A rare look inside a fossilized dinosaur egg found in southern China has revealed an exquisitely preserved embryo -- and evidence suggesting that some of these prehistoric creatures had even more in common with modern birds than previously thought. From a report: Scientists said the embryo inside the egg, which was laid between 72 million to 66 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period, was that of a two-legged, feathered carnivore known as an oviraptorid. They said, in a paper about the discovery published Tuesday in the journal iScience, the embryo's curled body position -- with its back against the blunt end of the 7-inch-long egg and its head between its legs -- resembles that of bird embryos.

"This posture was previously not recognized in any dinosaur embryo," said Fion Waisum Ma, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Birmingham in England and a co-author of the paper. She said the posture suggests that the embryo had assumed a tucked position before hatching -- a behavior previously thought unique to birds. She called the newly described specimen "one of the best preserved dinosaur embryos ever found." In birds, tucking leaves the embryo with its right wing over its head and its beak pointing toward an air space at the egg's blunt end. That orientation helps direct the hatchling's head as it uses its beak to crack the eggshell and emerge.

"Failure to attain this posture would increase the chance of death, as the bird is less likely to break out of the egg successfully," Ms. Ma said. An inspection of the oviraptorid egg showed what appeared to be an air space between the embryo's spine and the egg's blunt end, according to the researchers. The specimen was among several fossils discovered about two decades ago in the Chinese city of Ganzhou but not recognized to be fossilized dinosaur eggs until 2015, when evaluated by an expert. A close examination of one of the eggs, which had fossilized after breaking, showed that it held the preserved oviraptorid embryo.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails (as well as the co-founder and CTO of Basecamp, makers of the email software HEY). But he says Wednesday's release of version 7.0 is the version he's been longing for, "The one where all the cards are on the table. No more tricks up our sleeves. The culmination of years of progress on five different fronts at once." The backend gets some really nice upgrades, especially with the encryption work that we did for HEY, so your data can be encrypted while its live in the database.... But it's on the front end things have made a quantum leap. We've integrated the Hotwire frameworks of Stimulus and Turbo directly as the new defaults, together with that hot newness of import maps, which means you no longer need to run the whole JavaScript ecosystem enchilada in your Ruby app...

The part that really excites me about this version, though, is how much closer it brings us to the ideal of The One Person Framework. A toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which they might build a competitive business. The way it used to be... Rails 7 seeks to be the wormhole that folds the time-learning-shipping-continuum, and allows you to travel grand distances without knowing all the physics of interstellar travel. Giving the individual rebel a fighting chance against The Empire....

The key engine powering this assault is conceptual compression. Like a video codec that throws away irrelevant details such that you might download the film in real-time rather than buffer for an hour. I dedicated an entire RailsConf keynote to the idea...

[I]f there ever was an opening, ever was a chance that we might at least tilt the direction of the industry, now is it.

What a glorious time to be working in web development.

Regulators in Washington may crack down on the industry behind "buy now, pay later," the increasingly popular method for consumers to purchase things online. From a report: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday that it is looking to "collect information on the risks and benefits of these fast-growing loans" from five leading BNPL companies: Affirm; Australia's Afterpay, which is getting bought by Square owner Block; PayPal; privately held Swedish fintech Klarna; and Zip, another BNPL firm headquartered in Australia. "Buy now, pay later is the new version of the old layaway plan, but with modern, faster twists where the consumer gets the product immediately but gets the debt immediately too," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement Thursday. The CFPB said it was specifically worried about how quickly consumers can accumulate debt using BNPL services and also about how the BNPL companies may harvest data about their customers. It added that it is working with international partners in Australia, Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom on the inquiry.

The world's second most populous nation uses sterilization, contraceptives to reach fertility milestone. From a report: Back in the 1960s, India faced an exploding population, with a fertility rate of nearly six children per woman. When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country's high birth rate. In response, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dramatically expanded the first national family planning program in a major developing country, offering cash incentives for both men and women to be sterilized. The city of Madras, now called Chennai, paid men $6 a snip. For the next 60 years, India continued to focus on sterilization as well as contraceptives and education for girls. Now, Indian health officials say the task of defusing their population bomb is finally done. Late last month, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a periodic investigation of half a million households, announced a milestone: The country's fertility rate had for the first time fallen below the widely accepted "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman. (The U.S. rate is 1.8.) "Women are seeing the wisdom in having fewer children," says Poonam Muttreja, director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India.

