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Landlines Are Dying Out

Mon, 2024-03-25 15:21
An anonymous reader shares a report: The number of landline users has plummeted with the rise of cellphones, and the 19th-century technology's days appear to be numbered. Providers like AT&T are looking to exit the business by transitioning customers to cellphones or home telephone service over broadband connections. But for many of the millions of people still clinging to their copper-based landline telephones, newer alternatives are either unavailable, too expensive, or are unreliable when it matters most: in an emergency. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, only a quarter of adults in the United States still have landlines and only around 5 percent say they mostly or only rely on them. The largest group of people holding onto their landlines are 65 and older. Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of adults are using wireless phones only. The copper lines used for traditional landlines carry electricity over the wires, so as long as a phone is corded or charged it will work during a power outage. Landlines are separate from cellular and broadband networks and are not affected by their outages, making them a necessary backstop in rural areas. Many of those same areas have inadequate cellular or internet coverage. "In three, four, maybe five years a lot of states are going to say 'Okay, it's permissible to discontinue service if you, the phone company, can demonstrate there's functional alternative service,'" says Rob Frieden, an Academy and Emeritus Professor of Telecommunications and Law at Pennsylvania State University. AT&T recently asked the California Public Utilities Commission to end its obligation to provide landline service in parts of the state. The Federal Communications Commission, which has to approve a request to end service, said it hasn't received one from AT&T.

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Bitcoin 'Halving' Spurs Exodus of Old US Mining Computers Abroad

Mon, 2024-03-25 14:41
An anonymous reader shares a report: About 6,000 older Bitcoin mining machines in the US will soon be idled and sent to a warehouse in Colorado Springs where they'll be refreshed and resold to buyers overseas looking to profit from mining in lower-cost environs. Wholesaler SunnySide Digital operates the 35,000 square-foot facility taking in the equipment from a mining client. The outdated machines are among several hundred-thousand it expects to receive and refurbish around a major quadrennial update in the Bitcoin blockchain. Known as the halving, the late April event will slash the reward that's the main revenue stream for miners, who will try to lessen the impact by upgrading to the latest and most efficient technology. With electricity the biggest expense, mining companies including publicly traded giants Marathon Digital Holdings and Riot Platforms need to lower usage costs to maintain a positive margin. Their older computers may still bring a profit, just not likely in the US. Some 600,000 S19 series computers, which account for a majority of machines currently in use, are moving out of the US mostly to Africa and South America, according to an estimate by Ethan Vera, chief operating officer at crypto-mining services and logistics provider Luxor Technology in Seattle. In Bitcoin mining, specialized machines are used to validate transactions on the blockchain and earn operators a fixed token reward. Anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto baked in the once-every-four-years halving to maintain the hard cap of 21 million tokens. Next month's event is the fourth since 2012 and the reward will drop to 3.125 Bitcoin from 6.25 now.

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Behind the Plot To Break Nvidia's Grip on AI By Targeting Software

Mon, 2024-03-25 14:01
An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia earned its $2.2 trillion market cap by producing AI chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from startups to Microsoft, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Almost as important to its hardware is the company's nearly 20 years' worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia's CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm, Google and Intel, plans to loosen Nvidia's chokehold by going after the chip giant's secret weapon: the software that keeps developers tied to Nvidia chips. They are part of an expanding group of financiers and companies hacking away at Nvidia's dominance in AI. "We're actually showing developers how you migrate out from an Nvidia platform," Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm's head of AI and machine learning, said in an interview with Reuters. Starting with a piece of technology developed by Intel called OneAPI, the UXL Foundation, a consortium of tech companies, plans to build a suite of software and tools that will be able to power multiple types of AI accelerator chips, executives involved with the group told Reuters. The open-source project aims to make computer code run on any machine, regardless of what chip and hardware powers it. "It's about specifically - in the context of machine learning frameworks - how do we create an open ecosystem, and promote productivity and choice in hardware," Google's director and chief technologist of high-performance computing, Bill Hugo, told Reuters in an interview. Google is one of the founding members of UXL and helps determine the technical direction of the project, Hugo said. UXL's technical steering committee is preparing to nail down technical specifications in the first half of this year. Engineers plan to refine the technical details to a "mature" state by the end of the year, executives said. These executives stressed the need to build a solid foundation to include contributions from multiple companies that can also be deployed on any chip or hardware.

