Star Trek: The Animated Series was a half-hour Saturday morning cartoon that premiered exactly one half century ago — yesterday. You can watch its opening credits sequence on YouTube — with its strange 1970s version of the theme song. CBS's YouTube channel also offers clips from various episodes.

Starting in 1973, it ran for two seasons — a total of just 22 episodes. But the BBC notes it kept Star Trek in people's minds after the original series had been cancelled in 1969: While The Original Series had struggled in the ratings during its initial run, the show thrived in syndication, and created the phenomenon of fan conventions (think Comic-con in the present day). Because of this, studios were interested in more Star Trek, but there was a problem: the sets had been scrapped, the costumes were gone, and it would have been cost-prohibitive to rebuild everything from scratch. NBC settled on a different approach: an animated series.

According to The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark Altman and Edward Gross (an oral history of Star Trek), Gene Roddenberry wasn't overly interested in an animated show in and of itself. However, he was willing to go along with it because he saw it as a stepping stone to another live-action show or a feature film. An animated show would energise fans, he thought, so he agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control of The Animated Series. After a fight, the network gave in. The full, regular cast returned, with the exception of Walter Koenig's Pavel Chekov, who was cut for budget reasons...

[I]t was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones... [Another episode was a sequel to The City on the Edge of Forever.] Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That's why the show didn't catch on — while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children's series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture...

Whatever is decided regarding "the canon", The Animated Series sits firmly within Star Trek's guiding ethos: Gene Roddenberry's vision for a utopian future where humans coexist peacefully with aliens as part of a Federation, and there's no poverty or war.

Late Friday a Burning Man press release claimed that "zero stuck or abandoned vehicles remain on site or on the exit road, as people have returned with friends and tow trucks to retrieve them."

But the Reno Gazette-Journal reports that as of 5 p.m. Friday, "at least a half-dozen vehicles were still scattered across miles of the Black Rock National Conservation Area, public land Burning Man leases from the Bureau of Land Management. Their drivers appeared to have made a run for the exit and got stuck in mud out on the playa. One burned-out RV that caught fire in the exit queue was still on site."

The press release from the Burning Man project claimed their entire community of attendees, sometimes called "Black Rock City," had now "disappeared, leaving no trace." But the Reno Gazette-Journal says... Entire abandoned camps were still in what had been Black Rock City, the temporary encampment that draws more than 70,000 burners each year. Tents, garbage bags, rugs, boxes, boots stuck in mud, a barbecue grill, cans of oil and even a wig were seen on Friday. Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen estimated there were still up to 10,000 people on site Thursday but a steady stream of RVS and cars continued to leave the playa... Burning Man did not return request for comment... "I am concerned about this year and the amount of stuff being left out," Allen told the Reno Gazette-Journal on Friday. "Dispatch has told me that in the last two days a lot of (car and truck) rental agencies and motor home businesses are looking for their vehicles still out there...

On Friday, the site was busy with campers who were cleaning up sites. Some abandoned camps sites had signs that said they would return. One sign said, "We will come back Thur. Fri. Sat. to clean up. Too many sick people."
The newspaper points out that event volunteers traditionally spend three weeks after the event doing a major clean-up effort. "The restoration crews they have doing that do an outstanding job," a public affairs specialist for the Bureau of Land Management told the newspaper.

"12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets," NPR reported in 2021, citing a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation."

But this week Ars Technica reports that one of those 12 "lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels." Joseph Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola's complaint, U.S. magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was "under no obligation to host" Mercola's content after terminating his channel in 2021 "for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines."

"The court found no breach because 'there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content' or be a 'storage site for users' content,'" Beeler wrote. Because Mercola's contract with YouTube was found to be enforceable and "YouTube had the discretion to take down content that harmed its users," Beeler said that Mercola did not plausibly plead claims for breach of contract or unjust enrichment.

Mercola's complaint was dismissed without leave to amend.
Thanks to ArchieBunker (Slashdot reader #96,909) for sharing the article.

Internet services has long been slow for the Winnebago Tribe in the state of Nebraska, reports the Wall Street Journal. Now the U.S. government "plans to fix that by crisscrossing the reservation with fiber-optic cable — at an average cost of $53,000 for each household and workplace connected."

