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Politico writes:President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered a sweeping overhaul of the federal government's approach to cybersecurity, from the software that agencies buy to the security measures that they use to block hackers, as his administration continues grappling with vulnerabilities exposed by a massive digital espionage campaign carried out by the Russian government... Biden's order requires agencies to encrypt their data, update plans for securely using cloud hosting services and enabling multi-factor authentication... It also creates a cyber incident review group, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates aviation, railroad and vehicle crashes, to improve the government's response to cyberattacks. And it sets the stage for requiring federal contractors to report data breaches and meet new software security standards. The directive, which sets deadlines for more than 50 different actions and reports, represents a wide-ranging attempt by the new Biden administration to close glaring cybersecurity gaps that it discovered upon taking office and prevent a repeat of Moscow's SolarWinds espionage operation, which breached nine federal agencies and roughly 100 companies... In addition to requiring agencies to deploy multi-factor authentication, the order requires them to install endpoint detection and response software, which generates warnings when it detects possible hacks. It also calls for agencies to redesign their networks using a philosophy known as zero-trust architecture, which assumes that hackers are inside a network and focuses on preventing them from jumping from one computer to another... Officials say current federal monitoring programs are outdated — they can only spot previously identified malware, and they can't protect increasingly pervasive cloud platforms... Biden's executive order attempts to prevent another SolarWinds by requiring information technology service providers to meet new security requirements in order to do business with the federal government. These contractors will need to alert the government if they are hacked and share information about the intrusion. The order "reflects a fundamental shift in our mindset from incident response to prevention, from talking about security to doing security," one senior administration official told reporters. The order notes "persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns" that "threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people's security and privacy," calling for "bold changes and significant investments." But the order also argues that "In the end, the trust we place in our digital infrastructure should be proportional to how trustworthy and transparent that infrastructure is..." warning that "The development of commercial software often lacks transparency, sufficient focus on the ability of the software to resist attack, and adequate controls to prevent tampering by malicious actors." To that end, the order also requires guidelines for a "Software Bill of Materials" or "SBOM," a "formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software... analogous to a list of ingredients on food packaging."[A]n SBOM allows the builder to make sure those components are up to date and to respond quickly to new vulnerabilities. Buyers can use an SBOM to perform vulnerability or license analysis, both of which can be used to evaluate risk in a product. Those who operate software can use SBOMs to quickly and easily determine whether they are at potential risk of a newly discovered vulnerability. A widely used, machine-readable SBOM format allows for greater benefits through automation and tool integration. The SBOMs gain greater value when collectively stored in a repository that can be easily queried by other applications and systems. Understanding the supply chain of software, obtaining an SBOM, and using it to analyze known vulnerabilities are crucial in managing risk. ZDNet reports that "the Linux and open-source community are already well on their way to meeting the demands of this new security order," citing security projects in both its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and from the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population." Bloomberg follows up:In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true. In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either. In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear. "Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated. "Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though halted last week by ransomware, America's largest gasoline pipeline announced Saturday that it's resumed normal operations, reports the Associated Press, "delivering fuel to its markets, including a large swath of the East Coast."Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline had begun the process of restarting the pipeline's operations on Wednesday evening, warning it could take several days for the supply chain to return to normal. "Since that time, we have returned the system to normal operations, delivering millions of gallons per hour to the markets we serve," Colonial Pipeline said in a tweet Saturday. Those markets include Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C., Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes:Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies for allowing their platforms to be abused and calls for them to be de-platformed. "Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who... are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the study said in its introduction. "Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies." Some misinformation spreaders complain they're being censored, NPR reports, adding that "After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals." But the study concludes anti-vaccine misinformation has already spread to an audience of 59 million followers. And yet "Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen... "Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delaware State University -- also known as DSU -- "is cancelling more than $700,000 in student loans for recent graduates hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic," reports CNN:DSU will cancel $730,655 for more than 220 people, the school announced this week... "Too many graduates across the country will leave their schools burdened by debt, making it difficult for them to rent an apartment, cover moving costs, or otherwise prepare for their new careers or graduate school," said Antonio Boyle, DSU's Vice President for strategic enrollment management. "While we know our efforts won't help with all of their obligations, we all felt it was essential to do our part." DSU is paying for the expenses through the federal American Rescue Plan for COVID-19 relief, university officials said in the statement Wednesday. The school says that the average eligible student will qualify for about $3,276 in debt relief, according to a Delaware newspaper. They quote a statement from the School President that "Our students don't just come here for a quality college experience. Most are trying to change the economic trajectory of their lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. "Our responsibility is to do everything we can to put them on the path."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Decades before "Zoom fatigue" broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind," argues Laine Nooney (in a condensed version of a chapter in the 2022 book Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.) Slashdot reader em1ly shares its observation that "There was really no precedent in our history of media interaction for what the combination of sitting and looking at a computer monitor did to the human body..."Forty years later, what started with simple complaints about tired eyes has become commonplace experience for anyone whose work or school life revolves around a screen. The aches and pains of computer use now play an outsized role in our physical (and increasingly, our mental) health, as the demands of remote work force us into constant accommodation. We stretch our wrists and adjust our screens, pour money into monitor arms and ergonomic chairs, even outfit our offices with motorized desks that can follow us from sitting to standing to sitting again. Entire industries have built their profits on our slowly curving backs, while physical therapists and chiropractors do their best to stem a tide of bodily dysfunction that none of us opted into. These are, at best, partial measures, and those who can't afford extensive medical interventions or pricey furniture remain cramped over coffee tables or fashioning makeshift laptop raisers. Our bodies, quite literally, were never meant to work this way... As both desktop computers and networked terminals proliferated in offices, schools, and homes over the 1980s, chronic pain became their unanticipated remainder: wrist pain, vision problems, and back soreness grew exponentially... To consider the history of computing through the lens of computer pain is to center bodies, users, and actions over and above hardware, software, and inventors. This perspective demands computer history to engage with a world beyond the charismatic object of computers themselves, with material culture, with design history, with workplace ethnography, with leisure studies... This is not the history of killer apps, wild hacks, and the coding wizards who stayed up late, but something far quieter and harder to trace, histories as intimate as they are "unhistoric": histories of habit, use, and making do. That pain in your neck, the numbness in your fingers, has a history far more widespread and impactful than any individual computer or computing innovator. No single computer changed the world, but computer pain has changed us all... [T]he next time you experience "tired eyes," wrists tingling, neck cramps, or even the twinge of text neck, let it serve as a denaturalizing reminder that the function of technology has never been to make our lives easier, but only to complicate us in new ways. Computer-related pain, and the astounding efforts humans went to (and continue to, go to), to alleviate it, manage it, and negotiate it, provide one thread through the question of how the computer became personal. The introduction of computers into everyday routines, both at work and at home, was a historic site of vast cultural anxiety around the body.