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Comment Re:Work for free, work for exposure... yay (Score 1) 28

by PolygamousRanchKid (#62511646) Attached to: NASA Needs Your Help Building a VR Mars Simulator

So we're supposed to develop a game for free, with original art and code, and hope to be awarded a grand prize of $3.500?

Welcome to the Open Source Metaverse . . . folks put in a lot work for no direct benefit.

Of course, if you do win, you will probably land a juicy contractor gig with NASA.

Or maybe the publicity will attract some other folks with money to your project.

Submission + - Twitter Is Protecting Its Source Code From Disgruntled Employees, Reports Say (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter locked down its source code to prevent unauthorized changes, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The reports say that this change was made to prevent employees from “going rogue” and sabotaging the platform after Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company. Currently, a vice president must approve any changes.

After the company announced it would accept Musk’s offer to buy the publicly traded platform, it wasn’t immediately clear to Twitter’s 7,000 employees how their day-to-day would change. Even after a company all-hands, where CEO Parag Agrawal reassured the team that no layoffs were planned “at this time,” employees were still left with questions about how they would fare in Musk’s takeover. [...] For now, Musk’s takeover bid for Twitter remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. But if it goes through as expected, we may witness major personnel shifts, resignations and more. A similar shake-up took place when Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. By the time the company went public, there were already 90 startups being built by former Twitter employees.

Submission + - SPAM: Europe Developing 'Battery Passport' for EVs

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: OUT: United States of Europe Means No Passports
IN: “A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a ‘battery passport’ designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells.”

"According to the German economic ministry, officially the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the overarching plan is for the EU to mandate traceable hardware be installed in all batteries used in the continent by 2026. Those intended for use in electric vehicles are up first, with the passport scheme also serving to chronicle everything from the vehicle’s repair history to where the power cell’s raw materials were sourced."

"I’m also a little concerned that this could eventually end up as another arrow in the quiver of industries that are trying to hoard ownership rights on products they’ve already sold to the consumers."

"As vehicles and other products have become perpetually connected to the internet (beaming out your private data FYI), manufacturers have begun trying to put up roadblocks for anyone hoping to fix their own vehicle or utilize an independently owned repair shop. Despite the right-to-repair movement doing its utmost to prevent this, it’s fighting on too many fronts and is going against well-funded corporate lobbyists possessing longstanding relationships with government legislators. Meanwhile, the European Union seems far more interested in exerting new regulatory controls under the auspices of environmentalism and safety than backing a grass-roots movement comprised of people who still want to fix things."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - NASA's space telecoms network may soon be outsourced (space.com)

Submitted by vm
vm writes: Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project explained, "Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration.â

The development is part of NASA's long-term initiative to hand over most of low-Earth orbit operations to commercial players. The space agency is already purchasing cargo and crew transportation services from Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, with Boeing due to join that list later this year.

Submission + - Starlink support in Ukraine raises prospect of satellites being military targets 1

Submitted by AlanObject
AlanObject writes: Elon Musk's donation of Starlink terminals and service in Ukraine has been helpful in their defense, but as such they have arguably become a military asset and as such a legitimate military target.

The Starlink constellation may be a leading indicator for future state attribution questions under Article VI contemporaneously with armed conflict. Further exploration of the legal framework is necessary and should result in additional controls on freelancing corporations independently providing material support to belligerents. Addressing this question in the next NSP is an excellent place to start.

Submission + - Fidelity will allow investors access to Bitcoin in their 401(k)s (fortune.com)

Submitted by BeerFartMoron
BeerFartMoron writes: In a first-of-its-kind move—and the latest sign that crypto-investing has gone mainstream—Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday that 401(k) plan participants will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin via their retirement plan.

The investing option should be available by mid-year, Fidelity, the nation’s largest 401(k) plan provider, said in a press release. Employers will need to opt into the change, which may limit which employees actually have access to Bitcoin in their workplace retirement accounts.

There are few details currently available about how exactly the account will work, but Fidelity says employees will be able to invest in Bitcoin via what the company is calling the Digital Assets Account, which will be part of the investor's 401(k). That account will also hold short-term money market investments to provide the liquidity for transactions.

Employers will be able to set their own limits on how much an employee can contribute to Bitcoin, though Fidelity's platform allows no more than 20% of a saver's contributions to be allocated to it, the company said. More digital assets may be added to the 401(k) offerings in the future.

Submission + - UK court approves extradition of Julian Assange to US (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jaminhas
jaminhas writes: A court has formally approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the US on espionage charges, in what will ultimately be a decision for the UK home secretary, Priti Patel.

The Wikileaks co-founder, who has the right of appeal, appeared by videolink during the Westminster magistrates court hearing, which one of his barristers described as a “brief but significant moment in the case”.

Mark Summers QC, for Assange, told the chief magistrate that he had no option but to send the case to the home secretary. It was not open, at this point, for Assange’s team to raise fresh evidence but there had been “fresh developments”, he added.

Summers said “serious submissions” would be made to the home secretary regarding US sentencing and conditions.

Submission + - Single Mom Sues Coding Boot Camp Over Job Placement Rates (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under “false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the “true nature” of the school’s financial interest in students’ success. “I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn — about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally,” Bruner said in a press release. “I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me.”

Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit.

After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school’s job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students’ success — specifically by “falsely representing” that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.

Submission + - Insteon, long time maker of smart switches, has disappeared, stranding users (reddit.com)

Submitted by madsci1016
madsci1016 writes: Long time smart home control device brand Insteon has disappeared overnight. Users woke to hubs no longer connecting to the Insteon cloud server, losing full app control of their smart switches and dimmers. This include loss of all integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google. Insteon support phone numbers are off the hook, and the customer support forum has been taken offline. Users are rallying in r/insteon to help find solutions. "Bridges" (PLMs) needed to allow third party control of Insteon devices are now listing on ebay for $600+. 5x their original price. Yet another example of the folly of trusting a cloud based IoT solution.

Submission + - How Cryptocurrency Gave Birth to the Ransomware Epidemic (vice.com)

Submitted by em1ly
em1ly writes: In the latest episode of Motherboard's CRYPTOLAND series, they break down how the ransomware epidemic has been spurred on by cryptocurrency.

The team visits a school district in Missouri that was the victim of a ransomware attack, and speaks with experts that are tracking Bitcoin ransoms through the blockchain, identifying the hackers’ wallets and collaborating with law enforcement in an attempt to recover the funds or identify the hackers themselves.

Submission + - SPAM: Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Ukraine has run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russians in the 50 days since the war began, using the scans to find the soldiers' social media profiles — and send photos of their corpses to their families back home

Ukrainian officials say the use of facial recognition software could help end the brutal war. But some experts call it ‘classic psychological warfare’ that sets a gruesome precedent.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people's cell phones (insidenova.com) 1

Submitted by Beerismydad
Beerismydad writes: A Virginia man was secretly tracked by Chester County Police detectives using a warrant, which ordered Verizon to regularly ping the man's location and report it to police. The catch? The man was not named as a suspect in the warrant and has not been charged with a crime since the investigation began.

According to InsideNova, a local online news source for Northern Virginia, "The case offers a glimpse into a surveillance technique that’s become commonplace for police but is mostly unknown among the general public: cell phone location tracking."

Submission + - Why Gamers Are Adopting Windows 11 More Slowly Than Windows 10 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers—nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers—about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements—many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good.

Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users—and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users—were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller.

In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021—even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.

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