CNBC reports: Cryptocurrency miners are using compromised Google Cloud accounts for computationally-intensive mining purposes, Google has warned. The search giant's cybersecurity team provided details in a report published Wednesday. The so-called "Threat Horizons" report aims to provide intelligence that allows organizations to keep their cloud environments secure. "Malicious actors were observed performing cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud instances," Google wrote in an executive summary of the report...

Google said 86% of 50 recently compromised Google Cloud accounts were used to perform cryptocurrency mining. In the majority of cases, cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded within 22 seconds of the account being compromised, Google said.

"Remember how Microsoft spent years in hot water in the late '90s and early '00s by forcing Internet Explorer on its customers?" asks ZDNet.

"European open-source cloud company Nextcloud does." Now, with a coalition of other European Union (EU) software and cloud organizations and companies called the "Coalition for a Level Playing Field," Nextcloud has formally complained to the European Commission about Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior by aggressively bundling its OneDrive cloud, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and 11.

Nextcloud claims that by pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft, the Windows giant is limiting consumer choice and creating an unfair barrier for other companies offering competing services. Specifically, Microsoft has grown its EU market share to 66%, while local providers' market share declined from 26% to 16%. Microsoft has done this not by any technical advantage or sales benefits, but by heavily favoring its own products and services, self-preferencing over other services. While self-preferencing is not illegal per se under EU competition laws, if a company abuses its dominant market position, it can break the law. Nextcloud states that Microsoft has outright blocked other cloud service vendors by leveraging its position as gatekeeper to extend its reach in neighboring markets, pushing users deeper into its ecosystems. Thus, more specialized EU companies can't compete on merit, as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access....

So, Nextcloud is asking the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition to prevent this kind of abusive behavior and keep the market competitive and fair for all players. Nextcloud is doing this by filing an official complaint with this body. In addition, Nextcloud has also filed a request with the German antitrust authorities, the Bundeskartellamt, for an investigation against Microsoft. With its partners, it's also discussing filing a similar complaint in France.

Nextcloud is being joined in its complaint by several open-source, non-profit organizations. These include the European DIGITAL SME Alliance; the Document Foundation, LibreOffice's backing organization; and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)... Numerous businesses are also supporting Nextcloud's legal action. This includes Abilian, an open-source software publisher; DAASI, an open-source identity management company; and Mailfence.

"According to a report in The Telegraph, Raspberry Pi Trading, the arm responsible for the creation of the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico and the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W could soon be listed with a value of more than £370m ($493m)," reports Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi Trading has hired advisors from two investment banks, Stifel and Liberum to advise on floating the company in spring 2022. The news comes just a few months after Raspberry Pi received a £45m ($60m) investment from Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust which was used to fund the development of new products as demand increased during the global pandemic. A source close to The Telegraph has valued Raspberry Pi at a premium of $500m...

"Obviously, the $45m we raised in September takes away some of the urgency around figuring out how we fund the future. On the other hand, we have great plans for what we are going to do over the next five years." Eben Upton, talking to The Telegraph.

CNN profiles Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player — and the state of the chess community today: Interest in chess spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, and again in October 2020 after the release of the Netflix series, "The Queen's Gambit." In the first three weeks after its debut, sales of chess sets went up by 87% in the U.S. and sales of books about chess leaped 603%, according to marketing research company NPD Group. Not since the 1970s, when American legend Bobby Fischer burst onto the scene, has the game captured the attention of the world like this....

Carlsen tries hard to be indifferent toward anything at all during the press conference and interview. But he does have strong opinions on how the game should be changed to make sure it holds the attention of the current groundswell of interested players. "I've been somebody who's supported having quicker games in the world championship for a long time," he said. "I think for people who are not into chess at all, who don't know anything about the game, you're more naturally attracted to quicker games." World championship games can last hours and often end in ties because mistakes are so rare...

Carlsen's love of fast-paced chess isn't surprising, considering he is the current world champion in both "Rapid" and "Blitz" formats — games that generally last for 15 minutes or less. His tiebreak wins in previous championship games were both in the rapid format and there are numerous videos on YouTube where his quick thinking is showcased. Computers are now powerful enough to calculate billions of possible move combinations in seconds, ably deciding the best possible option. It makes preparation more exacting and less enjoyable, and Carlsen thinks quicker games would help solve that...

Carlsen could rightly be considered the greatest chess player ever. He has been the world champion for eight years and holds the longest unbeaten run in history. He only trails Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in weeks spent as the highest rated player.
But the New York Times points out that Carlsen has done something none of his chess-playing predecessors have ever done. "He has leveraged his fame to become one of the chess world's leading impresarios. In the process, he has amassed a small fortune." Carlsen has several private sponsorship agreements, including with Unibet, a sports betting site; Isklar, a Norwegian water company; and Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a Norwegian law firm. But the main vehicle for his business ventures is Play Magnus, a company that he co-founded in 2013, the year he became world champion. Initially designed as an app that allowed users to mimic Carlsen's playing style and strength at different ages, Play Magnus has expanded, mostly through acquisitions, to become a company with a dozen subsidiaries. It now includes an online playing site, multiple teaching and training platforms, and digital and book publishing arms.

