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The ATOM Team has revealed the release date of ATOM RPG: Trudograd: September 13th. Dear friends! Finally the moment has come when we can announce the release date for ATOM RPG: Trudograd. This event will happen on September 13th, 2021. Until then we will use every minute available playtesting the game, fixing bugs, checking out different PC configurations and planning for upcoming content patches....

Ransomware attack on U.S. farm incurred $9 million in losses

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When I walk out the door, I can't help but run through my "phone, wallet, keys" checklist. Perhaps that list may shorten as digital ID options gain popularity.

"Residents of Arizona and Georgia will soon be able to use their iPhones and Apple Watches as digital driver's licenses or ID cards.

— Read the rest

Larry Elder is the most likely of the GOP candidates to replace California governor Gavin Newsom should voters recall Newsom in this month's recall election. Elder, a conservative black man, is a treasure trove of remarkable opinions. This weekend, interest alighted on his suggestion that slave owners should have gotten paid for their property. — Read the rest

Reply from Laaca, 05.09.2021, 21:54:

> I accidentaly found a very new DOS game looking a little bit like Tomb
> Raider.
> Look at the Post Apocalyotic Petra.
> https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra

Hm, the author still supports this game. In the time when I pointed a link was available version F.
However actually is available version N.
Too bad that the programmer does not write any news or changelog file.
The main development is indeed done on the creating of the new ports (GL, D3D,...). Anyway, also a DOS specific code is changing.
Other new interresting feature is the editor.

By the way - I tried to run the SDLPetra.EXE under HX-DOS and it worked! But what is interresting, it works in the 16-bit or 32-bit color depth and the renderer is trying to emulate 3D hardware!
So the graphic is antialiassed and textures are filtered but it is EXTREMELY slow. But I was trying it on the P3-400MHz.
Maybe on some modern beast it could be better...

On the heels of my first post with this subject, I thought I'd continue adding tips as they came to mind...

I've been engaged with EDR frameworks for some time now. I first became aware of Carbon Black before it was "version 1.0", and before "carbonblack.com" existed. Since then, I've worked for several organizations that developed EDR frameworks (Secureworks, Nuix, CrowdStrike, Digital Guardian), and others that made use of frameworks created by others. I've also been very happy to see the development and growth of Sysmon, and used it in my own testing.

One thing I've been acutely aware of is the visibility afforded by EDR frameworks, as well as the extent of that visibility. This is not a knock against these tools...not at all. EDR frameworks and tools are incredibly powerful, but they are not a panacea. For example, most (I say "most" because I haven't seen all EDR tools) track process creation telemetry, but not process exit codes. As such, it can be detrimental to assume that because the EDR telemetry shows a process being created, that the process successfully executed and completed. Some EDR tools can block processes based on specific criteria...I saw a lot of this at CrowdStrike, and shared more than a few examples in public speaking events. 

In other instances, the process may have failed to execute all together. For example, it may be been detected by AV shortly after it started executing. I've actually been caught by Windows Defender; prior to initiating testing, I'll disable real-time monitoring, but leave Defender untouched other than that. I'll then go about my testing, and then at some point in the future (sometimes around 4 hrs), I'll be continuing my testing, only to have Windows Defender recover (real-time monitoring is automatically re-enabled), and what I was working on was quarantined.

Did the executable throw an error shortly after launch, with a WER record, or an Application PopUp message, being generated in the Windows Event Log? 

Were you able to validate the impact of the executable or command? For example, if the threat actor was seen running a command that would impact the Windows Registry and result in Windows Event Log records being generated, were those artifacts validated and observed on the system?

The overall point is that while EDR frameworks provide a tremendous amount of visibility, but they do not provide ALL visibility.

What's Old Is New Again
Something a bit more on the deeper forensicy-technical side...

I ran across a couple of things recently that reminded me that what I found fascinating and dug into deeply twenty years ago may not be that well known today. For example, last year, Windows Defender/MpCmdRun.exe was identified as an LOLBin, and that was accompanied by the fact that files could be written to alternate data streams (ADSs). 

I also ran across something "new" regarding the "zone.identifier" ADSs associated with downloads (Edge, Chrome); specifically, the ZoneID ADSs are no longer 26 or 29 bytes in size, now they're much larger because they include more information, including HostURL and RefererURL entries, as illustrated in fig 1.

