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Submission + - Data Indicate Figma's Userbase Is Rapidly Expanding Beyond Design Market (medium.com)

Submitted by gibbons
gibbons writes: Design professionals’ embrace of Figma has driven tremendous growth. As the law of large numbers and potential market saturation kick in, one big question is whether Figma can sustain its pace. ATC’s proprietary usage data reveal not only very strong developer momentum for Figma, but also broadening usage across the software stack that bode well for its future growth.

Submission + - Linus Torvalds: Rust will go into Linux 6.1 (zdnet.com)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: As previously indicated on Slashdot. Rust was slated to be coming to the Linux Kernel sometime in the 6.x version. Well wonder no longer on which version of kernel 6.x will have the first bits of Rust officially in the kernel, as Linus has confirmed that 6.1 will be the first with the new NVMe kernel drivers being in Rust.

The first version non-production ready code for the NVMe Rust based kernel drivers were already producing performance comparable to C code. So the final drivers to hit 6.1 are already looking promising. It also helped Rust's case that, thanks to the ground-breaking work of Linux kernel and Rust developer Miguel Ojeda, Rust on Linux has gotten much more mature. Kernel maintainers were convinced it is time to move forward with Rust in Linux. In short, they agreed that Rust on Linux was ready for work.

Submission + - SPAM: Ukraine's Astronomers Say There Are Tons of UFOs Over Kyiv

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ukraine’s airspace has been busy this year—that’s the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn’t expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv’s Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country’s National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn’t really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. “We see them everywhere,” the research said. “We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear.”

The paper is titled Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events come from observations made at NAS’ Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the paper’s authors, the observatories took on the job of hunting for UFO’s as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject. It describes a specific type of UFO the researchers call “phantoms” that is an “object [that] is a completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it.” The researchers also observed that the UFOs it’s seeing are so fast that it’s hard to take pictures of them. “The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second,” the paper said. “It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon]. To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range.”

So the researchers did just that using two meteor monitoring stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka. “We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects,” the paper said. “The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz.” The scientists divided the phenomenon they observed into two different categories: cosmics and phantoms. “We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle),” the paper said. “Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 percent.”

Using the cameras, stationed roughly 75 miles apart, allowed the scientists to make repeated observations of strange objects moving in the sky. The paper didn’t speculate on what the objects were, merely noted the observations and mentioned the objects’ incredible speeds. “Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second,” the research said. “Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 — 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s.” The easy explanation would be that these are missiles, or rockets, or something else associated with the war. But the scientists insist that their nature “is not clear.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Navy Says All UFO Videos Classified, Releasing Them 'Will Harm National Security (vice.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would “harm national security” and told a government transparency website that all of the government’s UFO videos are classified information. In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.”

The Black Vault was seeking all videos “with the designation of ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’” This is an interesting response from the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response, where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.

“While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release,” it said. “Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security."

Submission + - France to bar "dark store" delivery depots (bbc.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: "Dark stores", businesses which stock commonly needed items but which only offer delivery once you order over the internet, and whose "storefront" is a frosted window with no way to enter the "store", are now banned in all of France. The stores are now classified as warehouses rather than shops which will allow local mayors to take action if needed. From the BBC:

Run by half a dozen competing companies such as Gorillas, Cajoo, Getir, Flink and Gopuff, "dark stores" have proliferated in France as elsewhere over the last two years after Covid confinement popularised internet food shopping.

Advertising in Paris urges householders to get their food delivered in less than 10 minutes — or "quicker than a double by Benzema", referring to the French football star. A campaign by Cajoo shows "Alex" doing his shopping by smartphone while sitting on the lavatory.

But residents of buildings where "dark stores" have replaced pre-existing grocery shops are angry about noise from early morning lorries and the disruption caused by squads of deliverers on electric bicycles and scooters.

. . .

"This is not just a question of noise and traffic disruption. It's a question of society," said Camille Augey, a deputy mayor of Lyon.

"We need to ask ourselves what we want. Does every need have to be immediately satisfied regardless of external consequences? Do we really need that packet of pasta or bottle of shampoo at 11 o'clock at night? Can it really not wait until the morning?"

