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CES's Justification for Keeping the Show IRL is Absolutely Unhinged Published on January 01, 2022 at 07:30AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Somehow CES 2022 is still happening in a little over a week, despite the single-largest surge in COVID-19 cases ever recorded in the United States. The electronics show will be far less enormous than usual, but not necessarily because organizers at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) wanted it to be that way. CTA president Gary Shapiro went as far as to post an extensive rant on LinkedIn (and in the Las Vegas Review-Journal) about why, exactly, CES is still happening. He says CES "will and must go on." Let's take a moment or two to read through Shapiro's op-ed. We promise it's worth the time. Here are some of our favorite ways in which the CTA president explains his reasoning: 1. If we do not cancel, we face the drumbeat of press and other critics who tell the story only through their lens of drama and big na...

Amazing / Strange Things Scientists Calculated in 2021 Published on January 01, 2022 at 04:31AM fahrbot-bot writes: The world is full of beautiful equations, numbers and calculations. From counting beads as toddlers to managing finances as adults, we use math every day. But scientists often go beyond these quotidian forms of counting, to measure, weigh and tally far stranger things in the universe. From the number of bubbles in a typical glass of beer to the weight of all the coronavirus particles circulating in the world, LiveScience notes the 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021. Number of bubbles in a half-pint glass of beer: up to 2 million bubbles, about twice as many as Champagne. Weight of all SARS-CoV-2 particles: between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).Counted African elephants from space for the first time -- Earth elephants (using satellites and AI) not Space Elephants.Acceleration of a finger snap: maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 deg/s and a maxi...

A Program for Cheaper Internet for Low-Income Americans Launches Today Published on January 01, 2022 at 03:30AM Starting today, eligible US residents can apply for help with their internet bills under the new Affordable Connectivity Program. The program launched today with $14.2 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in November. From a report: Households can apply to take up to $30 a month off their internet service bill. For households on qualifying Tribal lands, the discount is up to $75 per month. The program could help to connect millions of people to the internet who haven't had access to it at home, especially in communities that have historically faced more barriers to getting online. Almost a third of people living on Tribal lands lacked high-speed internet at home in 2017, according to a report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That's compared to just 1.5 percent of city-dwellers without high-speed internet access. On top of limited infr...

Ask Slashdot: New Year's Resolution For Tech Companies? Published on January 01, 2022 at 02:30AM theodp writes: Slashdot has surveyed personal New Year's resolutions in the past. So this year, how about coming up with a list of New Year's resolutions you'd like to see tech companies keep in 2022? As for me, I'd like to see the tech giants resolve to making their desktop software work in the Cloud (and not just for Business), include a programming language with their desktop and mobile OS, provide the capability to share 'meaningful' file names, and allow developers to cap their Cloud charges. Is that too much to ask for in 2022? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Books You Liked Reading This Year? Published on January 01, 2022 at 01:30AM What are some books that you read this year that you enjoyed reading? Doesn't have to be those that released this year -- though if possible, mention any recently published books. Further reading: Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel Demos Lightning Fast 13.8 GBps PCIe 5.0 SSD with Alder Lake Published on January 01, 2022 at 12:51AM Intel has demonstrated how its Core i9-12900K Alder Lake processor can work with Samsung's recently announced PM1743 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD. The result is as astonishing as it is predictable: the platform demonstrated approximately 13.8 GBps throughput in the IOMeter benchmark. From a report: Intel planned to show the demo at CES, however, the company is no longer going in person. So, Ryan Shrout, Intel's chief performance strategist, decided to share the demo publicly via Twitter. The system used for the demonstration included a Core i9-12900K processor, an Asus Z690 motherboard and an EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics board. Intel hooked up Samsung's PM1743 SSD using a special PCIe 5.0 interposer card and the drive certainly did not disappoint. From a practical standpoint, 13.8 GBps may be overkill for regular desktop users, but for those who need to load huge games, work wi...