Fig 1: ZoneID ADS contents

This clearly provides some useful information regarding the source of the file. The ADS illustrated in fig 1 is from a PDF document I'd downloaded to my desktop via Chrome; as such, it wasn't found in my Downloads folder (a dead giveaway for downloads...), but the existence and contents of the ADS clearly demonstrate that the file was indeed downloaded to the system.

Now, we'll just need to see if other means for downloading files...BITS jobs, LOLBins, etc...produce similar results.

A team of modders is ceasing work on a project called GTA: Underground after six years of work, citing "increasing hostility towards the modding community" and an "imminent danger" to their mental and financial well-being. The decision comes as news broke last week that Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, is suing a separate team that's behind a GTA 3 and Vice City reverse-engineering project.

One of the project's developers, Dkluin, took to GTAForums to reveal the decision, confirming that the team would be taking all official uploads offline and that development on the project would cease. The team has also posted a video on YouTube titled 'The End', which features credits for everyone who worked on the project.

"Due to the increasing hostility towards the modding community and imminent danger to our mental and financial well-being, we sadly announce that we are officially ceasing the development of GTA: Underground and will be shortly taking all official uploads offline," the developer explains. "We would like to thank the community for the immense support they've given us for the past years and our talented modding team for the incredible work, dedication, and great times we had together."

RELATED LINKS: GTA: San Andreas Requirements

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code...

During an interview with financial analyst, Pierre Ferragu, Intel's CEO and CFO talked about their company's strategy in the x86 consumer, client, and data center segments. The executives also detailed their execution plans with upcoming consumer and cloud products including Alder Lake, Diamond Rapids, and Xe-HPG ARC GPUs.

Intel CEO Says Alder Lake Will Be Their AMD Zen Moment, Three Zen-Like Architectural Updates Coming To Consumers

Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, was asked about when his company will have a Zen moment to which he replied that Alder Lake will be bringing three Zen-like innovations as detailed during its Architecture Day 2021. The three key innovations would include the heterogeneous architecture itself which will include big and little cores. The CEO states that AMD has nothing like that at their end and with the Heterogenous approach, Alder Lake CPUs will boast high-performance cores alongside an energy-efficient version of the Big cores, leading to increased efficiency and higher multi-threading output.

But that's not all, Intel is also cooking next-gen architectures back in their labs which according to the CEO are going to be ' a pretty dramatic step forward and well beyond anything that was talked about yet'. Pat could be referring to Meteor Lake or future Cove cores that were recently leaked & are expected to bring a major push to IPC and architectural enhancements but I guess we will have to wait till the next IDM / Architecture Day for more details on those.

Q- Will there be a Zen moment for Intel?

A- We have a number of things going on over here[...] We are rolling out the heterogenous architecture that is part of Alder Lake where we have big and little cores, you know AMD only has one. We'll have a higher performance and a more energy-efficient version of the core, pretty compelling, we'll lay out our major vector enhancement stuff, we have our GPU architecture where we are gonna start being in a position to really put pressure on NVIDIA for the first time forever.

And we are laying out our IPU architecture when we get to our smart NICs and smart networking fabrics so three major architectural announcements this week that we think are pretty Zen-like.

And trust me, we have a few that are still cooking back in the labs that we are going to look forward to talking to people about that we think are a pretty dramatic step forward and well beyond anything that was talked about yet and some that might not be talked about for a couple of years but innovation, you know the geek is back.

Intel To Put Pressure on NVIDIA For The First Time With Its Xe-HPG ARC GPUs

Intel's CEO not only mentioned AMD but NVIDIA too. Pat states that with their upcoming graphics (Xe-HPG) architecture for ARC GPUs, they will be putting pressure on NVIDIA's GPU lineup for the first time forever! The company has so far only landed its Xe GPU architecture on mobile stuff but with Xe-HPG, the company is going to take the battle to all segments including desktop and discrete mobile graphics. But this is the first time the company has stated that it will be competing against NVIDIA which is an undisputed king of the discrete and AIB GPU segment.

Intel Looks To Regain Sustained Leadership In Cloud Segments Through Better Execution, Mentions Diamond Rapids As Future Xeon CPU Family

Pat also talked about how they aim to regain trust within the data center and cloud segment. As per the CEO, Intel definitely acknowledges the AMD threat and that's been the case since Brian Krzanich called AMD a 'Formidable Competition' and stated that it's their job to not let AMD capture a double-digit market share of 15-20%. Within a few years, AMD went from a 0% market hold in 2017 to over a 10% market share in 2021 with its Zen-powered EPYC lineup.

