Slashdot

Two top executives from the crypto exchange Binance have been arrested in Nigeria for allegedly destabilizing the national currency. Quartz reports: According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial-crime compliance at Binance who previously worked at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan national and Binance's regional manager for Africa, have been held against their will for the past two weeks in the country. As per reports, Nigerian government officials invited Binance executives to discuss an ongoing dispute about the world's largest crypto exchange allegedly driving down the value of their national currency. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria on February 25th; after their meeting with government officials, both were taken to their hotels. Later, they were instructed to pack their belongings and move to a guesthouse run by Nigeria's National Security Agency, as stated by their families, per reports. The Nigerian government has accused Binance of exacerbating the country's foreign exchange challenges through rate manipulation for profit. The authorities have also accused the crypto exchange of illegal operations and have restricted access to the company's website. There are also reports that Nigeria sought a $10 billion penalty from Binance for processing around $26 billion in untraceable funds in the country. [...] The reason why and how Nigeria's economic crisis is linked with Binance is yet to be found out. Binance is hoping to resolve the matter soon, according to CoinDesk. The report notes that Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent years due to inflation and the devaluation of their currency, the naira.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), the Pentagon has reportedly scrapped its plan to allocate $2.5 billion in grants to Intel, causing the firm's stock to slip in extended-hours trading. From a report: The decision now leaves the U.S. Commerce Department, which is responsible for doling out the funds from the U.S. CHIPs and Science Act, to make up the shortfall, the news outlet said. The Commerce Dept. was initially only supposed to cover $1B of the $3.5B that Intel is slated to receive for advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors. The deal is slated to position Intel as the dedicated supplier for processors used for military and intelligence applications and could result in a Secure Enclave inside Intel's chip factory, the news outlet said. With the Pentagon reportedly pulling out, it could alter how much Intel and other companies receive from the CHIPs Act, the news outlet said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...] The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired. Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After 10 years and billions of dollars spent in development, Apple abruptly canceled its ambitious car project known as "Titan," shifting its focus and resources on the company's artificial intelligence division. In a recent Q&A on Monday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled) shared some new insights about the project and how involved the Apple Silicon team was before it was shut down. According to Gurman, Apple was planning to power the "AI brain" of the car with a custom Apple Silicon chip that would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultra chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. 9to5Mac reports: A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was "nearly finished" before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far. The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The New York Times has denied claims by OpenAI that it "hacked" the company's artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the accusation as "irrelevant as it is false." The Times in a court filing on Monday said OpenAI was "grandstanding" in its request to dismiss parts of the newspaper's lawsuit alleging its articles were misused for artificial intelligence training. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users. The newspaper is among several prominent copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music publishers that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training. The Times' complaint cited several instances in which programs like OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT gave users near-verbatim excerpts of its articles when prompted. OpenAI responded last month that the Times had paid an unnamed "hired gun" to manipulate its products into reproducing the newspaper's content. It asked the court to dismiss parts of the case, including claims that its AI-generated content infringes the Times' copyrights. "In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will," OpenAI said. The company also said it would eventually prove that its AI training made fair use of copyrighted content. The Times replied on Monday that it had simply used the "first few words or sentences" of its articles to prompt ChatGPT to recreate them."OpenAI's true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times's content on an unprecedented scale -- a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute," the Times said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is using AI in the operation of its 45,000km (28,000-mile) high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. From a report: An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. "This helps on-site teams conduct reinspections and repairs as quickly as possible," wrote Niu Daoan, a senior engineer at the China State Railway Group's infrastructure inspection centre, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway. In the past year, none of China's operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularity issues, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80 per cent compared to the previous year. According to the paper, the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds also decreased -- even on massive valley-spanning bridges -- with the application of AI technology. [...] According to the paper, after years of effort Chinese railway scientists and engineers have "solved challenges" in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was "scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways," the engineers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video. Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc. You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin. Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written.The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is restricting AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions about the global elections set to happen this year, the Alphabet-owned firm said on Tuesday, as it looks to avoid potential missteps in the deployment of the technology. From a report: The update comes at a time when advancements in generative AI, including image and video generation, have fanned concerns of misinformation and fake news among the public, prompting governments to regulate the technology. When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search".Google had announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect ahead of the election. "In preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we are restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing's production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems (non-paywalled link) throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times. From the report: The air-safety regulator initiated the examination after a door panel blew off a 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Last week, the agency announced that the audit had found "multiple instances" in which Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, failed to comply with quality-control requirements, though it did not provide specifics about the findings. The presentation reviewed by The Times, though highly technical, offers a more detailed picture of what the audit turned up. Since the Alaska Airlines episode, Boeing has come under intense scrutiny over its quality-control practices, and the findings add to the body of evidence about manufacturing lapses at the company. For the portion of the examination focused on Boeing, the F.A.A. conducted 89 product audits, a type of review that looks at aspects of the production process. The plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance, according to the presentation. The F.A.A. also conducted 13 product audits for the part of the inquiry that focused on Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage, or body, of the 737 Max. Six of those audits resulted in passing grades, and seven resulted in failing ones, the presentation said. At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes some of the findings. That action was "not identified/documented/called-out in the production order," the document said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is under $50 USD. From a report: The "State of Subscription Apps" report offers a bird's-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform's tools to manage their monetization. Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform. This report specifically looks at data from over 29,000 apps and over 18,000 developers who collectively generate over $6.7 billion in tracked revenue and have over 290 million subscribers. After crunching its data, the company found that only 17.2% of apps will reach even $1,000 in monthly revenue, but after they hit that point, the odds of them growing further increase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

