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theodp writes: Video of Microsoft's Annual Shareholder Meeting in Dec. 2019, at which the company's Board of Directors dismissed the idea that employee Board representation was necessary to combat issues -- including sexual harassment -- takes on new significance in light of the company's response to a recent WSJ report that Bill Gates left the Microsoft Board in March 2020 amid a probe launched in late 2019 into a prior relationship with a staffer that was deemed inappropriate. "Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000," a Microsoft spokesman said in response to the WSJ story. "A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm to conduct a thorough investigation." At the 2019 Annual Meeting, Microsoft Board Chair John Thompson kicked things off by thanking shareholders for their trust before introducing the nominees for the board of directors who were in attendance, starting with "Bill Gates, our cofounder." Attention then turned to "a shareholder proposal requesting a report on Employee Representation on the Board of Directors," which shareholder advocate Mari Schwartzer argued was called for in light of "alleged gender discrimination and sexual harassment within our company." Unswayed by that argument, Microsoft Corporate Secretary Dev Stahlkopf responded that the Board had decided to nix the proposal as unnecessary, explaining that "the Board is already deeply engaged on providing oversight of workplace culture," which she noted included "receiving direct feedback from employees through anonymous polls." Schwartzer made the same proposal -- which again fell on deaf Board ears -- the next year at Microsoft's Dec. 2020 Annual Meeting. Gates was no longer on the Board at that time -- he resigned in Mar. 2020 just three months after his re-election for what Microsoft billed to the SEC as a chance to devote himself more fully to philanthropy, repeating the same reasons Gates provided in a self-published LinkedIn post (no connection was made between his departure and the Board's investigation, and a recent statement from a Gates spokesperson insisted, "Bill's decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter"). However, the Microsoft Board of Directors made sure shareholders were aware of Bill's continuing influence at Microsoft in a letter included in Microsoft's 2020 SEC proxy filing. The Board wrote, "This year, Co-Founder and Technology Advisor Bill Gates stepped down from the Company's Board of Directors to dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities. He continues to serve as Technology Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders in the Company. The Board has benefited from Bill's leadership and vision in innumerable ways over the years, and we are grateful for his contributions and insights." In an interview on CNBC last Friday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was pressed to address the issue of Bill Gates' acknowledged 2000 affair with a Microsoft employee. "The power dynamic in the workplace is not something that can be abused in any form," Nadella replied, "and the most important thing is for us to make sure that everybody is comfortable in being able to raise any issues they see, and for us to be able to fully investigate it." So, with all of the revelations and bad press, will Microsoft's Board reject the idea of Employee Board Representation for a third year straight while keeping mum on Gates later this year at the 2021 Annual Shareholders Meeting?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

phalse phace shares a report from the BBC: A suspected Bitcoin "mining" operation illegally stealing electricity has been found by police who were searching for a cannabis farm. Officers had been tipped off about the site on the Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell, and raided it on May 18, West Midlands Police said. Instead of cannabis plants they found a bank of about 100 computer units. The force said the cryptocurrency "mine" had effectively stolen thousands of pounds of electricity. Inquiries with network operator Western Power Distribution found an illegal connection to the electricity supply. Detectives said they were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit throughout the day and a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building. Sgt Jennifer Griffin said, given the signs, they had expected to find a cannabis farm. "It had all the hallmarks of a cannabis cultivation set-up and I believe it is only the second such crypto mine we have encountered in the West Midlands," she said. The computer equipment has been seized but no arrests have been made, the force said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI shared plans to bring GPT-3, one of the world's most advanced models for generating text, to programming based on natural language descriptions. This is the first commercial application of GPT-3 undertaken since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and gained exclusive licensing rights to GPT-3. "If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPT-3 will generate a list of the most relevant formulas for you to choose from," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a keynote address at the company's Build developer conference. "The code writes itself." Microsoft VP Charles Lamanna told WIRED the sophistication offered by GPT-3 can help people tackle complex challenges and empower people with little coding experience. GPT-3 will translate natural language into PowerFx, a fairly simple programming language similar to Excel commands that Microsoft introduced in March. Microsoft's new feature is based on a neural network architecture known as Transformer, used by big tech companies including Baidu, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce to create large language models using text training data scraped from the web. These language models continually grow larger. The largest version of Google's BERT, a language model released in 2018, had 340 million parameters, a building block of neural networks. GPT-3, which was released one year ago, has 175 billion parameters. Such efforts have a long way to go, however. In one recent test, the best model succeeded only 14 percent of the time on introductory programming challenges compiled by a group of AI researchers. Still, researchers who conducted that study conclude that tests prove that "machine learning models are beginning to learn how to code."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a terse court filing on Friday, the Biden administration indicated that it would continue to defend a controversial Trump administration rule that requires millions of visa applicants each year to register their social media handles with the U.S. government. From a report: The registration requirement, which stems from the Muslim ban, is the subject of an ongoing First Amendment challenge filed by the Knight Institute, the Brennan Center, and the law firm Simpson Thacher on behalf of two documentary film organizations, Doc Society and the International Documentary Association.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big games beget big leaks, especially this time of year when the gaming industry's porous promotional machinery is revving up for the E3 trade show. From a report: It happened again Thursday when eight minutes of Ubisoft's upcoming "Far Cry 6" leaked online, a day before it was supposed to appear. It was deleted in minutes, but thousands still saw it. Big video game leaks are nearly impossible to stop. Companies have tried many things to tighten the pipes, including blacklisting press outlets and suing leakers. But the more prominent the upcoming game, the more people involved, and the higher the public curiosity, the more likely the leak. "There's just too many opportunities for a mid level employee to have their laptop open on a plane in games," former Ubisoft creative director Alex Hutchinson told Axios, citing the notorious way the name of a previously-secretive mega-game leaked in 2013. (Sometimes those open laptops are on a subway.) The "Far Cry 6" incident appears to involve confusion over a coverage embargo date. The footage was posted to YouTube by Polish YouTuber Patryk "Rojson" Rojewski, who told Axios that he had been provided the clips by Ubisoft under an agreement that said they could run on May 27. Rojewski said he had not been told that Ubisoft changed the date. "I approach my work professionally," he said. Several minutes of video of another upcoming Ubisoft game, "The Division: Heartland," leaked two weeks ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch has received a "batch" of new takedown notices from music publishers over copyrighted songs in recorded streams (known as VODs), the company said in an email to streamers today. From a report: The notice may be worrying for some streamers who were affected by the waves of takedowns that hit last year, because if a user gets three copyright strikes on their channel, they will be permanently banned from the platform, according to Twitch's policies. With this advance warning, it seems Twitch is trying to get ahead of a sudden flurry of takedowns and give streamers some time to remove potentially offending VODs. "We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers," Twitch said in an email Friday, which was sent to a Verge staffer. "All of the claims are for VODs, and the vast majority target streamers listening to background music while playing video games or IRL streaming." [...] In Friday's email, Twitch noted that the only way to avoid DMCA (or Digital Millennium Copyright Act) strikes is to not stream copyrighted material in the first place, and said that if a streamer does have unauthorized content in their VODs or clips, "we strongly recommend that you permanently delete anything that contains that material."