India's population growth is not over yet, however. Thanks to past high fertility rates, two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old, and a large cohort of people is now entering childbearing age. Even at replacement fertility rates, the children of these young people will continue to push up numbers, and India may exceed China as the world's most populous nation as early as next year. Still, India's population is set to decline in about 3 decades, putting the country on the same track as a growing number of developing nations, such as its neighbor Bangladesh and Indonesia. India remains well behind China in falling fertility. In China, where the population may be at its peak, official figures put the fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman. State-sponsored family planning remains "the single most important driver" of India's drop in fertility, says Srinivas Goli, a demographer at Jawaharlal Nehru University. More than 55% of couples use modern contraceptives, the latest NFHS survey found. Of these, one-fifth use condoms and one-tenth the pill. But sterilization of women, generally in government-run clinics, accounts for two-thirds of all contraception. Sterilization has a checkered past in India. During the mid-1970s, Gandhi allowed states to operate compulsory sterilization camps. An estimated 19 million people were sterilized, three-quarters of them men. The program's unpopularity helped bring down Gandhi's government in 1977, says Monica Das Gupta of the Maryland Population Research Center.

Gizmodo's David Nield explains what Web3 is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: Let's cut to the chase: For Web3 evangelists, it's a revolution; for skeptics, it's an overhyped house of cards that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. [...] As you might remember if you're of a certain age, Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Sites displayed news and information, and maybe you had your own little corner of the World Wide Web to show off your personal interests and hobbies. Images were discouraged -- they took up too much bandwidth -- and video was out of the question. With the dawn of the 21st century, Web 1.0 gave way to Web 2.0 -- a more dynamic, editable, user-driven internet. Static was out and webpages became more interactive and app-like (see Gmail, for example). Many of us signed up for social media accounts and blogs that we used to put our own content on the web in vast amounts. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. And now the dawn of Web3 is upon us. People define it in a few different ways, but at its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies (key drivers of Web3). Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it's tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. The idea is that everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes, with both more privacy and more transparency baked in. In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it: The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users -- or at least that's the theory.

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability. NFTs are closely linked to the Web3 vision. [...] For our purposes here, the link between cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3 is the foundation: the blockchain. Throw in some artificial intelligence and some machine learning to do everything from filter out unnecessary data to spot security threats, and you've got just about every emerging digital technology covered with Web3. Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

This year's Game Awards also saw the premiere of The Matrix Awakens, a new in-world "tech demonstrator" written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer/director of the original Matrix trilogy and director of the upcoming sequel. It's available free on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, reports the Verge, and they also scored a sit-down video interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss about the new playable experience — and the new Matrix movie: Reeves also revealed that he thinks there should be a modern Matrix video game, that he's flattered by Cyberpunk 2077 players modding the game to have sex with his character, and why he thinks Facebook shouldn't co-opt the metaverse.

Apart from serving as a clever promotion vehicle for the new Matrix movie premiering December 22nd, The Matrix Awakens is designed to showcase what's possible with the next major version of Epic's Unreal Engine coming next year. It's structured as a scripted intro by Wachowski, followed by a playable car chase scene and then an open-world sandbox experience you can navigate as one of Epic's metahuman characters. A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy...

Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer "this sort of niche art form." Thanks to updates coming to Unreal Engine, which powers everything from Fortnite to special effects in Disney's The Mandalorian, developers will be able to use the same, hyper-realistic virtual assets across different experiences. It's part of Epic's goal to help build the metaverse.
Elsewhere the site writes that The Matrix Awakens "single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft's new game consoles." It's unlike any tech demo you've ever tried before. When we said the next generation of gaming didn't actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5, this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around....

Just don't expect it to make you question your reality — the uncanny valley is still alive and well.... But from a "is it time for photorealistic video game cities?" perspective, The Matrix Awakens is seriously convincing. It's head-and-shoulders above the most photorealistic video game cities we've seen so far, including those in the Spider-Man, Grand Theft Auto and Watch Dogs series... Despite glitches and an occasionally choppy framerate, The Matrix Awakens city feels more real, thanks to Unreal Engine's incredible global illumination and real-time raytracing ("The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes," claims Epic), the detail of the procedurally generated buildings, and how dense it all is in terms of cars and foot traffic.