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Which country will shoot the first movie in outer space? Russia is now "in a race with the United States to claim the achievement," reports NBC News. 36-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 37-year-old director Klim Shepenko will complete Russia's cosmonaut-training program, ultimately taking two of the three seats aboard the October launch of Russia's Soyuz mission to the International Space Station:The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced Thursday that it had selected its crew to headline the film, which will be called "Challenge..." Very little is known about the plot, which in many ways seems secondary to the spectacle. When Russia announced the project last year, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia's Channel One — which is working with Roscosmos on the film — said that it would not be a science fiction film, but a realistic depiction of near-term space travel. "It's a movie about how a person in no way connected with space exploration, due to various reasons and personal debt, ends up a month later in orbit," Ernst said in a September 2020 interview. "That's all I can tell you...." The decision to fill the October Soyuz flight with a movie crew comes at an uncertain time for Russia's space program... In October, NASA paid for its final flight aboard Soyuz... Russia is now left to look for other means to help subsidize launch costs. One of those obvious sources — beyond funding from the state television network Channel One — is space tourism. Another Soyuz will launch in December, and rather than fill those seats with Russian cosmonauts, Moscow announced Thursday that two Japanese space tourists will take the ride.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lambda School -- incubated at Y Combinator -- raised $130 million in venture funding from several investors including Google Ventures. Its original business model involved six-month virtual computer science courses for $30,000, remembers TechCrunch, "with the option of paying for the courses in installments based on a sliding scale that only kicks in after you land a job that makes at least $50,000." But this week three former students "filed lawsuits against the company in California, claiming misleading financial and educational practices."The suits — which are being brought by the nonprofit National Student Legal Defense Network on behalf of Linh Nguyen, Heather Nye and Jonathan Stickrod — go back to a period of between 2018 and 2020, and they focus on four basic claims. First, that Lambda School falsified and misrepresented job placement rates. Second, that Lambda School misrepresented the true nature of its financial interest in student success (specifically, there are question marks over how Lambda handles its Income-Share Agreement contracts and whether it benefits from those). Third, that it misrepresented and concealed a regulatory dispute in California that required the school to cease operations. And fourth, that it enrolled and provided educational services and signed Income-Share Agreement contracts in violation of that order... Some of the issues that are raised in the lawsuits have also been resolved since then. For example, the prominent display of over 80% of students finding jobs can no longer be found on the Lambda site, and in California you no longer get an Income-Share Agreement but a retail installment contract (similar but different). But as is the way of litigation, lawsuits based on past issues from people who were impacted by them when they were still active, are, in many ways, the next logical, unsurprising step.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports on misinformation that's further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas. At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not from Gaza. It was not even from this week. Instead, the video that he shared, which can be found on many YouTube channels and other video-hosting sites, was from 2018. And according to captions on older versions of the video, it showed militants firing rockets not from Gaza but from Syria or Libya. The video was just one piece of misinformation that has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media this week about the rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israeli military ground forces attacked Gaza early on Friday. The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region, with posts baselessly claiming early this week that Israeli soldiers had invaded Gaza, or that Palestinian mobs were about to rampage through sleepy Israeli suburbs. The lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The effect of the misinformation is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions between Israelis and Palestinians when suspicions and distrust have already run high.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cloudflare is testing out the possibility of security keys replacing one of the most irritating aspects of web browsing: the CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are used to catch out bots that are trawling websites and are often implemented to prevent online services from being abused. "CAPTCHAs are effectively businesses putting friction in front of their users, and as anyone who has managed a high-performing online business will tell you, it's not something you want to do unless you have no choice," Cloudflare says. To highlight the amount of time lost to these tests, Cloudflare said that based on calculations of an average of 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA, one test being performed every 10 days, and 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, roughly "500 human years [are] wasted every single day -- just for us to prove our humanity." On Thursday, Cloudflare research engineer Thibault Meunier said in a blog post that the company was "launching an experiment to end this madness" and get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The means to do so? Using security keys as a way to prove we are human. According to Meunier, Cloudflare is going to start with trusted security keys -- such as the YubiKey range, HyperFIDO keys, and Thetis FIDO U2F keys -- and use these physical authentication devices as a "cryptographic attestation of personhood." This is how it works: A user is challenged on a website, the user clicks a button along the lines of "I am human," and is then prompted to use a security device to prove themselves. A hardware security key is then plugged into their PC or tapped on a mobile device to provide a signature -- using wireless NFC in the latter example -- and a cryptographic attestation is then sent to the challenging website. Cloudflare says the test takes no more than three clicks and an average of five seconds -- potentially a vast improvement on the CAPTCHA's average of 32 seconds. You can access cloudflarechallenge.com to try out the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Canadian startup called Listing AI is using AI to quickly churn out computer-generated descriptions of real estate. All users need to do is give it some details about the home, and the AI does the rest. CNN reports: "L O V E L Y Oakland!" the house description began. It went on to give a slew of details about the 1,484 square-foot home -- light-filled, charming, Mediterranean-style, with a yard that "boasts lush front landscaping" -- and finished by describing the "cozy fireplace" and "rustic-chic" pressed tin ceiling in the living room. The results still need work: The real-life Oakland, California, home that fits with the above description (which my family is currently selling) actually has a pressed tin ceiling in the dining room, rather than the living room, for instance. The descriptions Listing AI created for me are not nearly as specific or well-written as