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Facebook rejected two proposals intended to diminish Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's control over the company, an expected though disappointing outcome for those worried about the CEO's power. From a report: The board Wednesday turned down a proposal to replace Zuckerberg as chairman with an independent representative. Zuckerberg, who has served as chairman since 2012, controls about 58% of the voting shares, according to a regulatory filing. During Facebook's annual meeting, the board also rejected a proposal to eliminate the special class of super-voting shares that gives Zuckerberg a controlling stake in the company. Under the plan, investors would have been awarded one vote per share. The Zuckerberg-controlled board has rejected similar motions in years past. While not surprising, the votes are likely to frustrate shareholders who argue Zuckerberg has too much power at a time Facebook needs more independent oversight to address its regulatory threats, privacy scandals and public controversies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

App developer and scam app hunter Kosta Eleftheriou's latest discovery is a real doozy: an iOS app that refuses to function until you give it at least a 3-star review in the App Store. From a report: Although the UPNP Xtreme app -- which claimed to let users stream video to their TVs -- now appears to have been pulled, we were able to verify that it generates the App Store rating box the second it opens. You can't dismiss the ratings box, nor can you tap the 1 or 2-star ratings, Eleftheriou said. We verified this behavior, but some other users report they were able to dismiss the dialog box or leave a lower rating.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU is said to be on the brink of opening a formal antitrust investigation into Facebook following complaints from rivals about the platform's classified ads business. From a report: Regulators have already sent questions to Facebook and its competitors asking whether the social media site distorted the classified ads market by promoting its Marketplace services for free to its 2bn users. Facebook Marketplace, which launched in 2016, allows users to buy and sell goods to each other without fees. It is used by 800m Facebook users in 70 countries. The European Commission first started looking at the platform in 2019, asking companies whether they considered Marketplace as a close rival and how many visits to their sites came from ads placed on Facebook's platform. Classified ads rivals are said to have complained that Facebook used its market power to gain an advantage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The next release of Edge will be the "best performing" browser available on Windows 10 when it arrives later this week, Microsoft claimed at its Build 2021 event. It said that version 91 contains new features, specifically "startup boost and sleeping tabs" that will push it ahead of Chrome and all other browsers. From a report: Startup boost was introduced in March and works by "running a core set of Microsoft Edge processes in the background," according to the post. At the same time, it supposedly won't use any additional resources when Microsoft Edge browser windows are open. That feature has boosted startup speeds by up to 41 percent, the company claims. In the upcoming build, Microsoft will introduce a "sleeping tabs" feature that immediately puts ads to sleep when you switch to another tab, allowing for "instance resource savings." That promises to boost browser performance and free up memory for other apps, as ads can be highly memory- and processor-intensive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Bond has a new home: Amazon and MGM announced a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire MGM for $8.45 billion. From a report: MGM, founded in 1924, complements Amazon Studios, which has primarily focused on producing TV programming, the companies said. Amazon will help "preserve MGM's heritage and catalog of films," and provide customers with greater access to these existing works, the companies said. For Amazon, snapping up MGM -- which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog -- is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment properties. In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to tap into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky, and, yes, the 007 franchises for new originals. "The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of [intellectual property] in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM's talented team," Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, said in announcing the deal. "It's very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality storytelling." Hopkins noted that MGM productions collectively have won more than 180 Oscars and 100 Emmys. The studio has roughly 800 employees globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy. "Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Thousands of Google Chrome extensions available on the official Chrome Web Store are tampering with security headers on popular websites, putting users at risk of a wide range of web-based attacks. While they are a little-known technical detail, security headers are an important part of the current internet landscape. At a technical level, a security header is an HTTP response sent by the server to a client app, such as a browser. [...] In a paper presented at the MADWeb workshop at the NDSS 2021 security conference, researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security said they tried to assess the number of Chrome extensions tampering with security headers for the very first time. Using a custom framework they built specifically for their study, the research team said they analyzed 186,434 Chrome extensions that were available on the official Chrome Web Store last year. Their work found that 2,485 extensions were intercepting and modifying at least one security header used by today's Top 100 most popular websites (as available in the Tranco list). The study didn't focus on all security headers, but only on the four most common ones, such as: Content-Security Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options. While 2,485 extensions disabled at least one, researchers said they found 553 disabling all the four security headers they analyzed in their research. The most commonly disabled security header was CSP, a security header that was developed to allow site owners to control what web resources a page is allowed to load inside a browser and a typical defense that can protect websites and browsers against XSS and data injection attacks. According to the research team, in most of the cases they analyzed, the Chrome extensions disabled CSP and other security headers "to introduce additional seemingly benign functionalities on the visited webpage," and didn't look to be malicious in nature. However, even if the extensions wanted to enrich a user's experience online, the German academics argued that by tampering with security headers, all the extensions did was to expose users to attacks from other scripts and sites running inside the browser and on the web.