the division involved in what could become an important future product. From a report: The iPhone maker has hundreds of engineers working on underlying self-driving car technology as well as groups of employees working on an actual vehicle, Bloomberg News has reported. Running the division is Doug Field, a former top vehicle engineer for Tesla, along with a management team of fewer than a dozen executives. At least three members of that Apple car management team have departed this year. In recent days, Dave Scott, who led teams working on robotics related to the car, left to become the chief executive officer at Hyperfine, a health care company developing next-generation MRI systems. Before Scott's departure, Jaime Waydo, who led autonomous car safety and regulation teams, departed to become the chief technology officer at Cavnue, a startup focused on the safety of autonomous cars on public roads. In February, Benjamin Lyon, who helped create Apple's original car team several years ago and was key in the future project's development, left to become the chief engineer at Astra, a company developing technology for sending satellites to space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission will on Thursday propose the introduction of so-called digital wallets that will offer access to a range of services across the EU for the bloc's 450 million citizens, in a further step toward closer integration in the aftermath of the pandemic. From a report: "Under the new rules, European Digital Identity Wallets will be available to everyone," according to a draft of the proposals seen by Bloomberg. The wallets will allow European Union citizens to digitally identify themselves, and store identity data and official documents such as driving licenses, medical prescriptions or education qualifications. Several member states already provide digital forms of identity, so the proposed new app would interact with existing systems while providing EU citizens with the right to a service that is recognized across the bloc. The wallet wouldn't be obligatory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: The ongoing multi-vendor investigations into the SolarWinds mega-hack took another twist this week with the discovery of new malware artifacts that could be used in future supply chain attacks. According to a new report, the latest wave of attacks being attributed to APT29/Nobelium threat actor includes a custom downloader that is part of a "poisoned update installer" for electronic keys used by the Ukrainian government. SentinelOne principal threat researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade documented the latest finding in a blog post that advances previous investigations from Microsoft and Volexity. "At this time, the means of distribution [for the poisoned update installer] are unknown. It's possible that these update archives are being used as part of a regionally-specific supply chain attack," Guerrero-Saade said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest science observatory to ever be placed into space, won't launch as scheduled on Halloween this year due to a "combination of different factors." The new launch date is expected to be pushed into November or possibly early December. Ars Technica reports: During a press briefing with reporters on Tuesday, the telescope's director for launch services, Beatriz Romero, said that there are a "combination of different factors" to consider when setting a new launch date. These factors include shipment of the telescope, the readiness of the Ariane 5 rocket, and the readiness of the spaceport in South America as well. Romero said she did not expect to identify a new launch date until later this summer or early fall. NASA plans to ship the telescope to the launch site by boat late this summer. (NASA is keeping precise plans vague due to concerns about piracy at sea. Seriously.) The space agency's chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Tuesday that "we don't have a lot of reserve" left in the schedule to prepare for shipment. However, he added that NASA and Webb's primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, are close to folding up the telescope and putting it into a shipping container. He said that this should happen toward the "end of August." The launch campaign, which begins when the telescope arrives in French Guiana, requires 55 days. Asked whether this means that Webb will not launch until mid-November at the earliest, Zurbuchen said this assessment was correct. The rocket is also not ready. The Ariane 5 booster, a venerable rocket in service for more than 25 years, has been grounded since August 2020 due to a payload fairing issue. However, officials with Arianespace, which manages launch for the Ariane 5, said the fairing issue's cause has been diagnosed and addressed with a redesign. Two Ariane 5 launches are scheduled before Webb's launch to ensure that the fairing issue has been fixed. (Those launches are scheduled for July and August, but delays are possible.) Finally, there are concerns about the spaceport itself, where operations have been limited by COVID-19. Vaccines are not yet widely available in French Guiana, and officials have said that if virus activity worsens, it could further slow operations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Obipale shares a report from ScienceAlert: The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station -- namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It's a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit's space junk problem is a ticking time bomb. Canadarm2 -- formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency -- has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It's a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance. It's unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage. "Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected," the CSA wrote in a blog post. "The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations." Robotics operations on the ISS using