| Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans To Police Disinformation Nov 1st 2022, 03:30, by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents -- obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents -- illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate -- the war on terror -- has been wound down. Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. [...] There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the "content request system" at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. These are the key takeaways from the report: - Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing. - DHS plans to target inaccurate information on 'the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine." - Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly. - The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure. - DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August. - DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts. - The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Electric Scooter Ban Increased Congestion In Atlanta By 10%, Study Finds Nov 1st 2022, 02:02, by BeauHD A study published last week in the scientific journal Nature Energy studied the effects of traffic and travel time in a city when micromobility options like electric scooters and e-bikes are banned. The results documented exactly how much traffic increased as a result of people switching back to personal cars instead of smaller, more urban-appropriate vehicles. Electrek reports: The study, titled "Impacts of micromobility on car displacement with evidence from a natural experiment and geofencing policy," was performed using data collected in Atlanta. The study was made possible due to the city's sudden ban on shared micromobility devices at night. That ban provided a unique opportunity to compare traffic levels and travel times before and after the policy change. The ban occurred on August 9, 2019, and restricted use of shared e-bikes and e-scooters in the city between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. The study's authors used high-resolution data from June 25, 2019, to September 22, 2019, from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times before and after the policy implementation. That created a window of analysis of 45 days with and without shared e-bike and e-scooter use at night. The study found that on average, travel times for car trips in Atlanta during evening hours increased between 9.9-10.7% immediately following the ban on shared micromobility. For an average commuter in Atlanta, that translated to an extra 2-5 minutes per evening trip. The authors also concluded that the impact on commute times would likely be higher in other cities across the country. According the study, "based on the estimated US average commute time of 27.6 minutes in 2019, the results from our natural experiment imply a 17.4% increase in travel time nationally." The study went on to consider the economic impact of that added congestion and increased travel time. [...] The economic impact on the city of Atlanta was calculated at US $4.9 million. The study estimated this impact on the national level could be in the range of US $408M to $573 million. Interestingly, the entirety of the study's data comes from before the COVID-19 pandemic, which played a major role in promoting the use of shared micromobility. A similar study performed today could find an even greater impact on congestion, travel times, and economic impact on cities. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Why Google Is Removing JPEG-XL Support From Chrome Nov 1st 2022, 01:25, by BeauHD Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format. Phoronix reports: As noted yesterday, a patch is pending for the Google Chrome/Chromium browser to deprecate the still-experimental (behind a feature flag) JPEG-XL image format support from their web browser. The patch marks Chrome 110 and later as deprecating JPEG-XL image support. No reasoning was provided for this deprecation, which is odd considering JPEG-XL is still very young in its lifecycle and has been receiving growing industry interest and support. Now this evening is a comment from a Google engineer on the Chromium JPEG-XL issue tracker with their expressed reasons: "Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons: - Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely - There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL - The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default - By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome" Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Crypto Lender Hodlnaut Lost Nearly $190 Million in TerraUSD Drop Nov 1st 2022, 00:45, by BeauHD Embattled cryptocurrency lender Hodlnaut downplayed its exposure to the collapsed digital-token ecosystem created by fugitive Do Kwon yet suffered a near $190 million loss from the wipeout. Bloomberg reports: The loss is among the findings of an interim judicial managers' report seen by Bloomberg News. It is the first such report since a Singapore court in August granted Hodlnaut protection from creditors to come up with a recovery plan. "It appears that the directors had downplayed the extent of the group's exposure to Terra/Luna both during the period leading up to and following the Terra/Luna collapse in May 2022," the report said. Kwon's TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and sister token Luna suffered a $60 billion wipeout in May as confidence in the project evaporated, exacerbating this year's crypto meltdown. Hodlnaut's Hong Kong arm made the near $190 million loss when it offloaded the stablecoin as its claimed dollar peg frayed. In a letter dated July 21, Hodlnaut's directors "made an about-turn" about the impact and informed a Singapore police department that digital assets had been converted to TerraUSD, according to the report. Much of the latter was lent out on the Anchor Protocol, the report said, a decentralized finance platform developed on the Terra blockchain. Hodlnaut, which operates out of Singapore and Hong Kong, halted withdrawals in August. The judicial report said more than 1,000 deleted documents from Hodlnaut's Google workspace could have helped shed light on the business. The judicial managers haven't been able to obtain several "key documents" in relation to Hodlnaut's Hong Kong arm, which owes $58.3 million to Hodlnaut Pte in Singapore. About S$776,292 appeared to have been withdrawn by some employees between July and when withdrawals were halted in August, the report stated. Most of the company's investments into DeFi were made via the Hong Kong division, it added. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | 'QR Code Menus Are the Restaurant Industry's Worst Idea' Nov 1st 2022, 00:02, by BeauHD An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article written by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf: Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather's credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, "Why did they stop using those?" If that happens, I'll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. "Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus," the federal agency advised (PDF). "Use disposable or digital menus." The QR-code menu -- which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone -- has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I'll be for heaven if I'm lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I'll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another's eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right -- when everyone's phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works -- they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. "You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be," Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, "but from there it's easy to start checking texts and emails." And wasn't it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study "Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions," where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones "enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted." He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes "are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, " the ACLU has warned. "In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior." In closing, Friedersdorf writes: "[...] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus." "What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?" Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Netflix Adds 6th Gaming Studio With Acquisition of Spy Fox Oct 31st 2022, 23:20, by BeauHD Amir Rahimi, vice president of game studios at Netflix, said in a blog post that, close to the first anniversary of launching games a year ago, Netflix is announcing that Spry Fox is joining as its sixth in-house games studio. VentureBeat reports: Spry Fox is an award-winning independent studio focused on cozy, original games. Their unique approach to game development and success with titles like Triple Town, Alphabear and Cozy Grove will help accelerate Netflix's creative development in another beloved genre and add to the growing variety of Netflix's games catalog that will have something for everyone, Rahimi said. Rahimi said Netflix looks forward to creating games with a studio whose values -- a relentless focus on employee and player joy -- align closely with its own. "Our games journey has only just begun, but I'm proud of the foundational work we've been doing to build out our in-house creative capacity so that we can deliver the best possible games experience -- including no ads and no in-app purchases -- to our members as part of their membership," Rahimi said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Former World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov Hospitalized In Serious Condition Oct 31st 2022, 22:40, by BeauHD According to Russian telegram channels, the former World Chess Champion, Antoly Karpov, was "rushed to the hospital with multiple head injuries in which he was placed in an induced coma," reports ChessBase. "Karpov was put on a ventilator now, and has been diagnosed with cerebral edema, fractures of the right parietal and right temporal bones, multiple head hematomas, and traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage." From the report: On a few things none of the reports still in circulation disagree: the 12th World Champion and current member of Duma, Anatoly Karpov, 71, was found on the ground outside of the Duma, and unresponsive. His blood alcohol levels were very elevated, and he was rushed to the hospital into intensive care. Some early reports claimed he was the victim of an assault and in induced coma. This was later reiterated by other outlets such as Marca from Spain. The source of this, according to Tass, Andrei Kovalev, chairman of the All-Russian Movement of Entrepreneurs, announced in his Telegram channel that Karpov was in intensive care after an attack by unknown people and put into an artificial coma. However Karpov's assistant denied this and said he was fine, had no injuries and was in stable condition. Which begs the question, how fine can he be if there is a need to reassure others he is in 'stable condition'. Since Russian media is under very tight control by the Russian State, it is impossible to know where the truth really lies. Developing... Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | White House Invites Dozens of Nations For Ransomware Summit Oct 31st 2022, 22:00, by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The White House is bringing together three dozen nations, the European Union and a slew of private-sector companies for a two-day summit starting Monday that looks at how best to combat ransomware attacks. The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults. A senior Biden administration official cited recent attacks such as one that targeted the Los Angeles school district last month to underscore the urgency of the issue and the summit. The official previewed the event on the condition of anonymity. Among the administration officials planning to participate in the event are FBI Director Christopher Wray, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. President Joe Biden is not expected to attend. Participating countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Microsoft Promises Eternal Support for Call of Duty on PlayStation Oct 31st 2022, 21:21, by msmash Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer said he intends to continue to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to." From a report: The new promise comes weeks after Sony lambasted an "inadequate" offer to extend Call of Duty's cross-platform access for three years past the current agreement and as Microsoft faces continuing scrutiny from international governments over its proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. "We're not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation," Spencer said directly in an interview with the Same Brain podcast. "That's not our intent." Instead, Spencer said Microsoft's plan for Call of Duty is "similar to what we've done with Minecraft," which has remained a cross-platform staple since Microsoft's $2.5 billion purchase of developer Mojang in 2014. Since then, Spencer said, "we've expanded the places where people can play Minecraft... and it's been good for the Minecraft community, in my opinion. I want to do the same as we think about where Call of Duty can go over the years." Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Discord Bans 68,000 Servers, 55 Million Accounts Oct 31st 2022, 20:41, by msmash The social media platform Discord recently published its quarterly safety report which notes that some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022. From a report: According to the company, the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses." The number of accounts that were disabled for reasons other than spam definitely pales in comparison, amounting to a mere 1,821,721. The bans in this category were mostly handed out for issues relating to "child safety" or "exploitative and unsolicited content." Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter of this year, meaning that of the 235,945 users who called for a second opinion about their ban, only 3,098 of them were reinstated on the platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | New York Could Become First State With a 'Right To Repair' Law for Electronic Devices Oct 31st 2022, 20:01, by msmash After passing with near unanimous support in both houses of the state Legislature, a bill that would allow New Yorkers to repair their electronic devices is all ready to become law as it awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul's signature. From a report: The bill's sponsor in the Assembly, Assemblywoman Pat Fahy of Albany, said the bill would create a system that we use for cars but for the electronic devices we use each day. The bill, known as "Right to Repair," would force companies to provide tools and parts for independent repair shops or individuals to repair devices like cell phones. Opponents of the legislation have cited safety and cybersecurity threats as their issues with the legislation. Supporters of the bill, including Fahy, said the bill will allow for economic growth in this sector and could help the "tinkerers of today" become the "inventors of the future." The Federal Trade Commission has called the bill a milestone and has said it does not harm intellectual property rights. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Apple Gears Up To Launch Its Next Crop of Macs Early Next Year Oct 31st 2022, 19:22, by msmash Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, Bloomberg News reports, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter. From the report: Apple has been gearing up to launch a slew of new Macs, and now we have a clearer idea of when that will occur: early next year. I'm told that Apple is aiming to introduce the upgraded models -- including M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros -- in the first quarter of calendar 2023 and has tied the launches to the upcoming macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3. Those software updates are expected to debut between early February and the beginning of March. [...] The new MacBook Pros will continue to look like the current models, but they'll trade their M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the first M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The M2 Max will go to 12 CPU cores, up from 10, and see its top graphics option move to 38 cores from 32. A new Mac mini remains in development, and the company continues to test versions with the same M2 chip as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as an M2 Pro chip, which hikes the CPU and graphics counts. If Apple indeed launches the M2 Pro variation, we can expect the company to probably wind down the still-available Intel model. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | US Workers Have Gotten Way Less Productive Oct 31st 2022, 18:44, by msmash Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done -- and there's evidence they're right to be spooked. From a report: In the first half of 2022, productivity -- the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour -- plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when "quiet quitting" -- doing only what's expected and no more -- is resonating, especially with younger workers. Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it's down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren't as easy to measure. "It is strange," Comin said. "The data is very odd these past couple of quarters in so many different ways. It's hard to even tell a coherent story." Tech CEOs such as Google's Sundar Pichai and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said his company coined the term "productivity paranoia" to describe employers' anxieties about whether their employees are working hard enough. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Why Mathematicians Study Knots Oct 31st 2022, 18:07, by msmash Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond. Quanta magazine: Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson -- later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) -- was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated. Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required. Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory. We are all familiar with knots -- they keep shoes on our feet, boats secured to docks, and mountain climbers off the rocks below. But those knots are not exactly what mathematicians (including Tait) would call a knot. Although a tangled extension cord may appear knotted, it's always possible to disentangle it. To get a mathematical knot, you must plug together the free ends of the cord to form a closed loop. Because the strands of a knot are flexible like string, mathematicians view knot theory as a subfield of topology, the study of malleable shapes. Sometimes it is possible to untangle a knot so it becomes a simple circle, which we call the "unknot." But more often, untangling a knot is impossible. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | TuSimple Fires Its CEO Xiaodi Hou Amid Probe Oct 31st 2022, 17:20, by msmash TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, said Monday it had fired its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou. From a report: The San Diego-based company said in a news release and securities filing that its board of directors on Sunday had ousted Mr. Hou, who was also the board chairman and chief technology officer. Mr. Hou was fired in connection with a continuing investigation by members of the board, the release said. That review "led the board to conclude that a change of Chief Executive Officer was necessary," the company said in the release. The securities filing said that the board's investigation found that TuSimple this year shared confidential information with Hydron, a trucking startup with operations mostly in China and funded by Chinese investors. The filing also said that TuSimple's decision to share the confidential information hadn't been disclosed to the board before TuSimple entered into a business deal with Hydron. TuSimple said it didn't know whether Hydron shared, or publicly disclosed, the confidential information, the securities filing said. WSJ, reporting on Sunday: TuSimple faces federal investigations into whether it improperly financed and transferred technology to a Chinese startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The people said the concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cfius, are examining TuSimple's relationship with Hydron, a startup that says it is developing autonomous hydrogen-powered trucks and is led by one of TuSimple's co-founders. Investigators at the FBI and SEC are looking at whether TuSimple and its executives -- principally Chief Executive Xiaodi Hou -- breached fiduciary duties and securities laws by failing to properly disclose the relationship, the people familiar with the matter said. They are also probing whether TuSimple shared with Hydron intellectual property developed in the U.S. and whether that action defrauded TuSimple investors by sending valuable technology to an overseas adversary, the people said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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