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Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts Published on February 01, 2022 at 05:32AM A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter's Algorithm Favors the Political Right, Study Finds Published on February 01, 2022 at 04:50AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter's algorithm amplifies their opponents' voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS. The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their exp...

8 In 10 App Developers Back Measure To Rein In Google and Apple, Poll Finds Published on February 01, 2022 at 04:10AM Eighty-four percent of app developers support an antitrust bill aimed at curtailing the market power of Apple's and Google's app stores, according to a poll (PDF) from the Coalition for App Fairness released Monday. The Hill reports: The industry group for app developers is pushing Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that would block app stores from favoring their own in-house apps in searches, requiring developers to use their payment systems and preventing users from downloading apps from third-party stores. Developers surveyed by the group complained about exorbitant fees charged by the largest app stores -- Apple charges a 30 percent commission on app store sales for large developers -- and expressed how they'd experienced difficulty getting their apps featured or accepted by app stores. Just 13 percent of app developers...

The New York Times Purchases Wordle Published on February 01, 2022 at 03:32AM The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures." The newspaper says it'll remain "free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay." From the report: Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created the game as a gift for his partner. It was released to the public in October, and it exploded in popularity in a matter of months. Ninety people played the game on Nov. 1, Mr. Wardle said. Nearly two months later, 300,000 people played it. To play the game, people are required to guess a predetermined five-letter word in six tries. The yellow and green squares indicate that the Wordle player has guessed a correct letter, or a combined correct letter and placement. The buzz around the game can be attributed to the spoiler-free scoring grid that allows players to share...

BlackBerry Sells Mobile and Messaging Patents For $600 Million Published on February 01, 2022 at 02:53AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the downfall of its smartphone business. Today the company announced a sale of its prized patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is "Catapult IP Innovations Inc.," a new company BlackBerry describes as "a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the BlackBerry patent assets." BlackBerry says the patents are for "mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking." These are going to be the patents surrounding BlackBerry's phones, QWERTY keyboards, and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). BlackBerry most recently weaponized these patents against Facebook Messenger in 2018, which covered ideas like muting a message thread and displaying notifications as a numeric icon badge. BlackBerry -- back when it was called RIM -- was a veteran of the original smartp...

Sony Buys 'Destiny' Game Developer Bungie for $3.6 Billion Published on February 01, 2022 at 12:39AM Sony Group is purchasing Bungie, the U.S. video game developer behind the popular Destiny franchise, for $3.6 billion to bolster its stable of game-making studios. From a report: The deal announced on Monday is the third significant video-game acquisition announced this month, following Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion two weeks ago and Take Two Interactive snagging mobile game leader Zynga on Jan. 10. Buying Bungie will give Sony one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with the massive Call of Duty series, which Sony's main rival now owns through Activision. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Secrets of 'Space Invaders' -- and One Very Tiny Homegrown Cabinet Published on January 31, 2022 at 04:56AM IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders. It's about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens... The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. "The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked," he explained. "The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped ...

Not Just the IRS - 20 US Agencies Are Already Set Up For Selfie IDs Published on January 31, 2022 at 03:56AM America's Internal Revenue Service created an uproar with early plans to require live-video-feed selfies to verify identities for online tax services (via an outside company called ID.me). But Wired points out that more than 20 U.S. federal agencies are already using a digital identification system (named Login.gov and built on services from LexisNexis) that "can use selfies for account verification." It's run by America's General Services Administration, or GSA.... The GSA's director of technology transformation services Dave Zvenyach says facial recognition is being tested for fairness and accessibility and not yet used when people access government services through Login.gov. The GSA's administrator said last year that 30 million citizens have Login.gov accounts and that it expects the number to grow significantly as more agencies adopt the sys...

Can AI Help Us Reimagine Chess? Published on January 31, 2022 at 02:34AM Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to "explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level," according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also "allow us to reimagine the game as we know it...." "For example, the 'castling' move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?" AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different "variants" of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variati...

Why Is a Harvard Astrophysicist Working With UFO Buffs? Published on January 31, 2022 at 01:34AM Science magazine checks in on the new "Galileo Project" from controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. It's searching for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, whether it's spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories or by their network of rooftop cameras "designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth's atmosphere." "After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project — as well as some notorious nonscientists — Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. 'Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,' Loeb says." Some researchers applaud Loeb's endeavor. "He has mounted a scientific attack on a problem that is frustratingly fuzzy," says Gregory Laughlin, an astrophysicist at Yale University. "A project like this would have been unthinkable 10 ye...

Intel Fails To Get Spectre, Meltdown Chip Flaw Class-action Suit Tossed Out Published on January 31, 2022 at 12:34AM "Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register: On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders.... To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that ...