the one crafted by our (human) realtor. And I had to provide the website with a lot of information about different rooms and features of the house and the outdoor landscaping -- a process that felt a bit like real-estate Mad Libs -- before the website was able to come up with several different descriptions. But the general coherence of the descriptions that Listing AI proposed within seconds of my submission provides yet another sign that AI is getting better at a task that was traditionally seen as uniquely human -- and shows how people may be able to work with the technology, rather than fearing it may replace us. It probably won't do all the work of writing a house description for you, but according to Listing AI co-founder Mustafa Al-Hayali, that's not the point. He hopes it will complete about 80% to 90% of the work for coming up with a home description, which may be completed by a realtor or a copy writer. "I don't believe it's meant to replace a person when it comes to completing a task, but it's supposed to make their job a whole lot easier," Al-Hayali told CNN Business. "It can generate ideas you can use." The information used in the app is processed by GPT-3, an AI model from nonprofit research company OpenAI. According to MIT Technology Review, GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solar panel installations in 2020 were up nearly 30 percent from the year before, breaking its own record for the number of solar panels installed in a year. ScienceAlert reports: The data, compiled by energy efficiency experts and reported in a CSIRO statement, come from Australia's Clean Energy Regulator, a national body tasked with reducing the country's carbon emissions and accelerating its use of clean energy. "Sustained low technology costs, increased work from home arrangements and a shift in household spending to home improvements during COVID-19 played a key role in the increase of rooftop solar PV systems under the SRES," said Clean Energy Regulator senior executive Mark Williamson, referring to a national scheme in Australia that allows homeowners and small businesses to recoup some of the costs of putting the panels on their roofs. Data used in the CSIRO analysis from Australia's federal Clean Energy Regulator showed that in 2020, a record-high 362,000 solar panels were installed and certified under the scheme for small-scale renewables.At the year's end, Australia had a total of over 2.68 million rooftop solar systems on homes - which means one in four households are now soaking up sunlight and converting it to electricity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet's surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars' atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the "seven minutes of terror" that NASA's Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars. A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA's Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1's landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent. China's Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet's composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Humanity's enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed. The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 meters since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometer by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications. The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth's surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract. The shrinking stratosphere is a stark signal of the climate emergency and the planetary-scale influence that humanity now exerts, according to Juan Anel, at the University of Vigo, Ourense in Spain and part of the research team. "It is shocking," he said. "This proves we are messing with the atmosphere up to 60 kilometers." The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reached its conclusions using the small set of satellite observations taken since the 1980s in combination with multiple climate models, which included the complex chemical interactions that occur in the atmosphere. "It may affect satellite trajectories, orbital life-times, and retrievals [...] the propagation of radio waves, and eventually the overall performance of the Global Positioning System and other space-based navigational systems," the researchers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn't appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can't naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel. The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has patented the ability to deliver 3D content to devices like the iPhone, iPad and Macs without requiring 3D glasses. From a report: The company recently filed a patent with the heading of "Split-screen driving of electronic device displays." And the tech it describes means that flat screens on smartphones and tablets will be able to show an image in 3D without the viewer having to wear any glasses or VR headset. The idea is that iPhone and iPad screen will be able to display two different images simultaneously, in a way that will fool your brain into seeing a three-dimensional image. Yes, there are already devices that do this, but the patent notes that existing methods are "problematic," stating: "it can be difficult to provide this type of content on a multi-function device such as a smartphone or a tablet without generating visible artifacts such as motion blur, luminance offsets, or other effects which can be unpleasant or even dizzying to a viewer." The rest of the patent application goes into a great deal of depth about how Apple plans to resolve these problems, and create a smooth 3D viewing experience on a flat screen without the need for glasses. This is gets hugely technical, but starts from the notion that the screen switches between left and right sides of an image via alternating pixel rows. The patent is also quite vague about how this will all work on a practical level. It doesn't state, for example, what angle viewers will need to position their iPhone or iPad at to get the effect. But it does show that Apple is serious about developing this tech, and has put some proper thought into it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A division of Toshiba said in a statement on Friday that its European business has been hit by a cyberattack by cyber criminal group DarkSide, which is the same group that the U.S. FBI blamed for the Colonial Pipeline attack. According to a Toshiba spokesperson, the attack occurred the evening of May 4. CNBC reports: The Toshiba unit, which sells self-checkout technology and point-of-sale systems to retailers, told CNBC that it has not paid a ransom. "They required money, but we didn't contact them and didn't pay any money," a spokesperson said. Toshiba Tec said that a "minimal" amount of work data was stolen in a ransomware attack. No leaks of the data have been detected so far and protective measures were put in place after the cyber-attack, the company said. Further reading: Darkside Ransomware Gang Says It Lost Control of Its Servers, Money a Day After Biden ThreatRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reuters reports that TSMC -- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the chip foundry making advanced processors for Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm -- is beefing up its plans to build factories in Arizona while turning away from an advanced plant in Europe. Last year, TSMC announced that it would invest $10-$12 billion to build a new 5 nm capable foundry near Phoenix, Arizona. According to Reuters' sources, TSMC officials are considering trebling the company's investment by building a $25 billion second factory capable of building 3 nm chips. More tentative plans are in the works for 2 nm foundries as the Phoenix campus grows over the next 10-15 years as well. TSMC's focus on the US rather than Europe may have a lot to do with the company's market -- in Q1 2021, 67 percent of its sales were in North America, 17 percent were in Asia Pacific, and only 6 percent came from Europe and the Middle East. The majority of TSMC's European clients are auto manufacturers who buy cheaper and less-advanced chips.