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma -- the first matter ever to be present -- during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today. Phys.org reports: "We have studied a substance called quark-gluon plasma that was the only matter, which existed during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Our results tell us a unique story of how the plasma evolved in the early stage of the universe," explains You Zhou, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. "First, the plasma that consisted of quarks and gluons was separated by the hot expansion of the universe. Then the pieces of quark reformed into so-called hadrons. A hadron with three quarks makes a proton, which is part of atomic cores. These cores are the building blocks that constitutes Earth, ourselves and the universe that surrounds us," he adds. The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) was present in the first 0.000001 second of Big Bang, and thereafter, it disappeared due to the expansion. But by using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, researchers were able to recreate this, the first matter in history, and trace back what happened to it. "In addition to using the Large Hadron Collider, the researchers also developed an algorithm that is able to analyze the collective expansion of more produced particles at once than ever possible before. Their results show that the QGP used to be a fluent liquid form and that it distinguishes itself from other matter by constantly changing its shape over time. "For a long time, researchers thought that the plasma was a form of gas, but our analysis confirm the latest milestone measurement, where the Hadron Collider showed that QGP was fluent and had a smooth soft texture like water. The new details we provide show that the plasma has changed its shape over time, which is quite surprising and different from any other matter we know and what we would have expected," says You Zhou. Even though this might seem like a small detail, it brings physicists one step closer to solving the puzzle of the Big Bang and how the universe developed in the first microsecond, he elaborates. The study has been published in the journal Physics Letters B.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Under the hollow pretense of concern for the environment, Starlink satellite internet competitor ViaSat has asked the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to force SpaceX to stop Starlink launches and threatened to take the matter to court if it doesn't get its way. Teslarati reports: A long-time satellite internet provider notorious for offering expensive, mediocre service with strict bandwidth restrictions, ViaSat has also been engaged in a years-long attempt to disrupt, slow down, and even kill SpaceX's Starlink constellation by any means necessary. That includes fabricating nonsensical protests, petitioning the FCC dozens of times, and -- most recently -- threatening to sue the agency and federal government as the company becomes increasingly desperate. The reason is simple: even compared to SpaceX's finicky, often-unreliable Starlink Beta service, ViaSat's satellite internet is almost insultingly bad. With a focus on serving the underserved and unserved, SpaceX's Starlink beta users -- many of which were already relying on ViaSat or HughesNet internet -- have overwhelmingly described the differences as night and day. In simple terms, if given the option, it's extraordinarily unlikely that a single public ViaSat subscriber would choose the company's internet over SpaceX's Starlink. While Starlink currently requires subscribers to pay a substantial upfront cost -- ~$500 -- for the dish used to access the satellite network, ViaSat internet costs at least as much per month. Currently, new subscribers would pay a bare minimum of ~$113 per month for speeds up to 12 Mbps (akin to DSL) and an insultingly small 40GB data cap. For a 60GB cap and 25 Mbps, subscribers will pay more than $160 per month after a three-month promotion. With a fixed cost of $99 per month, truly unlimited data, and uncapped speeds that vary from 50 to 200+ Mbps, any ViaSat "silver" subscriber would receive far better service by switching to Starlink and save enough money to pay off the $500 dish in less than a year. What ViaSat actually wants is for the FCC to catastrophically hamstring Starlink, thus saving the profit-focused company from having to actually work to compete with an internet service provider that is all but guaranteed to capture most of its subscribers on an even playing field. Incredibly, ViaSat actually removes its greenwashing mask in the very same FCC request [PDF], stating that it "will suffer competitive injury" if Starlink is allowed to "compete directly with Viasat in the market for satellite broadband services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Offshore wind is headed west. The Biden administration announced today that it will open up parts of the Pacific coast to commercial-scale offshore renewable energy development for the first time. The geography of the West Coast poses huge technical challenges for wind energy. But rising to meet those challenges is a big opportunity for both President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom to meet their clean energy goals. There are two areas now slotted for development off the coast of Central and Northern California -- one at Morro Bay and another near Humboldt County. Together, these areas could generate up to 4.6GW of energy, enough power for 1.6 million homes over the next decade, according to a White House fact sheet. Compared to the East Coast, waters off the West Coast get deeper much faster. That has stymied offshore wind development. So the White House says it's looking into deploying pretty futuristic technology there: floating wind farms. Until now, technical constraints have generally prevented companies from installing turbines that are fixed to the seafloor in waters more than 60 meters deep. That's left nearly 60 percent of offshore wind resources out of reach, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). With the development of new technologies that could let wind turbines float in deeper waters, it looks like those resources might finally be within reach. The Department of Energy says that it has funneled more than $100 million into moving floating offshore wind technology forward. There are only a handful of floating turbines in operation today, and no commercial-scale wind farms yet anywhere in the world. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management still needs to officially designate the areas off the California coast as Wind Energy Areas for development and complete an environmental analysis. The plan is to auction off leases for the area to developers in mid-2022. It's also working with the Department of Defense to make sure the projects don't interfere with its ongoing "testing, training, and operations" off California's coast.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian authorities on Tuesday fined Google 6 million rubles, or just under $82,000, after the company failed to comply with Moscow's demands to delete prohibited online content. Engadget reports: On Monday, Russia's internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, gave Google 24 hours to delete more than 26,000 instances of online media considered to be illegal in the country. If their demands weren't met, authorities threatened to slow down Google's services in Russia and levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company's annual revenue. Today, Roskomnadzor fined Google in three batches at 2 million rubles apiece, alleging administrative offenses in each case, according to Reuters. Much of the prohibited content involves calls for social action following the detention of high-profile Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in January.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new Bitcoin Mining Council has been created to improve the crypto-currency's sustainability, following a meeting of "leading" Bitcoin miners and Elon Musk. The BBC reports: It's hoped the council will "promote energy usage transparency" and encourage miners to use renewable sources. According to a tweet by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who convened the meeting of the group and Elon Musk, the council includes "the leading Bitcoin miners in North America." But research from a group of universities suggested that China accounted for more than 75% of Bitcoin mining as of April 2020. The authors estimated that 40% of China's Bitcoin mines were powered by coal. [T]he group needs to do more than "disclosing and promoting the use of renewables," Alex de Vries of the website Digiconomist told the BBC. "Even if we had disclosure, that doesn't change the natural incentive of these miners to search out the cheapest and most constant sources of power - which typically comes down to (obsolete) fossil fuels," he said. "Kentucky even came up with a tax break for Bitcoin miners to come and use their obsolete coalfields. So, I'm not seeing this trend towards more renewables." However council member Peter Wall, Chief Executive of Argo, argued that increasingly US Bitcoin miners were choosing renewable