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AI-Generated Artwork Wins First Place At a State Fair Fine Arts Competition Published on September 01, 2022 at 05:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. "I won first place," a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate's name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair's website (PDF), he won in the digital art category with a work called "Theatre D'opera Spatial." The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape. But...

California Asks Residents Not To Charge Electric Vehicles Published on September 01, 2022 at 04:10AM New submitter xwin shares a report from WTVO: With California's power grid under strain due to extreme heat and high demand, the utility grid operator is asking residents to avoid charging their electric vehicles. This comes days after the state announced a plan to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. The California Independent System Operator is asking residents for "voluntary energy conservation" over the Labor Day weekend. According to the National Weather Service, the western United States is facing a "prolonged and record heat wave." "The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights,â the American Public Power Association said, asking residents to limit energy usage during 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. "Today, most people charge...

US Asked British Spy Agency To Stop Guardian Publishing Snowden Revelations Published on September 01, 2022 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The US National Security Agency (NSA) tried to persuade its British counterpart to stop the Guardian publishing revelations about secret mass data collection from the NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, according to a new book. Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was reportedly called with the request in the early hours of June 6, 2013 but rebuffed the suggestion that his agency should act as a censor on behalf of its US partner in electronic spying. The late-night call and the British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks was the first of several episodes in which the Snowden affair caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition, recounted in a new book to be published on Thursday, The Secret History of Five Eyes, by film-maker and investigative journ...

Arm Sues Qualcomm and Nuvia For Breach of License and Trademark Published on September 01, 2022 at 02:52AM Chip technology firm Arm, which is owned by Softbank Group, said on Wednesday it has sued Qualcomm and Qualcomm's recently acquired chip design firm Nuvia for breach of license agreements and trademark infringement. From a report: Arm is seeking an injunction that would require Qualcomm to destroy the designs developed under Nuvia's license agreements with Arm, which Arm said could not be transferred to Qualcomm without Arm approval. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion last year. The lawsuit represents a major break between Qualcomm and Arm, one of its most important technology partners that Qualcomm relied on for years after Qualcomm stopped work on designing its own custom computing cores. But the two companies have been at odds for years, with some inside Qualcomm complaining privately that Arm's slackening pace of innovation is causing Qualcomm's chips t...

One of World's Most Polluted Spots Gets Worse as $1 Billion Cleanup Drags On Published on September 01, 2022 at 02:14AM Mismanagement, waste and lack of transparency are making the cleanup in the Niger Delta's Ogoniland anything but exemplary, UN reports indicate. From a report: In the more than a quarter century since Shell Plc left Ogoniland in southern Nigeria, oil has continued to ooze from dormant wellheads and active pipelines, leaving the 386-square mile kingdom's wetlands shimmering with a greasy rainbow sheen, its once-lush mangroves coated in crude, well-water smelling of benzene and farmlands charred and barren. So when the $1 billion Ogoniland cleanup began in 2019, backed by Shell's funding pledge and support from the United Nations, it was heralded as the most ambitious initiative of its kind anywhere in the world. But now, UN Environmental Programme documents seen by Bloomberg and reported for the first time indicate that the project -- far from being e...

Who Pays for an Act of Cyberwar? Published on September 01, 2022 at 01:35AM Cyberinsurance doesn't cover acts of war. But even as cyberattacks mount, the definition of "warlike" actions remains blurry. From a report: This summer marks the fifth anniversary of the most expensive cyberattack ever: the NotPetya malware, released by Russia in June 2017, that shut down computer systems at companies and government agencies around the world, causing upward of $10 billion in damage due to lost business, repairs, and other operational disruptions. Half a decade later, the businesses affected by NotPetya are still sorting out who will pay those considerable costs in a series of legal disputes that will have serious ramifications for the rapidly growing cyberinsurance industry, as well as for the even more rapidly growing number of state-sponsored cyberattacks that blur the line between cyberwar and standard-issue government cyberactivity. Whether or not insurers cover the costs o...

Scientists Call on Colleagues To Protest Climate Crisis With Civil Disobedience Published on September 01, 2022 at 01:06AM Scientists should commit acts of civil disobedience to show the public how seriously they regard the threat posed by the climate crisis, a group of leading scientists has argued. From a report: "Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis," the researchers wrote in an article, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday. "When those with expertise and knowledge are willing to convey their concerns in a more uncompromising manner ... this affords them particular effectiveness as a communicative act. This is the insight of Greta Thunberg when she calls on us to âact as you would in a crisis.'" In recent months, scientists have shown themselves increasingly willing to take part in direct actions to bring attention to the climate ...