According to Andreas Thome, Play Magnus's chief executive, the company has about 250 employees and about four million registered users of its products and proprietary learning programs. One year after it went public on the Euronext Growth Oslo stock exchange, Play Magnus now has a market capitalization of about $115 million. It is the only publicly traded chess company in the world.
Carlsen's personal stake in the company is worth nearly $9 million, the Times points out — even as Carlsen is now competing in the world chess championship for a $2.24 million prize, where "as much as 60% will go to the winner."

In the 14-game match, the first two games...all ended in a draw. "The result means there have now been 16 draws in a row in world championship games played at classical time controls," the Guardian pointed out, "dating back five years to game 11 of Carlsen's match against Sergey Karjakin in November 2016."

And then the third game, played Sunday....also ended in a draw.

Movie theatre chain AMC and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 Spider-man NFTs to people who buy/reserve tickets for December 16th's premiere of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The special tickets go on sale tonight at midnight EST on the AMC web site and app (available only to people who've signed up for one of the chain's special perks programs like Stubs Premiere, A-List, and Investor Connect). "The movie ticket must be scanned at the theatre when the guest arrives for the movie," explains the movie industry site Boxoffice Pro. "If the ticket purchase is refunded or the ticket goes unused, or is not scanned, the NFT code will not be delivered." The Spider-Man NFT will be available to be redeemed at a dedicated site operated by WAX, an energy efficient, ultra-low carbon footprint blockchain and the first certified carbon neutral. WAX is the most utilized blockchain in the world processing 15 million transactions daily.

Adam Aron, Chairman of the Board and CEO of AMC, commented: "Our AMC Theatres guests and our AMC Entertainment shareholders have been calling for AMC to get into the world of NFTs, and we couldn't imagine a more perfect way to start doing so than with our good friends at Sony Pictures."
Over 100 NFT designs will be available (designed by Cub Studios), the announcement points out

In a tweet Sunday, AMC's CEO said the idea came from the company's shareholders.

This week a Microsoft blog post announced they're opening two new data centers in Cheyenne, "built with sustainable design and operations in mind, contributing to Microsoft's commitment to being carbon negative." Our current and new datacenters will use adiabatic cooling, which uses outside air instead of water for cooling when temperatures are below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. This process uses less electricity and up to 90 percent less water than other water-based cooling systems. We've already invested over $500K in sustainability grants to local organizations that help preserve Wyoming's natural environment including Crow Creek Revival that aims to promote, enhance, restore, and revitalize the region's key watershed.
Building the data centers will also create 700 jobs "during peak construction," Microsoft adds. And they're also "investing in new water, sewer, and road infrastructure to create easier access to Bison Business Park, which will also support the growth of new businesses in Wyoming."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares more details: "I appreciate Microsoft's commitment to Wyoming and thank them for the benefits they have brought to multiple sectors of our economy," said Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. "The incentives that set this train in motion are working."

Sergio Loureiro, VP of Core Operations for Microsoft's Datacenters, suggested that Wyoming's children are also benefiting from the incentives and data center tax exemptions: "We've partnered with the Wyoming Department of Education to host ongoing computer science training for more than 30 school districts across the state," Loureiro explained, "impacting more than 60,000 K-12 students.

"We're also collaborating with [Microsoft-backed] Code.org and the University of Wyoming to build the capacity of hundreds of K12 teachers to offer computer science education to thousands of students across the state. Microsoft's TEALS high school computer science program has also partnered with six Wyoming high schools to build high-quality computer science education for approximately 500 students in Laramie, Gillette, Douglas, Casper, and Buffalo."
Microsoft also says they're investing over $350,000 to launch free WiFi at key community locations "helping more than 100,000 visitors and residents annually stay connected" — plus over a million dollars to launch three adult upskilling programs.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed "a kind of genetic toolbox" for tiny one-centimeter jellfyfish, reports Phys.org. Specifically, the jellyfish "have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated." Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal's neural activity as it behaves naturally. In other words, the team can read a jellyfish's mind as it feeds, swims, evades predators, and more, in order to understand how the animal's relatively simple brain coordinates its behaviors. A paper describing the new study appears in the journal Cell on November 24....

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal's entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on "eating" even without the rest of the animal's body.

This decentralized body plan seems to be a highly successful evolutionary strategy, as jellyfish have persisted throughout the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors...? [T]hough the network of jellyfish neurons originally seemed diffuse and unstructured, the researchers found a surprising degree of organization that only became visible with their fluorescent system.
Ultimately the researchers say they've identified "patches" of neurons that work together, and they now want to study how various "modules" of neuron groups are coordinating.

