"Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer," reports Sky News, "raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans." Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the U.S., has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles... The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives — which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness? "The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far." If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward. Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented. He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage. 2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future." One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser" Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."

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Thursday a climate technology startup called Twelve "took a major step toward producing sustainable aviation fuel..." reports Bloomberg, "by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit." Twelve is among the emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation. Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company's CO2 electrochemical reactor — called OPUS — will be at the center of its first commercial production plant for sustainable aviation fuel, under construction in Moses Lake and set to be completed this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of sustainable aviation fuel. Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions... Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said. It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix. "Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."

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Martin Hellman "achieved legendary status as co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman public key exchange algorithm, a breakthrough in software and computer cryptography," notes a new interview in InfoWorld. Nine years after winning the Turing award, the 78-year-old cryptologist shared his perspective on some other issues: What do you think about the state of digital spying today? Hellman: There's a need for greater international cooperation. How can we have true cyber security when nations are planning — and implementing — cyber attacks on one another? How can we ensure that AI is used only for good when nations are building it into their weapons systems? Then, there's the grandaddy of all technological threats, nuclear weapons. If we keep fighting wars, it's only a matter of time before one blows up. The highly unacceptable level of nuclear risk highlights the need to look at the choices we make around critical decisions, including cyber security. We have to take into consideration all participants' needs for our strategies to be effective.... Your battle with the government to make private communication available to the general public in the digital age has the status of folklore. But, in your recent book (co-authored with your wife Dorothie [and freely available as a PDF]), you describe a meeting of minds with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA. Until I read your book, I saw the National Security Agency as bad and Diffie-Hellman as good, plain and simple. You describe how you came to see the NSA and its people as sincere actors rather than as a cynical cabal bent on repression. What changed your perspective? Hellman: This is a great, real-life example of how taking a holistic view in a conflict, instead of just a one-sided one, resolved an apparently intractable impasse. Those insights were part of a major change in my approach to life. As we say in our book, "Get curious, not furious." These ideas are effective not just in highly visible conflicts like ours with the NSA, but in every aspect of life. Hellman also had an interesting answer when asked if math, game theory, and software development teach any lessons applicable to issues like nuclear non-proliferation or national defense. "The main thing to learn is that the narrative we (and other nations) tell ourselves is overly simplified and tends to make us look good and our adversaries bad."

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"Something revolutionary is on the horizon..." claims the company's web site. "Wearable neurotechnology that augments sleep, attention, and ultimately the human experience." Or, as Fierce Biotech put it, "A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed 'electric medicine.'" Elemind's approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company claims that its approach — which is based on research from its founders, a group of high-profile scientists hailing from the likes of MIT, Stanford and Harvard — offers a more "natural" treatment option than pharmaceuticals for neurological conditions like insomnia, essential tremor and memory loss. "Chemical drugs affect the entire body, often leading to unwanted side effects. Elemind offers a nonchemical, direct and on-demand solution that learns and dynamically adjusts to each person," Meredith Perry, a co-founder of Elemind and its CEO, said in the company's debut announcement. "We're the first and only company able to precisely guide and redirect brainwaves in real time." "Elemind's first product is a general wellness device and will not be subject to FDA regulation," notes an announcement from the company. But they've thoroughly researched the product's potential: To date, Elemind's technology is supported by five clinical trials and several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Clinical trials show Elemind's technology is effective at inducing sleep up to 74% faster, suppressing essential tremor with a significant decrease after only 30 seconds of stimulation, and boosting memory. Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation; this study is currently in peer review.... "You can think about it like noise cancellation for the mind," said Dr. David Wang, CTO and co-founder of Elemind. "Our technology uses phase-locking auditory stimuli to align precisely with the user's brainwaves and steer them to a different frequency associated with a different state." The company plans to announce its first product within a few months, reports the Boston Globe, noting that the company's $12 million in seed funding came from "a consortium that includes Village Global, an early-stage venture fund backed by high-tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates., Reid Hoffman, and Ann Wojcicki..." More info from VentureBeat.