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the creators of dogecoin has noted that he "didn't consider" the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency, which was initially created as a joke. The Independent reports: The comments from Billy Markus, one of the people who helped create dogecoin in the first place, when it was intended partly as a joke, came in response to a tweet from Elon Musk. Mr Musk had been attempting to clarify his position on cryptocurrency generally, in the wake of his statement about Tesla. "To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can't drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal," Mr Musk had written. In response, Mr Markus sent a crying face emoji, which he later clarified he had meant to indicate "aw man, you right, environment stuff." In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency. "i made doge in like 2 hours i didn't consider anything," he wrote. Dogecoin was created in 2013, in reference to the meme and to poke fun at the vast numbers of cryptocurrencies that had been launched. But Mr Markus helped build the technical foundations that allow it to practically work, too. Like bitcoin, dogecoin requires miners to undertake complex cryptographical puzzles to create new bitcoins. That system, known as proof-of-work, relies on large amounts of computing power that use considerable amounts of energy, much of which is generated from fossil fuels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sandbagger shares a report from The Register: FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser. Konstantin Darutkin, senior software engineer at FingerprintJS, said in a blog post that the company has dubbed the privacy vulnerability "scheme flooding." The name refers to abusing custom URL schemes, which make web links like "skype://" or "slack://" prompt the browser to open the associated application. "The scheme flooding vulnerability allows an attacker to determine which applications you have installed," explains Darutkin. "In order to generate a 32-bit cross-browser device identifier, a website can test a list of 32 popular applications and check if each is installed or not." Visiting the schemeflood.com site using a desktop (not mobile) browser and clicking on the demo will generate a flood of custom URL scheme requests using a pre-populated list of likely apps. A browser user would typically see a pop-up permission modal window that says something like, "Open Slack.app? A website wants to open this application. [canel] [Open Slack.app]." But in this case, the demo script just cancels if the app is present or reads the error as confirmation of the app's absence. It then displays the icon of the requested app if found, and moves on to its next query. The script uses each app result as a bit to calculate the identifier. The fact that the identifier remains consistent across different browsers means that cross-browser tracking is possible, which violates privacy expectations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious. From a report: Basically, the new thinking is that correcting fake news, disinformation, and horrible tweets at all is bad and makes everything worse. This is a "perverse downstream consequence for debunking," and is the exact title of MIT research published in the '2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.' The core takeaway is that "being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content." The MIT researchers' work is actually a continuation of their study into the effects of social media. This recent experiment started because the team had previously discovered something interesting about how people behave online. "In a recent paper published in Nature, we found that a simple accuracy nudge -- asking people to judge the accuracy of a random headline -- improved the quality of the news they shared afterward (by shifting their attention towards the concept of accuracy)," David Rand, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper told Motherboard in an email. "In the current study, we wanted to see whether a similar effect would happen if people who shared false news were directly corrected," he said. "Direct correction could be an even more powerful accuracy prime -- or, it could backfire by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on social factors (eg embarrassment) rather than accuracy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Indian government has told doctors to look out for signs of mucormycosis or "black fungus" in COVID-19 patients as hospitals report a rise in cases of the rare but potentially fatal infection. From a report: The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at the weekend that doctors treating COVID-19 patients, diabetics and those with compromised immune systems should watch for early symptoms including sinus pain or nasal blockage on one side of the face, one-sided headache, swelling or numbness, toothache and loosening of teeth. The disease, which can lead to blackening or discolouration over the nose, blurred or double vision, chest pain, breathing difficulties and coughing blood, is strongly linked to diabetes. And diabetes can in turn be exacerbated by steroids such as dexamethasone, used to treat severe COVID-19. "There have been cases reported in several other countries - including the UK, U.S., France, Austria, Brazil and Mexico, but the volume is much bigger in India," said David Denning, a professor at Britain's Manchester University and an expert at the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) charity. Further reading about the 'black fungus': BBC; NPR, the New York Times, and the Guardian.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: "In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems." The key innovation was an algorithm called PageRank, which ranked search results by calculating how relevant they were to a user's query on the basis of their links to other pages on the web. On the back of PageRank, Google became the gateway to the internet, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page built one of the biggest companies in the world. Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3 -- or a future version of them. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but what they do -- and how we interact with them. [Donald Metzler and his colleagues at Google Research] are interested in a search engine that behaves like a human expert. It should produce answers in natural language, synthesized from more than one document, and back up its answers with references to supporting evidence, as Wikipedia articles aim to do. Large language models get us part of the way there. Trained on most of the web and hundreds of books, GPT-3 draws information from multiple sources to answer questions in natural language. The problem is that it does not keep track of those sources and cannot provide evidence for its answers. There's no way to tell if GPT-3 is parroting trustworthy information or disinformation -- or simply spewing nonsense of its own making. Metzler and his colleagues call language models dilettantes -- "They are perceived to know a lot but their knowledge is skin deep." The solution, they claim, is to build and train future BERTs and GPT-3s to retain records of where their words come from. No such models are yet able to do this, but it is possible in principle, and there is early work in that direction. There have been decades of progress on different areas of search, from answering queries to summarizing documents to structuring information, says Ziqi Zhang at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies information retrieval on the web. But none of these technologies overhauled search because they each address specific problems and are not generalizable. The exciting premise of this paper is that large language models are able to do all these things at the same time, he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists -- including the world's foremost coronavirus researcher -- are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China's laboratories and agencies to "open their records" to independent analysis. UPDATE:The New York Times points out that at least one of the signers, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told them explicitly that "I think it is more likely than not that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an animal reservoir rather than a lab." And the Times notes that "Unlike other recent statements, the new letter did not come down in favor of one scenario or another." But Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, still points out to the Times that "the letter suggests a false equivalence between the lab escape and natural origin scenarios. To this day, no credible evidence has been presented to support the lab leak hypothesis, which remains grounded in speculation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists -- including the world's foremost coronavirus researcher -- are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China's laboratories and agencies to "open their records" to independent analysis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Balmuda, a Japanese design company known for its stylish appliances, has announced plans to make a smartphone. From a report: There aren't many details on the device itself yet, but it'll be a 5G handset that's expected to be released in November. SoftBank will sell it as a carrier model, while Balmuda will also offer an unlocked version. In its announcement, Balmuda notes that since the smartphone business is getting increasingly commoditized, the company wants to provide an experience that only it can. However, the actual manufacturing is out of Balmuda's wheelhouse, so it's partnering with Kyocera on the phone. Balmuda has a fairly limited product line for the home including air purifiers, humidifiers, lights, speakers, rice cookers, and so on. Its best known product is a toaster called "Balmuda The Toaster," which sells for 25,850 yen (about $235, though it's available in the US for $329 through the MoMa Design Store) and uses steam to ensure your shokupan, among