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Atlas VPN To Shut Down, Transfers Paid Subscribers To NordVPN

Mon, 2024-03-25 13:10
Atlas VPN informed customers on Monday that it will discontinue its services on April 24, citing technological demands, market competition, and escalating costs as key factors in the decision. The company will transfer its paid subscribers to its sister company, NordVPN, for the remainder of their subscription period to ensure uninterrupted VPN services. Atlas VPN, founded with the mission of providing accessible and user-friendly VPN services, expressed gratitude for its users' support.

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Consumers Sue Apple, Taking Page From Justice Department Lawsuit

Mon, 2024-03-25 12:41
Apple has been hit with a flurry of new consumer lawsuits accusing the iPhone maker of monopolizing the smartphone market, piggybacking on a sweeping antitrust case lodged by the U.S. Justice Department and 15 states last week. From a report: At least three proposed class actions have been filed since Friday in California and New Jersey federal courts by iPhone owners who claim Apple inflated the cost of its products through anticompetitive conduct. The lawsuits, seeking to represent millions of consumers, mirror the Justice Department's claims that Apple violated U.S. antitrust law by suppressing technology for messaging apps, digital wallets and other items that would have increased competition in the market for smartphones.

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UK Blames China for Massive Breach of Voter Data

Mon, 2024-03-25 12:00
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. From a report: In a statement to lawmakers in Parliament on Monday, U.K. deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden attributed the 2021 data breach at the Electoral Commission to hackers working for the Chinese government. Dowden told lawmakers that the U.K. government "will not hesitate to take swift and robust actions wherever the Chinese government threatens the United Kingdom's interests." It's the first time the United Kingdom has attributed the breach since the cyberattack was first disclosed in 2023. The Electoral Commission, which maintains copies of the U.K. register of citizens eligible to vote, said at the time hackers took the names and addresses of an estimated 40 million U.K. citizens, including those who were registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and overseas voters. The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn't detected until a year later. In a statement Monday, the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it is "highly likely" that the Chinese hackers accessed and exfiltrated emails and data from the electoral register during the hack.

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DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit Says Apple Is Causing Android Users 'Social Stigma'

Mon, 2024-03-25 11:21
FrankOVD shares a report: Here's a paragraph from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Apple in full: "In addition to degrading the quality of third-party messaging apps, Apple affirmatively undermines the quality of rival smartphones. For example, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages -- the default messaging app on an iPhone -- then the text appears to the iPhone user as a green bubble and incorporates limited functionality: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users cannot edit messages or see typing indicators. "This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse -- even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience. Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for 'breaking' chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers -- where the iPhone's share is 85 percent, according to one survey. This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones -- solidifying Apple's smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse."

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Microsoft Dev's 30-Year-Old Temporary Code Still Lingers in Windows 11

Mon, 2024-03-25 10:40
Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft developer, has shared the story behind the Format drive dialog box in Windows, which has remained unchanged for nearly three decades. According to Plummer, the dialog box was created as a temporary solution during the porting of code from Windows 95 to Windows NT, due to differences between the two operating systems. Plummer jotted down all the formatting options on a piece of paper and created a basic UI, intending it to be a placeholder until a more refined version could be developed. However, the intended UI improvement never materialized, and Plummer's temporary solution has persisted through numerous Windows versions, including the latest Windows 11. Plummer also admitted that the 32GB limit on FAT volume size in Windows was an arbitrary decision he made at the time, which has since become a permanent constraint.

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Boeing CEO, Many Other Top Execs To Step Down in Leadership Shakeup at Embattled Plane Maker

Mon, 2024-03-25 08:10
Boeing announced a major leadership overhaul Monday, with CEO Dave Calhoun set to step down at the end of 2024 amid mounting pressure from airlines and regulators over quality and manufacturing issues. Chairman Larry Kellner will also resign and depart the board at Boeing's annual meeting in May, the company said. He will be replaced as chair by Steve Mollenkopf, a Boeing director since 2020. Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, is leaving the company effective immediately. Stephanie Pope, who recently became Boeing's Chief Operating Officer after leading Boeing Global Services, will take over Deal's role. The shakeup comes as the aerospace giant faces increasing scrutiny following a series of production flaws and a recent incident involving a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9, where a door plug blew out minutes into an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5. Airlines and regulators have been calling for significant changes at Boeing to address these issues and restore confidence in the company's products. The leadership changes appear to be a response to these growing concerns. An excerpt from a letter the CEO wrote to employees, also on Monday: As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company. The eyes of the world are on us, and I know we will come through this moment a better company, building on all the learnings we accumulated as we worked together to rebuild Boeing over the last number of years.