While that amount exceeds the assessed value of some of the 658 homes getting hookups — at a cost of $35.2 million — "the tribe is also starting an internet company to run the network, creating jobs and competing with an existing provider known for slow customer service." While most connections will cost far less, the expense to reach some remote communities has triggered concerns over the ultimate price tag for ensuring every rural home, business, school and workplace in America has the same internet that city dwellers enjoy... The U.S. has committed more than $60 billion for what the Biden administration calls the "Internet for All" program, the latest in a series of sometimes troubled efforts to bring high-speed internet to rural areas... Providing fiber-optic cable is the industry standard, but alternative options such as satellite service are cheaper, if less reliable. Congress has left it up to state and federal officials implementing the program to decide how much is too much in hard-to-reach areas...

Defenders of the broadband programs say a simple per-location cost doesn't capture their benefits. Once built, rural fiber lines can be used to upgrade cell service or to add more connections to nearby towns...

Some of the differences can be explained by the distinct geographic areas the programs are targeting. While the FCC program included some suburbs and excluded remote locations such as Alaska, the programs run by Commerce and USDA specifically targeted far-flung regions with difficult construction conditions. "These are some of the most challenging locations that there are to reach in America," said Andy Berke, administrator of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. He cited one project in Alaska that involves a 793-mile undersea fiber cable to reach remote villages.

The Washington Post reports: Japan launched a lunar mission Thursday, overcoming multiple failures and delays to become the fifth country to head to the moon — just weeks after India — in a global race to better understand Earth's closest neighbor... It is scheduled to enter the moon's orbit in three to four months and land early next year.

The rocket is carrying two space missions: a new X-ray telescope to help scientists better understand the origins of the universe and a lightweight high-precision moon lander that will serve as the basis for future moon landing technology. The telescope separated at 8:56 a.m., and the moon lander separated at 9:29 a.m...

Japan has made several attempts to reach the moon, including its Omotenashi project to land an ultrasmall probe. In November, Japan abandoned the project after failing to restore communications with the spacecraft. Earlier this year, Tokyo-based space company ispace also pulled the plug on the first Japanese private-sector attempt to land on the moon.
Japan's high-precision lander hopes to land within 328 feet (100 meters) of its target — which the article says it "much closer than conventional lunar landers, which usually have an accuracy of several kilometers."

Huawei's launch last week of the Mate 60 Pro smartphone "shocked industry experts," reports CNN, who didn't understand how Huawei "would have the ability to manufacture such an advanced smartphone following sweeping efforts by the United States to restrict China's access to foreign chip technology."

And in a related note, CNN adds that South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix "is investigating how two of its memory chips mysteriously ended up inside the Mate 60 Pro, a controversial smartphone launched by Huawei last week." Shares in Hynix fell more than 4% on Friday after it emerged that two of its products, a 12 gigabyte (GB) LPDDR5 chip and 512 GB NAND flash memory chip, were found inside the Huawei handset by TechInsights, a research organization based in Canada specializing in semiconductors, which took the phone apart for analysis. "The significance of the development is that there are restrictions on what SK Hynix can ship to China," G Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, told CNN. "Where do these chips come from? The big question is whether any laws were violated."

A Hynix spokesperson told CNN Friday that it was aware of its chips being used in the Huawei phone and had started investigating the issue.

The company "no longer does business with Huawei since the introduction of the U.S. restrictions against the company," it said in a statement... Industry insiders said it was possible that Huawei had purchased the memory chips from the secondary market and not directly from the manufacturer. It's also possible Huawei may have had a stockpile of components accumulated before the U.S. export curbs kicked in fully.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

A United Nations report "says that overreliance on remote learning technology during the pandemic led to 'staggering' education inequality around the world," reports the New York Times. The 655-page report from the United Nations' education/culture agency UNESCO asks if we've just experienced a worldwide "ed-tech tragedy."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Some of the main findings of the report include:

1. The promise of education technology was overstated
2. Remote online learning worsened education disparities
3. Learning was hindered and altered
4. Regulation and guardrails are needed.
Remember that the report covers countries around the world, with different levels of economic development. One section of the report is actually titled, "Most learners were left behind," citing estimates that "at least half of all students expected to access remote learning systems to continue their education were unable to do so due to technology gaps... In many parts of the world, accessing education via a technology portal was so uncommon and so unrealistic that many families did not even know that the option existed when schools closed." This should not have come as a particular surprise. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the specialized agency of the United Nations for ICT, estimated that approximately 3.7 billion people — roughly half of the world's population — lacked a functional internet connection in 2020... Countries around the world invested heavily in internet-connected solutions for education, even though these solutions commonly reached only a minority of students, resulting in a bifurcation of educational opportunity.
The report begins with a warning from the agency's assistant director-general for education. "Ultimately, we should heed this publication's recommendation to exercise greater humility and caution when considering the educational promise of the latest technological marvels."

