Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer said he intends to continue to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to." From a report: The new promise comes weeks after Sony lambasted an "inadequate" offer to extend Call of Duty's cross-platform access for three years past the current agreement and as Microsoft faces continuing scrutiny from international governments over its proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. "We're not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation," Spencer said directly in an interview with the Same Brain podcast. "That's not our intent."

Instead, Spencer said Microsoft's plan for Call of Duty is "similar to what we've done with Minecraft," which has remained a cross-platform staple since Microsoft's $2.5 billion purchase of developer Mojang in 2014. Since then, Spencer said, "we've expanded the places where people can play Minecraft... and it's been good for the Minecraft community, in my opinion. I want to do the same as we think about where Call of Duty can go over the years."

The social media platform Discord recently published its quarterly safety report which notes that some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022. From a report: According to the company, the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses." The number of accounts that were disabled for reasons other than spam definitely pales in comparison, amounting to a mere 1,821,721. The bans in this category were mostly handed out for issues relating to "child safety" or "exploitative and unsolicited content." Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter of this year, meaning that of the 235,945 users who called for a second opinion about their ban, only 3,098 of them were reinstated on the platform.

After passing with near unanimous support in both houses of the state Legislature, a bill that would allow New Yorkers to repair their electronic devices is all ready to become law as it awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul's signature. From a report: The bill's sponsor in the Assembly, Assemblywoman Pat Fahy of Albany, said the bill would create a system that we use for cars but for the electronic devices we use each day.

The bill, known as "Right to Repair," would force companies to provide tools and parts for independent repair shops or individuals to repair devices like cell phones. Opponents of the legislation have cited safety and cybersecurity threats as their issues with the legislation. Supporters of the bill, including Fahy, said the bill will allow for economic growth in this sector and could help the "tinkerers of today" become the "inventors of the future." The Federal Trade Commission has called the bill a milestone and has said it does not harm intellectual property rights.

Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, Bloomberg News reports, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter. From the report: Apple has been gearing up to launch a slew of new Macs, and now we have a clearer idea of when that will occur: early next year. I'm told that Apple is aiming to introduce the upgraded models -- including M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros -- in the first quarter of calendar 2023 and has tied the launches to the upcoming macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3. Those software updates are expected to debut between early February and the beginning of March.

[...] The new MacBook Pros will continue to look like the current models, but they'll trade their M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the first M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The M2 Max will go to 12 CPU cores, up from 10, and see its top graphics option move to 38 cores from 32. A new Mac mini remains in development, and the company continues to test versions with the same M2 chip as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as an M2 Pro chip, which hikes the CPU and graphics counts. If Apple indeed launches the M2 Pro variation, we can expect the company to probably wind down the still-available Intel model.

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done -- and there's evidence they're right to be spooked. From a report: In the first half of 2022, productivity -- the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour -- plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when "quiet quitting" -- doing only what's expected and no more -- is resonating, especially with younger workers.

Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it's down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren't as easy to measure. "It is strange," Comin said. "The data is very odd these past couple of quarters in so many different ways. It's hard to even tell a coherent story." Tech CEOs such as Google's Sundar Pichai and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said his company coined the term "productivity paranoia" to describe employers' anxieties about whether their employees are working hard enough.

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond. Quanta magazine: Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson -- later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) -- was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.

Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required. Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory.

We are all familiar with knots -- they keep shoes on our feet, boats secured to docks, and mountain climbers off the rocks below. But those knots are not exactly what mathematicians (including Tait) would call a knot. Although a tangled extension cord may appear knotted, it's always possible to disentangle it. To get a mathematical knot, you must plug together the free ends of the cord to form a closed loop. Because the strands of a knot are flexible like string, mathematicians view knot theory as a subfield of topology, the study of malleable shapes. Sometimes it is possible to untangle a knot so it becomes a simple circle, which we call the "unknot." But more often, untangling a knot is impossible.

TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, said Monday it had fired its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou. From a report: The San Diego-based company said in a news release and securities filing that its board of directors on Sunday had ousted Mr. Hou, who was also the board chairman and chief technology officer. Mr. Hou was fired in connection with a continuing investigation by members of the board, the release said. That review "led the board to conclude that a change of Chief Executive Officer was necessary," the company said in the release.

