Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb brings news from the world of Linux desktop environments: After two years of development Xfce 4.18 is now live!

Several new features are available in each package. Thunar the default file manager for Xfce now includes a image preview sidebar, an editable toolbar that let's you reorder toolbar icons, file highlights, recursive search, and expanded undo/redo support.

Several new desktop settings allowing you to further configure the layout of the desktop are included. Additionally in this release for the desktop are, adaptive vsync support with GLX, and more enhancements for working with Wayland (though it may take a few more releases until everything works completely under Wayland).

You can find out more about the new release from the official tour here.
Also included is a new-filename Input Dialogue widget and a preliminary GUI-based shortcut editor...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have discovered a record number of dead fir trees in Oregon, in a foreboding sign of how drought and the climate crisis are ravaging the American west. A recent arial survey found that more than a million acres of forest contain trees that have succumbed to stressors exacerbated by a multi-year drought. Images released by the US forest service show Oregon's lush green expanses dotted with ominous swathes of red. "It is stunning," said Daniel DePinte, an aerial survey program manager with the Forest Service who led the agency's Pacific north-west region aerial survey, noting that this year saw the highest mortality rate for firs in this area in history. These evergreen conifers are less able to survive in drought conditions than other heartier trees that line the landscapes.

He and his colleagues scanned the slopes from planes several times between June and October, detailing the devastation on digital maps. During that time, it became clear that this year would be unlike anything he had seen before. The report is still being finalized but dead trees were spotted in areas across 1.1m acres of Oregon forest. The scientists have taken to dubbing it "firmageddon." "The size of this is enormous," DePinte said. "A lot of people out there think climate change is just impacting the ice caps or some low-level island out there but it is actually impacting right here in our backyard," he added. "If this drought continues as climate change keeps on, and we continue ignoring what nature is showing us across the globe – it doesn't bode well at all." "It will be a different forest with a different feel and it will happen across the landscape as nature decides," DePinte said. "Nature is saying there is just not enough to support the firs, and they will overtime be eliminated from those areas." "Scientists have expected to see signs of stress in the forests, but the suddenness of the spike in mortality was alarming," adds the report. "Before this year, the largest area where dead trees was recorded in Oregon was in 1952 where die-offs were spotted across roughly 550,000 acres."

"The flood of warmth and light once guarded by a thick canopy can increase stream temperatures or make space for invasive species once kept out by shade. Some species will thrive in the shift. But others will perish." The tree deaths also heighten the risk of wildfires.

Jamming and spoofing attacks can cripple GPS connections entirely or make something appear in the wrong location, causing disruption and safety issues. Just ask Russia. From a report: New data analysis reveals that multiple major Russian cities appear to have faced widespread GPS disruption during the past week. The signal interference follows Ukraine launching long-range drone attacks deep into Russian territory, and it may act as a way to potentially stop drones that rely upon GPS for navigation, experts say. The GPS interference has "expanded on a scale that hasn't been seen before," says Erik Kannike, a program manager at Estonian defense intelligence firm SensusQ who has been monitoring the situation. "What we're seeing now, since about a week ago, is GPS jamming bubbles covering hundreds if not thousands of kilometers around tactical cities."

The GPS issues were first spotted by the monitoring system GPSJam, which uses data from planes to track problems with the satellite navigation system. The website has logged an increasing number of GPS disturbances in the Russian cities of Saratov, Volgograd, and Penza since the start of December. All of the cities are in Eastern Russia and within hundreds of kilometers of the border with Ukraine. On December 5, GPSJam logged a limited amount of GPS interference in Russia -- the majority of registered interference took place around Moscow, where the Kremlin for years has tampered with GPS connections. However, since December 11, multiple areas of the country have faced GPS disruption, data gathered by GPSJam shows. In addition, wireless data analytics firm Aurora Insight measured an increase in GPS signal levels in the area at the start of December -- a sign that potential GPS interference could have happened.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to a recent IDC forecast, the PC and tablet markets are expected to shrink. Shipments for tablets and PCs will decline almost 12% in 2022, the research firm reported, and are expected to decline further in 2023. But excess inventory is already forcing suppliers to heavily discount products and shift from the premium segment to more mid-range products, the analysts said. On the other hand, the report states that tablet and PC shipments will continue to remain above pre-pandemic levels. But uncertain economic conditions will threaten inventory and increase market saturation next year.

