Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...]

To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study.

Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.

Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and others spoke at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, reports VentureBeat — and told the story of "a lost prototype of a Tetris game that was never published." But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game...

Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora's Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software... Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2.

Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman. In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde's talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game.

De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov.

"Are you kidding me?" Klanac reacted.
The idea is still to survive as long as you can, according to the article — but the entire playfield was accessible. "For the first time in public, they showed the video of the prototype in action," according to the article, which also records Pajitnov reaction. "When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements. This is Tetris for like 300 IQ people."

No word on yet on whether the game will ever be officially published.

Slashdot reader christoban writes: In what may be an issue for Sun-obscuring strategies to combat global warming, it turns out that during solar eclipses, low level cumulus clouds rapidly disappear, reducing by a factor of 4, researchers have found. The news comes from the science magazine Eos (published by the nonprofit organization of atmosphere/ocean/space scientists, the American Geophysical Union). Victor J. H. Trees, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues recently analyzed cloud cover data obtained during an annular eclipse in 2005, visible in parts of Europe and Africa. They mined visible and infrared imagery collected by two geostationary satellites operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. Going to space was key, Trees said. "If you really want to quantify how clouds behave and how they react to a solar eclipse, it helps to study a large area. That's why we want to look from space...." [T]hey tracked cloud evolution for several hours leading up to the eclipse, during the eclipse, and for several hours afterward.

Low-level cumulus clouds — which tend to top out at altitudes around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) — were strongly affected by the degree of solar obscuration. Cloud cover started to decrease when about 15% of the Sun's face was covered, about 30 minutes after the start of the eclipse. The clouds started to return only about 50 minutes after maximum obscuration. And whereas typical cloud cover hovered around 40% in noneclipse conditions, less than 10% of the sky was covered with clouds during maximum obscuration, the team noted. "On a large scale, the cumulus clouds started to disappear," Trees said... The temperature of the ground matters when it comes to cumulus clouds, Trees said, because they are low enough to be significantly affected by whatever is happening on Earth's surface...

Beyond shedding light on the physics of cloud dissipation during solar eclipses, these new findings also have implications for future geoengineering efforts, Trees and his collaborators suggested. Discussions are underway to mitigate the effects of climate change by, for instance, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols or launching solar reflectors into space to prevent some of the Sun's light from reaching Earth. Such geoengineering holds promise for cooling our planet, researchers agree, but its repercussions are largely unexplored and could be widespread and irreversible.

These new results suggest that cloud cover could decrease with geoengineering efforts involving solar obscuration. And because clouds reflect sunlight, the efficacy of any effort might correspondingly decrease, Trees said. That's an effect that needs to be taken into account when considering different options, the researchers concluded.
Another article on the site warns that "Planting Trees May Not Be as Good for the Climate as Previously Believed."

"The climate benefits of trees storing carbon dioxide is partially offset by dark forests' absorption of more heat from the Sun, and compounds they release that slow the destruction of methane in the atmosphere."

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla Firefox 124 looks like a small update that only updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API to prevent devices from dimming or locking the screen when an application needs to keep running. The Firefox View feature has been updated as well in this release to allow users to sort open tabs by either recent activity (default setting) or tab order. Also, Firefox 124 expands Qwant's availability to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

This release also adds support for using HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets, as well as support for the AbortSignal: any() static method, which takes an iterable of abort signals and returns an AbortSignal (more details are available here). For Android users, Firefox 124 enables the Pull to Refresh feature, which is now more robust than ever, by default and adds support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse, which accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps.

For macOS users, this release uses the fullscreen API for all types of full-screen windows, promising a better match to the expected macOS user experience for full-screen spaces, the Menubar, and the Dock. If you want to disable this feature, you'll need to set the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen preference to false in about:config. For Windows users, this release adds the ability to populate the Windows taskbar jump list more efficiently. According to Mozilla, this change should allow for a "smoother overall browsing experience."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: McDonald's restaurants are suffering global IT outages that prevent employees from taking orders and accepting payments, causing some stores to close for the day. The outages started overnight and are impacting restaurants globally, including those in the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK. "We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," McDonald's said in a statement to BleepingComputer. "We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event." In an updated statement, McDonald's says that the outage was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change. "Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change."