power. He felt the council could encourage change."It's early days, it's embryonic. There will be lots of discussions moving forward about the best way to promote sustainable Bitcoin mining and to do it not just in North America," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The major growth in Amazon's advertising unit means its revenue contribution is now 2.4 times larger than Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest combined, and it's growing 1.7 times as quickly, according to Loop Capital. CNBC reports: Amazon's "Other" unit, which is primarily made up of advertising but also includes sales related to other service offerings, grew revenue a whopping 77% year-over-year to more than $6.9 billion in the first quarter, the company reported last month. "Performance ads on the ecommerce sites fueled by Amazon's high-intent traffic and unparalleled user insights are providing significant value for sellers and brands," Loop Capital analysts wrote in the Monday note. They also cited the company's presentation at the recent IAB NewFronts that discussed the company's efforts in the streaming space. Amazon said early this month its ad-supported streaming video content now reaches more than 120 monthly users every month, driven by platforms like Twitch. Amazon generated $22.4 billion in ad revenue in the past 12 months, up 65% year-over-year, according to Loop. That was 2.4 times the $9.3 combined revenue total of middle-cap ad platforms Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest, which grew by 38% over that same timeframe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Video game and hardware studio Valve has been secretly building a Switch-like portable PC designed to run a large number of games on the Steam PC platform via Linux -- and it could launch, supply chain willing, by year's end. Multiple sources familiar with the matter have confirmed that the hardware has been in development for some time, and this week, Valve itself pointed to the device by slipping new hardware-related code into the latest version of Steam, the company's popular PC gaming storefront and ecosystem. On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal." The name is a derivative of a previously discovered code term, "Neptune," which began appearing in September of last year and came with a "Neptune Optimized Games" string. At the time, curious code crawlers thought this discovery referred to some type of controller. Technically, that's true. The "SteamPal," whose name we're putting in scare quotes because we do not have confirmation of the device's final name, is an all-in-one PC with gamepad controls and a touchscreen. In other words, it looks and functions like a Nintendo Switch (albeit without removable "Joy-Con" controller functionality). The SteamPal will [feature] a system on a chip likely coming from either Intel or AMD, not Nvidia. (The aforementioned Switch-like PC manufacturers have leaned on both AMD and Intel for their products.) It's unclear whether Valve will release multiple SKUs to offer customers a choice of power level, battery life, and other specs, as other Switch-like PCs have offered over the past year. At least one SteamPal prototype version is quite wide compared to the Nintendo Switch. This extra width accommodates a slew of control options. No, Valve is likely not slapping an entire QWERTY keyboard onto its system, but the company has packed in a standard array of gamepad buttons and triggers, along with a pair of joysticks and at least one thumb-sized touchpad (in addition to the device's touch-sensitive screen). The SteamPal's touchpad is likely smaller than the pair of touchpads that came standard on every Steam Controller. The SteamPal's Switch-like properties will include the option to "dock" to larger monitors via its USB Type-C port, but I don't have firm details on exactly how that connection will work or whether Valve has any plans for an eventual SteamPal dock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: Mountain View, CA silicon design tools heavyweight Synopsys is claiming a breakthrough in chip design automation that it claims will usher in a new level of semiconductor innovation that will take the industry above and beyond the limits of Moore's Law (Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors in chips double roughly every two years), which is now considered by many to be plateauing. Synopsys' tool called DSO.ai is the world's first autonomous AI tool set for chip design. Synopsys claims its DSO.ai tool can dramatically accelerate, enhance, and reduce the costs involved with something called place-and-route. Just as it sounds, place-and-route (sometimes called floor planning) referrers to the placement of logic and IP blocks, and the routing of the traces and various interconnects in a chip designed to join them all together. Synopsys' DSO.ai optimizes and streamlines this process using the iterative nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such that what used to take dozens of engineers weeks or potentially months, now will take a junior engineer just days to complete. DSO.ai iterates on the floorplan and layout of a chip, and learns from each iteration, fine tuning and optimizing the chip within its design parameters and targets along the way. The old semiconductor paradigms are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today, it's about the best transistors, architectures, and accelerators for the job, and the human-constrained physical design engineering effort no longer has to be a gating factor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down. Interesting Engineering reports: Over the last decade or so, Sci-Hub, often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," has been giving free access to a huge database of scientific papers that would otherwise be locked behind a paywall. Unsurprisingly, the website has been the target of multiple lawsuits, as well as an investigation from the United States Department of Justice. The site's Twitter account was also recently suspended under Twitter's counterfeit policy, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, reported that the FBI gained access to her Apple accounts. Now, Redditors from a subreddit called DataHoarder, which is aimed at archiving knowledge in the digital space, have come together to try to save the numerous papers available on the website. In a post on May 13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, stated that "it's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many." This will be no easy task. Sci-Hub is home to over 85 million papers, totaling a staggering 77TB of data. The group of Redditors is currently recruiting for its archiving efforts and its stated goal is to have approximately 8,500 individuals torrenting the papers in order to download the entire library. Once that task is complete, the Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new "uncensorable" open-source website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state. Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at the company's developer conference today: Across all the opportunities I've highlighted today, Windows is implicit. It's never been more important. Windows 10 is used by more than 1.3 billion people to work, learn, connect and play. And it all starts with Windows as a dev box. Windows brings together all developer and collaboration tools in one place. It lets you choose the hardware you want, works with Linux and Windows as one, and has a modern terminal. And soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. I've been selfhosting it over the past several months, and I'm incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows. Our promise to you is this: we will create more opportunity for every Windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications. We look forward to sharing more very soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle is giving customers more choice and flexibility with the launch of its first Arm-based cloud compute offering on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. From a report: The new offering, called OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is designed to power both general-purpose and cloud-native workloads