None of the big oil and gas producers surrounding the North Sea plan to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target, a report has found. From a report: The five countries -- the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark -- have failed to align their oil and gas policies with their climate promises under the Paris agreement, according to the campaign group Oil Change International. North Sea governments must act urgently, said Silje Ask Lundberg from Oil Change International, who co-wrote the report. "Failure to address these issues not only undermines international climate goals, but also jeopardises the liveability of our planet." The report found that policies in Norway and the UK were furthest from the Paris climate agreement because the countries were "aggressively" exploring and licensing new oil and gas fields. In 2021, the International Energy Agency found there was no room for new oil exploration in its pathway to net zero emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. From a report: The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update "later this spring," according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store -- as long as they're willing to adhere to Apple's strict rules. While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites -- namely, you'll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contributors from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, writing for BrowserBench: Since the initial version of the Speedometer benchmark was released in 2014 by the WebKit team, it has become a key tool for browser engines to drive performance optimizations as users and developers continue to demand richer and smoother experiences online. We're proud to release Speedometer 3.0 today as a collaborative effort between the three major browser engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Like previous releases (Speedometer 2 in 2018 and Speedometer 1 in 2014), it's designed to measure web application responsiveness by simulating user interactions on real web pages. Today's release of Speedometer 3.0 marks a major step forward in web browser performance testing: it introduces a better way of measuring performance and a more representative set of tests that reflect the modern Web. This is the first time the Speedometer benchmark, or any major browser benchmark, has been developed through a cross-industry collaboration supported by each major browser engine: Blink/V8, Gecko/SpiderMonkey, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore. It's been developed under a new governance model, driven by consensus, and is hosted in a shared repository that's open to contribution. This new structure involves a lot of collective effort: discussions, research, debates, decisions, and hundreds of PRs since we announced the project in December 2022. Speedometer 3 adds many new tests. We started designing this new benchmark by identifying some key scenarios and user interactions that we felt were important for browsers to optimize. In particular, we added new tests that simulate rendering canvas and SVG charts (React Stockcharts, Chart.js, Perf Dashboard, and Observable Plot), code editing (CodeMirror), WYSIWYG editing (TipTap), and reading news sites (Next.js and Nuxt.js).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A anonymous reader shares a report: Personal artificial intelligence assistants that know our health status and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly without any roadblocks. These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the 35th anniversary of its invention. [...] Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. [...] Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies "do the right thing by themselves" before regulators step in. "That's always been the spirit of the internet." He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms. "Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation," Berners-Lee said. "But this was an independent thing." However, he added: "Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web. Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don't know which company that will be."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled. Get ready for an even bigger display of China's solar energy dominance. The New York Times: While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead. At the annual session of China's legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country's second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects. With China's economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China's leaders say that a "new trio" of industries -- solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries -- has replaced an "old trio" of clothing, furniture and appliances. The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China's housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as "new productive forces," to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. The emphasis on solar power is the latest installment in a two-decade program to make China less dependent on energy imports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After weeks of testing, an electronic system for filing returns directly to the IRS is now available for taxpayers from 12 selected states. From a report: The new system, called Direct File, is a free online tool. Taxpayers in the selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday. The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed could be prepared using Direct File and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season. "Direct File will offer millions of Americans a free and simple way to file their taxes, with no expensive and unnecessary filing fees and no upselling, putting hundreds of dollars back in the pocket of working families each year, consistent with President Biden's pledge to lower costs," said National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard. Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York can participate. Direct File can only be used to file federal income taxes, taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch, the air-launch venture created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: The company's mammoth airplane deployed a winged test vehicle for its first rocket-powered flight. Stratolaunch's single-use TA-1 test vehicle blazed a trail for future reusable hypersonic test vehicles that are expected to help the U.S. military catch up on one of the frontiers of aerial combat. TA-1 went supersonic, according to Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO -- but based on his comments, it may not have quite hit the hypersonic standard of five times the speed of sound. "While I can't share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers," Krevor said in a news release. Today's test flight took place in the skies above California's Mojave Air and Space Port, where Stratolaunch keeps its twin-fuselage Roc airplane. Roc is the world's biggest operational aircraft, with a wingspan of 385 feet. It's designed to serve as a flying launch pad for rocket-powered vehicles like the TA-1 and its successors. The air-launch concept makes it possible for launch missions to be flown from any airport with a runway that's big enough to accommodate Roc. It's similar to the concept that was used back in 2004 to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight with financial backing from Paul Allen. [...] This flight was the 14th test mission for Roc, coming after an unpowered separation test of its TA-0 vehicle and two captive-carry test flights for TA-1. Today's test also marked the first in-flight use of Ursa Major's Hadley rocket engine. The primary test objectives included a safe release of TA-1, engine ignition, acceleration, sustained climb in altitude and a controlled splashdown into the Pacific.