the Canadarm2 will continue as planned for the near future, the CSA said. But both space agencies will continue to gather data in order to perform an analysis of the event, both to understand how it occurred, and to assess future risk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With the coronavirus pandemic receding for every vaccine that reaches an arm, the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who've embraced remote work as the new normal. While companies from Google to Ford and Citigroup have promised greater flexibility, many chief executives have publicly extolled the importance of being in offices. Some have lamented the perils of remote work, saying it diminishes collaboration and company culture. JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon said at a recent conference that it doesn't work "for those who want to hustle." But legions of employees aren't so sure. If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues. It's still early to say how the post-pandemic work environment will look. Only about 28% of U.S. office workers are back at their buildings, according to an index of 10 metro areas compiled by security company Kastle Systems. Many employers are still being lenient with policies as the virus lingers, vaccinations continue to roll out and childcare situations remain erratic. But as office returns accelerate, some employees may want different options. A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren't flexible about remote work. The generational difference is clear: Among millennials and Gen Z, that figure was 49%, according to the poll by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News. The lack of commutes and cost savings are the top benefits of remote work, according to a FlexJobs survey of 2,100 people released in April. More than a third of the respondents said they save at least $5,000 per year by working remotely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells. Phys.Org reports: "This material converts low resolution light to high resolution light," said Zhaowei Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego. "It's very simple and easy to use. Just place a sample on the material, then put the whole thing under a normal microscope -- no fancy modification needed." The work, which was published in Nature Communications, overcomes a big limitation of conventional light microscopes: low resolution. Light microscopes are useful for imaging live cells, but they cannot be used to see anything smaller. Conventional light microscopes have a resolution limit of 200 nanometers, meaning that any objects closer than this distance will not be observed as separate objects. And while there are more powerful tools out there such as electron microscopes, which have the resolution to see subcellular structures, they cannot be used to image living cells because the samples need to be placed inside a vacuum chamber. The technology consists of a microscope slide that's coated with a type of light-shrinking material called a hyperbolic metamaterial. It is made up of nanometers-thin alternating layers of silver and silica glass. As light passes through, its wavelengths shorten and scatter to generate a series of random high-resolution speckled patterns. When a sample is mounted on the slide, it gets illuminated in different ways by this series of speckled light patterns. This creates a series of low resolution images, which are all captured and then pieced together by a reconstruction algorithm to produce a high resolution image. The researchers tested their technology with a commercial inverted microscope. They were able to image fine features, such as actin filaments, in fluorescently labeled Cos-7 cells -- features that are not clearly discernible using just the microscope itself. The technology also enabled the researchers to clearly distinguish tiny fluorescent beads and quantum dots that were spaced 40 to 80 nanometers apart. The findings appear in the journal Nature Communications. Liu's team previously published a paper showing that his technology is also capable of imaging with ultra-high axial resolution (about 2 nanometers). They are now working on combining the two together.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union (EU) is set to unveil plans for a bloc-wide digital wallet on Wednesday, following requests from member states to find a safe way for citizens to access public and private services online, the Financial Times reported. Reuters reports: The app will allow citizens across the EU to securely access a range of private and public services with a single online ID, according to the FT report on Tuesday. The digital wallet will securely store payment details and passwords and allow citizens from all 27 countries to log onto local government websites or pay utility bills using a single recognized identity, the newspaper said, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans. The EU-wide app can be accessed via fingerprint or retina scanning among other methods, and will also serve as a vault where users can store official documents like the driver's license, the newspaper reported. EU officials will enforce a structural separation to prevent companies that access user data from using the wallet for any other commercial activity such as marketing new products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: AMD just took the wraps off its new line of Radeon RX 6000M GPUs for gaming laptops. Combined with its Ryzen 5000 series processors, the company claims all-AMD powered "AMD Advantage" machines will deliver new levels of performance, visual fidelity and value for gamers. AMD unveiled three new mobile GPUs. Sitting at the top is the Radeon RX 6800M, featuring 40 compute units, 40 ray accelerators, a 2,300MHz game clock and 12GB of GDDR6 memory. According to AMD, its flagship Radeon RX 6800M mobile GPU can deliver 120 frames per second at 1440p with a blend of raytracing, compute, and traditional effects. Next, the new Radeon RX 6700M sports 36 compute units, 36 ray