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This Startup Wants to Fix the Housing Market - with Robots

Mon, 2024-03-25 07:34
In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference? The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory." [Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian... Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls... Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities. After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article. "Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions."

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EU Launches Probes Into Apple, Meta, Google Under New Digital Competition Law

Mon, 2024-03-25 06:30
The European Union has launched investigations into Apple, Meta and Google under its sweeping new digital-competition law, adding to the regulatory scrutiny large U.S. tech companies are facing worldwide. From a report: The suite of probes [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; official press release here] announced Monday are the first under the EU's Digital Markets Act law, which took effect earlier this month. They come less than a week after the Justice Department sued Apple over allegations it makes it difficult for competitors to integrate with the iPhone, ultimately raising prices for customers. Apple and Google will now face EU scrutiny of how they are complying with rules that say they must allow app developers to inform customers about alternative offers outside those companies' main app stores. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it is concerned about constraints the tech companies place on developers' ability to freely communicate with users and promote their offers. The bloc will also examine changes that Google made to how its search results appear in Europe. The new digital competition law says companies cannot give their own services preference over similar services that are offered by rivals. Another probe will look at how Apple complies with rules that say users should be able to easily remove software applications and change default settings on their iPhones, as well as how the company shows choice screens that offer alternative search engine and browser options.

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Tired of Streaming? Home-Grown 'Free Blockbuster' Libraries Are Trying to Offer Alternatives

Mon, 2024-03-25 03:34
In 2019 Los Angeles film/TV producer Brian Morrison painted Blockbuster's logo onto an old newspaper box — and then filled it up with used DVDs. "The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction," reports the New York Times — aided at times by social media — "and eventually more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain." Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors. Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said. Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University... Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said. Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts). But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."

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California's Successful Dam-Removal Project Continues

Sun, 2024-03-24 23:34
The Los Angeles Times checks in on America's largest dam-removal project, which they say is now "revealing a stark landscape that had been underwater for generations." "A thick layer of muddy sediment covers the sloping ground, where workers have been scattering seeds and leaving meandering trails of footprints. In the cracked mud, seeds are sprouting and tiny green shoots are appearing." With water passing freely through tunnels in three dams, the Klamath River has returned to its ancient channel and is flowing unhindered for the first time in more than a century through miles of waterlogged lands. Using explosives and machinery, crews began blasting and tearing into the concrete of one of the three dams earlier this month... The emptying of the reservoirs, which began in January, is estimated to have released as much as 2.3 million tons of sediment into the river, abruptly worsening its water quality and killing nonnative perch, bluegill and bass that had been introduced in the reservoirs for fishing. Downstream from the dams, the river's banks are littered with dead fish. But tribal leaders, biologists and environmentalists say that this was part of the plan, and that the river will soon be hospitable for salmon to once again swim upstream to spawn... [The dams] blocked salmon from reaching vital habitat and degraded the river's water quality, contributing to toxic algae blooms in the reservoirs and disease outbreaks that killed fish... Workers have been drilling holes in the top of the Copco No. 1 Dam, placing dynamite and setting off blasts, then using machinery to chip away fractured concrete. The dam, which has been in place since 1918, is scheduled to be fully removed by the end of August. The smaller Copco No. 2 Dam was torn down last year as the project began. Two earthen dams, the Iron Gate and the John C. Boyle, remain to be dismantled starting in May. If the project goes as planned, the three dams will be gone sometime this fall, reestablishing a free-flowing stretch of river and enabling Chinook and coho salmon to swim upstream and spawn along about 400 miles of the Klamath and its tributaries. Meanwhile, teams of scientists and workers are focusing on restoring the landscape and natural vegetation on about 2,200 acres of denuded reservoir-bottom lands... River restoration advocates are optimistic. They say undamming the Klamath will demonstrate the potential for restoring free-flowing rivers elsewhere in California, and point to initial plans to remove two dams on the Eel River as another promising opportunity.

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Has 'Silicon Valley-style Startup Disruption' Arrived for Book Publishing?