Intel's CEO says that they were in a period where they were behind AMD for a couple of years and that was due to poor execution of their server/cloud strategy. However, they are going to do better and with products like Ice Lake and the upcoming Sapphire Rapids / Diamond Rapids Xeon chips, the company expects a period where they are going to be very competitive and in 3-4 years, Intel excepts sustained leadership within the cloud segment.

Q How do you make sure Intel remains central and the number one client in the cloud.

A-There are probably three different aspects Pierre to talk about, you know there's always the AMD view and the AI and alternative architecture view, and then how we deepen the partnership with the cloud guys. So we seem to think about it in all three dimensions.

We just say about the AMD threat, you know we got to do better products, period!

So we gonna build better products and they had a period we haven't executed well. We're gonna execute, execute, execute!

and with that, we see that we are coming into a period where we are going to be very competitive. So we were in a period where we were behind. Now with Ice Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Diamond Rapids, we are in a period where we are going to be very competitive and as we get out to 3 -4 years from now, we see that we will be in sustained leadership again.

So we are coming into a period where we are going to be much more competitive and with products that you know are much more competitive, more pricing dynamics, better market share potential, better TCO values for the cloud guys so we just gotta compete.

Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs will compete against AMD's EPYC Genoa family. The new EPYC lineup looks to be a tremendous step up over existing EPYC Milan chips. Intel's Diamond Rapids SP Xeon family might be the first lineup to offer leadership over the EPYC lineup but are expected to launch in 2025 which falls in line with the CEO's 3-4 years timeline.

I am going to have the bulk of [my product line] built internally and be able to harvest those margins as well. We are going to make selective use of foundries. […] If I need to use a foundry to have a unique product or a halo product and certain portions, absolutely.

I really unleashed my engineering teams to say, you are going to deliver the best product. Period. You are unconstrained to pick the technologies to always be delivering the best products that you have in the category.

Intel also wants to leverage the use of both internal and external fabs with its IDM 2.0 strategy as detailed during the process and manufacturing day. The CEO says that he wants his design teams to be utilizing the best foundries to build the best products. Overall, Intel's new strategy under Pat Gelsinger, CEO, looks like it could work if handled and executed well. The company faces a lot of competition from chipmakers and its fabs are also undress stress to deliver the next-gen nodes on time but with this new strategy, Intel could once again lead the industry forward in terms of innovation!

The post Intel CEO Says Alder Lake CPUs Will Have Three Major ‘AMD Zen-Like’ Architectural Announcements, ARC Alchemist Xe-HPG GPUs To Put Pressure On NVIDIA by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

The iPhone 13 series will bring major upgrades to the lineup. While the overall design aesthetics would remain the same, we are expecting the company to equip the devices with a higher 120Hz ProMotion display, enhanced camera modules, and a smaller notch. Other than this, we also heard last week that the iPhone 13 will bring forward support for LEO satellite communications. Now, a new report cites that the LEO satellite communication system will be available on iPhone 13 models only in select markets.

LEO Satellite Communication on iPhone 13 Models Will Only Be Available in Select Markets

The latest Power On newsletter by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman highlights Apple's plans to introduce the LEO satellite communication on iPhone 13 models only in select markets. The new LEO satellite communication system will allow users to send messages and make calls even without a network. The feature will be of immense importance in remote locations with no network coverage. However, it will launch in select markets with the iPhone 13.

“The emergency features will only work in areas without any cellular coverage and only in select markets. Apple envisions eventually deploying its own array of satellites to beam data to devices, but that plan is likely years away from taking off.”

Other than the availability of the feature in select regions, the report also mentions that Apple will not give iPhone users the ability to make calls without network coverage.

“Some have asked me if these new features mean that the iPhone can be used as a satellite phone and have the ability to make calls anywhere in the world without cellular coverage. The answer is a big no. That’s not happening now, next year, or anytime in the near future.”

Mark Gurman also mentions that the iPhone 13 models would be equipped with new hardware for satellite communication which is not ready as of now. In addition to this, it would be expensive and could possibly be revolted against by phone carriers. According to reports, you would need to be outside and it would take up to a minute to get a signal from the satellite.