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Astronomers have made new measurements of the Hubble Constant, a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding, by combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Their results confirmed the accuracy of Hubble's earlier measurement of the constant's value, according to their recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with implications for a long-standing discrepancy in values obtained by different observational methods known as the "Hubble tension." There was a time when scientists believed the Universe was static, but that changed with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Alexander Friedmann published a set of equations showing that the Universe might actually be expanding in 1922, with Georges Lemaitre later making an independent derivation to arrive at that same conclusion. Edwin Hubble confirmed this expansion with observational data in 1929. Prior to this, Einstein had been trying to modify general relativity by adding a cosmological constant in order to get a static universe from his theory; after Hubble's discovery, legend has it, he referred to that effort as his biggest blunder. The article notes how scientists have employed different methods to calculate the Hubble Constant, including observing nearby celestial objects, analyzing gravitational waves from cosmic events, and examining the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, these approaches yield differing values, highlighting the challenge in pinning down the constant precisely. A recent effort involved making additional observations of Cepheid variable stars, correlating them with the Hubble data. The results further confirmed the accuracy of the Hubble data. "We've now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed, and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble Tension with very high confidence," said co-author and team leader Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder. With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...] For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He's never been responsible for an accident. So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a "Risk Solutions" division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl's request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page "consumer disclosure report," which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking. According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score "for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage," according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month. "It felt like a betrayal," Mr. Dahl said. "They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance." In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But "drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs," as Ford Motor put it in apatent application (PDF) that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry. Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what's called usage-based insurance -- where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits -- it's easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people's driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis. Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers' permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature -- called OnStar Smart Driver -- and that their insurance rates went up as a result.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is reportedly considering buying TikTok. PCMag reports: Kotick floated the idea at a dinner at an Allen & Co. conference earlier this week with a group of potential partners, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the Journal says. Kotick left Activision in late December after more than 30 years following the approval of the Microsoft merger and a tumultuous period that included a damaging discrimination lawsuit. And while he got a hefty golden parachute, it's probably not enough to buy TikTok, so he'll need partners with deep pockets. The report comes amid a vote in the House that would require TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over 15,000 Roku customers were hacked and used to make fraudulent purchases of hardware and streaming subscriptions. According to BleepingComputer, the threat actors were "selling the stolen accounts for as little as $0.50 per account, allowing purchasers to use stored credit cards to make illegal purchases." From the report: On Friday, Roku first disclosed the data breach, warning that 15,363 customer accounts were hacked in a credential stuffing attack. A credential stuffing attack is when threat actors collect credentials exposed in data breaches and then attempt to use them to log in to other sites, in this case, Roku.com. The company says that once an account was breached, it allowed threat actors to change the information on the account, including passwords, email addresses, and shipping addresses. This effectively locked a user out of the account, allowing the threat actors to make purchases using stored credit card information without the legitimate account holder receiving order confirmation emails. "It appears likely that the same username/password combinations had been used as login information for such third-party services as well as certain individual Roku accounts," reads the data breach notice. "As a result, unauthorized actors were able to obtain login information from third-party sources and then use it to access certain individual Roku accounts. "After gaining access, they then changed the Roku login information for the affected individual Roku accounts, and, in a limited number of cases, attempted to purchase streaming subscriptions." Roku says that it secured the impacted accounts and forced a password reset upon detecting the incident. Additionally, the platform's security team investigated for any charges due to unauthorized purchases performed by the hackers and took steps to cancel the relevant subscriptions and refund the account holders. A researcher told BleepingComputer last week that the threat actors have been using a Roku config to perform credential stuffing attacks for months, bypassing brute force attack protections and captchas by using specific URLs and rotating through lists of proxy servers. Successfully hacked accounts are then sold on stolen account marketplaces for as little as 50 cents, as seen below where 439 accounts are being sold. The seller of these accounts provides information on how to change information on the account to make fraudulent purchases. Those who purchase the stolen accounts hijack them with their own information and use stored credit cards to purchase cameras, remotes, soundbars, light strips, and streaming boxes. After making their purchases, it is common for them to share screenshots of redacted order confirmation emails on Telegram channels associated with the stolen account marketplaces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surgeons in the United Kingdom have performed the first operation in the country using Apple's Vision Pro headset. TechSpot reports: During a recent operation to repair a patient's spine at the private Cromwell Hospital in London, a scrub nurse working alongside the surgeon used the Vision Pro to help prepare, keep track of the procedure, and choose the right tools, reports the Daily Mail. This marked the first operation in the UK where the Vision Pro was used. The software running on Apple's headset during the operation comes from US company eXeX, which has made similar programs for Microsoft's HoloLens. It offers nurses and technicians both holographic and touch-free access to the surgical setup and the procedural guides from within the sterile field of the operating room, according to the press release. The software also tracks each stage of an operation and can measure how well the op went compared to previous procedures performed by other surgeons. "It eliminates human error and eliminates the guesswork," said Suvi Verho, lead scrub nurse at London Independent Hospital. "It gives you confidence in surgery." While this marked the first time that the Vision Pro was used during a UK surgery, the first-ever time the device was used in an operating room was last month, just three days after its release, when Orlando resident and world-renowned Neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Masson wore it during several spine reconstruction surgeries. "We are in a new era of surgery, and for the first time, our surgical teams have the brilliance of visual holographic guidance and maps, improving visuospatial and temporal orientation for each surgical team and for each surgery in all specialties," said Masson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service. This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch. Before, even in incognito mode or when not logged in, Google would still show you video suggestions. Now, users see a message saying "Get Started" and "Start watching videos to help us build a feed of videos you'll love" when they open YouTube in incognito mode, with videos no longer being recommended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney's data. Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that "botnet-like activity from paid accounts" -- which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees -- was behind the outage. According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre on X, who listened to the call, Midjourney said that the service was brought down because "someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday." St. Pierre said that Midjourney had linked multiple paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team. In its summary of the business update call on March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as "office hours"), the company says it's banning all Stability AI employees from using its service "indefinitely" in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly ban employees of any company that exercises "aggressive automation" or causes outages to the service. St. Pierre flagged the accusations to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who replied on X, saying he was investigating the situation and that Stability hadn't ordered the actions in question. "Very confusing how 2 accounts would do this team also hasn't been scraping as we have been using synthetic & other data given SD3 outperforms all other models," said Mostaque, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview. He claimed that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, then it was unintentional and "obviously not a DDoS attack." Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him "some information" to help with his internal investigation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, AirPods Pro will gain a new "hearing aid mode" with the release of iOS 18 later this year. MacRumors reports: Writing in the subscriber edition of his regular Power On newsletter, Gurman claims that the "big news" for AirPods Pro in the near term will be support for a hearing aid-style function when iOS 18 drops in the fall. To be clear, this isn't the first time we have heard a potential hearing aid feature for AirPods Pro. The first rumor appeared in a 2021 Wall Street Journal report, but it was previously framed as a feature that would be exclusive to a next-generation model of AirPods Pro. However, Apple in September 2022 released the second-generation AirPods Pro, while the company more recently released a refreshed model with a USB-C port. AirPods Pro already offer a Conversation Boost feature, which boosts the volume and clarity of people directly in front of the wearer, but Apple has not advertised the earbuds as a hearing aid device, because this would require FDA regulatory approval. As per the FDA, a hearing aid is defined as "any wearable device designed for, offered for the purpose of, or represented as aiding persons with or compensating for, impaired hearing." This definition encompasses both air-conduction and bone-conduction devices in a variety of styles (for example, behind-the-ear, in-the-canal, or body worn). [...] It is not yet clear whether Apple will need FDA clearance in order to make explicit or implicit claims about the rumored "hearing aid mode," which may not even adopt this exact name. If, for example, Apple subsequently suggests that AirPods Pro are for users with certain types or severity of hearing loss/impaired hearing, or for use as an alternative to a hearing aid, then they will require FDA regulatory approval to be marketed as such.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A lengthy investigation into the European Union's use of Microsoft 365 has found the Commission breached the bloc's data protection rules through its use of the cloud-based productivity software. Announcing its decision in a press release today, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said the Commission infringed "several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365." "The Commission did not sufficiently specify what types of personal data are to be collected and for which explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365," the data supervisor, Wojciech Wiewiorowski, wrote, adding: "The Commission's infringements as data controller also relate to data processing, including transfers of personal data, carried out on its behalf." The EDPS has imposed corrective measures requiring the Commission to address the compliance problems it has identified by December 9 2024, assuming it continues to use Microsoft's cloud suite. The regulator, which oversees' EU institutions' compliance with data protection rules, opened a probe of the Commission's use of Microsoft 365 and other U.S. cloud services back in May 2021. [...] The Commission confirmed receipt of the EDPB's decision and said it will need to analyze the reasoning "in detail" before taking any decision on how to proceed. In a series of statements during a press briefing, it expressed confidence that it complies with "the applicable data protection rules, both in fact and in law." It also said "various improvements" have been made to contracts, with the EDPS, during its investigation. "We have been cooperating fully with the EDPS since the start of the investigation, by providing all relevant documents and information to the EDPS and by following up on the issues that have been raised in the course of the investigation," it said. "The Commission has always been ready to implement, and grateful for receiving, any substantiated recommendation from the EDPS. Data protection is a top priority for the Commission." "The Commission has always been fully committed to ensuring that its use of Microsoft M365 is compliant with the applicable data protection rules and will continue to do so. The same applies to all other software acquired by the Commission," it went on, further noting: "New data protection rules for the EU institutions and bodies came into force on 11 December 2018. The Commission is actively pursuing ambitious and safe adequacy frameworks with international partners. The Commission applies those rules in all its processes and contracts, including with individual companies such as Microsoft." While the Commission's public statements reiterated that it's committed to compliance with its legal obligations, it also claimed that "compliance with the EDPS decision unfortunately seems likely to undermine the current high level of mobile and integrated IT services." "This applies not only to Microsoft but potentially also to other commercial IT services. But we need to first analyze the decision's conclusions and the underlying reasons in detail. We cannot provide further comments until we have concluded the analysis," it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Controversial eyeball scanning startup Worldcoin has failed to get an injunction against a temporary suspension ordered Wednesday by Spain's data protection authority, the AEPD. TechCrunch: The authority used emergency powers contained in the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to make the local order, which can apply for up to three months. It said it was taking the precautionary measure against Worldcoin's operator, Tools for Humanity, in light of the sensitive nature of the biometric data being collected, which could pose a high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals. It also raised specific concerns about risks to minors, citing complaints received. Today a Madrid-based High Court declined to grant an injunction against the AEPD's order, saying that the "safeguarding of public interest" must be prioritized. As we reported Friday, the crypto blockchain biometrics digital identity firm shuttered scanning in the market shortly after the AEPD order -- which gave it 72 hours to comply. Today's court decision means Worldcoin's services remain suspended in Spain -- for up to three months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia, and Hyundai, have been collecting detailed driving data from millions of Americans through internet-enabled connected-car apps. The data, which includes information on speed, hard braking, and rapid accelerations, is shared with data brokers like LexisNexis. These