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Scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about the geologic process behind these large pieces of gold found in quartz rock. From a report: Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn't too tricky: Much of the world's gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth's squashed-up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets there in the first place was a mystery. Now, a new study published today in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes -- lots of them. Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity. That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth's crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold -- and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets. "If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out," says Christopher Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of that shaking, and the team's lab experiments show that earthquakes can make gold nuggets. The idea that gold nuggets appear because of electricity instead of a more conventional geologic process is, at first, a peculiar thought. But "it makes complete sense," says Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in England and who was not involved with the new work. Quartz veins host a disproportionate number of gold nuggets and their environments experience plenty of earthquakes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canva, a popular online design platform, plans to significantly increase prices for some of its business subscriptions next year, citing the addition of generative AI features. The company's Teams subscription, which supports multiple users, will see price hikes of up to 300% in some regions. From a report: Subscribers to Canva Teams, which is targeted at businesses with several users, were emailed late last week to notify them of the price increase, which amounts to a three-times jump. A spokesperson for Canva said the price rise was due in part to the introduction of a number of new features on the Canva platform, including many powered by AI and generative AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kotaku reviews Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's latest AAA title: I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft's latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention. It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past. Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over. I'm struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it's even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all. Brokerage firm UBS said in a note to clients: Based on the 621 ratings thus far the game has received a score of 4.8 (out of 10). This tracks behind previous blockbuster releases by Ubisoft in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, behind competing open world games released in 2024 and behind other major recent Star Wars Games released by EA in 2019 and 2023. The user ratings, which are generally unfavourable lag its generally favourable critic reviews (game received a score of 76 by critics). Early user ratings suggest downside risk to our 10m units forecast for the game: While we previously felt the largely positive critic reviews made our 10m units sold look achievable (a component upon which we forecast +4% FY25 net bookings growth), the user ratings now suggest downside risk to our estimates. Previous Ubisoft games in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry which sold 10m+ units in their first fiscal year all received higher user ratings and were instalments of well entrenched franchises.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children under the age of two should not be exposed to any screens whatsoever and teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day, according to guidelines announced by health authorities in Sweden. From a report: Parents and guardians should think about how they use screens with their children and tell them what they are doing on their phones when they use them in their presence, the advice says. The guidelines, announced on Monday, mark the first time that Folkhalsomyndigheten, Sweden's public health authority, has stipulated how parents should regulate screen time. Screen use among two- to five-year-olds should be limited to a maximum of one hour, while children aged between six and 12 should not use screens for more than two hours. Among 13- to 18-year-olds, the limit is three hours. This is a sharp reduction on the current average screen time figures among Swedish children and young people, which is estimated to be four hours a day for nine- to 12-year-olds and more than seven hours a day -- not including schoolwork -- for 17- and 18-year-olds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children under the age of two should not be exposed to any screens whatsoever and teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day, according to guidelines announced by health authorities in Sweden. From a report: Parents and guardians should think about how they use screens with their children and tell them what they are doing on their phones when they use them in their presence, the advice says. The guidelines, announced on Monday, mark the first time that Folkhalsomyndigheten, Sweden's public health authority, has stipulated how parents should regulate screen time. Screen use among two- to five-year-olds should be limited to a maximum of one hour, while children aged between six and 12 should not use screens for more than two hours. Among 13- to 18-year-olds, the limit is three hours. This is a sharp reduction on the current average screen time figures among Swedish children and young people, which is estimated to be four hours a day for nine- to 12-year-olds and more than seven hours a day -- not including schoolwork -- for 17- and 18-year-olds. Editor's note: the headline was revised to match the original wording used in the linked article. H/T to user cmseagle. Error is regretted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Night trains are experiencing a resurgence across Europe as travelers seek more environmentally friendly alternatives to flying. European Sleeper, a Dutch cooperative, recently launched a new overnight route from Brussels to Prague, extending its existing service to Berlin. The 13-hour journey traverses Germany in refurbished 1970s-era carriages, accommodating up to 600 passengers. Bart Poels, head of service, reports high demand with most routes fully booked through September. Passengers are citing various reasons for choosing night trains, including reduced carbon footprint, city center-to-center convenience, and cost savings on hotel accommodations, El Pais reports. The diverse clientele includes executives, families, and retirees. This revival comes after years of decline in night train services. Austrian railway OBB's Nightjet brand, launched in 2016, has also sparked renewed interest in overnight rail travel. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the trend as travelers sought alternatives to flying. European officials are supporting the expansion of cross-border rail connections. The European Commission has backed pilot projects for more frequent and affordable services, while the European Investment Bank has provided loans for new equipment purchases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elastic, creator of popular search engine Elasticsearch and visualization tool Kibana, plans to introduce the AGPL open-source license alongside its existing licenses. The move comes three years after Elastic ditched the Apache 2.0 license, sparking controversy in the tech community. Founder Shay Banon says the change aims to clarify Elastic's market position following AWS's creation of OpenSearch, a fork of Elasticsearch. Despite initial friction, Banon claims Elastic's relationship with AWS has improved, citing growth in Elastic Cloud revenue and customer base.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has confirmed it will push ahead with a high court lawsuit against the estate of the deceased tech tycoon Mike Lynch in which it is seeking damages of up to $4 billion. From a report: The US company said in a statement it would follow the legal proceedings "through to their conclusion" despite Lynch's death last month when his yacht sank off the coast of Italy. HPE won a civil claim against Lynch in the English high court in 2022, after accusing him and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain of fraud over its $11 billion takeover of his software company Autonomy in 2011. A ruling on damages is expected soon, although the judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Hildyard, wrote in 2022 that he expected final damages to be "substantially less than is claimed." Lynch, 59, who was cleared in a separate criminal fraud trial over the Autonomy deal in the US in June, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, were among seven people who died after the Bayesian superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily last month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While the latest update to Windows 11 makes it look like the upcoming Recall feature can be easily removed by users, Microsoft tells us it's just a bug and a fix is coming. Deskmodder spotted the change last week in the latest 24H2 version of Windows 11, with KB5041865 seemingly delivering the ability to uninstall Recall from the Windows Features section. "We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the 'Turn Windows features on or off' dialog in Control Panel," says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. "This will be fixed in an upcoming update."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A former executive of smartphone startup OSOM Products has filed a lawsuit alleging the company's founder misused funds for personal expenses, including two Lamborghinis and a lavish lifestyle. Mary Ross, OSOM's ex-Chief Privacy Officer, is seeking access to company records in a Delaware court filing. OSOM, founded in 2020 by former Essential employees, launched two products: the Solana-backed Saga smartphone and a privacy cable. Android founder Andy Rubin founded Essential, which sought to compete with Apple and Android-makers on a smartphone, but later shutdown after not find many takers for its phone. The lawsuit claims OSOM founder Jason Keats used company money for racing hobbies, first-class travel, and mortgage payments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Efforts to add Rust code to the Linux kernel has suffered a setback as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project has stepped down -- citing frustration with "nontechnical nonsense." The Register: Wedson Almeida Filho, a software engineer at Microsoft who has overseen the Rust for Linux project, announced his resignation in a message to the Linux kernel development mailing list. "I am retiring from the project," Filho declared. "After almost four years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them." [...] Memory safety bugs are regularly cited as the major source of serious software vulnerabilities by organizations overseeing large projects written in C and C++. So in recent years there's been a concerted push from large developers like Microsoft and Google, and well as from government entities like the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to use memory-safe programming