Sun, 2024-03-24 21:34
The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month "brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books." Authors Equity has "a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers," and like a handful of other publishers "is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead." It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells.... Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: "Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves." Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits. In an added twist, "Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together." Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like. "Bespoke Teams" is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill. The article concludes with this prediction. "It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing." Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money."

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GitHub Introduces AI-Powered Tool That Suggests Ways It Can Auto-Fix Your Code

Sun, 2024-03-24 18:34
"It's a bad day for bugs," joked TechCrunch on Wednesday. "Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code..." And then the same day, BleepingComputer reported that GitHub "introduced a new AI-powered feature capable of speeding up vulnerability fixes while coding." This feature is in public beta and automatically enabled on all private repositories for GitHub Advanced Security customers. Known as Code Scanning Autofix and powered by GitHub Copilot and CodeQL, it helps deal with over 90% of alert types in JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python... After being toggled on, it provides potential fixes that GitHub claims will likely address more than two-thirds of found vulnerabilities while coding with little or no editing. "When a vulnerability is discovered in a supported language, fix suggestions will include a natural language explanation of the suggested fix, together with a preview of the code suggestion that the developer can accept, edit, or dismiss," GitHub's Pierre Tempel and Eric Tooley said... Last month, the company also enabled push protection by default for all public repositories to stop the accidental exposure of secrets like access tokens and API keys when pushing new code. This was a significant issue in 2023, as GitHub users accidentally exposed 12.8 million authentication and sensitive secrets via more than 3 million public repositories throughout the year. GitHub will continue adding support for more languages, with C# and Go coming next, according to their announcement. "Our vision for application security is an environment where found means fixed."

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Judge Orders YouTube to Reveal Everyone Who Viewed A Video

Sun, 2024-03-24 17:34
"If you've ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to 'put you on some kind of list,' your concern may be more than warranted," writes Mashable : In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators. The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer... In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case. YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023... "According to documents viewed by Forbes, a court granted the government's request for the information," writes PC Magazine, adding that Google was asked "to not publicize the request." The requests are raising alarms for privacy experts who say the requests are unconstitutional and are "transforming search warrants into digital dragnets" by potentially targeting individuals who are not associated with a crime based simply on what they may have watched online. That quote came from Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who elaborates in Forbes' article. "No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I'm horrified that the courts are allowing this." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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Say Hello To Biodegradable Microplastics?

Sun, 2024-03-24 16:34
Long-time Slashdot reader HanzoSpam shared an announcement from the University of California San Diego. The school's researchers teamed with materials-science company Algenesis to show "that their plant-based polymers biodegrade — even at the microplastic level — in under seven months." "We're trying to find replacements for materials that already exist, and make sure these replacements will biodegrade at the end of their useful life instead of collecting in the environment," stated Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Michael Burkart, one of the paper's authors and an Algenesis co-founder. "That's not easy." "When we first created these algae-based polymers about six years ago, our intention was always that it be completely biodegradable," said another of the paper's authors, Robert Pomeroy, who is also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and an Algenesis co-founder. "We had plenty of data to suggest that our material was disappearing in the compost, but this is the first time we've measured it at the microparticle level...." "This material is the first plastic demonstrated to not create microplastics as we use it," said Stephen Mayfield, a paper coauthor, School of Biological Sciences professor and co-founder of Algenesis. "This is more than just a sustainable solution for the end-of-product life cycle and our crowded landfills. This is actually plastic that is not going to make us sick." Creating an eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based plastics is only one part of the long road to viability. The ongoing challenge is to be able to use the new material on pre-existing manufacturing equipment that was originally built for traditional plastic, and here Algenesis is making progress. They have partnered with several companies to make products that use the plant-based polymers developed at UC San Diego, including Trelleborg for use in coated fabrics and RhinoShield for use in the production of cell phone cases. "When we started this work, we were told it was impossible," stated Burkart. "Now we see a different reality. There's a lot of work to be done, but we want to give people hope. It is possible."

