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Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the refreshed 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with a notable change: The new iPad Pro models are powered by the M1 chip, the company's in-house chipset that also powers the current-generation MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. Is the company planning to put macOS on the iPad in the future or merge iPads and Macbooks? No remains the answer. Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak, in an interview: "There's two conflicting stories people like to tell about the iPad and Mac. On the one hand, people say that they are in conflict with each other. That somebody has to decide whether they want a Mac, or they want an iPad. Or people say that we're merging them into one: that there's really this grand conspiracy we have, to eliminate the two categories and make them one. And the reality is neither is true. We're quite proud of the fact that we work really, really hard to create the best products in their respective category." Hardware chief John Ternus, in the same interview: "We're pushing to make the best Mac we can make; we're pushing to make the best iPad we can make."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Wing Aviation is asking U.S. regulators to allow it to expand drone operations as a way to make more efficient deliveries controlled from a central command post. From a report: Wing wants to control its drone flights at a "central hub" from which the remote pilots can oversee operations without being in the aircraft's operating area, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday in a filing in the Federal Register. The company also wants to launch drones from multiple locations within an operating area, and get FAA permission to receive less frequent checks from the regulator, the filing said. The agency posted the requests without saying whether it will approve them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX has another successful human space launch to its credit, after a good takeoff and orbital delivery of its Crew Dragon spacecraft on Friday morning. From a report: The Dragon took off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:49 AM EDT (2:49 AM EDT). On board were four astronauts, including NASA's Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as JAXA's Akihiko Hoshide and the ESA's Thomas Pesquet. This was Spacex's second official astronaut delivery mission for NASA, after its Crew-1 operation last year. SpaceX has characterized the use of re-flown elements as arguably even safer than using new ones, with CEO Elon Musk noting that you wouldn't want to be on the "first flight of an airplane when it comes out of the factory" during a conversation with Xprize's Peter Diamandis on Thursday evening. Now that the Crew Dragon is in its target transfer orbit, itâ(TM)ll be making its way to rendezvous with the Space Station, which will take just under 24 hours. It'll be docking with the station early tomorrow morning, attaching to a docking port that was just cleared earlier this month when SpaceX's other Crew Dragon relocated to another port on the ISS earlier this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth's axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said. New submitter DickHodgman shares a report: In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions. The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995. Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A hospital employee in Italy has been accused of skipping work on full pay for 15 years, local media report. From a report: The man is alleged to have stopped turning up to work at the Ciaccio hospital in the southern city of Catanzaro in 2005. He is now being investigated for fraud, extortion and abuse of office, Italian news agency Ansa reports. He was reportedly paid $649,500 in total over the years he is thought not to have been working. Six managers at the hospital are also being investigated in connection with the alleged absenteeism. The arrests are the result of a lengthy police investigation into absenteeism and suspected fraud in the Italian public sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Met Office is working with Microsoft to build a weather forecasting supercomputer in the UK. From a report: They say it will provide more accurate weather forecasting and a better understanding of climate change. The UK government said in February 2020 it would invest $1.6bn in the project. It is expected to be one of the top 25 supercomputers in the world when it is up and running in the summer of 2022. Microsoft plans to update it over the next decade as computing improves. "This partnership is an impressive public investment in the basic and applied sciences of weather and climate," said Morgan O'Neill, assistant professor at Stanford University, who is independent of the project. "Such a major investment in a state-of-the-art weather and climate prediction system by the UK is great news globally, and I look forward to the scientific advances that will follow." The Met Office said the technology would increase their understanding of the weather -- and will allow people to better plan activities, prepare for inclement weather and get a better understanding of climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin and other digital currencies plunged on Friday as a proposed capital gains tax hike from U.S. President Joe Biden led to a wave of selling. From a report: At around 9:30 a.m. ET, bitcoin was down 7.6% in the last 24 hours at $49,000, according to Coin Metrics data. It's the first time bitcoin has traded below $50,000 since early March. Ether fell to $2,255, down 10.7%. XRP, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, plunged 16%. This wiped out more than $200 billion of value from the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from CoinMarketCap. "The market has run up quite a bit overall, and it's probably cooling off before the next leg up," Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email. President Biden is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans to 43.4%, including a surtax. That would be higher than the top federal tax rate on wage income. The new tax rate would apply to returns on assets held in taxable accounts and sold after more than a year. This triggered a sell-off in stock markets overnight, with all three major U.S. indexes ending Thursday's session in the red. Analysts said fears over Biden's capital gains tax proposal may be extending to crypto investors, who have had a great year with the price of bitcoin having climbed more than sixfold in the last 12 months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If possession is nine-tenths of the law, what happens when possession gets slippery? From a report: That's a question for a federal courtroom in Sacramento, California, where Apple is facing a putative class action over the way consumers can "buy" or "rent" movies, TV shows and other content in the iTunes Store. David Andino, the lead plaintiff in this case, argues the distinction is deceptive. He alleges Apple reserves the right to terminate access to what consumers have "purchased," and in fact, has done so on numerous occasions. This week, U.S. District Court Judge John Mendez made clear he isn't ready to buy into Apple's view of consumer expectations in the digital marketplace. "Apple contends that '[n]o reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely," writes Mendez. "But in common usage, the term 'buy' means to acquire possession over something. It seems plausible, at least at the motion to dismiss stage, that reasonable consumers would expect their access couldn't be revoked." Apple tried other ways to slip away from claims of false advertising and unfair competition. For example, it tried the time-tested approach of challenging Andino's "injury" to knock his potential standing as a plaintiff.