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The People Turning Time Into a Currency Published on May 01, 2023 at 10:29AM The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'." Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins. "We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person....

'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety Published on May 01, 2023 at 07:33AM Phoronix reports: With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security. "[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project: It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su. This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Has More Powerful AI, Says Engineer Fired Over Sentience Claims Published on May 01, 2023 at 05:33AM Remember that Google engineer/AI ethicist who was fired last summer after claiming their LaMDA LLM had become sentient? In a new interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine now says the "best way forward" for humankind's future relationship with AI is "understanding that we are dealing with intelligent artifacts. There's a chance that — and I believe it is the case — that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when interacting with them." (Although earlier in the interview, Lemoine concedes "Is there a chance that people, myself included, are projecting properties onto these systems that they don't have? Yes. But it's not the same kind of thing as someone who's talking to their doll.") But he also thinks there's a lot of research happening inside corporatio...

Russian Forces Suffer Radiation Sickness After Digging Trenches and Fishing in Chernobyl Published on May 01, 2023 at 03:25AM The Independent reports: Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed. Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just thick", installed themselves in the forest, reportedly carved out trenches, fished in the reactor's cooling channel — flush with catfish — and shot animals, leaving them dead on the roads... In the years after the incident, teams of men were sent to dig up the contaminated topsoil and bury it below ground in the Red Forest — named after the colo...

Chess has a New World Champion: China's Ding Liren Published on May 01, 2023 at 02:04AM The Guardian reports: The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West. After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi. Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in th...

Droids for Space? Startup Plans Satellites With Robotic Arms For Repairs and Collecting Space Junk Published on May 01, 2023 at 01:04AM The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk: "Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" — satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collect orbiting rubble left behind by hundreds of previous launches — dangerous junk that's become a hazard to celestial navigation... Rogue Space aims to catch up fast, with help from Small Business Technology Transfer funds from the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime initiative. Created by the U.S. Space Force, Orbital Prime seek...

Microsoft is Now Supporting Right-to-Repair Legislation Published on April 30, 2023 at 10:04AM Microsoft's headquarters are in the state of Washington — and this year when the state legislature considered a right-to-repair bill, Microsoft showed its support. The nonprofit "climate solutions" site Grist reports that the committee considering that bill received an email from Microsoft's senior director of government affairs, saying that the bill "fairly balances the interests of manufacturers, customers, and independent repair shops and in doing so will provide more options for consumer device repair." The Fair Repair Act stalled out a week later due to opposition from all three Republicans on the committee and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. (Apple frequently lobbies against right-to-repair bills, and during a hearing, Wellman defended the iPhone maker's position that it is already doing enough on repair.) But despite the bi...

Can OpenAI Trademark 'GPT'? Published on April 30, 2023 at 07:46AM "ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months," notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase 'GPT'... Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for "GPT," which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the "myriad infringements and counterfeit apps" beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week... Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm's trademark p...

Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup Published on April 30, 2023 at 04:23AM For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles. In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software. "Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's ...

Six Months Later, Poker Player Garrett Adelstein Still Thinks He Was Cheated Published on April 30, 2023 at 03:23AM In October professional poker player Garrett Adelstein lost to a relative newcomer. Last month 15,000 viewers tuned in for his first new public interview, Poker News reports. Adelstein "reiterated his confidence that he was cheated," and said he will not fund the $135,000 the newcomer gave hiim as a peace offering. [Newcomer Robbi Jade Lew] denied cheating and Hustler's third-party investigation concluded there was "no evidence of wrongdoing." Early in the two-hour interview, Polk asked his guest if he still feels the same about what went down on that memorable evening. "In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it's extremely likely that I was cheated," the high-stakes pro responded... Adelstein said that Lew "has a lot of balls" to return to live-stream poker after, as he claims, cheating him out of...

Report: Apple's AI and 'Siri' Efforts Hindered by Caution, Dysfunction Published on April 30, 2023 at 02:04AM The Information reports: Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT... For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there. They'd left Apple last fall because "they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs...according to two people familiar with their thinking... They're now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people." MacRumors summarizes the article this way. "Siri and Apple's use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information's Wayne Ma." The exten...

Long-time Slashdot Reader Announces Open Source, Java-Based, Full-Stack Web Development Framework Published on April 30, 2023 at 01:04AM Long-time software engineer Blake1024 (Slashdot reader #846,727) writes: We are thrilled to announce the release of Kiss v2.0, a comprehensive, Java-based, open-source, full-stack web development framework... Kiss v2.0 provides an even more seamless, out-of-the-box experience, including pre-configured front-end and back-end components... Key Features: * Custom HTML controls* RESTful web services* Microservices architecture* Built-in authentication* SQL API integration* Robust reporting capabilities Kiss utilizes microservices, allowing developers to work on a running system without the need for rebuilds, redeploys, or server reboots... Production systems can be updated without any downtime. With proven success in commercial applications, Kiss v2.0 is ready for prime time. It's not a beta, but a reliable solution for your web development needs. ...

Daimler Is Setting Up a $650 Million Charging Network For Commercial EVs Published on April 29, 2023 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a new fast-charging network coming to North America. It's called Greenlane, and it's a $650 million joint venture between Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and a BlackRock investment fund. But it's unlikely you'll recharge your passenger EV at a Greenlane site any time soon -- this new network is being designed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty commercial EVs. [...] Based on the company's renderings, Greenlane's sites will be much more comfortable for big rigs. The first of these sites will be in Southern California, and Greenlane says it will build out a network along critical freight routes on the East and West Coasts, as well as in Texas. To begin with, the company will focus on commercial EV recharging, but refueling infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell EVs will follow. In...

Key Radar Antenna Stuck On Europe's Jupiter-Bound Spacecraft Published on April 29, 2023 at 02:53AM The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn't work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem. Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won't reach the giant planet until 2031. It's taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a majo...