brokers then provide the information to insurance companies, which use it to personalize coverage and set rates, The New York Times reported Monday. While automakers and data brokers claim to have drivers' consent, the partnerships are often obscured in fine print and unclear privacy policies. The practice raises concerns about privacy and transparency, as some drivers may be unaware that their driving habits are being tracked and shared with third parties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dozens of people have been injured by what officials described as a "strong movement" on a Chilean flight from Australia to New Zealand. From a report: In a statement on Monday, Chilean LATAM Airlines blamed the injuries on "a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement." It is just the latest in a series of safety-related incidents to feature a Boeing plane. Passengers were met by paramedics when the LATAM Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner touched down in Auckland. It was not immediately clear what caused the incident. About 50 people were treated at the scene, mostly for mild injuries. Twelve were taken to hospital, an ambulance spokesperson said, with one believed to be in serious condition. It is been a turbulent week for Boeing, with the US plane maker suffering a series of safety-related issues. Further reading: Justice Department Opens Criminal Investigation Into Boeing's Window Blowout Incident.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of Texas at Austin said Monday that it would again require standardized tests for admissions (non-paywalled source), becoming the latest selective university to reinstate requirements for SAT or ACT scores that were abandoned during the pandemic. From a report: A few years ago, about 2,000 colleges across the country began to move away from requiring test scores, at least temporarily, amid concerns they helped fuel inequality. But a growing number of those schools have reversed those policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue, with several announcing the changes in recent months. U.T. Austin, which admits a cross-section of high-achieving Texas students under a plan designed to increase opportunity in the state, cited a slightly different reason than the other schools in returning to test requirements. Without requiring test scores, officials said, they were hampered in placing the admitted students in programs they would be most suited for and in determining which ones needed extra help. After making test scores optional the past few years, the university will now require applicants to submit either SAT or ACT scores beginning Aug. 1, with applications for fall 2025 admissions. In an interview, Jay Hartzell, the U.T. president, said that the decision followed an analysis of students who did not submit scores. "We looked at our students and found that, in many ways, they weren't faring as well," Dr. Hartzell said. Those against testing requirements have long said that standardized tests are unfair because many students from affluent families use tutors and coaches to bolster their scores. But recent data has raised questions about the contention. In reinstating test requirements, some universities have said that making scores optional had the unintended effect of harming prospective students from low-income families.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US could further tighten controls on China's access to sophisticated semiconductor technologies, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, signaling Washington may intensify its campaign to prevent Beijing catching up in military capabilities. From a report: "We cannot allow China to have access for their military advancement to our most sophisticated technology," she told reporters in Manila on Monday. "So yes, we will do whatever it takes to protect our people including expanding our controls." Raimondo, who is leading a trade delegation to the Philippines and Thailand, was asked if the US is planning to add new restrictions on the sale of semiconductors to China. The Biden administration is mulling fresh sanctions on several Chinese tech companies, including memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc., while pushing allies to do more to curb the export of advanced tech to China, Bloomberg has reported in recent days. Washington has taken aim at China's chip industry for years, imposing sweeping controls on the export of advanced semiconductor-making machines and sophisticated chips like those used to develop artificial intelligence. Japan and the Netherlands, the two key countries where chip-making equipment is developed, joined the US effort last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government must move "quickly and decisively" to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an "extinction-level threat to the human species," says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. Time: "Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security," the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. "The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons." AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less. The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies -- like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta -- as part of their research. Accounts from some of those conversations paint a disturbing picture, suggesting that many AI safety workers inside cutting-edge labs are concerned about perverse incentives driving decisionmaking by the executives who control their companies. The finished document, titled "An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI," recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power. The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the "frontier" of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also "urgently" consider outlawing the publication of the "weights," or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward "alignment" research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several French government agencies were hit by "intense" cyberattacks beginning Sunday night. From a report: The attacks' impact on most services has been reduced and access to agencies' websites restored, the prime minister's office said in a statement Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbnb will no longer allow hosts to use indoor security cameras, regardless of where they're placed or what they're used for. In an update on Monday, Airbnb says the change to "prioritize the privacy" of renters goes into effect on April 30th. From a report: The vacation rental app previously let hosts install security cameras in "common areas" of listings, including hallways, living rooms, and front doors. Airbnb required hosts to disclose the presence of security cameras in their listings and make them clearly visible, and it prohibited hosts from using cameras in bedrooms and bathrooms. But now, hosts can't use indoor security cameras at all. The change comes after numerous reports of guests finding hidden cameras within their rental, leading some vacation-goers to scan their rooms for cameras. Airbnb's new policy also introduces new rules for outdoor security cameras, and will now require hosts to disclose their use and locations before guests book a listing. Hosts can't use outdoor cams to keep tabs on indoor spaces, either, nor can they use them in "certain outdoor areas where there's a great expectation of privacy," such as an outdoor shower or sauna.