And the most convincing part is that it's not just a scripted sequence running in real-time on your PS5 or Xbox like practically every other tech demo you've seen — you get to run, drive, and fly through it, manipulate the angle of the sun, turn on filters, and dive into a full photo mode, as soon as the scripted and on-rails shooter parts of the demo are done. Not that there's a lot to do in The Matrix Awakens except finding different ways to take in the view. You can't land on buildings, there's no car chases except for the scripted one, no bullets to dodge. You can crash any one of the game's 38,146 drivable cars into any of the other cars or walls, I guess. I did a bunch of that before I got bored, though, just taking in the world.... Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city....

Epic Games' pitch is that Unreal Engine 5 developers can do this or better with its ready-made tools at their disposal, and I can't wait to see them try.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")

Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:

-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.

Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"

Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.

What do you remember about Windows ME?

Alphabet's Google is suing two Russian nationals it claims are part of a criminal enterprise that has silently infiltrated more than a million computers and devices around the world, creating "a modern technological and borderless incarnation of organized crime." From a report: In a complaint being unsealed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Google names two defendants, Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, as well as 15 unnamed individuals. Google claims the defendants have created a âoebotnetâ known as Glupteba, to use for illicit purposes, including the theft and unauthorized use of Google users' login and account information. A botnet is a network of internet-connected devices that have been infected with malware. When summoned together, they can do the bidding of a hacker, often with the devices' owners not realizing their machines have been hijacked. A swarm of devices can jam traffic at websites, run malware to steal login credentials, sell fraudulent credit cards online and grant unauthorized access to other cyber criminals. The Glupteba botnet stands out from others because of its "technical sophistication," using blockchain technology to protect itself from disruption, Google said in the complaint. At any moment, the power of the Glupteba botnet could be used in a powerful ransomware attack or distributed denial of service attack, Google said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Almost exactly a year ago, security researchers uncovered one of the worst data breaches in modern history, if not ever: a Kremlin-backed hacking campaign that compromised the servers of network management provider SolarWinds and, from there, the networks of 100 of its highest-profile customers, including nine US federal agencies. Nobelium -- the name Microsoft gave to the intruders -- was eventually expelled, but the group never gave up and arguably has only become more brazen and adept at hacking large numbers of targets in a single stroke. The latest reminder of the group's proficiency comes from security firm Mandiant, which on Monday published research detailing Nobelium's numerous feats -- and a few mistakes -- as it continued to breach the networks of some of its highest-value targets.

Mandiant's report shows that Nobelium's ingenuity hasn't wavered. Since last year, company researchers say the two hacking groups linked to the SolarWinds hack -- one called UNC3004 and the other UNC2652 -- have continued to devise new ways to compromise large numbers of targets in an efficient manner. Instead of poisoning the supply chain of SolarWinds, the groups compromised the networks of cloud solution providers and managed service providers, or CSPs, which are outsourced third-party companies that many large companies rely on for a wide range of IT services. The hackers then found clever ways to use those compromised providers to intrude upon their customers. The advanced tradecraft didn't stop there. According to Mandiant, other advanced tactics and ingenuities included:

• Use of credentials stolen by financially motivated hackers using malware such as Cryptbot (PDF), an information stealer that harvests system and web browser credentials and cryptocurrency wallets. The assistance from these hackers allowed the UNC3004 and UNC2652 to compromise targets even when they didn't use a hacked service provider.
• Once the hacker groups were inside a network, they compromised enterprise spam filters or other software with "application impersonation privileges," which have the ability to access email or other types of data from any other account in the compromised network. Hacking this single account saved the hassle of having to break into each account individually.
• The abuse of legitimate residential proxy services or geo-located cloud providers such as Azure to connect to end targets. When admins of the hacked companies reviewed access logs, they saw connections coming from local ISPs with good reputations or cloud providers that were in the same geography as the companies. This helped disguise the intrusions, since nation-sponsored hackers frequently use dedicated IP addresses that arouse suspicions.
• Clever ways to bypass security restrictions, such as extracting virtual machines to determine internal routing configurations of the networks they wanted to hack.
• Gaining access to an active directory stored in a target's Azure account and using this all-powerful administration tool to steal cryptographic keys that would generate tokens that could bypass two-factor authentication protections. This technique gave the intruders what's known as a Golden SAML, which is akin to a skeleton key that unlocks every service that uses the Security Assertion Markup Language, which is the protocol that makes single sign-on, 2FA, and other security mechanisms work.
• Use of a custom downloader dubbed Ceeloader.

