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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Exxon Mobil, which has long been criticized by environmentalists and some investors and elected leaders for not doing enough to curb climate change, said on Monday it would invest $3 billion over the next five years in energy projects that lower emissions. The company said the first area it would work on is capturing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial plants and storing the gas so it does not enter the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. Many climate experts have said that such carbon capture and sequestration will be critical in the fight against climate change. Exxon said it was creating a new business called ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions and is working on 20 carbon capture projects around the world, including in Texas, the Netherlands, Singapore and Qatar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CEO of online stock brokerage Robinhood is expected to testify before a House committee on Feb. 18 as lawmakers dig into the firm's role in the tumultuous trading of GameStop stock and other companies, people familiar with the matter said. Politico reports: The hearing before the House Financial Services Committee with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, which has not been formally announced, is primed to be a blockbuster. Share prices of GameStop and other struggling companies skyrocketed last week in part thanks to traders on the social media website Reddit targeting Wall Street hedge funds, which were betting heavily that the stock price would fall. Some of the investors betting against the companies subsequently suffered huge losses.[...]"I am concerned about whether or not Robinhood restricted the trading because there was collusion between Robinhood and some of the hedge funds that were involved with this," Waters said on MSNBC this weekend. It was not clear if Democrats would ask other financial institutions to testify. Democratic lawmakers are also examining the role of firms owned by billionaire Ken Griffin. The two companies -- the hedge fund Citadel and trading firm Citadel Securities -- denied responsibility for any broker's decision to suspend trading. Citadel bailed out a hedge fund that suffered from GameStop's stock increase and Citadel Securities pays Robinhood to execute its stock trades.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The official Reddit for iOS app recently received an update that added a new video player UI, and many users don't like it one bit. XDA Developers reports: The Reddit Mobile subreddit, the community where Reddit administrators notify users of new Android and iOS app updates, is currently filled to the brim with complaints about the new video player. Many users describe the experience as TikTok or Instagram-like. Others simply say it's too intrusive and also requires more button presses to reach the comments section of a post. The new video player UI has yet to reach the Android version, but we'd be surprised if Reddit pushes ahead with the controversial video player changes in their current form. For those looking for an alternative, XDA Developers recommends the Apollo app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla boss Elon Musk said in an interview late Sunday that a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its mind by a company he founded called Neuralink. CNBC reports: Neuralink put a computer chip into the monkey's skull and used "tiny wires" to connect it to its brain, Musk said. "It's not an unhappy monkey," he said during a talk on Clubhouse, a new social media app gaining popularity that allows people to have informal voice chats while others listen in. "You can't even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he's got a slight like dark mohawk." The billionaire -- who also spoke about space travel, colonies on Mars, crypto, artificial intelligence and Covid-19 vaccines -- said Neuralink is trying to figure out if it can use its chips to get monkeys to play "mind Pong" with each other. "That would be pretty cool," said Musk, who is CEO of Neuralink, in addition to SpaceX and Tesla. Neuralink's team of around 100 people is trying to develop an implementable computer-brain interface. Musk describes it as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go into your brain. [...] Musk said Neuralink will "probably" be releasing some videos that show the company's progress in the next month or so. Last August, Neuralink conducted a live demo of its technology on three pigs. A wireless link from the Neuralink device showed the pig's activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage. Musk made the comments on the audio chat app Clubhouse, where he also grilled Robinhood CEO about what happened with GameStop.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In China's popular online-streaming industry, virtual gift-giving is big. You can send your favorite live performer anything from a rose for 5 yuan (80 cents) to a space rocket for 500 yuan. The present is just a symbol, but the money is real -- and that's what's made Kuaishou Technology so successful. [...] Co-founders Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao will each be worth more than $5.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Su, a native of China's central Hunan province, studied computer programming at the prestigious Tsinghua University before joining Google in Beijing in 2006. There, he earned about $23,000 annually, eight times the country's average salary back then. While he said he was "extremely happy," a stay in Silicon Valley inspired him to start his own business, according to Kuaishou's biography. The 38-year-old quit Google during the global financial crisis to start his own video-advertising venture, which didn't come to fruition. After a short stint with Baidu Inc., he got acquainted with Cheng in 2011 and they soon decided to pair up. In 2013, the duo transformed the Kuaishou app from a GIF-maker to the social-video platform it is today, initially gaining popularity with its videos of life in rural China. With the rise of ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese twin app of TikTok, Kuaishou broadened its appeal, luring influencers backed by talent agencies and pop stars like Taiwan's Jay Chou. Along the way, it sped up monetization by creating ad slots and in-app stores for brands and merchants. While virtual gift purchases are still its bread and butter -- they make up almost two-thirds of its revenue -- the company is delving deeper into higher-margin businesses like e-commerce and online gaming. Its sales rose almost 50% to 40.7 billion yuan in the first nine months of last year, according to the IPO prospectus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's latest iOS 14.5 update for beta testers brings support for the new PS5 DualSense and Xbox Series X controllers. The Verge reports: Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 update follows the company revealing back in November that it was working with Microsoft to include support for the Xbox Series X controllers. Steam also added PS5 controller support last year, followed by Nvidia's Shield TV support last month. Other features of iOS 14.5 include the ability to unlock an iPhone with an Apple Watch while wearing a mask, Siri emergency contact calling, CarPlay ETA sharing, and dual-SIM 5G support. The official release is expected in the next couple of months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook is testing a notification that notifies Apple iOS users about ways the tech giant uses their data to target personalized ads to them. Axios reports: The test is happening in light of upcoming changes to Apple's privacy settings that will make it harder for Facebook and others to collect data on Apple users for ad targeting. Facebook warned investors last week that changes to Apple's "Identifier for Advertisers" (IDFA) user tracking feature will likely impact its business. The feature asks Apple iOS users to opt-in to having their data collected, instead of asking them to opt-out. Developers forecast that only around 10-30% of users will actually opt-in to having their data collected, making it much harder for advertisers to target potential Apple customers without as much access to their data. Details: In an updated blog post, Facebook says it will be showing their prompt "to ensure stability for the businesses and people who use our services." The prompt, which provides information about how Facebook uses personalized ads, will be shown to users globally on Facebook and Instagram. In the post, Facebook says that if users accept the prompts for Facebook and Instagram, the ads you see on those apps won't change. "If you decline, you will still see ads, but they will be less relevant to you." The tech giant notes that Apple has said that providing education about its new privacy changes is allowed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that was wrongfooted by retail traders who drove up shares in GameStop and other companies it had bet against, lost 53 percent in January, according to people familiar with the firm's results. The New York-based hedge fund sustained a $4.5 billion fall in its assets from the end of last year to $8 billion, even after a $2.75 billion cash injection from Steve Cohen's Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffin's Citadel. Melvin became the target of retail traders who coordinated to drive up the share price of GameStop on online message boards such as Reddit, after the firm disclosed its bet against the company in regulatory filings. On Wednesday Melvin said it had exited its bet against GameStop and repositioned its portfolio. The firm moved to reduce risk in its investments following a turbulent start to January when it lost 30 percent in the first three weeks. Melvin's leverage ratio is at the lowest it has been since