languages -- among them Rust. Discussions about adding Rust to Linux date back to 2020 and were realized in late 2022 with the release of Linux 6.1. "I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages," Filho's note continued. "I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Notorious for a hardworking culture, Japan launched an initiative to help people cut back. But three years into the effort, the country is having a hard time coaxing people to take a four-day workweek. From a report: Japanese lawmakers first proposed a shorter work week in 2021. The guidelines aimed to encourage staff retention and cut the number of workers falling ill or dying from overwork in an economy already suffering from a huge labor shortage. The guidelines also included overtime limits and paid annual leave. However, the initiative has had a slow start: According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, only about 8% of companies in Japan allow employees to take three or more days off a week. It's not just companies -- employees are hesitant, too. Electronics manufacturer Panasonic, one of Japan's largest companies, opted into the effort in early 2022. Over two years in, only 150 of its 63,000 eligible employees have chosen to take up four-day schedules, a representative of the company told the Associated Press. Other major companies to introduce a four-day workweek include Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, electronics giant Hitachi, and financial firm Mizuho. About 85% of employers report giving workers the usual two days off a week. Much of the reluctance to take an extra day off boils down to a culture of workers putting companies before themselves, including pressure to appear like team players and hard workers. This intense culture stems from Japan's postwar era, where, in an effort to boost the economy, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida enlisted major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security, asking only that workers repay them with loyalty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google executive James Manyika has warned that AI's impact on productivity is not guaranteed [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], despite predictions of trillion-dollar economic potential. From the report: "Right now, everyone from my old colleagues at McKinsey Global Institute to Goldman Sachs are putting out these extraordinary economic potential numbers -- in the trillions -- [but] it's going to take a whole bunch of actions, innovations, investments, even enabling policy ...The productivity gains are not guaranteed. They're going to take a lot of work." In 1987 economist Robert Solow remarked that the computer age was visible everywhere except in the productivity statistics. "We could have a version of that -- where we see this technology everywhere, on our phones, in all these chatbots, but it's done nothing to transform the economy in that real fundamental way." The use of generative AI to draft software code is not enough. "In the US, the tech sector is about 4 per cent of the labour force. Even if the entire tech sector adopted it 100 per cent, it doesn't matter from a labour productivity standpoint." Instead the answer lies with "very large sectors" such as healthcare and retail. Former British prime minister Sir Tony Blair has said that people "will have an AI nurse, probably an AI doctor, just as you'll have an AI tutor." Manyika is less dramatic: "In most of those cases, those professions will be assisted by AI. I don't think any of those occupations are going to be replaced by AI, not in any conceivable future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report: If you are reading this and live in America, or used to live in America, or maybe just went to America one time many years ago, then you are almost certainly performing unpaid labor for the U.S. government and have been for years. How? By storing some of the billions of pennies the U.S. Mint makes every year that virtually no one uses. Why are we still making tons (many thousands of tons) of pennies if no one uses them? That's a sensible question with a psychotic answer: We have to keep making all these pennies -- over $45 million worth last year -- because no one uses them. In fact, it could be very bad if we did. When you insert a quarter into a soda machine, that quarter eventually finds its way back to a bank, from which it can be redistributed to a store's cash register and handed out as change -- maybe even to you, who can put it into a soda machine again and start the whole process over. That's beautiful. (Please be mindful of your soft drink consumption.) But few of us ever spend pennies. We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you've left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don't have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change. That is where the Mint comes in. Every year it makes a few billion more pennies to replace the ones everyone is thoughtlessly, indefinitely storing and scatters them like kudzu seeds across the nation. You -- a scientist of some kind, possibly -- might think an obvious solution now presents itself: Why not encourage people to use the pennies they have lying around instead of manufacturing new ones every year? We can't! Or, anyway, we'd better not. According to a Mint report, if even a modest share of our neglected pennies suddenly returned to circulation, the result would be a "logistically unmanageable" dilemma for Earth's wealthiest nation. As in, the penny tsunami could overwhelm government vaults. That's not great, but at the end of the day we're talking only about pennies. How much could a penny cost to make? A penny? If only we lived in such a paradise. Unfortunately, one penny costs more than three pennies (3.07 cents at last count) to make and distribute! When I learned this, I lost my mind.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system has surpassed Windows 10 usage for Steam users for the first time since its launch in 2021. From a report: Windows 10 has been holding strong in recent years, despite Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025. There are now signs that Windows 11 adoption is finally heading in the right direction for Microsoft. Steam hardware survey data for August puts Windows 11 usage at 49 percent, an increase of more than 3 percent over the previous figure in July of nearly 46 percent. Windows 10 usage has dipped by around 3 percent to 47 percent, while macOS and Linux Steam usage has largely remained the same during August.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and key executives are expected to present a plan later this month to the company's board of directors to slice off unnecessary businesses and revamp capital spending, according to a source familiar with the matter, as they try to revive the once-dominant chipmaker's fortunes. The plan will include ideas on how to shave overall costs by selling businesses, including its programmable chip unit Altera, that Intel can no longer afford to fund from the company's once-sizeable profit. Gelsinger and other high-ranking executives at Intel are expected to present the plan at a mid-September board meeting, the same source said. The proposal does not yet include plans to split Intel and sell off its contract manufacturing operation, or foundry, to a buyer such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to the source and another person familiar with the matter.The presentation, including the plans around its manufacturing operations, are not yet finalized and could change ahead of the meeting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Let's get one thing out of the way," writes the Verge's transportation editor. Contrary to what you may have heard about U.S. sales of electric vehicles - sales are up.[Consumer insights company] JD Power is projecting that 1.2 million EVs will be sold in the US by the end of 2024, an increase over 1 million sold last year. That's 9 percent of total vehicles sold, which has been revised down from a previous prediction of 12 percent... Overall, an additional 35,000 battery-electric vehicles were sold in the first seven months of 2024 as compared to last year, JD Power says. That includes hybrids and PHEVs, which I think gets at the root of the problem. Those who were expecting an even swap - battery-electric for internal combustion - didn't anticipate the popularity of hybrids in the market. If anything, hybrids are cannibalizing EV sales, giving the pure-battery electric vehicles more competition than anticipated. But in retrospect, it makes sense. What better response to "range anxiety" than a vehicle that, in a sense, operates as an electric vehicle until the battery runs out, and then switches over to gas...? EVs are still too expensive, giving potential buyers sticker shock. According to data from Kelley Blue Book, the average transaction price for an electric car in July 2024 was $56,520. Meanwhile, the average gas-powered vehicle is selling at $48,401. There's also a depreciation problem. New research out of George Washington University finds that older EVs depreciate in value faster than conventional gas cars. Some even lost 50 percent of their resale value in a single year. The upside is that newer models with longer driving ranges are holding their value better and approaching the retention rates of many gas cars. The charging experience is still wildly out-of-sync for most people. Either it's the single most satisfying thing about owning an EV or it's the worst. And the distinction is usually between people who live in houses and can install a home charger in their garage and those who live in an apartment building or multi-unit housing and have to rely on unreliable public chargers... But JD Power is optimistic about where that's heading, especially as public satisfaction is growing in both Level 2 and DC fast charging over two consecutive quarters. The Biden administration also continues to make massive investments in public charging, which should slowly ease the experience of public charging from "soul-sucking" to "honestly whatever." The article concludes that the EV industry needs patience and flexibility. But more than that, it "needs to slow it down with the six-figure, luxury pickups and SUVs and start offering more low-cost compact cars and sedans."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Houston resident Brandy Deason put an Apple AirTag in her recycling to see where her plastic trash was going," writes Tom's Hardware. "While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management."Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear. That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight. Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling - and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. "I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem." In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has "applied" for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved. CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. "We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here," a spokesperson answered, "And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it." CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. "So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem." Cyclix Project Manager: "Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products - that's what we're trying to do!" CBS News points out that urning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot covered shrinkwrap licenses on software back in 2000 and 2002. But now ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes:The user Wraithe on the Mastodon network is reporting that a bottle of Vital Proteins(TM) collagen peptides purchased at Costco came with a shrinkwrap contract. Collagen peptides are often used as an anti-aging nutritional supplement. The top of the Vital Proteins bottle has a pull-to-open seal. Printed on the seal is the following: "Read This: By opening and using this product, you agree to be bound by our Terms and Conditions, fully set forth at vitalproteins.com/tc, which includes a mandatory arbitration agreement. If you do not agree to be bound, please return this product immediately." So-called "shrinkwrap contracts" have been the subject of controversy and derision for decades since their first widespread appearance in the 1970's, attempting to alter the terms of sale after the fact, impose unethical and onerous restrictions on the purchaser, and absolving the vendor of all liability. Most such contracts appear on items involving copyrighted works (computer software, or any item containing computer software). The alleged "validity" of such contracts supposedly proceeds from the (alleged) need that the item requires a copyright license from the vendor to use (because the right to use/read/listen/view/execute is somehow not concomitant with purchase), and that the shrinkwrap contract furnishes such license. The application of such a contract to a good where copyright has no scope, however, is something new. The alleged contract itself governs consumers' use of, "the VitalProteins.com website and any other applications, content, products, and services (collectively, the "Service")...," contains the usual we're-not-responsible-for-anything indemnification paragraph, and unilaterally removes your right to seek redress in court of law and imposes binding arbitration involving any disputes that may arise between the consumer and the company. Indeed, the arbitration clause is the first numbered section in the alleged contract. The same contract has been spotted by numerous others - including someone who posted about it on Reddit two years ago. ("When I opened it, encountered a vacuum seal with the following 'READ THIS: by opening and using this product, you agree to...'") But the same verbiage still appears in online listings today for the product from Albertsons, Walgreens, and CVS. Shrinkwrap contracts. They're not just for software any more...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1.9 million solar panels began operating this year in California - at a Mortenson facility with 120,000 installed batteries that give it a storage capacity of 3,280 megawatts. An article in El Pais notes that this helped California pass 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaic storage in April - enough to meet 20% of demand - for the first time ever. (In 2019, the state had just 770 megawatts of storage capacity.) Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. "In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid," Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego... Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California's grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. "The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO," notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts... [California's goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.] Arizona and Georgia have followed California's lead. But it is Texas, the other major U.S. giant in this industry, that is snapping at its heels. At the end of April, batteries supplied 4% of the grid's electricity, enough to power several million homes. Batteries are beginning to look like an alternative to a system heavily dependent on gas and coal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pundits aggregate results from multiple pollsters to minimize biases. So ZDNet tried the same approach, but aggregating rankings for the popularity of 19 top programming languages. Senior contributing editor David Gewirtz combined results from nine popularity rankings, including PYPL, the Tiobe index, GitHub's Usage 2023 summary report, and several rankings from Stack Overflow and from IEEE Spectrum. The results?The top cluster contains Python, JavaScript, and Java. These are all very representative in the world of AI coding... The next cluster contains the classic C-based languages [C++, C#, C], plus TypeScript (which is a more robust JavaScript variant) and SQL. Below that are languages that were dominant a while ago, the web languages used to build and operate websites [HTML/CSS, PHP, Shell], followed by a range of other languages that are either growing in popularity (R, Dart) or dropping in popularity (Ruby). [Just above Ruby are Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Lua.] Finally, at the bottom is Swift, Apple's language of choice. Objective-C, the previous language of Apple programming, has all but dropped off the list since Apple launched Swift. But while Apple boasts many developers, Swift is clearly not a standout in programmer interest... [T]here aren't a huge number of companies hiring Apple app developers, at least primarily. That's why Swift is relatively far down the chart. Objective-C is being replaced by Swift, and we can see it dropping right before our eyes. "With the exception of Java, the C-family of languages still dominates," the article concludes, before adding that if you're only going to learn one language, "I'd recommend Python, Java, and JavaScript instead." But it also advises aspiring programmers to learn "multiple languages and multiple frameworks. Build things in the languages. Programming is not just an intellectual exercise. You have to actually make stuff.... "[L]earning how to learn languages is as important as learning a language - and the best way to do that is to learn more than one."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Politico reports U.S. states have no uniform way of policing the use of overseas subcontractors in election technology, "let alone to understand which individual software components make up a piece of code." For example, to replace New Hampshire's old voter registration database, state election officials "turned to one of the best - and only - choices on the market," Politico: "a small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software."But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November. The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain. The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia ["probably by accident," they write later] and the use of open-source code - which is freely available online - overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it... New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv. None of the findings amounted to evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said, and the company resolved the issues before the new database came into use ahead of the presidential vote this spring. This was "a disaster averted," said the person familiar with the probe, citing the risk that hackers could have exploited the first two issues to surreptitiously edit the state's voter rolls, or use them and the presence of the Ukrainian national anthem to stoke election conspiracies. [Though WSD only maintains one other state's voter registration database - Vermont] the supply-chain scare in New Hampshire - which has not been reported before - underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise. The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems. Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure. The article also points out that many state and federal election officials "insist there has been significant progress" since 2016, with more regular state-federal communication. "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, now the lead federal agency on election security, didn't even exist back then. "Perhaps most importantly, more than 95% of U.S. voters now vote by hand or on machines that leave some type of paper trail, which officials can audit after Election Day."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

renzema (Slashdot reader #84,617) wants suggestions for a point-to-point video conferencing system "to connect the kids to their grandparents... We live in Europe and they in the U.S., but we both have gigabit internet and can sustain upwards of 100mb between our houses."I've been spoiled at work with super high quality Cisco systems... Currently, we have Amazon Echos, but the video quality on these (at least for Sweden/U.S. calls) is really lacking. We've tried Facetime as well, and while the video quality is much better, the inconvenience of needing to use it on an iPad or phone is quite high (or starting a call with them, then them needing to move to the computer...) Ideally I would love Facetime on an Apple TV with a camera that follows us. We have played a bit with the phone-as-a-camera thing with Facetime and Apple TV, but the sound was not great... I'm willing to invest in hardware, up to a few hundred dollars per site, if this can really be bulletproof and give a consistently high quality video connection. Ideally it would be standalone hardware that does not need a computer to be running all the time. There's one problem that can't be solved: calling the grandparents' phone when they're out of the house and not available to talk. But the dream solution involves using a TV to make and receive video calls. "When a call is received, it would power on the TV and 'ring'." The wishlist?High quality pictureNo echo in large rooms. Handles people sitting a few meters away from the TV."Would really prefer no monthly fees."Any suggestions? Share your own thoughts and experience in the comments. What's the best home videoconferencing system?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica:On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft. "I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it." [Ars Technica embeded a clip of the conversation including the rhythmic, sonar-like noise which was shared online by a Michigan-based meteorologist.] Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months. Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. "Alright Butch, that one came through," Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping." "I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To make America the "crypto capital of the planet," former U.S. President Donald Trump promised crypto-friendly policies, writes Politico, which "could have a new beneficiary: his own family."Trump has vowed to enact an array of pro-crypto policies in a bid to win votes - and campaign cash - from digital asset enthusiasts in recent months. Now, he's weaving the overtures into his pitch for his sons' forthcoming startup... It remains unclear what the Trump sons' crypto venture will look like. They have been teasing their plans to launch it for weeks, in part by positioning it as an alternative to the use of big banks.... ["Be defiant," reads the tagline on their World Liberty Financial home page - with nothing more than its name and the words "Coming soon."] Trump's sons took over control of their father's business, the Trump Organization, after he became president in 2017, but he retained ownership of the company... It is unclear whether the crypto startup would be launched as part of the Trump Organization or as a separate entity. Either way, ethics experts and watchdogs say the crypto business could create the appearance of a conflict of interest if Trump wins back the White House this fall... From an "optics perspective, it's terrible," said Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush and later ran for Congress as a Democrat. But he said it wouldn't violate any ethics laws. The family venture is the latest way Trump has embraced the digital asset industry, which is pouring more than $160 million into the 2024 elections as it seeks to help elect allies up and down the ballot. Trump has also marketed his own line of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are digital images of the former president that fans can purchase for $99... Trump's NFT sales could also raise ethics concerns, said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.... "[P]rior conflicts and illegalities took advantage of preexisting loopholes," said Norman Eisen, an ethics lawyer who served in the Obama White House and later helped build the first impeachment case against Trump. "Here, Trump appears to be promising to create the loopholes while his family is simultaneously designing a business venture to exploit them." The article notes that Trump promoted his son's crypto venture on X this week with audio from Trump's speech at a crypto conference in July. "He first revealed his pro-crypto leanings - after previously deriding digital currency - at a Mar-a-Lago event in May with supporters who bought his crypto-linked digital trading cards..." "Trump is also facing new questions about what he would do with his stake in the parent company of the social media service Truth Social," the article adds. (Although this week the stock hit a new low. After losing 50% of its value in six weeks, it's dropped below $20 per share for the first time since it started publicly trading...)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Contingency Contingent, is Leigh Claire La Berge's amazing tale of what she calls her "fake job in Y2K preparedness." La Berge offers an insider's view of the madness that ensued when Y2K panic gave rise to seemingly-limitless spending at mega-corporations for massive enterprise-wide Y2K remediation projects led by management consulting firms that left clients with little to show for their money. (La Berge was an analyst for consulting firm Arthur Andersen, where "the Andersen position was that 'Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem'.... At a certain point all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation."). In what reads like the story treatment for an Office Space sequel, La Berge writes that it was a fake job "because Andersen was faking it." From the article:The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later. Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms. With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options. Looking back, the author remembers being "surprised by how quickly Y2K disappeared from office discourse as though censored..." Their upcoming book is called Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from NBC News:A new approach to a routine blood test could predict a person's 30-year risk of heart disease, research published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine found. Doctors have long assessed their patients' risk for cardiovascular disease by using a blood test to look at cholesterol levels, focusing particularly on LDL or "bad" cholesterol. But limiting blood testing to just cholesterol misses important - and usually silent - risk factors, experts say... Lead study author Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and his team found that in addition to LDL cholesterol, two other markers - a type of fat in the blood called lipoprotein (a), or Lp(a), and an indicator of inflammation - are important predictors of a person's risk of heart attack, stroke and coronary heart disease... In the study, the researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 U.S. women who were part of the Women's Health Study. On average, the women were 55 years old when they enrolled in the years 1992 through 1995. About 13% - roughly 3,600 participants - had either a heart attack or stroke, had surgery to fix a narrowed or blocked artery, or died from heart disease over the 30-year follow-up period... All of the women had blood tests done at the beginning of the study to measure their LDL cholesterol, Lp(a) and C-reactive protein levels, a marker of inflammation in the body. These measurements, individually as well as together, appeared to predict a woman's heart health over the next three decades, the study found. Women with the highest levels of LDL cholesterol had a 36% higher risk for heart disease compared with those with the lowest levels. The highest levels of Lp(a) indicated a 33% elevated risk, and those with the highest levels of CRP were 70% more at risk for heart disease. When the three were looked at together, women who had the highest levels were 1.5 times more likely to have a stroke and over three times more likely to develop coronary heart disease over the next 30 years compared with women with the lowest levels. All of the markers have been individually linked to higher risk of heart disease, but "all three represent different biological processes. They tell us why someone is actually at risk," Ridker said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Casey Newton, former senior editor at the Verge, weighs in on Platformer about the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. "Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to."Officially, Telegram's terms of service prohibit users from posting illegal pornographic content or promotions of violence on public channels. But as the Stanford Internet Observatory noted last year in an analysis of how CSAM spreads online, these terms implicitly permit users who share CSAM in private channels as much as they want to. "There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?" asks a question on Telegram's FAQ page. The company declares that it will not intervene in any circumstances: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants," it states. "We do not process any requests related to them...." Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data. Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again: To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. [...] To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments. As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM.... The company's refusal to answer almost any law enforcement request, no matter how dire, has enabled some truly vile behavior. "Telegram is another level," Brian Fishman, Meta's former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. "It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It's not 'light' content moderation; it's a different approach entirely. The article asks whether France's action "will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data."On the other hand, Telegram really does seem to be actively enabling a staggering amount of abuse. And while it's disturbing to see state power used indiscriminately to snoop on private conversations, it's equally disturbing to see a private company declare itself to be above the law. Given its behavior, a legal intervention into Telegram's business practices was inevitable. But the end of private conversation, and end-to-end encryption, need not be.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open source leader, wanted his audience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China to know he's not a Valkey developer," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. "He's a Valkey user and fan."[Hohndel] opened his speech by recalling how the open source, high-performance key/value datastore Valkey had been forked from Redis... Hohndel emphasized that "forks are good. Forks are one of the key things that open source licenses are for. So, if the maintainer starts doing things you don't like, you can fork the code under the same license and do better..." In this case, though, Redis had done a "bait-and-switch" with the Redis code, Hohndale argued. This was because they had made an all-too-common business failure: They hadn't realized that "open source is not a business model...." While the licensing change is what prompted the fork, Hohndel sees leadership and technical reasons why the Valkey fork is likely to succeed. First, two-thirds of the formerly top Redis maintainers and developers have switched to Valkey. In addition, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, under the Linux Foundation's auspices, all support Valkey. When both the technical and money people agree, good things can happen. The other reason is that Valkey already looks like it will be the better technical choice. That's because the recently announced Valkey 8.0, which builds upon the last open source version of Redis, 7.2.4, introduces serious speed improvements and new features that Redis users have wanted for some time. As [AWS principal engineer Madelyn] Olson said at Open Source Summit North America earlier this year, "Redis really didn't want to break anything." Valkey wants to move a bit faster. How much faster? A lot. Valkey 8.0 overhauls Redis's single-threaded event loop threading model with a more sophisticated multithreaded approach to I/O operations. Hohndel reported that on his small Valkey-powered aircraft tracking system, "I see roughly a threefold improvement in performance, and I stream a lot of data, 60 million data points a day." The article notes that Valkey is already being supported by major Linux distros including AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Big Bang may not have been the beginning of the universe," writes LiveScience, citing "a theory of cosmology that suggests the universe can 'bounce' between phases of contraction and expansion." The recent study suggests that dark matter could be composed of black holes formed before the Big Bang, during a transition from the universe's last contraction to the current expansion phase...In the new study, researchers explored a scenario where dark matter consists of primordial black holes formed from density fluctuations that occurred during the universe's last contraction phase, not long before the period of expansion that we observe now. They published their findings in June in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics ... In this "bouncing" cosmology, the universe contracted to a size about 50 orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. After the rebound, photons and other particles were born, marking the Big Bang. Near the rebound, the matter density was so high that small black holes formed from quantum fluctuations in the matter's density, making them viable candidates for dark matter. "Small primordial black holes can be produced during the very early stages of the universe, and if they are not too small, their decay due to Hawking radiation [a hypothetical phenomenon of black holes emitting particles due to quantum effects] will not be efficient enough to get rid of them, so they would still be around now," Patrick Peter, director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "Weighing more or less the mass of an asteroid, they could contribute to dark matter, or even solve this issue altogether." The scientists' calculations show that this universe mode's properties, such as the curvature of space and the microwave background, match current observations, supporting their hypothesis. "If this hypothesis holds, the gravitational waves generated during the black hole formation process might be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories, providing a way to confirm this dark matter generation scenario..