The securities filing said that the board's investigation found that TuSimple this year shared confidential information with Hydron, a trucking startup with operations mostly in China and funded by Chinese investors. The filing also said that TuSimple's decision to share the confidential information hadn't been disclosed to the board before TuSimple entered into a business deal with Hydron. TuSimple said it didn't know whether Hydron shared, or publicly disclosed, the confidential information, the securities filing said. WSJ, reporting on Sunday: TuSimple faces federal investigations into whether it improperly financed and transferred technology to a Chinese startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The people said the concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cfius, are examining TuSimple's relationship with Hydron, a startup that says it is developing autonomous hydrogen-powered trucks and is led by one of TuSimple's co-founders.

Investigators at the FBI and SEC are looking at whether TuSimple and its executives -- principally Chief Executive Xiaodi Hou -- breached fiduciary duties and securities laws by failing to properly disclose the relationship, the people familiar with the matter said. They are also probing whether TuSimple shared with Hydron intellectual property developed in the U.S. and whether that action defrauded TuSimple investors by sending valuable technology to an overseas adversary, the people said.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday cracked down on Chegg, an education technology firm based in Santa Clara, Calif., saying the company's "careless" approach to cybersecurity had exposed the personal details of tens of millions of users. From a report: In a legal complaint, filed on Monday morning, regulators accused Chegg of numerous data security lapses dating to 2017. Among other problems, the agency said, Chegg had issued root login credentials, essentially an all-access pass to certain databases, to multiple employees and outside contractors. Those credentials enabled many people to look at user account data, which the company kept on Amazon Web Services' online storage system.

As a result, the agency said, a former Chegg contractor was able to use company-issued credentials to steal the names, email addresses and passwords of about 40 million users in 2018. In certain cases, sensitive details on students' religion, sexual orientation, disabilities and parents' income were also taken. Some of the data was later found for sale online. Chegg's popular homework help app is used regularly by millions of high school and college students. To settle the F.T.C.'s charges, the agency said Chegg had agreed to adopt a comprehensive data security program.

A new art exhibition in San Francisco showcases some of the unique ways that artists have begun to incorporate Dall-E 2, GPT-3 and other AI systems into their work -- efforts that go well beyond just typing some text and seeing what pops out. From a report: The exhibit, "Artificial Imagination," comes amid a broad debate over the legal and artistic merits of AI-created art, as well as concerns that more powerful computers could take jobs away from humans. "Artificial Imagination" includes a range of work, from videos to still images and sculpture. While many of the pieces used Dall-E 2 to help generate images, others took a different approach. Alexander Reben, for example, used text generated by GPT-3 and then built his interpretation of the computer's description. The artists and curators said the exhibition, believed to be the first of its kind, is an important recognition that AI art is indeed art.

Hong Kong has proposed allowing retail investors to trade in cryptocurrencies and crypto exchange-traded funds and plans to conduct pilots in NFT issuance and CBDC as it looks to regain its status as a global financial hub. From a report: The city had last year proposed limiting crypto trade to professional investors, a move that saw many crypto entrepreneurs shift base to friendlier jurisdictions such as Dubai and Singapore. Hong Kong will review property rights for tokenized assets and explore legalizing smart contracts "to provide a solid legal foundation for their development," it said. It is also planning to put in place "appropriate regulations" on aspects such as "governance, stabilization and redemption mechanism" of stablecoin. The proposal comes at a time when China has ramped up its efforts to crackdown on crypto transactions and Singapore is exploring a series of stringent guidelines surrounding virtual digital assets.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will launch the pilot for a central-bank-backed digital rupee for the wholesale segment on Nov. 1, it said on Monday, identifying nine banks, including top lender State Bank of India, to participate in the project. From a report: The pilot's use case will be to settle secondary market transactions in government securities, with the e-rupee expected to make the interbank market more efficient, the RBI said in a statement. Settlements in central bank digital currency would reduce transaction costs, the RBI added. Besides SBI, the pilot will include Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank and HSBC, the RBI said.

The White House is bringing together three dozen nations, the European Union and a slew of private-sector companies for a two-day summit starting Monday that looks at how best to combat ransomware attacks. From a report: The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults. A senior Biden administration official cited recent attacks such as one that targeted the Los Angeles school district last month to underscore the urgency of the issue and the summit. The official previewed the event on the condition of anonymity. Among the administration officials planning to participate in the event are FBI Director Christopher Wray, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. President Joe Biden is not expected to attend.

"Today, tools like drones, digital recorders, and artificial intelligence are helping us listen to the sounds of nature in unprecedented ways," writes Vox, citing Karen Bakker, author of the new book Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.

But how far will this lead? Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and miniaturization has allowed scientists to stick microphones onto animals as small as honeybees. "Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities," Bakker writes.