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Linus Torvalds has released version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel. "So it took a bit longer for the commit counts to come down this release than I tend to prefer," Torvalds wrote on the Linx kernel mailing list on Sunday, "but a lot of that seemed to be about various selftest updates (networking in particular) rather than any actual real sign of problems." "And the last two weeks have been pretty quiet, so I feel there's no real reason to delay 6.8." So he delivered it, ending his own speculation that this cut of the kernel might need an eighth release candidate. Torvalds found time to note what he described as "a bit of random git numerology" as when work ended on this version of the kernel the git repository used to track it contained 9.996 million objects." "This is the last mainline kernel to have less than ten million git objects," Torvalds wrote. "Of course, there is absolutely nothing special about it apart from a nice round number. Git doesn't care," he added. Fair enough -- especially as noted that other trees, such as linux-next, have well and truly passed ten million objects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently took to the stage to claim that Nvidia's GPUs are "so good that even when the competitor's chips are free, it's not cheap enough." Huang further explained that Nvidia GPU pricing isn't really significant in terms of an AI data center's total cost of ownership (TCO). The impressive scale of Nvidia's achievements in powering the booming AI industry is hard to deny; the company recently became the world's third most valuable company thanks largely to its AI-accelerating GPUs, but Jensen's comments are sure to be controversial as he dismisses a whole constellation of competitors, such as AMD, Intel and a range of competitors with ASICs and other types of custom AI silicon. Starting at 22:32 of the YouTube recording, John Shoven, Former Trione Director of SIEPR and the Charles R. Schwab Professor Emeritus of Economics, Stanford University, asks, "You make completely state-of-the-art chips. Is it possible that you'll face competition that claims to be good enough -- not as good as Nvidia -- but good enough and much cheaper? Is that a threat?" Jensen Huang begins his response by unpacking his tiny violin. "We have more competition than anyone on the planet," claimed the CEO. He told Shoven that even Nvidia's customers are its competitors, in some cases. Also, Huang pointed out that Nvidia actively helps customers who are designing alternative AI processors and goes as far as revealing to them what upcoming Nvidia chips are on the roadmap.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, the entrepreneur said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open-source roots. From a report: xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to "real-time" information and views undeterred by "politically correct" norms. The service is available to customers paying for X's $16 monthly subscription.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Streamers narrowly avoided getting shut out at the 2024 Oscars: Netflix came away with just one trophy and Apple left empty-handed, after they garnered a total of 32 nominations. From a report: Netflix collected its one win for Wes Anderson's "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, in the live action short film category. The 40-minute film, with a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes, is the first Oscar for Anderson (who wasn't in attendance to receive the award). Heading into Sunday's 96th Academy Awards, Netflix led all studios and platforms with 19 nominations across 11 films, including seven for Bradley Cooper's "Maestro" -- which was shut out. Apple had picked up 13 nods, including 10 for Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which also drew a goose egg. Since 2017, Netflix has now won 23 Oscars in all. But the best picture prize continues to elude the streamer as "Maestro" lost out to this year's awards powerhouse, "Oppenheimer." Nor has Netflix won in the lead actor or actress categories, coming up empty this year after four noms (Cooper and Carey Mulligan for "Maestro"; Colman Domingo for "Rustin"; and Annette Bening for "Nyad"). "Killers of the Flower Moon's" nominations included one for Scorsese in the best director category. His only Oscar to date came in 2007 for "The Departed" (for director). In 2020, his mafioso pic "The Irishman" for Netflix was shut out at the Oscars after receiving 10 nominations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN's national security analyst interviewed a U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the newly-released Defense report debunking UFO sightings - physicist Sean Kirkpatrick. He tells CNN "about two to five percent" of UFO reports are "truly anomalous." But CNN adds that "he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth..."This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence. Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities. Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft... Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working. The pattern keeps repeating. "Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S. or of benign civilian drones and balloons." ("What's more likely?" asked Kirkpatrick. "The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials?") But the greatest irony may be that "stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who'd heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people... [F]or decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there's a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But - if you believe Kirkpatrick - the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Toronto Sun columnist writes that two Canadian civil liberties groups are "sounding alarms" about the proposed new Online Harms Act (C-63):The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) say while the proposed legislation contains legitimate measures to protect children from online sexual abuse, cyber-bulling and self-harm, and to combat the spread of so-called "revenge porn," its provisions to prevent the expression of hate are draconian, vaguely worded and an attack on free speech... "[D]on't be fooled," said CCF executive director Joanna Baron. "Most of the bill is aimed at restricting freedom of expression. This heavy-handed bill needs to be severely pared down to comply with the constitution." Both the CCLA and CCF warn the bill could lead to life imprisonment for someone convicted of "incitement to genocide" - a vague term only broadly defined in the bill - and up to five years in prison for other vaguely defined hate speech crimes. The legislation, for example, defines illegal hate speech as expressing "detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals," while legally protected speech, "expresses dislike or disdain, or ... discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends." The problem, critics warn, will be determining in advance which is which, with the inevitable result that people and organizations will self-censor themselves because of fear of being prosecuted criminally, or fined civilly, for what is actually legal speech. "Both the CCLA and the CCF say the proposed legislation, known as Bill C-63, will require major amendments before becoming law to pass constitutional muster," according to the columnist. Some specific complains:The CCF argues that the Bill "would allow judges to put prior restraints on people who they believe on reasonable grounds may commit speech crimes in the future." The CCLA adds that the proposed bill also grants authorities "sweeping new search powers of electronic data, with no warrant requirement," according to the Toronto Sun, and also warns about the creation of a government-appointed "digital safety commission" given "vast authority" and "sweeping powers" to "interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner."And in addition, the CCF points out under the proposed rules the Canadian Human Rights Commission "could order fines of up to $50,000, and awards of up to $20,000 paid to complainants, who in some cases would be anonymous." "Findings would be based on a mere 'balance of probabilities' standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt... The mere threat of human rights complaints will chill large amounts of protected speech." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1995 Scottish video game designer Chris Sawyer created the business simulator game Transport Tycoon Deluxe - and within four years, Wikipedia notes, work began on the first version of an open source version that's still being actively developed. "According to a study of the 61,154 open-source projects on SourceForge in the period between 1999 and 2005, OpenTTD ranked as the 8th most active open-source project to receive patches and contributions. In 2004, development moved to their own server." Long-time Slashdot reader orudge says he's been involved for almost 25 years. "Exactly 21 years ago, I received an ICQ message (look it up, kids) out of the blue from a guy named Ludvig Strigeus (nicknamed Ludde).""Hello, you probably don't know me, but I've been working on a project to clone Transport Tycoon Deluxe for a while," he said, more or less... Ludde made more progress with the project [written in C] over the coming year, and it looks like we even attempted some multiplayer games (not too reliable, especially over my dial-up connection at the time). Eventually, when he was happy with what he had created, he agreed to allow me to release the game as open source. Coincidentally, this happened exactly a year after I'd first spoken to him, on the 6th March 2004... Things really got going after this, and a community started to form with enthusiastic developers fixing bugs, adding in new features, and smoothing