"For Halo fans who only care about multiplayer, 'Halo Infinite' is a free-to-play game," writes the Washington Post. "But improbably, it's messing up the free-to-play part." [I]ts progression system has been widely criticized for being too slow. You can only advance...and earn rewards by completing specific objectives for a few hundred experience points. Nothing else counts toward your progress besides a morsel of experience points earned just by playing a match, win or lose. Many of these challenges distract from the objective of winning matches, like when players are asked to use certain weapons or vehicles to get a kill. And since the current playlist system means you can't choose what game type you'll play, oftentimes you'll see people running around using less-than-viable guns instead of, say, capturing the flag in a game of Capture the Flag...

Progression by itself is a tricky balancing act for developer 343 Industries, a studio that has never released a free-to-play game before. The issue is exacerbated by separating rewards out to be used only for specific armor sets. So for example, if you earn a blue color coating for armor, it's applicable to only one type of armor. Currently, there are samurai-themed items on sale in the digital shop, including a sword belt for $15. The value of the sword is significantly lowered once you realize it can only be used along with the armor set unlocked by playing the event. There's a surprising lack of cosmetic interoperability: If you want to wear the sword belt on your Mark VII armor, you're out of luck. "Infinite" restricts armor customization to specific "core" armor sets, like the Mark VII or Mark V. Anything samurai-related can only be attached to the samurai armor set.

If all of that sounds confusing, it is, and it's one of the main reasons the game's monetization needs a rethink. Regardless of your opinion on the value of cosmetic-only rewards, 343 Industries had years of industry research to fall back on to implement these features better, communicate them more clearly and understand how challenge-only progression might divide the player base between people who focus only on completing challenges and those who'd rather work toward the objectives of a match.

All this criticism comes with a big caveat: The core gameplay of "Halo Infinite" has received almost universal praise. The game is undeniably fun for almost anyone who touches it. But the fun turns to frustration if players don't feel sufficiently rewarded for the experience. Therein lies the great divide in the Halo audience. Longtime Halo players like myself play the games because, well, they feel fun to play; "Halo Infinite" succeeds on those merits. But players who are accustomed to earning cosmetic rewards in free-to-play games feel cheated when those rewards don't come fast enough. That's just how multiplayer games work these days....

"Halo Infinite" was very nearly a home run, but 343 Industries is struggling coming to grips with the free-to-play reality, and the audience is left confused and frustrated because of it.

"A team of researchers has finally created a long-sought locally testable code that can immediately betray whether it's been corrupted..." reports Quanta magazine.

"Many thought local testability would never be achieved in its ideal form." Now, in a preprint released on November 8, the computer scientist Irit Dinur of the Weizmann Institute of Science and four mathematicians, Shai Evra, Ron Livne, Alex Lubotzky and Shahar Mozes, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have found it. "It's one of the most remarkable phenomena that I know of in mathematics or computer science," said Tom Gur of the University of Warwick. "It's been the holy grail of an entire field."

Their new technique transforms a message into a super-canary, an object that testifies to its health better than any other message yet known. Any corruption of significance that is buried anywhere in its superstructure becomes apparent from simple tests at a few spots. "This is not something that seems plausible," said Madhu Sudan of Harvard University. "This result suddenly says you can do it."

Most prior methods for encoding data relied on randomness in some form. But for local testability, randomness could not help. Instead, the researchers had to devise a highly nonrandom graph structure entirely new to mathematics, which they based their new method on. It is both a theoretical curiosity and a practical advance in making information as resilient as possible....

To get a sense of what their graph looks like, imagine observing it from the inside, standing on a single edge. They construct their graph such that every edge has a fixed number of squares attached. Therefore, from your vantage point you'd feel as if you were looking out from the spine of a booklet. However, from the other three sides of the booklet's pages, you'd see the spines of new booklets branching from them as well. Booklets would keep branching out from each edge ad infinitum. "It's impossible to visualize. That's the whole point," said Lubotzky. "That's why it is so sophisticated...."

[A] test at one node can reveal information about errors from far away nodes. By making use of higher dimensions, the graph is ultimately connected in ways that go beyond what we typically even think of as connections... It establishes a new state of the art for error-correcting codes, and it also marks the first substantial payoff from bringing the mathematics of high-dimensional expanders to bear on codes...

Practical and theoretical applications should soon follow. Different forms of locally testable codes are now being used in decentralized finance, and an optimal version will allow even better decentralized tools.

Slashdot reader ellithligraw brings the news that the oldest person on earth has died in the Philippines this week at age 124.