accelerators, a 2,300MHz game clock and 10GB of GDDR6 memory. Finally, the Radeon RX 6600M comes armed with 28 compute units and 28 ray accelerators, a 2,177MHz game clock and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. HotHardware has a deep dive review of a new ASUS ROG Strix G15 gaming laptop with the Radeon RX 6800M on board, as well as an 8-core Ryzen 9 5900HX processor. In the benchmarks, the Radeon RX 6800M-equipped machine puts up numbers that rival GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 laptop GPUs in traditional rasterized game engines, though it trails a bit in ray tracing enhanced gaming. You can expect this new breed of all-AMD laptops to arrive in market sometime later this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The now-unemployed owner of a shuttered ROM distribution site has been ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages to Nintendo after trying and failing to defend himself in the case. In September 2019, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles resident Matthew Storman over his operation of RomUniverse.com, which offered prominent downloads of "Nintendo Switch Scene Roms" and other copyrighted game files. At the time, Nintendo said that the site had been "among the most visited and notorious online hubs for pirated Nintendo video games" for "over a decade."[...]In providing summary judgment for Nintendo (as noted by Torrent Freak), the judge suggested that this was a clear case of infringement, one in which "there is no genuine issue of material fact that Plaintiff owns the copyrighted works and Defendant copied the works." While Nintendo sought $4.41 million in copyright damages -- or $90,000 each for 49 games -- the judge lowered the amount to $1.715 million ($35,000 per work). That amount should be sufficient to "compensate Plaintiff for its lost revenue and deter Defendant who is currently unemployed and has already shut down the website," the judge wrote. The judge also awarded an additional $400,000 for RomUniverse's use of Nintendo's trademarked box art, down from a massive $11.2 million ask. But Storman avoided a permanent injunction on "future infringement," with the judge suggesting that there was no "irreparable harm" given the monetary damages and the fact that the site had already been shuttered. Storman invoked the "safe harbor" protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but Nintendo got him to admit that he had uploaded Nintendo's copyrighted ROM files himself. "Another attempted Storman defense based on the 'first sale doctrine' also failed to go anywhere, since the site was distributing copies rather than Storman's personal property," adds Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Of the 150 disinformation campaigns that Facebook has caught and removed in the past four years, the U.S. has been the most frequent target by far, according to a new threat intelligence report from Facebook. Axios reports: "I think it's significant that while we saw a lot of foreign targeting of the U.S. ahead of 2020 election, there was also a lot of domestic targeting," says Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of security policy. One campaign the company points to was the network operated by a U.S. based marketing firm, working on behalf of its clients, including a pro-Trump organization. In total, the company said there were 16 takedowns of coordinated inauthentic behavior networks, or disinformation campaigns, ahead of the 2020 elections. Of those 16 networks, five originated in Russia, five originated in Iran, and five originated in the the U.S. One originated in China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New terms of use for eBay have come into effect which mean the online auction house will now pay sellers directly rather than through PayPal. The BBC reports: PayPal was acquired by eBay in its early days in 2002, and the two firms have worked in partnership ever since. The changes mean that while eBay buyers can still pay with PayPal, sellers will be paid straight into their bank accounts. But some sellers have threatened to stop using the service over the move. EBay's forums have several posts from sellers who say they are reluctant to use the new system and give eBay direct debit access to their personal bank accounts. But the new terms, effective from 1 June, say the new "managed payments" system is compulsory, and the company has the power to limit or remove listings from sellers who refuse to use it. The company says the new system is simpler, convenient, and gives buyers more payment options - and the rollout will be gradual. It marks a significant change in an almost two-decade partnership with PayPal, which split from eBay in 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Bloomberg, written by Timothy Massad: On Sept. 16, 2008, the day after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary Fund "broke the buck": Its net asset value fell below $1 per share. The fund -- often called the first money-market fund -- held $785 million of Lehman commercial paper that was suddenly worthless. Although the paper represented only 1.2% of the fund's total assets of $64.8 billion, demands for withdrawals escalated, and the fund lost two-thirds of its assets within 24 hours. This triggered a general run on money-market funds that stopped only when the U.S. Treasury issued an extraordinary guarantee of essentially all money-market fund liabilities. The episode underscored how important that $1 net asset value is to investors. Certain cryptocurrencies known as stablecoins are today's economic equivalent of money-market funds, and in some cases their practices should have us worried that they could break the buck, creating significant damage in the broader crypto market. One such stablecoin is Tether. With a market capitalization close to $60 billion, it is almost as big as the Reserve Fund was in 2008. Each Tether token is pegged to be equivalent to $1. But, as with the Reserve Primary Fund, the true value of those tokens depends on the market