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Shell once announced it would build 48 new Hydrogen fueling stations for light-duty vehicles in California, according to the blog Hydrogen Insights. But then in September, Shell told the site they'd "discontinued" that plan. And last month the Inside EVs blog noted that in all of 2023, just 2,968 hydrogen cars were sold "in the United States — and by that, we mean in California, where the series-produced models are available." That's according to data from the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership — admittedly a 10% increase from 2022's sales figure of 2,707 — but with both numbers lower than 2021's sales of 3,341. "The overall cumulative sales of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles exceeded 17,940 as of the end of the quarter (not counting vehicles removed from use), which is 20% more than a year ago." Then this week Shell said it will "no longer be operating" any light-duty hydrogen fuelling stations in the U.S., and will close all seven of its California pumping stations immediately. (Three in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, one in San Jose, and two in the Sacramento area.) Inside EVs says Shell's move "represents another blow to the struggling hydrogen car market in the only state where the fuel is widely available at all." Shell had, until recently, operated seven of the 55 total retail hydrogen stations in California, per the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership (H2FCP). That makes this a blow, but not apocalyptic news for the (small) hydrogen community.... In the letter announcing the closure, Shell Hydrogen Vice President Andrew Beard said they were shutting them down "due to hydrogen supply complications and other external market factors." It's not hard to see what Beard is referencing here... Hydrogen Insight reports that this shortage has been disrupting stations since August 13... Some are also down for repairs, as many hydrogen stations suffer from serious reliability issues. Iwatani, a Japanese gas company that is one of the two largest names in American hydrogen filling stations, is currently suing the company that provided the core technology for its stations. In a court filing viewed by Hydrogen Insight, Iwatini alleges that its provider did not test its equipment in a real-world commercial scenario, hid defects, and misled the company. It is, in short, a big mess. All of this makes the future of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the United States even more uncertain. The technology has struggled to catch on, as the stations and their fuel remain expensive. Though hydrogen car manufacturers usually include a large amount of free fuel in the purchase of a vehicle, once that runs out consumers are left with eye-watering prices from stations that are often broken, out of fuel, or swarmed with long lines. It's why used hydrogen cars are so cheap, and why they still aren't a good deal. Few companies can make a better case for it than Shell, though, as the cheapest way to produce hydrogen involves a lot of natural gas. Its proximity to the fossil-fuel industry was supposed to make it cheaper, and provide incentive for robust fueling infrastructure. That hasn't played out, though, and one of the largest oil giants is throwing in the towel. If even a fossil giant like Shell can't justify investing in the future of light-duty hydrogen infrastructure, we're not sure who can.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times When it's after hours, and the boss is on the line, Australian workers — already among the world's best-rested and most personally fulfilled employees — can soon press "decline" in favor of the seductive call of the beach. In yet another buttress against the scourge of overwork, Australia's Senate on Thursday passed a bill giving workers the right to ignore calls and messages outside of working hours without fear of repercussion. It will now return to the House of Representatives for final approval. The bill, expected to pass in the House with ease, will let Australian workers refuse "unreasonable" professional communication outside of the workday. Workplaces that punish employees for not responding to such demands could be fined. "Someone who is not being paid 24 hours a day shouldn't be penalized if they're not online and available 24 hours a day," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a news conference Wednesday... Australia follows in the footsteps of European nations such as France, which in 2017 introduced the right of workers to disconnect from employers while off duty, a move later emulated by Germany, Italy and Belgium. The European Parliament has also called for a law across the European Union that would alleviate the pressure on workers to answer communications off the clock... Australians already enjoy a host of standardized benefits, including 20 days of paid annual leave, mandatory paid sick leave, "long service" leave of six weeks for those who have remained at an employer for at least seven years, 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and a nationwide minimum wage of about $15 an hour.