Ars Technica reports: Months after the first-person-shooter classic Quake got a major 25th anniversary re-release, its modern handlers have returned with an update that exceeds all expectations. Thursday's new 770MB patch on all platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC) adds an entirely new co-op combat mode, and it officially opens the game's mod floodgates for players outside the PC ecosystem.

The uncreatively named "Horde" mode works much like a mode of the same name in Gears of War. Instead of progressing through a level from start to finish, players are expected to hunker down inside a somewhat circular arena and then contend with hundreds of enemies spawning from all sides. Kill a full "wave" of foes, and your team will get a moment to breathe, replenish health and ammo (or argue over who gets to use it), and do it all over again.

For the sake of Quake's first-ever official co-op mode (beyond the campaign, which always supported co-op as an option), Bethesda support studio MachineGames has whipped up four brand-new battling arenas, which are pictured above. Each includes at least one "silver key" door, which is full of more powerful weapons and is gated until players earn a key by defeating a tougher "boss wave" of foes. Get through nine enemy waves, and your team gets a "gold key." You can either exit the level at that point or stay and keep fighting increasingly tough foes until your team dies.
In addition, Quake now has a new "add-on" menu, and this week's patch gives it an option for playing the foggy 2012 Quake mod "Honey."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: New rules approved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that took effect on Tuesday dictate how collection agencies can email and text people as well as message them on social media to seek repayment for unpaid debts. Kathleen L. Kraninger, the former CFPB director who oversaw the rule changes, said last year that they were a necessary update to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which is more than four decades old. "We are finally leaving 1977 behind and developing a debt collection system that works for consumers and industry in the modern world," Kraninger said in a blog post.

Under the new rules, debt collectors who contact you on social media have to identify themselves as debt collectors but can attempt to join your network by sending you a friend request. Collectors must give you the option to opt out of being contacted online, and any messages they send have to be private -- collectors can't post on your page if it can be seen by your contacts or the public. Collection agencies can also email and text message debtors, but must still offer the ability to opt out. Industry officials praised the move as a welcome change to the outdated methods currently used by the collections industry. The new rules were devised during the Trump administration, when the bureau became more business-friendly than it had been in the past. The new rules also set a limit for the first time on how often debt collectors can call you. Agencies will be restricted to seven calls per week per account in collection.

Sony Group's PlayStation division is planning a new subscription service to compete with rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass, according to people familiar with Sony's plans and documents reviewed. Blooomberg: The service, code-named Spartacus, will allow PlayStation owners to pay a monthly fee for access to a catalog of modern and classic games, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak to the press about the plans. The offering will likely be available on the smash hit PlayStation 4, which has sold more than 116 million units, and its elusive successor, the PlayStation 5, which launched more than a year ago but is still difficult to buy due to supply chain issues.

When it launches, expected in the spring, the service will merge Sony's two existing subscription plans, PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. Currently, PlayStation Plus is required for most online multiplayer games and offers free monthly titles, while PlayStation Now allows users to stream or download older games. Documents reviewed by Bloomberg suggest that Sony plans to retain the PlayStation Plus branding but phase out PlayStation Now.

At the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021 yesterday, Qualcomm introduced their new always-on camera capabilities in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, which is expected to arrive in high-end Android phones early next year. The company says this new feature will let users wake and unlock their phone without having to pick it up or have it instantly lock when it no longer sees their face. Even though Judd Heape, Qualcomm Technologies vice president of product management, said that the "always-on camera data never leaves the secure sensing hub while it's looking for faces," it raises a serious privacy concern that "far outweighs any potential convenience benefits," argues The Verge's Dan Seifert. From the report: Qualcomm is framing the always-on camera as similar to the always-on microphones that have been in our phones for years. Those are used to listen for voice commands like "Hey Siri" or "Hey Google" (or lol, "Hi Bixby") and then wake up the phone and provide a response, all without you having to touch or pick up the phone. But the key difference is that they are listening for specific wake words and are often limited with what they can do until you do actually pick up your phone and unlock it. It feels a bit different when it's a camera that's always scanning for your likeness.