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Sometimes an artificial intelligence tool comes out of nowhere and dominates the conversation on social media," writes Tom's Guide. "This week that app is Cursor, an AI coding tool that uses models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o to make it easier than ever to build your own apps," with the ability to "write, predict and manipulate code using nothing but a text prompt."Cursor is part development environment, part AI chatbot and unlike tools like GitHub Copilot it can more or less do all of the work for you, transforming a simple idea into functional code in minutes... Built on the same system as the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Cursor has already found a fanbase among novice coders and experienced engineers... Cursor's simplicity, working from a chat window, means even someone completely new to code could get a functional app running in minutes and keep building on it to add new features... The startup has raised over $400 million since it was founded in 2022 and works with various models including those from Anthropic and OpenAI... In my view, its true power is in the democratization of coding. It would also allow someone without much coding experience to build the tools they need by typing a few lines of text. More from ReadWrite:Cursor, an AI firm that is attempting to build a "magical tool that will one day write all the world's code," has announced it has raised $60 million in its Series A funding round... As of August 22, the company had a valuation of $400 million, according to sources cited by TechCrunch... Anysphere is the two-year-old startup that developed the app. Its co-founders are Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, who started the company while they were students at MIT... Using advanced AI capabilities, it is said to be able to finish, correct, and change AI code through natural language commands. It currently works with JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript, and is free for most uses. The pro plan will set you back $20 per month. But how well does it work? Tom's Guide notes that after requesting a test app, "It generated the necessary code in the sidebar chat window and all I had to do was click Apply and then Accept. This added the code to a new Python file including all the necessary imports. It also gave me instructions on how to add modules to my machine to make the code work. "As the chat is powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, you can just have it explain in more detail any element of the code or any task required to make it run..." Andreessen Horowitz explains why they invested in the company:It's very clear that LLMs are a powerful tool for programmers, and that their coding abilities will improve over time. But it's also clear that for most coding tasks, the problem to solve is not how to make LLMs perform well in isolation, but how to make them perform well alongside a human developer. We believe, therefore, the interface between programmers and AI models will soon become one of the most important pieces of the dev stack. And we're thrilled to announce our series A investment... Cursor is a fork of VS Code that's heavily customized for AI-assisted programming. It works with all the latest LLMs and supports the full VS Code plugin ecosystem. What makes Cursor special are the features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows - including next action prediction, natural language edits, chatting with your codebase, and a bunch of new ones to come... Our belief is that Cursor, distinctly among AI coding tools, has simply gotten it right. That's why, in a little over a year, thousands of users have signed up for Cursor, including at companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, Replicate, Shopify, Instacart, and many others. Users give glowing reviews of the product, many of them have started to pay for it, and they rarely switch back to other IDEs. Most of the a16z Infra team have also become avid Cursor users! One site even argues that Cursor's coding and AI capabilities "should be a wake up call for Microsoft to make VS Code integration with GitHub Copilot a lot easier." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 25,000 Python developers from nearly 200 countries took the 7th annual Python Developers Survey between November 2023 and February 2024, with 85% saying Python was their main language. Some interesting findings:Though Python 2 reached "end-of-life" status in April of 2020, last year's survey found 7% of respondents were still using Python 2. This year's survey found that number has finally dropped... to 6%. "Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old," the survey results point out, "and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?"Meanwhile, 73% are using one of the last three versions of Python (3.10, 3.11, or 3.12)"The share of developers using Linux as their development environment has decreased through the years: compared with 2021, it's dropped by 8 percentage points." [The graphic is a little confusing, showing 55% using Linux, 55% using Windows, 29% on MacOS, 2% on BSD, and 1% on "Other."]Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE (22%), followed by Jupyter Notebook (20%) and Vim (17%). The next-most popular IDEs were PyCharm Community Edition (13%), JupyterLab (12%), NotePad++ (11%) and Sublime Text (9%). Interestingly, just 23% of the 25,000 respondents said they only used one IDE, with 38% saying they used two, 21% using three, and 19% using four or more. [The annual survey is a collaboration between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains.]37% said they'd contributed to open-source projects within the last year. (77% of those contributed code, while 38% contributed documentation, 35% contributed governance/leadership/maintainer duties, and 33% contributed tests...)For "age range," nearly one-third (32%) said 21-29 (with another 8% choosing 18-20). Another 33% said 30-39, while 16% said 40-49, 7% said 50-59, and 3% chose "60 or older." 49% of respondents said they had less than two years of programming experience, with 33% saying "less than 1 year" and 16% saying "1-2 years." (34% of developers also said they practiced collaborative development.)And here's how the 25,000 developers answered the question: how long have you been programming in Python?Less than 1 year: 25%1-2 years: 16%3-5 years: 26%6-10 years: 19%11+ years: 13%So what are they doing with Python? Among those who'd said Python was their main language:Data analysis: 44%Web development: 44%Machine learning: 34%Data engineering: 28%Academic research: 26%DevOps / Systems administration / Writing automation scripts 26%Programming of web parsers / scrapers / crawlers: 25%62% were "fully employed by a company," while the next-largest category was "student" (12%) with another 5% in "working student". There were also categories for "self-employed" (6%), "freelancer" (another 6%), and "partially employed by a company" (4%). Another 4% said they were unemployed. In other news, the Python Software Foundation board has also "decided to invest more in connecting and serving the global Python community" by hosting monthly "office hours" on their Discord channel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A climate newsletter from the Los Angeles Times asked the question: Is it ethical to have children in the face of climate change? And they start by noting many people ask that question:A Pew Research Survey published in July found that among U.S. adults aged 18 to 49 who don't plan on having kids, more than a quarter - 26% - cited "concerns about the environment, including climate change," as a major factor. Of the people over 50 who did not have kids, 6% cited the same reason, pointing to a generational divide that may be fueled by growing awareness of the issue, as well as increasing exposure to worsening climate hazards... I worry about the well-being of these kids: What kind of world will they live in? Will there be clean air and water? Will it be too hot or smoky to play outside? (To be blunt, the outlook on these matters doesn't look great under most emissions scenarios.) But the other side of the coin involves the well-being of the planet. Is it wrong to add more people at a moment when resources are so strained - when, say, the Colorado River is shrinking to record lows and the global average temperature is soaring to record highs? Each new child, after all, will bring not only a cute little footprint but a carbon footprint as well... [T]he fact is that climate change is also affecting reproduction. Hotter temperatures and air pollution, for instance, have been linked to increased stillbirths, preterm births, lower birth weight and increased risk of hospitalization for newborns and infants, among other negative outcomes. Pregnant people are also especially vulnerable to climate hazards, which can trigger hypertension and other health issues and contribute to reduced fertility rates. The newsletter makes many other points, but ultimately concludes that "children, after all, are one of the clearest symbols of how we, as a society, feel about the future." And it includes this quote from the book The Quickening, in which author Elizabeth Rush visits the melting Thwaites Glacier in Antarctic. "I can celebrate the idea that to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of the change yourself."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The online news site San Francisco Standard profiles an open-source platform "that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI... "A Fight Health Insurance user can scan their insurance denial, and the system will craft several appeal letters to choose from and modify."With the slogan "Make your health insurance company cry too," [San Francisco tech worker Holden Karau's site] makes filing appeals faster and easier. A recent study found that Affordable Care Act patients appeal only about 0.1% of rejected claims, and she hopes her platform will encourage more people to fight back... The "dirty secret" of the insurance industry is that most denials can be successfully appealed, according to Dr. Harley Schultz, a patient advocate in the Bay Area. "Very few people know about the process, and even fewer take advantage of it, because it's rather cumbersome, arcane, and confusing, by design," he said. "But if you fight hard enough and long enough, most denials get overturned...." While some doctors have turned to artificial intelligence themselves to fight claims, Karau's service puts the power in the hands of patients, who likely have more time and motivation to dedicate to their claims. "In an ideal world, we would have a different system, but we don't live in an ideal world, so what I'm shooting for here is incremental progress and making the world suck a little less," she said. Karau estimates she's spent about $10,000 building the platform, according to the article, which adds that "it's free for users, though she might eventually charge for added services like faxing appeals." Thanks to Slashdot reader mirro_dude for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN.Many of the world's highest mountains aren't visible on land - they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, 900 miles off the coast of Chile, has mapped and explored a newly discovered seamount four times taller than the world's tallest building. What's more, the underwater mountain's peaks, crags and ridges are home to coral gardens that host rare deep-dwelling octopuses, squids and creatures known as flying spaghetti monsters, some of which hadn't been well documented before this research. The undersea mountain is 1.9 miles (3,109 meters) tall, according to another article, which notes that the researchers also used a sonar system to bounce waves to the ocean floor, timing how long they took to reach the surface:The researchers documented a ghostly white Casper octopus, marking the first time this deep-dwelling cephalopod has been seen in the southern Pacific. They also spotted two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, sometimes known as flying spaghetti monsters for their stringlike appearance. "The (Casper) octopus has never been captured, so it doesn't actually have a scientific name yet," Virmani said. The team also recorded the first footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid, known only from a few collected specimens.