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google, Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn and Tiger Global-backed Indian startups ShareChat and Koo have either fully or partially complied with the South Asian nation's new IT rules, TechCrunch reported Friday, citing two people familiar with the matter and a government note. From a report: India's new IT rules, unveiled in February this year, require firms to appoint and share contact details of representatives tasked with compliance, nodal point of reference and grievance redressals to address on-ground concerns. The aforementioned firms have complied with this requirement, the government note and a person familiar with the matter said. The firms were required to comply with the new IT rules by this week. Twitter has yet to comply with the rules. "Twitter sent a communication late last night, sharing details of a lawyer working in a law firm in India as their Nodal Contact Person and Grievance Officer," a note prepared by New Delhi said, adding that the rules require the aforementioned officials to be direct employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Canadian astronaut, who commanded the International Space Station and recorded the famous microgravity rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity, on Sunday spit some fire at true believers who see a link between UFOs or UAPs (for "unidentified aerial phenomena" in the newish military parlance) and some sort of alien intelligence. From a report: "Obviously, I've seen countless things in the sky that I don't understand," Chris Hadfield, a former pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, said during a CBC Radio call-in show. "But to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic." [...] Hadfield added that he does think it's likely there's life somewhere else in the universe. "But definitively up to this point, we have found no evidence of life anywhere except Earth," he said, "and we're looking."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvey Schlossberg, a former New York City traffic cop with a doctorate in psychology who choreographed what became a model law enforcement strategy for safely ending standoffs with hostage takers, died on May 21 in Brooklyn. He was 85. From a report: His death, at a hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest, said his wife, Dr. Antoinette Collarini Schlossberg. The need for a standard protocol for hostage situations became more pressing in 1971 after the botched rescue of guards during the Attica prison riots in upstate New York. The next year, captives were taken in a Brooklyn bank robbery (the inspiration behind the 1975 Al Pacino film "Dog Day Afternoon") and Israeli athletes were seized and massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics. In a pioneering training film he made for the New York Police Department in 1973, Harvey Schlossberg said that in a hostage situation, police officers "all believed, 'If you gave me the right gun with the right bullet, I can put everybody out.'" "But I don't think it works that easy," he said. "That's a Hollywood thing." Instead, he counseled patience and "crisis intervention therapy." Delaying tactics, he said, allowed more time for the criminals to make mistakes and, just as crucially, to develop a rapport with their victims, leaving the hostage-takers less likely to harm them. "Harvey faced an uphill battle getting cops to 'negotiate with killers,' because for 130 years the N.Y.P.D.'s official M.O. in barricade situations had been to issue ultimatums, throw in smoke and tear gas, and, if necessary storm the building," Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, said in an email. "Many lives were lost. Harvey changed that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, security firm FireEye detected a Chinese hacking campaign that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN appliances to breach defense contractors and government organizations in the US and across Europe. The hacking campaign allowed the threat actors -- two groups which FireEye tracks as UNC2630 and UNC2717 -- to install web shells on Pulse Secure devices, which the attackers used to pivot to internal networks from where they stole internal network credentials, email communications, and sensitive documents. But in a follow-up report published today, FireEye said it found something strange -- namely that at least one of the groups involved in the attacks began removing its malware from infected networks three days before its researchers exposed the attacks. "Between April 17th and 20th, 2021, Mandiant incident responders observed UNC2630 access dozens of compromised devices and remove webshells like ATRIUM and SLIGHTPULSE," researchers said on Thursday. The threat actor's actions are highly suspicious and raise questions if they knew of FireEye's probing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google is nearing a settlement of an antitrust case in France alleging the company has abused its power in online advertising, and is likely to pay a fine and make operational changes, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The French case is one of the most advanced in the world looking at Google's dominance as a provider of tools for buying and selling ads across the web. As part of the case, France's Competition Authority alleged that the company's advertising server -- historically known as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and used by most large online publishers to sell ad space -- gave Google's online ad auction house, AdX, an advantage against other auction operators, the people said. The authority also alleged other forms of self-preferencing between Google's advertising technology tools, they added. To settle the French charges, Google has offered to improve the interoperability of AdX with advertising servers run by other companies, as well as to remove some other obstacles faced by competitors, some of the people said. The settlement still must be approved by the authority's board, which could reject the deal, the people said. If approved, the settlement could be announced in coming weeks, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The global shortage of semiconductor chips could last three to six months, Logitech Chief Executive Bracken Darrell told Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft, with some industries facing shortages of up to a year. From a report: "Like others we have felt the shortages, but we have been able to cushion them well," Darrell said in an article published on Friday. "It takes time to ramp up production but in the meantime, prices have also adjusted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has shipped a new JavaScript compiler for its V8 JavaScript engine in Chrome called Sparkplug that promises a much faster web experience -- and it does it by 'cheating', according to the engineers on the project. From a report: Sparkplug is part of Chrome 91, which Google released on Tuesday with security updates but also some key changes under the hood that improve its powerful JavaScript engine, V8. Microsoft relies on V8 these days too after ditching its Chakra JavaScript engine from legacy Edge and moving to Chromium for the new Edge browser and switching to V8. Google says Chrome 91 has 23% faster performance thanks to Sparkplug's integration into V8's JavaScript pipeline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The hackers behind one of the worst data breaches ever to hit the US government have launched a new global cyberattack on more than 150 government agencies, think tanks and other organizations, according to Microsoft. ytene shares a report: The group, which Microsoft calls "Nobelium," targeted 3,000 email accounts at various organizations this week -- most of which were in the United States, the company said in a blog post Thursday. It believes the hackers are part of the same Russian group behind last year's devastating attack on SolarWinds -- a software vendor -- that targeted at least nine US federal agencies and 100 companies. Cybersecurity has been a major focus for the US government following the revelations that hackers had put malicious code into a tool published by SolarWinds. A ransomware attack that shut down one of America's most important pieces of energy infrastructure -- the Colonial Pipeline -- earlier this month has only heightened the sense of alarm. That attack was carried out by a criminal group originating in Russia, according to the FBI. Microsoft said that at least a quarter of the targets of this week's attacks were involved in international development, humanitarian, and human rights work, across at least 24 countries. It said Nobelium launched the attack by gaining access to a Constant Contact email marketing account used by the US Agency for International Development.