Building the World's Brightest X-Ray Laser Published on December 31, 2021 at 12:30PM Thirty feet underground and a stone's throw from Stanford University, scientists are putting the finishing touches on a laser that could fundamentally change the way they study the building blocks of the universe. CNET reports: When completed next year, the Linac Coherent Light Source II, or the LCLS-II , will be the second world-class X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. CNET was given the rare opportunity to film inside the more than 2-mile long tunnel ahead of the new laser's launch. The first LCLS, in operation since 2009, creates a beam capable of 120 light pulses per second. The LCLS-II will be capable of up to 1 million pulses per second, and a beam 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor. You can think of the LCLS as being like a microscope with atomic resolution. At its core it is a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up ch...

Sega Left One of Its European Servers Wide Open Published on December 31, 2021 at 04:20AM What could have been a damaging breach in one of Sega's servers appears to have been closed, according to a report by security firm VPN Overview. Engadget reports: The misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket contained sensitive information which allowed researchers to arbitrarily upload files to a huge swath of Sega-owned domains, as well credentials to abuse a 250,000-user email list. The domains impacted included the official landing pages for major franchises, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Bayonetta and Total War, as well as the Sega.com site itself. VPNO was able to run executable scripts on these sites which, as you can imagine, would have been quite bad if this breach had been discovered by malicious actors instead of researchers. An improperly stored Mailchimp API key gave VPNO access to the aforementioned email list. The emails themselves were available in plaintext alongside ass...

University Loses 77TB of Research Data Due To Backup Error Published on December 31, 2021 at 03:40AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. After investigating to determine the impact of the loss, the university concluded that the work of four of the affected groups could no longer be restored. All affected users have been individually notified of the incident via email, but no details were published on the type of work that was lost. At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022. The plan is to also keep i...

Two NFT Copycats Are Fighting Over Which is the Real Fake Bored Ape Yacht Club Published on December 31, 2021 at 02:59AM A pair of non-fungible token projects are testing the boundary between plagiarism and parody. From a report: Digital marketplace OpenSea has banned the PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club (or PAYC) collections, both of which are based on the same gimmick: selling NFTs with mirrored but otherwise identical versions of high-priced Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars. Now the dueling projects are selling their apes while dodging bans from other marketplaces, becoming the latest example of how the NFT world handles copied art. Bored Ape Yacht Club (or BAYC) NFTs are some of the most expensive crypto art assets -- they recently overtook CryptoPunks as the highest-priced NFT avatars with the cheapest available ape selling for $217,000. Like other avatars, though, anybody can technically copy or modify the associated ape picture. So PAYC and PHAYC simply flip the right-facing BAYC a...

Are Apple AirTags Being Used To Track People and Steal Cars? Published on December 31, 2021 at 02:18AM Privacy groups sounded alarms about the coin-sized location-tracking devices when they were introduced. Now people are concerned those fears are being realized. From a report: On a Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend's home in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: "AirTag Detected Near You." An AirTag is a 1.26-inch disc with location-tracking capabilities that Apple started selling earlier this year as a way "to keep track of your stuff." Ms. Estrada, 24, didn't own one, nor did the friends she was with. The notification on her phone said the AirTag had first been spotted with her four hours earlier. A map of the AirTag's history showed the zigzag path Ms. Estrada had driven across the city while running errands. "I felt so violated," she said. "I just felt like, who's tracking me...

SK Hynix Completes First Phase of $9 Billion Intel NAND Business Buy Published on December 31, 2021 at 01:48AM South Korea's SK Hynix said it had completed the first phase of its acquisition of Intel's NAND flash memory chip business, after it received regulatory nods from eight countries including China. From a report: In exchange, SK Hynix will pay $7 billion out of the deal's total $9 billion price tag, the world's second-largest memory chip maker said in a statement on Thursday. The deal, signed in 2020, will allow Intel to focus on its smaller but more lucrative Optane memory business. For SK Hynix, it is the biggest acquisition ever as it seeks to boost its capacity to build NAND chips, used to store data in smartphones and data centre servers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gov. Parson Says He Believes Prosecutor Will Bring Charges Against Reporter For Using 'View Source' Published on December 31, 2021 at 01:00AM Gov. Mike Parson this week expressed his opinion the Cole County prosecuting attorney would bring charges in the case of a Post-Dispatch reporter who alerted the state to a significant data vulnerability. From a report: "I donâ(TM)t think that'll be the case," Parson said when asked what he would do if the prosecutor didn't pursue the case. "That's up to the prosecutor; that's his job to do." Parson referenced a state statute on computer tampering, which says a person commits the offense if they "knowingly and without authorization or without reasonable grounds to believe that he has such authorization" modifies or destroys data, discloses or takes data, or accesses a computer network and intentionally examines personal information. "If somebody picks your lock on your house -- for what...

