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Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/intel-accuses-amd-of-selling-old-cpus-with-new-model-numbers-which-intel-also-does/

An Anonymous Coward writes:systemd's newest contribution to FOSS is the BSoD - but this time, new and improved, with QR codes!Not a joke, truth. QR codes!https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/linux-distros-are-about-to-get-a-killer-windows-feature-the-blue-screen-of-death/

upstart writes:I received the new gene-editing drug for sickle cell disease. It changed my life.:

KritonK writes:As reported on the Vivaldi browser blog:Just when you thought the Do-Not-Track (DNT) privacy setting was gathering dust, a court in Berlin, Germany decided to exhume it. The Berlin Regional court ruled in favor of the Federation of German Consumer Organization (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, vzbv), in their lawsuit against LinkedIn for ignoring users who had enabled 'Do-Not-Track' in their browsers. According to the German judge, companies must respect DNT settings under the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/us-regulators-will-now-have-access-to-years-of-binance-transaction-data/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

DannyB writes:SpaceX acquires parachute supplier

canopic jug writes:Several sites are reporting on the 40 anniversary of Turbo Pascal.At the vintage computing web blog, Byte Cellar:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

canopic jug writes:Retired self-proclaimed ordinary guy Bryce Wray has written an analysis of the situation with Mozilla's Firefox, the tipping point it is rapidly approaching, and the factors behind it heading towards that tipping point as it descends towards 2%. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) guides those building US government web sites, but the influence extends much further in practice:

upstart writes:Tesla whistleblower casts doubt on car safety:

fliptop writes:Hackers have been able to gain access to personal information from about 6.9 million users of genetic testing company 23andMe, using customers' old passwords:

fliptop writes:One of the oldest distinctions in information access is between searching and browsing. Does a user initiate an information-seeking journey by typing keywords into a search box, or by browsing a category hierarchy?

In the early days of autonomous driving development, there was some press about researchers using the "trolley problem" (kill one person "on purpose" vs "do nothing" and kill many) to think about how robot cars should work. Now researchers at North Carolina State U have broken that big moral question down into smaller, more mundane pieces, in an attempt to see what ordinary human drivers think and do. Press release at: https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/adas/ncsu-researchers-ditch-the-trolley-problem-to-help-autonomous-vehicles-make-moral-decisions.html and full paper at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01813-y

upstart writes:IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip:

mcgrew writes:I decided a few years ago that I was sick of standing in the snow at a gas station waiting for the person inside the building to finish selling that lottery ticket and turn the pump on so I can stand there some more babysitting it while it fills up and I freeze. The answer, of course, was to buy a car that didn't need gasoline, one I could plug into the house and go inside where it's warm.I'm not a rich man, I'm a pensioner who is still paying a mortgage, so I looked for an affordable EV. Used ones are almost nonexistent, and I found out why when I finally bought one: it has a ten year warranty. They haven't been making them much longer than that.I swore off new cars decades ago when my month old VW stranded me ninety miles from home with a bad alternator, but if you want an EV, new is your only choice. I kept seeing the Chevy Bolt advertised, but could never find one for sale at all. Then I found that they had stopped making them two years earlier.Why? Well, battery problems, they claimed. Why just the not so expensive one, $30,000? GM is still selling electric Cadillacs and Corvettes, why no cheap cars?I discovered after buying an EV that the only two advantages of a piston car to an electric one are the lack of infrastructure for long trips, and the high purchase price of the vehicle. Why high? Because only their flagship autos have electric motors, the ones that formerly had V8s.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/gmails-ai-powered-spam-detection-is-its-biggest-security-upgrade-in-years/

fliptop writes:Spying has always been limited by the need for human labor. A.I. is going to change that:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/amazon-faces-trial-after-selling-bathroom-spycam-used-to-abuse-minor/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

canopic jug writes:Software engineer Miguel Grinberg is getting a jump on the new year and has already published the Flask Mega-Tutorial, 2024 Edition. As he introduces its 23 chapters,

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/GovernanceThe community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

