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Almost half a decade after the first reports were published, mobile app developers are still exposing their users' personal information through abhorrently simple misconfigurations. From a report: In a report published last week, security firm Check Point said it found 23 Android applications that exposed the personal data of more than 100 million users through a variety of misconfigurations of third-party cloud services. This included developers who forgot to password-protect their backend databases and developers who left access tokens/keys inside their mobile application's source code for services such as cloud storage or push notifications. The Check Point team said it was able to use the information they found through a routine examination of 23 random applications and access the backend databases of 13 apps. In the exposed databases, researchers said they found information such as email addresses, passwords, private chats, location coordinates, user identifiers, screen recordings, social media credentials, and personal images.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For over an hour on Saturday, retired Microsoft OS developer David Plummer answered questions from his viewers on YouTube. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He began with an update on a project to test the performance of the same algorithm using 30 different programming languages, and soon tells the story of how he was inspired to apply for his first job at Microsoft after reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. I decided that this is where I wanted to work, because these guys sound like me, they act like me, they are what I want to be when I grow up. And holy cow, they pay them well, apparently. So I wrote to everybody that I could find that had a Microsoft email address, which was about four people, because I had a software product people had been regisering on the Amiga. And one guy, Alistair Banks... responded and he hooked me up with a hiring manager directly in Windows that had an open slot that was hiring... And a couple of interview slots later, I wound up as an intern at MS-DOS working for Ben Slivka. So you would think, "Oh, an intern on MS-DOS. What'd you do? Format disks?" No — it's amazing to me, actually. They give you as much work as they believe that you are capable of, and — they get you for all that you're worth, basically. They had me write a bunch of major features, like the Smart Drive cache for CD-ROMs was the first thing I wrote. Then I wrote DISKCOPY, making it work, single pass, bunch of features in MS-DOS. I re-wrote Setup to work on a single floppy disk by using deltas and patching in place, DOS 5 to turn it into DOS 6, something like, or maybe it was DOS 6 into 6.2... A whole bunch of features, within the span of, like, three months, which to me was fairly impressive at the time, I thought. And that only got me an interview... Later he says that he'd like to see most of 16-bit Windows and all of MS-DOS open sourced, along with some select application code from that era. I don't think there's any reason to hold back any of MS-DOS at this point. They have absolutely no reason to open source any of it, really — other than PR, because all it brings them is potential liability, complaints and angst, and probably nothing positive for putting the code out there and exposing it to ridicule. Because it's ancient code at this point. It's like, "Ha! Look what Microsoft did!" Well, yeah, I know Linux is cool now, but go look at Linux code from 1991 — and I worked on some of that code. Well, '93 I did. It's not the same as what you see today. So yeah, MS-DOS probably looks archaic — although it's super tight, it doesn't have many bugs. It's just written differently than you would write code today, because you're targetting something that is a very different CPU and memory system and PC as a whole, and it's so much more limited that everybody's sacred, every cycle matters. That kind of thing that you don't worry about now. But I'd still like to see all the code from back then that's not embarrassing released. And when asked what he misses most about being a Microsoft developer, he answers: I miss going for lunch with the people that I went for lunch with, and talking to the people that I worked with. Because they were a lot like me, they had similar interests, they had similar abilities, they were people like me. We went for lunch, we ate food, it was awesome, and then we talked about cool things. And we did that every day. And now I don't get to do that any more. I get to do it rarely, because I take guys out for lunch and stuff, but it's not the same. So that's really what I miss. And I miss somebody always feeding me something interesting to do. Because now I have to go out and find something that's interesting to do on my own. And I can't make everything be monetarily remunerative...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed higher-yield rice varieties that helped feed people around the world, died Saturday at a hospital in the southern city of Changsha, the Xinhua News agency reported. He was 90. Yuan spent his life researching rice and was a household name in China, known by the nickname "Father of Hybrid Rice." Worldwide, a fifth of all rice now comes from species created by hybrid rice following Yuan's breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004... It was in the 1970s when Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him a household name. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties — meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year, according to Xinhua... Yuan and his team worked with dozens of countries around the world to address issues of food security as well as malnutrition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. "There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this..." argues author Steven Johnson. In a recent 10,000-word excerpt from his new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (now also a four-part PBS/BBC series that's streaming online), Johnson tries to convey the magnitude of humanity's accomplishment:[I]t manifests in countless achievements, often quickly forgotten, sometimes literally invisible: the drinking water that's free of microorganisms, or the vaccine received in early childhood and never thought about again... The decade following the initial mass production of antibiotics marked the most extreme moment of life-span inequality globally. In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold. But the post-colonial era that followed would be characterized by an extraordinary rate of improvement across most of the developing world... The forces behind these trends are complex and multivariate. Some of them involve increasing standards of living and the decrease in famine, driven by the invention of artificial fertilizer and the "green revolution"; some of them involve imported medicines and infrastructure — antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water — that were developed earlier. But some of the most meaningful interventions came from within the Global South itself, including a remarkably simple but powerful technique called oral rehydration therapy... the treatment is almost maddeningly simple: give people lots of boiled water to drink, supplemented with sugar and salts.... The Lancet called it "potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century." As many as 50 million people are said to have died of cholera in the 19th century. In the first decades of the 21st century, fewer than 66,000 people were reported to have succumbed to the disease, on a planet with eight times the population... Of all the achievements that brought the great escape to the entire world, though, one stands out: the vanquishing of smallpox... One key factor was a scientific understanding about the virus itself... Scientific innovations also played a crucial role in the eradication projects... But another key breakthrough was the development of institutions like the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. themselves. Starting in the mid-1960s, the W.H.O. — led by a C.D.C. official, D.A. Henderson — worked in concert with hundreds of thousands of health workers, who oversaw surveillance and vaccinations in the more than 40 countries still suffering from smallpox outbreaks. The idea of an international body that could organize the activity of so many people over such a vast geography, and over so many separate jurisdictions, would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 19th century... The list of new ideas that propelled the great escape is long and varied. Some of them took the form of tangible objects: X-ray machines, antiretroviral drugs. Some of them were legal or institutional in nature: the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, seatbelt laws. Some of them were statistical breakthroughs: new ways of tracking data, like the invention of randomized controlled trials, which finally allowed us to determine empirically if new treatments worked as promised, or proved a causal link between cigarettes and cancer. Some of them were meta-innovations in the way that new treatments are discovered, like the development of "rational drug design," which finally moved drug development from the Fleming model of serendipitous discovery to a process built on the foundations of chemistry... The truth is the spike in global population has not been caused by some worldwide surge in fertility. What changed is people stopped dying... All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves. Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year author Sonia Shah predicted that after pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ended, "The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life." This week the Atlantic's technology staff writer is now suggesting that "As the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated..."As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it's getting easier to imagine that we're on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront. Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining...? A few signs that this movement could be upon us: Netflix reported its worst first quarter in eight years, after seeing historic growth in 2020. Tinder conceded that more than half of its Gen Z users have no intention of using its videochat features ever again. Clubhouse downloads dropped significantly in April, prompting worry that the app was always just "a temporary salve to being stuck inside." On The Cut, Safy-Hallan Farah has predicted a post-pandemic future in which our culture prioritizes, among other things, "earnestness," "communism," and "being extremely offline." The writer Luke Winkie forecasts a 10-week period of everyone abandoning the internet, adding that "offline is going to hit like a drug." Discourse's Patrick Redford put it best, writing that "the idea of further screen-only interaction with my friends and loved ones after a year overstuffed with them makes me want to toss my phone into the Pacific Ocean...." [B]ut it's hard to imagine that a Great Offlining is really in the cards. Instead, we could be heading for a Great Rebalancing, where we reconfigure how we do our work and how we organize our time on the internet. We've grown more aware of how we rely on one another — online as well as off — and of the tools we have or could build for responding to a crisis. The biggest tech companies' accrual of power remains one of the most serious problems of my lifetime, but I no longer talk about the internet itself as if it were an external and malignant force, now that I've lived in such intimate contact with it for so long.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Obipale quotes Gizmodo:Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is facing a million-dollar lawsuit for allegedly stealing the idea to create a Woz-branded tech school, according to a weekend Insider report. Connecticut business professor Ralph Reilly claims he and Wozniak agreed to establish a "tech university" and sealed the deal with an on-camera handshake in 2011. The educational platform, which was aimed at teaching adults computer and other technical skills, would lean heavily on Wozniak's name and reputation as a key engineering force in Apple's early days for branding purposes. However, the partnership never got off the ground, Reilly said in court filings reviewed by Gizmodo and Insider. Wozniak went on to launch virtually the same idea under the name Woz U in 2017 after partnering with the code-learning firm Coder Camps. In response, Reilly reached out to Wozniak via email asking to be a part of the venture, according to court filings. "It's exactly what I envisioned for Woz Institute of Technology when I first approached you with the idea," Reilly wrote at the time. "You are right on the mark," Wozniak responded. "You had the right idea... I doubt it would have happened without your initial idea!" But when Reilly pushed back asking for partial ownership in the project, he was met with radio silence. Reilly went on sue Wozniak for alleged intellectual property theft and copyright infringement. He's seeking at least $1 million in relief and damages. Other accusations Reilly's brought against Wozniak such as breach of contract have already been dismissed by a judge... For his part, Wozniak's team claims the two never reached a real deal on the proposal and the aforementioned on-camera handshake was just one of countless photo-ops he regularly conducts with fans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CalMatters writes:At least six Cal State campuses and nearly all of the University of California campuses have created esports programs since 2015, in which students host and compete in live tournaments, sometimes funded by corporate sponsors. Both Cal State Dominguez Hills and UC Irvine offer certificates in esports, which means students can earn credit for, yes, playing video games. Educators who support the trend point to the jobs available in gaming and other forms of digital media, while students say esports clubs and classes have given them another way to connect virtually during the pandemic. "Higher ed needs to evolve or die," said Dina Ibrahim, the academic advisor of the SF State esports athletic club and a professor of broadcast journalism. "We need to be teaching students relevant skills, that's going to get them jobs in a rapidly changing landscape...." Ibrahim shared the syllabus for her live stream broadcasting class, which she created after she noticed the effects esports and gaming were having on the field of digital media. In the course, students learn how to market a brand, monetize it, and develop live streamed events using Twitch — an entertainment site mainly aimed at gamers — and other platforms. For their final project, they help organize and market a live-streamed tournament featuring games like Overwatch, Valorant and League of Legends. "What I wanted to do was just provide a venue for students who are doing it anyway, to get credit," said Ibrahim. "And also not just focusing on the gaming community; it's really gaming, plus content creation." Those skills could help students land their first media jobs, said Mark "Garvey" Candella, director of student and education programs for Twitch... "All the skills that you're learning and using while you participate in gaming and esports are highly transferable and valuable skills in emerging new and digital media," said Candella, who has helped universities establish esports curriculum that uses gaming as a vehicle to teach branding, management and hardware and software knowledge. At Cal State Dominguez Hills, esports academic advisor Ruben Caputo says he's seen 37 students obtain internships based on their work in the program this past year alone... Like other collegiate esports programs, the one at Dominguez Hills started as an informal student club and is now a thriving organization that has obtained sponsorships with companies such as Microsoft and Level Up Esports Apparel. The university is building a new $750,000 esports lab in the campus library, according to the student-run newspaper, The Bulletin. It will be divided into three sections: a classroom, an incubator and a competition area with rows of PCs... More than 170 schools across the country have varsity esports teams, according to the National Association of Collegiate Esports, but the number with academic programs is much smaller — and students and professors involved in them say they still encounter skepticism from colleagues who see gaming as just a mind-numbing hobby. At UC Irvine, the first California college to pioneer an esports program, students can earn a continuing education certificate but there are no plans to develop a major in the field, said assistant director Kathy Chiang. "We don't think that there's enough content for that," she said... Ibrahim argues that gaming "is a huge, profit-churning component of the entertainment industry that can no longer be ignored," adding that gaming students "are getting skills that are going to prime you to work in a very significant industry that's only growing post pandemic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The space-news web site NASASpaceFlight writes:While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover's Gale Crater location. What's more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them. For decades, scientists theorized that organic compounds were almost certainly to have been preserved to some detectable degree in the Martian surface environment. In 2018, Curiosity's instruments allowed Eigenbrode et al. to conclusively prove that they were in fact there. In turn, if organic compounds were present at one time, their by-products — organic salts — would still be around as well, even given the harsh radiation environment of Mars compared to Earth. While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes. Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars' surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A U.S.-backed consortium beat out one financed by China in a closely watched telecommunications auction in Ethiopia — handing Washington a victory in its push to challenge Beijing's economic influence around the world," reports the Wall Street Journal:The East African country said Saturday it tapped a group of telecommunications companies led by the U.K.'s Vodafone Group PLC to build a nationwide, 5G-capable wireless network. The group had won financial backing for the multibillion-dollar project from a newly created U.S. foreign-aid agency. The agency offers low-interest loans, but the financing comes with a condition: the money won't be used to buy telecom equipment from China's Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. Washington considers both a spying threat, an accusation the companies deny... The telecom license auction in Ethiopia took on wider geopolitical significance amid heightened competition between the U.S. and China over key technological pursuits, from the rollout of 5G to chip manufacturing. "The U.S. and China are fighting a proxy war in Ethiopia for influence," said Zemedeneh Negatu, chairman of Fairfax Africa Fund LLC, a U.S.-based investment firm that focuses on Africa. After all but shutting out Huawei in the U.S., Washington has become more assertive about challenging Beijing's economic footprint overseas. It is using new financial tools to win influence and ensure that strategic assets in foreign countries stay in friendly hands... Backing the Vodafone bid was the International Development Finance Corp., or DFC. The U.S. government-funded agency was created in December 2019 with a goal of offering alternatives to cheap, Chinese financing for foreign infrastructure projects... U.S. law also prohibits its loan from being used to buy Huawei or ZTE equipment, though one person familiar with the matter said it is possible the Vodafone-led bid could still buy some Chinese gear because of the project's size and cost.