'The Dark Side of Cobalt, the Digital Age's Miracle Metal' Published on January 31, 2022 at 12:04AM The Toronto Star just published a searing excerpt from the book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower — written by a member of Canada's Parliament: It argues in part that "The social conflict that existed in the early days of Cobalt has been magnified a thousandfold in jurisdictions where the rule of law is compromised, and incursions into Indigenous territories heighten conflict." The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal's capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones and laptops. More crucially, in the face of catastrophic climate change, cobalt offers the hope of a clean-energy future. But cobalt has a much darker side. The relentless drive to feed the cobalt needs of Silicon Valley has led to appalling...

America Races to Salvage Its Sunken F-35 Warplane - Before China Does Published on January 30, 2022 at 08:04AM "A race against time is under way for the U.S. Navy to reach one of its downed fighter jets — before the Chinese get there first," reports the BBC: The $100m (£74m) F-35C plane came down in the South China Sea after what the Navy describes as a "mishap" during take-off from the USS Carl Vinson. The jet is the Navy's newest, and crammed with classified equipment. As it is in international waters, it is technically fair game. Whoever gets there first, wins. The prize? All the secrets behind this very expensive, leading-edge fighting force.... A U.S. salvage vessel looks to be at least 10 days away from the crash site. That's too late, says defence consultant Abi Austen, because the black box battery will die before then, making it harder to locate the aircraft. "It's vitally important the U.S. gets this back," she says. "The F-35 ...

Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your Web pages With Microsoft Edge? Published on January 30, 2022 at 05:04AM `Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: If you're doing any web page programming for money, then I'm pretty sure you're paid to support Edge, too. Probably even required to test it. So this question is really directed to the relative amateur programmers among us. As I think about the topic from my overly philosophic perspective, I even considered asking "Do you feel pressured or even blackmailed to support MS Edge?" The original submission tells the story of a homegrown app involving "moderately complicated data structures embedded in JavaScript files that are loaded on the fly..." that might grow into an 800K re-write. "Since it's mostly for my own use, I don't care at all about Edge, but it got me to thinking and led to this question." So do others uses Edge to test their web pages? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K has already a...

US Space Force Wants to Fund 'Space Junk'-Cleaning Startups Published on January 30, 2022 at 04:04AM America's Department of Defense "wants to clean up space...at least the increasingly polluted region in low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably," writes the Washington Post. They're reporting that America's Space Force has now launched a program to give companies seed money to develop space-cleaning technology to eventually demo in space (starting with awards of $250,000 that rise as high as $1.5 million). The name of the program: Orbital Prime. The issue also has gotten the attention of the White House. Its Office of Science and Technology Policy recently held a meeting asking for input from space industry leaders about what to do about the problem. Speaker after speaker said that governments around the world need to fund these efforts to help create a market for companies to operate...

The Pope Denounces Misinformation 'Infodemic' About Vaccines Published on January 30, 2022 at 03:04AM The Washington Post reports: Pope Francis denounced on Friday the "distortion of reality based on fear" that has ripped across the world during the coronavirus pandemic, but he also called for compassion, urging journalists to help those misled by coronavirus-related misinformation and fake news to better understand the scientific facts. "We can hardly fail to see that these days, in addition to the pandemic, an 'infodemic' is spreading: A distortion of reality based on fear, which in our global society leads to an explosion of commentary on falsified if not invented news," the leader of the world's Catholics said. Meeting with members of the International Catholic Media Consortium on COVID-19 Vaccines — a fact-checking network that aims to combat misinformation — the pope said that being fully informed by scientific data was a human right. ...

After 56 years, SEGA Officially Sells Off All Its Arcades Published on January 30, 2022 at 02:04AM There may still be cabinets in rows with flashing lights and electronic sounds — but Polygon reports a historic change in the world of videogame arcades: Even though arcades all over the world have been in a steady decline over the past 20 years, owing to the ubiquity of console and PC gaming, they've kept a fairly major place in Japan's gaming culture. However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, even Japan's arcades started to falter. In late 2020 Sega sold 85% of its shares in the company's arcades, which are run by the Sega Entertainment division, to Genda. Now, as new variants of COVID-19 crop up and the arcade business continues to struggle, Sega has sold the remaining shares to Genda as well, according to Eurogamer and Tojodojo. Sega's arcades will be renamed GiGO throughout Japan, according to a tweet from Genda chief executive Takashi Kataoka. "It's...

Domestic Extremists Have Plotted to Disrupt US Power Grid, DHS Bulletin Warns Published on January 30, 2022 at 01:04AM CBS News reports that foreign cyberattackers aren't the only potential threat to America's electrical power grid: Domestic violent extremists have been planning to try to disrupt the U.S. power grid and will probably keep doing so, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin shared with law enforcement agencies and utility operators Monday and obtained by CBS News. "Domestic violent extremists have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors," the bulletin reads. It warns that extremists "adhering to a range of ideologies will likely continue to plot and encourage physical attacks against electrical infrastructure." Still, the bulletin notes t...