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that final rules announced in December took effect on Wednesday allowing for small drones to fly over people and at night, a significant step toward their eventual use for widespread commercial deliveries. The effective date was delayed about a month during the change in administration. The FAA said its long-awaited rules for the drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, will address security concerns by requiring remote identification technology in most cases to enable their identification from the ground. Previously, small drone operations over people were limited to operations over people who were directly participating in the operation, located under a covered structure, or inside a stationary vehicle -- unless operators had obtained a waiver from the FAA. Drone manufacturers have 18 months to begin producing drones with Remote ID, and operators will have an additional year to provide Remote ID. The new rules eliminate requirements that drones be connected to the internet to transmit location data but do require that they broadcast remote ID messages via radio frequency broadcast. One change, since the rules were first proposed in 2019, requires that small drones not have any exposed rotating parts that would lacerate human skin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Poole, who founded controversial online community 4chan before joining Google in 2016, has left the search giant after jumping among several groups within the company, CNBC has learned. From the report: Poole's last official day at Google was April 13th, according to an internal repository viewed by CNBC, which described his last role as a product manager. Oftentimes, employee shares attached to hiring vest at the five-year mark, though it's unclear if that's a reason for Poole's departure now. Poole, who goes by the moniker "Moot," founded 4chan in 2003 at age 15. It grew into one of the most influential and controversial online communities to date. Rolling Stone famously called him a boy-genius and the "Mark Zuckerberg of the online underground." [...] Poole revealed in 2016 that he'd joined Google as a continuation of his work, and in a now-removed post, stated he'd use his "experience from a dozen years of building online communities" and "grow in ways one simply cannot on their own." He joined as product manager in the photos and streams unit, which oversaw social networking efforts under VP Bradley Horowitz at the time. That sparked speculation that the company hired him to help it revamp its social media ambitions, some of which aimed to compete with Facebook. Poole jumped between several different roles during his five years. At one point, he reportedly became a partner at Google's in-house start-up incubator, Area 120, which was just getting off the ground in 2016. He then became a product manager in Google's Maps division, according to Crunchbase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA successfully carried out a second flight on Mars on Thursday of its mini helicopter Ingenuity, a 52-second sortie that saw it climb to a height of 16 feet. Phys.Org reports: "So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analyzed tell us that the flight met expectations," said Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. "We have two flights of Mars under our belts, which means that there is still a lot to learn during this month of Ingenuity," Balaram said in a statement. The US space agency conducted the first flight of the four pound (1.8 kilogram) rotorcraft on Monday, the first powered flight ever on another planet. That time Ingenuity rose to a height of 10 feet and then touched down after 39.1 seconds. For the second flight, which lasted 51.9 seconds, Ingenuity climbed to 16 feet, hovered briefly, tilted and then accelerated sideways for seven feet. "The helicopter came to a stop, hovered in place, and made turns to point its camera in different directions," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot. "Then it headed back to the center of the airfield to land. "It sounds simple, but there are many unknowns regarding how to fly a helicopter on Mars."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The world's nuclear powers have detonated more than 500 nukes in the atmosphere. These explosions were tests, shows of force to rival nations, and proof that countries such as Russia, France, and the U.S. had mastered the science of the bomb. The world's honey has suffered for it. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, honey in the United States is full of fallout lingering from those atmospheric nuclear tests. For the study, researchers collected honey samples from more than 100 hives and soil samples from 110 locations across the Eastern United States. The scientists found elevated levels of cesium in both the soil and honey samples. "While most of the radiation produced by a nuclear weapon detonation decays within the first few days, one of the longest-lived and more abundant fission products is [cesium] , which has a radioactive half-life of 30.2 years," the study said. Previous research after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster identified elevated levels of cesium in European honey and pollen. The good news is that, according to researchers, most of this honey is probably safe for humans to consume. "While the concentrations of [cesium] we report in honey today are below the...dietary threshold level of concern observed by many countries, and not evidently dangerous for human consumption, the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production of [cesium]," they said. Interestingly, the researchers "also found an inverse relationship between the amount of potassium naturally occurring in soil and the amount of fallout found in honey," the report says. "Southern states contained three times the amount of fallout that the northern states did. Southern soil doesn't contain much potassium while soil in the north is rich with the stuff. While this honey is probably safe for human consumption, it may not be for the bees who generate it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from Ars Technica: Last Saturday, two men died when a Tesla Model S crashed into a tree in a residential neighborhood. Authorities said they found no one in the driver's seat -- one man was in the front passenger seat, while the other was in the back. That led to speculation that the car might have been under the control of Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system at the time of the crash. Elon Musk has tweeted that "data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled." Tesla defenders also insisted that Autopilot couldn't have been active because the technology doesn't operate unless someone is in the driver's seat. Consumer Reports decided to test this latter claim by seeing if it could get Autopilot to activate without anyone in the driver's seat. It turned out not to be very difficult. Sitting in the driver's seat, Consumer Reports' Jake Fisher enabled Autopilot and then used the speed dial on the steering wheel to bring the car to a stop. He then placed a weighted chain on the steering wheel (to simulate pressure from a driver's hands) and hopped into the passenger seat. From there, he could reach over and increase the speed using the speed dial. Autopilot won't function unless the driver's seatbelt is buckled, but it was also easy to defeat this check by threading the seatbelt behind the driver. "In our evaluation, the system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn't tell if there was a driver there at all," Fisher wrote in a post on the Consumer Reports website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Websites for customers of agricultural equipment maker John Deere contained vulnerabilities that could have allowed a remote attacker to harvest sensitive information on the company's customers including their names, physical addresses and information on the Deere equipment they own and operate, The Security Ledger reported. The researcher known as "Sick Codes" published two advisories on Thursday warning about the flaws in the myjohndeere.com website and the John Deere Operations Center website and mobile applications. In a conversation with Security Ledger, the researcher said that a he was able to use VINs (vehicle identification numbers) taken from a farm equipment auction site to identify the name and physical address of the owner. Furthermore, a flaw in the myjohndeere.com website could allow an unauthenticated user to carry out automated attacks against the site, possibly revealing all the user accounts for that site. Sick Codes disclosed both flaws to John Deere and also to the U.S. Government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors food and agriculture as a critical infrastructure sector. The information obtained from the John Deere websites, including customer names and addresses, could put the company afoul of data security laws like California's CCPA or the Personal Information Protection Act in Deere's home state of Illinois. However, the national security consequences of the company's leaky website could be far greater. Details on what model combines and other equipment is in use on what farm could be of very high value to an attacker, including nation-states interested in disrupting U.S. agricultural production at key junctures, such as during planting or harvest time. The consolidated nature of U.S. farming