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post writes that Telegram's "anything-goes approach" to its 950 million users "has also made it one of the internet's largest havens for child predators, experts say...." "Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... "[Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI "deepfake" nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials," Stamos said. That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don't actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added. Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can't access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to... French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram's emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations... David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression... said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down [CSAM] content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies. Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway - but not Telegram. "NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space," a NCMEC spokesperson said. The Post also writes that Telegram "has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery." (They cite several examples, including two different men convicted to minimum sentences of at least 10 years for using the service to purchase CSAM and solicit explicit photos from minors.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the "door plug" incident "was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews" in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing's quality control system "failed to catch the faulty work.") But the details tell a larger story. The newspaper bases their conclusion on "transcripts of federal investigators' interviews of a dozen Boeing workers, synchronized with an internal Boeing document obtained by The Seattle Times," tracing the whole history of that panel's production. Within a day of its fuselage arriving at the factory, "a small defect was discovered: Five rivets installed by Spirit on the door frame next to the door plug were damaged."That day, the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, repair of those rivets was handed to Spirit, which has contract mechanics on-site in Renton to do any rework on its fuselage. In the meantime, inspectors gave mechanics the OK to install insulation blankets, which covered the door plug. By the following Thursday, a Spirit mechanic had logged an entry in the official Federal Aviation Administration-required record of this aircraft's assembly - the Common Manufacturing Execution System or CMES, pronounced "sea-mass" by the mechanics - that the rivet repair was complete: "removed and replaced rivets." But that day, a Boeing inspector responded with a scathing rebuttal, stating that the rivets had not been replaced but just painted over. "Not acceptable," read the work order. On Sept. 10, records show Spirit was ordered a second time to remove and replace the rivets... ["Shipside Action Tracker"] entries show that after several days, the still-unfinished work order was elevated to higher-level Boeing managers. On Sept. 15, Boeing cabin interiors manager Phally Meas, who needed the work finished so he could get his crew to install cabin walls and seats, texted on-site Spirit manager Tran Nguyen to ask why the rivet work hadn't been done, NTSB interview transcripts show. Spirit mechanics couldn't get to the rivets unless the plug door was opened, Nguyen responded. He sent Meas a photo from his phone showing it was closed, according to the transcripts. It wasn't Spirit's job to open the sealed door plug. Boeing's door team would have to do that, the records show. "He kept asking me how come there wasn't work yet," Nguyen told the NTSB. "The door was not open. That's why there wasn't work yet." By Sept. 17, the door was still closed, the rivets still unrepaired. The job was elevated again, to the next level of managers. On that day, according to the SAT record, senior managers worked with Ken McElhaney, the door crew manager in Renton, "to determine if the door can just merely be opened or if it needs removal...." [On September 18] at 6:48 a.m., a Boeing mechanic identified as a Door Master Lead texted a young Trainee mechanic on his team to come to the Alaska jet and open the door. The NTSB interviewed but did not name the Trainee or the Door Master Lead, who had almost 16 years at Boeing. Filling in for the veteran mechanic on vacation, the Trainee was perhaps the least equipped to do this atypical job. He'd been at Boeing for about 17 months, his only previous jobs being at KFC and Taco Bell. "He's just a young kid," the Door Master Lead said... More key quotes from the article: Boeing put both employees on paid administrative leave."A company investigator accused one of them of lying. That employee told the NTSB that Boeing has set the pair up as scapegoats.""A 35-year veteran on the door team told NTSB investigators that he is 'the only one that can work on all the doors' and he was typically the only mechanic who would work on door plugs. That mechanic was on vacation on the two critical days, September 18 and 19 last year, when the door plug on the Alaska MAX 9 had to be opened and closed...""No quality inspection of the door plug was conducted, since no record of its opening and closing was ever entered in the system, documents show."The FBI is investigating Boeing "for potential criminal negligence," according to the article, "and has issued subpoenas using a Seattle grand jury."Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that long Covid "has pushed around one million Americans out of the labor force, economists estimate."More than 5% of adults in the U.S. have long Covid, and it is most prevalent among Americans in their prime working years. About 3.6 million people reported significantly modifying their activities because of the illness in a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Long Covid is a chronic condition with symptoms lasting at least three months after a Covid infection, according to the CDC. Symptoms include fatigue, changes in memory, shortness of breath and trouble concentrating. Long Covid can make tasks as simple as responding to an email arduous, people with the condition say. They struggle to summon the right word or manage stress. Among its many symptoms is post-exertional malaise, which can worsen after even minor physical or mental activity. "People can't go back to work or have to significantly cut down on the amount of work that they can handle," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiology professor at Yale School of Medicine. Researchers don't know how long symptoms can last. Few people with long Covid have fully recovered within two years. Patients say their doctors have tried everything from antihistamines to blood thinners to physical therapy to acupuncture. Some people might live with the condition for the rest of their lives, said Dr. Paul Volberding, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco... Some people with long Covid, which the federal government has classified as a disability, have stayed in their jobs. Human-resource managers have made accommodations including remote work, flexible hours or modified responsibilities, said Rue Dooley of the Society for Human Resource Management. "It's not going away," he said. "It's going to be one of another 100 conditions that we have to grapple with." People were more likely to develop long Covid at the start of the pandemic, according to a study published in July in the New England Journal of Medicine. The proliferation of vaccines and changes to the virus have made people infected with Covid less likely to develop long Covid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S." Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' - who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems."The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country's cyberespionage activities. The U.S. Treasury department first warned about the tactic in 2022. Thosands of highly skilled IT workers are taking advantage of the demand for software developers to obtain freelance contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and East Asia. "Although DPRK [North Korean] IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK's malicious cyber intrusions," the Treasury department warned... North Korean IT workers present themselves as South Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Eastern European, and as U.S.-based teleworkers. In some cases, DPRK IT workers further obfuscate their identities by creating arrangements with third-party subcontractors. Christina Chapman, a resident of Arizona, faces fraud charges over an elaborate scheme that allegedly allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as U.S. citizens and residents using stolen identities to obtain jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies. U.S. payment platforms and online job site accounts were abused to secure jobs at more than 300 companies, including a major TV network, a car manufacturer, a Silicon Valley technology firm, and an aerospace company... According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, unsealed in May 2024, Chapman ran a "laptop farm," hosting the overseas IT workers' computers inside her home so it appeared that the computers were located in the U.S. The 49-year-old received and forged payroll checks, and she laundered direct debit payments for salaries through bank accounts under her control. Many of the overseas workers in her cell were from North Korea, according to prosecutors. An estimated $6.8 million were paid for the work, much of which was falsely reported to tax authorities under the name of 60 real U.S. citizens whose identities were either stolen or borrowed... Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, was separately charged over a years-long scheme to create fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms and with U.S.