Rotten Tomatoes celebrated its 25th year of assigning scores to movies based on their aggregate review. Now Vulture writes that Rotten Tomatoes "can make or break" movies, "with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit". But unfortuately, the site "is also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked."

Vulture tells the story of a movie-publicity company contacting "obscure, often self-published critics" to say the film's teams "feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics" — while making undisclosed payments of $50 or more.) A critic asking if it's okay to pan the movie was informed that "super nice" critics move their bad reviews onto sites not included in Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Vulture says after bringing this to the site's attention, Rotten Tomatoes "delisted a number of the company's movies from its website and sent a warning to writers who reviewed them." But is there a larger problem? Filmmaker Paul Schrader even opines that "Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do...." A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they're more likely to boast that a film has been "Certified Fresh...."

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here's how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It's a film publicist's job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie's review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales... [I]n February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film's grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.

In studios' defense, Rotten Tomatoes' hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one's bat. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Cannes, the world's snootiest film festival, from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33 percent. "What they should've done," says Publicist No. 1, "was have simultaneous screenings in the States for critics who might've been more friendly." A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69 percent. "They had a low Rotten Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks before release, and that was deadly," says a third publicist.

On August 30th the University of Michigan announced it had finally restored its internet connectivity and Wi-Fi network, according to the Ann Arbor News, "after several days of outages caused by a 'significant security concern,' officials said." The outage coincided with the first days of the new school year, although "classes continued through the outage." The internet was shut down on 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 27, after the Information Assurance team at the university identified a security concern, according to previous reporting. The Information Assurance team fights cybersecurity threats and malicious actors... The investigation into the security issue is ongoing and no other information will be released, said Santa Ono, president of University of Michigan.
But a local CBS station heard some theories from cybersecurity experts: "The fact that they took their systems down, like proactively took their systems down, is the indication that it is a cybersecurity incident," said co-founder and CTO of SensCy Dave Kelly. "The reason why you do that is that you don't want it to spread further."

"They probably didn't know to what extent they'd been compromised," senior penetration tester and ethical hacker at NetWorks Group Chris Neuwirth said. "They probably didn't know how many accounts were compromised or the initial entry point that the threat actor used to gain access into the network." Sources close to the investigation told CBS News Detroit that U-M detected malware on its Wi-Fi network and decided to shut it down in response.

So, did the school avoid a disaster? Neuwirth thinks it very well could have. "They likely had very robust backups and data recover, plans, procedures in place that helped them make the decision very confidently and rapidly," he said. "Four days in that they're already bringing up their systems tells me that it's likely that a lot of what they had been preparing for worked."

Kelly said these types of incidents are on the rise. "There's been a large increase in cybersecurity incidents," he said. It's been trending up, quite frankly, for the last several years. It used to be that these threat actors were targeting the government and Fortune 500 companies, but they've started to, more and more over the years, look at universities."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader regoli for sharing the news.

"On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.... The information on his devices would provide a remarkable window into what has become the world's most manipulated sport, according to betting regulators. Thousands of texts, gambling receipts and bank transfers laid out Sargsyan's ascent in remarkable detail..."

That's part one of a two-part story in which more than 181 tennis players are involved, and from more than 30 countries, fixing more than 375 professional tennis matches. The Washington Post reveals the years-long investigation that began when Belgium's gambling commission tipped off their federal prosecutor's office to "irregular wagers on obscure tennis matches played around the world."

The breakthrough came with geolocation data on a cellphone, cross-referenced against the the names of people who'd recently flown to that country... The bets were made in small towns in the Flemish countryside. The gamblers appeared to be acting on inside information; they consistently won even when they bet against steep odds... [Nicolas Borremans, a 45-year-old police investigator based in the Flanders region of Belgium] knew little about sports. He had never watched an entire tennis match. But even a cursory description of the case was enough for him to see how a gambling operation might be used to launder money...