that demand high performance at more manageable costs, Oracle said today. It's based on the Ampere Altra architecture built by Ampere Computing. Today's announcement comes as Oracle makes a big investment into the Arm ecosystem more generally, with the availability of more resources and tools, including a new development environment for developers that's intended to support Arm-based application development. Arm's central processing units are known for their extremely efficient, flexible and scalable architecture. They're most prominently used in smaller devices such as smartphones, but in more recent years they have come to power everything from personal computers and "internet of things" devices to computer servers and even supercomputers. Oracle said its new Arm compute instances come in a range of options and sizes to fit just about any workload, with choices including what it says are the industry's first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes that can be right-sized for different jobs. There are also more powerful bare metal server options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is now using OpenAI's massive GPT-3 natural language model in its no-code/low-code Power Apps service to translate spoken text into code in its recently announced Power Fx language. From a report: Now don't get carried away. You're not going to develop the next TikTok while only using natural language. Instead, what Microsoft is doing here is taking some of the low-code aspects of a tool like Power Apps and using AI to essentially turn those into no-code experiences, too. For now, the focus here is on Power Apps formulas, which despite the low-code nature of the service, is something you'll have to write sooner or later if you want to build an app of any sophistication. "Using an advanced AI model like this can help our low-code tools become even more widely available to an even bigger audience by truly becoming what we call no code," said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for Microsoft's low-code application platform. In practice, this looks like the citizen programmer writing "find products where the name starts with 'kids'" -- and Power Apps then rendering that as "Filter('BC Orders' Left('Product Name',4)="Kids")". Because Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI, it's no surprise the company chose its model to power this experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have shed light on why everyday sounds such as chewing, drinking and breathing can be so maddening to some people that it drives them to despair. From a report: Now, brain scans performed by researchers at Newcastle University have revealed that people with misophonia have stronger connectivity between the part of the brain that processes sounds and the part of the so-called premotor cortex which handles mouth and throat muscle movements. When people with misophonia were played a "trigger sound," the scans showed that the brain region involved in mouth and throat movement was overactivated compared with a control group of volunteers who did not have the condition. "What we are suggesting is that in misophonia the trigger sound activates the motor area even though the person is only listening to the sound," said Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University. "It makes them feel like the sounds are intruding into them." Kumar and his colleagues believe that trigger sounds activate what is called the brain's mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are thought to fire when a person performs an action, but also when they see others make particular movements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Department of Homeland Security is moving to regulate cybersecurity in the pipeline industry for the first time in an effort to prevent a repeat of a major computer attack that crippled nearly half the East Coast's fuel supply this month -- an incident that highlighted the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to online attacks. From a report: The Transportation Security Administration, a DHS unit, will issue a security directive this week requiring pipeline companies to report cyber incidents to federal authorities, senior DHS officials said. It will follow up in coming weeks with a more robust set of mandatory rules for how pipeline companies must safeguard their systems against cyberattacks and the steps they should take if they are hacked, the officials said. The agency has offered only voluntary guidelines in the past. The ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shutter its pipeline for 11 days this month prompted gasoline shortages and panic buying in the southeastern United States, including in the nation's capital. Had it gone on much longer, it could have affected airlines, mass transit and chemical refineries that rely on diesel fuel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation. From a report: The lawsuit filed in D.C. Superior Court claims that Amazon has engaged in anti-competitive business practices including not allowing third party sellers to offer their products at lower prices elsewhere and imposing excessive fees. The suit alleges that those practices have passed on fees to consumers in the form of higher prices, prevents other platforms from competing and takes away choices from consumers. "Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs," Racine said in a statement. "It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation, and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has teamed up with Qualcomm to create a Windows on ARM-based dev kit for developers. From a report: The miniature PC will be sold at the Microsoft Store this summer, and is designed to be more affordable to encourage developers to create ARM64 apps for Snapdragon-based PCs. Until now, developers have had to purchase devices like the Surface Pro X to fully test their ARM64 apps on Windows. That's a costly exercise for developers, particularly when the Surface Pro X retails from $999 and up. While Microsoft and Qualcomm haven't put a price on this new dev kit, there are promises it will be more affordable than what developers can buy today. "This developer kit provides an affordable alternative to other consumer and commercial devices," says Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management at Qualcomm. "With the smaller desktop configuration, this kit gives developers more flexibility than notebook options, and at a lower price point."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is making the promised support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps on Windows 10 available to customers as of the next Windows 10 release, officials said on May 25. Microsoft officials made the announcement on Day 1 of its virtual Build 2021 developers conference. From a report: During his Day 1 keynote, CEO Satya Nadella basically acknowledged there will be another event "soon" about the next Windows. He said: ""And soon we will share one of the most significant updates of Windows of the past decade." He said he has been self-hosting it over the past several months and called it "the next generation of Windows." Microsoft released a preview of Linux GUI apps on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in April, 2021. This capability is meant to allow developers to run their preferred Linux tools, utilities and apps directly on Windows 10. With GUI app support, users can now run GUI apps for testing, development and daily use without having to set up a virtual machine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems that Microsoft's digital rights management decisions for the Xbox Series X are a serious cause for concern. From a report: According to a video from YouTuber and game developer Modern Vintage Gamer, the Xbox Series X is unable to play games without connecting to Microsoft's servers. He tried games off a disc like Rise of the Tomb Raider as well as Hitman 3 and both refused to work offline. While Microsoft recommends keeping your Xbox Series X as your 'Home Console' in its settings, it's a solution that's described as a 'band-aid' as it doesn't seem to work with every game as it should. Native Xbox Series X physical games like Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition work fine. It installed off the disc and ran as it should offline. This should in theory mean that games that are solely for the Xbox Series X should work both offline and online. However with Microsoft's focus on Smart Delivery, it means that the current crop of Xbox Series X discs that run on Xbox One as well are essentially coasters. All of this essentially means that you won't be able to play your Xbox games when Microsoft decides to take its servers offline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big under-the-hood changes are coming to Google's original Nest Hub, even if most users won't ever be aware of what's happening. From a report: Starting today, the open-source Fuchsia OS will start rolling out to first-gen Nest Hub displays, according to 9to5Google. In the works since 2016, Fuchsia will land first on Nest Hub devices enrolled in Google's Preview Program, before arriving more widely on non-Preview Program displays. Don't expect the user experience to change much, though. 