Zimbabwe Will Issue Gold-Backed Digital Tokens From Next Month Published on April 29, 2023 at 02:11AM Zimbabwe's central bank plans to sell a gold-backed digital currency to the public from May 8 in another attempt to stabilize its tumbling currency and offer an alternative to the US dollar. From a report: The tokens, to be sold through banks in local and foreign currency at a 20% margin above the interbank mid-rate, will be introduced in two phases, central bank governor John Mangudya, said in an emailed statement on Friday. The currency will initially be used for investment and then for transactions. "The issuance of the gold backed digital tokens is meant to expand the value-preserving instruments available in the economy and enhance the divisibility of the investment instruments and widen their access and usage by the public," Mangudya said. This year, Zimbabwe's local currency has declined 35% against the US dollar, which superseded it as the preferred currency...

China Ramps Up Coal Power Despite Carbon Neutral Pledges Published on April 29, 2023 at 01:31AM Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents. From a report: The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved. A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China's leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing's priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governme...

New Venmo Feature Lets Users Transfer Crypto To Outside Wallets - and To Each Other Published on April 29, 2023 at 12:51AM Venmo soon will allow users to transfer their Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash to outside wallets -- as well as to other users of the popular payment app. From a report: The feature will roll out starting in May, according to a statement from PayPal, which acquired Venmo in 2013. Users can also transfer crypto to their PayPal wallets, which released a similar ability for users in 2022. Crypto transfers on Venmo will be irreversible, just like crypto transactions more broadly -- a function of cryptocurrency's use of blockchains, or immutable public ledgers. To roll out the transfer system, PayPal is partnering with Paxos, a crypto firm that specializes in stablecoins. "We're excited to connect Venmo's customers to the community, other wallets and exchanges, and we intend to continue to roll out additional crypto products and services ...

Microsoft is Busy Rewriting Core Windows Code in Memory-safe Rust Published on April 29, 2023 at 12:10AM Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers. From a report: David "dwizzle" Weston, director of OS security for Windows, announced the arrival of Rust in the operating system's kernel at BlueHat IL 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel, last month. "You will actually have Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months, which is really cool," he said. "The basic goal here was to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents." Microsoft showed interest in Rust several years ago as a way to catch and squash memory safety bugs before the code lands in the hands of users; these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in it...

Coinbase Offers a Fiery Response To SEC's Threat of Enforcement Action Published on April 28, 2023 at 03:30AM Crypto exchange Coinbase offered a fiery response on Thursday to last month's Wells notice from the SEC, telling the federal regulator that an enforcement action against the crypto exchange would pose "major programmatic risks" to the SEC that would "fail on the merits." From a report: "Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities," the company's response said. The analysis SEC did staffers to justify an enforcement action "appears to rest on superficial and incorrect analogies to products and services offered by others," Coinbase wrote in a blog post from chief legal officer Paul Grewal. Separately, Grewal told CNBC, "At the time when we went public we had detailed discussions with the SEC about the very aspects of our business that are now -- two years later -- the subject of the Wells notice. Nothin...

New Intel Linux Graphics Driver Patches Released, Up To 10-15% Better Performance Published on April 28, 2023 at 02:50AM A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that "can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode," reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other ga...

Microsoft's Mice, Keyboards, and Webcams Are Being Discontinued in Favor of Surface Accessories Published on April 28, 2023 at 02:10AM Microsoft will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams that are Microsoft-branded. Instead, Microsoft is now focusing on its Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more. From a report: It brings an end to the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware after the company first launched its first mouse in 1983 and bundled it with Microsoft Word and Notepad. "Going forward, we are focusing on our Windows PC accessories portfolio under the Surface brand," says Dan Laycock, senior communications manager at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "We will continue to offer a range of Surface branded PC Accessories -- including mice, keyboards, pens, docks, adaptive accessories, and more. Existing Microsoft branded PC accessories like mice, keyboards, and webcams will continue to be sold in existing...

The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going To Break Large Parts of the Internet Published on April 28, 2023 at 01:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously -- the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn't been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now. The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning t...

The Rapid Rise of Generative AI Threatens To Upend US Patent System Published on April 28, 2023 at 12:52AM Intellectual property laws cannot handle possibility artificial intelligence could invent things on its own. From a report: When members of the US supreme court refused this week to hear a groundbreaking case that sought to have an artificial intelligence system named as the inventor on a patent, it appeared to lay to rest a controversial idea that could have transformed the intellectual property field. The justices' decision, in the case of Thaler vs Vidal, leaves in place two lower court rulings that only "natural persons" can be awarded patents. The decision dealt a blow to claims that intelligent machines are already matching human creativity in important areas of the economy and deserve similar protections for their ideas. But while the court's decision blocked a potentially radical extension of patent rights, it has done nothing to calm growing worries th...

Brave Search Removes Last Remnant of Bing From Search Results Page Published on April 28, 2023 at 12:17AM Brave browser: Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We've removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inmates Are Using VR To Learn Real-World Skills Published on April 27, 2023 at 02:55AM Corrections systems are using simulators to provide incarcerated individuals with more lifelike instruction. But is it working? From a report: Atorrus Rainer, 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy room wearing a virtual-reality headset. Every so often, he extends his arm, using the VR controller to pick up garbage bags, a toothbrush, and toilet paper during a simulated trip to the supermarket. The self-checkout station overwhelms him: those didn't exist in 2001, when Rainer, then a teenager, was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. His first experience with one is this virtual interaction taking place inside Fremont Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison about two hours south of Denver. Rainer is practicing in the hopes of stepping into a real store in the near future through an initiative launched in Colorado in 2017 in response to US Supreme Court rulings that deemed juven...