means that an attacker with knowledge of specific, Internet connected machinery in use by a small number of large-scale farming operations in the midwestern United States could launch targeted attacks on that equipment that could disrupt the entire U.S. food supply chain, researchers warn. The Agriculture sector and firms that supply it, like Deere, lag other industries in cyber security preparedness and resilience. A 2019 report (PDF) released by Department of Homeland Security concluded that the "adoption of advanced precision agriculture technology and farm information management systems in the crop and livestock sectors is introducing new vulnerabilities" (and that) "potential threats to precision agriculture were often not fully understood or were not being treated seriously enough by the front-line agriculture producers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a complaint filed on Tuesday, Apple user Matthew Price spent nearly $25,000 on content attached to his Apple ID, which was terminated by the company for unknown reasons. The lawsuit targets a clause in Apple's media services terms and conditions, which states a user with a terminated Apple ID cannot access media content that they've purchased. AppleInsider reports: "Apple's unlawful and unconscionable clause as a prohibited de facto liquidated damages provision which is triggered when Apple suspects its customers have breached its Terms and Conditions," the lawsuit reads. Additionally, the complaint claims that users with Apple devices will find their products "substantially diminished in value" if their Apple IDs are terminated, since they won't be able to access Apple services or purchased content. According to the complaint, the $25,000 worth of media included apps, in-app purchases, programs and platform extensions, and related services. The plaintiff also alleges that Apple prevents users from accessing unused funds attached to an Apple account. Price, for example, had about $7 in iTunes credit. The lawsuit doesn't specify why Price's account was terminated. However, it does claim that Apple shut down the Apple ID "without notice, explanation, policy or process." It goes on to claim that Apple's conduct -- specifically, the clause and resulting terminations -- are "unfair, unlawful, fraudulent, and illegal," and alleges that Apple is in violation of several consumer regulations in California. The lawsuit is seeking class action status, with a Nationwide Class consisting of people in the U.S. who have had their Apple IDs terminated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Today, with the expansion of its Galaxy Upcycling at Home service (which is still in beta), users in the U.S., U.K., and South Korea will get access to an experimental feature in the SmartThings app designed to give an old Galaxy handset new life as a useful smart home accessory. By using the app to reconfigure the device's battery usage and optimization, Samsung says even older devices will still be able to deliver good longevity, while the phone's usual assortment of wireless connectivity features makes it easy to pair the phone with other devices in your home. In the SmartThings app, Samsung provides a range of functions that an old smartphone can perform, including serving as a light sensor that can automatically turn on your smart lights or even your TV when it gets dark. Alternatively, you can also convert an old Galaxy phone into a sound sensor, with the phone using AI to detect common household noises like a barking dog, crying baby, or a knock on the door. In this way, you can also repurpose an old Samsung phone as a baby monitor of sorts [...]. And of course, even without much fiddling, upcycled Samsung phones can also be used as universal remotes, providing an easy way to control your streaming video box, play music on your smart speakers, control your lights, and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. Wired reports: A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher -- who said he went public after Facebook said it didn't think the weakness he found was "important" enough to be fixed -- fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next. "As you can see from the output log here, I'm getting a significant amount of results from them," the researcher said as the video showed the tool crunching the address list. "I've spent maybe $10 to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 [email] accounts." The researcher [...] said that Facebook Email Search exploited a front-end vulnerability that he reported to Facebook recently but that "they [Facebook] do not consider to be important enough to be patched." Earlier this year, Facebook had a similar vulnerability that was ultimately fixed. "This is essentially the exact same vulnerability," the researcher says. "And for some reason, despite me demonstrating this to Facebook and making them aware of it, they have told me directly that they will not be taking action against it." In a statement, Facebook said: "It appears that we erroneously closed out this bug bounty report before routing to the appropriate team. We appreciate the researcher sharing the information and are taking initial actions to mitigate this issue while we follow up to better understand their findings." A Facebook representative didn't respond to a question asking if the company told the researcher it didn't consider the vulnerability important enough to warrant a fix. The representative said Facebook engineers believe they have mitigated the leak by disabling the technique shown in the video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Over the past ten years, Firefox market share has decreased substantially and the web browser has lost its appeal and coolness. Seeing that, someone at Mozilla probably decided that the best way to entice people back is by changing its UI, thus Firefox has already seen quite a huge number of changes despite other major web browsers staying relatively the same in terms of their visuals; i.e. Google Chrome and Apple Safari look almost the same as they did a decade ago. The most substantial redesign, which is being prepared for the next release, called Proton, promises to drive most power users away because it's broken on a number of levels and makes using the browser a very unpleasant experience. So, what has changed: - The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming. It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A massive procession of gig workers riding e-bikes with food coolers strapped to their backs protested in streets of Manhattan on Wednesday with a growing set of grievances: wage theft, no access to bathrooms, arbitrary deactivations, rampant e-bike theft, and violent assault and murder while they're working. The mass demonstration was the second organized by Los Deliveristas Unidos, a growing grassroots campaign formed by immigrant Latinx delivery workers in New York City during the pandemic. The group formed last year to organize for better working conditions on food delivery apps, as New Yorkers laid off during the pandemic have turned to gig work. In recent weeks, workers have organized on Whatsapp and other apps to form self-defense groups. Organizers estimate more than 1,000 app-based delivery workers attended Wednesday's protest -- which took over Times Square. Delivery workers honked horns, waved Mexican and Guatemalan flags, and raised banners in Spanish that said "Don't buy bikes on the street without a receipt" and "United we are stronger." Wednesday's protest follows a growing trend of violent assaults and murders of app-based grocery and food delivery workers not just in New York City, but across the United States. In early April, a 29-year old e-bike delivery delivery worker, Francisco Villalva Vitinio, was shot and killed while delivering food in Manhattan. In Washington DC, two teenage girls allegedly carjacked and killed a 66-year old UberEats driver, Mohammed Anwar, in late March. Gig workers have also been killed in Illinois, Texas, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan over the past 18 months. The assaults and murders have forced e-bike delivery workers to do their jobs with the constant threat of violence and financial ruin looming over their heads. "Los Deliveristas Unidos is pushing for New York City Council to pass a package of laws that would improve their working conditions, including the right to use restaurants' bathroom (which have been closed to workers during the pandemic), insurance to protect workers from robberies, free personal protective equipment, access to a copy of their receipts to verify tip amounts, and limits to distance and weight on deliveries," adds Motherboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Code.org