9to5Google notes that the look and feel of Fuchsia OS-powered Nest Hubs will be "essentially identical" to what it was before. OK, so what's the big deal about Fuchsia, then? It's a new, open-source OS that's decidedly not based on the Linux kernel, as Android and Chrome OS are. Instead, Fuchsia is based on Magneta, which (as we described it back in 2016) is "combination microkernel and set of user-space services and hardware drivers" with a "physics based renderer" that can power graphical user interfaces. Because it's an open-source project, Fuchsia's existence has been well publicized over the years, although its purpose has been harder to fathom; "out in the open" yet "shrouded in mystery" is how we aptly put it. With its arrival on the original Nest Hub, Fuchsia is taking its first tentative steps out of the lab and into the hands of actual users, even if those users aren't aware of the new OS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GCHQ's methods for bulk interception of online communications violated the right to privacy and the regime for collection of data was "not in accordance with the law," the grand chamber of the European court of human rights has ruled. From a report: In what was described as a "landmark victory" by Liberty, one of the applicants, the judges also found the bulk interception regime breached the right to freedom of expression and contained insufficient protections for confidential journalistic material but said the decision to operate a bulk interception regime did not of itself violate the European convention on human rights. The chamber, the ultimate court of the ECHR, also concluded that GCHQ's regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal. The grand chamber judgment is the culmination of a legal challenge to GCHQ's bulk interception of online communications begun in 2013 by Big Brother Watch and others after Edward Snowden's whistleblowing revelations concerning the interception, processing and storing of data about millions of people's private communications by the eavesdropping agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's market power and control over users' data faces intense scrutiny in Germany as the nation's antitrust watchdog added it to the list of U.S. tech giants targeted by expanded new rules. From a report: Germany's Federal Cartel Office said Tuesday it's started two investigations under antitrust measures that allow regulators to target large digital companies that may dominate several markets. The authority will conduct an in-depth analysis of Google's data processing terms, saying the Alphabet unit enjoys a "strategic advantage" from the information it collects. Regulators also questioned whether users "have sufficient choice as to how Google will use their data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The original 2007 video "Charlie Bit My Finger," a standard-bearer of viral internet fascination, has sold as a nonfungible token for $760,999, and the family who created it will take down the original from YouTube for good. The original video, which has close to 900 million views, features Charlie Davies-Carr, an infant in England, biting the finger of his big brother, Harry Davies-Carr, and then laughing after Harry yells "OWWWW." The owner will also be able to create their own parody of the video featuring Charlie and Harry Davies-Carr. Many duplicates of the video remain online, including one apparently rebranded by the family itself in anticipation of the auction. But the auction allowed bidders to "own the soon-to-be-deleted YouTube phenomenon" and be the "sole owner of this lovable piece of internet history." The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media, known as NFTs, continues to grow and bring attention to widely viewed videos and memes that many people have long forgotten. NFT buyers are not usually acquiring copyrights, trademarks or the sole ownership of whatever they purchase. They're mostly bought with the idea that their copy is authentic. During anNFT sale, computers are connected to a cryptocurrency network. They record the transaction on a shared ledger and store it on a blockchain, sealing it as part of a permanent public record and serving as a sort of certification of authenticity that cannot be altered or erased.There were 11 active bidders in the war for the NFT that was driven mainly between two bidders named 3fmusic and mememaster, who ultimately was outbid by 3fmusic by $45,444. The bidding closed on Sunday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To detect wildfires earlier on, some researchers are proposing a novel solution that harnesses a network of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and a fleet of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). IEEE Spectrum reports: The researchers tested their approach through simulations, described in a study published May 5 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, finding that it can detect fires that are just 2.5 km2 (just under one square mile) in size with near perfect accuracy. "In the last few years, the number, frequency, and severity of wildfires have increased dramatically worldwide, significantly impacting countries' economies, ecosystems, and communities. Wildfire management presents a significant challenge in which early fire detection is key," emphasizes Osama Bushnaq, a senior researcher at the Autonomous Robotics Research Center of the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, who was involved in the study. The approach that Bushnaq and his colleagues are proposing involves a network of IoT sensors scattered throughout regions of concern, such as a national park or forests situated near communities. If a fire ignites, IoT devices deployed in the area will detect it and wait until a patrolling UAV is within transmission range to report their measurements. If a UAV receives multiple positive detections by the IoT devices, it will notify the nearby firefighting department that a wildfire has been verified. The researchers evaluated a number of different UAVs and IoT sensors based on cost and features to determine the optimal combinations. Next, they tested their UAV-IoT approach through simulations, whereby 420 IoT sensors were deployed and 18 UAVs patrolled per square kilometer of simulated forest. The system could detect fires covering 2.5 km2 with greater than 99 percent accuracy. For smaller fires covering 0.5 km2 the approach yielded 69 percent accuracy. These results suggest that, if an optimal number of UAVs and IoT devices are present, wildfires can be detected in much shorter time than with the satellite imaging.