the firm's founding in 2014, said a source familiar with the firm. The news of Melvin's January performance was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The GameStop saga marks a fall from grace for Melvin, which gained 52 percent last year, ranking it among the best performing hedge funds. Founder Gabe Plotkin was one of Mr Cohen's most prominent traders at SAC Capital, until it shut down amid an insider trading scandal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's latest iPhones stuck with Face ID as the singular method of biometric authentication in an era when people are wearing face masks everywhere they go. This inevitably means having to enter your passcode constantly throughout the day. But Apple has come up with a stopgap solution that should make it easier to get into your phone during mask life -- as long as you've got an Apple Watch. From a report: As first reported by Pocket-lint, the new iOS 14.5 update, which went into beta today, uses the Apple Watch on your wrist to quickly authenticate and unlock your iPhone. Apple already offers this convenient trick on the Mac, but now it's coming to the iPhone as well. It works similarly here. You lift your iPhone to turn on the screen, and you'll feel a little nudge of haptic feedback on your Apple Watch to indicate that your iPhone has been unlocked. The devices must be in close proximity for this to work in the first place, which is a measure to keep your data secure. (If the Apple Watch is locked, this won't work either.) And this Apple Watch shortcut is only good for unlocking your iPhone; App Store and iTunes purchases will still require other authentication if your face is covered. And as a final security check, you'll still be asked to put in your passcode every few hours even when unlock with Apple Watch is enabled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VideoLAN, in a blog post: The VideoLAN project and the VideoLAN non-profit organization are happy to celebrate today the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the project. VideoLAN originally started as a project from the Via Centrale Reseaux student association, after the successful Network 2000 project. But the true release of the project to the world was on 1st of February 2001, the Ecole Centrale Paris director, Mr. Gourisse, allowed the open-sourcing of the whole VideoLAN project under the GNU GPL. This open sourcing concerned all the software developed by the VideoLAN project, including VideoLAN Client, VideoLAN Server, VideoLAN Bridge, VideoLAN Channel Switcher, but also libraries to decode DVDs, like libdca, liba52 or libmpeg2. At that time, this was a risky decision for the Ecole Centrale Paris, and the VideoLAN project is very grateful. Since then, the project evolved to become a French non-profit organization, and continued developing numerous solutions around the free software multimedia world. Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years. VLC is today available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (including TV and Auto versions), iOS (and AppleTV), OS/2 and BSD. Over the years, around 1000 volunteers worked to make VLC a reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Stadia, the late 2019 streaming platform that promised to revolutionize gaming by letting users stream games without needing to own a powerful PC or console, is altering course, getting out of the game-making business and will now offer its platform directly to game publishers alongside offering Stadia Pro to the public. From a report: The company is announcing the news today, though Kotaku began to hear rumblings from sources close to Stadia last week that Google's service was heading for a major change. One games industry source told Kotaku that Google was canceling multiple projects, basically any games slated for release beyond a specific 2021 window, though they believed games close to release would still come out. Today brings some clarification. Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. That closure will impact around 150 developers, one source familiar with Stadia operations said. The company says it will try to find those developers new roles at Google. Jade Raymond, the veteran producer who helped build Assassin's Creed for Ubisoft and moved on to EA several years ago before leaving to run game creation at Stadia, is exiting the company, according to Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Allison, reporting at CoinDesk: IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing, according to four people familiar with the situation. Job losses at IBM escalated as the company failed to meet its revenue targets for the once-fÃted technology by 90% this year, according to one of the sources. "IBM is doing a major reorganization," said a source at a startup that has been interviewing former IBM blockchain staffers. "There is not really going to be a blockchain team any longer. Most of the blockchain people at IBM have left." IBM's blockchain unit missed its revenue targets by a wide margin for two years in a row, said a second source. Expectations for enterprise blockchain were too high, they said, adding that IBM "didn't really manage to execute, despite doing a lot of announcements." A spokesperson for IBM denied the claims. "Our blockchain business is doing well, thank you," Holli Haswell, a director of public relations at IBM, said via email. "We have realigned some leaders and business units to continue to drive growth -- we do that every year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Xiaomi has sued the U.S. Defense and Treasury departments, challenging a blacklisting that blocks American investors from buying the Chinese smartphone giant's securities. The lawsuit came after the Defense Department determined earlier this month that China's biggest smartphone maker was affiliated with the People's Liberation Army. Beijing-based Xiaomi called the blacklisting "unconstitutional" and seeks a court ruling to reverse the designation, which was made in the waning days of the Trump administration. "Xiaomi faces imminent, severe, and irreparable harm if the Designation remains in place and the restrictions take effect," the company said in the filing in the U.S. district court of Columbia. The lawsuit also named Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as defendants. Under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. had targeted scores of Chinese tech companies citing national security. Huawei Technologies, one of the biggest rivals to Xiaomi in smartphone market, was cut off from its key suppliers as a result of a series of restrictions imposed by the former administration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google signed a six-year deal with Ford Motor that will bring Android technology to the automaker's cars and cloud services to its factory floor, in a triumph for the internet giant over rival Microsoft. From a report: Google Cloud Platform will be Ford's "preferred cloud provider" and the partners will form an innovation team called Team Upshift to jointly work on future projects, the companies said Monday in a statement. Ford dashboard infotainment screens will be powered by an Android operating system starting in 2023 and the automaker will adopt Google's artificial intelligence and data-analytics technology. The companies did not disclose the value of their deal, but Google will receive revenue from cloud services as well as a Google apps and services licensing fee for every Ford and Lincoln vehicle sold starting in 2023. Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, is trying to sell the Alphabet company's computing and storage services through broad strategic partnerships. Fresh off a multiyear alliance with Deutsche Bank announced in December, Google has snagged Ford, a longtime Microsoft client. Google will need to continue accumulating these types of customer wins to catch cloud market leaders Amazon.com and Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As it sits amid the recent extreme bouts of market volatility, discount online brokerage Robinhood has been able to raise another $2.4 billion from investors, the company said Monday. From a report: That brings to $3.4 billion that the firm has been able to raise since last Thursday, a total that exceeds the amount it has raised in its entire history. "This funding is a strong sign of confidence from investors and will help us build for the future and continue to serve people through the exponential growth we've seen this year," the company said in a statement. The startup started easing trading restrictions on Monday, raising its trading limit on GameStop to four shares from a single share.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New transparency figures released by Amazon show the company responded to a record number of government data demands in the last six months of 2020. From a report: The new figures land in the company's bi-annual transparency report published to Amazon's website over the weekend. Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last six months of 2020, up from 3,222 data demands in the first six months of the year, an increase of close to 800%. That user data includes shopping searches and data from its Echo, Fire, and Ring devices. The new report presents the data differently from previous transparency disclosures. Amazon now breaks down the top requesting countries. U.S. authorities historically made up the bulk of the overall data demands Amazon receives, but this latest report shows Germany with 42% of all requests, followed by Spain with 18%, and Italy and the U.S. with 11% share each. But the report also removes the breakdown by legal process, and now only differentiates between the requests it gets for user's content and for non-content. Amazon said it handed over user content data in 52 cases. For its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which it reports separately, Amazon said it processed 523 data demands, with 75% of all requests made by U.S. authorities, and Amazon turned over user's content in 15 cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software giant Microsoft is confident its search product Bing can fill the gap in Australia if Google pulls its search over required payments to media outlets, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday. From a report: Australia has introduced laws that would force internet giant Google and social media heavyweight Facebook Inc to negotiate payments to domestic media outlets whose content links drive traffic to their platforms. However, the Big Tech firms have called the laws unworkable and said last month they would withdraw key services from Australia if the regulations went ahead. Those services include Google's search engine, which has 94% of the country's search market, according to industry data. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken with Morrison about the new rules, the tech company told Reuters, and on Monday, Morrison said the software company was ready to grow the presence of its search tool Bing, the distant No. 2 player.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk had just wrapped up a wide-ranging 90-minute interview on the audio chat app Clubhouse early on Monday, when he threw the hosts a curveball. "Do you want to hear the real story from Vlad [from] Robinhood about what happened on the Street with GameStop?" Musk asked. He advised the moderators to click on Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev so he could talk. From a report: That's when Musk launched into a torrent of questions, a CEO-to-CEO showdown over why the popular trading app had halted trading on the market's hottest stocks at one point last week. "Spill the beans, man," Musk said to Tenev, whom the Tesla CEO introduced as "Vlad the stock impaler." "What happened last week? Why couldn't people buy the GameStop shares? The people demand answers, and they want to know the truth." Musk, who has come under fire for quality control issues, business missteps and personal behaviors, asked Tenev what caused him to halt trades on GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks last week. Were more powerful entities, such as regulators, depriving smaller retail investors of a potential payday at the expense of shadowy hedge funds? Was Robinhood partner Citadel Securities responsible for the trading halt? "Is anyone holding you hostage right now?" Musk asked. [...] "If you had no choice, that's understandable, but then we got to find out why you have no choice," Musk said. "And who are these people that are saying you have no choice?" In response, Tenev suggested more transparency was needed in the formulas used by financial institutions to calculate these requirements. He emphasized how Robinhood was able to raise more than $1 billion in capital in 24 hours to reopen on Monday. Tenev would not commit to imposing no restrictions on the stocks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter blocked access to dozens of accounts in India, including some that belonged to high-profile individuals, on Monday to comply with a "legal demand," prompting confusion and anger among users who are seeking an explanation for this action. From a report: Among those whose accounts have been withheld in India include Caravan, a news outlet that conducts investigative journalism, political commentator Sanjukta Basu, activist Hansraj Meena, actor Sushant Singh, and Shashi Shekhar Vempati, chief executive of state-run brodcasting agency Prasar Bharti. Accounts of at least two politicians with Aam Aadmi Party -- Preeti Sharma Menon and Jarnail Singh -- that governs the National Capital Territory of Delhi have also been withheld. At least two popular accounts linked with ongoing protests by farmers -- Kisan Ekta Morcha and Tractor2Twitr -- in India have also been restricted. Citing a government source, AFP journalist Bhuvan Bagga reported earlier today that India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology directed Twitter to block around 250 tweets and accounts that were using a hashtag to make what it alleged were false, intimidatory and provocative tweets over the weekend. He adds: "Incitement to genocide is a grave threat to public order and therefore the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY) ordered for blocking of these Twitter accounts and Tweets under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act." A person familiar with the matter corroborated this claim to TechCrunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Network data from the NetBlocks Internet Observatory indicate the onset of widespread internet disruptions in Myanmar on Sunday 31 January 2021 (UTC) amid reports of a military uprising and the detention of political leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi. From a report: The telecommunication disruptions beginning approximately 3:00 a.m. Monday morning local time have significant subnational impact including the capital and are likely to limit coverage of events as they take place. Continuing disconnections have been monitored with national connectivity falling initially to 75% and subsequently 50% of ordinary levels by 8:00 a.m. local time. Technical data show cuts affecting multiple network operators including state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) and international operator Telenor, with preliminary findings indicating a centrally ordered mechanism of disruption targeting cellular and some fixed-line services, progressing over time as operators comply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Until recently, it was unclear whether variable renewable energy, nuclear, or fossil fuel with carbon capture and storage would become the main form of generation in a decarbonized electricity system," argues a recently-published analysis titled Carbon-Neutral Pathways for the United States. "The cost decline of variable renewable energy over the last few years, however, has definitively changed the situation." Ars Technica reports:In many areas of the United States, installing a wind or solar farm is now cheaper than simply buying fuel for an existing fossil fuel-based generator. And that's dramatically changing the electricity market in the U.S. and requiring a lot of people to update prior predictions. That has motivated a group of researchers to take a new look at the costs and challenges of getting the entire U.S. to carbon neutrality. By building a model of the energy market for the entire U.S., the researchers explored what it will take to get the country to the point where its energy use has no net emissions in 2050 — and they even looked at a scenario where emissions are negative. They found that, as you'd expect, the costs drop dramatically — to less than 1 percent of the GDP, even before counting the costs avoided by preventing the worst impacts of climate change. And, as an added bonus, we would pay less for our power... The researchers estimate that the net cost of the transformation will be a total of $145 billion by 2050, which works out to be less than one-half percent of the GDP that year. That figure does include the increased savings from electrical heating and vehicles, which offset some of their costs. But it doesn't include the reduced costs from climate change or lower health care spending due to reduced fossil fuel use. These savings will be substantial, and they will almost certainly go well beyond offsetting the cost. Due to the reduced cost of renewable generation, the authors project that we'll spend less for electricity overall, as well... Part of the reason it is so cheap is because reaching the goal doesn't require replacing viable hardware. All of the things that need to be taken out of service, from coal-fired generators to gas hot-water heaters, have finite lifetimes. The researchers calculate that simply replacing everything with renewables or high-efficiency electric versions will manage the transition in sufficient time... The scenarios with additional constraints produce some odd results as well. The only scenario in which nuclear power makes economic sense is the one in which land use is limited.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports that SpaceX's first high-altitude test flight of its Starship rocket, "which launched successfully but exploded in a botched landing attempt in December, violated the terms of its Federal Aviation Administration test license, according to two people familiar with the incident."Both the landing explosion and license violation prompted a formal investigation by the FAA, driving regulators to put extra scrutiny on Elon Musk's hasty Mars rocket test campaign. The so-called mishap investigation was opened that week, focusing not only on the explosive landing but on SpaceX's refusal to stick to the terms of what the FAA authorized, the two people said. It was unclear what part of the test flight violated the FAA license, and an FAA spokesman declined to specify in a statement to The Verge. "The FAA will continue to work with SpaceX to evaluate additional information provided by the company as part of its application to modify its launch license," FAA spokesman Steve Kulm said Friday. "While we recognize the importance of moving quickly to foster growth and innovation in commercial space, the FAA will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety. We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements." The heightened scrutiny from regulators after the launchpad spectacle has played a role in holding up SpaceX's latest "SN9" Starship test attempt, which the company said would happen on Thursday. The shiny steel alloy, 16-story-tall rocket was loaded with fuel and ready to fly. But at the time, FAA officials were still going through their license review process for the test because of several changes SpaceX made in its license application, a source said. Musk, frustrated with the