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australian security researcher Troy Hunt announced today that he granted the US Federal Bureau of Investigation a direct line to upload new content into Have I Been Pwned, a website that indexes data from security breaches. From a report: The HIBP creator said that when the FBI discovers password collections during their investigations, they will upload the data into a section of the site called Pwned Passwords. The FBI will provide passwords as SHA-1 and NTLM hashes and not in plain text. No user personal details will be provided, but only the password hashes. The passwords will be added to Pwned Passwords, a collection of more than 613 million leaked passwords. While the main HIBP website allows users to search if their emails, names, or usernames have been leaked online in past security breaches, Pwned Passwords is a smaller and more specialized component of the HIBP site that tells users if a password string has ever been leaked online, without attaching the password to any user details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [According to an article yesterday by Stop the Gap] Charter charges $20 more per month for slower speeds on the street where it faces no serious competition. When customers in two areas purchase the same speeds, the customer on the street without competition could have to pay $40 more per month and would have their promotional rates expire after only one year instead of two. [...] "Charter's offers are address-sensitive," Stop the Cap founder Phillip Dampier wrote. "The cable company knows its competition and almost exactly where those competitors offer service. That is why the company asks for your service address before it quotes you pricing." Dampier found that Charter offers 200Mbps service for $50 a month "[i]n neighborhoods where Spectrum enjoys a broadband monopoly." Charter charges $70 for 400Mbps service in those same competition-free neighborhoods. But "[j]ust one street away, where Greenlight offers customers the option of gigabit speed over a fiber-to-the-home network, Spectrum's promotional prices are quite different," Dampier wrote. On the competitive street, Charter charges only $30 a month for the same 400Mbps service that costs $70 nearby. As previously noted, customers on the noncompetitive street have to pay $50 for 200Mbps. "Spectrum does not even bother offering new customers its entry-level 200Mbps plan in areas where it has significant fiber competition," Dampier noted, referring to the promotional offers that pop up when you type in an address. "For $20 less per month, you get double that speed." For gigabit-download service, Charter charges $90 a month on the competitive street versus $110 on the noncompetitive street. These are the base prices without fees and taxes. Charter also offers to lock in the monthly rate for two years in the competitive area, compared to just one year in the noncompetitive area. And that's not all. Charter "charges a hefty $199.99 compulsory installation fee for gigabit service in noncompetitive neighborhoods. Where fiber competition exists, sometimes just a street away, that installation fee plummets to just $49.99," Dampier wrote. He added: "Note similar pricing variability exists in Spectrum service areas around the country, with the most aggressively priced offers reserved for addresses also served by a fiber-to-the-home provider or multiple competitors (e.g., cable company, phone company, Google Fiber or other [competitor]). Current customers typically have to cancel existing service and sign up as a new customer to get these prices." In a statement to Ars, Charter said that "Spectrum Internet retail prices, speeds, and features are consistent in each market -- regardless of the competitive environment." But, as Ars notes, "retail prices" are the standard rates customers pay after promotional rates expire. Stop the Cap showed that Charter's promotional rates vary between competitive and noncompetitive areas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese-speaking hackers are masquerading as the United Nations in ongoing cyber-attacks against Uyghurs, according to the cybersecurity firms Check Point and Kaspersky. MIT Technology Review reports: Researchers identified an attack in which hackers posing as the UN Human Rights Council send a document detailing human rights violations to Uyghur individuals. It is in fact a malicious Microsoft Word file that, once downloaded, fetches malware: the likely goal, say the two companies, is to trick high-profile Uyghurs inside China and Pakistan into opening a back door to their computers. "We believe that these cyber-attacks are motivated by espionage, with the endgame of the operation being the installation of a back door into the computers of high-profile targets in the Uyghur community," said Lotem Finkelstein, head of threat intelligence at Check Point, in a statement. "The attacks are designed to fingerprint infected devices, including all of [their] running programs. From what we can tell, these attacks are ongoing, and new infrastructure is being created for what look like future attacks." In addition to pretending to be from the United Nations, the hackers also built a fake and malicious website for a human rights organization called the "Turkic Culture and Heritage Foundation," according to the report. The group's fake website offers grants -- but in fact, anybody who attempts to apply for a grant is prompted to download a false "security scanner" that is in fact a back door into the target's computer, the researchers explained. "The attackers behind these cyber-attacks send malicious documents under the guise of the United Nations and fake human rights foundations to their targets, tricking them into installing a backdoor to the Microsoft Windows software running on their computers," the researchers wrote. This allows the attackers to collect basic information they seek from the victim's computer, as well as running more malware on the machine with the potential to do more damage. The researchers say they haven't yet seen all the capabilities of this malware. The researchers weren't able to determine an exact known hacking group, but the code in these attacks "was found to be identical to code found on multiple Chinese-language hacking forums and may have been copied directly from there," the report notes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter rundgong shares a report from the BBC: An international team of researchers has created the largest and most detailed map of the distribution of so-called dark matter in the Universe. The results are a surprise because they show that it is slightly smoother and more spread out than the current best theories predict. The observation appears to stray from Einstein's theory of general relativity -- posing a conundrum for researchers. The results have been published by the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration. Using the Victor M Blanco telescope in Chile, the team behind the new work analyzed 100 million galaxies. The map shows how dark matter sprawls across the Universe. The black areas are vast areas of nothingness, called voids, where the laws of physics might be different. The bright areas are where dark matter is concentrated. They are called "halos" because right in the centre is where our reality exists. In their midst are galaxies like our own Milky Way, shining brightly like tiny gems on a vast cosmic web. According to Dr Jeffrey, who is also part of a department at University College London, the map, clearly shows that galaxies are part of a larger invisible structure. "No one in the history of humanity has been able to look out into space and see where dark matter is to such an extent. Astronomers have been able to build pictures of small patches, but we have unveiled vast new swathes which show much more of its structure. For the first time we can see the Universe in a different way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The wearables category of consumer devices -- which includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality glasses -- shipped more than 100 million units in the first quarter for the first time, according to research firm IDC. Q2 2021 saw a 34.4 percent increase in sales over the same quarter in 2020. To be clear: wearables have sold that many (and more) units in a quarter before, but never in the first quarter, which tends to be a slow period following a spree of holiday-related buying in Q4. According to IDC's data, Apple leads the market by a significant margin, presumably thanks to the Apple Watch. In Q1 2021, Apple had a market share of 28.8 percent. Samsung sat in a distant second at 11.3 percent, followed by Xiaomi at 9.7 percent and Huawei at 8.2. From there, it's a steep drop to the smaller players -- like BoAt, which has a market share of just 2.9 percent. However, analysts say upstarts or smaller companies like BoAt are driving the significant year-over-year growth for wearables. IDC's report says that the fastest growth comes from form factors besides smartwatches, such as digitally connected rings, audio glasses, and wearable patches. This grab-bag subcategory within wearables, which the IDC simply classifies as "other," actually grew 55 percent year-over-year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When Chris Mason's daughter was a toddler, he watched, intrigued, as she touched surfaces on the New York City subway. Then, one day, she licked a pole. "There was a clear microbial exchange," says Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine. "I desperately wanted to know what had happened." So he started swabbing the subway, sampling the microbial world that coexists with people in our transit systems. After his 2015 study revealed a wealth of previously unknown species in New York City, other researchers contacted him to contribute. Now, Mason and dozens of collaborators have released their study of subways, buses, elevated trains, and trams in 60 cities worldwide, from Baltimore to Bogota, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. They identified thousands of new viruses and bacteria, and found that each city has a unique microbial "fingerprint." They found that about 45% didn't match any known species: Nearly 11,000 viruses and 1,302 