CNN Philippines reports: Susano was born on Sept. 11, 1897, which was before the country became independent from Spanish rule. As of September this year, Guinness World Records was still verifying the documents needed for her to be officially declared as the world's oldest living person.
NextShark calls Susano "the last surviving person born in the 19th century." And they add that, according to Manila Bulletin, "Susano has 14 children. One of them is considered a centenarian at the age of 101."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares the New York Times' report on a 64-year-old man who participated in a clinical trial by Vertex Pharmaceuticals involving an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells grown from stem cells.

"Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels." Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Mr. Shelton said. "It's like a miracle." Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution.

The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes. It is not intended as a treatment for the more common Type 2 diabetes.

"We've been looking for something like this to happen literally for decades," said Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. He wants to see the result, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, replicated in many more people. He also wants to know if there will be unanticipated adverse effects and if the cells will last for a lifetime or if the treatment would have to be repeated. But, he said, "bottom line, it is an amazing result...."

For Mr. Shelton the moment of truth came a few days after the procedure, when he left the hospital. He measured his blood sugar. It was perfect. He and Ms. Shelton had a meal. His blood sugar remained in the normal range.

Mr. Shelton wept when he saw the measurement.

"The only thing I can say is 'thank you.'"
15 people in a lab spent over 20 years working on converting the stem cells, the article reports. The total cost: about $50 million.

"It's one thing to produce nanoscale devices, but it's another to study and improve on them — they're so small they can't reflect enough light to get a good look," reports Engadget. "A breakthrough might make that possible, however." Univeristy of California Riverside researchers have built technology that squeezes tungsten lamp light into a 6-nanometer spot at the end of a silver nanowire. That lets scientists produce color imaging at an "unprecedented" level, rather than having to settle for molecular vibrations. The developers modified an existing "superfocusing" tool (already used to measure vibrations) to detect signals across the entire visible spectrum. Light travels in a flashlight-like conical path. When the nanowire's tip passes over an object, the system records that item's influence on the beam shape and color (including through a spectrometer). With two pieces of specrtra for every 6nm pixel, the team can create color photos of carbon nanotubes that would otherwise appear gray.
"The researchers expect that the new technology can be an important tool to help the semiconductor industry make uniform nanomaterials with consistent properties for use in electronic devices," according to an announcement from University of California Riverside, adding that the new full-color nano-imaging technique "could also be used to improve understanding of catalysis, quantum optics, and nanoelectronics."

How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt?

For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.) "Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM.

Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation.

One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..."

The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community."
And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."

Long-time Slashdot reader thisisnotreal writes: Long sought-after, and previously thought impossible — a McMaster University PhD student in Hamilton Canada demonstrates a cost-effective and simple laser in silicon.

This could have dramatic consequences for the SiP (Silicon Photonics) — a hot topic for those working in the field of integrated optics. Integrated optics is a critical technology involved in advanced telecommunications networks, and showing increasing importance in quantum research and devices, such as QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) and in various entanglement type experiments (involved in Quantum Compute).
"This is the holy grail of photonics," says Jonathan Bradley, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Physics (and the student's co-supervisor) in an announcement from McMaster University. "Fabricating a laser on silicon has been a longstanding challenge." Bradley notes that Miarabbas Kiani's achievement is remarkable not only for demonstrating a working laser on a silicon chip, but also for doing so in a simple, cost-effective way that's compatible with existing global manufacturing facilities. This compatibility is essential, as it allows for volume manufacturing at low cost. "If it costs too much, you can't mass produce it," says Bradley.

The Los Angeles Times summarizes the results of a new medical study conducted by Northwestern University researchers on antibody levels protecting against Covid-19 in 974 people. "Those who were immunized against COVID-19 with two doses of an mRNA vaccine and received a booster shot about eight months later saw their levels of neutralizing antibodies skyrocket.

"Among this group of 33 fully vaccinated and boosted people, the median level of these antibodies was 23 times higher one week after the booster shot than it had been just before the tune-up dose." What's more, their median post-booster antibody level was three times higher than was typical for another group of people whose antibodies were measured a few weeks after getting their second dose of vaccine, when they're close to their peak.

And it was 53 times higher than that of a group of 76 unvaccinated people who had recovered from COVID-19 just two to six weeks earlier. Even compared to a group of 73 people who had weathered a bout with COVID-19 and went on to get two doses of an mRNA vaccine, the boosted group's median antibody level was 68% higher.

Study leader Alexis Demonbreun, a cell biologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the data demonstrate that no matter how well protected a vaccinated person may think she is, getting a booster shot is likely to increase her neutralizing antibodies — and with it, her immunity — considerably. And because scientists expect large antibody responses to create more durable immunity, the protection afforded by the booster should last longer than the initial two-shot regimen did...

Among their other findings: After receiving two doses of vaccine, people who'd already had an asymptomatic infection were typically no better protected than vaccinated people who had never been infected.