off the rough edges. Ludde was, I think, a bit taken aback by how popular it proved, and even rejoined the development effort for a while. A read through the old changelogs reveals just how many features were added over a very short period of time. Quick wins like higher vehicle limits came in very quickly, and support for TTDPatch's NewGRF format started to be functional just four months later. Large maps, improved multiplayer, better pathfinders, improved TTDPatch compatibility, and of course, ports to a great many different operating systems, such as Mac OS X, BeOS, MorphOS and OS/2. It was a very exciting time to be a TTD fan! Within six years, ambitious projects to create free replacements for the original TTD graphics, sounds and music sets were complete, and OpenTTD finally had its 1.0 release. And while we may not have the same frantic addition of new features we had in 2004, there have still been massive improvements to the code, with plenty of exciting new features over the years, with major releases every year since 2008. he move to GitHub in 2018 and the release of OpenTTD on Steam in 2021 have also re-energised development efforts, with thousands of people now enjoying playing the game regularly. And development shows no signs of slowing down, with the upcoming OpenTTD 14.0 release including over 40 new features! "Personally, I would like to say thank you to everyone who has supported OpenTTD development over the past two decades..." they write, adding "Finally, of course, I'd like to thank you, the players! None of us would be here if people weren't still playing the game. "Seeing how the first twenty years have gone, I can't wait to see what the next twenty years have in store. :)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Cado Security Labs received an alert about a honeypot using the Docker Engine API. "A Docker command was received..." they write, "that spawned a new container, based on Alpine Linux, and created a bind mount for the underlying honeypot server's root directory..."Typically, this is exploited to write out a job for the Cron scheduler to execute... In this particular campaign, the attacker exploits this exact method to write out an executable at the path /usr/bin/vurl, along with registering a Cron job to decode some base64-encoded shell commands and execute them on the fly by piping through bash. The vurl executable consists solely of a simple shell script function, used to establish a TCP connection with the attacker's Command and Control (C2) infrastructure via the /dev/tcp device file. The Cron jobs mentioned above then utilise the vurl executable to retrieve the first stage payload from the C2 server... To provide redundancy in the event that the vurl payload retrieval method fails, the attackers write out an additional Cron job that attempts to use Python and the urllib2 library to retrieve another payload named t.sh "Multiple user mode rootkits are deployed to hide malicious processes," they note. And one of the shell scripts "makes use of the shopt (shell options) built-in to prevent additional shell commands from the attacker's session from being appended to the history file... Not only are additional commands prevented from being written to the history file, but the shopt command itself doesn't appear in the shell history once a new session has been spawned." The same script also inserts "an attacker-controlled SSH key to maintain access to the compromised host," according to the article, retrieves a miner for the Monero cryptocurrency and then "registers persistence in the form of systemd services" for both the miner and an open source Golang reverse shell utility named Platypus. It also delivers "various utilities," according to the blog Security Week, "including 'masscan' for host discovery." Citing CADO's researchers, they write that the shell script also "weakens the machine by disabling SELinux and other functions and by uninstalling monitoring agents."The Golang payloads deployed in these attacks allow attackers to search for Docker images from the Ubuntu or Alpine repositories and delete them, and identify and exploit misconfigured or vulnerable Hadoop, Confluence, Docker, and Redis instances exposed to the internet... ["For the Docker compromise, the attackers spawn a container and escape from it onto the underlying host," the researchers writes.] "This extensive attack demonstrates the variety in initial access techniques available to cloud and Linux malware developers," Cado notes. "It's clear that attackers are investing significant time into understanding the types of web-facing services deployed in cloud environments, keeping abreast of reported vulnerabilities in those services and using this knowledge to gain a foothold in target environments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this story from the New York Times:Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture. While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations - at least five, so far - represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November... The Miami Chronicle's website first appeared on Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered "the Florida News since 1937." Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a "leaked audio recording" of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in American support for Russia's beleaguered opposition after the death of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters. From the Raw Story:The network was discovered by Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub by researchers Patrick Warren and Darren Linvill, who tell the Times that its websites are designed to lend journalistic credibility to slickly produced propaganda."The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they're reading a genuine, U.S.-branded article," Linvill told the Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An article in Inc notes a "wild projection" in Reddit's SEC filing that Reddit's global market opportunity by 2027 is $1.4 trillion."Some of the numbers lead back to a single individual: Sam Altman. The co-founder and chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI owns an 8.7 percent stake in Reddit, more than its co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, who owns 3.3 percent... Altman, through various funds and holding companies he owns or manages, controls more than a million shares of Reddit at $60 million in aggregate purchase price - and holds more than 9 percent of voting rights... Discussing Reddit's future, financial analyst and journalist Herb Greenberg recently told CNBC, "This is an AI play." But the senior investing editor for Kiplinger.com argues that retail investors "may want to hold tight before rushing out to buy the Reddit IPO."While IPO stocks tend to have strong first-day showings, returns for the first year are generally weak, says the team of analysts at Trivariate Research, a market research firm based in New York. And since 2020, "the average IPO has lagged its industry average by 30% over the subsequent three years following its first closing price..." Other commenters have noted that Reddit's allotment of shares to select Redditors could lower demand on the first day of trading, which would work against any IPO pop. "Over the past few years, there have been a bunch of IPOs in the U.S. in which overhyped names enjoyed flashy stock-market debuts only to drop sharply soon after," notes the Street.Notable examples include Coinbase, which plummeted by almost 90% after its debut, Robinhood, still down 53% since its IPO, and Rivian, down over 91% since its debut. However, it's crucial to note that all of these IPOs occurred in 2021 amid market euphoria fueled by low interest rates, significant economic stimulus, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the current macroeconomic landscape differs from three years ago, valuations of tech and growth stocks remain stretched. Kiplingers.com concludes it "boils down to your own personal investing goals and risk tolerance. If you do decide to buy Reddit stock when it first begins trading, do so in a small amount that you can afford to lose." But they also cite analysis from David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs, a research firm powered by artificial intelligence. "Reddit's IPO marks the return of the junk IPO," Trainer wrote in Forbes. "[The valuation] implies that Reddit will grow its user base to 26 times current levels, which would be nearly five times the size of [Snapchat-maker] Snap, and a highly unlikely feat. Reddit looks overvalued, and we think investors should pass on this IPO." Trainer writes:[T]he company has never been profitable and should not be a publicly traded company... I