It's true that smart home products already have features like this. Google's Nest Hub Max uses its camera to recognize your face when you walk up to it and greet you with personal information like your calendar. Home security cameras and video doorbells are constantly on, looking for activity or even specific faces. But those devices are in your home, not always carried with you everywhere you go, and generally don't have your most private information stored on them, like your phone does. They also frequently have features like physical shutters to block the camera or intelligent modes to disable recording when you're home and only resume it when you aren't. It's hard to imagine any phone manufacturer putting a physical shutter on the front of their slim and sleek flagship smartphone.

Lastly, there have been many reports of security breaches and social engineering hacks to enable smart home cameras when they aren't supposed to be on and then send that feed to remote servers, all without the knowledge of the homeowner. Modern smartphone operating systems now do a good job of telling you when an app is accessing your camera or microphone while you're using the device, but it's not clear how they'd be able to inform you of a rogue app tapping into the always-on camera. [...] But even if it's not found in every phone next year, the mere presence of the feature means that it will be used by someone at some point. It sets a precedent that is unsettling and uncomfortable; Qualcomm may be the first with this capability, but it won't be long before other companies add it in the race to keep up. Maybe we'll just start having to put tape on our smartphone cameras like we already do with laptop webcams.

What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? A startup called "Massive" is working to take this concept "into the modern world as an alternative to charging users or pounding them with advertisements to generate revenue," writes TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm. From the report: Massive announced an $11 million round this morning, led by Point72 Ventures with participation from crypto-themed entities, including CoinShares Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Several angels also participated in the funding event. The model is interesting, and Massive's funding round is an indication that it has found some market traction. So, we get the company on the horn to learn more.

Massive co-founder and CEO Jason Grad described the startup's work as something akin to an Airbnb or Turo for users' computers, comparing its service to some of the more popular consumer-sharing startups that folks already know. It's a reasonable comparison. Some 50,000 desktop computer users -- nodes, in the company's parlance -- have opted into its service. Which is white hat, it goes without saying. Given that Massive is asking for compute power, it will have constant work to do to ensure that it is a good steward of user trust and partner selection; no one wants their spare CPU cycles to go to something illegal. The company has a good early stance toward caring for its nascent compute exchange, with a hard requirement of getting users to opt into its service before joining.

To start, Massive is working with crypto-focused companies. They have an obvious need for compute power, and the work they execute -- running blockchain calculations -- is monetized through block rewards and other fees, making them easy choices for partnerships. You can now see why the company's investor list includes a number of crypto-focused venture capital firms. The startup's goal is broader, however. It wants to build a two-sided marketplace for compute power, Grad explained. That means lots more users offering up a slice of their computing power, future acceptance of mobile devices, and a broader partner list. Part of the company's perspective is rooted in the belief that the dominant business models of the internet today are lacking. "Shit," to quote Grad directly.

The U.S. city of Carmel, Indiana (population: 102,000) has 140 roundabouts, "with over a dozen still to come," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) "No American city has more. The main reason is safety; compared with regular intersections, roundabouts significantly reduce injuries and deaths.

"But there's also a climate benefit." Because modern roundabouts don't have red lights where cars sit and idle, they don't burn as much gasoline. While there are few studies, the former city engineer for Carmel, Mike McBride, estimates that each roundabout saves about 20,000 gallons of fuel annually, which means the cars of Carmel emit many fewer tons of planet-heating carbon emissions each year. And U.S. highway officials broadly agree that roundabouts reduce tailpipe emissions. They also don't need electricity, and, unlike stoplights, keep functioning after bad storms — a bonus in these meteorologically turbulent times.

"Modern roundabouts are the most sustainable and resilient intersections around," said Ken Sides, chairman of the roundabout committee at the Institute of Transportation Engineers...

A recent study of Carmel's roundabouts by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety found that injury crashes were reduced by nearly half at 64 roundabouts in Carmel, and even more at the more elaborate, dogbone-shaped interchanges... [V]ehicular fatalities in Carmel, according to a city study, are strikingly low; the city logged 1.9 traffic deaths per 100,000 people in 2020. In Columbus, Indiana, an hour or so south, it was 20.8. (In 2019, the national average was 11.)
The Times points out other advantages — they can also be more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, and alleviate rush-hour backups. But Carmel's former city engineer just argues it's an improvement over an older roadway system which "doesn't put a lot of faith in the driver to make choices.

"They're used to being told what to do at every turn."

Friday Rockstar Games issued an update in the Announcements section of the company's web site "regarding the unexpected technical issues that came to light as part of the launch of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition." (See Slashdot's earlier coverage here and here.)