We are expecting Apple to announce the iPhone 13 later this month alongside the Apple Watch Series 7. The Apple Watch is expected to launch in limited quantities, as shared in the report. This is all there is to it, folks. Share your views with us in the comments section below.

The post iPhone 13’s LEO Satellite Communication System Will be Available Only in Select Markets by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.

Sony’s Jim Ryan has clarified the PS4 to PS5 upgrade paths for Horizon Forbidden West and its upcoming first-party exclusive cross-gen titles.

Last week, Sony revealed additional details about the different editions of the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn sequel for both PS4 and PS5, Horizon Forbidden West.  Interestingly, and to the disappointment of many PS4 owners, Sony said that the standard and special editions of the title on PS4 won’t include a free upgrade to the PS5 version – something that Sony sort of did promise last year.

“No one should be disappointed... we have an upgrade path for PS4 users to get the PS5 versions for free”, PlayStation Boss Jim Ryan said.

Following community criticism, Jim Ryan has now said that PS4 players buying Forbidden West will be able to upgrade to the PS5 version for free.

“Last year we made a commitment to deliver free upgrades for our cross-gen launch titles, which included Horizon Forbidden West”, Sony clarified on the official PS Blog. “While the pandemic’s profound impact pushed Forbidden West out of the launch window we initially envisioned, we will stand by our offer: Players who purchase Horizon Forbidden West on PlayStation 4 will be able to upgrade to the PlayStation 5 version for free.”

In addition, the PlayStation boss has said that future PS4 to PS5 upgrades for first-party exclusives, including the upgrades for God of War and Gran Turismo 7, will cost $10 USD.

“I also want to confirm today that moving forward, PlayStation first-party exclusive cross-gen titles (newly releasing on PS4 & PS5)–both digital and physical*–will offer a $10 USD digital upgrade option from PS4 to PS5. This will apply to the next God of War and Gran Turismo 7, and any other exclusive cross-gen PS4 & PS5 title published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.”

Horizon Forbidden West launches on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on February 18, 2022.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you agree with Sony’s PS4 to PS5 upgrade path for future first-party exclusives? Hit the comments down below.

The post Free Horizon Forbidden West PS4 to PS5 Upgrade, Sony Confirms; Upgrades for Upcoming 1st Party Cross-Gen Games to Cost $10 USD by Aernout van de Velde appeared first on Wccftech.

A new The Witcher 3 mod titled First Person Camera Reworked aims to improve the first person experience attempted by other modders for CD PROJEKT RED's acclaimed open world action RPG. Created by ExtremeDotneting, it can be downloaded directly via his GitHub repository or via Nexus Mods.

The mod takes into account the errors of the mods First Person Improved and modFirstPerson.

Makes control more convenient and fixes some problems, such as displaying swords, crossbows, camera shifts during different actions (for example, attack or sprint), use of the witcher's instinct.

Installation instructions

1. Unpack the mod archive to the root of the game folder.
2. Add to the file C: \ Users \ <your user name> \ Documents \ The Witcher 3 \ input.settings lines from add_to_inputsettings.txt, each at the beginning of its category.
3. Use Script Merger if you have other mods installed.
4. Start the game. Go to the mod settings Settings -> Mods -> Gameplay and click on the top ## PRESET_VALUE_DEFAULT.
5. In the settings, you can also enable first person view in dialogs, but it works with bugs. It's the same with boats.

Usage

Press the P button to turn on / off the mod.

Used third party mods

• modInvisibleweapons - used the code from here to remove swords if they are not in hand (otherwise they will be in the frame).
• modinvisibleCrossbow - makes the crossbow invisible so that it does not climb into the camera when walking.
• modFirstPersonHorseCamera - the code from here is partially used for riding a horse.
• modFirstPerson - used only in dialogs.
• First Person Improved - the code of this mod helped me figure it out.

As a reminder, CD PROJEKT RED is still targeting late 2021 for The Witcher 3 enhanced edition, which will feature ray traced effects and faster loading times on both PC and next-generation consoles. It is currently unclear whether a The Witcher 3 mod like this one will work with it, though.

The game will also eventually get some smaller DLCs inspired by the Netflix The Witcher series.

The post The Witcher 3 Mod First Person Camera Reworked Out Now by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.