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports:At least 15 people died when torrents of lava poured into villages after dark in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo destroying more than 500 homes, officials and survivors said Sunday. The eruption of Mount Nyiragongo on Saturday night sent about 5,000 people fleeing from the city of Goma across the nearby border into Rwanda, while another 25,000 others sought refuge to the north-west in Sake, the UN children's agency said Sunday... Goma ultimately was largely spared the mass destruction it suffered the last time the volcano erupted back in 2002. Hundreds died then and more than 100,000 people were left homeless. But in outlying villages closer to the volcano, Sunday was marked by grief and uncertainty... The air remained thick with smoke because of how many homes had caught fire from the lava... Residents said there was little warning before the eruption. Smoke rose from smouldering heaps of lava in the Buhene area near Goma on Sunday... Witnesses said lava had engulfed one highway connecting Goma with the city of Beni. However, the airport appeared to be spared the same fate as 2002 when lava flowed on to the runways.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Technological advances are driving rapid change in the global payments landscape," says the U.S. federal reserve, the country's central banking system. They announced this week that they're "studying these developments" and exploring ways that the central bank "might refine its role as a core payment services provider and as the issuing authority for U.S. currency." Slashdot reader clubalien shares Engadget's argument that the Reserve "took a step toward developing a digital currency as it announced plans to publish a research paper on the subject," seeking public comment on its pros and cons for payments, financial inclusion, data privacy, and information security. But the Federal Reserve emphasizes that "before making any decision on whether and how to move forward with a U.S. central bank digital currency," their paper "represents the beginning of what will be a thoughtful and deliberative process" that has more than one possible outcome. "Irrespective of the conclusion we ultimately reach, we expect to play a leading role in developing international standards for central bank digital currencies, engaging actively with central banks in other jurisdictions as well as regulators and supervisors here in the United States throughout that process." Their announcement notes America's central bank has already been exploring the benefits and risks of issuing a digital currency "for the past several years," but emphasizes they're exploring it "as a complement to, and not a replacement of" current systems. And the Reserve also state pointedly that "To date, cryptocurrencies have not served as a convenient way to make payments, given, among other factors, their swings in value," before the announcement switches its attention to stablecoins pegged to the value of a non-virtual currency. But even there, the interest seems to be as much regulatory as it is monetary. "As stablecoins' use increases, so must our attention to the appropriate regulatory and oversight framework. "This includes paying attention to private-sector payments innovators who are currently not within the traditional regulatory arrangements applied to banks, investment firms, and other financial intermediaries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader esm88 shares the BBC's story about a couple who experienced "a knock on the door from the police" investigating child abuse images posted online. "The couple insisted they had nothing to do with it. But the next few months were 'utter hell' as they attempted to clear their names," before their case was finally dropped in March:In February, a conversation with a friend who worked in cyber-security alerted them to the possibility that their router, supplied by their broadband provider Vodafone, might hold clues to what had happened. They had not changed the default passwords for either the router itself or the admin webpage, leaving it susceptible to brute force attacks. "We think of ourselves as competent users but we are not IT experts," said Matthew. "No-one told us to change the password and the setting up of the router didn't require us to go on to the admin menu, so we didn't. "It came with a password, so we plugged it in and didn't touch anything." Ken Munro, a security consultant with Pen Test Partners, told the BBC that it can take "a matter of minutes" for criminals to piggyback on insecure wireless connections... "So what I guess has happened here, is that the hacker has cracked the wi-fi password and then made changes to the router configuration, so their illicit activities on the internet appear to be coming from the innocent party." In March, when the couple's devices were returned and the case closed, the police officer assigned to liaise with them seemed to corroborate that unauthorised use of their wi-fi was to blame. But it couldn't be proved... The problem is industry-wide, points out Mr Munro. "Internet service providers have started to improve matters to make these attacks harder, by putting unique passwords on each router. However, it will take years for all of the offending routers to be replaced," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history..." reports the New York Times. There's already been some surprising results: Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation. "A paradigm shift is necessary," said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. "Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline...." The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs)... As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff... Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the "demographic time bomb" that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off... According to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100... The article asks us to imagine a world where now-empty homes become "a common eyesore," noting that in regional towns Korea , already "it's easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights: Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really improves on C++ in one particular area — it makes it much harder to bypass the checks in the compiler. And of course it solves the memory allocation problem in a near perfect way... if you wrote the same thing in C++, you could not be as sure, as compared to Rust, that you've gotten all your memory allocation and memory management stuff right. So Rust is an interesting language." Go and Julia: "I still think that Go is a very interesting language too. Of all the new languages, Go is probably the most Python-ic — or at least the general-purpose new languages. There's also Julia, which is sort of an interesting sort of take on something Python-like. It has enough details that look very similar to Python that then when you realize, 'Oh, but all the indexing is one-based and ranges are inclusive instead of exclusive,' you think, 'Argh!' Nobody should ever try to code in Julia and in Python on the same day. "My understanding is that Julia is sort of much more of a niche language, and if you're in that niche, it is superior because the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably never will. On the other hand, it is much more limited in other areas, and I wouldn't expect that anybody ever is going to write a web server in Julia and get a lot of mileage out of it. And I'm sure in five minutes that will be on Hacker News with a counterexample." TypeScript: "TypeScript is a great language. You might have noticed that in the past six or seven years, we've been adding optional static typing to Python, also known as gradual typing. I wasn't actually aware of TypeScript when we started that project, so I can't say that we were inspired by TypeScript initially. TypeScript, because it sort of jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon — and because Anders is a really smart guy — TypeScript did a few things that Python is still waiting to figure out. So nowadays, we definitely look at TypeScript for examples. We have a typing SIG where we discuss extensions of the typing syntax and semantics and the type system in general for Python, and we definitely sometimes propose new features because we know that certain features were also originally initially lacking in TypeScript, and then added to TypeScript based on user demand, and [became] very successful in TypeScript. And so now we can see we are in that same situation. "Because JavaScript and Python are relatively similar... Much more so than Python and say C++ or Rust or Java. So we are learning from TypeScript, and occasionally, from my conversations with Anders, it sounds like TypeScript is also learning from Python, just like JavaScript has learned from Python in a few areas."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: In the 1940s, IBM tried to market a typewriter capable of handling all 5,400 Chinese characters. The catch was that using it required memorizing a 4-digit code for each character. But a young woman named Lois Lew tackled the challenge and demoed the typewriter for the company in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. More than 70 years later, Lew, now in her 90s, told her remarkable story to Thomas S. Mullaney for Fast Company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Telegraph reports:Video-sharing platform YouTube has announced changes in its terms of services, which confer the company the right to monetise all content on its platform by placing advertisements along its videos from channels that are not covered by its partner programme. From June onwards, content created by those who have not enrolled for the YouTube partner programme will also run advertisements curated by YouTube. The creators/uploaders will not earn any revenue from these promotions... "You grant YouTube the right to monetise your content on the service (and such monetisation may include displaying ads on or within content or charging users a fee for access)," said the updated terms of service. "This agreement does not entitle you to any payments...." This was already in effect in the U.S. from November last year and will now be extended across other geographies effective from June. According to industry observers, the change in terms of service is motivated by the fast growing revenue channels from YouTube advertisements. For the March quarter of 2021, Alphabet, Google's parent, earned a revenue of $6 billion from YouTube advertising, posting a year on year growth of 49 per cent... Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer, Google explained to the analysts on what is driving such growth... "Advertisers are using YouTube now to reach the audiences they can't find anywhere else. And remember, more 18-to-49-year-olds are actually watching YouTube than all linear TV combined...." According to official figures, over 2 billion logged in users visit YouTube every month and every day people watch over a billion hours of video on the platform... "Today there are two models in place - either the subscriber pays or the advertiser pays. It is inevitable that all platforms will follow one or the other and viewers and content creators have to accept that," said a media and entertainment industry analyst requesting anonymity. YouTube reminds users that its Terms of Service also "already state that you cannot collect any information that might identify a person without their permission. While this has always included facial recognition information, the new Terms make that explicitly clear."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Ars Technica:Texas Governor Greg Abbott's office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars. Abbott's office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor's office spoke 31 more times. Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state's electrical grid. The PUC chair's diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages. After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Decades of research have consistently shown that extroverts have a significant happiness edge over introverts," writes Harvard professor/PhD social scientist Arthur C. Brooks. Extroverts "report higher levels of general well-being as well as more frequent moments of joy." "COVID-19, however, has given us extroverts our comeuppance..."Research published in March in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts... In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place. A side effect of shutting down the world was to turn it into Catland, at least for a little while. That gave the introverts a chance to lord their solitary comfort over the rest of us, for once... But the temporary shift has also created a kind of social-science field experiment, highlighting all the ways in which introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. If we take the lessons to heart, we can all benefit... Extroversion is highly rewarded in American society, and predicts a significant edge in earning power — on average, extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts. Extroverts attain other advantages in the workplace as well, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations. Some resent these patterns, and believe they show a lack of cultural depth. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain lists the many advances made by introverts — from the theory of gravity to Google — and argues that admiring and rewarding extroversion is not just unfair, but hinders progress... The pandemic's pause in life's rhythms has left society's dogs in a state of social withdrawal, explaining the current happiness inversion. But it also presents an opportunity for extroverts to cultivate more real friendships like introverts have... Beyond the specifics of introversion and extroversion, there is one important lesson in all this: Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to learn to be happier. Each group can teach the other a lesson that can improve all of our well-being. The article argues that while extroverts "should work on deep friendships, which introverts tend to have more of," introverts "should focus more on the future, like extroverts do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The official Python software package repository, PyPI, is getting flooded with spam packages..." Bleeping Computer reported Thursday. "Each of these packages is posted by a unique pseudonymous maintainer account, making it challenging for PyPI to remove the packages and spam accounts all at once..."PyPI is being flooded with spam packages named after popular movies in a style commonly associated with torrent or "warez" sites that provide pirated downloads: watch-(movie-name)-2021-full-online-movie-free-hd-... Although some of these packages are a few weeks old, BleepingComputer observed that spammers are continuing to add newer packages to PyPI... The web page for these bogus packages contain spam keywords and links to movie streaming sites, albeit of questionable legitimacy and legality... February of this year, PyPI had been flooded with bogus "Discord", "Google", and "Roblox" keygens in a massive spam attack, as reported by ZDNet. At the time, Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation had told ZDNet that the PyPI admins were working on addressing the spam attack, however, by the nature of pypi.org, anyone could publish to the repository, and such occurrences were common. Other than containing spam keywords and links to quasi-video streaming sites, these packages contain files with functional code and author information lifted from legitimate PyPI packages... As previously reported by BleepingComputer, malicious actors have combined code from legitimate packages with otherwise bogus or malicious packages to mask their footsteps, and make the detection of these packages a tad more challenging... In recent months, the attacks on open-source ecosystems like npm, RubyGems, and PyPI have escalated. Threat actors have been caught flooding software repositories with malware, malicious dependency confusion copycats, or simply vigilante packages to spread their message. As such, securing these repositories has turned into a whack-a-mole race between threat actors and repository maintainers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"60 seconds of rocket burn, straight into space," Virgin Galactic tweeted today, sharing a video of their historic launch. CNN reports:Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane, carrying two pilots, soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning. The success cues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its new headquarters in New Mexico. Spaceplane VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.45 miles, according to the company. The U.S. government recognizes the 50-mile mark as the edge of space. The company tweeted Saturday morning that the spaceflight carried technology experiments for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program... Saturday's flight comes after Virgin Galactic's last spaceflight attempt ended abruptly when the rocket engine that powers the space plane, called VSS Unity, failed to ignite, setting the company's testing schedule back by months. Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, has spent years pledging to take groups of customers on brief, scenic flights to suborbital space. But the company has faced a series of complications and delays, including a 2014 test flight crash that left one pilot dead. Nonetheless, Virgin Galactic has already sold tickets for $200,000 to $250,000 to more than 600 people. The company said it also collected data "to be used for the final two verification reports that are required as part of the current FAA commercial reusable spacecraft operator's license." Virgin Galactic's CEO called it "a major step forward for both Virgin Galactic and human spaceflight in New Mexico. Space travel is a bold and adventurous endeavor, and I am incredibly proud of our talented team for making the dream of private space travel a reality." In fact, this was the first ever spaceflight from Spaceport America, New Mexico, making it the third U.S. state to launch humans into space. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham said proudly in the company's statement that "After so many years and so much hard work, New Mexico has finally reached the stars." To commemorate the moment, the flight carried New Mexico's traditional green chile seeds, and featured the Zia Sun Symbol from the state flag on the outside of the spaceship. "The crew experienced extraordinary views of the bright, blue-rimmed curvature of the earth against the blackness of space," reads the statement from Virgin Galactic, adding that New Mexico's White Sands National Park "sparkled brilliantly below." And pilot-in-command CJ Sturckow now becomes the first person ever to have flown to space from three different states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider re-visits the story of why May 22nd is celebrated as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."Exactly 11 years ago today, a software programmer from Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, became well known in the crypto world after trading 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas. In honor of that purchase, the date is now celebrated in the crypto calendar as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." "It wasn't like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool," Hanyecz said in an interview with the New York Times in 2013... In 2018, he gave an interview to Cointelegraph. He said: "You know, I don't regret it. I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of bitcoin in that way, and people know about the pizza and it's an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] - "Oh my God, you spent all of that money!" So today Papa John's is giving away 10,000 slices of pizza to commemorate their place in history, another Business