-based money service transmitters. "Didenko sold the accounts to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean, and the overseas IT workers used the false identities to apply for jobs with unsuspecting companies," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Didenko, who was arrested in Poland in May, faces U.S. extradition proceedings... How this type of malfeasance plays out from the perspective of a targeted firm was revealed by security awareness vendor KnowBe4's candid admission in July that it unknowingly hired a North Korean IT spy... A growing and substantial body of evidence suggests KnowBe4 is but one of many organizations targeted by illicit North Korean IT workers. Last November security vendor Palo Alto reported that North Korean threat actors are actively seeking employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world... Mandiant, the Google-owned threat intel firm, reported last year that "thousands of highly skilled IT workers from North Korea" are hunting work. More recently, CrowdStrike reported that a North Korean group it dubbed "Famous Chollima" infiltrated more than 100 companies with imposter IT pros. The article notes the infiltrators use chatbots to tailor the perfect resume "and further leverage AI-created deepfakes to pose as real people." And the article includes this quote from a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force turned cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig. "In some cases, they may try to get jobs at tech companies in order to steal their intellectual property before using it to create their own knock-off technologies." The article closes with its suggested "countermeasures," including live video-chats with prospective remote-work applicants - and confirming an applicant's home address.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After game developer Nolen Royalty launched his short-lived viral site "One Million Checkboxes" in June. (Any visitor could check or uncheck a box in the grid - which would change how it displayed for every other visitor to the site, in near real-time.) "Within days there were half a million people on the site," he says in a new video, "and people checked over 650 million boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online." But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing:He'd stored the state of his one million checkboxes in a million-bit database - 125 kilobytes - and got a surprise after rewriting the backend in Go. Looking at the raw bytes (converted into their value in the 256-character ASCII table)... they spelled out a URL. Had someone hacked into his database? No, the answer was even stranger. Somebody was writing me a message in binary." "Someone was sitting there, checking and unchecking boxes to form numbers that formed letters that spelled out this URL. And they were probably doing this with a bot, to make sure those boxes remained checked and unchecked in exactly the way that they wanted them to." The URL led to a Discord channel, where he found himself talking to the orchestrators of the elaborate prank. And it was then that they asked him: "Have you seen your checkboxes as a 1,000 x 1,000 image yet?" It turns out they'd also input two alternate versions of the same message - one in base64, and one drawn out as a fully-functional QR code. (And some drawings....) "The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret - with tens of thousands of people on the web site - to gather other very sharp teens. And it totally worked. There were 15 people when I joined, over 60 people in the Discord by the time that i left. "I tried to make it hard for them to draw, but... no problem. They found a way. And they started drawing some very cool things. They put a Windows blue-screen-of-death on the site. They put sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs on the site. At the end I removed all my rate limits for an hour as a treat, and they did a real-time [animated] Rickroll across the entire site." The video ends with the webmaster explaining why he thought their project was so cool. "As I kid, I spent a lot of time doing dum stuff on the computer, and I didn't get into too much trouble when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There is no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, provide some encouragement and say, 'Hey this is amazing' - was so special for me. "The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, so cool, I cannot wait to see what they go on to make." Link via Kottke.orgRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Several items were stolen from a woman's P.O. box. So she mailed herself a package containing an Apple AirTag, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office:Her mail was again stolen on Monday morning, including the package with the AirTag that she was able to track. It is important to note that the victim did not attempt to contact the suspects on her own... The Sheriff's Office would like to commend the victim for her proactive solution, while highlighting that she also exercised appropriate caution by contacting law enforcement to safely and successfully apprehend the suspects. CNN reports on what the authorities found:The suspected thieves were located in nearby Santa Maria, California, with the victim's mail - including the package containing the AirTag - and other items authorities believe were stolen from more than a dozen victims, according to the sheriff's office. Virginia Franchessca Lara, 27, and Donald Ashton Terry, 37, were arrested in connection with the crime, authorities said. Lara was booked on felonies including possession of checks with intent to commit fraud, fictitious checks, identity theft, credit card theft and conspiracy, and remains held on a $50,000 bail as of Thursday, jail records show. Terry faces felony charges including burglary, possession of checks with intent to commit fraud, credit card theft, identity theft and conspiracy and was held on a $460,000 bail, according to jail records... Authorities said they're working on contacting other victims of theft in this case. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Google Play Store is now rolling out support for downloading up to three Android app updates simultaneously, addressing a long-standing limitation where apps could only be downloaded one at a time. 9to5Google reports: We're seeing simultaneous app update downloads working in the Google Play Store today across multiple devices, and a few of our readers are seeing the same behavior this week as well. It's unclear if this is a server-side change on Google's part or an update to the Play Store itself, but the functionality is much appreciated. As far as we can tell, you can download up to three app updates at once through the Play Store. The apps will start to download, with only anything beyond three showing the "Pending" status that we're all so used to seeing in the Play Store. This matches the App Store on iOS which can also download up to three apps at once. The same limit of three also now applies to new app installs, which was previously limited to two at a time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have finally detected and measured the ambipolar field, a weak electric field surrounding Earth that was first theorized over 60 years ago. "Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time." ScienceAlert reports: Here's how the ambipolar field was expected to work. Starting at an altitude of around 250 kilometers (155 miles), in a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, extreme ultraviolet and solar radiation ionizes atmospheric atoms, breaking off negatively charged electrons and turning the atom into a positively charged ion. The lighter electrons will try to fly off into space, while the heavier ions will try to sink towards the ground. But the plasma environment will try to maintain charge neutrality, which results in the emergence of an electric field between the electrons and the ions to tether them together. This is called the ambipolar field because it works in both directions, with the ions supplying a downward pull and the electrons an upward one. The result is that the atmosphere is puffed up; the increased altitude allows some ions to escape into space, which is what we see in the polar wind. This ambipolar field would be incredibly weak, which is why Collinson and his team designed instrumentation to detect it. The Endurance mission, carrying this experiment, was launched in May 2022, reaching an altitude of 768.03 kilometers (477.23 miles) before falling back to Earth with its precious, hard-won data. And it succeeded. It measured a change in electric potential of just 0.55 volts -- but that was all that was needed. "A half a volt is almost nothing -- it's only about as strong as a watch battery," Collinson says. "But that's just the right amount to explain the polar wind." That amount of charge is enough to tug on hydrogen ions with 10.6 times the strength of gravity, launching them into space at the supersonic speeds measured over Earth's poles. Oxygen ions, which are heavier than hydrogen ions, are also lofted higher, increasing the density of the ionosphere at high altitudes by 271 percent, compared to what its density would be without the ambipolar field. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Biden administration has finalized a plan to expand solar on 31 million acres of federal lands in 11 western states. The proposed updated Western Solar Plan is a roadmap for Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) governance of solar energy proposals and projects on public lands. It bumps up the acreage from the 22 million acres it recommended in January, and this plan adds five additional states -- Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming -- to the six states -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah -- analyzed in the original plan. It would make the public lands available for potential solar development, putting solar farms closer to transmission lines or on previously disturbed lands and avoiding protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitats. [...] BLM surpassed its goal of permitting more than 25 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy projects on public lands earlier in 2024. It's permitted 29 GW of projects on public lands -- enough to power over 12 million homes. The Biden administration set the goal to achieve 100% clean electricity on the US grid by 2035.