taylorvich writes:https://phys.org/news/2023-11-genetic-year-old-shaman-burial-germany.htmlThe double burial of an adult woman and an infant, dating to about 7000-6800 BCE, discovered in 1934 during construction works at the spa gardens of Bad Durrenberg, is regarded as one of the outstanding burial finds of the Mesolithic in Central Europe. Because of the unusual equipment with the woman, who was buried in a seated position, and her bodily anomalies, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.Genetic research now reveals the relation of the woman and the child: the boy is not her son, but is a fourth- or fifth-degree relation. The phenotypic variants analyzed in the woman's genome inform us that she had a relatively dark skin complexion, dark, straight hair, and blue eyes.The unusual equipment buried with the woman comprises flint artifacts and solid rock tools, but also bone and antler artifacts, a piece of red ochre, a number of animal bones including the shell of at least three terrapins and partly pierced animal teeth. Together with deer antlers and originally six partly pierced boar's tusks, these finds are probably head/body ornaments. Due to the grave goods and bodily anomalies of the woman, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.[...] Subsequent excavations at the site as part of the preparations for the State Garden Exhibition 2024 brought not only new revelations about the deposition and positioning of the body to light, but also revealed a multitude of new finds, which could be clearly attributed to the burial. Besides the pierced animal teeth, remains of fauna, lithic artifacts and a large amount of human skeletal remains could also be recovered.At the base of the skull, there is an anomaly at the edge of the great occipital hole, in the form of a small constriction. This area is the imprint of an abnormally developed blood vessel. The first cervical vertebra is incompletely formed due to a congenital growth defect and has only reached 40% of the arch. The rounded end of the vertebral arch corresponds to the previously observed defect at the large occipital hole.[...] This can be caused intentionally by adopting a certain head posture. The consequences are unlikely to have been serious or hazardous to the person's health. However, it is conceivable that a nystagmus, i.e., an involuntary movement of the eyeballs, could be caused by the blockage of a blood vessel. This unusual feature might have been perceived as uncanny and when initiated on purpose may have reinforced or even justified her role as a shaman.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

hubie writes:Physicists confirm 67-year-old prediction of massless, neutral composite particle:

Rosco P. Coltrane writes:If you use any Simple Mobile Tools Android app (Simple Draw Pro, Simple Music Player, Simple Dialer, Simple SMS Messenger, Simple Voice Recorder, Simple Flashlight, Simple App Launcher, Simple Clock, Simple Launcher, Simple Camera or Simple Calendar Pro), you might want to consider uninstall it - particularly if you've installed it from the Google Play Store rather than from F-Droid.The author, Tibor Kaputa has sold Simple Mobile Tools apps to well-know Israeli advertisement company ZipoApps. If you don't like ads or you fear ad-borne malware, Simple Mobile Tools apps aren't for your anymore.Most users of the apps and contributors are dismayed. You can follow the Reddit threads dedicated to the issue here and here if you want to find ads-free open-source alternative apps. Of course, F-Droid builds will start flagging Simple Mobile Tools with the ads anti-feature flag - if the tools aren't dropped altogether - but the safest action if you rely on them is to disable updating the apps altogether, to keep the last independent versions installed.It's a sad day for the open-source Android ecosystem, as Simple Mobile Tools apps are well-regarded and part of many people's everyday lives. Hopefully they will be forked and development will continue on the forked versions.Thanks Tibor for your great work over the years. Too bad that you couldn't find any other way to cash out.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

upstart writes:A high school's deepfake porn scandal is pushing US lawmakers into action:

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owl writes:https://www.righto.com/2023/11/intel-386-clock-circuit.html

taylorvich writes:https://phys.org/news/2023-11-sentinel-universally-understood-continents.html

hubie writes:When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower:

taylorvich writes:https://newatlas.com/biology/dolphin-sense-electric-fields/

canopic jug writes:Standards nerd and technology enthusiast, Terence Eden, has published a South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map which has the south end up and uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size. In other words, the globe has been rotated to 150 and created in a multi-stage process mostly using R. The borders are from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji.

taylorvich writes:https://newatlas.com/science/fungi-boost-crop-yield/

canopic jug writes:The site Switch On Business analyzed Microsoft's LinkedIn employee profiles for Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft itself, IBM, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix, Nvidia, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel, and Uber. From that subset of employees they highlighted those who currently work in each tech giant and previously worked for one of the others. That provided for an estimate of the number and percentage of employees who have moved from one of these companies to another:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/sam-altman-officially-back-as-openai-ceo-we-didnt-lose-a-single-employee/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/hackers-spent-2-years-looting-secrets-of-chipmaker-nxp-before-being-detected/

upstart writes:If you've got an old Google account that you have not used for a couple of years then it could soon be deleted:

upstart writes:Every Bitcoin transaction uses, on average, enough water to fill "a back yard swimming pool", a new study suggests:

hubie writes:Modern day parenting pressures and expectations are leading to the death knell for children enjoying spontaneous play:

fliptop writes:Tim O'Reilly, Mariana Mazzucato, and Ilan Strauss have three working papers focusing on Amazon's ability to extract unusual profits from its customers nowadays:

Rich writes:The Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/), a subsidiary of Germany's Ministry for Economic affairs, will issue a one million dollar grant to the GNOME foundation (https://www.gnome.org/). Most reports are in German, but OMGUbuntu has a summary at https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/gnome-sovereign-tech-fund. The foundation already has supported several open source infrastructure projects, from FORTRAN to cURL, but this is the first time that it directly supports the Linux desktop.This grant acknowledges GNOME a part of critical infrastructure and therefore worthy of this public support. Most of the spent money will go into improving accessibility, but some points also address security and the general software infrastructure.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/stability-ai-releases-stable-video-diffusion-which-turns-pictures-into-short-videos/

taylorvich writes:https://newatlas.com/medical/traffic-triggers-blood-pressure-surge/