Insider article reports. Justin Falciola, SVP, chief insights & technology officer, tells them that "Celebrating National Bitcoin Pizza Day felt like a natural extension of Papa John's historical tie to the bitcoin story... It's great for consumer brands to show that they're aware of trends and emerging technologies. The benefit to this is meeting consumers where they are and continuing to build a meaningful connection." The link between pizza and bitcoin was further observed earlier in the week when crypto investor Anthony Pompliano launched a bitcoin-themed pizza service in the US that won't accept the digital asset as payment. As Insider's Shalini Nagarajan reported, the service will partner with independent pizzerias in 10 cities across the US, but won't accept bitcoin payments. All proceeds will go towards supporting research and development of bitcoin, Pompliano said. The article also points out that "Earlier this week, the crypto market lost 47% of its value in just seven days," and by Friday one bitcoin was worth $37,340. But another article notes that the 10,000 bitcoins traded for two Papa Johns pizzas would, at one point this year, have been worth $648,950,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: India's information technology (IT) ministry has written to all social media companies asking them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian variant" of the coronavirus, according to a letter issued on Friday which was seen by Reuters. The World Health Organization said on May 11 that the coronavirus variant B.1.617, first identified in India last year, was being classified as a variant of global concern. The Indian government a day later issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis, saying the WHO had classified the variant as just B.1.617. In a letter to social media companies on Friday, the IT ministry asked the companies to "remove all the content" that names or implies "Indian variant" of the coronavirus. "This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of Covid-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term 'Indian Variant' with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports," stated the letter, which is not public. A senior Indian government source told Reuters the notice was issued to send a message "loud and clear" that such mentions of "Indian variant" spread miscommunication and hurt the country's image.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: India's information technology (IT) ministry has written to all social media companies asking them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian variant" of the coronavirus, according to a letter issued on Friday which was seen by Reuters. The World Health Organization said on May 11 that the coronavirus variant B.1.617, first identified in India last year, was being classified as a variant of global concern. The Indian government a day later issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis, saying the WHO had classified the variant as just B.1.617. In a letter to social media companies on Friday, the IT ministry asked the companies to "remove all the content" that names or implies "Indian variant" of the coronavirus. "This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of Covid-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term 'Indian Variant' with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports," stated the letter, which is not public. A senior Indian government source told Reuters the notice was issued to send a message "loud and clear" that such mentions of "Indian variant" spread miscommunication and hurt the country's image.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid quotes The Hill: California is requiring ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to transition from gasoline to electric vehicles (EVs) in their networks by the end of this decade. The state's clean-air regulator on Thursday unanimously approved the Clean Miles Standard mandating that EVs account for 90 percent of ride-hailing vehicle miles traveled in California by 2030. The ride-share companies will have to begin the electrification of their fleets in 2023. The move by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is part of California's effort to phase out gas-powered vehicles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become carbon neutral by 2045. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) last year signed an executive order requiring all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state of nearly 40 million residents be zero-emission by 2035. "The transportation sector is responsible for nearly half of California's greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority of which come from light-duty vehicles," CARB Chair Liane M. Randolph said in a statement... Both Uber and Lyft have already committed to converting their fleets entirely to EVs by 2030 and have made efforts to help drivers make the shift. The companies have said, however, California needs to spend more money to help drivers afford the zero emissions vehicles, according to Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine:On 27 June 1918, two young German soldiers—one age 18, the other 17—died in Berlin from a new influenza strain that had emerged earlier that year. Their lungs ended up in the collection of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, where they rested, fixed in formalin, for 100 years. Now, researchers have managed to sequence large parts of the virus that infected the two men, giving a glimpse into the early days of the most devastating pandemic of the 20th century. The partial genomes hold some tantalizing clues that the infamous flu strain may have adapted to humans between the pandemic's first and second waves. The researchers also managed to sequence an entire genome of the pathogen from a young woman who died in Munich at an unknown time in 1918. It is only the third full genome of the virus that caused that pandemic and the first from outside North America, the authors write in a preprint posted on bioRxiv. "It's absolutely fantastic work," says Hendrik Poinar, who runs an ancient DNA lab at McMaster University. "The researchers have made reviving RNA viruses from archival material an achievable goal. Not long ago this was, like much ancient DNA work, a fantasy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Atlanta newspaper tells the story of 11-year-old Malachi Battle, who's been suspended from school for the rest of the year after being accused of "repeatedly trying to log into Zoom classes with threatening phrases" in lieu of his name (according to documents shared by the family's lawyers, in a story shared by Slashdot reader McGruber). The student says they're innocent:Malachi's lawyers say Gwinnett County Public Schools accused him based on an inaccurate list of students' Internet Protocol addresses from Zoom, a problem that could repeat elsewhere since the company's online sessions are replacing classrooms for millions of students amid the coronavirus pandemic... Chris Gilliard, a fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project of the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, had not heard of a situation similar to Malachi's but said "it's hugely unlikely that this is the first time" a student had been disciplined based on questionable data from Zoom... During the "Zoom bombing" attempts, Malachi had already logged into the classes under his regular name, according to his appeal. The school district retrieved from Zoom a list of the names and IP addresses in each waiting room, Malachi's legal team said. The Zoom bombers' public IP addresses matched Malachi's — but four other students who did not appear to be Zoom bombers were also listed as having Malachi's public IP address, an impossibility since they were not in the same house, said Scott Moulton, a Woodstock-based forensics expert hired by the attorney working on Malachi's case. Moulton said the school district's technology employee who investigated should have been able to tell that many of the IP addresses in the Zoom report were wrong. "I would have at least picked up the phone and called Zoom before hanging the life of an 11-year-old kid based on a log that looks like an error," Moulton said. The Zoom bombers' local IP addresses, which identify the exact device being used, did not match Malachi's, according to the log his attorneys provided. Nor did the local IP addresses match any of the possible sequences available under the configuration of the router in Malachi's house, Moulton said. There were no other routers or devices in the house that could have used those local IP addresses, Moulton said... Teachers also said Malachi's camera was on and he did not appear to be doing anything unusual... Teachers also said unknown people had tried to enter their virtual classes using false names before the day Malachi stayed home sick. Wild theory: pranksters spoofed Malachi's address.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: That's right, Microsoft's CLI management tool was the source of more than a third of critical security threats detected by Cisco in the second half of 2020, according to eSecurity Planet. Dual-use tool exploitation was the top threat category noted by Cisco, followed by ransomware, fileless malware, and credential dumping, with PowerShell a primary vector in those last two categories also. "Based on Cisco's research, PowerShell is the source of more than a third of critical threats," noted Gedeon Hombrebueno, Endpoint Security Product Manager for Cisco Secure. Cisco recommends a number of protection steps that are, of course, made easier with Cisco Secure Endpoint, and other EDR tools are effective against PowerShell exploits also. But there are a number of steps admins can (and should) take that are completely free, like preventing or restricting PowerShell execution in non-admin accounts, allowing execution of signed scripts only, and using Constrained Language mode.