bacteria were new to science. The researchers also found a set of 31 species present in 97% of the samples; these formed what they called a "core" urban microbiome. A further 1145 species were present in more than 70% of samples. Samples taken from surfaces that people touch -- like railings -- were more likely to have bacteria associated with human skin, compared with surfaces like windows. Other common species in the mix were bacteria often found in soil, water, air, and dust. But the researchers also found species that were less widespread. Those gave each city a unique microbiomeâ"and helped the researchers predict, with 88% accuracy, which city random samples came from, they report today in Cell. The study's main value isn't in its findings (which are mapped here) so much as its open data, available at metagraph.ethz.ch, says Noah Fierer, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved with the research. That will give other researchers the chance to delve into new questions. "Different cities have different microbial communities," Fierer says. "That's not super surprising. The question for me is, why?" Mason sees an opportunity for "awe and excitement about mass transit systems as a source of unexplored and phenomenal biodiversity." Newly discovered species have potential for drug research, he says, and wide-scale mapping and monitoring of urban microbiomes would be a boon for public health, helping researchers spot emerging pathogens early.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June. Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels -- a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company. The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it's not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half. One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It's a tight fit. There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of work, Epic Games is launching early access for game developers for Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company's tools for making games with highly realistic 3D animations. VentureBeat reports: Unreal Engine 5, which will officially ship in 2022, is the company's crowning technical achievement. The early access build will let game developers start testing features and prototyping their upcoming games. Epic isn't saying how long this took or how many employees are working on it, but it's a safe bet that a large chunk of those devs are involved in Unreal Engine 5. It's been seven years since the last engine shipped. Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said it will be effortless for game developers to use groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, which provide a generational leap in visual fidelity. The new World Partition system enables the creation of expansive worlds with scalable content. Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences." You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X here on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Telegraph: Scientists in Germany believe they have discovered why the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccines cause potentially fatal blood clots in rare cases, and claim the issue can be fixed with a minor adjustment. The authors of a new study claim their findings show that it is not the key component of the vaccines that cause the clotting, but a separate vector virus that is used to deliver them to the body (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). Both the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs use a modified adenovirus, similar to the common cold virus, to deliver the spike protein of SarsCov2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The scientists claim the delivery mechanism means the spike protein is sent into the cell nucleus rather than the cellular fluid, where the virus usually generates proteins. In rare cases, they argue, parts of the spike protein can splice inside the nucleus, creating mutant versions which do not bind to the cell membrane where immunization takes place, but are secreted into the body, where they can cause blood clots. These claims are only one of a number of hypotheses currently being explored on why the jabs cause blood clots in some people. A rival German study led by Prof Andreas Greinacher of Greifswald University Hospital claimed the clots were being caused by EDTA, a chemical used as a preservative in the AstraZeneca vaccine. In a two-step process, the vaccine can cause an overreaction by the immune system in some people which causes too many platelets to form in the blood, Prof Greinacher argues. EDTA can cause the cells in blood vessels to become "leaky," causing platelets and proteins to flood through the body, triggering a massive immune reaction that can cause the blood clots. A third German study released in preprint this week by scientists at Ulm University Medical Centre claims to have found unusually high levels of proteins in the AstraZeneca vaccine which it is theorized could be behind the clots. "The often-observed strong clinical reaction one or two days after vaccination is likely associated with the detected protein impurities," the authors of the study wrote. The type of proteins involved "are known to affect innate and acquired immune responses and to intensify existing inflammatory reactions," Prof Stefan Kochanek, the study leader, said. "They have also been linked to autoimmune reactions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A coalition of internet accountability groups is warning the Biden administration against including liability protections for tech companies in future trade agreements, saying that could hamstring efforts to hold platforms responsible for user content. From a report: In a letter sent to President Joe Biden on Thursday, the organizations said including a legal shield in trade deals like the 2018 U.S.-Mexico-Canada accord "reflects a broad effort by the big tech platforms to use 'trade negotiations' to limit domestic policy options." The letter was signed by 16 public interest groups focused on issues such as civil rights, democracy and the market power of tech platforms, including Public Citizen, Color of Change and the Center for Digital Democracy. The coalition came together as the advocates observed how a ratified trade deal could bake in -- and export -- increasingly controversial legal protections for internet companies, said Morgan Harper, a policy director at the American Economic Liberties Project, which also signed the letter. The groups are "sounding the alarm about this tactic by Big Tech to undermine the inevitability of domestic regulation that's coming their way," Harper said. "We expect that this will be a priority for the Biden administration."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Colorado has become the first state to ban "legacy" admissions, a practice that gives preference to certain applicants based on their familial relationship to alumni of that institution. "The governor also signed a bill that removes a requirement that public colleges consider SAT or ACT scores for freshmen, though the new law still allows students to submit test scores if they wish," adds NPR. From the report: Both moves are aimed at making higher education access more equitable. According to the legislation, 67% of middle- to high-income students in Colorado enroll in bachelor's degree programs straight from high school, while 47% of low-income students do. There are also major differences when it comes to race, with white students far more likely to enroll in college. Legacy admissions have long been a target for reform. In a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed, 42% of private institutions and 6% of public institutions said they consider legacy status as a factor in admissions. Some of the nation's largest public universities do not consider legacy, including both the University of California and the California State University systems. However, private colleges in California have reported using legacy as a way to encourage philanthropic giving and donations. During the pandemic, many colleges backed off on using SAT and ACT scores in admissions. Research has shown -- and lawsuits have argued -- that the tests, long used to measure aptitude for college, are far more connected to family income and don't provide meaningful information about a student's ability to succeed in college. Wealthier families are also more likely to pay for test prep courses, or attend schools with curricula that focus on the exams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels. Now it's appealing it. From a report: Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages. Heavily disappointed by the decision, Cox later asked the court to set the jury verdict aside and decide the issue directly. In addition, the company argued that the "shockingly excessive" damages should be lowered. Both requests were denied by the court, which upheld the original damages award. Despite the setbacks, Cox isn't giving up. The company believes that the district court's ruling isn't just a disaster for Internet providers. If it stands, the verdict will have dramatic consequences for the general public as well. This week the ISP submitted its opening brief at the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, hoping to reverse the lower court's judgment. The filing begins by placing the lawsuit in a historical context. "The music industry is waging war on the internet," Cox's lawyers write. First, the music companies went after thousands of file-sharers and software companies such as Napster. When those tactics didn't deliver the desired result, Internet providers became a target.