other things, is perfectly crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. Bloomberg reported five years ago that it had become a cult hit in Japan with a three-month waiting time to buy one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The iconic spacefaring adventure "Mass Effect" is back today with "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition," a single, remastered version of all three games. From a report: There is no series like "Mass Effect" -- even when it comes to BioWare's other choice-driven RPGs like "Dragon Age." "Mass Effect" is a big ol' space adventure first and foremost, but it's also about loyalty, love, and tough calls. "Mass Effect" follows Commander Shepard -- a hero players can customize for looks and gender -- across three games as they wage war against a galactic threat known as the Reapers. Key choices carry through all three games, whether it's who survives, or who you ally yourself with. "Mass Effect" (2007) is a classic sci-fi thriller, where Shepard races to stop a turncoat operative hungry for power. "Mass Effect 2" (2010) is a miscreant adventure centered on building a ragtag squad, culminating in a final "suicide" mission where everyone's survival is on the line."Mass Effect 3" (2012) brings the trilogy to a close through a more somber, war-focused story about loss and consequence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A day after US President Joe Biden said the US plans to disrupt the hackers behind the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the operator of the Darkside ransomware said the group lost control of its web servers and some of the funds it made from ransom payments. From a report: "A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely: Blog. Payment server. CDN servers," said Darksupp, the operator of the Darkside ransomware, in a post spotted by Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Dmitry Smilyanets. "Now these servers are unavailable via SSH, and the hosting panels are blocked," said the Darkside operator while also complaining that the web hosting provider refused to cooperate. In addition, the Darkside operator also reported that cryptocurrency funds were also withdrawn from the gang's payment server, which was hosting ransom payments made by victims. The funds, which the Darkside gang was supposed to split between itself and its affiliates (the threat actors who breach networks and deploy the ransomware), were transferred to an unknown wallet, Darksupp said. This sudden development comes after US authorities announced their intention to go after the gang.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook lost a court fight over an initial order from a European Union privacy watchdog threatening its transfers of users' data across the Atlantic. From a report: An Irish court on Friday rejected the social network's challenge, saying it didn't establish "any basis" for calling into question the Irish Data Protection Commission's decision. The dispute is part of the fallout from July's shock decision at the EU's Court of Justice, which toppled the so-called Privacy Shield, an EU-approved trans-Atlantic transfer tool, over fears citizens' data isn't safe once shipped to the U.S. That EU court ruling was quickly followed by a preliminary order from the Irish authority telling Facebook it could no longer use an alternative tool, known as standard contractual clauses, to satisfy privacy rules when shipping data to the U.S.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is all set to attempt its first landing on another planet. After months in orbit around Mars, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft will deposit a rover called Zhurong on the surface of Mars. If successful, China will become the second country in history to explore the Martian surface with a rover. From a report: Tianwen-1 arrived at Mars on February 10, marking the arrival of China's first independent interplanetary mission. Since then, Tianwen-1 has been making close approaches to Mars every 49 hours as it flies in an elliptical orbit around the planet, each time taking high-resolution images of the landing site in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain that may once have been covered by an ancient Martian ocean. Chinese officials have said the landing attempt would take place in mid-to-late May, and a report on Twitter quoted Ye Peijian of the China Association for Science and Technology saying the landing will take place on May 14 at 7:11 p.m. ET. This aligns with estimates from amateur radio astronomers tracking the spacecraft. Mission scientists have been analyzing the topography and geology of Utopia Planitia to guide the spacecraft's landing attempt, and if they decide not to attempt a landing on May 14, they will have additional opportunities on May 16 and May 18. Named for an ancient Chinese fire god, the 529-pound Zhurong rover is similar in size to NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on the red planet in 2004 and sent back exciting images and data about the planet's surface conditions. China's rover could make additional important discoveries concerning water and past habitability on the planet, paving the way for future human missions to Mars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of U.S. senators are close to unveiling a $52-billion proposal Friday that would significantly boost U.S. semiconductor chip production and research over five years, Reuters reported today, citing sources briefed on the matter. From the report: Senators Mark Kelly, John Cornyn, Mark Warner and Tom Cotton have been negotiating a compromise measure to address the issue in the face of rising Chinese semiconductor production and shortages impacting automakers and other U.S. industries. Sources said there remains at least one sticking point over whether to include a provision on labor rates. The chips funding is expected to be included in a bill the Senate will take up next week to spend more than $110 billion on basic U.S. and advanced technology research to better compete with China. The proposal includes $49.5 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations to fund the chip provisions that were included in this year's National Defense Authorization Act, but which require a separate process to garner funding, according to a draft summary seen by Reuters. Democratic Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, also involved in the talks, said Thursday the Senate will take up the technology bill known as the Endless Frontier Act next week in a package of legislation that would include efforts to "invest in the American semiconductor industry, ensure that China pays a price for its predatory actions, and boost advanced manufacturing, innovation, and critical supply chains."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is swatting down criticisms about how it runs its App Store, arguing its policies are just like those of its peers, in a new letter to senators today. From a report: Apple is making similar arguments to Congress to the ones in its defense in the Epic Games lawsuit -- namely, that it has the right to run its marketplace as it sees fit, and that companies and consumers that don't like it have alternatives. The letter, addressed to the members of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that held a contentious hearing on app stores last month, contends that Spotify, Tile and Match Group misstated Apple's policies and are actually examples of companies that have been successful on iOS. "Rather than demonstrating a problem with competition, these witnesses -- representing companies that have thrived in Apple's ecosystem -- showcased how Apple and the iOS ecosystem foster competition," wrpte Apple chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer, in the letter to Congress. At points, Apple appears to overstate its case. In one part, it writes that Spotify is wrong to suggest that developers can't communicate with customers about alternate purchase options, saying "Apple simply says that developers cannot redirect customers who are in the App Store to leave the App Store and go elsewhere." However, this restriction doesn't just apply in the App Store, but anywhere within an iOS app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan reports that she has received a worrying email, ostensibly from Apple, revealing that law enforcement has demanded and gained access to her account data. The email indicates an FBI investigation although the precise nature of any inquiry remains unclear. From a report: In a message posted to her personal Twitter account, which is not currently subject to a suspension, Elbakyan draws attention to an email she received to one of her accounts operated by Google. "At first I thought it was spam and was about to delete the email, but it turned out to be about FBI requesting my data from Apple," she writes. As the email reveals, the apparent request to access the data from Elbakyan's account dates back more than two years but due to its nature, Apple has only just been able to reveal its existence to the Sci-Hub founder. What this is about, however, remains unclear but perhaps