process, took to Twitter. "Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure," Musk tweeted on Thursday. "Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars." The Verge also notes that Musk was asked by the Wall Street Journal what role government should play in regulating innovation just a few hours before Starship's test in December. Musk's reply? "A lot of the time, the best thing the government can do is just get out of the way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution," Ars Technica reports:Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor. The Rocky Linux concept got immediate, positive community reaction — but there's an awful lot of work and expense that goes into creating and maintaining a Linux distribution. The CentOS Linux project itself made that clear when it went for the Red Hat acquisition in 2014; without its own source of funding, the odds of Rocky Linux becoming a complete 1:1 replacement — serving the same massive volume of users that CentOS did — seemed dicey at best. In a statement Ctrl IQ notes the Rocky Linux community was already "in the thousands of people driving the foundation of the organization..." And as for Gregory Kurtzer, he was "originally basing Ctrl IQ's stack on CentOS, but he needed to pivot, as did most of the community to something else. Due to the alignment, Greg chose Rocky, and has been asked to help support it." Ars Technica adds:The company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing..." Wading through the buzzword bingo, Ctrl IQ's real business seems to be in supplying relatively turn-key infrastructure for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, capable of running distributed across multiple sites and/or cloud providers... Not all of Ctrl IQ's offerings are theoretical. Warewulf, also founded by Kurtzer, is currently developed and maintained by the US Department of Energy. Anyone can freely download and use Warewulf, but it's not difficult to imagine value added in consulting with one of its founders... Ctrl IQ is one of three Tier 1 sponsors identified by the Rocky Linux project, along with Amazon Web Services (which provides core build infrastructure) and Mattermost, which is providing enterprise collaboration services... Rocky Linux is generally expected to be widely available in Q2 2021, with a first-release candidate build expected on March 31.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A malicious Home Depot advertising campaign is redirecting Google search visitors to tech support scams," claims Bleeping Computer. Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 shares their report:BleepingComputer searched for 'home depot' and was shown the malicious advertisement on our first try. Even worse, the ad is the top spot in the research result, making it more likely to be clicked... [T]he ad clearly states it's for www.homedepot.com, and hovering over it shows the site's legitimate destination URL. However, when visitors click on the ad, they will be redirected through various ad services until eventually they are redirected to a tech support scam. Ultimately, the visitor will land at a page showing an incredibly annoying "Windows Defender - Security Warning' tech support scam. This scam will repeatedly open the Print dialog box, as shown below, which prevents the visitor from easily closing the page. To make it more difficult for security professionals to diagnose these ads, it appears that they only redirect to the scam once every 24 hours to the same IP address. Once a tech support scam is shown by clicking on the ad, subsequent clicks bring visitors to the legitimate site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser," reports ZDNet, "for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms."To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe began blocking Flash content from playing inside the app starting January 12, with the help of a time-bomb mechanism... As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets. But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial. Instead, the South African government agency decided to take one of the most mind-blowing decisions in the history of bad IT decisions and release its own web browser. Released on Monday on the agency's official website, the new SARS eFiling Browser is a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser that has two features. The first is to re-enable Flash support. The second is to let users access the SARS eFiling website. As Chris Peterson, a software engineer at Mozilla, pointed out, the SARS browser only lets users access the official SARS website, which somewhat reduces the risk of users getting their systems infected via Flash exploits while navigating the web. But as others have also pointed out, this does nothing for accessibility, as the browser is only available for Windows users and not for other operating systems such as macOS, Linux, and mobile users, all of which are still unable to file taxes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite bad weather and early technical difficulties, employee-owned bluShift Aerospace "made history Sunday afternoon when it launched its prototype rocket, Stardust 1.0," reports Maine's Portland Press Herald:The company became the first in Maine to launch a commercial rocket and the first in the world to launch a rocket using bio-derived fuel... It carried three payloads, two commercial and one, free of charge, from Falmouth High School... The rocket and payloads returned to the ground under a parachute shortly after launch and were retrieved by a team of snowmobilers. The rocket is intended to be reusable and environmentally friendly. While the components of the biofuel remain a company secret, bluShift CEO Sascha Deri said it is solid, non-toxic and carbon neutral. "I can tell you this much, I discovered it with a friend of mine on my brothers farm here in Maine," he said. The company describes its business model as the Uber of space, where they will target a specific customer who wishes to send their payload into a particular orbit. "We are targeting people that want to go to a specific orbit, they want to have control of their launches, they want to be the primary payload even though their payload is very small," Deri said. The rocket is roughly 20 feet tall and 14 inches in diameter, the newspaper reports — noting that an earlier launch planned for January 15th had to be called off due to bad weather. "It turns out launching rockets is complicated, apparently it's rocket science," CEO Deri told them. "We did learn a lot from that failed launch. We learned, first and foremost, that you can't rely upon weather websites, you really need to use a professional meteorologist." The Associated Press also reports the rocket carried "a Dutch dessert called stroopwafel, in an homage to its Amsterdam-based parent company. Organizers of the launch said the items were included to demonstrate the inclusion of a small payload."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Tesla posted its first full year of net income in 2020 — but not because of sales to its customers," reports CNN:Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can't, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements — such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars. It's a lucrative business for Tesla — bringing in $3.3 billion over the course of the last five years, nearly half of that in 2020 alone. The $1.6 billion in regulatory credits it received last year far outweighed Tesla's net income of $721 million — meaning Tesla would have otherwise posted a net loss in 2020. "These guys are losing money selling cars. They're making money selling credits. And the credits are going away," said Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research and one of the biggest bears on Tesla shares... Tesla also reports other measures of profitability, as do many other companies. And by those measures, the profits are great enough that they do not depend on the sales of credits to be in the black... Its automotive gross profit, which compares total revenue from its car business to expenses directly associated with the building the cars, was $5.4 billion, even excluding the regulatory credits sales revenue... But the debate between skeptics and devotees of the company whether Tesla is truly profitable has become a "Holy War," according to Gene Munster, managing partner of Loup Ventures and a leading tech analyst. "They're debating two different things. They'll never come to a resolution," he said. Munster believes critics focus too much on how the credits still exceed net income. He contends that automotive gross profit margin, excluding those sales of regulatory credits, is the best barometer for the company's financial success. "It's a leading indicator," of that measure of Tesla's profit, he said. "There's no chance that GM and VW are making money on that basis on their EVs..." Tesla shares are now worth roughly as much as those of the combined 12 largest automakers who sell more than 90% of autos globally. What Tesla has that other automakers don't is rapid growth... Tech analyst Gene Munster also tells CNN "Something most people can agree on... Electric vehicles are the future. I think that's a safe assumption."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early Friday the principal author of GNU Privacy Guard (the free encryption software) warned that version 1.9.0 of its cryptographic library Libgcrypt, released January 19, had a "severe" security vulnerability and should not be used. A new version 1.9.1, which fixes the flaw, is available for download, Help Net Security reports:He also noted that Fedora 34 (scheduled to be released in April 2021) and Gentoo Linux are already using the vulnerable version... [I]t's a heap buffer overflow due to an incorrect assumption in the block buffer management code. Just decrypting some data can overflow a heap buffer with attacker controlled data, no verification or signature is validated before the vulnerability occurs. It was discovered and flagged by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy and affects only Libgcrypt v1.9.0. "Exploiting this bug is simple and thus immediate action for 1.9.0 users is required..." Koch posted on the GnuPG mailing list. "The 1.9.0 tarballs on our FTP server have been renamed so that scripts won't be able to get this version anymore."