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Guardian, a man in Catalonia died after becoming trapped inside a large dinosaur statue while trying to retrieve his smartphone. From the report: Officers were called to the statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a satellite town of Barcelona, after a man and his son noticed something inside the papier-mache stegosaurus on Saturday afternoon. A spokeswoman for the regional police force, the Mossos d'Esquadra, said the death of the 39-year-old man was not being treated as suspicious. "A father and son noticed that there was something inside and raised the alarm," she said. "We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It's an accidental death; there was no violence. This person got inside the statue's leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he'd dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn't get out." "We're still waiting for the autopsy results, so we don't know how long he was in there, but it seems he was there for a couple of days," she added. Slashdot reader shanen submitted this story with the following commentary: Not sure what the technology link is. Smartphones make people stupid? Dinosaurs are scientific, but this is ridiculous? It would be funny, but it's too gruesome. But I guess I'll go ahead and submit it in the Darwin Awards category. Maybe a better title is man kills himself with dinosaur and smartphone? Death by paper mache?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A team of scientists announced Monday that they had partially restored the sight of a blind man by building light-catching proteins in one of his eyes. Their report, which appeared in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first published study to describe the successful use of this treatment. The procedure is a far cry from full vision. The volunteer, a 58-year-old man who lives in France, had to wear special goggles that gave him the ghostly perception of objects in a narrow field of view. But the authors of the report say that the trial -- the result of 13 years of work -- is a proof of concept for more effective treatments to come. The scientists are taking advantage of proteins derived from algae and other microbes that can make any nerve cell sensitive to light. In the early 2000s, neuroscientists figured out how to install some of these proteins into the brain cells of mice and other lab animals by injecting viruses carrying their genes. The viruses infected certain types of brain cells, which then used the new gene to build light-sensitive channels. Originally, researchers developed this technique, called optogenetics, as a way to probe the workings of the brain. By inserting a tiny light into the animal's brain, they could switch a certain type of brain cell on or off with the flick of a switch. The method has enabled them to discover the circuitry underlying many kinds of behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Kevin Purdy of iFixit published a blog post telling the story of "how Samsung announced a 'revolutionary' upcycling program in 2017, delayed it for years, and eventually gutted it before shipping a pale imitation of the original idea," reports Ars Technica. "iFixit was actually involved in the initial 2017 announcement, and the repair outfit says that after endorsing the original idea with its brand and stamp of approval, Samsung never delivered on its promises." From the report: Despite the 2017 announcement of an upcycling program, the code didn't ship until April 2021, when Samsung finally launched a beta version of "Galaxy Upcycling at Home." This program lets users turn end-of-life Samsung phones into smart home sensors that could be paired with Samsung's SmartThings ecosystem. iFixit was initially given an inside look at the project back in 2017, liking it so much that it endorsed the project and lent its name to the marketing materials. To hear iFixit tell the story, bootloader unlocking was actually the original plan. Samsung was going to let users replace the shipping Android OS with whatever they wanted, like builds of LineageOS or some other custom OS. Samsung was also going to launch an open source marketplace where users could submit ideas and software for repurposing old Galaxy devices. iFixit called the original plan "novel" and "revolutionary." "We were so excited," iFixit writes, "that when Samsung asked us to help launch the product in the fall of 2017, we jumped at the chance. You'll see iFixit's name and logo all over Samsung's original Galaxy Upcycling materials." iFixit went to Samsung HQ in South Korea to see prototypes of the project, and after testing working software, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens actually helped announce the project on stage at Samsung's developer conference in 2017. Despite all the pomp and circumstance, iFixit says, "The actual software was never posted. The Samsung team eventually stopped returning our emails. Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn't excited about a project that didn't have a clear product tie-in or revenue plan." iFixit calls the version of the program that launched in April "nearly unrecognizable" to what it originally endorsed. What used to be an ambitious plan now barely makes any sense financially. iFixit rightfully points out that if you really want something as simple as a light sensor or sound monitor, at this point you're better off selling the phone and buying a purpose-built sensor. Samsung's on-rails functionality is so simple that it can be replicated by a $30 sensor, and you're sure to get more than that from a working device on the secondary market, especially due to another limitation of the program: it only extends back to the 3-year-old Galaxy S9.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peloton said Monday it will invest $400 million to build its first factory in the United States to speed up production and delivery of its popular cycles and high-end treadmill machines. CNBC reports: After vetting a number of locations, it selected a 200-acre site in Troy Township in Wood County, Ohio, to construct more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing, office and amenities space, the company said. Peloton expects to break ground later this summer on the project, which should bring more than 2,000 jobs to the area. The facility should be up and running by 2023. Potential customers will be able to visit the Ohio facility to view its products or schedule tours to see the cycles and treadmills being made, the company said. The site will also have a fitness center for its workers. According to Foley, the extra space also means Peloton will have room to manufacture additional products in the years ahead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

German lawmakers greenlit a bill that would allow for some autonomous vehicles to hit public roads as early as next year. Deutsche Welle reports: The bill, passed by Bundestag lawmakers in a late-night session on Thursday, changes traffic regulations to allow for autonomous vehicles to be put into regular use across Germany. The bill specifically concerns vehicles with fully autonomous systems that fall under the "Level 4" classification -- where a computer is in complete control of the car and no human driver is needed to control or monitor it. Once approved, it would be the world's first legal framework for integrating autonomous vehicles in regular traffic. According to the Transportation Ministry, the bill was written to be as flexible as possible, with the new regulations not requiring a human driver to be on standby. Starting in 2022, the German government says the bill would allow for driverless shuttle busses to be put into use, as well as autonomous public transportation busses that would drive on set routes. Autonomous vehicles would also be permitted to transport goods, and "dual-mode vehicles" could be used for automated valet parking. Self-driving cars for the general public would also be permitted in regular traffic, although experts estimate it will take years before the vehicles become established in the market, public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: According to a tweet from Executable Fix, a well-known leaker, AMD will finally move away from PGA to LGA with the shift to AM5, the new socket set to replace AM4. They say the new socket design will be LGA-1718 -- the number representing the number of pins required for the package. They also note that a coming generation of AMD chip will support DDR5 and PCIe 4.0 with a 600-series chipset. When we talk about PGA, we're most often discussing processors with pins sticking out the underside of a chip that slot into a motherboard with a compatible socket. An LGA design will instead see a flat array of connection points on the processor, which will align with pins within the