on Wednesday announced that dozens of industry, education, and state leaders are supporting a new Code.org AP CS A Java-focused curriculum for high school students, which will be available at no charge to all schools starting in the 2022-23 school year. "We are proud to have the following companies on our Industry Advisory Panel: Adobe, Amazon, Atlassian, Disney, Epic Games, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Instagram, Microsoft, Riot Games, Roblox, Snapchat, Spotify, Tesla, Unity, Vista Equity," Code.org tweeted. "A big thank you to the following colleges and universities on our Education Advisory Panel: @BowieState @UBuffalo @CarnegieMellon @Harvard @montgomerycoll @NCWIT @thisisUIC @Illinois_Alma @unlv @UNOmaha @SpelmanCollege @UT_Dallas @UW @westminsterpa." In an accompanying Medium post, Code.org explained: "This work is all made possible through a generous [$15 million] gift from Amazon Future Engineer." Despite having the support of some of the world's richest corporations and individuals whose goals the nonprofit helps advance, recently-released SBA records show that Code.org applied for and was approved for its second forgivable Federal Paycheck Protection Program loan in the amount of $1.9 million dollars on March 25, a month after Amazon and Code.org issued a joint press release announcing their $15 million plan to work on a new AP CS A curriculum and other initiatives. Amazon certainly has ambitious plans for influencing K-12 CS education. Last week, the company announced a 2021 goal to "reach 1.6 million underrepresented students globally through Amazon Future Engineer with real world-inspired virtual and hands-on computer science project learning." And an Amazon Future Engineer job listing for a U.S. Country Senior Manager notes the job will require working "with national and local educational non-profits and governmental entities such as BootUp, Project STEM, Code.org, and the US and State Departments of Education," as well as positioning Amazon "as subject matter experts on US computer science education, as well as the local education systems of our headquarter regions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to "quash a campaign of harassment" against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws to remove his tweets that were critical of the software. From a report: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of Miami University student Erik Johnson, who also does security research on the side, accused Proctorio of having "exploited the DMCA to undermine Johnson's commentary." Twitter hid three of Johnson's tweets after Proctorio filed a copyright takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, alleging that three of Johnson's tweets violated the company's copyright. Schools and universities have increasingly leaned on proctoring software during the pandemic to invigilate student exams, albeit virtually. Further reading: Proctorio Is Using Racist Algorithms To Detect Faces; Cheating-Detection Software Provokes 'School-Surveillance Revolt'; and Students Are Easily Cheating 'State-of-the-Art' Test Proctoring Tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jonesy16 writes: While users have long been able to run Linux GUI apps on Windows by installing a separate X Server, this marks the first time that native support is available through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Audio support and hardware acceleration are also provided, seemingly enabling a limitless set of use cases for those wishing to live the dual OS life. The change is identified in the recent preview build release along with a more in-depth discussion of the graphical subsystem now called WSLg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology giants led by Apple and Microsoft disclosed more than $100 billion in profit outside the U.S. in their last fiscal years, making them prime targets of President Joe Biden's proposals to boost taxes on earnings stashed overseas. From a report: The tax proposals, unveiled this month to help foot the bill for massive infrastructure plans, target common tactics used by U.S. multinationals such as stashing income-generating assets in low-tax offshore jurisdictions. The tech industry is particularly adept at shifting profits to tax-friendly locales because its main assets -- software code, patents and other intellectual property -- are relatively easy to move around compared to factories and other physical assets. Former President Donald Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was supposed to crack down on offshore tax maneuvering, but Republicans neutered the rules by adding extra deductions and other benefits, according to Andrew Silverman, a tax policy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Big Tech will find it harder to dodge Biden's plan because, if turned into law, it would close most of the loopholes left by Trump's 2017 legislation. The move threatens to leave the industry further at odds with Washington, where lawmakers are already scrutinizing the spread of misinformation on online platforms and regulators are embarking on antitrust investigations into large tech companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Google forgot to renew its Argentina domain, a user beat the firm into buying it for about $3.85. A report adds: However, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain. Users complained about the failure of the website for at least three hours, but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case, Kurona's (the protagonist in the story) posting on Twitter revealed the truth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The operators of the Darkside ransomware are expanding their extortion tactics with a new technique aimed at companies that are listed on NASDAQ or other stock exchanges. From a report: In a message posted on their dark web portal, the Darkside crew said it is willing to notify crooked market traders in advance so they can short a company's stock price before they list its name on their website as a victim. The Darkside crew believes that the negative impact of having a traded company's name listed on its website would be enough to cause its stock price to fall and for a crooked trader to make a profit. "While other ransomware families previously discussed how to leverage the effect of a publicly disclosed cyber attack on the stock market, they have never made it their official attack vector," Dmitry Smilyanets, threat intel analyst at Recorded Future, told The Record today. "DarkSide becomes the first ransomware variant to make it formal." However, the announcement also serves as an indirect method to threaten hacked companies that not paying the ransom demand could result in negative press large enough to impact their market listings and enough to push some victims into paying the asked ransom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ewhac writes: Firefox has long had a built-in PDF viewer, allowing users to view PDF files in the browser without having to install a third-party application. In addition to the other weird things PDF files can contain, one of them is JavaScript. Putatively offered as a way to create self-validating forms, this scripting capability has been abused over the decades in just about every way you can imagine. Firefox's built-in viewer, although it has apparently had the ability to execute embedded JS for some time, never turned that feature on, making it a safe(r) way to open PDFs... Until now. The newly released Firefox version 88 has flipped that switch, and will now blithely execute JavaScript embedded in PDFs. Firefox's main preferences dialog offers no control for turning this "feature" off. To turn off JavaScript execution in PDFs: Enter about:config in the address bar; click "I'll be careful." In the search box near the top, enter pdfjs.enableScripting. Change the setting to False. Close the page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is behind a newly discovered series of hacks against key targets in the U.S. government, private companies and the country's critical infrastructure, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Wednesday. From a report: The hack works by breaking into Pulse Secure, a program that businesses often use to let workers remotely connect to their offices. The company announced Tuesday how users can check to see if they were affected but said the software update to prevent the risk to users won't go out until May. The campaign is the third distinct and severe cyberespionage operation against the U.S. made public in recent months, stressing an already strained cybersecurity workforce. The U.S. government accused Russia in January of hacking nine government agencies via SolarWinds, a Texas software company widely used by American businesses and government agencies. In March, Microsoft blamed China for starting a free-for-all where scores of different hackers broke into organizations around the world through the Microsoft Exchange email program. In all three campaigns, the hackers first used those programs to hack into victims' computer networks, then created backdoors to spy on them for months, if not longer. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, said in a warning Tuesday evening the latest hacking campaign is currently "affecting U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and other private sector organizations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India reported a global record of more than 314,000 new infections Thursday as a grim coronavirus surge hits the world's second-most populous country, sending more and more sick people into a fragile health care system critically short of hospital beds and oxygen. From a report: The 314,835 infections added in the past 24 hours raise India's total past 15.9 million cases since the pandemic began. It's the second-highest total in the world next to the United States. India has nearly 1.4 billion people. A large number of hospitals are reporting acute shortages of beds and medicine and are running on dangerously low levels of oxygen. The New Delhi High Court on Wednesday ordered the government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals to save people's lives. "You can't have people die because there is no oxygen. Beg, borrow or steal, it is a national emergency," the judges said responding to a petition by a New Delhi hospital seeking its intervention. The government is rushing oxygen tankers to replenish supplies to hospitals. India's Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Thursday that "demand and supply is being monitored round the clock." He said in a tweet that to address the exponential spike in demand, the government has increased the quota of oxygen for the worst-hit seven states. The surge has brought pain, fear and agony to many lives in New Delhi and other cities. In scenes familiar across the country, ambulances are seen rushing from one hospital to another, trying to find an empty bed. Grieving relatives are lining up outside crematoriums where the arrival of dead bodies has jumped several times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court slashed the Federal Trade Commission's power to seek monetary awards in court, throwing out a legal tool the consumer-protection agency has used to collect billions of dollars over the past decade. From a report: The justices on Thursday unanimously said the FTC can't seek consumer redress when it invokes a provision that lets the agency go straight to federal court to try to stop an alleged fraud. The ruling is a triumph for business trade groups, which urged the court to curb the agency's powers. The FTC in 2012 dramatically ramped up its use of the decades-old provision to recoup money. The agency reported winning so-called restitution and disgorgement of almost $12 billion in 2016 alone, including $10 billion in a settlement with Volkswagen AG stemming from its diesel-emissions scandal. Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the FTC retains other avenues to get restitution for consumers, though those tools involve a more complicated process. "If the commission believes that authority too cumbersome or otherwise inadequate, it is, of course, free to ask Congress to grant it further remedial authority," Breyer wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04 with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK. Separately, Canonical and Microsoft have announced performance optimization and joint support for Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu. Canonical blog adds: "Native Active Directory integration and certified Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu are top priorities for our enterprise customers." said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. "For developers and innovators, Ubuntu 21.04 delivers Wayland and Flutter for smoother graphics and clean, beautiful, design-led cross-platform development." You can read the full list of new features and changelog here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm writes: Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former U.S. President Donald Trump once called "the eighth wonder of the world." Under a deal with the state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000. The Foxconn-Wisconsin deal was first announced to great fanfare at the White House in July 2017, with Trump boasting of it as an example of how his "America first" agenda could revive U.S. tech manufacturing. For Foxconn, the investment promise was an opportunity for its charismatic founder and then-chairman, Terry Gou, to build goodwill at a moment when Trump's trade policies threatened the company's cash cow: building Apple's iPhones in China for export to America.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a follow-up to a story previously reported, Slashdot reader Turkinolith shares a report from Teslarati: In the latest trials and tribulations of a SpaceX Starlink competitor that went bankrupt after spending $3 billion to launch just 74 small internet satellites, it appears that OneWeb knowingly misled both media and US regulators over a claimed 'near-miss' with a Starlink satellite. Back on April 9th, OneWeb went public with claims that SpaceX had mishandled its response to a routine satellite collision avoidance warning from the US military, which monitors the location of satellites and space debris. According to OneWeb government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin, SpaceX disabled an automated system designed to detect and automatically command Starlink satellite collision avoidance maneuvers to let OneWeb move its satellite instead. McLaughlin also stated that "Coordination is the issue -- it is not sufficient to say 'I've got an automated system.'" He also recently criticized the maneuverability of Starlink satellites, claiming that "Starlink's engineers said they couldn't do anything to avoid a collision and switched off the collision avoidance system so OneWeb could maneuver around the Starlink satellite without interference." As it turns out, OneWeb's "near-miss" appears to have been a farce and the company scrambled to promise to retract those statements in an April 20th meeting with the FCC and SpaceX. In an apparent attempt to capitalize on vague fears of "space debris" and satellite collisions, OneWeb -- or perhaps just McLaughlin -- took it upon itself to consciously misconstrue a routine, professional process of collision-avoidance coordination between OneWeb and SpaceX. McLaughlin ran a gauntlet of media outlets to drag SpaceX through the mud and criticize both the company's technology and response, ultimately claiming that SpaceX's Starlink satellite was incapable of maneuvering out of the way. Instead, according to a precise, evidenced timeline of events presented by SpaceX to the FCC, the coordination was routine, uneventful, and entirely successful. OneWeb itself explicitly asked SpaceX to disable its autonomous collision avoidance software and allow the company to maneuver its own satellite out of the way after SpaceX made it clear that the Starlink spacecraft could also manage the task. The event was neither "urgent" or a "close call," as OneWeb and media outlets later claimed. SpaceX says it has been coordinating similar avoidance maneuvers with OneWeb since March 2020. Most damningly, SpaceX says that immediately after OneWeb disseminated misleading quotes about the event to the media, "OneWeb met with [FCC] staff and Commissioners [to demand that] unilateral conditions [be] placed on SpaceX's operations." Those conditions could have actually made coordination harder, "demonstrating more of a concern with limiting [OneWeb's] competitors than with a genuine concern for space safety." Crucially, despite lobbying to restrict its competitors, "OneWeb [has] argued forcefully that [it] should be exempt from Commission rules for orbital debris mitigation due to their status as non-U.S. operators." In simple terms, OneWeb is trying to exploit the FCC to suppress its competition while letting it roam free of the exact same regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In what may be the largest interspecies communication effort in history, scientists plan to use machine learning to try to decode what Sperm whales say to one another. National Geographic reports: [Sperm whales "speak" in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. Shane Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica for over thirteen years, using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales.] On Monday, a team of scientists announced that they have embarked on a five-year odyssey to build on Gero's work with a cutting-edge research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to one another. Such an attempt would have seemed folly even just a few years ago. But this effort won't rely solely on Gero. The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean heavily on advances in artificial intelligence, which can now translate one human language to another without help from a Rosetta Stone, or key. The quest, dubbed Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history. Already, these scientists have been at work building specialized video and audio recording devices. They aim to capture millions of whale codas and analyze them. The hope is to expose the underlying architecture of whale chatter: What units make up whale communication? Is there grammar, syntax, or anything analogous to words and sentences? These experts will track how whales behave when making, or hearing, clicks. And using breakthroughs in natural language processing -- the branch of artificial intelligence that helps Alexa and Siri respond to voice commands -- researchers will attempt to interpret this information. Nothing like this has ever been attempted. [T]he goal isn't to get whales to understand humans. It's to understand what sperm whales say to one another as they go about their lives in the wild.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Texas will add a record 10 GW of utility-scale solar capacity by the end of 2022, compared with 3.2 GW in California. A third of all U.S. utility-scale solar capacity planned to come online in the next two years (30 GW) will be in Texas. Reuters reports: California currently has the most installed utility-scale solar capacity of any state - about 16 gigawatts (GW). One gigawatt can power about 1 million U.S. homes. But since solar power is on only about a third of the time, a gigawatt of solar can only power about 330,000 homes. Texas added 2.5 GW of solar capacity in 2020, and EIA said it expected the state to add another 4.6 GW in 2021 and 5.4 GW in 2022, bringing the state's total to 14.9 GW. Solar is expected to make up the largest share of capacity additions in Texas between 2020 and 2022, with almost half of the additions, compared with 35% for wind and 13% for gas, according to EIA projections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg article, written by Joe Deaux: As David DeYoung, then a director of business technologies at Alcoa, walked into Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in September 2015, he knew that the stakes were high. DeYoung led a group of engineers who'd spent decades pursuing the holy grail for the notoriously dirty aluminum industry: a way to smelt the metal without producing any direct carbon emissions. Apple, which Harbor Intelligence analyst Jorge Vazquez estimates uses almost 15,000 metric tons of aluminum annually for its electronics gear, had invited DeYoung to explain a potentially revolutionary carbonless manufacturing process for aluminum that his group was developing. Alcoa was on the verge of ending the DeYoung team's yearslong search. To make the tension even worse, moments before DeYoung stepped into a roundtable with Apple engineers, he received word Alcoa was splitting into two publicly traded companies -- casting another cloud on his unit's project. So Apple's interest in reducing the carbon footprint of its metal casings looked to be key to saving the funding. But it wasn't until later in 2015 that the payoff from that meeting came, with help from an unexpected source. That's when Vincent Christ, a manufacturing information technology expert from Rio Tinto Group Plc, flew to Cupertino for a similar visit. The London-based company, one of Alcoa's biggest rivals, was also struggling to develop a way to produce aluminum through a process that would emit oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. While heading back to the airport after an hourslong confab with Apple engineers, Christ received a call. Apple had an idea: Rio Tinto and Alcoa were both close to the answer they were looking for, but neither company seemed able to do it on its own. So why not combine efforts? "We had the engine, but we didn't have the wheels, chassis, or body, and Rio brought that all to the party," says DeYoung, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT. "[Apple] said, 'You guys really ought to talk to Rio,' and we were like, 'Yeah, we have already.' But then we said we'll talk to them again, and Apple actually facilitated that second contact." The result was the creation of Elysis, a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto with investments from Apple, the government of Canada, and the provincial government of Quebec, which is one of the biggest aluminum-producing regions in the world. The venture has developed a technology that makes so-called green aluminum, whose production doesn't emit carbon dioxide. If the partners can make the process work at commercial scale, it could be used to retrofit existing smelters, transforming them from some of the dirtiest industrial polluters into the kind of green manufacturing facilities business and government are shifting toward. "Elysis has developed a process that substitutes carbon with inert materials -- it won't say what they are -- to make the anode that conducts the electricity causing the chemical reaction," reports Bloomberg. "Elysis' operating costs are about 15% lower than those of conventional smelting, in part because the carbon anodes used in the chemical reaction must be replaced after 25 days, while Elysis' inert material lasts two years. The carbonless process also requires fewer workers, since there's no need to frequently change out the cathodes sitting in the pots of molten alumina." The immediate hurdle for Elysis is to prove it can crank up the amperage used during carbonless smelting to industrial-strength power levels, which would allow higher daily production rates, says CRU Group analyst Greg Wittbecker. "Elysis announced on April 20 it will begin installing commercial inert anode prototype cells on a smelter in Quebec in an effort to prove it can retrofit existing smelters," adds Bloomberg. "A pivotal moment will be if or when governments implement carbon credit or carbon tax programs that would penalize low-cost aluminum made in plants in China and India that use power from coal-fired plants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, six hours or less of sleep a night between the ages of 50, 60 and 70 was associated with a "30% increased dementia risk," independent of "sociodemographic, behavioral, cardiometabolic, and mental health factors," including depression. CNN reports: "Sleep is important for normal brain function and is also thought to be important for clearing toxic proteins that build up in dementias from the brain," said Tara Spires-Jones, who is deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in a statement. Spires-Jones was not involved in the study. "What's the message for us all? Evidence of sleep disturbance can occur a long time before the onset of other clinical evidence of dementia," said Tom Dening, who heads the Centre for Dementia at the Institute of Mental Health at the University of Nottingham in the UK, in a statement. "However, this study cannot establish cause and effect," said Denning, who was not involved in the study. "Maybe it is simply a very early sign of the dementia that is to come, but it's also quite likely that poor sleep is not good for the brain and leaves it vulnerable to neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease." Because the new study followed a large population over an extended period of time, it adds "new information to the emerging picture" on the link between sleep deprivation and dementia, said Elizabeth Coulthard, an associate professor in dementia neurology at the University of Bristol in the UK, in a statement. "This means that at least some of the people who went on to develop dementia probably did not already have it at the start of the study when their sleep was first assessed," said Coulthard, who was not involved in the study. "It strengthens the evidence that poor sleep in middle age could cause or worsen dementia in later life," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite only being released in November, sales of the M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini now represent the majority of Mac sales, outperforming Mac computers powered by Intel processors, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. MacRumors reports: Cook made the remarks during Apple's "Spring Loaded" event yesterday, where it introduced a completely redesigned 24-inch iMac powered by the M1 Apple silicon chip. Cook says that the M1 and Apple silicon "isn't just an upgrade, but a breakthrough," while touting Mac's industry-leading customer satisfaction. According to Cook, the four M1-powered Macs now outperform the five remaining Intel-powered computers in its lineup in terms of sales. During the keynote, Cook's comment went largely unnoticed but is likely to be a key point the CEO makes during Apple's upcoming earnings call, which is being held on April 28.