All those devices create a ton of data, which would be impossible to go through manually. So researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (which studies sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (which studies the sounds made by entire ecosystems) are turning to artificial intelligence to sift through the piles of recordings, finding patterns that might help us understand what animals are saying to each other. There are now databases of whale songs and honeybee dances, among others, that Bakker writes could one day turn into "a zoological version of Google Translate."
In an interview with Vox, the author points out that already "We can use artificial intelligence-enabled robots to speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication. Researchers are doing this in a very rudimentary way with honeybees and dolphins and to some extent with elephants.

"Now, this raises a very serious ethical question..." I'll give you one example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. That robot is able to use the honeybees' waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it's able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we'll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way we've never done so before. This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there's a long history of the military use of animals, so that's one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells.

The Jerusalem Post reports that "Certain star clusters do not seem to be following current understandings of Isaac Newton's laws of gravity, according to new research published on Wednesday." (Specifically open star clusters, formed when thousands of stars are born in a gas cloud within a short time period.)

The researchers examined data on each stars' velocity, direction of motion and age using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission that allowed them to count the stars accurately for the very first time. The results? As the clusters dissolve, the stars accumulate on two "tidal tails:" one pulled behind the cluster and the other pushed forward. "According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail...."

When the researchers looked at the data, they found that it did not fit Newton's law of gravity and instead fit better with an alternate theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

"Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors," explained Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front. However, the first is much narrower than the second — so it's less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it. Newton's theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width...."

The simulations also coincided with the Gaia data in terms of how long the star clusters typically survive, which is much shorter than would be expected according to Newton's laws....

The MOND theory is controversial as modifications to Newton's laws of gravity would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics as well, although they would solve many problems facing cosmology.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story!

It's been one week since Python 3.11 was released — and it's "faster than ever!" So says Jay Miller, a developer on Microsoft's six-person "Faster CPython" team (which includes Python creator Guido van Rossum, and offers assistance to other core developers). Miller reports that Python 3.11 "has already seen speedups of 10-60% in some areas of the language," and offers an inside look at team.

First, how the team came together: In 2020, Core Developer Mark Shannon drafted an Implementation plan for speeding up CPython (the most common implementation) by five times. This plan proposed a 4-stage process that, as Python's creator Guido van Rossum says, "was an effort that was too much for one volunteer to accomplish".

"Right from the start, my thought was well, we should try to see if Microsoft can hire Mark and a small team of people to support him." In the previous year Van Rossum came out of retirement and joined Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer. "It was an important effort and it was too much for one person." Microsoft was open to the idea and a team of 6 engineers, including Van Rossum were established. That team has assisted other core developers in acting on this plan.
But the blog post also looks at how the team functions: Every contributor that made the switch from part-time to full-time contribution mentioned being able to get deeper into their work on the language.... The team meets regularly to discuss these things. "All six of us meet every Monday," says Van Rossum. "There's always more than enough to talk about. That is very different than as a core dev community getting together for a Sprint twice a year, like one day after the conference. That is a very special event, of course, but it doesn't feed me throughout the year." Van Rossum believes that knowledge of one another and their collaborative work gave the team a "leg up" because everyone "knows what communication styles people have and what everybody's weaknesses and strengths are...."

Shannon's original 4 stage plan has continued to evolve to have continuous optimizations for the next several years. "To make that as smooth as possible, you have to think in terms of smaller steps, right?" says [team member] Michael Droettboom. Droettboom has worked on long-term projects in the scientific community including the Hubble Space Telescope and more recently the James Web Space Telescope.... "We hope we can bring some knowledge from really large proprietary systems into what we develop for the Community." says Droettboom. "I think that's really valuable because then you're not just doing it in the abstract. Not just imagining what's going to make Python faster for real use cases, but actually measuring it." [Team member] Brandt Bucher adds in that developers working with these teams can test the impact of changes, "getting useful insights and contributions from people who maintain large, diverse codebases...." Many of the team's meetings feature core developers from other teams and companies.
The blog post highlights specific activities of team members:

• L Pereira is working on a change to how integers are represented inside Python, and "intends to change smaller integers to use native computation instead of the slower algorithms for arbitrarily large numbers."

• Irit Katriel implemented the new Exception groups and except* features in Python 3.11, and reports that "By simplifying the interpreter's internal representation of raised exceptions, I reduced the time it takes to raise and catch an exception by about 10%."

• Brandt Bucher (who helped create structural pattern matching for Python 3.10) is working on a Specialized Adaptive Interpreter (and tools like Specialist to help users move to Python).

And they've already begun working on features for future versions of Python. "You can also find out more about what the Faster CPython Team has in mind for 3.12 in their ideas repo on Github."