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America's Federal Aviation Administration "is midway through a review of manufacturing at Boeing," reports the Associated Press, but "already knows that changes must be made in how the government oversees the aircraft manufacturer." FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker suggested that Boeing — under pressure from airlines to produce large numbers of planes — is not paying enough attention to safety. Whitaker said that FAA has had two challenges since January 5, when an emergency door panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner over Oregon. "One, what is wrong with this airplane? But two, what's going on with the production at Boeing?" Whitaker told a House subcommittee. "There have been issues in the past. They don't seem to be getting resolved, so we feel like we need to have a heightened level of oversight." Whitaker, who took over the FAA about three months ago, was making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the blowout over Oregon.... Whitaker said the FAA is halfway through a six-week audit that has involved placing "about two dozen" inspectors in Boeing's 737 plant in Renton, Washington, and "maybe half a dozen" at a Wichita, Kansas, plant where supplier Spirit AeroSystems makes the fuselages for 737s. The inspectors are looking for gaps in the quality of work during the manufacturing process that might have contributed to a door plug blowing off an Alaska Airlines Max 9 at 16,000 feet over Oregon. Whitaker said he expects the FAA will keep people in the Boeing and Spirit factories after the audit is done, but he said the numbers haven't been determined. For many years, the FAA has relied on employees of aircraft manufacturers to perform some safety-related work on planes being built by their companies. That saves money for the government, and in theory taps the expertise of industry employees, but it was criticized after two deadly crashes involving Boeing Max 8 planes in 2018 and 2019. "In order to have a truly safe system, it seems to me that we can't rely on the manufacturers themselves to be their own watchdogs," Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said during Tuesday's hearing. Whitaker has said that the self-checking practice — in theory, overseen by FAA inspectors — should be reconsidered, but he again stopped short of saying it should be scrapped. But he said closer monitoring of Boeing is needed. "The current system is not working because it is not delivering safe aircraft," Whitaker said. "Maybe we need to look at the incentives to make sure safety is getting the appropriate first rung of consideration that it deserves."

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InfoWorld reports: Don't look now, but 25% of organizations surveyed in the United Kingdom have already moved half or more of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures. This is according to a recent study by Citrix, a Cloud Software Group business unit. The survey questioned 350 IT leaders on their current approaches to cloud computing. The survey also showed that 93% of respondents had been involved with a cloud repatriation project in the past three years. That is a lot of repatriation. Why? Security issues and high project expectations were reported as the top motivators (33%) for relocating some cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures such as enterprise data centers, colocation providers, and managed service providers (MSPs). Another significant driver was the failure to meet internal expectations, at 24%... Those surveyed also cited unexpected costs, performance issues, compatibility problems, and service downtime. The most common motivator for repatriation I've been seeing is cost. In the survey, more than 43% of IT leaders found that moving applications and data from on-premises to the cloud was more expensive than expected. Although not a part of the survey, the cost of operating applications and storing data on the cloud has also been significantly more expensive than most enterprises expected. The cost-benefit analysis of cloud versus on-premises infrastructure varies greatly depending on the organization... The cloud is a good fit for modern applications that leverage a group of services, such as serverless, containers, or clustering. However, that doesn't describe most enterprise applications. The article cautions, "Don't feel sorry for the public cloud providers." "Any losses from repatriation will be quickly replaced by the vast amounts of infrastructure needed to build and run AI-based systems... As I've said a few times here, cloud conferences have become genAI conferences, which will continue for several years."