RetroArch, the popular open source frontend for emulators and videogames, just got updated to version 1.9.9. This new release contains some major new features, such as support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution spatial upscaling technology.

Interestingly, AMD's official implementation of FSR is done through compute shaders, but the RetroArch contributor Jonatas Esteves managed to add it as a pixel shader.

A very generous contributor submitted a fully working implementation of AMD FSR as an slang shader for use in RetroArch! This shader should be fully compatible with the following video drivers in RetroArch:

* Metal
* OpenGL Core (or at least 4.0 with regular OpenGL driver)
* Vulkan
* Direct3D 11 (if your card supports Direct3D 11 Feature Level 11.0 or higher)
* Direct3D 12

We have had to update our Direct3D 11 driver to allow for the use of Shader Model 5.0 when your GPU supports it, since this shader requires SM 5.0 features and wouldn’t work on D3D11 without it.

Here's a comparison image featuring Ys Seven running in RetroArch 1.9.9 (PPSSPP core) with and without FSR.

The other big addition is HDR support, though this only works in the Direct3D 11/12 driver right now. RetroArch creators pointed out that Linux is well behind Windows when it comes to HDR support, though they hope that will change in the future.

We have now added HDR (High Dynamic Range) support to RetroArch’s Direct3D 11/12 driver thanks to a generous contributor!

What you should know:

* The HDR settings can be found in Settings -> Video when you are using the Direct3D 11 or 12 driver. In order to change to D3D11/12, go to Settings -> Drivers, and change Video to ‘D3D11/12’.

In case you don’t see the option, and you have made sure first that your driver is set to Direct3D 11/12, it might be that HDR is disabled in Windows 10. Make sure HDR is enabled in Windows in case you don’t see it pop up. In Windows, go to ‘Display Settings’ (pictured below) and make sure the HDR setting is turned on. If it doesn’t show up, your display device might simply not support HDR.

* We now let Direct3D 11 compile frontend shaders against Shader Model 5.0 (SM 5.0) in case your graphics card driver supports D3D11 Feature Level 11.0 or higher. Previously, it would always compile frontend shaders against Shader Model 4.0, and unfortunately the AMD FSR shader that has just been added needs SM 5.0 capabilities in order to work.

* While HDR already works on the UWP version on PC, on Xbox there are currently several deal-breaking display issues with it, so it remains disabled there for now.

The post RetroArch 1.9.9 Adds AMD FSR and High Dynamic Range Support by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.

Some prospective Steam Deck owners have apparently been getting a little too excited about how much of the Steam library will be compatible with the handheld PC when it launches. It’s actually rather unlikely that every Steam game will readily work, according to James B. Ramey, president of software dev outfit CodeWeavers.

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In June, we informed you about the possibility of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Alan Wake Remastered coming to Epic Games Store. And while we don’t have any details about the former, it appears that the latter will release on October 5th. Rakuten Taiwan may have just leaked the release date of Alan Wake Remastered. … Continue reading Alan Wake Remastered rumored to be releasing on October 5th →

The post Alan Wake Remastered rumored to be releasing on October 5th appeared first on DSOGaming.

Ubisoft has revealed the full patch notes for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Title Update 1.3.1. This Update will be 26GB in size on PC and promises to feature a number of game improvements, as well as a new Nightmare combat difficulty. This brand new update will fix instances where Eivor, NPCs, or the longship would get … Continue reading Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Title Update 1.3.1 is 26GB in size, full patch notes →

The post Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Title Update 1.3.1 is 26GB in size, full patch notes appeared first on DSOGaming.