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...]

The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired.

Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.

None of the big oil and gas producers surrounding the North Sea plan to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target, a report has found. From a report: The five countries -- the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark -- have failed to align their oil and gas policies with their climate promises under the Paris agreement, according to the campaign group Oil Change International.

North Sea governments must act urgently, said Silje Ask Lundberg from Oil Change International, who co-wrote the report. "Failure to address these issues not only undermines international climate goals, but also jeopardises the liveability of our planet." The report found that policies in Norway and the UK were furthest from the Paris climate agreement because the countries were "aggressively" exploring and licensing new oil and gas fields. In 2021, the International Energy Agency found there was no room for new oil exploration in its pathway to net zero emissions.

The US could further tighten controls on China's access to sophisticated semiconductor technologies, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, signaling Washington may intensify its campaign to prevent Beijing catching up in military capabilities. From a report: "We cannot allow China to have access for their military advancement to our most sophisticated technology," she told reporters in Manila on Monday. "So yes, we will do whatever it takes to protect our people including expanding our controls."

Raimondo, who is leading a trade delegation to the Philippines and Thailand, was asked if the US is planning to add new restrictions on the sale of semiconductors to China. The Biden administration is mulling fresh sanctions on several Chinese tech companies, including memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc., while pushing allies to do more to curb the export of advanced tech to China, Bloomberg has reported in recent days. Washington has taken aim at China's chip industry for years, imposing sweeping controls on the export of advanced semiconductor-making machines and sophisticated chips like those used to develop artificial intelligence. Japan and the Netherlands, the two key countries where chip-making equipment is developed, joined the US effort last year.

Space.com describes it as "a nearly 3-ton leftover tossed overboard from the International Space Station" — which crashed back to earth today. One satellite tracker claims to have filmed it passing over the Netherlands...

"A couple minutes later reentry and it would have reached Fort Meyers" in Florida, posted astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But instead it re-entered the earth's atmosphere "over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba," Friday afternoon. "This was within the previous prediction window but a little to the northeast of the 'most likely' part of the path."

From Space.com: The multi-ton Exposed Pallet 9 (EP9) was jettisoned from the space station back in March 2021. At the time, it was reported to be the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. Disposing of used or unnecessary equipment in such a way is common practice aboard the space station, as the objects typically burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere.

Ahead of EP9's reentry, the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, National Warning Center 1 in Bonn, Germany issued this information... "The object is battery packs from the International Space Station. Luminous phenomena or the perception of a sonic boom are possible...." EP9 is loaded with old Nickel-Hydrogen batteries, NASA explained at the time it was jettisoned, also explaining that EP9 has the approximate mass of a large SUV and predicting it would re-enter Earth's atmosphere in two-to-four years.
"A large space object reenters the atmosphere in a natural way approximately once per week," the European Space Agency points out, "with the majority of the associated fragments burning up before reaching the ground.

"Most spacecraft, launch vehicles and operational hardware are designed to limit the risks associated with a reentry."

Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios. Axios reports: Globally, trust in AI companies has dropped to 53%, down from 61% five years ago. In the U.S., trust has dropped 15 percentage points (from 50% to 35%) over the same period. Trust in AI is low across political lines. Democrats trust in AI companies is 38%, independents are at 25% and Republicans at 24%. Tech is losing its lead as the most trusted sector. Eight years ago, technology was the leading industry in trust in 90% of the countries Edelman studies. Today, it is the most trusted in only half of countries.

People in developing countries are more likely to embrace AI than those in developed ones. Respondents in France, Canada, Ireland, UK, U.S., Germany, Australia, the Netherlands and Sweden reject the growing use of AI by a three-to-one margin, Edelman said. By contrast, acceptance outpaces resistance by a wide margin in developing markets such as Saudi Arabia, India, China, Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand. "When it comes to AI regulation, the public's response is pretty clear: 'What regulation?'," said Edelman global technology chair Justin Westcott. "There's a clear and urgent call for regulators to meet the public's expectations head on."

Microsoft built two datacenters west of Phoenix, with plans for seven more (serving, among other companies, OpenAI). "Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late," writes the Atlantic. "One semiconductor analyst called this "the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen."