think the company may never monetize its platform without angering its users and the entire premise of Reddit is user-generated content. This business model is inescapably built on a catch-22: make money or please users... Reddit looks overvalued, and I think investors should pass on this IPO. Buyers and analysts told the site Marketing Brew "that they see the platform as nice-to-have, but that it is not an essential part of their media plans, like Meta or Google are.""They've always been solidly in the second or third tier of social networks," alongside Snap, Pinterest, and X, Brian Wieser, a former GroupM exec who's now author of the industry newsletter Madison and Wall, told Marketing Brew. Yet Trainer notes that "98% of Reddit's revenue in 2023 came from third-party advertising on the site and 28% of all revenue came from ten customers," and "Reddit's cost of revenue, sales & marketing, general & administrative, and research & development costs were 117% of revenue in 2023." Trainer concludes "Reddit is nowhere near breakeven. Reddit is an unprofitable social media company fighting for users." Bloomberg adds that the subreddit r/WallStreetBets "has threatened to bet against the stock, with many people noting that the company still loses money two decades into its existence. (Reddit lost $90.8 million last year, down from $158.6 million the year before.)"Some have complained that the invitation to invest fails to make up for the unpaid labor they've invested making the site work... In 2021 the platform's WallStreetBets forum ignited a meme-stock frenzy, propelling skyward the stocks of nostalgic but struggling companies like GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and sending shockwaves through the financial industry... When it goes public, the platform that invented meme stocks runs the risk of becoming one itself. Reddit noted the possibility as a risk in its IPO filing. "Given the broad awareness and brand recognition of Reddit, including as a result of the popularity of r/wallstreetbets among retail investors," the company warned that its stock could "experience extreme volatility ... which could cause you to lose all or part of your investment if you are unable to sell your shares at or above the initial offering price." Users on WallStreetBets got a kick out of the fact that the company listed the forum as a risk factor, posting about it with a sly smiling emoji... Meanwhile, reports that marketers are infiltrating subreddits have been confirmed. Over 200 businesses have "integrated Reddit Pro into their digital strategies," reports Search Engine Land, including "well-known names such as Taco Bell, the NFL, and The Wall Street Journal... "During the initial alpha testing phase with approximately 20 businesses, Reddit reported its Pro partners, on average, generated 11 additional posts and comments per month."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Department of Justice "has launched a criminal investigation into the Boeing jetliner blowout that left a gaping hole on an Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal. "As part of the new investigation, the Justice Department has interviewed pilots and flight attendants on the flight..." the Journal reports. "Investigators have taken steps to begin notifying Alaska passengers on board during the Jan. 5 accident that they are potential crime victims in the case, according to a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal."The probe would inform the Justice Department's review of whether Boeing complied with an earlier settlement that resolved a federal investigation following two fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. Investigations don't always result in formal charges of wrongdoing. Separately, investigators with the Transportation Department's Inspector General's office in recent weeks have been seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing... If the Justice Department finds that Boeing violated the terms of the 2021 settlement, the company could face prosecution on the original count of defrauding the U.S. Alternatively, the government could seek to extend the probationary, three-year agreement that requires Boeing to update the Justice Department on its compliance improvements. In a related development, Boeing "has acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it cannot find records for work done on the door panel of the Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press:"We have looked extensively and have not found any such documentation," Ziad Ojakli, Boeing executive vice president and chief government lobbyist, wrote to Sen. Maria Cantwell on Friday. The company said its "working hypothesis" was that the records about the panel's removal and reinstallation on the 737 MAX final assembly line in Renton, Washington, were never created, even though Boeing's systems required it. Not having the documents "raises concerns about quality assurance, quality management safety management systems within Boeing," said the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board earlier this week. "This is a serious, potentially illegal, lapse in standard aviation manufacturing quality processes," reports the Seattle Times. Meanwhile, America's National Transportation Safety Board is also investigating a United Airlines Boeing 737-8 flight "that last month experienced 'stuck' rudder pedals," reports Axios, "after touching down in Newark, per a preliminary report released Thursday."The captain reported that during the landing rollout, which is after touchdown but before the plane slows to taxi speed, the pedals did not respond to foot pressure and remained stuck. "The captain used the nosewheel steering tiller to keep the airplane near the runway centerline while slowing to a safe taxi speed before exiting the runway onto a high-speed turn-off," the report states. Shortly after, the rudder pedals began to operate normally, the captain said. There were no injures and the airplane was removed from service for maintenance and troubleshooting. An inspection found no obvious malfunctions, said the National Transportation Safety Board. After removing the rudder system components, United conducted a second flight test and found the rudder controls operated normally, per the report. "With coordination with United, the issue was successfully resolved with the replacement of three parts and the airplane returned to service last month," Boeing said in a statement, adding that this is the only report of such an issue that they've received for the 737 MAX fleet. The investigation is ongoing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene - our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age - and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. "Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming."The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning - though not unexpected - rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch - some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s - isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World? Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration."Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again... Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...." From the New York Times:Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term. That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing." Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this article from Futurism:More than two years since MIT claimed its scientists achieved a breakthrough in fusion energy, the university is claiming that new research "confirms" that the magnet-based design used in those tests isn't just impressive in a lab setting, but is practical and economically viable, too. These findings come from a comprehensive report which features six separate [peer-reviewed] studies published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity this month, assessing the feasibility of the superconductor magnets used by MIT scientists in their landmark test conducted in September 2021. "Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance," MIT announced, "as well as the lessons learned from the process. "Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet's unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant."The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was "the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research." Before the [2021] demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy - but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, "overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day," Whyte says. "Now fusion has a chance," Whyte addsRead more of this story at Slashdot.