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In 2022 Apple filed a lawsuit against startup Rivos. The lawsuit said that in one year Rivos had hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology, according to Reuters, "and that at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos." But Friday Bloomberg reported that the two companies told a judge that they'd "signed an agreement that potentially settles the case." "The agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities," according to the filing in federal court in San Jose, California. "The parties currently are working through that process." More details from Engadget: Apple also accused the defendant of instructing the employees it hired away to steal presentations and other proprietary information for unreleased iPhone chip designs that cost billions of dollars to develop. Rivos countersued Apple last year, accusing the larger company of restricting employees' ability to work elsewhere and of hindering emerging startups' growth by using anticompetitive measures. The court dismissed Apple's trade secret claims against Rivos in April 2023, though the company was allowed to file a revised complaint. Apple already settled with its six former employees who filed a countersuit against the iPhonemaker along with Rivos after they dropped their claims against each other last month. Both companies are now requesting the court to put their cases on hold until March 15, when they expect the settlement to be completed.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Nvidia is building a new business unit focused on designing bespoke chips for cloud computing firms and others, including advanced AI processors, nine sources familiar with its plans told Reuters. The dominant global designer and supplier of AI chips aims to capture a portion of an exploding market for custom AI chips and shield itself from the growing number of companies pursuing alternatives to its products. The Santa Clara, California-based company controls about 80% of high-end AI chip market, a position that has sent its stock market value up 40% so far this year to $1.73 trillion after it more than tripled in 2023. Nvidia's customers, which include ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms, have raced to snap up the dwindling supply of its chips to compete in the fast-emerging generative AI sector. Its H100 and A100 chips serve as a generalized, all-purpose AI processor for many of those major customers. But the tech companies have started to develop their own internal chips for specific needs. Doing so helps reduce energy consumption, and potentially can shrink the cost and time to design. Nvidia is now attempting to play a role in helping these companies develop custom AI chips that have flowed to rival firms such as Broadcom and Marvell Technology, said the sources, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly... Nvidia moving into this territory has the potential to eat into Broadcom and Marvell sales.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: A California state lawmaker introduced a bill on Thursday aiming to force companies to test the most powerful artificial intelligence models before releasing them — a landmark proposal that could inspire regulation around the country as state legislatures increasingly tackle the swiftly evolving technology. The new bill, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents San Francisco, would require companies training new AI models to test their tools for "unsafe" behavior, institute hacking protections and develop the tech in such a way that it can be shut down completely, according to a copy of the bill. AI companies would have to disclose testing protocols and what guardrails they put in place to the California Department of Technology. If the tech causes "critical harm," the state's attorney general can sue the company. Wiener's bill comes amid an explosion of state bills addressing artificial intelligence, as policymakers across the country grow wary that years of inaction in Congress have created a regulatory vacuum that benefits the tech industry. But California, home to many of the world's largest technology companies, plays a singular role in setting precedent for tech industry guardrails. "You can't work in software development and ignore what California is saying or doing," said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program... Wiener says he thinks the bill can be passed by the fall. The article notes there's now 407 AI-related bills "active in 44 U.S. states (according to an analysis by an industry group called BSA the Software Alliance) — with several already signed into law. "The proliferation of state-level bills could lead to greater industry pressure on Congress to pass AI legislation, because complying with a federal law may be easier than responding to a patchwork of different state laws." Even the proposed California law "largely builds off an October executive order by President Biden," according to the article, "that uses emergency powers to require companies to perform safety tests on powerful AI systems and share those results with the federal government. The California measure goes further than the executive order, to explicitly require hacking protections, protect AI-related whistleblowers and force companies to conduct testing." They also add that as America's most populous U.S. state, "California has unique power to set standards that have impact across the country." And the group behind last year's statement on AI risk helped draft the legislation, according to the article, though Weiner says he also consulted tech workers, CEOs, and activists. "We've done enormous stakeholder outreach over the past year."

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Former FTX customers "have reasons to believe they could actually recoup their money," reports CNBC: Bankman-Fried, who could spend the rest of his life behind bars, was found guilty in November on seven criminal counts after roughly $10 billion in customer funds from his company went missing. Some of that money went to pay for Bankman-Fried's lavish lifestyle, but much of it went towards other investments that have, of late, appreciated dramatically in value. Lawyers representing the bankruptcy estate of FTX told a judge in Delaware last week that they expect to fully repay customers and creditors with legitimate claims. Bankruptcy attorney Andrew Dietderich, who works with FTX's new leadership team, said "there is still a great amount of work and risk" ahead in getting all the money back to clients, but that the team has a "strategy to achieve it." It's a welcome development for the many thousands of customers (reportedly up to a million) who collectively lost billions of dollars in FTX's collapse 15 months ago, when the crypto exchange spiraled into bankruptcy in a matter of days. Given the lightly regulated and unsecured nature of FTX — and the crypto industry at large — those clients faced the real possibility that the vast majority of their money had evaporated. Plenty of failed hedge funds and lenders lost virtually everything during the 2022 crypto winter... [C]rypto was mired in a bear market, with bitcoin trading at around $16,000. It's now above $47,000... FTX's bitcoin stash, which was worth $560 million at the time of the September report, is today valued north of $1 billion. Bankman-Fried's investments weren't limited to crypto. He also used client money to back startups like Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company founded by ex-OpenAI employees. FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, before the generative AI boom. Anthropic's valuation hit $18 billion in December 2023, which would value FTX's roughly 8% stake at about $1.4 billion. CNBC suggests this could affect the length of Bankman-Fried's prison sentence (which will be determined next month). There's now also a so-called "FTX IOU" market where investors are selling their debt, CNBC adds. "One financial firm that had lost around $100 million initially sold its FTX debt for 6 cents on the dollar in a new secondary market out of concern that he may never get a better deal. As of December, those claims were going for more than 70 cents on the dollar." CNBC also reports that FTX "had been negotiating with bidders about a potential reboot of the company, but those efforts were scrapped last month."