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020." So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. He'd made the bet with a "Luddite-loving doomsayer," according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. "Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote a musical with Thomas Pynchon about escaping a dystopian America ruled by IBM," remembers Slashdot reader joeblog. This month a new article in Wired re-visits that 25-year bet:They argued about the Amish, whether printing presses denuded forests, and the impact of technology on work. Sale believed it stole decent labor from people. Kelly replied that technology helped us make new things we couldn't make any other way. "I regard that as trivial," Sale said. Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn't entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn't be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned... Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right. Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes... "I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe," Kelly said. Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed... "Oh, boy," Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. "This is easy money." Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn't been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We're about to find out how easy that money is... Sale failed to account for how human ingenuity would keep us from getting tossed into forests and caves. Kelly didn't factor in tech companies' reckless use of power or their shortcomings in solving (or sometimes stoking) tough societal problems... Sale believes more than ever that society is basically crumbling — the process is just not far enough along to drive us from apartment blocks to huts. The collapse, he says, is "not like a building imploding and falling down, but like a slow avalanche that destroys and kills everything in its path, until it finally buries the whole village forever." "I cannot accept that I lost," he wrote... "The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won..." Kelly warns Sale that history will recall him as a man who doesn't honor his word. But Sale doesn't believe that there will be a history. Kelly responded by offering Sale a second double-or-nothing bet:I believe that we are in fact on the eve of a 25-year period of global progress and prosperity, the likes of which we have not seen before on this planet. In 25 years, poverty will be rare, and middle class lifestyle the norm. War between nations will also be rare. A bulk of our energy will be renewables, slowing down climate warming. Lifespans continue to lengthen. I'll bet on it. Kelly added later that his rival "did not take me up on the double or nothing offer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Huawei, the crown jewel of China's technology industry, has suffered from a sustained American campaign to keep its equipment from being used in new 5G networks around the world," reports the New York Times. Now they've identified "a covert pro-Huawei influence campaign in Belgium about 5G networks." [Alternate URL here] It began when trade lawyer Edwin Vermulst was paid to write an article criticizing a Belgian policy that would block Huawei from lucrative contracts:First, at least 14 Twitter accounts posing as telecommunications experts, writers and academics shared articles by Mr. Vermulst and many others attacking draft Belgium legislation that would limit "high risk" vendors like Huawei from building the country's 5G system, according to Graphika, a research firm that studies misinformation and fake social media accounts. The pro-Huawei accounts used computer-generated profile pictures, a telltale sign of inauthentic activity. Next, Huawei officials retweeted the fake accounts, giving the articles even wider reach to policymakers, journalists and business leaders. Kevin Liu, Huawei's president for public affairs and communications in Western Europe, who has a verified Twitter account with 1.1 million followers, shared 60 posts from the fake accounts over three weeks in December, according to Graphika. Huawei's official account in Europe, with more than five million followers, did so 47 times... Twitter said it had removed the fake accounts after Graphika alerted it to the campaign on Dec. 30... Many of their followers appeared to be bots... The effort suggests a new twist in social media manipulation, said Ben Nimmo, a Graphika investigator who helped identify the pro-Huawei campaign. Tactics once used mainly for government objectives — like Russia's interference in the 2016 American presidential election — are being adapted to achieve corporate goals. "It's business rather than politics," Mr. Nimmo said. "It's not one country targeting another country. It looks like an operation to promote a major multinational's interests — and to do it against a European state." Though the social media campaign had little impact on Belgian policymakers, one telecom consultancy noted Huawei's fear that similar legislation "could spread to other parts of the world." (The article points out Belgium is the headquarters of both NATO and the European Union.) But Phil Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, see a future where disinformation will become increasingly commercialized. "The flow of money is increasingly there," he tells the Times. "Large-scale social media influence operations are now part of the communications tool kit for any large global corporation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Was Nextdoor's impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium's tech site OneZero reports:As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher test scores. The last of those was true — but left out the context that Christina hosts both the state's school for the deaf and its largest autism program. District advocates told me later that they had wanted to post counterarguments to the platform, but were hindered by Nextdoor's decentralized structure. Some district officers, for instance, couldn't even access the posts and discussions happening in the city of Newark, because they were only visible to other Newark residents, and they lived outside the city's borders. (The district's headquarters are actually in nearby Wilmington.) After the referendum failed, some pointed to misinformation on Nextdoor as a factor in its defeat.... A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate... This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again. Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks. "It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong. "There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech blogger Paul Thurrott writes:Firefox 85 now protects users against supercookies, which Mozilla says is "a type of tracker that can stay hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you clear cookies. By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to the next." It also includes small improvements to bookmarks and password management. Unfortunately, Mozilla has separately — and much more quietly — stopped work on Site Specific Browser (SSB) functionality... This feature allowed users to use Firefox to create apps on the local PC from Progressive Web Apps and other web apps, similar to the functionality provided in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based web browsers. "The SSB feature has only ever been available through a hidden [preference] and has multiple known bugs," Mozilla's Dave Townsend explains in a Bugzilla issue tracker. "Additionally, user research found little to no perceived user benefit to the feature and so there is no intent to continue development on it at this time. As the feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage and keeping it around is sending the wrong signal that this is a supported feature, we are going to remove the feature from Firefox." Thurrott's conclusion? "Mozilla is walking away from a key tenet of modern web apps and, in doing so, they are making themselves irrelevant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The domain name perl.com was stolen and now points to an IP address associated with malware campaigns," reports Bleeping Computer:Perl.com is a site owned by Tom Christiansen and has been used since 1997 to post news and articles about the Perl programming language. On January 27th, Perl programming author and Perl.com editor brian d foy tweeted that the perl.com domain was suddenly registered under another person. Intellectual property lawyer John Berryhill later replied to the tweet that the domain was stolen in September 2020 while at Network Solutions, transferred to a registrar in China on Christmas Day, and finally moved to the Key-Systems registrar on January 27th, 2020. It wasn't until the last transfer that the IP addresses assigned to the domain were changed from 151.101.2.132 to the Google Cloud IP address 35.186.238[.]101... On the 28th, d foy tweeted that they have set up perl.com temporarily at http://perldotcom.perl.org for users who wish to access the site until the domain is recovered... d foy has told BleepingComputer that it is not believed that the domain owner's account was hacked and that they are currently working with Network solutions and Key-Systems to resolve the issue. "I do know from direct communication with the Network Solutions and Key Systems that they are working on this and that the perl.com domain is locked. Tom Christiansen, the rightful owner, is going through the recovery process with those registrars." "Both registrars, along with a few others, reached out to me personally to offer help and guidance. We are confident that we will be able to recover the domain, but I do not have a timetable for that," d foy told BleepingComputer. The IP address that perl.com is now hosted has a long history of being used in older malware campaigns and more recent ones. "Anyone using a perl.com host for their CPAN mirror should use www.cpan.org instead," advises an announcement page today at Perl.org, which d foy tweeted "is now going to be the source for the latest http://Perl.com info." On Thursday d foy tweeted that "There's no news on the recovery progress. Everyone who needs to be talking is talking to each other and it's just a process now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Among tech pundit Robert Cringley's predictions for 2021? "This year is going to be a tough one for Mark Zuckerberg."