"We managed perfectly well before quick commerce, didn't we?" she added.

Submission + - IRS Moves Toward Free E-Filing (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Internal Revenue Service will spend $15 million studying a free, government-backed tax filing system under a provision in the sweeping climate and health-care law Congress passed this summer. It’s a landmark step toward overhauling the way most Americans file their taxes and ending years of domination of tax prep by private corporations. Democrats have long lamented that millions of American pay for the privilege of filing taxes, and that corporate tax services take money from the neediest households. Hardly anyone uses the free e-filing options that industry supports because of restrictions on which returns qualify.

But the IRS has lacked the funding — or the clout to outmaneuver private lobbyists — to seriously consider its own e-filing platform, current and former officials say, forcing taxpayers instead to deal with a consortium of private providers and setting the agency back decades in technology and customer service. “The IRS is completely beholden to the software companies at this point because it just doesn’t have anything to replace them,” said Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate, the IRS’s internal consumer rights watchdog, from 2001 to 2019.

The commercial tax prep industry is gargantuan, worth $11.9 billion in 2022, according to market research firm IBIS World; 9 in 10 individual tax returns were filed digitally in 2021, the IRS reported. The largest players, Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block, offer narrowly tailored free e-filing options, and charge $59 and $55, respectively, for their lowest-paid tiers, plus variable filing fees and costs for state tax returns. Tax experts say a government-backed system could give more Americans access to free and trustworthy services, while increasing IRS efficiency by encouraging more taxpayers to file easy-to-process digital returns rather than cumbersome paper ones. But that would upset an ecosystem that by many accounts has served taxpayers and the government well for decades. The U.S.'s voluntary tax compliance rate — the proportion of filers who pay federal taxes accurately each year — is 83.6 percent by the most recent measurements, among the highest of developed economies.

Submission + - SPAM: BlenderBot3 - MetaAI's Largest and Most Competent AI Research Chatbot to date

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Play with the chatbot here: [spam URL stripped]

More than half a decade after Microsoft's truly monumental Tay debacle, the incident still stands as stark reminder of how quickly an AI can be corrupted after exposure to the internet's potent toxicity and a warning against building bots without sufficiently robust behavioral tethers. On Friday, Meta's AI Research division will see if its latest iteration of Blenderbot AI can stand up to the horrors of the interwebs with the public demo release of its 175 billion-parameter Blenderbot 3.


Link to Original Source

Submission + - North Korea-backed hackers have a clever way to read your Gmail (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen malware that hackers from North Korea have been using to surreptitiously read and download email and attachments from infected users' Gmail and AOL accounts.

The malware, dubbed SHARPEXT by researchers from security firm Volexity, uses clever means to install a browser extension for the Chrome and Edge browsers, Volexity reported in a blog post. The extension can't be detected by the email services, and since the browser has already been authenticated using any multifactor authentication protections in place, this increasingly popular security measure plays no role in reining in the account compromise.

Submission + - Red Hat's Matt Hicks On His Journey To the Top (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Matt Hicks, Red Hat's new CEO, doesn't have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company's new leader, Hicks says. "The markets are changing really quickly," he tells ZDNet. "And just having that intuition — of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering — I know that's intuition that I'll lean on... Around that, there's a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition."

Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference — they really start to define people's careers."

Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier — then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO — moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...]

Submission + - The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the 'Old Internet' (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know—which in those days was anime—the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here’s a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn’t exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994.

The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today’s Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. “HotSprings” was dedicated to health and fitness, while “Area 51” was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.

Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers—named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on—instead of neighborhoods. Proponents of Web3, like Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon, argue that we need to get back to what we had in the days of GeoCities—while also not giving up the advances of the Web2 years—and allow creators and businesses to form a relationship with their audiences that is not governed by algorithms and advertising. It’s yet to be seen if the version of Web3 backed by Dixon will ever materialize but it’s not looking good.