Microsoft EU Cloud Revisions Just So Happen To Exclude Google, Amazon Published on September 01, 2022 at 12:17AM Facing European antitrust scrutiny, Microsoft has made it easier to virtualize its software on non-Microsoft cloud infrastructure -- just so long as that infrastructure isn't owned by notable competitors Amazon, Google, or Alibaba. From a report: The conflict, months in the making, is striking for a company that has largely avoided the antitrust scrutiny of its rivals, and eagerly sought to distance itself from the anti-competitive complaints and government actions that beset Microsoft in the late 1990s. Microsoft outlined the changes that would take effect on October 1 in a blog post. Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer, wrote that Microsoft "believes in the value of the partner ecosystem" and changed outsourcing and hosting terms that "will benefit partners and customers globally." New licensing terms would make it easier for Microsoft's enter...

Solana-Based DeFi Protocol OptiFi Loses $661K In Programming Blunder Published on August 31, 2022 at 04:50AM Derivatives-focused decentralized finance (DeFi) platform OptiFi accidentally closed its mainnet platform in a programming blunder, locking away $661,000 in USDC. CoinDesk reports: The Solana blockchain-powered protocol made the error when it tried to update its program code. Instead of a standard update, OptiFi accidentally used the "solana program close" command, resulting in the permanent closure of the platform on the mainnet, according to a blog post. The funds are irretrievable, although OptiFi said that it will return all users' deposits and settle positions manually on Friday. The estimated process time will be two weeks. [...] In a tweet, OptiFi said that 95% of total value locked is from one of its team members, meaning that customer asset may equate to only $33,000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SmartDry's Useful Laundry Sensor To Be Cloud-Bricked Next Month Published on August 31, 2022 at 04:10AM SmartDry, a small sensor that could be mounted inside a dryer to tell you when your clothes were dry, is losing access to the servers necessary for it to continue working. "In other words, SmartDry will become a tiny brick inside your dryer unless you're willing to procure a little ESP32 development board, load some code onto it, plug it in near your dryer, and set up your own alerts in your Home Assistant server," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home's Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life's servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, "cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer ...

Last Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Who Ended the Cold War, Dies Aged 91 Published on August 31, 2022 at 03:32AM Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Reuters reports: "Mikhail Gorbachev passed away tonight after a serious and protracted disease," Interfax news agency cited Russia's Central Clinical Hospital as saying in a statement. Gorbachev will be buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999, said Tass news agency, citing the foundation that the former Soviet leader set up once he left office. Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and bring about the reunification of Germany. [...] When pro-democracy protests swept across the Soviet bloc nations of communist ...

Marijuana Use Is Outpacing Cigarette Use For the First Time Published on August 31, 2022 at 02:53AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: More people in the U.S. are now smoking marijuana than cigarettes, according to a Gallup poll. Cigarette use has been trending downward during the past decades, with only 11% of Americans saying they smoke them in a poll conducted July 5 to 26, compared to 45% in the mid-1950s. Sixteen percent of Americans say they smoke marijuana, with 48% saying they have tried it at some point in their lives. In 1969, only 4% of Americans said they smoked marijuana. Attitudes around both substances have also shifted dramatically. In 2019, 83% of Americans said they thought cigarettes were "very harmful" to smokers, while 14% said they are "somewhat harmful." Nine out of 10 adults said in 2013 that smoking causes cancer, while 91% of smokers surveyed in 2015 said they wish they never started. Meanwhile, 53% of people said in a July pol...