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Lemonade, the fast-growing, machine learning-powered insurance app, put out a real lemon of a Twitter thread on Monday with a proud declaration that its AI analyzes videos of customers when determining if their claims are fraudulent. The company has been trying to explain itself and its business model -- and fend off serious accusations of bias, discrimination, and general creepiness -- ever since. [...] Over a series of seven tweets, Lemonade claimed that it gathers more than 1,600 "data points" about its users -- "100X more data than traditional insurance carriers," the company claimed. The thread didn't say what those data points are or how and when they're collected, simply that they produce "nuanced profiles" and "remarkably predictive insights" which help Lemonade determine, in apparently granular detail, its customers' "level of risk." Lemonade then provided an example of how its AI "carefully analyzes" videos that it asks customers making claims to send in "for signs of fraud," including "non-verbal cues." Traditional insurers are unable to use video this way, Lemonade said, crediting its AI for helping it improve its loss ratios: that is, taking in more in premiums than it had to pay out in claims. Lemonade used to pay out a lot more than it took in, which the company said was "friggin terrible." Now, the thread said, it takes in more than it pays out. The Twitter thread made the rounds to a horrified and growing audience, drawing the requisite comparisons to the dystopian tech television series Black Mirror and prompting people to ask if their claims would be denied because of the color of their skin, or if Lemonade's claims bot, "AI Jim," decided that they looked like they were lying. What, many wondered, did Lemonade mean by "non-verbal cues?" Threats to cancel policies (and screenshot evidence from people who did cancel) mounted. By Wednesday, the company walked back its claims, deleting the thread and replacing it with a new Twitter thread and blog post. You know you've really messed up when your company's apology Twitter thread includes the word "phrenology." "The Twitter thread was poorly worded, and as you note, it alarmed people on Twitter and sparked a debate spreading falsehoods," a spokesperson for Lemonade told Recode. "Our users aren't treated differently based on their appearance, disability, or any other personal characteristic, and AI has not been and will not be used to auto-reject claims." The company also maintains that it doesn't profit from denying claims and that it takes a flat fee from customer premiums and uses the rest to pay claims. Anything left over goes to charity (the company says it donated $1.13 million in 2020). But this model assumes that the customer is paying more in premiums than what they're asking for in claims. So, what's really going on here? According to Lemonade, the claim videos customers have to send are merely to let them explain their claims in their own words, and the "non-verbal cues" are facial recognition technology used to make sure one person isn't making claims under multiple identities. Any potential fraud, the company says, is flagged for a human to review and make the decision to accept or deny the claim. AI Jim doesn't deny claims. The blog post also didn't address -- nor did the company answer Recode's questions about -- how Lemonade's AI and its many data points are used in other parts of the insurance process, like determining premiums or if someone is too risky to insure at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two tech industry organizations are suing Florida over its newly passed rules for social networks, claiming it violates private companies' constitutional rights. The Verge reports: SB 7072, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed earlier this week, restricts how large social apps and websites can moderate user-generated content. It makes banning any Florida political candidate or "journalistic enterprise" unlawful, lets users sue if they believe they were banned without sufficient reason, requires an option to "opt out" of sorting algorithms, and places companies that break the law on an "antitrust violator blacklist" that bars them from doing business with public entities in Florida. Notably, it includes an exception for companies that operate a theme park. NetChoice and the CCIA say SB 7072 conflicts with both constitutional protections and federal Section 230 rules. "As private businesses, Plaintiffs' members have the right to decide what content is appropriate for their sites and platforms," their complaint says. "The Act requires members to display and prioritize user-generated content that runs counter to their terms, policies, and business practices; content that will likely offend and repel their users and advertisers; and even content that is unlawful, dangerous to public health and national security, and grossly inappropriate for younger audiences." The lawsuit claims Florida lawmakers and DeSantis specifically tailored the law to punish services whose moderation policies they disagreed with, while adding the arbitrary theme park exception to pacify Disney, Comcast NBCUniversal, and a handful of other big companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived. From a report: Together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and who were later immunized will not need boosters. Vaccinated people who were never infected most likely will need the shots, however, as will a minority who were infected but did not produce a robust immune response. Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that retain a memory of the virus persist in the bone marrow and may churn out antibodies whenever needed, according to one of the studies, published on Monday in the journal Nature. The other study, posted online at BioRxiv, a site for biology research, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least 12 months after the initial infection. "The papers are consistent with the growing body of literature that suggests that immunity elicited by infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lived," said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. The studies may soothe fears that immunity to the virus is transient, as is the case with coronaviruses that cause common colds. But those viruses change significantly every few years, Dr. Hensley said. "The reason we get infected with common coronaviruses repetitively throughout life might have much more to do with variation of these viruses rather than immunity," he said. In fact, memory B cells produced in response to infection with SARS-CoV-2 and enhanced with vaccination are so potent that they thwart even variants of the virus, negating the need for boosters, according to Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York who led the study on memory maturation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science is once again casting doubt on the notion that we could live to be nearly as old as the biblical Methuselah or Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man. From a report: New research research [PDF] from Singapore-base biotech company Gero looks at how well the human body bounces back from disease, accidents or just about anything else that puts stress on its systems. This basic resilience declines as people age, with an 80-year-old requiring three times as long to recover from stresses as a 40-year-old on average. This should make sense if you've ever known an elderly person who has taken a nasty fall. Recovery from such a spill can be lif- threatening for a particularly frail person, whereas a similar fall might put a person half as old out of commission for just a short time and teenagers might simply dust themselves off and keep going. Extrapolate this decline further, and human body resilience is completely gone at some age between 120 and 150, according to new analysis performed by the researchers. In other words, at some point your body loses all ability to recover from pretty much any potential stressor. The researchers arrived at this conclusion by looking at health data for large groups from the US, the UK and Russia. They looked at blood cell counts as well as step counts recorded by wearables. As people experienced different stressors, fluctuations in blood cell and step counts showed that recovery time grew longer as individuals grew older. "Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration," Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero, said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Indonesian government has blocked access inside its borders to Raid Forums, a well-known cybercrime hub, in an attempt to limit the spread of a sensitive data leak. From a report: The ban, which the government wants internet service providers to implement, comes after a threat actor claimed in a Raid Forums post on May 12 to be in possession and selling the personal data of 279 million Indonesians. The threat actor, an individual known as Kotz, leaked a sample of one million citizens' details to prove their claims. The leaked data included citizen names, national ID numbers, tax registration information, mobile phone numbers, and for some citizens also came with headshots and salary-related information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australians were among those lucky enough to see it on Wednesday evening, a rare astronomical event marked by a dazzling array of sunset colors like red and burnt orange: a "super blood moon." From a report: From Brazil to Alaska, California to Indonesia, people with the right view of the celestial phenomenon