the more pressing question is whether it is a genuine email from Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for Record: Ireland's national health service, the Health Service Executive (HSE), temporarily shut down its IT systems today after suffering a ransomware attack overnight. The organization, which is in the mid of its COVID-19 vaccination program, said the attack did not impact its ability to provide urgent medical care but that some routine checks and services might be delayed or canceled. The HSE described the ransomware incident as "significant" and "human-operated," a term used to describe high-end sophisticated ransomware groups which orchestrate targeted attacks against carefully big organizations. In a morning radio show with public broadcaster RTE, HSE Chief Executive Paul Reid said the agency's IT teams are currently investigating the incident to find out its breadth. In a different radio show, Reid identified the ransomware gang behind the attack as Conti, a ransomware gang that started operating in the summer of 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big Tech is wading into a legal fight over visas in an attempt to preserve jobs of spouses of its foreign employees who are working in the U.S. From a report: Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more than 20 other companies and organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on Friday urged a federal court in Washington to reject a lawsuit seeking to eliminate work authorization for more than 90,000 H-4 visa holders. Eliminating H-4 visas "would not only siphon off U.S. gross domestic product, but gift that productivity -- and the innovation that comes with it -- to other nations, harming America's global economic competitiveness into the future," the companies and organizations said in a so-called friend-of-court brief. Under the Obama-era "H-4 Rule," the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2015 issued visas to spouses, more than 90% of whom are women, of more than 580,000 highly skilled workers who live in the U.S. on H-1B visas, according to the companies' filing. H-4 visas are critical to couples' decisions to come to the U.S., buy homes and raise children, they argue. The Trump administration attempted to dismantle the rule, but never introduced regulation to do so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: For decades, ExxonMobil has deployed Big Tobacco-like propaganda to downplay the gravity of the climate crisis, shift blame onto consumers and protect its own interests, according to a Harvard University study published Thursday. The peer-reviewed study found that Exxon (XOM) publicly equates demand for energy to an indefinite need for fossil fuels, casting the company as merely a passive supplier working to meet that demand. The study used machine learning and algorithms to uncover trends in more than 200 public and internal Exxon documents between 1972 and 2019. "These patterns mimic the tobacco industry's documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations -- which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms -- and onto consumers," the study concludes. "ExxonMobil has used language to subtly yet systematically frame public discourse." The Harvard study described "propaganda tactics of the fossil fuels industry" aimed at downplaying the climate crisis. For example, the authors said that after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil, the companies began saying in public documents such as paid "advertorials" that "climate change was a 'risk,' rather than a reality." Prior to the merger, "risk" of climate change was only mentioned once in Exxon's public communications, the study said. From 2000 and beyond, it appeared 46 times, the study found, adding that no other term was more associated with climate change in the company's public statements. The study notes that "this scientific hedging strategy" was repeatedly used by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. Moreover, the study found that Exxon has framed the debate around consumer energy "demand" to build a "fossil fuel savior" framework that "downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in and individualizes responsibility." [Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard research associate and one of the study's authors] told CNN Business this strategy is "effectively gaslighting the public into thinking there is no alternative, making the blame pill that Exxon is feeding the public easier to swallow." Supran said it's "certainly true" that modern society continues to rely mostly on fossil fuels, but added that Exxon's decades-long "disinformation" campaign is a central reason why it still does. "We are passively guilty, born into a fossil fuel society," he said. "But companies like Exxon are actively guilty for working to keep society the way it is."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Framework is one of an increasing number of companies working to address planned obsolescence by creating products that are incredibly customizable and easy to repair. Today, the company's Framework Laptop is up for preorder, starting at $999 and shipping at the end of July. TechCrunch reports: There are three basic configurations -- Base, Performance and Professional, ranging from $999 to $1,999, upgrading from an Intel Core i5, 8GB of Ram and 256GB of storage to a Core i7 and 32GB/1TB. Windows also gets upgraded from Home to Pro at the top level. At $749, the company offers a barebones shell, where users can plug in their own internals. Other upgrades include: "On top of that, the Framework Laptop is deeply customizable in unique ways. Our Expansion Card system lets you choose the ports you want and which side you want them on, selecting from four at a time of USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, MicroSD, ultra-fast 250GB and 1TB storage, and more. Magnetic-attach bezels are color-customizable to match your style, and the keyboard language can be swapped too."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from New Atlas: UCF researchers say they've trapped a sustained explosive detonation, fixed in place, for the first time, channeling its enormous power into thrust in a new oblique wave detonation engine that could propel an aircraft up to 17 times the speed of sound, potentially beating the scramjet as a hypersonic propulsion method. [...] Rotating detonation engines, in which the shockwaves from one detonation are tuned to trigger further detonations within a ring-shaped channel, were thought of as impossible to build right up until researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) went ahead and demonstrated a prototype last year in sustained operation. Due for testing in a rocket launch by around 2025, rotating detonation engines should be more efficient than pulse detonation engines simply because the combustion chamber doesn't need to be cleared out between detonations. Now, another team from UCF, including some of the same researchers that built the rotating detonation engine last year, says it's managed a world-first demonstration of an elusive third type of detonation engine that could out-punch them all, theoretically opening up a pathway to aircraft flying at speeds up to 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h), or 17 times the speedThe UCF team claims it has successfully stabilized a detonation wave under hypersonic flow conditions, keeping it in place rather than having it move upstream (where it could cause the fuel source to explode) or downstream (where it would lose its explosive advantage and fizzle out into a deflagration). [...] Where a detonation typically lasts only a matter of micro- or milliseconds, the UCF team managed to sustain this one experimentally until the fuel was turned off after around three seconds. That's long enough to prove the device works [...]