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Pardon me while I feed the meter on my critical safety device," quips a Hackaday article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo):If you ride a motorcycle, you may have noticed that the cost of airbag vests has dropped. In one case, something very different is going on here. As reported by Motherboard, you can pick up a KLIM Ai-1 for $400 but the airbag built into it will not function until unlocked with an additional purchase, and a big one at that. So do you really own the vest for $400...? The Klim airbag vest has two components that make it work. The vest itself is from Klim and costs $400 and arrives along with the airbag unit. But if you want it to actually detect an accident and inflate, you need load up a smartphone app and activate a small black box made by a different company: In&Motion. That requires your choice of another $400 payment or you can subscribe at $12 a month or $120 a year. If you fail to renew, the vest is essentially worthless. Hackaday notes it raises the question of what it means to own a piece of technology. "Do you own your cable modem or cell phone if you aren't allowed to open it up? Do you own a piece of software that wants to call home periodically and won't let you stop it?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quoting the Google Developers blog:Developers around the world are constantly creating open source tools and tutorials but have a hard time getting them discovered. The content published often spanned many different sites - from GitHub to Medium. Therefore we decided to create a space where we can highlight the best projects related to Google technologies in one place - introducing the Developer Library. The platform showcases blog posts and open source tools with easy-to-use navigation. Content is categorized by product areas; Machine Learning, Flutter, Firebase, Angular, Cloud, Android, with more to come. What makes the Developer Library unique is that each piece featured on the site is reviewed, in detail, by a team of Google experts for accuracy and relevancy, so you know when you view the content on the site it has the stamp of approval from Google. The "Dev Library" web site describes itself as "a showcase of what developers like you have built with Google technologies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Over the course of the last few months, some crypto-mining gangs have switched their modus operandi from attacking and hijacking unpatched servers to abusing the free tiers of cloud computing platforms. Gangs have been operating by registering accounts on selected platforms, signing up for a free tier, and running a cryptocurrency mining app on the provider's free tier infrastructure. After trial periods or free credits reach their limits, the groups register a new account and start from the first step, keeping the provider's servers at their upper usage limit and slowing down their normal operations... The list of services that have been abused this way includes the likes of GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft Azure, TravisCI, LayerCI, CircleCI, Render, CloudBees CodeShip, Sourcehut, and Okteto. GitLab and Sourcehut have published blog posts detailing their efforts to curtail the problem, with Sourcehut complaining cryptocurrency miners are "deliberately circumventing our abuse detection," which "exhausts our resources and leads to long build queues for normal users." In the article an engineer at CodeShip acknowledges "Our team has been swamped with dealing with this kind of stuff."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: In a national effort to get through to horny but vaccine-hesitant Americans, the White House announced Friday that it is joining forces with dating apps to encourage people to get their COVID-19 vaccines so that they can go forth and fuck freely this summer. Vaccinated users on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Badoo will have access to some premium features for free. OkCupid, Chispa, BLK, and Match are giving out a free "Boost" to those who've been vaccinated so that their profiles are more likely to be seen first. Plenty of Fish is also offering free credits to vaccinated members for its livestreaming feature. The dating apps will add badges or stickers that users can include on their profile to indicate that they've been vaccinated, as well as filters so that you only swipe on fellow vaccinated people. There will also be in-app links to find your closest vaccination site. "People who display their vaccination status are 14% more likely to get a match," White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said at a press conference, citing research from OkCupid. "We have finally found the one thing that makes us all more attractive." The new features are expected to launch on the apps in the next few weeks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mnemotronic writes: Igor Gamow, inventor of the "Gamow bag," a portable hyperbaric chamber for treatment of altitude or Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), has died. He is credited or co-credited with other inventions, including prosthetics for amputees. His career at the University of Colorado in Boulder was marred by accusations from multiple sources of sexual predation. He is one of only three tenured professors ever to be fired by CU Boulder since its founding in 1876.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter StellarThoughts writes: Scientists analyzed the second ever known interstellar object, a comet known as 2I/Borisov, and found some very unlikely results. Molecules of nickel and iron were being vaporized and drifting from the surface. Typically, nickel and iron vaporize when comets streak near the sun or aim directly for it, reaching temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And instead, this comet was a toasty -135 degrees F. Comparing data with 20 other comets of varying chemical composition within the solar system, they spewed nickel and iron much like 2I/Borisov. Scientists have a few theories, including: "One possibility is that harsh ultraviolet light from the sun might break apart nickel-containing molecules in the comets." Scientists believe these traces were missed for so long because of the supposed unlikelihood of gaseous metals at such a low temperature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Seagate has been working on dual-actuator hard drives -- drives with two independently controlled sets of read/write heads -- for several years. Its first production dual-actuator drive, the Mach.2, is now "available to select customers," meaning that enterprises can buy it directly from Seagate, but end-users are out of luck for now. Seagate lists the sustained, sequential transfer rate of the Mach.2 as up to 524MBps -- easily double that of a fast "normal" rust disk and edging into SATA SSD territory. The performance gains extend into random I/O territory as well, with 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS write and only 4.16 ms average latency. (Normal hard drives tend to be 100/150 IOPS and about the same average latency.) The added performance requires additional power; Mach.2 drives are rated for 7.2 W idle, while Seagate's standard Ironwolf line is rated at 5 W idle. It gets more difficult to compare loaded power consumption because Seagate specs the Mach.2 differently than the Ironwolf. The Mach.2's power consumption is explicitly rated for several random I/O scenarios, while the Ironwolf line is rated for an unhelpful "average operating power," which isn't defined in the data sheet. Still, if we assume -- probably not unreasonably -- a similar expansion of power consumption while under load, the Mach.2 represents an excellent choice for power efficiency since it offers roughly 200% of the performance of competing traditional drives at roughly 144% of the power budget. Particularly power-conscious users can also use Seagate's PowerBalance mode -- although that feature decreases sequential performance by 50% and random performance by 10%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On May 18, a South Korean politician put forward a bill that would stop esports tournament organizers and stakeholders from unilaterally terminating tournaments without first informing participants and other principles involved in the event. The Esports Observer reports: The bill, "The Heroes of the Storm Law," was put forward to parliament by Congressman Dong-su Yoo of the Democratic Party of Korea, as first reported in Naver Sports. As Yoo explained, the bill is to prevent a game publishers' unilateral termination of an esports competition, and would require the game publisher or distribution company (which owns the copyright of the game, or has the rights to operate an event) to inform involved parties several months in advance if they are planning to shut down an esports competition. The "HOTS Law" was inspired by an incident that traces back to December 2018, when Blizzard Entertainment shut down Heroes Global Championship (HGC) and Heroes of the Dorm. The decision was made by Blizzard President J. Allen Brack and infuriated many esports organizations, players, and coaches because they were not informed of the cancelation prior to the announcement. South Korean team Gen.G Esports was one of the best Heroes of The Storm teams at the time and were forced out of jobs because of it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is shutting down its standalone Prime Now delivery app, with its speedy two-hour delivery options moving exclusively into the company's main app and website, the company announced today. The standalone Prime Now app and website will be retired by the end of the year. The Verge reports: Originally launched in 2014, Prime Now was designed to offer deliveries of essential items within hours rather than days for Prime members. The service was initially available in just a small number of cities, but has since expanded to over 5,000 locations around the world, CNBC notes. Writing in a blog post, Amazon's vice president of grocery Stephenie Landry said shutting down the separate app will "make this experience even more seamless for customers." Two-hour delivery options from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods have been available on the main Amazon site and app in the US since 2019, but the company says third-party partners and local stores around the world will be moved onto its main service by the end of the year. These include local stores like Bartell's in Seattle, Morrisons in Leeds, or Monoprix in Paris.