marveled as their moon, usually a predictable, pale, Swiss-cheese-like round in the sky, was transformed into a fierce, red giant. As one Twitter user, words failing, put it: "Man I'm in love with this urghhh." The striking display was the result of two simultaneous phenomena: a supermoon (when the moon lines up closer than normal to our planet and appears to be bigger than usual), combined with a total lunar eclipse, or blood moon (when the moon sits directly in the Earth's shadow and is struck by light filtered through the Earth's atmosphere). "A little bit of sunlight skims the Earth's atmosphere," said Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist based at the Australian National University in Canberra, the country's capital. He said this creates the effect of "sunrise and sunset being projected onto the moon." Depending on your vantage point and the amount of dust, clouds and pollution in the atmosphere, Dr. Tucker added, the moon appears pink-orange or burned red or even a brown color. "A super poo moon doesn't really have the same ring," he said. Sky gazers in eastern Australia caught the eclipse beginning around 6:47 p.m. local time Wednesday, with it peaking by 9:18 p.m., while those in Los Angeles were to see the action beginning at 1:47 a.m. Pacific time. In Australia, some took to the skies on a special flight to see the supermoon. It left Sydney about 7:45 p.m. and was to return later that evening. Vanessa Moss, an astronomer with Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, and the guest expert on the flight, said this kind of phenomenon was exciting because it was accessible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that they've filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. From a report: The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company's method of documenting and collecting data -- including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites -- violates European privacy laws. New York-based Clearview claims to have built "the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images." PI, NYOB, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, and Homo Digitalis all claim that Clearview's data collection goes beyond what the average user would expect when using services like Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. "Extracting our unique facial features or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users," said PI legal officer Ioannis Kouvakas in a joint statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter called the visit by police to its Indian offices on Monday a form of intimidation in its first public comments on the matter. From a report: The social network reiterated its commitment to India as a vital market, but signaled its growing concern about the government's recent actions and potential threats to freedom of expression that may result. The company also joined other international businesses and organizations in criticizing new IT rules and regulations that it said "inhibit free, open public conversation." Twitter will continue its dialog with the Indian government for a collaborative approach, while also advocating for change to the regulations. The San Francisco-based company has disagreed with local government officials on a number of fronts, deeming some enforcement orders to be improper curbs on free speech. Most recently, Twitter marked several posts by accounts associated with India's ruling party as containing manipulated media -- they purported to show a strategy document from the opposition party whose authenticity has been disputed -- which prompted the police visit to its offices late Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto giant Coinbase on Thursday launched its own media operation. The company is calling it "Fact Check" -- and giving it a dedicated section on its blog. In a blog post, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said the firm, which recently went public, will use Fact Check to combat misinformation and mischaracterizations about Coinbase or crypto being shared in the world. "Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures. This doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest," wrote Armstrong, who in the post outlines in detail his thinking behind launching Fact Check. An excerpt from the blogpost: In the future, we will need to move beyond fact checking, and start creating more of our own original content to communicate with our audience, and tell the stories of crypto that are happening all over the world. Many of these stories are not being told by traditional media. Fact checking is still largely reactive, but we need to move to a more proactive stance on content creation to have a true media arm. Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles. Long term, the real source of truth will be what can be found on-chain, with a cryptographic signature attached.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A team of Google security researchers said they discovered a new way to perform Rowhammer attacks against computer memory (RAM) cards that broaden the attack's initial impact. From a report: First detailed in 2014, Rowhammer was a ground-breaking attack that exploited the design of modern RAM cards, where memory cells are stored in grid-like arrangements. The basic principle behind Rowhammer was that a malicious app could perform rapid read/write operations on a row of memory cells. As the cells would shift their values from 0 to 1 and vice versa in a very small time window, this would generate small electromagnetic fields inside the row of "hammered" memory cells. The result of these fields were errors in nearby memory rows that sometimes flipped bits and altered adjacent data. [...] In a research paper published this week, a team of five Google security researchers took Rowhammer attacks to a new level. In a new attack variation named Half-Double, researchers said they managed to carry out a Rowhammer attack that caused bit flips at a distance of two rows from the âoehammeredâ row instead of just one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook has ended its ban on posts asserting Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a policy shift that reflects a deepening debate over the origins of the pandemic that was first identified in Wuhan, China, almost 18 months ago. An anonymous reader shares a report: The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report. "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," Facebook said in a statement on its website Wednesday. President Biden on Wednesday ordered a U.S. intelligence inquiry into the origins of the virus. The White House has come under pressure to conduct its own investigation after China told the World Health Organization that it considered Beijing's part of the investigation complete, calling for efforts to trace the virus's origins to shift into other countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new paper shows that as automation has reduced the number of rote jobs, it has led to an increase in the proportion and value of occupations that involve decision-making. From a report: Automation and AI will shape the labor market, putting a premium -- at least for now -- on workers who can make decisions on the fly, while eroding the value of routine jobs. David Deming, a political economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, analyzed labor data over the past half-century and found that the share of all U.S. jobs requiring decision-making rose from 6% in 1960 to 34% in 2018, with nearly half the increase occurring since 2007. Partially as a result, a greater share of wages is going to management and management-related occupations, more than doubling since 1960 to 32% -- a trend that is more pronounced in high-growth industries. This shift has also reinforced generational disparity in the labor market. Getting better at making decisions requires experience, and experience requires time on the job. Largely as a result, career earnings growth in the U.S. more than doubled between 1960 and 2017, and the age of peak earnings increased from the late 30s to the mid-50s.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: VMware is urging its vCenter users to update vCenter Server versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 immediately, after a pair of vulnerabilities were reported privately to the company. The most pressing is CVE-2021-21985, which relates to a remote code execution vulnerability in a vSAN plugin enabled by default in vCenter that an attacker could use to run whatever they wished on the underlying host machine, provided they can access port 443. Even if users do not use vSAN, they are likely to be affected because the vSAN plugin is enabled by default. "This needs your immediate attention if you are using vCenter Server," VMware said in a blog post. The second vulnerability, CVE-2021-21986, would allow an attacker to perform actions allowed by plugins without authentication. "The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a vulnerability in a vSphere authentication mechanism for the Virtual SAN Health Check, Site Recovery, vSphere Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Cloud Director Availability plug-ins," VMware said. In terms of CVSSv3 scores, CVE-2021-21985 hit an 9.8, while CVE-2021-21986 was scored as 6.5.