As Chile Drafts New Constitution, 'Citizen Proposals' Urge Free Software and User Freedom Published on January 30, 2022 at 12:04AM The nation of Chile "is in the midst of governmental changes," writes the Free Software Foundation, "and with these changes comes the opportunity for the people of Chile to make their voices heard for long-term benefits to their digital rights and freedoms. "Chilean activists have submitted three constitutional proposals relating to free software and user freedom, but they need signatures in order to have these proposals submitted to the constitutional debate." FSF community member Felix Freeman writes: Chile is living a historic moment. For the first time, it is drafting a constitution with constituents elected democratically, on a participatory basis, and with the participation of native peoples. 154 people are in charge of drafting the new fundamental charter of the country, and they have arranged a mechanism of popular...

More Than 80% of NFTs Created For Free On OpenSea Are Fraud Or Spam, Company Says Published on January 29, 2022 at 08:33AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it's a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it would limit how many times a user could create (or "mint") an NFT for free on the platform using its tools to 50. So-called "lazy minting" on the site lets users skip paying a blockchain gas fee when they create an NFT on OpenSea (with the buyer eventually paying the fee at the time of sale), so it's a popular option especially for people who don't have deep pockets to jumpstart their digital art empire. This decision set off a firestorm, wit...

Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Argues Nuclear Power Isn't a Climate Solution Published on January 29, 2022 at 10:35AM "Former heads of nuclear regulatory bodies across Europe and the US put out a statement this week voicing their opposition to nuclear energy as a climate solution," reports The Verge's Justine Calma. The publication spoke with Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to learn more about why some nuclear experts oppose the energy source as a climate fix. Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc shares an excerpt of the interview: Former NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko in an interview with the Verge notes: "I think there's been a lot of misinformation about the role that nuclear power can play in any climate strategy. A lot of attention has been put on nuclear as somehow the technology that's going to solve a lot of problems when it comes to dealing with climate change. I just think that's not true. And it's ta...

More Than 80% of NFTs Created For Free On OpenSea Are Fraud Or Spam, Company Say Published on January 29, 2022 at 08:33AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it's a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it would limit how many times a user could create (or "mint") an NFT for free on the platform using its tools to 50. So-called "lazy minting" on the site lets users skip paying a blockchain gas fee when they create an NFT on OpenSea (with the buyer eventually paying the fee at the time of sale), so it's a popular option especially for people who don't have deep pockets to jumpstart their digital art empire. This decision set off a firestorm, with...

Samsung Spilled Up To 763K Gallons of Sulfuric Acid Waste Into Austin Tributary Published on January 29, 2022 at 06:31AM New submitter blackprint writes: The City of Austin released a memo saying that Samsung released as much as 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek over a period as long as 106 days. They confirmed the leak has stopped, but no fish or macro invertebrates survived in the impacted area. They don't know if there are any long-term impacts, but pH levels in the area have returned close to normal. According to the memo, "Public access to this area is limited, and there are no nearby parks." They have not stated the cause of the spill. "Spill investigators and scientists took a look at the area Jan. 18-19 and saw iron staining in the tributary channel consistent with a low pH environment," reports local news station KXAN, citing the memo. "WPD says it was in this tributary stretch from the Samsung plant to the main...

DeFi Platform Qubit Finance Begs Hacker To Return $80 Million In Stolen Funds Published on January 29, 2022 at 04:53AM Qubit Finance took to Twitter last night to beg hackers to return more than $80 million in stolen cryptocurrency this week. ZDNet reports: On Thursday, the DeFi platform said their protocol was exploited by a hacker who eventually stole 206,809 binance coins from Qubit's QBridge protocol, worth more than $80 million according to PeckShield. An hour after the first message, the company explained that they were tracking the exploiter and monitoring the stolen cryptocurrency. They noted that they contacted the hacker and offered them the maximum bug bounty in exchange for a return of the funds, something a number of other hacked DeFi platforms have tried to middling success. They shared multiple messages on Twitter that they purportedly sent to the hacker offering a bug bounty of $250,000 and begging for a return of the stolen funds. "We propose you negotiate d...

Microsoft Fends Off Record-Breaking 3.47Tbps DDoS Attack Published on January 29, 2022 at 02:51AM Microsoft's Azure DDoS Protection team said that in November, it fended off what industry experts say is likely the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever: a torrent of junk data with a throughput of 3.47 terabits per second. Ars Technica reports: The record DDoS came from more than 10,000 sources located in at least 10 countries around the world. The DDoS targeted an unidentified Azure customer in Asia and lasted for about two minutes. The following month, Microsoft said, Azure warded off two other monster DDoSes. Weighing in at 3.25Tbps, the first one came in four bursts and lasted about 15 minutes. The second December DDoS reached a peak of 2.54Tbps and lasted about five minutes. The record beats a 2.5Tbps attack that Microsoft mitigated in the first half of 2021. Previously, one of the biggest attacks was 2.37Tbps in size, a 35 percent increase over a record set in 201...