'Critical' Polygon Bug Put $24 Billion in Tokens at Risk Until Recent Hard Fork Published on December 31, 2021 at 12:41AM Ethereum scaling project Polygon was at risk of losing nearly all of its MATIC tokens until it upgraded its network earlier this month. From a report The problem was a "critical" vulnerability in Polygon's proof-of-stake genesis contract, which could have allowed attackers to steal over 9.2 billion MATIC tokens (currently worth over $24 billion). The total supply of MATIC tokens is 10 billion. The vulnerability was reported on the bug bounty platform Immunefi by a whitehat hacker known as Leon Spacewalker. According to details shared Wednesday, the bug essentially could have allowed attackers to arbitrarily mint all of Polygon's more than 9.2 billion MATIC tokens from its MRC20 contract. After Spacewalker found the bug, Immunefi informed the Polygon team the same day. The team then confirmed the vulnerability and moved to update the Polyg...

With Its Single 'Eye,' NASA's DART Returns First Images From Space Published on December 30, 2021 at 12:30PM Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space -- a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team. Phys.Org reports: After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. On Tuesday, Dec. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic ...

BlackBerry OS Devices Will Stop Working On January 4, 2022 Published on December 30, 2021 at 04:12AM If you're still using an older BlackBerry phone running BlackBerry OS, it's time you upgrade devices. According to BlackBerry, it's ending support for legacy services for BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry PlayBook OS on January 4, 2022. Liliputing reports: Among other things, that means that if you have a phone running BlackBerry 10 or BlackBerry 7.1 OS or earlier, then as of January 4, 2022 it will no longer reliably support: Phone calls; SMS; and 9-1-1 emergency calls. BlackBerry says WiFi and mobile data might also become unreliable, and applications including BlackBerry Link, BlackBerry Desktop Manager, BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect, BlackBerry Messenger, and BlackBerry Blend "will also have limited functionality." The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is also reaching end-of-life status, which means that anyone hanging onto the 10-year-old tablet will also find i...

Apple Ditched Intel, and It Paid Off Published on December 30, 2021 at 03:36AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any c...

Federal Court Ruling Will Make Wifi 6E a Reality Published on December 30, 2021 at 02:55AM Federal courts have opened the door for what may amount to the most substantial wifi upgrade in over twenty years. From a report: On Tuesday, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling where it supported the FCC's decision to divvy up 1,200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use, a move that paves the way for the eagerly anticipated move to wifi 6E. Prior to the ruling, wifi was limited to broadcasting over 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. That new spectrum represents the single largest addition since wifi was first introduced in 1989, the Verge notes. To put that in perspective, prior to the FCC's additions, wifi operated with just 400MHz of the spectrum. With that in mind, this new ruling should essentially increase the space available to wifi by four times. When implemented, all this additional spectrum could provide enough capacity to allow seven ...

James Webb Space Telescope's Smooth Launch Extended Its Life Expectancy, NASA Says Published on December 30, 2021 at 02:15AM The James Webb Space Telescope should be able to remain in orbit for more than 10 years, thanks to a fuel-efficient launch on Christmas Day, according to NASA. From a report: The telescope was carried aboard the Arianespace Ariane 5. Despite two brief midcourse corrections, its launch used less propellant than initially expected. That will allow the $10 billion observatory "science operations in orbit for significantly more than a 10-year science lifetime," the US space agency said in a release on Wednesday The first midcourse correction was a relatively minor, 65-minute post-launch burn, which bumped up the telescope's speed by approximately 45 miles per hour. Another smaller correction on Dec. 27 added an additional 6.3 mph. That added boost also allowed the JWST's solar array to unfold about a minute and a half after it separated from t...