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reports: Apple is standing by its decision to terminate the Apple Developer Account of Appstun, a mobile app company created by one of Apple's own Worldwide Developer Conference 2021 student winners. According to an announcement published on Appstun's website, Apple moved to terminate the developer's account after multiple rejections of its app that Apple says violates its App Store guidelines. Apple's decision to shut down the developer's account was recently highlighted on X by Apple critic and 37signals co-owner and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, where he celebrated how much better web developers had it, noting they could run their businesses without the involvement of big tech gatekeepers. "No fear on [sic] capricious rejections that might suddenly kill the business overnight," he remarked. Appstun co-founder Batuhan Karababa says that he and the other co-founder had been trying to work with Apple over the App Store rejections. (Karababa tells us that he's only the formal founder on paper.) "We responded transparently and collaborated with Apple to ensure our app doesn't violate any guidelines. However, as the process continued, we began to face rejection for the issue that we thought we had already resolved in previous submissions. Apple didn't find our solution good enough," according to the announcement on Appstun's website. The company went back and forth with App Review, receiving multiple rejections over an app for designing Apple Watch faces. In addition to a more standard watch face, Appstun also came up with a workaround that would allow it to offer more highly customizable watch faces. But these weren't actually watch faces in the traditional sense, but rather custom images and animations that run independently of the App Watch face system. Essentially, the app would take over the screen showing an image that was similar to a watch face, allowing Appstun to offer more customization. Of course, running a custom animation in this way could drain the Apple Watch battery faster. Apple was also concerned that customers wouldn't understand that they weren't running a normal watch face, and that Appstun deceived them by suggesting that's what it was offering. Though Appstun added notifications to its app that these were not real watch faces, in an attempt to placate App Review, Apple instead decided to terminate the company's developer account after repeated back-and-forth. The company pleaded on its website for any help in getting its developer account restored. According to Apple, there's more to this story, and it thinks it made the correct decision. The iPhone maker said Appstun's app repeatedly tried to mislead users into thinking that it offered features and functionality that it didn't support and also marketed the app with deceptive ads, leading to negative app ratings and reviews. [...] Apple pointed to its guideline 5.6 -- a developer code of conduct -- that warns developers that "repeated manipulative or misleading behavior or other fraudulent conduct will lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denise Prudhomme, a 60-year-old Wells Fargo employee, was found dead at her desk four days after clocking in. Apparently, nobody noticed her body because of the secluded location of her cubicle and the fact that many employees were working remotely. VICE reports: Prudhomme last scanned into her office job in Tempe, Arizona, at 7 AM on Friday, and her body was reportedly discovered at 4:55 PM on Tuesday, August 20. Her coworkers did pick up that something weird was going on. They detected a weird smell but assumed it was some kind of plumbing issue. Prudhomme's cubicle was on the third floor of the building, tucked away from any main thoroughfares that employees would use to travel between departments. On top of that, most employees at the Tempe Wells Fargo location worked remotely, significantly cutting down the chance of someone finding her body. Tempe police and the Maricopa County Medical Examiner didn't detect any signs of foul play, but the woman's official cause of death remains to be seen. Wells Fargo has said that they're going to look into their internal procedures to make sure employees receive some kind of check-in to make sure they're not, you know, dead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: A judge in Ohio has issued a temporary restraining order against a security researcher who presented evidence that a recent ransomware attack on the city of Columbus scooped up reams of sensitive personal information, contradicting claims made by city officials. The order, issued by a judge in Ohio's Franklin County, came after the city of Columbus fell victim to a ransomware attack on July 18 that siphoned 6.5 terabytes of the city's data. A ransomware group known as Rhysida took credit for the attack and offered to auction off the data with a starting bid of about $1.7 million in bitcoin. On August 8, after the auction failed to find a bidder, Rhysida released what it said was about 45 percent of the stolen data on the group's dark web site, which is accessible to anyone with a TOR browser. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said on August 13 that a "breakthrough" in the city's forensic investigation of the breach found that the sensitive files Rhysida obtained were either encrypted or corrupted, making them "unusable" to the thieves. Ginther went on to say the data's lack of integrity was likely the reason the ransomware group had been unable to auction off the data. Shortly after Ginther made his remarks, security researcher David Leroy Ross contacted local news outlets and presented evidence that showed the data Rhysida published was fully intact and contained highly sensitive information regarding city employees and residents. Ross, who uses the alias Connor Goodwolf, presented screenshots and other data that showed the files Rhysida had posted included names from domestic violence cases and Social Security numbers for police officers and crime victims. Some of the data spanned years. On Thursday, the city of Columbus sued Ross (PDF) for alleged damages for criminal acts, invasion of privacy, negligence, and civil conversion. The lawsuit claimed that downloading documents from a dark web site run by ransomware attackers amounted to him "interacting" with them and required special expertise and tools. The suit went on to challenge Ross alerting reporters to the information, which ii claimed would not be easily obtained by others. "Only individuals willing to navigate and interact with the criminal element on the dark web, who also have the computer expertise and tools necessary to download data from the dark web, would be able to do so," city attorneys wrote. "The dark web-posted data is not readily available for public consumption. Defendant is making it so." The same day, a Franklin County judge granted the city's motion for a temporary restraining order (PDF) against Ross. It bars the researcher "from accessing, and/or downloading, and/or disseminating" any city files that were posted to the dark web. The motion was made and granted "ex parte," meaning in secret before Ross was informed of it or had an opportunity to present his case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader mmell writes: Regular Slashdot users will certainly be aware of the saga unfolding between the country of Brazil and X. Reuters has already reported that what I have to relay here will come as no surprise to Elon Musk, but reporting on CNN confirms that Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered X to suspend operations in Brazil until X names a representative to appear on X's behalf in Brazilian Courts. Is this the end of X or some brilliant Machiavellian ploy on the part of Elon Musk? Only time and the informed and spirited debate of the users here at /. can be sure. Here's a recap of the saga, as told by X's Grok-2 chatbot: The Beginning: Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice with a reputation for tackling misinformation, especially around elections, found himself at odds with Elon Musk, the space-faring, electric-car magnate turned social media mogul. The conflict kicked off when Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts in Brazil, part of his broader crackdown on what he deemed as misinformation. The Escalation: Musk, never one to shy away from a fight, especially when it involves what he perceives as free speech issues, declared on X that he would not comply with Moraes' orders. This defiance wasn't just a tweet; it was a digital declaration of war. Musk accused Moraes of overstepping his bounds, betraying the constitution, and even likened him to Darth Vader in a less than flattering comparison. Moraes, not amused, opened an investigation into Musk for obstruction of justice, accusing him of inciting disobedience and disrespecting Brazil's sovereignty. The stakes were raised with fines of around $20,000 per day for each reactivated account, and threats of arresting X employees in Brazil. The Drama Unfolds: The internet, as it does, had a field day. Posts on X ranged from Musk supporters calling Moraes a dictator to others backing Moraes, arguing he was defending democracy against foreign billionaires. The conflict became a global spectacle, with Musk's posts drawing international attention, comparing the situation to a battle for free speech versus censorship. Musk, in true Musk fashion, didn't just stop at defiance. He shared all of Moraes' demands publicly, suggesting users use VPNs, and even hinted at closing X's operations in Brazil, which eventually happened, citing the need to protect staff safety. The Latest Chapter: Recently, X announced the closure of its operations in Brazil, a move seen as the culmination of this legal and ideological battle. Musk framed it as a stand against what he saw as an assault on free speech, while critics viewed it as an overreaction or a strategic retreat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pidgin messaging app removed the ScreenShareOTR plugin from its third-party plugin list after it was found to be used to install keyloggers, information stealers, and malware targeting corporate networks. BleepingComputer reports: The plugin was promoted as a screen-sharing tool for secure Off-The-Record (OTR) protocol and was available for both Windows and Linux versions of Pidgin. According to ESET, the malicious plugin was configured to infect unsuspecting users with DarkGate malware, a powerful malware threat actors use to breach networks since QBot's dismantling by the authorities. [...] Those who installed it are recommended to remove it immediately and perform a full system scan with an antivirus tool, as DarkGate may be lurking on their system. After publishing our story, Pidgin's maintainer and lead developer, Gary Kramlich, notified us on Mastodon to say that they do not keep track of how many times a plugin is installed. To prevent similar incidents from happening in the future, Pidgin announced that, from now on, it will only accept third-party plugins that have an OSI Approved Open Source License, allowing scrutiny into their code and internal functionality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Amazon releases its revamped AI Alexa update in October, it'll be powered by Anthropic's Claude AI models due to performance issues with its in-house AI. Reuters reports: Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new "Remarkable" version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the "Classic" voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June. But initial versions of the new Alexa using in-house software simply struggled for words, sometimes taking six or seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply, one of the people said. That's why Amazon turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant's own AI models, the people said. "Amazon uses many different technologies to power Alexa," a company spokeswoman said in a statement in response to detailed Reuters questions for this story. "When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models - including (Amazon AI model) Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners - to build the best experience for customers," the spokeswoman said. Amazon has typically eschewed relying on technology it hasn't developed in-house so it can ensure it has full control of the user experience, data collection and direct relationships with customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.