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israeli company ElectReon Wireless is building a kilometer-long stretch of electric vehicle-charging highway between Milan and Brescia in Italy. It's the first trial of its kind involving a highway and will help determine if the technology is ready for widespread adoption. Innovation Origins reports: In a nutshell, Electreon is building the infrastructure by installing copper coils under the asphalt. Energy is transferred directly and wirelessly to the vehicle's batteries while driving by means of magnetic induction. The system includes a control unit located on the side of the lane of the electrified road. A receiver is installed in the chassis of each electric vehicle that is participating in the trial. ElectReon is working with more than ten Italian partners to carry out the test. The most important of these is Brebemi, who operate the toll road. The goal of the pilot is to see how the technology will fare on toll roads. Brebemi is footing the bill for the pilot project while ElectReon will supply the wireless electric road system. "Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer," as the technology is called, will be tested on different types of electric vehicles in both stationary and dynamic environments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: [T]he Responsible Artificial Intelligence Institute (RAI) -- a non-profit developing governance tools to help usher in a new generation of trustworthy, safe, Responsible AIs -- hopes to offer a more standardized means of certifying that our next HAL won't murder the entire crew. In short they want to build "the world's first independent, accredited certification program of its kind." Think of the LEED green building certification system used in construction but with AI instead. Work towards this certification program began nearly half a decade ago alongside the founding of RAI itself, at the hands of Dr. Manoj Saxena, University of Texas Professor on Ethical AI Design, RAI Chairman and a man widely considered to be the "father" of IBM Watson, though his initial inspiration came even further back. Certifications are awarded in four levels -- basic, silver, gold, and platinum (sorry, no bronze) -- based on the AI's scores along the five OECD principles of Responsible AI: interpretability/explainability, bias/fairness, accountability, robustness against unwanted hacking or manipulation, and data quality/privacy. The certification is administered via questionnaire and a scan of the AI system. Developers must score 60 points to reach the base certification, 70 points for silver and so on, up to 90 points-plus for platinum status. [Mark Rolston, founder and CCO of argodesign] notes that design analysis will play an outsized role in the certification process. "Any company that is trying to figure out whether their AI is going to be trustworthy needs to first understand how they're constructing that AI within their overall business," he said. "And that requires a level of design analysis, both on the technical front and in terms of how they're interfacing with their users, which is the domain of design." RAI expects to find (and in some cases has already found) a number of willing entities from government, academia, enterprise corporations, or technology vendors for its services, though the two are remaining mum on specifics while the program is still in beta (until November 15th, at least). Saxena hopes that, like the LEED certification, RAI will eventually evolve into a universalized certification system for AI. He argues, it will help accelerate the development of future systems by eliminating much of the uncertainty and liability exposure today's developers -- and their harried compliance officers -- face while building public trust in the brand. "We're using standards from IEEE, we are looking at things that ISO is coming out with, we are looking at leading indicators from the European Union like GDPR, and now this recently announced algorithmic law," Saxena said. "We see ourselves as the 'do tank' that can operationalize those concepts and those think tank's work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around 4.5% of all bitcoin mining takes place in Iran, allowing the country to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies that can be used to buy imports and lessen the impact of sanctions, a new study has found. At its current level of mining, Iran's bitcoin production would amount to revenues close $1 billion a year, according to figures from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. Reuters reports: The United States imposes an almost total economic embargo on Iran, including a ban on all imports including those from the country's oil, banking and shipping sectors. While, exact figures are "very challenging to determine," Elliptic estimates are based on data collected from bitcoin miners by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance up to April 2020, and statements from Iran's state-controlled power generation company in January that up to 600 MW of electricity was being consumed by miners. "Iran has recognised that bitcoin mining represents an attractive opportunity for a sanctions-hit economy suffering from a shortage of hard cash, but with a surplus of oil and natural gas," the study finds. The electricity being used by miners in Iran would require the equivalent of around 10 million barrels of crude oil each year to generate, around 4% of total Iranian oil exports in 2020, according to the study. "The Iranian state is therefore effectively selling its energy reserves on the global markets, using the Bitcoin mining process to bypass trade embargoes," the study reads. "Iran-based miners are paid directly in Bitcoin, which can then be used to pay for imports - allowing sanctions on payments through Iranian financial institutions to be circumvented."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One month ago the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel when it was revealed the university researchers were trying to intentionally submit bugs into the kernel via new patches as "hypocrite commits" as part of a questionable research paper. Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches. Sent in on Thursday by Greg Kroah-Hartman was char/misc fixes for 5.13-rc3. While char/misc fixes at this mid-stage of the kernel cycle tend to not be too exciting, this pull request has the changes for addressing the patches from University of Minnesota researchers. [...] Going by the umn.edu Git activity that puts 37 patches as having been reverted with this pull request. The reverts span from ALSA to the media subsystem, networking, and other areas. That is 37 reverts out of 150+ patches from umn.edu developers over the years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lanodonal shares a report from the BBC: Hackers responsible for causing widespread disruption to the Irish health system have unexpectedly gifted it with the tool to help it recover. The Conti ransomware group was reportedly asking the Irish health service for $20 million to restore services after the "catastrophic hack." But now the criminals have handed over the software tool for free.The Irish government says it is testing the tool and insists it did not, and would not, be paying the hackers. Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) MicheÃl Martin said on Friday evening that getting the software tool was good, but that enormous work is still required to rebuild the system overall. Conti is still threatening to publish or sell data it has stolen unless a ransom is paid. On its darknet website, it told the Health Service Executive (HSE), which runs Ireland's healthcare system, that "we are providing the decryption tool for your network for free." "But you should understand that we will sell or publish a lot of private data if you will not connect us and try to resolve the situation." It was unclear why the hackers gave the tool -- known as a decryption key -- for free, said Health Minister Stephen Donnelly. In an alert made public Thursday by the American Hospital Association, the FBI said the Conti group has also hit at least 16 U.S. medical and first response networks in the past year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions. From a report: Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time. The finding -- which is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny -- has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention. [...] The study in Science Advances is the latest to highlight the "replication crisis" where results, mostly in social science and medicine, fail to hold up when other researchers try to repeat experiments. Following an influential paper in 2005 titled Why most published research findings are false, three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in the Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen has ambitions to deploy private security workers to the scene of disturbances at the request of app users, according to leaked internal Citizen documents and Citizen sources. The plans mark a dramatic expansion of Citizen's purview. It is currently an app where users report "incidents" in their neighborhoods and, based on those reports and police scanner transcriptions, the app sends "real-time safety alerts" to users about crime and other incidents happening near where a user is located. It is essentially a mapping app that allows users to both report and learn about crime (or what users of the app perceive to be crime) in their