Scientists Find Unexpected Trove of Life Forms Beneath Antarctic Ice Shelf Published on December 30, 2021 at 01:37AM A team of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany has discovered a whopping 77 seafloor-dwelling species beneath an Antarctica ice shelf -- a hint that this mysterious realm may be far more biologically rich than scientists realized. From a report: Little is known about the environment beneath Antarctica's floating ice shelves, the seaward extensions of the continent's glaciers that span 1.6 million square kilometers. It's a harsh, cold environment shrouded in continuous darkness, and previous studies of life beneath the ice have only documented a few dozen hardy life forms. The new research, published earlier this month in Current Biology, identified more species in a single spot than had previously been documented across all the ice shelves of the frozen continent. After drilling two holes through the Weddell Sea's Ekstrom Ice Shelf, ...

Attackers in China Using Open-source Log4j Flaw Published on December 30, 2021 at 01:09AM A group of Chinese attackers has been using the massive vulnerability in Log4j, common piece of open-source code, to target a large academic institution, Crowdstrike says. From a report: Experts say hundreds of millions of systems are vulnerable and that attacks based on the flaw are continuing. CrowdStrike said its software observed an attack that exploited the Log4j flaw in software from VMware. The attack came from a China-based group dubbed Aquatic Panda that has been conducting intelligence gathering and industrial espionage, CrowdStrike said. Some security experts, including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) head Jen Easterly, have called the flaw among the worst they have ever seen. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX Will Take Humans To Mars Within 10 Years, Elon Musk Predicts Published on December 30, 2021 at 12:27AM Elon Musk predicted this week that SpaceX will be able to fly humans to Mars within the next 10 years. From a report: Musk made the bold prediction during an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. The Tesla founder reiterated his view that humanity should become a "multi-planet species" and detailed SpaceX's plans to develop the necessary technology for the trip. "Best case is about five years. Worst case, 10 years," Musk said. He noted that "engineering the vehicle" required for the trip remains a key factor in establishing a timeframe. "Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, an order of magnitude or something like that," Musk added. "It's a lot. It's really next level." SpaceX has ramped up its operations in recent years as part of Musk's long-term goa...

Iranian Hackers Behind Cox Media Group Ransomware Attack Published on December 29, 2021 at 07:45PM The ransomware attack that crippled the IT systems and live streams of Cox radio and TV stations earlier this year was the work of Iranian hackers, The Record has learned. From the report: The attack has been attributed to a threat actor tracked under the codename of DEV-0270, a group linked to several intrusions against US companies this year that have ended in the deployment of ransomware. While the intrusion at the Cox Media Group came to light on June 3, when the attackers deployed their ransomware and encrypted some internal servers, the group had actually breached and been lurking inside the companyâ(TM)s internal network for weeks since mid-May. The attack did not impact all Cox Media Group radio and TV stations but managed to cripple the ability of some stations to broadcast live streams on their sites. The Cox Media Group initially tried to play down the attack. Local reporters...

Retailers Surrender To Unprecedented Costs On Online Returns Published on December 29, 2021 at 07:32AM Returning unwanted gifts this holiday season is becoming so expensive for retailers that they just might let customers keep the products -- and issue refunds anyway. Axios reports: The cost of online returns is soaring, contributing to increased prices, product shortages and supply chain stress. Returning a $50 item is expected to cost an average of $33, up 59% from 2020, according to Optoro, a returns processor. Worker shortages and supply chain problems are taking a toll, Optoro CEO Tobin Moore tells Axios. About three in 10 online purchases are returned, according to CBRE Supply Chain. Retailers are expected to pass on the cost of returns in the form of higher prices. "The consumer pays the price of a free return,â Columbia Business School retail studies professor Mark Cohen told Today. Some retailers, namely Amazon, sometimes tell returners to keep it. It would cost them to...

Google's Pichai Ordered To Answer Queries About 'Incognito' Mode Published on December 29, 2021 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai must face questioning in a California federal court lawsuit over privacy concerns surrounding Google's "incognito" web browsing mode. Lawyers for the consumers who sued want to ask Pichai about user misconceptions of their privacy online while using Google's Chrome browser. Pichai is subject to up to two hours of testimony under an order issued Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit, filed in June 2020, alleges that Google tracks users even when they're browsing in incognito mode. Google disputes the claims, arguing that its privacy disclosures make clear that the private browsing mode doesn't make user activities "invisible" online. In an earlier order, Judge Lucy Koh also allowed consumers to question...