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Dutch court on Wednesday ruled oil giant Royal Dutch Shell must reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels. That's a much higher reduction than the company's current aim of lowering its emissions by 20% by 2030. CNBC reports: Shell's current climate strategy states that the company is aiming to become a net-zero emissions business by 2050, with the company setting a target of cutting its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2035. A spokesperson for Shell said the company "fully expect to appeal today's disappointing court decision." "We are investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy, including electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, renewables and biofuels," the spokesperson said via email. "We want to grow demand for these products and scale up our new energy businesses even more quickly." The lawsuit was filed in April 2019 by seven activist groups -- including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace -- on behalf of 17,200 Dutch citizens. Court summons claimed Shell's business model "is endangering human rights and lives" by posing a threat to the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. Roger Cox, a lawyer for environmental activists in the case, said in a statement that the ruling marked "a turning point in history" and could have major consequences for other big polluters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long working hours are leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, according to a new study by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. The Seattle Times reports: Working more than 55 hours a week in a paid job resulted in 745,000 deaths in 2016, the study estimated, up from 590,000 in 2000. About 398,000 of the deaths in 2016 were because of stroke and 347,000 because of heart disease. Both physiological stress responses and changes in behavior (such as an unhealthy diet, poor sleep and reduced physical activity) are "conceivable" reasons that long hours have a negative impact on health, the authors suggest. Other takeaways from the study: - Working more than 55 hours per week is dangerous. It is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of heart disease compared with working 35-40 hours per week.- About 9% of the global population works long hours. In 2016, an estimated 488 million people worked more than 55 hours per week.- Long hours are more dangerous than other occupational hazards. In all three years that the study examined (2000, 2010 and 2016), working long hours led to more disease than any other occupational risk factor, including exposure to carcinogens and the nonuse of seat belts at work. And the health toll of overwork worsened over time: From 2000 to 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease because of working long hours increased 42%, and from stroke 19%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: After more than three years of negotiations, San Jose officials voted late Tuesday to approve Google's plan for a sprawling downtown campus with thousands of new homes, millions of square feet of office space and a first-of-its kind $200 million community benefit agreement. It's a deal that business, labor and community groups say could signal a shift in Bay Area development politics -- particularly as San Jose, long overshadowed by neighboring San Francisco, looks to rebound from the pandemic with more active public spaces near transit. But in a region long accustomed to isolated suburban tech campuses and big-dollar affordable housing commitments, some still questioned how exactly a $155 million community fund will be spent, and whether it will be enough to offset familiar concerns about gentrification, homelessness and daily issues like parking. With the vote on Tuesday, Google can move forward with an80-acre development plan near San Jose's central rail hub at Diridon Station, including 4,000 new homes, more than 7 million square feet of office space, 15 acres of parks and 500,000 square feet of retail and other space. Under a community benefit deal approved earlier this year, the company also agreed to create a $155 million community stabilization fund for job training, homelessness and affordable housing. It's unprecedented for a Bay Area tech campus -- and a stark contrast to tech peers like Amazon and Tesla, which have at times asked governments to compete for business by cutting costs -- as well as developers from other industries where community concessions are not the norm. Before the coronavirus upended daily commutes, Google planned for up to 25,000 workers to occupy the new San Jose office. The company has since announced that some of its global workforce will shift to remote roles, but the city hopes that the proposed "Downtown West" neighborhood around the new offices will help buoy lively public spaces. "A Google spokesman said the company will soon transfer land to the city for planned affordable housing development," the report says. "It aims to start construction work in 2022 and plans to transfer an initial $3 million to the city within 30 days of approval of the project, the spokesman said. In the meantime, the San Jose City Council will be tasked with appointing a new committee to oversee the $155 million community fund."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hidden in the vast, arid expanses of India's Thar Desert lie mysterious old drawings that may be the largest-ever graphical depictions designed by humans. ScienceAlert reports: "So far, these geoglyphs, the largest discovered worldwide and for the first time in the Indian subcontinent, are also unique as regards their enigmatic signs," researchers explain in a new paper detailing the find. Discovered by a pair of independent researchers from France -- Carlo and Yohann Oetheimer -- the new geoglyphs were spotted using Google Earth, during a virtual survey of the Thar Desert region (also known as the Great Indian Desert); this region encompasses some 200,000 square kilometers (roughly 77,000 square miles) of territory overlapping India and Pakistan. Amidst this huge, dry landscape, the Oetheimers identified several sites located around the 'Golden City' of Jaisalmer, marked by geometrical lines resembling geoglyphs. Closer inspection during a field study in 2016 using an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) revealed some of the identified sites were furrows dug for tree plantations, but also helped reveal a cluster of enigmatic line formations seemingly absent of trees. In particular, two "remarkable geometrical figures" of exceptional character close to the village of Boha stood out: a giant spiral and a serpent-shaped drawing, each connected by a cluster of sinuous lines. The lines that make up these figures are stripes etched into the ground, ranging up to 10 centimeters deep (4 in) and spreading 20 to 50 cm wide (8-20 in). While these dimensions up close may be unremarkable, what they end up making up is not. The largest geoglyph identified, the giant asymmetrical spiral (called Boha 1), is made from a single looping line running for 12 kilometers (7.5 miles), over an area 724 meters long by 201 meters wide (790 by 220 yards). To the southwest of this huge vortex shape rests a serpentine geoglyph (Boha 2), composed of an 11-kilometer long line, which encompasses a serpent-like figure, a smaller spiral, and a long boustrophedon-style sequence of lines running back and forth. Other small geoglyphs can also be found in the Boha region (including a feature of meandering lines, called Boha 3), which in total includes around 48 kilometers of still visible lines today, which the researchers estimate may once have extended for about 80 kilometers. The researchers say it's unlikely these designs were intended as a form of artistic expression contemplated from the ground, but rather might have served as an unkown type of cultural practice in their making. "Because of their uniqueness, we can speculate that they could represent a commemoration of an exceptional celestial event observed locally."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, through which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems (and productivity). Among those partners and investors in the fund is Microsoft, at whose Build conference OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced the news. TechCrunch reports: In a prerecorded video, Altman explained that "this is not a typical corporate venture fund. We plan to make big early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably not more than 10." It's not clear exactly how the $100 million will be divided or disbursed, or on what timeline, or whether this is part of a longer program. But it seems to be a limited fund, not just the 2021 round. Altman did say that they will be looking for companies that are taking on serious issues, like healthcare, climate change and education, where AI-powered applications or approaches could "benefit all of humanity," in keeping with OpenAI's mission statement. But it would also consider productivity improvements as well, presumably like the GPT-3-powered natural language coding Microsoft showed off yesterday. Companies selected for funding will receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft, which hopefully would allow them to spring fully formed and ready to scale from the program. OpenAI would not elaborate on the equity agreement, expectations for startups, other partners or any further details. It's entirely possible that the $100 million figure is the only thing they've actually settled on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameStop has quietly unveiled a new web portal for a non-fungible token (NFT) platform. The Block reports: "We are building a team" the page declares, stating: "We welcome exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders. If you want to join our team, send your profile or something you've built to: nfteam@gamestop.com." The exact scope of the project is unclear, though prominently featured on the page is a link to an Ethereum address, indicating that GameStop's team will use Ethereum as a technology base. The smart contract code declares "Game On Anon" and links to GameStop's NFT page and indicates that potential GameStop-released NFTs will utilize Ethereum's ERC721 standard. The code also points to a dedicated token, GME.