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Earth had its first year-long, 1.5-degree rise in temperature. But does this mean we've already missed our goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees? No, argues the Washington Post: There's actually some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold — but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in the 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then. Can we still avoid passing 1.5C? Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. "The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail," Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.... The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesn't yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees. Does that mean we'll pass catastrophic tipping points? That's a more difficult question. Scientists don't know exactly when certain tipping points — like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost — will occur. It's very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes. And 1.5C isn't a magic threshold; it's not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on. And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built — electric grids, homes, livelihoods — will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isn't what matters most. It's where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero — and stop contributing to future warming altogether.

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Since 2006 Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) has been part of the team verifying "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge," an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of Wikipedia (approximately the amount a human can read in a lifetime). "The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to Artificial General Intelligence," explains the project's web site. 15 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot post explaining the logic (titled "Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize"): The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids. The amount of the prize also increases based on how much compression is achieved. (So if you compress the 1GB file x% better than the current record, you'll receive x% of the prize...) The first prize was awarded in 2006. And now Baldrson writes: Kaido Orav has just improved 1.38% on the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge with his "fx-cmix" entry. The competition seems to be heating up, with this winner coming a mere 6 months since the prior winner. This is all the more impressive since each improvement in the benchmark approaches the (unknown) minimum size called the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data.

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Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz shared this report from MuckRock: Founded in 2003, Appin has been described as a cybersecurity company and an educational consulting firm. Appin was also, according to Reuters reporting and extensive marketing materials, a prolific "hacking for hire" service, stealing information from politicians and militaries as well as businesses and even unfaithful spouses. Legal letters, being sent to newsrooms and organizations around the world, are trying to remove that story from the internet — and are often succeeding. Reuters investigation, published in November, was based in part on corroborated marketing materials, detailing a range of "hacking for hire" services Appin provided. After publication, Reuters was targeted by a legal campaign to shut down critical reporting, an effort which expanded to target news organizations around the world, including MuckRock. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MuckRock is now sharing more details on this effort while continuing to host materials the Association of Appin Training Centers has gone to great lengths to remove from the web. The original story, by Reuters' staff writers Raphael Satter, Zeba Siddiqui and Chris Bing, is no longer available on the Reuters website. Following a preliminary court ruling issued in New Delhi, the story has been replaced with an editor's note, stating that Reuters "stands by its reporting and plans to appeal the decision." The story has since been reposted on Distributed Denial of Secrets, while the primary source materials that Reuters reporters and editors used in their reporting are available on MuckRock's DocumentCloud service. Representatives of the company's founders denied the assertions in the Reuters story, insisting instead that rogue actors "were misusing the Appin name." TechDirt titled their article "Sorry Appin, We're Not Taking Down Our Article About Your Attempts To Silence Reporters." And Thursday the EFF wrote its own take on "a campaign of bullying and censorship seeking to wipe out stories about the mercenary hacking campaigns of a less well-known company, Appin Technology, in general, and the company's cofounder, Rajat Khare, in particular." These efforts follow a familiar pattern: obtain a court order in a friendly international jurisdiction and then misrepresent the force and substance of that order to bully publishers around the world to remove their stories. We are helping to push back on that effort, which seeks to transform a very limited and preliminary Indian court ruling into a global takedown order. We are representing Techdirt and MuckRock Foundation, two of the news entities asked to remove Appin-related content from their sites... On their behalf, we challenged the assertions that the Indian court either found the Reuters reporting to be inaccurate or that the order requires any entities other than Reuters and Google to do anything. We requested a response — so far, we have received nothing... At the time of this writing, more than 20 of those stories have been taken down by their respective publications, many at the request of an entity called "Association of Appin Training Centers (AOATC)...." It is not clear who is behind The Association of Appin Training Centers, but according to documents surfaced by Reuters, the organization didn't exist until after the lawsuit was filed against Reuters in Indian court.... If a relatively obscure company like AOATC or an oligarch like Rajat Khare can succeed in keeping their name out of the public discourse with strategic lawsuits, it sets a dangerous precedent for other larger, better-resourced, and more well-known companies such as Dark Matter or NSO Group to do the same. This would be a disaster for civil society, a disaster for security research, and a disaster for freedom of expression.