But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....

Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."

Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."

Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year "to start companies or nonprofits," reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool "is bigger than ever."

So how's it going? Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart...

Thiel and executives of the fellowship acknowledge they have learned painful lessons along the way. Some applicants pursued ambitious ideas that turned out to be unrealistic, for example. "Asteroid mining is great for press releases but maybe we should have pushed back early on," he says. Others were better at applying to be Thiel fellows than they were starting businesses, it turned out... They've also learned that lone geniuses with brilliant ideas aren't usually the kinds of people who can build organizations. "It's a team sport to get something going and build on it, you can't just be a mad genius, you have to have some social skills and emotional intelligence," says Michael Gibson, an early leader of the organization who is co-founder of a venture fund that invests primarily in those who don't have a college degree...

Thiel hasn't attempted to build a better education system, which program officials acknowledge has made it harder to develop talent in the program... Thiel fellows say they don't receive much more than funding from the program and have limited contact with Thiel, though access to a network of former Thiel fellows can be useful. "Meeting some of the other members inspires you to think bigger," says Boyan Slat, a 2016 Thiel fellow who is chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit developing technologies to remove plastic from oceans. Slat says he has spoken to Thiel "three or four times."

As a result, Thiel and other staffers have concluded they can't grow beyond the 20 or so young people chosen as fellows each year. "If you scale the program," Thiel says, "you will have a lot more people who aren't quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them" — which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren't skilled at doing... About a quarter of the Thiel fellows eventually returned to college to finish their degrees, suggesting that even the dropouts see enduring value in higher education.

Thiel says they "got way more out of it by going back" after launching their businesses.

"The other 75% didn't need a college degree," he says.

"Dutch motorist Tim Hansenn was fined 380 euros for using his phone while driving," reports the Jerusalem Post. "But there was one problem: He wasn't using his phone at all..." Hansenn, who works with AI as part of his job with the firm Nippur, found the photo taken by the smart cameras. In it, he was clearly scratching his head with his free hand. Writing in a blog post in Nippur, Hansenn took the time to explain what he thinks went wrong with the Dutch police AI and the smart camera they used, the Monocam, and how it could be improved.

In one experiment he discussed with [Belgian news outlet] HLN, Hansenn said the AI confused a pen with a toothbrush — identifying it as a pen when it was just held in his hand and as a toothbrush when it was close to a mouth. As such, Hansenn told HLN that it seems the AI may just automatically conclude that if someone holds a hand near their head, it means they're using a phone.
"We are widely assured that AIs are subject to human checking," notes Slashdot reader Bruce66423 — but did a human police officer just defer to what the AI was reporting? Clearly the human-in-the-loop also made a mistake.

Hansenn will have to wait up to six months to see if his appeal of the fine has gone through. And the article notes that the Netherlands has been using this technology for several years, with plans for even more automated monitoring in the years to come...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before as a new complex computer simulation finds a "cliff-like" tipping point looming in the future. A long-worried nightmare scenario, triggered by Greenland's ice sheet melting from global warming, still is at least decades away if not longer, but maybe not the centuries that it once seemed, a new study in Friday's Science Advances finds.

The study, the first to use complex simulations and include multiple factors, uses a key measurement to track the strength of vital overall ocean circulation, which is slowing. A collapse of the current — called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC — would change weather worldwide because it means a shutdown of one of key the climate and ocean forces of the planet. It would plunge northwestern European temperatures by 9 to 27 degrees (5 to 15 degrees Celsius) over the decades, extend Arctic ice much farther south, turn up the heat even more in the Southern Hemisphere, change global rainfall patterns and disrupt the Amazon, the study said. Other scientists said it would be a catastrophe that could cause worldwide food and water shortages.

"We are moving closer (to the collapse), but we we're not sure how much closer," said study lead author Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "We are heading towards a tipping point." When this global weather calamity — grossly fictionalized in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" — may happen is "the million-dollar question, which we unfortunately can't answer at the moment," van Westen said. He said it's likely a century away but still could happen in his lifetime. He just turned 30.

"It also depends on the rate of climate change we are inducing as humanity," van Westen said.