"The reality is that both PC and tablet makers will struggle in the coming months as not only are volumes expected to decline, but so will average selling prices," Jitesh Ubrani, IDC's research manager for mobility and consumer device trackers, said in a release. In October of this year, IDC reported that tablet shipments were down 8.8%, signaling the fifth straight quarter of the tablet market's decline. This market contraction followed two years of massive growth, which can be mostly attributed to economic factors.

"When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they're not expected," reports the Register: Null in this context is an assignment value indicating the absence of a value or referenced object.... Dart, an object-oriented, garbage-collected C-like language that once aspired to replace JavaScript, supported sound null safety — a way to prevent errors from accessing variables set to null — as of version 2.12. But it maintained modes for running code without null safety or with partial null safety. Dart 3 will no longer entertain those suboptimal possibilities.

"Our next release, Dart 3, completes the journey to a fully sound null safe language," explained Michael Thomsen, product manager on Dart and Flutter, in a blog post. "As the last step of that journey, we're removing several historical Dart language and SDK artifacts, including removing support for running without sound null safety." Sound null safety, Thomsen explains, means that a non-nullable variable never contains a null value. Not every implementation of null safety is so certain: TypeScript, for example, is unsound — you can assign a null value to a non-null variable. C# has exceptions to its null checks. And Kotlin also has exceptions.

Dart's transition will help catch type-related bugs at compile time, and should improve code readability, maintainability, and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. There's a cost however. Sound null safety will be the only option so pubspec files — Dart package metadata — with an SDK constraint set for less than 2.12 will no longer resolve in Dart 3. According to Thomsen, about 85 percent of Flutter code (which is written in Dart) supports sound null safety at this point. Those with apps and packages in the remaining 15 percent are urged to adapt their code prior to Dart 3's arrival....

Following the release of Dart 3, the next significant milestone for the language is likely to be support for compiling Dart code into WebAssembly (Wasm), which will allow Flutter Web apps to run as native code in browsers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Following Google's beta rollout of the feature in October, passkeys are now hitting Chrome stable M108. "Passkey" is built on industry standards and backed by all the big platform vendors -- Google, Apple, Microsoft -- along with the FIDO Alliance. Google's latest blog says: "With the latest version of Chrome, we're enabling passkeys on Windows 11, macOS, and Android." The Google Password Manager on Android is ready to sync all your passkeys to the cloud, and if you can meet all the hardware requirements and find a supporting service, you can now sign-in to something with a passkey. [...]

Now that this is actually up and running on Chrome 108 and a supported OS, you should be able to see the passkey screen under the "autofill" section of the Chrome settings (or try pasting chrome://settings/passkeys into the address bar). Next up we'll need more websites and services to actually support using a passkey instead of a password to sign in. Google Account support would be a good first step -- right now you can use a passkey for two-factor authentication with Google, but you can't replace your password yet. Everyone's go-to example of passkeys is the passkeys.io demo site, which we have a walkthrough of here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Joe Bowser is a computer scientist based in Port Moody, British Columbia, who has long loved Raspberry Pis. He uses the low-cost, single-board computers, which were launched in February 2012 by a UK-based company of the same name, for many of his tech projects. Those include linking the Raspberry Pi up to a 3D printer, and using the Pi to run a machine-learning demo. There's one use case that Bowser described as "the most important": using a Raspberry Pi to identify the use of IMSI catchers -- telephone eavesdropping devices that snoop on phone calls and text messages -- by law enforcement. Protesters opposing new oil pipelines happen to pass by Bowser's house regularly. He thinks cops shouldn't spy on them. So he's trying to help out the protesters using his tech knowledge. To do that, he uses Raspberry Pis. Or more accurately, he did. Bowser has forsworn using the computers ever again. He and many others are expressing their displeasure with the company on social media.