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it. Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister." She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices." In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The European Union unveiled strict regulations on Wednesday to govern the use of artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind policy that outlines how companies and governments can use a technology seen as one of the most significant, but ethically fraught, scientific breakthroughs in recent memory. The draft rules would set limits around the use of artificial intelligence in a range of activities, from self-driving cars to hiring decisions, bank lending, school enrollment selections and the scoring of exams. It would also cover the use of artificial intelligence by law enforcement and court systems -- areas considered "high risk" because they could threaten people's safety or fundamental rights. Some uses would be banned altogether, including live facial recognition in public spaces, though there would be several exemptions for national security and other purposes.The108-page policy is an attempt to regulate an emerging technology before it becomes mainstream. The rules have far-reaching implications for major technology companies that have poured resources into developing artificial intelligence, including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, but also scores of other companies that use the software to develop medicine, underwrite insurance policies and judge credit worthiness. Governments have used versions of the technology in criminal justice and the allocation of public services like income support. Companies that violate the new regulations, which could take several years to move through the European Union policymaking process, could face fines of up to 6 percent of global sales. The European Union regulations would require companies providing artificial intelligence in high-risk areas to provide regulators with proof of its safety, including risk assessments and documentation explaining how the technology is making decisions. The companies must also guarantee human oversight in how the systems are created and used.Some applications, like chatbots that provide humanlike conversation in customer service situations, and software that creates hard-to-detect manipulated images like "deepfakes," would have to make clear to users that what they were seeing was computer generated. [...] Release of the draft law by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, drew a mixed reaction. Many industry groups expressed relief that the regulations were not more stringent, while civil society groups said they should have gone further.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon One is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon's home city of Seattle. The Verge reports: The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes "the minute characteristics of your palm -- both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns" in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan as an alternative (and, theoretically, faster) method of checking out than fumbling around with a credit card or cash. Customers will be able to register their palms at kiosks in the supported Whole Foods stores, allowing them to associate a physical credit card to that palm scan. And of course, Amazon One users will be able to link their Prime accounts to their scans to get the subscription service's discounts when shopping. Amazon One will debut at the Madison Broadway Whole Foods in Seattle as an additional payment option for customers, with plans to expand it to seven other Whole Foods stores in the Seattle area over the next few months. Amazon hasn't announced plans to further build out the palm-scanning payment system outside of the Seattle area.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The owner of the Daily Mail newspaper and MailOnline website is suing Google over allegations the search engine manipulates search results. The BBC reports: Associated Newspapers accuses Google of having too much control over online advertising and of downgrading links to its stories, favoring other outlets. It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace. Google called the claims "meritless." Associated Newspapers' concerns stem from its assessment that its coverage of the Royal Family in 2021 has been downplayed in search results. For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets. That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist. In response, a Google spokesperson said: "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search. More generally, we compete in a crowded and competitive ad tech space where publishers have and exercise multiple options. The Daily Mail itself authorizes dozens of ad tech companies to sell and manage their ad space, including Amazon, Verizon and more. We will defend ourselves against these meritless claims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After visits by unnamed masked intruders and the cancellation of its lease, Imaguru -- the country's key startup hub, event and co-working space in Minsk -- has effectively been shut down by the Lukashenko regime, which has led a brutal crackdown on its own people in recent months. But the company behind the space says it will defy the authorities and continue its activities online. Since 2013, Imaguru had become known as being the birthplace of a large number of startups from Belarus, including MSQRD, acquired by Facebook in 2017 -- as well as a landing pad for international investors visiting the country. Startups that have emerged from the space have attracted over $100 million in investments in recent years. The "Imaguru Startup HUB" leased the space from "Horizon Holding" in 2013, when it took over a dilapidated building from a state-owned company. But on April 16, 2021, Horizon told Imaguru it was unilaterally terminating its lease and the startup space has been given until April 30 to vacate. Imaguru says there has been no reason given for the lease termination, despite Horizon calling Imaguru a "flagship" leasehold for its property business. To outside observers, it looks like Horizon has come under pressure because of Imaguru's active support of the pro-democracy protests inside the country. In early March, unidentified men wearing masks broke into the office, "blocked the exit, put young event attendees against the wall, and brought them to the police station" said the company. [...] In recent months, the startup hub came out in solidarity with the protests inside the country following last year's tainted elections, recorded videos of solidarity with PandaDoc, who's employees have been jailed, and supported the general strike on October 26, 2020. In a statement, Imaguru said it is "not silent about lawlessness, repressions and persecution against civilians who defend their rights to an honest and fair choice ... Not silent about the regime shutting down the business, investment and startup environment ... Not silent about the massive relocation of startups from Belarus, about the catastrophe of this for the country and the role of the High Tech Park in this process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bank of England and the Treasury have announced they are setting up a taskforce to explore the possibility of a central bank digital currency. From a report: The aim is to look at the risks and opportunities involved in creating a new kind of digital money. Issued by the Bank for use by households and businesses, it would exist alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. No decision has been taken on whether to have such a currency in the UK. However, the government and the Bank want to "engage widely with stakeholders" on the benefits and practicalities of doing so. The taskforce will be jointly led by the Bank's deputy governor for financial stability, Sir Jon Cunliffe, and the Treasury's director general of financial services, Katharine Braddick. The Bank has previously said it is interested in a central bank digital