value of Tether's reserves -- the portfolio of investments made with the fiat currency it receives. Tether recently disclosed that as of March 31, only 8% of its assets were in cash, Treasury bills and "reverse repo notes." Almost 50% was in commercial paper, but no detail was provided about its quality. "Fiduciary deposits" represented 18%. Even more troubling: 10% of total assets were in "corporate bonds, funds & precious metals," almost 13% were in "secured loans (none to affiliated entities)," and the remainder in "other," which includes digital tokens. Tether separately provided a report from the accounting firm Moore Cayman stating that Tether's assets exceed "the amount required to redeem" outstanding tokens. But that report provided no description of assets. It appeared to be based solely on management's accounting, noting that Tether's policy is to use "historic cost," and that "the realizable value of these assets ... could be materially different." These facts should put holders of Tether -- and other stablecoins -- on notice that they may have trouble getting back $1 for each token. "If some of Tether's investments were to become worthless or decline in value, it would suffer the equivalent fate of breaking the buck," says Massad. "And if, for any reason, a wave of Tether holders suddenly tried to convert their tokens to cash, we do not know whether Tether could liquidate sufficient investments quickly to satisfy the demand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major meat supplier JBS USA was the latest victim of an organized cybersecurity attack, with servers in North American and Australian affected, the company said Sunday. From a report: Why it matters: JBS USA is the largest producer of beef in the country, The Hill notes, and also is a major supplier of poultry and pork. The disclosure of the attack comes as cyber threats have picked up over the last year. Last month, Colonial Pipeline was taken offline by its operator because of a cyberattack. In March, a cyber-espionage unit backed by the Chinese government resulted in 30,000 U.S. victims, including many small businesses and local governments. Earlier this year, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia was responsible for the major SolarWinds attack. Nine federal agencies and more than 100 private sector groups were compromised in the attack, per the Hill.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States must pass new legislation to limit how its national security agencies access Europeans' data if Washington and Brussels are to hammer out a new deal on transferring people's digital information across the Atlantic, according to European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova. From a report: Speaking at POLITICO's AI summit on Monday, the Czech politician said the U.S. needed to create legally binding laws to provide European Union citizens' the ability to challenge bulk data collection by federal authorities in U.S. courts. The goal, she said, would be "to have legally binding rules, or rule, on the U.S. side guaranteeing this. It's of course the best and the strongest way to do that," said Jourova when asked if the Commission would accept a presidential executive order or would require new U.S. legislation to provide EU citizens with the power to sue over how U.S. national security agencies collected and used their data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Belarus has temporarily banned most of its citizens from leaving, including many foreign residency permit holders. From a report:There are some exceptions, such as for Belarusian civil servants on official trips and state transport staff. The State Border Committee's tightening of the rules follows international outrage over Belarus's recent diversion of a Ryanair flight and arrest of a top dissident and his girlfriend on board. Many dissidents have left Belarus since a disputed election last year. In its statement on the Telegram messaging service, the border committee says it has received "many requests to leave Belarus on the strength of residence permits [issued] by foreign countries." Only those with permanent residence in foreign countries -- not temporary -- are allowed to leave Belarus now, it says. The border committee blamed the measures on the coronavirus pandemic.President Alexander Lukashenko's harsh crackdown on opponents since his disputed 9 August election victory has sent many into exile or to jail. His main rival, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who insists that she won, moved to neighbouring Lithuania with her team. Poland also hosts many Belarusians. Her foreign affairs adviser, Valery Kovalevsky, posted an angry tweet, saying President Lukashenko had "severely limited the right of Belarusians to travel, asserting that certain grounds (residency abroad) aren't sufficient to leave Belarus."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instacart has an audacious plan to replace its army of gig shoppers with robots -- part of a long-term strategy to cut costs and put its relationship with supermarket chains on a sustainable footing. From a report: The plan, detailed in documents reviewed by Bloomberg, involves building automated fulfillment centers around the U.S., where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup while humans gather produce and deli products. Some facilities would be attached to existing grocery stores while larger standalone centers would process orders for several locations, according to the documents, which were dated July and December. Despite working on the strategy for more than a year, however, the company has yet to sign up a single supermarket chain. Instacart had planned to begin testing the fulfillment centers later this year, the documents show. But the company has fallen behind schedule, according to people familiar with the situation. And though the documents mention asking several automation providers to build the technology, Instacart hasn't settled on any, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. In