. The paper is open-access at PNAS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 1949 letter by the physicist and Nobel laureate discusses bees, birds and whether new physics principles could come from studying animal senses. Phys.Org reports: The previously unpublished letter was shared with researchers by Judith Davys -- Einstein had addressed it to her late husband, radar researcher Glyn Davys. RMIT's Associate Professor Adrian Dyer has published significant studies into bees and is the lead author of the new paper on Einstein's letter, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A. Dyer said the letter shows how Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals. "Seven decades after Einstein proposed new physics might come from animal sensory perception, we're seeing discoveries that push our understanding about navigation and the fundamental principles of physics," he said. The letter also proves Einstein met with Nobel laurate Karl von Frisch, who was a leading bee and animal sensory researcher. In April 1949, von Frisch presented his research on how honeybees navigate more effectively using the polarization patterns of light scattered from the sky. The day after Einstein attended von Frisch's lecture, the two researchers shared a private meeting. Although this meeting wasn't formally documented, the recently discovered letter from Einstein provides insight into what they might have talked about. "It is thinkable that the investigation of the behavior of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known," Einstein wrote. Professor Andrew Greentree, a theoretical physicist at RMIT, said Einstein also suggested that for bees to extend our knowledge of physics, new types of behavior would need to be observed. "Remarkably, it is clear through his writing that Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals' behaviors," Greentree said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An EV motor has been developed that uses no magnets, thus lessening the United States' reliance on Chinese magnets (which make up 97% of the world's supply)," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77, adding: "I wonder what the motor's performance is like on high grade roads?" New Atlas reports: German company Mahle has just announced a new electric motor that sounds like it solves a lot of problems in a very tidy manner. The new Mahle design uses no magnets, instead using powered coils in its rotor. Unlike previous efforts, it transfers power to the spinning rotor using contactless induction -- so there are basically no wear surfaces. This should make it extremely durable -- not that electric motors have a reputation for needing much maintenance. The lack of expensive metals should make it cheaper to manufacture than typical permanent-magnet motors. Mahle says the ability to tune and change the parameters of the rotor's magnetism instead of being stuck with what a permanent magnet offers has allowed its engineers to achieve efficiencies above 95 percent right through the range of operating speeds -- "a level that has only been achieved by Formula E racing cars." It's also particularly efficient at high speeds, so it could help squeeze a few extra miles out of a battery in normal use. The company says it'll scale nicely from sizes relevant to compact cars up to commercial vehicles. "Our magnet-free motor can certainly be described as a breakthrough, because it provides several advantages that have not yet been combined in a product of this type," says Dr. Martin Berger, Mahle's VP of Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering. "As a result, we can offer our customers a product with outstanding efficiency at a comparatively low cost." Mass production is about two and a half years away, according to IEEE Spectrum, and Mahle has not yet nominated which auto manufacturers it's dealing with, but test samples are already starting to circulate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service on September 10, 2021. Existing deployments will be supported until that date, but as of May 10 this year, no new deployments or member creation is being supported. ZDNet reports: Microsoft's initial foray into Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) began in 2015 with an offering on the Etherum Platform with ConsenSys. In late January 2016, Microsoft made available a preview of a lab environment in Azure's DevTest Labs so that Blockchain-related services and partners can decouple the Blockchain technology from virtual machines. Microsoft's short-term goal for the Azure BaaS was to make available a certified blockchain marketplace. In the interim, the focus was to add blockchain partners of all kinds, rather than trying to pick a limited number of potential winners, officials said. Microsoft ended up fielding a preview of Azure BaaS, but lately had not done much to update the service. However, Microsoft's product page for Azure BaaS lists GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers. Microsoft's documentation suggests users start migrating to an alternative now. The recommended migration destination is ConsenSys Quorum Blockchain Service. Users also could opt to self-manage their blockhains using VMs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard. Senator Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens. Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time, but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD is interpreting the law and its purchases of data. "I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads. Wyden and his staff with appropriate security clearances are able to review classified responses, a Wyden aide told Motherboard. Wyden's office declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the DoD buying internet metadata. "Are any DoD components buying and using without a court order internet metadata, including 'netflow' and Domain Name System (DNS) records," the question read, and asked whether those records were about "domestic internet communications (where the sender and recipient are both U.S. IP addresses)" and "internet communications where one side of the communication is a U.S. IP address and the other side is located abroad." Netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. DNS records relate to when a user looks up a particular domain, and a system then converts that text into the specific IP address for a computer to understand; essentially a form of internet browsing history. Wyden's new letter to Austin urging the DoD to release that answer and others says "Information should only be classified if its unauthorized disclosure would cause damage to national security. The information provided by DoD in response to my questions does not meet that bar."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few days ago, Disney added a new anti-piracy patent to its arsenal: a blockchain-based distribution system that aims to make it harder for pirates to intercept films being distributed to movie theaters. TorrentFreak reports: The patent in question, titled "Blockchain configuration for secure content delivery," focuses on the distribution of content to movie theaters. This is a vulnerable process where pirates with the right connections can make copies during or after delivery. There are already several security mechanisms in place to prevent leaks from happening. Theaters have to adhere to strict rules, for example, and movies are all watermarked. Nevertheless, Disney believes that this isn't sufficient to stop pirates. "[S]uch security mechanisms are often reactive rather than preventative. For example, watermarking configurations insert a watermark into content to track piracy after the piracy has already occurred. As a result, current configurations do not adequately prevent piracy," the company explains. Disney argues that by implementing a secure blockchain-based system, the distribution process can be more tightly controlled. Among other things, it will make it impossible for a movie to be played before it arrives at the intended location. "In contrast with previous configurations, the blockchain configuration verifies that the content is received at the intended destination prior to allowing playback of the content at that destination," the patent reads. The system can also be configured with other anti-piracy features. For example, it can track the number of times a movie is played to prevent bad actors from showing it more often than they should. "Further, the blockchain configuration has an automated auditing mechanism that tracks playback of the content at the destination to ensure that the quantity of playbacks is accurately recorded. Therefore, piracy by the intended recipient, in the form of a greater quantity of actual playbacks than reported playbacks, is prevented.' While Disney regularly refers to movie theaters and projectors, it specifically states that the patent also applies to other 'playback environments.' For example, when Disney content is sent to other streaming providers, which will need the proper credentials to play the content. There are several possible practical implementations but whether Disney has concrete plans to use these in the real world is unknown.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk-founded SpaceX is in the process of rolling out Starlink as a satellite internet provider around the world. As part of a new partnership, Google Cloud data centers will be home to key Starlink infrastructure in order to let enterprise users better access key services. 9to5Google reports: This partnership starts with SpaceX building Starlink ground stations inside Google data centers for "secure, low-latency, and reliable delivery of data" from existing fiber networks to space and back to end users. There are currently over 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit, with more launching on a regular basis aboard Falcon 9 rockets. The end goal is to make cloud services, data, and applications available to businesses in rural or remote areas: "Connectivity from Starlink's constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites provides a path for these organizations to deliver data and applications to teams distributed across countries and continents, quickly and securely." The first Google Cloud and Starlink customers will be able to benefit from this partnership in the second half of 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer hardware maker MSI is warning gamers not to visit a website that's impersonating the brand and its graphics card overclocking software, Afterburner, to push malware. From a report: On Thursday, MSI published a press release warning of "a malicious software being disguised as the official MSI Afterburner." "The malicious software is being unlawfully hosted on a suspicious website impersonating as MSI's official website with the domain name https:// afterburner - msi [ . ] space," the company wrote. "MSI has no relation with this website or the aforementioned domain. [...] This webpage is hosting software which may contain virus, trojan, keylogger, or other type of malicious program that have been disguised to look like MSI Afterburner," the company added. "DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANY SOFTWARE FROM THIS WEBSITE."