[W]hile I don't expect Zuckerberg to abandon his CEO job this year, he eventually will, simply because it isn't as much fun as it used to be and there will come a point (maybe in 2022) when leaving the top job will help Facebook's stock... Zuckerberg no longer has any who have faced what he is facing today. He has outgrown his own psychological support system... Zuckerberg's primary role models have been Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Page. Each modeled different ways to manage through dominance. Steve was a brilliant tyrant ("I know I'm an asshole," he told me more than once); Bill tried to technically dominate by claiming to identify bad code from across a room (he really can't); Larry taught by example to hide behind the algorithm, blaming it for, well, everything from nonexistent customer service to employee income inequality. The only unique truly self-actualized character in this mentor group was Steve Jobs and Steve is dead... But none of those guys faced what Zuckerberg faces today, calling all the shots and making all the hard calls by himself. That has to be exhausting... [T]he social media market is in transition and none of my kids have Facebook accounts, which I think is telling... And so 2021 will see Facebook poked and prodded and taxed and regulated and possibly even torn apart. Google will be, too, but Facebook is frankly less essential and more vulnerable. How Zuckerberg responds will be where he blazes his own managerial trail. However it goes will take a toll, though, and even Zuck will eventually decide it's better to become a philanthropist and find some new way to change the world. Though probably not until 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visual Studio Magazine reports:Microsoft, which calls its Excel spreadsheet a programming language, reports that an effort called LAMBDA to make it even more of a programming language is paying off, recently being deemed Turing complete. Being Turing complete is the litmus test of a full-fledged programming language, marking the ability to imitate a Turing machine. According to one definition, that means, "A programming language is Turing complete if you can implement any possible algorithm with it." And that's exactly what LAMBDA can now do. "You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language," said Microsoft researchers in a Jan. 25 blog post. To get there, researchers at the Calc Intelligence project addressed two shortcomings to the LAMBDA project, which is conducted in coordination with the Excel team and which was first announced early last month. They are: - The Excel formula language supported only scalar values like numbers, strings and Booleans - It didn't let users define new functions.... "Moreover, even if it takes greater skill and knowledge to author a lambda, it takes no extra skill to call it," researchers said. "LAMBDA allows skilled authors to extend Excel with application-domain-specific functions that appear seamlessly part of Excel to their colleagues, who simply call them. "It will be interesting to see how users continue to experiment with and apply not only LAMBDA but also data types and dynamic arrays. We believe these new functional programming features will transform how people make decisions with Excel." And there is certainly a large audience of both programmers and coders, as Microsoft claims "Excel formulas are written by an order of magnitude more users than all the C, C++, C#, Java, and Python programmers in the world combined." Towards the end the article points out that right now to actually use the new feature, "you have to be a member of the Insiders: Beta program."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"More than at any point since the QAnon conspiracy began, there is a tremendous opportunity to pull disaffected followers out of the conspiracy," writes FiveThirtyEight. And while it's just one of three possible scenarios, online posts suggest at least some members are abandoning the group, "but they will need support to really sever their connection." ABC News reports that some QAnon adherents "are turning to therapy and online support groups to talk about the damage done when beliefs collide with reality," including Ceally Smith, a working single mom in Kansas City:"We as a society need to start teaching our kids to ask: Where is this information coming from? Can I trust it?" she said. "Anyone can cut and paste anything." After a year, Smith wanted out, suffocated by dark prophesies that were taking up more and more of her time, leaving her terrified.... Another ex-believer, Jitarth Jadeja, now moderates a Reddit forum called QAnon Casualties to help others like him, as well as the relatives of people still consumed by the theory. Membership has doubled in recent weeks to more than 119,000 members. Three new moderators had to be added just to keep up. "They are our friends and family," said Jadeja, of Sydney, Australia. "It's not about who is right or who is wrong. I'm here to preach empathy, for the normal people, the good people who got brainwashed by this death cult." His advice to those fleeing QAnon? Get off social media, take deep breaths, and pour that energy and internet time into local volunteering. Michael Frink is a Mississippi computer engineer who helps administer a QAnon recovery channel on the social media platform Telegram. He said that while mocking the group has never been more popular online, it will only further alienate people. Frink said he never believed in the QAnon theory but sympathizes with those who did. "I think after the inauguration a lot of them realized they've been taken for a ride," he said. The New York Times tells the story of one Bernie Sanders supporter who entered — and then exited — the QAnon movement: Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends... "We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club." Meanwhile, her family was eating takeout all the time since she had stopped cooking and her stress levels had shot up, causing her blood pressure medication to stop working. Her doctor, worried, doubled her dose... When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master's degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was... She agreed to speak for this article to help others who are still in the throes of QAnon. And CNN reporter Anderson Cooper recently interviewed a recovering QAnon supporter, who tells him there were many theories about Cooper, including one that said he was actually a robot. The embarrassed former QAnon supporter admits that he had once believed that the people behind Q "were actually a group of 5th dimensional, intra-dimensional, extraterrestrial bi-pedal bird aliens called blue avians." During that interview, he also tells Anderson Cooper, "I apologize for thinking that you ate babies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes a recent blog post from BoingBoing: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most crammed-with-digital-tech fighter jet in history, the product of a multi-decade, trillion-dollar design process that has been famously messy. But the jet is out there, and pilots are flying it. One big design shift with the F-35 is that it removes many of the small physical switches that crowded older jet cockpits, and replaces them with a big touchscreen... The folks at the Husk-Kit aviation magazine got an (anonymous) pilot of the F-35 to give their candid assessment of the plane, and it turns out the touchscreen causes some serious problems — for this pilot, anyway, an astounding error rate of 20% while trying to activate a feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jalopnik reports:The United States government operates a fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, from mail delivery trucks to military vehicles and passenger cars. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration intends to replace them all with American-made, electric alternatives... In 2015, the government operated 357,610 gasoline vehicles and 3,896 electric ones; in 2019, those numbers grew to 368,807 and 4,475, respectively. That's excluding the tens of thousands of E-85 ["flex fuel"] and diesel-based vehicles on the road, which, together, comprise nearly a third of the 645,047 total. So, yeah, there's certainly a lot of work to do... The Washington Post reports:The declaration is a boon to the fledgling electric vehicle industry, which has grown exponentially in the past decade but still represents less than 2 percent of automobiles sold in the United States... "It's important as a symbolic thing," said Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "But I think it also will have a way of helping to jolt the industry forward at a time when it kind of needed that...." One of the biggest issues: Just three automakers currently manufacture electric vehicles in the United States, and none of those cars meet Biden's criteria of being produced by union workers from at least 50 percent American-made materials. The closest is the Chevrolet Bolt, assembled at a General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan. But most of that car's parts — including the battery, motor and drive unit — are produced overseas. But that could easily change, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research. If Biden succeeds in making every car in the federal fleet electric, he would increase the total number of electric vehicles in the United States by more than 50 percent. "One of the big questions for companies is, 'Is the consumer there?' Well, [the government] is a big consumer," Dziczek said. "Now they know there's some solid demand from the government to support their early launches of new vehicles...." With 640,000 nonelectric vehicles, the federal fleet represents the annual output of about three or four automotive plants, Dziczek said. That's not exactly the million jobs Biden promised in his announcement Monday. But it might be sufficient to convince car manufacturers to change their supply chains or shift their production to U.S. facilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from Sky.com:Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi "has invented a new fusion rocket thruster concept which could power humans to Mars and beyond," writes Sky.com Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report:The physicist who works for the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory designed the rocket which will use magnetic fields to shoot plasma particles — electrically charged gas — into the vacuum of space. According to Newton's second and third laws of motion, the conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forwards — and at speeds 10 times faster than comparable devices. While current space-proven plasma propulsion engines use electric fields to propel the particles, the new rocket design would accelerate them using magnetic reconnection... Dr. Ebrahimi's new concept performs much better than existing plasma thrusters in computer simulations — generating exhaust with velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second, 10 times faster than those of other thrusters. That faster velocity at the beginning of a spacecraft's journey could bring the outer planets within reach of astronauts, the physicist said.... "The next step is building a prototype!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. "The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in 2019," reported the Verge. Motherboard reported the bot was also offering "bulk" pricing, selling 10,000 phone numbers for $5,000. Telegram told the New York Post that they'd blocked the bot Tuesday morning, while Facebook downplayed the incident, reminding the Post "This is old data." But the Post notes that Facebook already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019, and security researcher Alon Gal posted a count of the millions of affected users in each country, finding 32,315,282 in America, 11,522,328 in the United Kingdom, 7,320,478 in Australia, and 3,494,385 in Canada. But the Verge points out the most ominous message of the breach: that ""the data is still out there on the web" — and that it's already resurfaced, more than once, in the days since it was initially scraped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bay Area Newsgroup reports:Despite high salaries and world-class amenities, San Jose is the least affordable place for tech workers to buy a home. [Alternate URL here] A new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the typical tech worker and his or her partner — with two incomes totaling $200,000 — can afford just 12 percent of the homes for sale in the San Jose metro area. The picture in San Francisco and the East Bay is nearly as bad, with just 21 percent of homes for sale fitting in the budget of an average tech couple. The high-hurdles to home ownership are fueling a Bay Area exodus that has contributed to the state's sluggish population growth in recent years, researchers say. Study author Ed Pinto, director of the AEI Housing Center, said tech workers can afford their pick of homes in almost every other U.S. city. "But in those places like San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles," he said, "that is not the case." The analysis gives another explanation for the Bay Area exodus. And it's not only workers who are leaving. Tech heavyweights HPE and Oracle have announced moves of their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas. Pinto believes the spread of remote work will only accelerate migration from the Bay Area. With new workplace flexibilities, tech workers have a choice between high-cost regions near their offices and low-cost regions with bigger houses and remote work. "Work from home is winning," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco quotes a new report from IEEE Spectrum:In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. "Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain," wrote the controller. "Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead...." There are some 90 reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System forum detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country. The military is jamming GPS signals to develop its own defenses against GPS jamming. Ironically, though, the Pentagon's efforts to safeguard its own troops and systems are putting the lives of civilian pilots, passengers, and crew at risk... Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, says. "When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits," warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging "It's time to fix the fine print." [Alternate URL here][M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click "agree" to binding terms of service contracts — again and again on phones, laptops, tablets, watches, e-readers and televisions. Agreeing often means allowing personal data to be resold or waiving the right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit... Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don't have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company's terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies' policies. That number would probably be much higher today. At its core, the arrangement is unbalanced, putting the burden on consumers to read through voluminous, nonnegotiable documents, written to benefit corporations in exchange for access to their services. It's hard to imagine, by contrast, being asked to sign a 60-page printed contract before entering a bowling alley or a florist shop... Though courts have held terms of service contracts to be binding, there is generally no legal requirement that companies make them comprehensible. It is understandable, then, that companies may feel emboldened to insert terms that advantage them at their customers' expense. That includes provisions that most consumers wouldn't knowingly agree to: an inability to delete one's own account, granting companies the right to claim credit for or alter their creative work, letting companies retain content even after a user deletes it, letting them gain access to a user's full browsing history and giving them blanket indemnity. More often than not, there is a clause (including for The New York Times's website) that the terms can be updated at any time without prior notice. Some terms approach the absurd. Food and ride-share companies, like DoorDash and Lyft, ask users to agree that the companies are not delivery or transportation businesses, a sleight of hand designed to give the companies license to treat their contract drivers as employees while also sheltering the companies from liability for whatever may happen on a ride or delivery. Handy, an on-demand housecleaning service, once sought in its terms of service to put customers on the hook for future tax liabilities should their contract workers' job classification be changed to employee... "This is one of the tools used by corporations to assert themselves over their customers and whittle away their rights," said Nancy Kim, a California Western School of Law professor who studies online contracts. "With their constant updates to terms and conditions, it amounts to a massive bait-and-switch...." "We have become so beaten down by this that we just accept it," said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University law professor. "The idea that anyone should be expected to read these terms of service is preposterous — they are written to discourage people from reading them...." The Board urges the U.S. Congress to consider requiring greater transparency about terms and their changes — as well as simpler explanations. "If a company's online service is open to 13-year-olds, as many are, then the terms of use need to be written so an eighth grader can understand them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nonprofit watchdog news site in Tulsa, Oklahoma reports:The Oklahoma Attorney General's Office has been tasked with attempting to return a $2 million stockpile of a malaria drug once touted by former President Donald Trump as a way to treat the coronavirus. In April, Gov. Kevin Stitt, who ordered the hydroxychloroquine purchase, defended it by saying that while it may not be a useful treatment for the coronavirus, the drug had multiple other uses and "that money will not have gone to waste in any respect." But nearly a year later the state is trying to offload the drug back to its original supplier, California-based FFF Enterprises, Inc, a private pharmaceutical wholesaler... It's unclear yet how much of the initial $2 million investment in the hydroxychloroquine the state could recoup. "While governments in at least 20 other states obtained more than 30 million doses of the drug through donations from the federal reserve or private companies, Oklahoma and Utah bought them from private pharmaceutical companies," notes ABC News:Then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, initially defended the state's $800,000 purchase