motherboard's socket. Either way you look at it, you're getting some very bendable, if not breakable, pins. But in my opinion it's much easier to bend those pins on the CPU. While a shift to LGA may seem somewhat trivial, the change will mark a major shakeup in AMD's desktop lineup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ability to boot from an external drive on an Apple Silicon Mac may not be an option for much longer, with the creation and use of the drives apparently being phased out by Apple, according to developers of backup tools. Apple Insider reports: Mike Bombich, the founder of Bombich Software behind Carbon Copy Cloner, wrote in a May 19 blog post that the company will continue to make bootable backups for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and will "continue to support that functionality as long as macOS supports it." However, with changes in the way a Mac functions with the introduction of Apple Silicon, the ability to use external booting could be limited, in part due to Apple's design decisions. The first problem is with macOS Big Sur, as Apple made it so macOS resides on a "cryptographically sealed Signed System Volume," which could only be copied by Apple Software Restore. While CCC has experience with ASR, the tool was deemed to be imperfect, with it failing "with no explanation" and operating in a "very one-dimensional" way. The second snag was Apple Fabric, a storage system that uses per-file encryption keys. However, ASR didn't work for months until the release of macOS 11.3 restored it, but even then kernel panics ensued when cloning back to the original internal storage. In December, Bombich spoke to Apple about ASR's reliability and was informed that Apple was working to resolve the problem. During the call, Apple's engineers also said that copying macOS system files was "not something that would be supportable in the future." "Many of us in the Mac community could see that this was the direction Apple was moving, and now we finally have confirmation," writes Bombich. "Especially since the introduction of APFS, Apple has been moving towards a lockdown of macOS system files, sacrificing some convenience for increased security." [...] While CCC won't drop the ability to copy the System folder, the tool is "going to continue to offer it with a best effort' approach." Meanwhile, for non-bootable data restoration, CCC's backups do still work with the macOS Migration Assistant, available when booting up a new Mac for the first time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is updating its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) app for Android, and it includes dual-screen support for the Surface Duo. The Verge reports: The app update allows Surface Duo owners to use a virtual gamepad on one screen of their device and games on the other. It makes the Surface Duo look more like a Nintendo 3DS than a mobile phone, with touch controls for a variety of games. Microsoft has been steadily adding Xbox Touch Controls to more than 50 games in recent months, including titles like Sea of Thieves, Gears 5, and Minecraft Dungeons. The full list of touch-compatible games is available here, and you can of course just use a regular Bluetooth or Xbox controller to stream games to the Surface Duo. The benefits of a dual-screen device for this type of mobile experience are obvious. You no longer have touch controls over the top of the game, and your thumbs don't get in the way of seeing important action on-screen. If dual-screen or foldable devices ever catch on, this is a far superior way to play Xbox games without a dedicated controller.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man has been jailed for 13 years after his fingerprints were analysed from a photo of a block of cheese. Sky News reports: Carl Stewart shared the M&S Stilton picture -- but made the mistake of showing his fingers and palm. He may have thought he was safe because he was using an EncroChat phone, a highly encrypted device used by criminals. However, police cracked the system last year -- leading to the arrest of hundreds of people in the UK suspected of murder, gun smuggling and serious drug trafficking. Sixty-thousand users -- about 10,000 of them in the UK -- have been identified globally as part of Operation Venetic. Stewart, 39, of Gem Street, Liverpool, received a sentence of 13-and-a-half years at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday. [...] Detective Inspector Lee Wilkinson said Stewart had been "caught out by his love of Stilton cheese." "His palm and fingerprints were analysed from this picture and it was established they belonged to [him]," the officer said. Stewart had used the name Toffeeforce to conduct his EncroChat deals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Bitcoin took investors on another rollercoaster ride over the weekend after a top regulator in China announced a crackdown on mining, a new tack in the country's ongoing fight against the cryptocurrency. The government will "crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society," said the statement, which was issued by the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council, the country's cabinet equivalent. The committee is chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, who acts as President Xi Jinping's top representative on economic and financial matters. "The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining," Li Yi, chief research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. "When all mining activities are banned in China, it will be a turning point for the fate of bitcoin, as a large chunk of its processing power is taken out of the picture." The Chinese government isn't just worried about financial stability, either. A commentary piece in Xinhua News, the Communist Party's official media outlet, elaborated on the government's stance, voicing concerns about bitcoin's role in money laundering, drug trafficking, and smuggling. It also mentioned bitcoin's profligate energy use. Last week, China warned financial institutions not to participate in crypto-transactions or related services. The combination of bitcoin's high price and its tremendous energy demand has pushed miners to take extreme positions. Miners in China have flocked to provinces such as Inner Mongolia, where cheap coal power makes mining more profitable. The scale of these facilities reflects how much money investors have sunk into the projects. At least one mining facility in Inner Mongolia draws more than 50 MW. Similarly large operations are popping up in the US, too. In upstate New York, a private equity firm bought and revamped an abandoned power plant just to mine bitcoin. When its data centers are completed, mining will consume 79 percent of the power plant's capacity, or 85 MW. China's warning to bitcoin miners is certain to push many operations out of the country. At least one bitcoin observer said that he anticipates miners pushed out of China will set up operations in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state. From a report: The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook's and Twitter's bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that Floridians would be "guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites." "If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable," he said in a statement. The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off after Mr. Trump was barred after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against conservative personalities and publications, even though those accounts often thrive online. More than a hundred bills targeting the companies' moderation practices have been filed nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports: Jamf says it found evidence that the XCSSET malware was exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it access to parts of macOS that require permission -- such as accessing the microphone, webcam, or recording the screen -- without ever getting consent. XCSSET was first discovered by Trend Micro in 2020 targeting Apple developers, specifically their Xcode projects that they use to code and build apps. By infecting those app development projects, developers unwittingly distribute the malware to