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Nation states are serving as safe havens for sophisticated criminal cyber actors and that is leading to an "increased blending of the threat," said John Demers, assistant attorney general at the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, speaking on a CNBC Evolve livestream on Wednesday. He said that is also a reason to believe that DarkSide could be back, or is still operating under a new name. "When nation states aren't doing their part to investigate and root out hacking activity happening within their borders, then any number of things could have been the answer to ... what happened to the DarkSide infrastructure including that ... they're just off renaming themselves, so we'll see." "Groups like that will come back," he added. "Probably Darkside itself, those actors that comprise that group, will be back if they're not already out there in other forms operating as we're talking about." Michael Orlando, acting director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said during the CNBC Evolve livestream that ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure rise to the level of national security threat and the "safe haven" aspect is one part of the cybersecurity riddle the government and business world will have to counteract. "We do know that countries like Russia and China, Iran and others certainly create safe havens for criminal hackers as long as they don't conduct attacks against them. But that's a challenge for us that we're going to have to work through as we figure out how to counter ransomware attacks." DarkSide received a total of $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments before shutting down. The hacker group coincidentally lost control of its web servers and some of the funds the day after President Joe Biden announced plans to disrupt the hackers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Biden administration, half of the country's adults are now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. NPR reports: "This is a major milestone in our country's vaccination efforts," Andy Slavitt, a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said during a midday briefing. "The number was 1% when we entered office Jan. 20." Nearly 130 million people age 18 and older have completed their vaccine regimens since the first doses were administered to the public in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Another 70 million vaccine doses are currently in the distribution pipeline, according to the agency. The U.S. is pushing to add millions more people to the ranks of the vaccinated. President Biden said this month that his new goal is to administer at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to 70% of U.S. adults by the Fourth of July. Nine states have given at least one vaccine shot to 70% of their adult population, Slavitt said at Tuesday's briefing. Acknowledging the welcome return to a more normal life taking place around the country, he urged more people to get the vaccine: "Unless you're vaccinated, you're at risk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Tom's Hardware: Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he's gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public. Martin's executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: "A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon 'M1' chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. [...] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision." He also noted that this was the result of an intentional decision on Apple's part. "Basically, Apple decided to break the ARM spec by removing a mandatory feature, because they figured they'd never need to use that feature for macOS," he explained. "And then it turned out that removing that feature made it much harder for existing OSes to mitigate this vulnerability." The company would have to make a change on the silicon level with its followup to the M1 to mitigate this flaw. But he also made it clear in the FAQ that Mac owners shouldn't be particularly worried about M1RACLES because that covert channel affects two bits. It can be expanded, and Martin said that transfer rates over 1 MB/s are possible "without much optimization," but any malicious apps that might take advantage of such methods would be far more likely to share information via other channels. Calling this a two-bit vulnerability would be both technically and linguistically correct. It's a real security flaw, sure, but it's unlikely to pose a real threat to Apple's customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Who wants to be an astronaut? If the answer is you, there's a reality TV show, appropriately titled "Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?", that you ought to apply for. From a report: The Discovery Channel is seeking to cast about 10 would-be astronauts to compete during the series' eight-episode run next year for a seat on a real-life trip to the International Space Station, followed by live coverage of the launch of the winner on a SpaceX rocket. "We'd like a diverse group of people that each have their own story, why they want to go to space, why they're worthy of going to space, what their back story is," said Jay Peterson, president of Boat Rocker Studios, Unscripted, one of the companies producing the show for Discovery. That person will not be the only amateur astronaut destined for the space station next year. So many tourism and entertainment efforts are preparing trips there that it could begin to look more like a soundstage for television shows and a hotel for the wealthy than an orbiting research laboratory. Many who work in the business of space believe that is a good thing, even if trips to orbit will remain out of reach of all but the wealthiest passengers in the near term. "This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight," Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, said during a news conference this month announcing that the agency had signed an agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, to fly the first mission of private astronauts to the space station. "I'm very bullish on the tourism market and the tourism activity," Mr. McAlister said. "I think more people that are going to fly, they're going to want to do more things in space." Although the International Space Station may stay up in orbit at least until 2028, in the future it will not be only space station. Russian space authorities last month declared their intention to leave the I.S.S. in the coming years and build a station of their own. A Chinese orbital outpost is expected to come online in the next year or two.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Every day, people who download and share pirated content receive DMCA notices via their ISPs, warning them to cease and desist their infringing behavior. While the majority of these notices are accurate, one Ubuntu user says he has just been targeted by an anti-piracy company alleging that by torrenting an OS ISO released by Ubuntu itself, he breached copyright law. Posting to Reddit's /r/linux sub-Reddit, a forum with more than 656K subscribers, 'NateNate60' reported the unthinkable. After downloading an official Ubuntu ISO package (filename ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso) he says he received a notice from Comcast's Infinity claiming that he'd been reported for copyright infringement. "We have received a notification by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, reporting an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works made on or over your Xfinity Internet service," the posted notice reads. NateNate60 wisely redacted the notice to remove the 'Incident Number' and the precise time of the alleged infringement to protect his privacy but the clam was reported filed with Comcast on May 24, 2021. "The copyright owner has identified the IP address associated with your Xfinity Internet account at the time as the source of the infringing works," it continues, adding that NateNate60 should search all of his devices connected to his network and delete the files mentioned in the complaint. The allegedly infringing content is the 64-bit Ubuntu 20.04.2.0 LTS release but the first big question is whether the file is actually the official release from Canonical. Given that the listed hash value is 4ba4fbf7231a3a660e86892707d25c135533a16a and that matches the hash of the official release, mislabeled or misidentified content (wrong hash, mislabeled file etc) appears to be ruled out. Indeed, the same hash value is listed on Ubuntu's very own BitTorrent tracker and according to NateNate60, this is where he downloaded the torrent that led to the DMCA notice. It doesn't get much more official than that. According to the DMCA notice sent by Comcast, the complainant wasn't Ubuntu/Canonical but an anti-piracy company called OpSec Security, which according to its imprint is based in Germany. Presuming the notice is genuine (albeit sent in error), Comcast needs to be informed that mistakes have been made. The ISP has a repeat infringer policy and given the current hostile environment, terminating users is certainly on the agenda. Indeed, the notice states just that.Read more of this story at Slashdot.