Snap Plans To Lay Off 20 Percent of Employees Published on August 31, 2022 at 02:12AM Snap is planning to lay off approximately 20 percent of its more than 6,400 employees, The Verge reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The layoffs, which Snap has been planning for the past several weeks, will begin on Wednesday and hit some departments harder than others, the people said. For example, the team working on ways for developers to build mini apps and games inside Snapchat will be severely impacted. Zenly, the social mapping app Snap bought in 2017 and has since run separately, will also see deep cuts. Another team that will see layoffs is Snap's hardware division, which is responsible for Spectacles and the Pixy camera drone that was recently canceled after being on sale for just a few months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel, Which Coined The Term 'Patent Troll', Makes Deal With Patent Troll To 'Monetize' Unused Patents Published on August 31, 2022 at 01:35AM Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Intel recently announced that it was handing 5,000 patents off to IPValue, which (as it does in these kinds of deals) spun up a shell corporation called Tahoe Research Limited to go see who it can shake down over these patents. Usually, the way these deals work is that the company, Intel, gets some relatively modest amount of cash upfront, but also a piece of anything the troll can squeeze out of others. Considering these are basically zero value patents for Intel, the temptation must be great to at least get something out of them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook is Shutting Down Its Standalone Gaming App in October Published on August 31, 2022 at 01:00AM Just over two years after its launch, Facebook is shutting down the Facebook Gaming app on October 28, 2022. Now, when you open the app, you'll see a banner stating that the app will no longer be available on iOS and Android after that date. The app also won't be available on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. From a report: "Despite this news, our mission to connect players, fans and creators with the games they love hasn't changed, and you'll still be able to find your games, streamers and groups when you visit Gaming in the Facebook app," the notice reads. "We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of you for everything that you've done to build a thriving community for gamers and fans since this app first launched." If you've been using the app, you can download your search data before the app is discontinued. The app la...

Google's Open-Source Bug Bounty Aims To Clamp Down on Supply Chain Attacks Published on August 31, 2022 at 12:22AM Google has introduced a new vulnerability rewards program to pay researchers who find security flaws in its open-source software or in the building blocks that its software is built on. It'll pay anywhere from $101 to $31,337 for information about bugs in projects like Angular, GoLang, and Fuchsia or for vulnerabilities in the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects' codebases. From a report: While it's important for Google to fix bugs in its own projects (and in the software that it uses to keep track of changes to its code, which the program also covers), perhaps the most interesting part is the bit about third-party dependencies. Programmers often use code from open-source projects so they don't continuously have to reinvent the same wheel. But since developers often directly import that code, as well as any updates to it, that...

Elon Musk Says World Needs More Oil and Gas As Bridge To Renewables Published on August 30, 2022 at 04:50AM "In a speech today that is likely making some EV proponents' heads spin and implode, Musk made the argument that we need more oil and gas as we transition to alternative energy solutions," writes Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck. "He said this at the ONS Energy Conference being held in Norway this week." Bloomberg reports: The world needs more oil and gas now to deal with an energy shortage while pushing to transition to renewable supplies, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said. "At this time, we actually need more oil and gas, not less," Musk said Monday during an energy conference in Norway, adding that he's not someone to "demonize" the fossil fuels. At the same time, "we must have a clear path to a sustainable energy future." Musk said the transition to a sustainable economy should be "as fast as possible,...

Bluetooth Xbox Controllers Are Now Compatible With GameCube Published on August 30, 2022 at 04:10AM "2022 is a wild, wonderful world where if you've dreamt it, you can have it," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81. "Such is the case with this new mod that allows you to pair Xbox controllers (among others) with your GameCube." Neowin reports: Laser Bear Industries, who offers other key mods for the Nintendo GameCube, is currently taking pre-orders for the GameCube Blue Retro Internal Adapter, a controller input board replacement that brings Bluetooth capability to the Nintendo GameCube. These new Bluetooth capabilities offer a wide range of compatibility with different Bluetooth input devices. Currently, the firmware is compatible with all Bluetooth Xbox One controllers. Unsurprisingly, it does not support the early Wi-Fi direct Xbox One controllers from 2013 and 2014. In addition to Xbox controllers, it supports a host of other contemporary input devices, includi...

Germany Orders Shutdown of Digital Ad Displays To Save Gas Published on August 30, 2022 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Germany has ordered overnight shutdowns for non-essential digital signage, to save its reserves of natural gas for more important purposes. Like many European nations, Germany relies on natural gas imported from Russia. And thanks to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, that gas is currently in short supply. The European Union has therefore implemented an energy saving plan. One of Germany's tactics is requiring digital signage in shop windows and other non-essential locations to be turned off between 10:00PM and 6:00AM. Germany will also stop external lighting of some public buildings and implement many other power-saving measures. The plan [PDF] requiring the switch-off was published on August 12, with a deadline of September 1. But as German outlet Invidis reports, the regulation was unhelpfully vague. For starters an up...