"Firstly, we want to sincerely apologize to everyone who has encountered issues playing these games..." the Rockstar Games Team wrote: The Grand Theft Auto series — and the games that make up this iconic trilogy — are as special to us as we know they are to fans around the world. The updated versions of these classic games did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality, or the standards our fans have come to expect.

We have ongoing plans to address the technical issues and to improve each game going forward. With each planned update, the games will reach the level of quality that they deserve to be.

A new Title Update is on the way in the coming days for all versions of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition that will address a number of issues. We will update everyone as soon as it is live.

In the meantime, it pains us to mention that we are hearing reports of members of the development teams being harassed on social media. We would kindly ask our community to please maintain a respectful and civil discourse around this release as we work through these issues.

While one of the goals of the Definitive Editions was to allow players to enjoy these games on modern platforms for many years to come, we also understand that some of you would still like to have the previous classic versions available for purchase.

We will be adding the classic PC versions of Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas back to the Rockstar Store shortly as a bundle. Additionally, everyone who has purchased Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition for PC from the Rockstar Store through June 30, 2022, will receive these classic versions in their Rockstar Games Launcher library at no additional cost. We will update everyone as soon as these are back in the Rockstar Store.

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding while we work through these updates to ensure these games meet everyone's justifiably high standards.

A service's guts, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and Netflix has spent the last 10 years building out an expansive server network called Open Connect in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches. From a report: It's the thing that's allowed Netflix to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors and not falter when some 111 million users tuned in to Squid Game during its earliest weeks on the service. "One of the reasons why Netflix is the leader in this market and has the number of subs they do [...] is something that pretty much everybody outside of the technical part of this industry underestimates, and that is Open Connect," Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert and principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan, tells The Verge. "How many times has Netflix had a problem with their streaming service over the last 10 years?"

Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself.

Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.

Facebook advertisers promoted false and misleading claims about climate change on the platform in recent weeks, just as the COP26 conference was getting under way. From a report: Days after Facebook's vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company's efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a "hoax." The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views.

In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, "apparently we're just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government" on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how "modern doomsayers" had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens's page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet's Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios. Emulation allows modern hardware to simulate the functions of older hardware and run game files, or executables. "My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he wrote in a direct message. Microsoft's newer consoles -- the Xbox Series and Xbox One -- run huge libraries of older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games using this technique.

Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates. They run games from the original Nintendo era to more recent PlayStations, but there is no consistent use of them by the industry. [...] An official industry emulation approach would require long-term online support to offer game files and to possibly check if the user has the right to access them. Spencer, whose own platform has some of these issues, still sees a path forward. "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."

Is the ocular product EyeDetect a leap ahead of the polygraph? Or just the same dubiousness in a more high-tech box? From a report: In 2018, John Rael, a volunteer track coach in Taos, N.M., was on trial for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl when his lawyer made an unusual request. He wanted the judge to admit evidence from "EyeDetect," a lie-detection test based on eye movements that Rael had passed. The judge agreed, and five of the 12 jurors wound up voting not to convict. A mistrial was declared. EyeDetect is the product of the Utah company Converus. "Imagine if you could exonerate the innocent and identify the liars ... just by looking into their eyes," the company's YouTube channel promises. "Well, now you can!" Its chief executive, Todd Mickelsen, says they've built a better truth-detection mousetrap; he believes eye movements reflect their bearer far better than the much older and mostly discredited polygraph. Its popularity may be growing: the company says EyeDetect has gone from 500 customers in 2019 to 600 now.

Its critics, however, say the EyeDetect is just the polygraph in more algorithmic clothing. The machine is fundamentally unable to deliver on its claims, they argue, because human truth-telling is too subtle for any data set. And they worry that relying on it can lead to tragic outcomes, like punishing the innocent or providing a cloak for the guilty. EyeDetect raises a question that draws all the way back to the Garden of Eden: Are humans so wired to tell the truth we'll give ourselves away when we don't? And, to a more 21st-century query: Can modern technology come up with the tools to detect those tells? An EyeDetect test has a subject placed in front of a monitor with a digital camera and, as with the polygraph, lobbed generically true-false queries like "have you ever hurt anybody" to establish a baseline. Then come specific questions. If the subject's physical responses are more demonstrative there, they are presumed to be lying; less demonstrative, they're telling the truth.