Ideas from 4chan (including its paranormal section) have percolated into the "dead internet" theory, writes the Atlantic, with a seminal post on another forum by "IlluminatiPirate" now arguing that the internet is almost entirely overrun by artificial intelligence: Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat... Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is "empty and devoid of people," as well as "entirely sterile." Much of the "supposedly human-produced content" you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of "influencers" on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group's intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff... He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled "How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually." "I think it's entirely obvious what I'm subtly suggesting here given this setup," the post continues. "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population." So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times... The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory's validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be "hijacked" by bots so often. The theory's spread hasn't been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories... Anyway ... dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet's many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point... [Y]ou could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it's cliché — people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the "old" internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response. That 2018 article in New York magazine had argued that (at that time) a majority of web traffic was probably coming from bots — including especially high bot traffic on YouTube — while even the engagement metrics for major sites like Facebook had been gamed or inflated. But whether or not that's changed, the Atlantic shares a compelling argument from a forum poster arguing that their very presence in this discussion proves they must be a bot. "If I was real I'm pretty sure I'd be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I'll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A security researcher has discovered malicious code inside the firmware of four low-budget push-button mobile phones sold through Russian online stores," reports the Record: In a report published this week by a Russian security researcher named ValdikSS, push-button phones such as DEXP SD2810, Itel it2160, Irbis SF63, and F+ Flip 3 were caught subscribing users to premium SMS services and intercepting incoming SMS messages to prevent detection. ValdikSS, who set up a local 2G base station in order to intercept the phones' communications, said the devices also secretly notified a remote internet server when they were activated for the first time, even if the phones had no internet browser... All the remote servers that received this activity were located in China, ValdikSS said, where all the devices were also manufactured before being re-sold on Russian online stores as low-budget alternatives to more popular push-button phone offerings, such as those from Nokia. But who's responsible, the article ultimately asks. The third party supplying the firmware? The parties shipping the phones? The vendors selling the phone without detecting its malware? Or the government agencies lacking a mechanism for collecting reports of malware...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Tech companies have long encouraged putting listening devices in homes and pockets..." reports the Washington Post. "But some are growing concerned that these devices are recording even when they're not supposed to — and they're taking their fears to the courts." (Alternate URLs here and here.) On Thursday, a judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California, alleging that the company's voice assistant Siri has improperly recorded private conversations... [H]e ruled that the plaintiffs, who are trying to make the suit a class action case, could continue pursuing claims that Siri turned on unprompted and recorded conversations that it shouldn't have and passed the data along to third parties, therefore violating user privacy. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants... The voice assistants are supposed to turn on when prompted — saying "Hey, Siri," for example — but the lawsuit alleges that plaintiffs saw their devices activate even when they didn't call out the wake word. That conversation was recorded without their consent and the information was then used to target advertisements toward them and sent on to third-party contractors to review, they allege... The lawsuits ask the companies to contend with what they do once they hear something they weren't intended to. Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties director of the ACLU of California, said the suits are a sign that people are realizing how much information the voice technology is collecting. "I think this lawsuit is part of people finally starting to realize that Siri doesn't work for us, it works for Apple," she said. An Amazon spokesperson told the Post only a "small fraction" of audio is manually reviewed, and users can opt-out of those reviews or manage their recordings. Apple told the Post that isn't selling its Siri recordings, and that its recordings are not associated with an "identifiable individual." And Google pointed out that they don't retain audio recordings by default "and make it easy to manage your privacy preferences." But there's still concerns. "A Washington Post investigation in 2019 found that Amazon kept a copy of everything Alexa records after it thinks it hears its name — even if users didn't realize," the Post adds. In a 2019 video, Post reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler even spliced together all of Amazon's recordings of his voice, into a spoken-word anthem titled "Your voice now belongs to Amazon. "Eavesdropping is an invasion," Fowler argues in the video, adding that Amazon "is putting its profits over our privacy. It's also a sign of a bold data grab that's going on in our increasingly connected homes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT's Technology Review reports on "Silicon Valley's latest wild bet on living forever," the newly-formed Altos Labs which it describes as "an ambitious new anti-aging company... "Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life." The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process. Some people briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos... Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Salk declined to comment. The article points out that a securities disclosure filed in California "indicates the company has raised at least $270 million, according to Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia who reviewed the document."

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A Guardian article begins with the story of how a digital surveillance platform called Sneek ruined the first week on the job for a remote worker named David: Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague's face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek's integration with the messaging platform Slack. According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. "We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks," Currie says. "But there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together." For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. "I signed up to manage their digital marketing," he tells me, "not to livestream my living room." Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance- and one that's poised to become a standard feature of life on the job... One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers — or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff — which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market — have all seen similar growth from prospective customers. These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring workers' online activity and assessing their productivity: from screenshotting employees' screens to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing. Speaking to the Guardian, Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne, shares a theory about why remote workers aren't pushing back against surveillance softare. "Since, rightly or wrongly, [its] being framed as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it slide."