currency (CBDC) because "this is a period of significant change in money and payments." The use of cash in financial transactions has been steadily declining in recent years, while debit card payments have been on the rise. Use of credit cards and direct debits have also been increasing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is updating Outlook to give companies the option to automatically start or end all meetings early to ensure employees have a break between back-to-backs. New settings in Outlook are rolling out to help reduce the digital overload of working remotely. From a report: Companies can set their own scheduling defaults, and they're fully customizable. That means you could have five minutes blocked off before or after a 30-minute meeting, or 10-15 minutes after hourlong meetings. Individuals can also set their own scheduling defaults, but the company-wide option is the significant change here. The inclusion of the new change comes after Microsoft's own research confirmed that back-to-back virtual meetings are stressful. CNBC adds: For the research, 14 individuals took part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment to measure brain activity, one day attending stretches of four half-hour meetings back-to-back, while on another day four half-hour meetings interspersed with 10-minute breaks. Lack of breaks resulted in spikes in the beta waves associated with stress building up near the transition periods between meetings, while breaks allowed brains to reset and better engage. Pictures of what the human brain actually looks like "on meeting" are in the full report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After pouring beer into a glass, streams of little bubbles appear and start to rise, forming a foamy head. As the bubbles burst, the released carbon dioxide gas imparts the beverage's desirable tang. But just how many bubbles are in that drink? The American Chemical Society: By examining various factors, researchers reporting in ACS Omega estimate between 200,000 and nearly 2 million of these tiny spheres can form in a gently poured lager. Worldwide, beer is one of the most popular alcoholic beverages. Lightly flavored lagers, which are especially well-liked, are produced through a cool fermentation process, converting the sugars in malted grains to alcohol and carbon dioxide. During commercial packaging, more carbonation can be added to get a desired level of fizziness. That's why bottles and cans of beer hiss when opened and release micrometer-wide bubbles when poured into a mug. These bubbles are important sensory elements of beer tasting, similar to sparkling wines, because they transport flavor and scent compounds. The carbonation also can tickle the drinker's nose. Gerard Liger-Belair had previously determined that about 1 million bubbles form in a flute of champagne, but scientists don't know the number created and released by beer before it's flat. So, Liger-Belair and Clara Cilindre wanted to find out. The researchers first measured the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in a commercial lager just after pouring it into a tilted glass, such as a server would do to reduce its surface foam. Next, using this value and a standard tasting temperature of 42 F, they calculated that dissolved gas would spontaneously aggregate to form streams of bubbles wherever crevices and cavities in the glass were more than 1.4 um-wide. Then, high-speed photographs showed that the bubbles grew in volume as they floated to the surface, capturing and transporting additional dissolved gas to the air above the drink. As the remaining gas concentration decreased, the bubbling would eventually cease. The researchers estimated there could be between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles released before a half-pint of lager would go flat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FlatEric521 shares a report: Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted chat app Signal claims to have hacked devices made by the infamous phone unlocking company Cellebrite, which has famously worked with cops to circumvent encryption such as Signal's. In a blog post Wednesday, Marlinspike not only published details about the new exploits for Cellebrite devices but seemed to suggest that Signal's code could be theoretically altered to hack Cellebrite devices en masse. "We were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite's own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present," Marlinspike wrote in the post. "Any app could contain such a file, and until Cellebrite is able to accurately repair all vulnerabilities in its software with extremely high confidence, the only remedy a Cellebrite user has is to not scan devices." Marlinspike claims (whether you believe this portion of the post or not is up to you) that while he was on a walk he happened to find a Cellebrite phone unlocking device: "By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters." Along with his colleagues, Marlinspike analyzed the device and found that it included several vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to include an "otherwise innocuous file in an app" that when it gets scanned by a Cellebrite device exploits it and tampers with the device and the data it can access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stack Overflow blog: They say there's a kernel of truth behind every joke. In the case of our recent April Fools gag, it might be more like an entire cob, perhaps a bushel of truth. We wanted to embrace a classic Stack Overflow meme and tweak one of our core principles. Our company was inspired by the founders frustration with websites that kept answers to coding questions behind paywalls. What would the world look like if we suddenly decided to monetize the act of copying code from Stack Overflow? Ok, jokes over, hope everyone had a good laugh and no one got too freaked out. But wait, there's more. Once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. We were able to catalog every copy command made on Stack Overflow over the course of two weeks, and here's what we found. One out of every four users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page. That adds up to 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26th and April 9th. People copy from answers about ten times as often as they do from questions and about 35 times as often as they do from comments. People copy from code blocks more than ten times as often as they do from the surrounding text, and surprisingly, we see more copies being made on questions without accepted answers than we do on questions which are accepted. So, if you've ever felt bad about copying code from our site instead of writing it from scratch, forgive yourself!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of hackers executed a ransomware attack on Hoya, marking the second successful attack suffered by the Japanese firm in two years. From a report: "We can confirm that Hoya Vision Care US has experienced a cyberattack. Based on our initial forensics, the disruption appears to have been limited to our United States systems," a Hoya spokesperson said. "After identifying the threat, we quickly took action to contain it and contacted law enforcement. The company has engaged external experts to determine the nature and scope of this event. We will provide updates as more information becomes available." Hoya, named after the West Tokyo neighborhood where it was founded in 1941, is a glassmaker with about 37,000 employees worldwide and about $5 billion in annual revenue. The company gets last year 65% of its sales from contact lenses and glasses, while the rest comes Information technology devices and services such glass substrate used in the manufacturing of semiconductors and hard disk drives, according to 2020 company's report. The hacker group called Astro Team said on its blog last week that it targeted Hoya servers and stole about 300 gigabytes of confidential corporate data including finance, production, email messages, passwords and safety reports. In 2019, Hoya suffered a major cyberattack, infectong over 100 computers and forcing the company to shut down its factories for three days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans' social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News. From the report: The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as "inflammatory" postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. "Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021," says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as "law enforcement sensitive" and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers. "Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.