Within a few months, he had traced the accounts of four men who had placed suspicious bets in Belgium, all Armenian immigrants. Their wagers were mostly small — a few hundred euros each — ostensibly to avoid scrutiny. Almost all of the bets were on low-level professional tennis tournaments, where players earned barely enough to pay for their travel. Borremans secured wiretaps on the gamblers' phones, and a team of Armenian interpreters listened in. It became clear that the gamblers were working for someone. They received detailed instructions about which matches to bet on. They weren't gambling just on the outcomes, but on specific scores for sets and games... Borremans added more gamblers to his diagram. "Money mules," he called them. Eventually, he would uncover 1,671 accounts at gambling establishments across Europe. Many were registered by working-class Armenians: mechanics, a pizza deliveryman, a taxi driver.
While the tennis tour "has in recent months issued a raft of bans and suspensions," the article points out that the scale of the gambler/tennis player network "has remained a secret until now, in part because the tour is still working on active investigations related to the operation." (The professional tennis tour has its own investigation unit "formed in part because of pervasive allegations of match-fixing in the sport," which assisted the Belgian police.)

The operation's "maestro" had tried to evade investigators. (One French player received his payment in 21 separate transfers from Armenia.) The maestro also gave the tennis players anonymously-registered SIM cards for communication. But unfortunately, the article points out, every professional tennis player "signs a contract agreeing to hand their phones over to tennis investigators at any time if required." Soon investigators were reading the mastermind's text messages — and even wiretapping his phone calls to his mother.

His phone's search history would later offer a glimpse into his life and concerns. Sargsyan scoured the internet for references to himself and his players ("maestro tennis," "match fixing tennis hossam"); he did some broader research into his world ("tennis corruption," "armenian mafia"); he searched for ways to spend his new fortune ("escort geneve," "villa rent close port mallorca") But, mostly, he searched for new bookmakers ("croatia betting shop," "usa betting," "mybet Australia").
Caught in the investigation were Sebastian Rivera, the Chilean coach based in the United States, and Slovakian tennis player Dagmara Baskova (who says she was paid 10,000 euros for each thrown match). Another French player told investigators "Since 2015, I estimate that I have accepted to deliberately lose or manipulate the outcome of 20 to 30 matches for Maestro, both in singles and doubles." Some tennis players infuriated the maestro by tipping off other gamblers about their plans to throw matches.

Leaving the courtroom for his own trial, the maestro gave this response to the Post reporter asking how he felt about the courtroom proceedings. "If the prosecutor knew what I know, there would be many more people on trial." Later the maestro was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud, money laundering, and leading a criminal organization.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the senior space editor at Ars Technica: In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently U.S. taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program. Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program. "Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states...

Moreover, the report indicates that NASA has not regularly updated its five-year production cost estimates for the rocket. The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage. Another problem with NASA's cost estimates is that they do not appear to account for delays to Artemis missions. It is probable that the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight around the Moon, will launch no earlier than 2025. The Artemis III crewed landing will likely slip to at least 2026, if not more, with additional delays down the line...

NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned about the costs of the SLS rocket. "NASA recognizes the need to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to do so," the report states. "Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Cryptocurrency trading volume declined in August to the lowest level of the year, another sign of waning investor interest since the collapse of digital asset prices from all-time highs in late 2021. The combined monthly volume of so-called spot and derivatives trading fell 11.5% to $2.09 trillion, and was the second-lowest monthly total since October 2020, according to data compiled by CCData. "The (spot) trading volumes on centralized exchanges have remained low since April this year and are now comparable to the stagnant trading activity in the bear market of 2019," CCData said in a report published Thursday.

The tepid interest appears to be carrying into September, with crypto bellwether Bitcoin little changed through much of the first week of the month. Bitcoin, which accounts for about half of crypto's $1 trillion market capitalization, was little changed at around $25,800 on Thursday. It almost reached $69,000 in November 2021. [...] While Binance remains the largest exchange for crypto spot trading, its market share shrank for the sixth straight month, settling at 38.5%, the lowest since August 2022, according to CCData.

A web caching issue resulted in some Wyze security camera owners being able to see webcam feeds that weren't theirs. The Verge reports: Earlier on Friday, users on Reddit made posts about the issue. "Went to check on my cameras and they are all gone be replaced with a new one... and this isn't mine!" wrote one user. "Apologies if this is your house / dog... I don't want it showing up as much as you don't want it!" "I am able to click the events tab and see ALL the events on this random person's camera INSIDE their house," wrote another. "I don't know why, but I can see someone else's camera," wrote another.

Each thread has comments from other Reddit users reporting similar issues. Shockingly, I even saw some instances of people claiming they saw the same cameras that other people did. The user reports indicated that they were seeing the other feeds through Wyze's web viewer at view.wyze.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019. But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance.

The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it."

As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.