neighborhood. The introduction of in-person, private security forces drastically alters the service, and potential impact, that Citizen may offer in the future, and provides more context as to why a Citizen-branded vehicle has been spotted driving around Los Angeles. The news comes after Citizen offered a $30,000 bounty against a person it falsely accused of starting a wildfire. In short, the product, described as "security response" in internal emails, would have Citizen send a car with private security forces to an app user, according to the former employee. A private security company working with Citizen would provide the response staff, the former employee added. A second Citizen source confirmed this description of the service. Citizen has been actively testing the program, with what the company describes as quick response times and instant communication between Citizen and security partners, according to the emails. Currently, Citizen offers a subscription product called "Protect," which costs $19.99 per month. Protect sends a user's location to a Citizen employee when it's turned on, can stream video to a "Protect agent" when activated using a safeword, and is pitched to users as a "digital bodyguard." Protect also advertises "Instant emergency response to your exact location," and says "Live monitoring means you never have to walk alone." It is not clear if the private security response would be tied to Protect or another service. A Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard that "LAPS offers a personal rapid response service that we are testing internally with employees as a small test. For example, if someone would like an escort to walk them home late at night, they can request this service. We have spoken with various partners in designing this pilot project." They declined to answer other questions from Motherboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took his first turn in the witness chair this morning in what is probably the most anticipated testimony of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. But rather than a fiery condemnation of Epic's shenanigans and allegations, Cook offered a mild, carefully tended ignorance that left many of the lawsuit's key questions unanswered, or unanswerable. TechCrunch reports: The facade of innocent ignorance began when he was asked about Apple's R&D numbers -- $15-20 billion annually for the last three years. Specifically, he said that Apple couldn't estimate how much of that money was directed towards the App Store, because "we don't allocate like that," i.e. research budgets for individual products aren't broken out from the rest. [...] This was further demonstrated when Cook was asked about Apple's deal with Google that keeps the search engine as the default on iOS. Cook said he didn't remember the specific numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the same group of online extortionists blamed for striking the Irish health system last week have also hit at least 16 U.S. medical and first response networks in the past year. From a report: In an alert made public Thursday by the American Hospital Association, the FBI said the cybercriminals using the malicious software dubbed 'Conti' have targeted law enforcement, emergency medical services, dispatch centers, and municipalities. The alert did not name the victims or go into detail about the nature or severity of the breaches, saying only that they were among more than 400 organizations worldwide targeted by "Conti actors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, technology companies have imposed strict limits on who can fix chipped iPhones, broken game consoles and a wealth of other non-working (or defective) gadgets. From a report: Components are kept in short supply or simply not shared with independent shops to mend things like USB ports and batteries. After seeing these restrictions firsthand, Millman [anecdote in the story, who runs a repair shop in New York] joined a cadre of small business owners, hobbyists and activists pushing right-to-repair bills across the country. These measures are designed to undo rules businesses set to restrict repairs to authorized providers for a vast range of products from a Kindle to a wheelchair. Twenty-seven states considered such bills in 2021. More than half have already been voted down or dismissed, according to consumer groups tracking the proposals. To advocates of these bills, the current repair system is a major reason why we cycle through personal devices so quickly, furthering the environmental impact of these gadgets. [...] One reason these legislative efforts have failed is the opposition, which happens to sell boatloads of new devices every year. Microsoft's top lawyer advocated against a repair bill in its home state. Lobbyists for Google and Amazon.com swooped into Colorado this year to help quash a proposal. Trade groups representing Apple successfully buried a version in Nevada. Telecoms, home appliance firms and medical companies also opposed the measures, but few have the lobbying muscle and cash of these technology giants. While tech companies face high-profile scrutiny in Washington, they quietly wield power in statehouses to shape public policy and stamp out unwelcome laws.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For 10 years, Sci-Hub, the "Pirate Bay of Science" has hosted scientific papers free for anyone who wanted them. But it hasn't uploaded anything new since December 2020 and is facing prosecution in America. Now, determined activist archivists are working to make a decentralized backup of the website that can never be erased from the internet. From a report: Sci-Hub hosts 85 million articles and the Reddit community at /r/datahoarder wants to make sure they're free and available for everyone forever by decentralizing it because of recent legal challenges for the site, which was sued by science publishing giant Elsevier and owes it millions. "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," said a post on the /r/datahoarder subreddit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's software engineering head Craig Federighi had a tricky task in the Epic v. Apple trial: explaining why the Mac's security wasn't good enough for the iPhone. From a report: Mac computers have an official Apple App Store, but they also allow downloading software from the internet or a third-party store. Apple has never opened up iOS this way, but it's long touted the privacy and security of both platforms. Then Epic Games sued Apple to force its hand, saying that if an open model is good enough for macOS, Apple's claims about iOS ring hollow. On the stand yesterday, Federighi tried to resolve this problem by portraying iPhones and Macs as dramatically different devices -- and in the process, threw macOS under the bus. The second difference is data sensitivity. "iPhones are very attractive targets. They are very personal devices that are with you all the time. They have some of your most personal information -- of course your contacts, your photos, but also other things," he said. Mobile devices put a camera, microphone, and GPS tracker in your pocket. "All of these things make access or control of these devices potentially incredibly valuable to an attacker." That may undersell private interactions with Macs; Epic's counsel Yonatan Even noted that many telemedicine calls and other virtual interactions happen on desktop. Still, it's fair to say phones have become many people's all-purpose digital lockboxes. The third difference is more conceptual. Federighi basically says iOS users need to be more protected because the Mac is a specialist tool for people who know how to navigate the complexities of a powerful system, while the iPhone and iPad are -- literally -- for babies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior managers at Google artificial-intelligence unit DeepMind have been negotiating for years with the parent company for more autonomy, seeking an independent legal structure for the sensitive research they do. From a report: DeepMind told staff late last month that Google called off those talks, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The end of the long-running negotiations, which hasn't previously been reported, is the latest example of how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen their control over the study and advancement of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Google unveiled plans to double the size of its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence and to consolidate that research. [...] DeepMind's founders had sought, among other ideas, a legal structure used by nonprofit groups, reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldn't be controlled by a single corporate entity, according to people familiar with those plans. On a video call last month with DeepMind staff, co-founder Demis Hassabis said the unit's effort to negotiate a more autonomous corporate structure was over, according to people familiar with the matter. He also said DeepMind's AI research and its application would be reviewed by an ethics board staffed mostly by senior Google executives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's internet watchdog has named and shamed some of the country's most popular mobile applications, including the Chinese version of TikTok, Kuaishou, LinkedIn and 102 other apps, for the illegal collection and use of personal data. From a report: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said that after receiving complaints from users, it had found that 105 apps had violated several laws and had infringed personal information through illegal access, over-collection and excessive authorisation, according to a notice on its WeChat official account. Short video apps including Kuaishou and ByteDance-owned TikTok were included in the list as well as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and Bing, Tencent-owned music streaming service Kugou, and search giant Baidu's mobile browser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.