their users, in what Trend Micro researchers described as a "supply-chain-like attack." The malware is under continued development, with more recent variants of the malware also targeting Macs running the newer M1 chip. Once the malware is running on a victimâ(TM)s computer, it uses two zero-days -- one to steal cookies from the Safari browser to get access to a victimâ(TM)s online accounts, and another to quietly install a development version of Safari, allowing the attackers to modify and snoop on virtually any website. But Jamf says the malware was exploiting a previously undiscovered third-zero day in order to secretly take screenshots of the victim's screen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In late 2019, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8c and 7c, a pair of affordable chips for always-on Windows 10 PCs and Chromebooks. Today, the company is updating the latter of those two SoCs to improve performance. Engadget: The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 features a Kyro CPU that can achieve clock speeds of up to 2.55GHz. The company claims it delivers 10 percent faster performance than "most competing platforms." Qualcomm likely has processors from Intel's Gemini Lake family in mind here. The company also claims the 7c Gen 2 can deliver up to two times the battery life of its competitors. Outside of the faster CPU, the 7c Gen 2 is more or less the same chip Qualcomm announced in 2019. It features an Adreno 618 GPU and Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. The latter allows the 7c Gen 2 to hit theoretical download speeds of 800 Mbps. As with its predecessor, the chip is designed for education and price-conscious customers. According to Qualcomm, we can expect the first Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 laptops to arrive this summer, with the first models coming from Lenovo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple refused a request from Facebook to remove negative reviews in the App store after pro-Palestinian protesters coordinated an effort to tank ratings because of censorship of Palestinian content, NBC News reported. From a report: On Saturday, the Facebook app had a 2.3 out of five-star rating in the App store compared to a more than four-star rating last week. The largest category of ratings is one-star reviews, with many comments saying their rating is due to Facebook censoring hashtags like #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack. "User trust is dropping considerably with the recent escalations between Israel and Palestine," said one senior software engineer in a post on Facebook's internal message board, NBC reported. "Our users are upset with our handling of the situation. Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced. As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews." An internal message reviewed by NBC showed that the company was very concerned about the coordinated effort to tank ratings, categorizing the issue as an SEV1, which stands for "severity 1."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today released macOS Big Sur 11.4, the fourth major update to the macOS Big Sur, operating system that launched in November 2020. From a report: The new macOS Big Sur 11.4 update can be downloaded for free on all eligible Macs using the Software Update section of System Preferences. macOS Big Sur 11.4 lays the groundwork for two upcoming Apple Music features: Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos and Lossless Audio, both of which will be available on the Mac. It also adds support for Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and fixes a number of bugs. Apple today also released iOS and iPadOS 14.6, marking the sixth major updates to the iOS and iPadOS operating systems that initially came out in September 2020. From a report: The iOS and iPadOS 14.5 updates can be downloaded for free and the software is available on all eligible devices over-the-air in the Settings app. To access the new software, go to Settings - General - Software Update. iOS 14.6 introduces support for several previously announced features. It lays the groundwork for the Apple Music Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos and Lossless Audio functionality, but these new Apple Music capabilities aren't expected to launch until June. The update also adds support for Apple Card Family for sharing Apple Cards, it introduces new Podcast subscription options, and it adds new AirTags capabilities, in addition to addressing several bugs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, a team of officers from the Special Cell, an elite branch of the Delhi Police in charge of investigating terrorism and organized crime in New Delhi descended on Twitter's offices in the city to "serve a notice" to Twitter's India head. Police also attempted to raid a Twitter office in Gurugram, a location that has been permanently closed, a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. The move came three days after Twitter put a "Manipulated Media" label on the tweets of half a dozen members of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, in which they had accused the opposition Congress party of scheming to damage Indian prime minister Narendra Modi for his handling of the second wave of India's coronavirus pandemic. In an image they circulated, they claimed that the Congress party was giving special medical favors to journalists affected by the pandemic among other things. AltNews, an Indian fact-checking website, found that the image was forged. (The Congress party has also filed a police complaint against Sambit Patra, the BJP spokesperson who initially shared the image.) On Friday, India's IT ministry sent a letter to the company asking it to remove the labels. Twitter did not.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: The German Parliament has adopted new legislation that will implement the EU Copyright Directive into local law. This includes the controversial Article 17 that, according to some, would lead to overbroad upload filters. To deal with these concerns, the German law prevents 'minor' and limited use of copyrighted content from being blocked automatically. These 'presumably authorized' uploads should not be blocked automatically if they qualify for all of the selection criteria below: 1. The upload should use less than 50% of the original copyrighted work2. The upload must use the copyrighted work in combination with other content3. The use should be 'minor' The term 'minor' applies to non-commercial uses of fewer than 15 seconds of video or audio, 160 characters of text, or 125 kB of graphics. If the use of a copyrighted work exceeds these 'minor' thresholds, it can still qualify as 'presumably authorized' when the uploader flags it as an exception.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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 that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory. WSJ: The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 "with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness." The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization's decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19's origins. Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment. One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Founder of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Ren Zhengfei has called on the company's staff to "dare to lead the world" in software as the company seeks growth beyond the hardware operations that U.S. sanctions have crippled. From a report: The internal memo seen by Reuters is the clearest evidence yet of the company's direction as it responds to the immense pressure sanctions have placed on the handset business that was at its core. Ren said in the memo the company was focusing on software because future development in the field is fundamentally "outside of U.S. control and we will have greater independence and autonomy." As it will be hard for Huawei to produce advanced hardware in the short term, it should focus on building software ecosystems, such as its HarmonyOS operating system, its cloud AI system Mindspore, and other IT products, the note said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.