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Google Teams with 'Highlights', Shows How Goofus and Gallant Use the Internet

Sun, 2024-03-24 15:34
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last month there was a special Google-funded edition of Highlights for Children, the 77-year-old magazine targetting children between the ages of 6 and 12. This edition was based on Google's "Be Internet Awesome" curriculum, and 1.25 million copies of the print magazine were distributed to children, schools, and other organizations. It's all part of a new partnership between Google and Highlights. A Google.org blog post calls out the special issue's Goofus and Gallant cartoon, in which always-does-the-wrong-thing Goofus "promised Kayden he wouldn't share the silly photo, but he shares it anyway", while always-does-the-right-thing Gallant "asks others if it's OK to share their photos"... theodp's orignal submission linked ironically to Slashdot's earlier story, "Google Hit With Lawsuit Alleging It Stole Data From Millions of Users To Train Its AI Tools." But even beyond that, it's not always clear what the cartoon is teaching. (In one picture it looks like they're condemning Goofus for not intervening in a flame war between two other people — "Be Kind!") Still, for me the biggest surprise is that Goofus and Gallant even have laptops. (How old are these kids, that they're already uploading photos of the other children onto the internet?!) Will 6- to 12-year-old children start demanding that their parents buy them their own laptop now — since even Goofus and Gallant already have them?

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Astronomers Demand Radio Silence at the Moon's Far Side, But Resistance May Be Futile

Sun, 2024-03-24 14:34
Gizmodo reports that increased activity on the Moon "may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past." This week, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) held the first Moon Farside Protection Symposium in Italy to advocate for preserving radio silence on the far side of the Moon. The symposium hopes to raise awareness about the threat facing the far side of the Moon and develop approaches to shielding it from artificial radio emissions.... NASA has shown interest in using the lunar radio silence, proposing an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is designed to observe the universe at frequencies below 30 megahertz, which are largely unexplored by humans since those signals are reflected by the Earth's ionosphere, according to NASA. At those low frequencies, radio telescopes on the Moon can detect near-Earth objects approaching our planet before other observatories, it can search for signals of alien civilizations, and study organic molecules in interstellar space... As more missions head towards the Moon, however, that perfect silence is increasingly being compromised. Earlier this week, for example, China launched a satellite to relay communication between ground operations on Earth and an upcoming mission on the far side of the Moon. The satellite, Queqiao-2, is the first of a constellation of satellites that China hopes to deploy by 2040 to communicate with future crewed missions on the Moon and Mars. As part of its Artemis program, NASA is aiming to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station designed to orbit the Moon to support future missions to the lunar surface and Mars. In advance of this, a NASA-funded cubesat, called CAPSTONE, has entered into a unique halo orbit to demonstrate the stability and practicality of this trajectory for future lunar missions... CAPSTONE marks the beginning of something big — establishing a permanent communication link between Earth and lunar assets, and ensuring the steady, uninterrupted flow of data. NASA and its Chinese counterparts have eerily similar plans for lunar exploration, and the Moon is currently a 'free-for-all' with no regulations set in place as to who can own our dusty orbital companion. "In other words, things are about to get real loud out there as far as radio transmissions are concerned."

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Chinese Spies Sell Access into Top US, UK Networks

Sun, 2024-03-24 13:34
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register: Chinese spies exploited a couple of critical-severity bugs in F5 and ConnectWise equipment earlier this year to sell access to compromised U.S. defense organizations, UK government agencies, and hundreds of other entities, according to Mandiant. The Google-owned threat hunters said they assess, "with moderate confidence," that a crew they track as UNC5174 was behind the exploitation of CVE-2023-46747, a 9.8-out-of-10-CVSS-rated remote code execution bug in the F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface, and CVE-2024-1709, a path traversal flaw in ConnectWise ScreenConnect that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 CVSS severity rating. UNC5174 uses the online persona Uteus, and has bragged about its links to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) — boasts that may well be true. The gang focuses on gaining initial access into victim organizations and then reselling access to valuable targets... Just last month, Mandiant noticed the same combination of tools, believed to be unique to this particular Chinese gang, being used to exploit the ConnectWise flaw and compromise "hundreds" or entities, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Also between October 2023 and February 2024, UNC5174 exploited CVE-2023-22518 in Atlassian Confluence, CVE-2022-0185 in Linux kernels, and CVE-2022-3052, a Zyxel Firewall OS command injection vulnerability, according to Mandiant. These campaigns included "extensive reconnaissance, web application fuzzing, and aggressive scanning for vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems belonging to prominent universities in the U.S., Oceania, and Hong Kong regions," the threat intel team noted. More details from The Record. "One of the strangest things the researchers found was that UNC5174 would create backdoors into compromised systems and then patch the vulnerability they used to break in. Mandiant said it believes this was an 'attempt to limit subsequent exploitation of the system by additional unrelated threat actors attempting to access the appliance.'"

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