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE: The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code. Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems. As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities. A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone." The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform." The Register adds: Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...." According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation." Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

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The world's biggest builder of recycling plants has teamed with a startup to install AI-powered systems for sorting recycling, reports the Washington Post. And now over the next few years, "The companies plan to retrofit thousands of recycling facilities around the world with computers that can analyze and identify every item that passes through a waste plant, they said Wednesday." "[S]orted" recyclables, particularly plastic, wind up contaminated with other forms of trash, according to Lokendra Pal, a professor of sustainable materials engineering at North Carolina State University... [W]aste plants don't catch everything. [AI startup] Greyparrot has already installed over 100 of its AI trash spotters in about 50 sorting facilities around the world, and [co-founder Ambarish] Mitra said as much as 30 percent of potentially recyclable material winds up getting lumped in with the trash that's headed for the landfill. Failing to recycle means companies have to make more things from scratch, including a lot of plastic from fossil fuels. Also, more waste ends up in landfills and incinerators, which belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and pollute their surroundings. Mitra said putting Greyparrot's AI tools in thousands of waste plants around the world can raise the percentage of glass, plastic, metal and paper that makes it to recycling facilities. "If we can move the needle by even 5 to 10 percent, that would be a phenomenal outcome on a planetary basis for greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact," he said. Cutting contamination would make recycled materials more valuable and raise the chances that companies would use them to make new products, according to Reck. "If the AI and the robots potentially helped to increase the quality of the recycling stream, that's huge," she said... Greyparrot's device is, basically, a set of visual and infrared cameras hooked up to a computer, which monitors trash as it passes by on a conveyor belt and labels it under 70 categories, from loose bottle caps (not recyclable!) to books (sometimes recyclable!) to aluminum cans (recyclable!). Waste plants could connect these AI systems to sorting robots to help them separate trash from recyclables more accurately. They could also use the AI as a quality control system to measure how well they're sorting trash from recyclables. That could help plant managers tinker with their assembly lines to recover more recyclables, or verify that a bundle of recyclables is free of contaminants, which would allow them to sell for a higher price. GreyParrot's co-founder said their trash-spotting computers "could one day help regulators crack down on companies that produce tsunamis of non-recyclable packaging," according to the article. "The AI systems are so accurate, he said, that they can identify the brands on individual items. 'There could be insights that make them more accountable for ... the commitments they made to the public or to shareholders,' he said."

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Last week Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. But now Microsoft "has announced a temporary reprieve for developers who use VS Code to connect to servers, clouds, container, and other devices running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu: Microsoft [had] pushed out an update to VS Code that bumps its glibc requirement, dropping support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (which uses an older version of glibc) in the process. Innocuous though it sounds, that move had a huge impact, leaving thousands of developers who use VS Code unable to connect to/work with devices running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or other Linux distros using glibc 2.27, including RHEL 7, CentOS 7, and Amazon Linux 2. — "Screwed" was the term many of those affected used! Well, good news: Microsoft says it plans to release a 'recovery' update for VS Code soon. This will restore the ability for developers to use the text editor's remote dev tools to connect to/work with machines running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other, older Linux distros. But only for the next 12 months. "We hope this will provide the needed time for you and your companies to migrate to newer Linux distributions," Microsoft's senior product manager for VS Code posted on GitHub. He added that the software will "show the appropriate dialog and banner that you are connecting to an OS that is not supported by VS Code." (The updated was released on Thursday.) He also thanked developers for their feedback and "for sharing your passion for VS Code and sharing how it is being used to enable various scenarios." Thanks to Slashdot reader motang for sharing the article.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: California would ban all plastic shopping bags in 2026 under a new bill announced Thursday in the state Legislature. California already bans thin plastic shopping bags at grocery stores and other shops, but shoppers at checkout can purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly makes them reusable and recyclable. Democratic state Sen. Catherine Blakespear said people are not reusing or recycling those bags. She points to a state study that found the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed per person grew from 8 pounds per year in 2004 to 11 pounds per year in 2021. "It shows that the plastic bag ban that we passed in this state in 2014 did not reduce the overall use of plastic. It actually resulted in a substantial increase in plastic," Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said Thursday. "We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste." While California's bag ban would apply statewide, it would only end up impacting about half the state's population, according to Mark Murray, lead advocate for the environmental advocacy group Californians Against Waste. That's because most of the state's major cities already ban these types of thicker plastic bags. But a state law passed in 2014 and approved by voters in a 2016 referendum bans cities from passing new laws restricting plastic bag use. If the Legislature passes this bill, it would be up to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to decide whether to sign it into law. As San Francisco's mayor in 2007, Newsom signed the nation's first plastic bag ban.

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