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter imcdona writes: VideoLan has released VLC Media Player 3.0.14 to fix an issue affecting Window users and causing the widely-used software's auto-updater not to launch the new version's installer automatically. "VLC users on Windows might encounter issues when trying to auto update VLC from version 3.0.12 and 3.0.13," VideoLan explained."We are publishing version 3.0.14 to address this problem for future updates." This issue is caused by a bug introduced in the automatic updater code of VLC 3.0.12 and fixed with the release of VLC 3.0.14. Because of this bug, VLC updates are downloaded to the users' computers, verified for integrity, but will not be installed as the auto-updater fails to launch the VLC 3.0.14 installer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Binance Holdings Ltd. is under investigation by the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange in U.S. efforts to root out illicit activity that's thrived in the red-hot but mostly unregulated market. As part of the inquiry, officials who probe money laundering and tax offenses have sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the probe is confidential. Led by Changpeng Zhao, a charismatic tech executive who relishes promoting tokens on Twitter and in media interviews, Binance has leap-frogged rivals since he co-founded it in 2017. The firm, like the industry it operates in, has succeeded largely outside the scope of government oversight. Binance is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and has an office in Singapore but says it lacks a single corporate headquarters. Chainalysis Inc., a blockchain forensics firm whose clients include U.S. federal agencies, concluded last year that among transactions that it examined, more funds tied to criminal activity flowed through Binance than any other crypto exchange. [...] While the Justice Department and IRS probe potential criminal violations, the specifics of what the agencies are examining couldn't be determined, and not all inquiries lead to allegations of wrongdoing. The officials involved include prosecutors within the Justice Department's bank integrity unit, which probes complex cases targeting financial firms, and investigators from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle. The scrutiny by IRS agents goes back months, with their questions signaling that they're reviewing both the conduct of Binance's customers and its employees, another person said. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has also been investigating Binance over whether it permitted Americans to make illegal trades, Bloomberg reported in March. In that case, authorities have been examining whether Binance let investors buy derivatives that are linked to digital tokens. U.S. residents are barred from purchasing such products unless the firms offering them are registered with the CFTC. [...] Along with the CFTC, the Justice Department is likely to examine steps that Binance has taken to keep U.S. residents off its exchange. One person familiar with Binance's operations said that prior to the establishment of Binance.US, Americans were advised to use a virtual proxy network, or VPN, to disguise their locations when seeking to access the exchange. "We take our legal obligations very seriously and engage with regulators and law enforcement in a collaborative fashion," Binance spokeswoman Jessica Jung said in an emailed statement. "We have worked hard to build a robust compliance program that incorporates anti-money laundering principles and tools used by financial institutions to detect and address suspicious activity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists studying a sample of oceanic crust retrieved from the Pacific seabed nearly a mile down have discovered traces of a rare isotope of plutonium, the deadly element that has been central to the atomic age. From a report: They say it was made in colliding stars and later rained down through Earth's atmosphere as cosmic dust millions of years ago. Their analysis opens a new window on the cosmos. "It's amazing that a few atoms on Earth can help us learn about where half of all the heavier elements in our universe are synthesized," said Anton Wallner, the paper's first author and a nuclear physicist. Dr. Wallner works at the Australian National University as well as the Helmholtz Center in Dresden, Germany. Dr. Wallner and his colleagues reported their findings in Science on Thursday. Plutonium has a bad reputation, one that is well-deserved. The radioactive element fueled the world's first nuclear test explosion as well as the bomb that leveled the Japanese city of Nagasaki during World War II. After the war, scientists found the health repercussions of plutonium to be particularly deadly. If inhaled or ingested in minute quantities, it could result in fatal cancers. Small amounts also pack a bigger punch than other nuclear fuels, a quality that aided the making of compact city busters that nuclear powers put atop their intercontinental missiles. The element is often considered artificial because it is so seldom found outside of human creations. In the periodic table, it is the last of 94 atoms characterized as naturally occurring. Traces of it can be found in uranium ores. Astrophysicists have long known that it's also spontaneously created in the universe. But they've had a hard time pinpointing any exact sites of its origin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spencer Silver, a research chemist at 3M who inadvertently created the not-too-sticky adhesive that allows Post-it Notes to be removed from surfaces as easily as they adhere to them, died on Saturday at his home in St. Paul, Minn. He was 80. From a report: His wife, Linda, said that he died after an episode of ventricular tachycardia, in which the heart beats faster than normal. Mr. Silver had a heart transplant 27 years ago. Since their introduction in 1980, Post-it Notes have become a ubiquitous office product, first in the form of little canary-yellow pads -- billions of which are sold annually -- and later also in different hues and sizes, some with much stickier adhesives. There are currently more than 3,000 Post-it Brand products globally. Dr. Silver worked in 3M's central research laboratory developing adhesives. In 1968, he was trying to create one that was so strong it could be used in aircraft construction. He failed in that goal. But during his experimentation, he invented something entirely different: an adhesive that stuck to surfaces, but that could be easily peeled off and was reusable. It was a solution to a problem that did not appear to exist, but Dr. Silver was certain it was a breakthrough. "I felt my adhesive was so obviously unique that I began to give seminars throughout 3M in the hope I would spark an idea among its product developers," he told Financial Times in 2010. Dr. Silver promoted his adhesive for several years within 3M, a company known for its innovative workplace, so assiduously that he became known as "Mr. Persistent."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a face mask or stay 6 feet away from others in most settings, whether outdoors or indoors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in updated public health guidance released Thursday. From a report: There are a handful of instances where people will still need to wear masks -- in a health-care setting, at a business that requires them -- even if they've had their final vaccine dose two or more weeks ago, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters at a press briefing. Fully vaccinated people will still need to wear masks on airplanes, buses, trains and other public transportation, she said. "Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing," Walensky said. "If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. We have all longed for this moment, when we can get back to some sense of normalcy." Walensky said unvaccinated people should still continue to wear masks, adding they remain at risk of mild or severe illness, death and risk spreading the disease to others. People with compromised immune systems should speak with their doctor before giving up their masks, she said. She added there is always a chance the CDC could change its guidance again if the pandemic worsens or additional variants emerge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.