The controversy began yesterday when Raspberry Pi posted an announcement on Twitter and Mastodon: "We hired a policeman and it's going really great." The company linked to a laudatory blog post on its website announcing it had hired an ex-police officer, Toby Roberts, as its maker-in-residence. "I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear," Roberts is quoted as saying in the post. "You really don't want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I'd disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today." A subsection of the Raspberry Pi community expressed concern about the blase way the company presented intrusive covert surveillance. (The news caused particular ire on Mastodon, leading some to describe Roberts as the burgeoning social media platform's first "main character.") [...]

Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi's cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. "We didn't put a content warning on it, because we don't put a content warning on meat," Upton said. "There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that." She also claimed that part of the vitriolic response could be because Raspberry Pi is struggling with supply chain difficulties at present, and people "were already cross." "I think what we're looking at is a dogpile that's being organized somewhere," Upton said. "There's obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere." She did not provide evidence to support that claim. "I don't think this is organic, but it's very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved," she said. Upton claimed both Roberts and Raspberry Pi's social media manager have been doxxed and received death threats. "I am disgusted that [Raspberry Pi's] official post on Toby Roberts' hiring promotes his use of their products to surveil individuals without their consent," Matt Lewis, a Denver-based site reliability engineer, wrote via Twitter DM. "In my eyes, this behavior is completely unethical and the work Toby has done for 15 years is indefensible. I'm also upset that they have chosen to double down on this position against the community outrage."

"I think this event will mark a turning point in the organization's reputation," added Wikipedia consultant Pete Forsyth in a Twitter DM. "It's hard to see how they can recover the trust they seem to have almost willfully dismantled today."

Not everyone is downbeat about the future of the company. University of Surrey cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward called Roberts an "interesting hire" for Raspberry Pi. "His previous uses of the Pi shows just what a versatile device it is: I'm sure he's not the only one using the smallest variants to make covert devices," Woodward said. "You find that you have to be very creative to build these types of covert devices, so hopefully he can now bring that to his new role, for a wider variety of applications."

"It's not as if he is going to corrupt any of the Pis -- like all technology, it has some uses some people will object to," he said. Rather, Woodward believes "the loudest objectors are taking it a bit far. Maybe they could look at it as a glass-half-full situation: Think of the unusual innovations he might bring."

Robots may be the future, but robotic arms are apparently no good at using an old and steadfast form of technology: the barcode. Barcodes can be hard to find and might be affixed to oddly shaped products, Amazon said in a press release Friday, something robots can't troubleshoot very well. As a result, the company says it has a plan to kill the barcode. From a report: Using pictures of items in Amazon warehouses and training a computer model, the e-commerce giant has developed a camera system that can monitor items flowing one-by-one down conveyor belts to make sure they match their images. Eventually, Amazon's AI experts and roboticists want to combine the technology with robots that identify items while picking them up and turning them around.

"Solving this problem, so robots can pick up items and process them without needing to find and scan a barcode, is fundamental," said Nontas Antonakos, an applied science manager in Amazon's computer vision group in Berlin. "It will help us get packages to customers more quickly and accurately." The system, called multi-modal identification, isn't going to fully replace barcodes soon. It's currently in use in facilities in Barcelona, Spain, and Hamburg, Germany, according to Amazon. Still, the company says it's already speeding up the time it takes to process packages there. The technology will be shared across Amazon's businesses, so it's possible you could one day see a version of it at a Whole Foods or another Amazon-owned chain with in-person stores.

A worldwide recession is just around the corner as central banks boost borrowing costs aggressively to tame inflation -- and this time, it will ignite more market turbulence than ever before, according to BlackRock, the investment giant that manages about $10 trillion. From the report: The global economy has already exited a four-decade era of stable growth and inflation to enter a period of heightened instability -- and the new regime of increased unpredictability is here to stay, according to the world's biggest asset manager. That means policymakers will no longer be able to support markets as much as they did during past recessions, a team of BlackRock strategists led by vice chairman Philipp Hildebrand wrote in a report titled 2023 Global Outlook.