of 20,000 packets of hydroxychloroquine compounded with zinc, but later canceled an additional plan to spend $8 million more to buy 200,000 more treatments. The state then managed to secure a refund on the $800,000 no-bid contract it signed with a local pharmacy company that had been promoting the drugs. The CEO of the pharmacy company has since pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor for mislabeling the drug imported from China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday afternoon CNBC reported that "heightened speculative trading by retail investors" (later referred to as "GameStop mania") had "continued to unnerve the market."The Dow Jones Industrial average lost 620.74 points, or 2%, to 29,982.62, the first time the 30-stock gauge has closed below the 30,000 mark since Dec. 14.... The market also experienced the highest trading volume in years as the mania heated up. On Wednesday, total market volume hit more than 23.7 billion shares, surpassing the level during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. Thursday also saw extremely heavy trading with more than 19 billion shares changing hands. But Forbes reports that experts "seem in broad agreement that the bull market can rage on.""The market is not broken, but recent events have revealed some cracks," says Commonwealth Financial Network Chief Investment Officer Brad McMillan, who thinks one likely result of the week's frenzy could be that the price of options — which helped fuel some of the outsized meme-stock demand — rise to help curb "price hacking" in the future. McMillan eschews concerns from other experts that the Reddit-fueled price mania could be a sign the market is in the middle of a bubble akin to the dot-com era in the late 1990s, but he says "crackdown" by regulators is likely. CNN pointed out that the tagline of Reddit's forum is "like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal illness" — and cited two more reactions: - "We've seen how social media can be manipulated to expose fault lines in our democracy," said Arthur Levitt, Jr., the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in an op-ed [titled "Danger Lurks Beneath Reddit Day Traders' GameStop Triumph"]. "Are we certain the same isn't happening in our financial markets? Time to find out." - "I think it's a real example of what we're already seeing with the way media has been upended," said Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in an Instagram video this week. "All of these big institutions have been challenged, quietly and sometimes loudly, at moments, for the last 10 years with the rise of social media." Meanwhile, CNBC's stock pundit Jim Cramer advised the traders who'd helped spark the runup to grab their profits now:"Take the home run. Don't go for the grand slam. Take the home run. You've already won. You've won the game. You're done," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." "Please don't lose a lot of money on GameStop," added the "Mad Money" host. Cramer, who's being treated in the hospital for a pinched nerve, said he called into CNBC in hopes of making sure people recognize the potential downside risk in GameStop and other soaring short squeezed stocks. "Don't let them get hurt. It's our job" to make sure people know they may get burned if the stock price collapses, he said.... Cramer said he was concerned about the stability of the rest of the U.S. equity market the longer the frenzied trading continued... "I'm not saying that Reddit is good or bad, or that the shorts are good or bad," he said. "I'm just saying that the government has to step in and at least try to address the situation so the rest of the market isn't panicked by four stocks that are heavily shorted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft this morning disclosed investments in more climate-related companies as part of efforts to make good on its year-old pledge to become "carbon negative" by 2030. From a report: One company the tech behemoth is staking is Climeworks, a firm looking to scale up deployment of direct air capture technology that removes CO2 already in the atmosphere. The size of the investment was not disclosed. Microsoft also revealed that it's a customer of the Swiss firm. "Through Microsoft's purchase of negative emissions from Climeworks, we will permanently remove 1,400 metric tons of carbon," Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's top environmental official, said in a blog post. It's part of a growing move by deep-pocketed companies and investors to back the fledgling direct air capture sector -- and pay them for carbon removal. The volumes currently being removed are a tiny drop in the bucket, but DAC could be among the technologies that eventually join the list of meaningful tools against warming. Another firm, Carbon Engineering, counts backers including Bill Gates, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum.Climeworks' other investors and customers include e-commerce heavyweight Shopify.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Reddit's interest in sending some stocks soaring showing no sign of slowing down, the trading app Robinhood started restricting some transactions Thursday morning. Reddit wasn't happy -- and neither are some lawmakers. From a report:The incident apparently struck an unusual bipartisan chord, with Texas Republican Ted Cruz throwing his weight behind progressive Democrats who called out the company. Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Robinhood's decision "beyond absurd" and suggested that the House Financial Services Committee hold a hearing on what she deemed "market manipulation" from the personal finance startup. "They're blocking the ability to trade to protect Wall St. hedge funds, stealing millions of dollars from their users to protect people who've used the stock market as a casino for decades," Tlaib said. Her colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- a member of that committee -- chimed in with support for a hearing on Robinhood, calling the situation an "unacceptable" step to prevent retail investors from trading. Seeing Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez line up on anything right now is unusual, to put it mildly. Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna also flagged Robinhood's decision to stop some trades, slamming the startup for freezing out small investors while powerful hedge funds scramble to get control of the situation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook on Thursday criticized polarization and misinformation on social media, intensifying a conflict between the iPhone maker and Facebook. From a report: In remarks delivered at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference, Cook critiqued apps that he argued collect too much personal information and prioritize "conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of their high rates of engagement." "At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement -- the longer the better -- and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible," Cook said. He did not name Facebook, but the two companies have been in a high-profile dispute. Apple is preparing to implement privacy notifications that many in the digital advertising industry believe will cause some users to decline to allow the use of ad-targeting tools. Facebook has accused Apple of anticompetitive conduct because Apple has a growing catalog of paid apps and its own digital advertising business. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said Apple has "every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work." Cook on Thursday criticized social media practices that he said undermine public trust in vaccines and encourage users to join extremist groups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify has been granted a patent with technology that aims to use recordings of users' speech and background noise to determine what kind of music to curate and recommend to them. The company filed for the patent in 2018; it was approved on January 12, 2021. From a report: The patent outlines potential uses of technology that involves the extraction of "intonation, stress, rhythm, and the likes of units of speech" from the user's voice. The tech could also use speech recognition to identify metadata points such as emotional state, gender, age, accent, and even environment -- i.e., whether someone is alone, or with other people -- based on audio recording.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla has unveiled refreshed versions of its Model X and Model S cars, revealing that both are equipped with gaming hardware supporting "up to 10 teraflops of processing power." This theoretically puts a car within the ballpark of a new generation console. From a report: The Tesla models, priced in excess of $80,000 and shipping in March, are fitted with hardware to power Tesla Arcade, an in-car gaming system that is already available in current Tesla models. The difference is that previous models are only able to run less demanding games such as Cuphead and Cat Quest, while the promotional materials for the new Tesla models show The Witcher 3 displayed on the 17" central console. This suggests a significant step up for the car's gaming potential. Specifics on how powerful the car's gaming rig is isn't easy to tell, as the quoted "up to 10 teraflops of processing power" can't be directly translated to the power of a PS5, which is capable of 10.28 teraflops. The accompanying components must also be taken into account, and Tesla has offered no details on the full specs of the hardware. It's unclear if Nvidia or AMD GPUs are being used, or if it all comes from Tesla's own system-on-a-chip. And while The Witcher 3 is an impressive game by... err... car standards, it's very much a last-gen experience now. Theoretically, though, the system in the new Teslas is capable of strong gaming performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.