February, the Financial Times reported on elements of the strategy and said Instacart in early 2020 sent out requests for proposals to five robotics companies. An Instacart spokeswoman said the company was busy buttressing its operations during the pandemic, when it signed up 300,000 new gig workers in a matter of weeks, bringing the current total to more than 500,000. But the delays in getting the automation strategy off the ground could potentially undermine plans to go public this year. Investors know robots will play a critical role in modernizing the $1.4 trillion U.S. grocery industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last fall, with the Medici Chapel in Florence operating on reduced hours because of Covid-19, scientists and restorers completed a secret experiment: They unleashed grime-eating bacteria on the artist's masterpiece marbles. From a report: As early as 1595, descriptions of stains and discoloration began to appear in accounts of a sarcophagus in the graceful chapel Michelangelo created as the final resting place of the Medicis. In the ensuing centuries, plasters used to incessantly copy the masterpieces he sculpted atop the tombs left discoloring residues. His ornate white walls dimmed. Nearly a decade of restorations removed most of the blemishes, but the grime on the tomb and other stubborn stains required special, and clandestine, attention. In the months leading up to Italy's Covid-19 epidemic and then in some of the darkest days of its second wave as the virus raged outside, restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord. "It was top secret," said Daniela Manna, one of the art restorers. On a recent morning, she reclined -- like Michelangelo's allegorical sculptures of Dusk and Dawn above her -- and reached into the shadowy nook between the chapel wall and the sarcophagus to point at a dirty black square, a remnant showing just how filthy the marble had become. She attributed the mess to one Medici in particular, Alessandro Medici, a ruler of Florence, whose assassinated corpse had apparently been buried in the tomb without being properly eviscerated. Over the centuries, he seeped into Michelangelo's marble, the chapel's experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations, and, more recently, providing a feast for the chapel's preferred cleaning product, a bacterium called Serratia ficaria SH7. "SH7 ate Alessandro," Monica Bietti, former director of the Medici Chapels Museum, said as she stood in front of the now gleaming tomb, surrounded by Michelangelos, dead Medicis, tourists and an all-woman team of scientists, restorers and historians. Her team used bacteria that fed on glue, oil and apparently Alessandro's phosphates as a bioweapon against centuries of stains.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla's Firefox 89 releases to the general public today complete with the new Proton interface which simplifies the browser's menus and alters the tabs bar beyond anything we've seen from previous Firefox releases or other web browsers. From a report: This update also improves macOS integration and includes further privacy enhancements. The first thing that people will notice in this update is the Proton interface, the browser chrome and toolbar have been simplified so that redundant and less frequently used features have been removed, menus have been altered so that the most used features are prominent and visual noise has been reduced. Proton also updates prompts so they have a cleaner appearance and unnecessary alerts and messages have been removed. The attached tabs have also been supplanted by floating tabs; Mozilla says the rounded design of the active tab "signals the ability to easily move the tab as needed." While almost everyone will support cleaner menus, the new tabs are drawing the ire of some who are not pleased with the radical departure from the traditional look and feel of tabs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Dismissed by critics and devoured by fans, "Transformers: Age of Extinction" was the top box office film in 2014, bringing in $1.1 billion, with more than three-quarters of those dollars coming from overseas. ViacomCBS's Paramount Pictures, which distributed the computer animated action-fest, saved much of that money by licensing the international rights through a complex strategy designed to avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to a study published on Tuesday by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, a nonprofit group funded in part by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is common practice for multinational corporations to take advantage of tax shelters. The report offers a rare look at how one company has pulled it off. ViacomCBS, a media giant that came into being after the 2019 merger of the sibling companies, has used the same strategy for all its entertainment properties, according to the report. Since 2002, ViacomCBS and its predecessor companies Viacom and CBS together avoided paying $3.96 billion in U.S. corporate income tax through a system that involved subsidiaries in Barbados, the Bahamas, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain, according to the report. Much of the $30 billion in non-U.S. royalty revenue brought in by the company's film and TV franchises, such as "SpongeBob," "Star Trek" and "Mission: Impossible," has not been subject to corporate taxes, the study determined.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia officially announced the long-awaited GeForce RTX 3080 Ti during its Computex keynote late Monday night, and this $1,200 graphics card looks like an utter beast. The $600 GeForce RTX 3070 Ti also made its debut with faster GDDR6X memory. From a report: All eyes are on the RTX 3080 Ti, though. Nvidia dubbed it GeForce's "new gaming flagship" as the $1,500 RTX 3090 is built for work and play alike, but the new GPU is a 3090 in all but name (and memory capacity). While Nvidia didn't go into deep technical details during the keynote, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's specifications page shows it packing a whopping 10,240 CUDA cores -- just a couple hundred less than the 3090's 10,496 count, but massively more than the 8,704 found in the vanilla 3080. Expect this card to chew through games on par with the best, especially in games that support real-time ray tracing and Nvidia's amazing DLSS feature. The memory system can handle the ride, as it's built using the RTX 3090's upgraded bones. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti comes with a comfortable 12GB of blazing-fast GDDR6X memory over a wide 384-bit bus, which is half the ludicrous 24GB capacity found in the 3090, but more than enough to handle any gaming workload you through at it. That's not true with the vanilla RTX 3080, which comes with 10GB of GDDR6X over a smaller bus, as rare titles (like Doom Eternal) can already use more than 10GB of memory when you're playing at 4K resolution with the eye candy cranked to the max. The extra two gigs make the RTX 3080 Ti feel much more future-proof.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don't allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action. Now, Amazon is bucking that trend. From a report: With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company's Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission. The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs' lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies. Amazon's decision to drop its arbitration requirement is the starkest example yet of how companies are responding to plaintiffs' lawyers pushing the arbitration system to its limits. Arbitration agreements are buried in the contracts consumers sign to do everything from buying a cellphone to using a ride-hailing app. Many employers also require arbitration for adjudicating issues like pay disputes or discrimination claims. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld and strengthened the rights of companies to mandate arbitration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years after announcing plans to bring AMD graphics to Samsung Exynos mobile chips, it looks like the first of those chips could be ready to launch soon. From a report: During a Computex keynote, AMD's Lisa Su said that Samsung's "next flagship" mobile system-on-a-chip would feature custom graphics from AMD featuring the company's RDNA 2 graphics architecture. What does that means for mobile devices powered by the chip? The kind of graphics horsepower that had usually been associated with discrete GPUs. Su says that the upcoming Exynos chip will support features including ray tracking and variable rate shading. While that wouldn't make it the first ARM-based chip with those features (Apple's M1 processor also supports ray tracing), it could still be enough to help give Samsung an edge over rival Qualcomm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: Mountain rescuers have questioned the accuracy of using a location app, citing dozens of examples where the wrong address was given to their teams. What3Words (W3W) divides the world into three-by-three metre squares, each with a three-word address. It is free and used by 85% of UK emergency services. Reasons for the errors were not given, but were likely to be things such as mispronunciation or spelling errors. W3W said human error was "a possibility with any type of tool." The mapping system was created by an algorithm which assigned three words to each square in the world. Mark Lewis, the head of ICT at Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW), said that the use of the W3W app had been "testing" for rescue teams. He gave the BBC a database from the last 12 months which listed 45 locations across England and Wales that rescuers received from lost or injured walkers and climbers, which turned out to be incorrect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A UN report says that a drone attacked (and possibly killed) soldiers all on its own. CNET: It's thought to be the first recorded case of an autonomous drone attack. The incident occurred in March 2020 in Libya, a country that was in the midst of a civil war. Turkey, a key combatant in the war, deployed the STM Kargu-2 drone, according to the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya report. The drone, which the report refers to as a "lethal autonomous weapon," then found and attacked Libya's Haftar Armed Forces. Logistics convoys and retreating forces were "hunted down and remotely engaged by lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2," the report reads. "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget and find' capability."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coronavirus variants with clunky, alphanumeric names have now been assigned the letters of the Greek alphabet to simplify discussion and pronunciation while avoiding stigma. From a report: The World Health Organization revealed the new names on Monday amid criticism that those given by scientists to strains such as the South African variant -- which goes by multiple names including B.1.351, 501Y.V2 and 20H/501Y.V2 -- were too complicated. Since the pandemic began, the names people have used to describe the virus have provoked controversy. Former U.S. President Donald Trump called the new coronavirus "the China virus" and other monikers, raising concern he was using the names as a political weapon to shift blame to a rival nation. The WHO, which has urged people not to use language to advance COVID-19 profiling of people or nationalities, has also said people should avoid using country names in association with emerging variants. The four coronavirus variants considered of concern by the U.N. agency and known generally by the public as the UK, South Africa, Brazil and India variants have now been assigned the Greek letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, respectively, according to the order of their detection. Other variants of interest continue down the alphabet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.