"Recession is foretold as central banks race to try to tame inflation. It's the opposite of past recessions," they said. "Central bankers won't ride to the rescue when growth slows in this new regime, contrary to what investors have come to expect. Equity valuations don't yet reflect the damage ahead." The prospect of limited policy support means investors need more dynamic methods -- involving more frequent portfolio changes and taking a more "granular view on sectors, regions and sub-asset classes" -- to navigate the volatility ahead, according to BlackRock. "What worked in the past won't work now," the strategists said. "The old playbook of simply "buying the dip" doesn't apply in this regime of sharper trade-offs and greater macro volatility. We don't see a return to conditions that will sustain a joint bull market in stocks and bonds of the kind we experienced in the prior decade."

Boeing's final 747 rolled out of the company's cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines' push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet. From a report: The 1,574th -- and last -- 747 will later be flown by a Boeing test pilot, painted and handed over to cargo and charter carrier Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings early next year.

"It's a very surreal time, obviously," said Kim Smith, vice president and general manager of Boeing's 747 and 767s programs out of the assembly plant here. "For the first time in well over 50 years we will not have a 747 in this facility."

The next wave of Moore's Law will rely on a developing concept called system technology co-optimization, Ann B. Kelleher, general manager of technology development at Intel told IEEE Spectrum in an interview ahead of her plenary talk at the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Meeting. From a report: "Moore's Law is about increasing the integration of functions," says Kelleher. "As we look forward into the next 10 to 20 years, there's a pipeline full of innovation" that will continue the cadence of improved products every two years. That path includes the usual continued improvements in semiconductor processes and design, but system technology co-optimization (STCO) will make the biggest difference. Kelleher calls it an "outside-in" manner of development. It starts with the workload a product needs to support and its software, then works down to system architecture, then what type of silicon must be within a package, and finally down to the semiconductor manufacturing process. "With system technology co-optimization, it means all the pieces are optimized together so that you're getting your best answer for the end product," she says.

STCO is an option now in large part because advanced packaging, such as 3D integration, is allowing the high-bandwidth connection of chiplets -- small, functional chips -- inside a single package. This means that what would once be functions on a single chip can be disaggregated onto dedicated chiplets, which can each then be made using the most optimal semiconductor process technology. For example, Kelleher points out in her plenary that high-performance computing demands a large amount of cache memory per processor core, but chipmaker's ability to shrink SRAM is not proceeding at the same pace as the scaling down of logic. So it makes sense to build SRAM caches and compute cores as separate chiplets using different process technology and then stitch them together using 3D integration. A key example of STCO in action, says Kelleher, is the Ponte Vecchio processor at the heart of the Aurora supercomputer. It's composed of 47 active chiplets (as well as 8 blanks for thermal conduction). These are stitched together using both advanced horizontal connections (2.5 packaging tech) and 3D stacking. "It brings together silicon from different fabs and enables them to come together so that the system is able to perform against the workload that it's designed for," she says.

Crypto broker Genesis and its parent company Digital Currency Group (DCG) owe customers of the Winklevoss twins' crypto exchange Gemini $900 million, the Financial Times reported on Saturday. Reuters reports: Crypto exchange Gemini is trying to recover the funds after Genesis was wrongfooted by last month's failure of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX crypto group, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. Venture capital company Digital Currency Group, which owns Genesis Trading and cryptocurrency asset manager Grayscale, owes $575 million to Genesis' crypto lending arm, Digital Currency Chief Executive Barry Silbert told shareholders last month.

Gemini, which runs a crypto lending product in partnership with Genesis, has now formed a creditors' committee to recoup the funds from Genesis and its parent DCG, the report added. Separately, Coindesk on Sunday reported that creditor groups in negotiation with Genesis currently account for $1.8 billion of loans, with that number likely to continue to grow. A second group of Genesis creditors, with loans also amounting to $900 million, is being represented by law firm Proskauer Rose, CoinDesk said citing a source. Further reading: Sam Bankman-Fried Says He Will Testify Before Congress On FTX Collapse

Palo Alto, California began investigating where its recycling goes over four years ago, reports NBC News. The results? Palo Alto's best reckoning, today, is that about 40% of its recyclable material stays in North America, where it's supposed to be processed according to strict environmental and labor standards. The other roughly 60% goes abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about its fate.

Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled. "If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal," said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. "That's not what the whole idea was of recycling."

The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city's recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons. Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck. "It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems," they wrote in a report published this year....

Palo Alto officials said they've taken two lessons from this saga. First, they want to recycle more in the U.S.... If made permanent, staff said, the change could increase the average citizen's recycling bill by about $33 a year. The second lesson, City Manager Ed Shikada said, is that Palo Alto can't transform the global recycling system alone. In March the city began talks with other interested California cities to discuss possible reforms at the local or state levels. The group includes San Jose, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about a dozen other Northern California municipalities. Shikada said they might seek to expand recycling capacity in California, for instance, or ask lawmakers to impose new transparency requirements on companies that export recyclable goods.
The article cites World Bank estimates that only about 9% of waste ultimately gets recycled in East Asia and Pacific region. "The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.... Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic."

America's Transportation Security Administration "has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles," reports the Washington Post.

Their article adds that the agency "hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year." Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers' IDs to make sure they're not impostors.... You step up to the travel document checker kiosk and stick your ID into a machine. Then you look into a camera for up to five seconds and the machine compares your live photo to the one it sees on your ID. They call this a "one to one" verification system, comparing one face to one ID. Even though the software is judging if you're an impostor, there's still a human agent there to make the final call (at least for now).

So how accurate is it? The TSA says it's been better at verifying IDs than the manual process. "This technology is definitely a security enhancement," said [TSA program manager Jason] Lim. "We are so far very satisfied with the performance of the machine's ability to conduct facial recognition accurately...." But the TSA hasn't actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches. Some of that might come to light next year when the TSA has to make its case to the Department of Homeland Security to convert airports all over the United States into facial recognition systems....

The TSA says it doesn't use facial recognition for law-enforcement purposes. It also says it minimizes holding on to our face data, so it isn't using the scans to build out a new national database of face IDs. "The scanning and match is made and immediately overwritten at the Travel Document Checker podium. We keep neither the live photo nor the photo of the ID," said Lim. But the TSA did acknowledge there are cases in which it holds on to the data for up to 24 months so its science and technology office can evaluate the system's effectiveness....

"None of this facial recognition technology is mandated," said Lim. "Those who do not feel comfortable will still have to present their ID — but they can tell the officer that they do not want their photo taken, and the officer will turn off the live camera." There are also supposed to be signs around informing you of your rights.
Here's the TSA's web page about the program. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

Electrek recaps yesterday's Tesla's Semi Delivery Event in Nevada: As expected, Tesla delivered the first electric trucks to PepsiCo, a long-time reservation holder, and held a presentation to reveal more details about the production version of the Tesla Semi. There wasn't any big surprise during the presentation. Tesla basically delivered on its original promises made in 2017 when it first unveiled the prototypes of the Tesla Semi. Despite the lack of major changes, it's still a big moment since the electric truck has the potential to change the trucking industry for good by eliminating emissions and significantly reducing costs.

In terms of the technology powering the truck, things have changed since the original prototypes, but not in any major ways. Tesla is now using a tri-motor drivetrain that is basically the same as in the Model S and Model X Plaid. Dan Priestley, Tesla Semi Program manager, explained that Tesla is using one of the motors for cruising speed geared toward peak efficiency at highway speeds and the two other motors are used for torque when accelerating in order to create a smooth driving experience never seen in a class 8 truck before. To prove the capacity, Tesla shared a very impressive video of a Tesla Semi loaded at 82,000 lb. passing a diesel truck at 6% incline on the Donner Pass as if it's nothing:

Tesla promised a range of 500 miles with a full load five years ago, and it delivered on the promise. Tesla shared data on a 500-mile trip with a full load of just under 82,000 lb. total with the tractor. It started out in the Bay Area with a 97% state of charge and ended up in San Diego with still 4% charge. Tesla reiterated that it can achieve a less-than-2 kWh-per-mile efficiency, which means that trucking companies can achieve up to $70,000 in fuel savings per year depending on their cost of electricity. Once the battery pack is depleted after 500 miles or so, you can expect blazing-fast charging thanks to the new 1-megawatt charging technology developed by Tesla. The automaker also said it will make it to the Cybertruck. In an updated article, Electrek's Fred Lambert says Musk confirmed Tesla Semi's efficiency at 1.7 kWh per mile, "which means it has a roughly 900 kWh battery pack."