Microsoft Finalizes Plans To Fix Unfair Licensing in EU Published on August 30, 2022 at 02:52AM Responding to a three-year-old complaint, Microsoft today said that it would fix its unfair licensing terms in the EU. From a report: "We recognize the importance of a competitive environment in the European cloud provider market, in which smaller competitors can thrive," a new post to the Microsoft Corporate Blogs notes. "It is therefore critical for us to remain mindful of our responsibilities as a major technology company." In 2019, several Microsoft customers in the EU complained that the software giant was making it prohibitively expensive to run Windows and Office workloads on non-Azure cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, triggering inquiries from EU antitrust regulators. Microsoft immediately responded that the complaints were "valid," but it did nothing to address them in any material way. In May 2022, Microsoft finally came up with a response, ...

YouTube Now Controls Its Hardware Roadmap Published on August 30, 2022 at 02:15AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Partha Ranganathan came to realize about seven years ago that Moore's law was dead. No longer could the Google engineering VP expect chip performance to double roughly every 18 months without major cost increases, and that was a problem considering he helped Google construct its infrastructure spending budget each year. Faced with the prospect of getting a chip twice as fast every four years, Ranganathan knew they needed to mix things up. Ranganathan and other Google engineers looked at the overall picture and realized transcoding (for YouTube) was consuming a large fraction of compute cycles in its data centers. The off-the-shelf chips Google was using to run YouTube weren't all that good at specialized tasks like transcoding. YouTube's infrastructure uses transcoding to compress video down to the smallest possible size for your device, while presenting ...

Closure of Coal Power Station Set To Be Delayed To Prevent UK Blackouts Published on August 30, 2022 at 01:35AM The effort to prevent electricity blackouts this winter is expected to delay the closure of part of a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, with the plant's German owner nearing agreement with the UK authorities. From a report: In the third in a series of deals to have more coal power on standby if needed, National Grid's electricity system operator (NGESO) is working towards finalising an agreement with Uniper to keep all of the operations at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar site open through the winter. In May, the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, wrote to NGESO asking executives to work with Uniper and fellow owners of coal-power stations Drax and EDF to slow their closure plans after Russia's invasion of Ukraine shook the energy markets. Uniper had been due to decommission one of its 500-megawatt units at the Nottinghamshire plant at the end of September, two...

Microsoft Launches Arm-based Azure VMs Powered by Ampere Chips Published on August 30, 2022 at 12:55AM Following a preview in April, Microsoft this morning announced the general availability of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure featuring the Ampere Altra, a processor based on the Arm architecture. From a report: The first Azure VMs powered by Arm chips, Microsoft says that they're accessible in 10 Azure regions today and can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service beginning on September 1. The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as "engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads," including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubu...

Sony's New PlayStation Studios Mobile Team is Making Spinoff Games For Your Phone Published on August 30, 2022 at 12:14AM As part of Sony's push into mobile gaming, the company has formed a PlayStation Studios Mobile Division that will operate separately from console game development. According to a press release, the new team will create mobile games with "new and existing PlayStation IP." From a report: Sony's move to form a mobile gaming division aligns with the company's overall goal of extending its IP to PC and mobile games, as well as TV series and movies. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it wants half of its games to be on PC and mobile by 2025, with Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan stating that it could result in a "significant growth in the number of people who play our games." The company's also looking to expand into live service games -- games like Fortnite, Rocket League, or Destiny 2 that are continually up...

Soon Electric Vehicles Could Charge Faster Than Your iPhone Published on August 29, 2022 at 07:04AM The Washington Post shares a little-acknowledged downside to electric cars: recharging takes "upward of 15 to 30 minutes." But scientists are already working on improvements: In a report released this week, government researchers said they have found a way to charge electric car batteries up to 90 percent in just 10 minutes. The method is likely five years away from making its way into the market, scientists said, but would mark a fundamental shift. "The goal is to get very, very close to [times] you would see at the gas pump," said Eric Dufek, a lead author of the study and scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research center run by the Department of Energy.... At issue is the delicate balance of trying to charge an electric vehicle battery quicker, but not doing it so fast that a rapid charge does long-term damage to the battery or plays a role in causing...