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"Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks," reports the Associated Press. They're arguing that the pandemic "didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs." Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe... Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise." Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies. Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. "Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified," they wrote in a January paper... Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.

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"The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs," argues American economist Tyler Cowen (in a Bloomberg opinion column). "Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back... Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role. The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your "game" just might influence events in the real world... [R]egulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government's attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.) Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing. If the much-heralded "metaverse" ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

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ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. From a report: The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn't log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation -- in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn't cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying premises rented by Le Petit Cambodge -- a restaurant that was targeted by the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. On September 1st, the group published an article on Paris-luttes.info, an anticapitalist news website, summing up different police investigations and legal cases against some members of the group. According to their story, French police sent an Europol request to ProtonMail in order to uncover the identity of the person who created a ProtonMail account -- the group was using this email address to communicate. The address has also been shared on various anarchist websites. The next day, @MuArF on Twitter shared an abstract of a police report detailing ProtonMail's reply. According to @MuArF, the police report is related to the ongoing investigation against the group who occupied various premises around Place Sainte-Marthe. It says that French police received a message on Europol.

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"A mystery lies deep within the Grand Canyon: one billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared," Space.com reported last week. The BBC explains: Today geologists know that the youngest of the hard, crystalline rocks are 1.7 billion years old, whereas the oldest in the sandstone layer were formed 550 million years ago. This means there's more than a billion-year-gap in the geological record. To this day, no one knows what happened to the rocks in between. While the missing rock is particularly obvious in the Grand Canyon, the phenomenon is ubiquitous. "It's one of these features that pretty much occurs under a lot of people's feet, when they don't even realise it," says Stephen Marshak, professor emeritus in the Department of Geology at the University of Illinois. He explains that in the centre of any continent, whether you're in the United States, Siberia or Europe, if you drill down far enough you'll hit the two layers of rock involved in this mysterious geological anomaly.... [F]inding out what happened during, and led to, the missing billion years is no trivial matter. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it just so happens to have occurred immediately before another inexplicable event — the sudden proliferation in the diversity of life on Earth 541 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion refers to an era when the oceans suddenly shifted from hosting a scattering of weird and unfamiliar creatures — such as triffid-like leaf-shaped animals and giant steamrollered ovals which continue to defy all efforts to categorise them — to an abundance of life, with many of the major taxonomic groups around today. It happened in the space of just 13-25 million years — an evolutionary twinkling of an eye... The second is that it's thought Earth underwent radical climate change during the lost years — possibly turning into a giant ball of ice, with an almost entirely frozen surface. Very little is currently known about how this "snowball Earth" formed, or how life managed to cling on. They share the three good theories. First, "snowball" — the earth develops a global ice sheet, with the speedy glaciers wearing away surface rocks. The second theory is that it was all lost during the erosion of the supercontinent Rodinia. And theory #3 is: confusion. The BBC cites new research that "suggests that the epic interruption in the geological record was not a single, discrete phenomenon — but instead is actually at least two mini-gaps, which look like one big one because they occurred at around the same time." Even the missing rocks on the two sides of America's Grand Canyon "may instead have vanished in several separate events over the course of several hundred million years."

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650 U.K. schools received educational kits from a charity for testing the lead levels in their water. Students at more than 14 schools then discovered their drinking water had higher lead levels than the recommended maximum. The Guardian reports: Several schools reported levels of lead at 50 micrograms per litre — five times the maximum allowed. Even low levels of lead are toxic and can reduce children's IQ and damage their nervous system... The charity conducted its own tests on samples returned by 81 schools and has confirmed that 14 samples have lead above 50 micrograms per litre, with several more showing signs of elevated levels. The charity is now contacting the schools to alert them and filtration firm Aquaphor, which co-sponsored the project, said it would supply free water filters to affected schools. "One of the frustrations of most school science is that it doesn't have any significance," writes Slashdot reader. "This is a story of one that revealed that lead levels were far higher than everyone was assuming..." A spokesperson for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian that "If a school becomes aware they have lead pipework or have a test which has failed for lead, they should contact their local water company who will be required to enforce the removal of the lead pipe by the owner of the building."

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Even if you’ve never heard of milk paint or chalk paint before, you’ve definitely seen it. Except, the chalk paint we’re referring to here isn’t the dark-colored kind that you can use to turn any surface into your very own chalkboard. That’s something else.

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