Tesla didn't reveal the weight of the actual truck or the price. "In 2017, Tesla said the trucks would be $150,000, $180,000, and $200,000, depending on the model, but those prices are expected to have changed over the last five years," reports Lambert.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: One bit of accepted wisdom in some cloud circles is that OpenStack, the open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, is declining. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's alive, well, and growing like crazy. According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack now has over 40 million production cores. Or, in other words, it's seen 60% growth since 2021 and a 166% jump since 2020. Not bad for a so-called also-run, eh? It's not just telecoms, where OpenStack has become the backbone of major cell companies such as China Mobile and Verizon. Nor is it just other major companies such as the Japanese instant messaging service LINE, the on-demand, cloud-based financial management service company Workday, Walmart Labs, and Yahoo. No, many other, much smaller companies have also staked their cloud future on OpenStack.

Why? There are many reasons. As Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), OpenStack's parent organization, said, "OpenStack supports the ever-changing world of infrastructure where now we have GPUs, FPGAs, smart NICs, and smart storage. At the same time, you can still get direct access to the underlying hardware." This, in turn, enables "OpenStack users to create such amazing things as telecom cloud workloads on the cloud that can do edge transcoding video. With this, people can watch 4K videos on their phones using 5G." Another reason for OpenStack's growing popularity is its Kubernetes integration. Thanks to Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure (LOKI), Kubernetes is now deployed on over 85% of OpenStack deployments. In addition, Magnum, the OpenStack container orchestration service, is also gaining popularity. 21% of users are now running production workloads with it. [...] Kubernetes is also very useful with hybrid clouds. OpenStack is often used in hybrid clouds. Indeed, 80% of OpenStack users are deploying it in hybrid clouds. To make it easier to build out hybrid clouds, operators are turning to Octavia, an open-source, operator-scale load-balancing program. Today, not quite 50% of OpenStack deployments are using Octavia. OpenInfra Foundation's general manager Thierry Carrez said: "Hype is nice, but substance lasts, and as OpenStack deployments continue to grow in staggering numbers, the OpenStack community is proving that it's not only alive and well, but also delivering indisputable value to organizations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Bohemia Interactive, the Czech Republic based developer of the military simulator game Arma 3, has published a blog and a video it hopes will help it with a unique problem. Footage from the video game known for its realism has gone viral several times since the game's release in 2013 as people have tried to pass off clips of the military simulation as footage of real war. This happens a lot, so often that there are multiple debunking stories on Reuters and the Associated Press specifically about debunking viral clips of war footage. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the problem has gotten much worse. The invasion is the largest ground war in Europe in a generation and people around the world gobble up every scrap of information they can. Pranksters and fraudsters have taken to uploading clips from Arma 3 to capitalize on that need for information.

Arma 3 is a hyper realistic military simulation and sandbox. It's meant to be a realistic modeling of real world conflict. It's even teamed up with the International Committee of the Red Cross to release DLC that details the after effects of armed conflict. A sister studio, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, broke from the company in 2013 and makes simulations for the Pentagon using similar technology. The game is also a sandbox with a vibrant modding scene (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds began its life as an Arma 3 mod) that allows players to customize the game however they want. That devotion to realism and open platform has made Arma 3 the perfect platform to use to create fake war footage. "While it's flattering that Arma 3 simulates modern war conflicts in such a realistic way, we are certainly not pleased that it can be mistaken for real-life combat footage and used as war propaganda," Pavel Krizka, PR Manager of Bohemia Interactive, said in a November 28 press release. "It has happened in the past (Arma 3 videos allegedly depicted conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, and even between India and Pakistan), but nowadays this content has gained traction in regard to the current conflict in Ukraine."