We can, however, ask GeoCities’ founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the ‘90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. “GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

Submission + - SpaceX and Viasat Fight Over Whether Starlink Can Meet FCC Speed Obligations (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink—though not the only problem—is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat, which says Starlink lacks the capacity and speed to meet FCC obligations. In a new FCC filing, SpaceX denounced Viasat's "misguided campaign" against the Starlink funding. "Viasat is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology," SpaceX told the FCC. The new SpaceX filing was submitted on Friday and posted to the FCC's website Monday, as pointed out by Light Reading.

Viasat submitted an analysis (PDF) to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction. Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites." Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing [...].

In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance." SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 (PDF) and December 2021 (PDF). The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review. "Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff—not competitors—to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."

Submission + - Over 3,200 Apps Leak Twitter API Keys, Some Allowing Account Hijacks (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a set of 3,207 mobile apps that are exposing Twitter API keys to the public, potentially enabling a threat actor to take over users' Twitter accounts that are associated with the app. The discovery belongs to cybersecurity firm CloudSEKE, which scrutinized large app sets for potential data leaks and found 3,207 leaking a valid Consumer Key and Consumer Secret for the Twitter API.

When integrating mobile apps with Twitter, developers will be given special authentication keys, or tokens, that allow their mobile apps to interact with the Twitter API. When a user associates their Twitter account with this mobile app, the keys also will enable the app to act on behalf of the user, such as logging them in via Twitter, creating tweets, sending DMs, etc. As having access to these authentication keys could allow anyone to perform actions as associated Twitter users, it is never recommended to store keys directly in a mobile app where threat actors can find them. CloudSEK explains that the leak of API keys is commonly the result of mistakes by app developers who embed their authentication keys in the Twitter API but forget to remove them when the mobile is released. [...] One of the most prominent scenarios of abuse of this access, according to CloudSEK, would be for a threat actor to use these exposed tokens to create a Twitter army of verified (trustworthy) accounts with large numbers of followers to promote fake news, malware campaigns, cryptocurrency scams, etc.

Submission + - How the US Gave Away a Breakthrough Battery Technology To China (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work. They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid. "It was beyond promise," said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. "We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected." But that's not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

The Chinese company didn't steal this technology. It was given to them — by the U.S. Department of Energy. First in 2017, as part of a sublicense, and later, in 2021, as part of a license transfer. An investigation by NPR and the Northwest News Network found the federal agency allowed the technology and jobs to move overseas, violating its own licensing rules while failing to intervene on behalf of U.S. workers in multiple instances. Now, China has forged ahead, investing millions into the cutting-edge green technology that was supposed to help keep the U.S. and its economy out front. Department of Energy officials declined NPR's request for an interview to explain how the technology that cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars ended up in China. After NPR sent department officials written questions outlining the timeline of events, the federal agency terminated the license with the Chinese company, Dalian Rongke Power Co. Ltd. "DOE takes America's manufacturing obligations within its contracts extremely seriously," the department said in a written statement. "If DOE determines that a contractor who owns a DOE-funded patent or downstream licensee is in violation of its U.S. manufacturing obligations, DOE will explore all legal remedies." The department is now conducting an internal review of the licensing of vanadium battery technology and whether this license — and others — have violated U.S. manufacturing requirements, the statement said.

Submission + - SPAM: Russian Military Satellite Appears To Be Stalking A New U.S. Spy Satellite

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Kosmos-2558, which the Russian Ministry of Defense itself said is a military satellite in an official statement, was deployed into a Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO), which pertains to satellites that travel over the polar regions of the globe so their orbital paths are synchronous with the Sun. Its exact purpose is unknown at present, but it has been described as an "inspector" satellite, a term that is often associated with so-called “killer satellites.”

Independent analyst Dr. Marco Langbroek, a lecturer for optical space situational awareness at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has gone on to speculate about the type of satellite that USA-326 may be. In one of his blog posts, Dr. Langbroek wrote that the spacecraft could possibly be a next-generation electro-optical imagery intelligence (IMINT) satellite, which would line up with what we do know of the USA-326 mission’s ISR focus. IMINT satellites are used primarily to monitor ground and sea activity, and U.S. military capabilities in this space exceed any other on the planet.
Link to Original Source

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