The life cycle is almost always the same. An Arma 3 nerd uploads something to YouTube and other people pull the video, edit it to make it look more realistic, then pass it off as actual footage of the conflict. The footage goes viral then the fact-checkers come in and tell everyone it's a video game. Bohemia Interactive issues a statement and then everyone waits for the next fake to come along. "We've been trying to fight against such content by flagging these videos to platform providers (FB, YT, TW, IG etc.), but it's very ineffective," Krizka said in the press release. "With every video taken down, ten more are uploaded each day. We found the best way to tackle this is to actively cooperate with leading media outlets and fact-checkers (such as AFP, Reuters, and others), who have better reach and the capacity to fight the spreading of fake news footage effectively." Some of the tells of fake footage include a low resolution, a shaky camera, and/or a night setting. "They're often without sound, don't feature people in motion, and sometimes still include the HUD elements from the video game," adds Motherboard. "There's typically unnatural particle effects, unrealistic vehicles, uniforms, and equipment."

"We have seen many Arma players pointing out mistakenly identified footage, which helps viewers understand what they're seeing," said Bohemia Interactive. "Thank you for helping!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The US space agency's Orion capsule has reached a key milestone on its demonstration mission around the Moon. On Monday, it moved some 430,000km (270,000 miles) beyond the Earth -- the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry humans has travelled. The ship is uncrewed on this occasion, but if it completes the current flight without incident, astronauts will be on the next outing in two years' time. [...] The previous record for the most distant point reached by a human-rated spacecraft was set by the Apollo-13 mission in April 1970. It went out to 400,171km (248,655 miles) from Earth as its crew fought to navigate their way home following an explosion in their capsule's service module. Monday's milestone marks the middle point of the mission. "This halfway point teaches us to number our days so that we can get a heart of wisdom," said Mike Sarafin, Nasa's Artemis mission manager.

"The halfway point affords us an opportunity to step back and then look at what our margins are and where we could be a little smarter to buy down risk and understand the spacecraft's performance for crewed flight on the very next mission."

Google announced today that it has licensed its AI research model for breast cancer screening to medical technology company iCAD. This is the first time Google is licensing the technology, with the hopes that it will eventually lead to more accurate breast cancer detection and risk assessment. From a report: The two companies aim to eventually deploy the technology in real-world clinical settings -- targeting a "2024 release," Google communications manager Nicole Linton told The Verge in an email. Commercial deployment, however, still depends on how successful continued research and testing are. "We will move deliberately and test things as we go," Linton said in the email.

The partnership builds on Google's prior work to improve breast cancer detection. Back in 2020, Google researchers published a paper in the journal Nature that found that its AI system outperformed several radiologists in identifying signs of breast cancer. The model reduced false negatives by up to 9.4 percent and reduced false positives by up to 5.7 percent among thousands of mammograms studied. iCAD plans to incorporate Google's mammography AI research model into iCAD's existing tools. The first is its "ProFound AI" tool that analyzes images from digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), an advanced imaging technique sometimes called "3D mammography." The tool scans DBT images to look for malignant soft tissue densities and calcifications. iCAD also plans to use Google's model with its risk evaluation tool, which the company says provides personalized breast cancer risk estimation tailored to each person.

Japanese electronics and printer maker Epson announced this month that it will end the sale and distribution of laser printer hardware by 2026, citing sustainability issues. From a report: According to the company, inkjets have a "greater potential" than laser printers to make "meaningful advances" when it comes to the environment. The company already halted laser printer sales in many markets, but continued in Asia and Europe. Even though new hardware would be unavailable everywhere, Epson said it would continue to support consumers with consumables and spare parts.

"As a company we're totally committed to sustainable innovation and action, and inkjets simply use less energy and fewer consumable parts," explained Epson sales and marketing manager Koichi Kubota in canned statement. "While laser printers work by heating and fusing toner to a page, Epson's Heat-Free inkjet technology consumes less electricity by using mechanical energy to fire ink onto the page."