The Dutch parent of Russian tech company Yandex is selling its search engine and other services at a steeply discounted price of $5.21 billion to a group of Russian-based managers and oil company Lukoil. According to the Associated Press, it marks "one of the biggest deals for Western-held companies to exit Russia since the invasion of Ukraine." From the report: The price reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia, according to a statement Monday from Nasdaq-exchange listed Yandex NV. [...] The sale in cash and shares worth 475 billion rubles would transfer Yandex's core business -- representing more than 95% of its revenue, assets and employees -- to the group of up to 50 managers, Lukoil and business entities owned by investors Alexander Chachava, Pavel Prass and Alexander Ryazanov.

The 50% discounted sale price was based on the average value of Yandex shares on the Moscow exchange for the three months ending Jan. 31 -- $10.2 billion. That's after shares had already fallen by more than half in ruble terms since their peak before the invasion. After the sale, Yandex NV would be left with its international businesses -- employing 1,300 people -- including self-driving technology and generative artificial intelligence as well as a data center in Finland.

Yandex, founded in 1997 as Russia's answer to Google and Yahoo, serves Russian-speaking customers through its search engine and with widely used apps for food delivery, car-sharing and shopping. Co-founder Arkady Volozh, who had earlier moved to Israel, resigned as CEO in 2022 after he was hit with European Union sanctions. He subsequently condemned Russia's invasion as "barbaric." The Nasdaq exchange suspended trading in Yandex shares days after the invasion.

The Guardian reports that "Hundreds of thousands of EU citizens were wrongly fined for driving in London's Ulez clean air zone, according to European governments..." The Guardian can reveal Transport for London (TfL) has been accused by five EU countries of illegally obtaining the names and addresses of their citizens in order to issue the fines, with more than 320,000 penalties, some totalling thousands of euros, sent out since 2021...

Since Brexit, the UK has been banned from automatic access to personal details of EU residents. Transport authorities in Belgium, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands have confirmed to the Guardian that driver data cannot be shared with the UK for enforcement of London's ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), and claim registered keeper details were obtained illegally by agents acting for TfL's contractor Euro Parking Collection. In France, more than 100 drivers have launched a lawsuit claiming their details were obtained fraudulently, while Dutch lorry drivers are taking legal action against TfL over £6.5m of fines they claim were issued unlawfully.

According to the Belgian MP Michael Freilich, who has investigated the issue on behalf of his constituents, TfL is treating European drivers as a "cash cow" by using data obtained illegitimately to issue unjustifiable fines.
Freilich describes the situation as "possibly one of the largest privacy and data breaches in EU history," according to the article.

Some drivers have even received penalties of up to five-figure sums — for compliant vehicles which had simply not yet been registered. And "some low-emission cars have been misclassed as heavy goods diesel vehicles and fined under the separate low-emission zone scheme, which incurs penalties of up to £2,000 a day."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

In response to new EU regulations, Apple on Thursday outlined plans to allow iOS developers to distribute apps outside the App Store starting in March, though developers must still submit apps for Apple's review and pay commissions. Now critics say the changes don't go far enough and Apple retains too much control.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA (Digital Markets Act), or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process. 37signals's David Heinemeier Hansson, who is also the creator of Ruby on Rails: Let's start with the extortion regime that'll befell any large developer who might be tempted to try hosting their app in one of these new alternative app stores that the EU forced Apple to allow. And let's take Meta as a good example. Their Instagram app alone is used by over 300 million people in Europe. Let's just say for easy math there's 250 million of those in the EU. In order to distribute Instagram on, say, a new Microsoft iOS App Store, Meta would have to pay Apple $11,277,174 PER MONTH(!!!) as a "Core Technology Fee." That's $135 MILLION DOLLARS per year. Just for the privilege of putting Instagram into a competing store. No fee if they stay in Apple's App Store exclusively.

Holy shakedown, batman! That might be the most blatant extortion attempt ever committed to public policy by any technology company ever. And Meta has many successful apps! WhatsApp is even more popular in Europe than Instagram, so that's another $135M+/year. Then they gotta pay for the Facebook app too. There's the Messenger app. You add a hundred million here and a hundred million there, and suddenly you're talking about real money! Even for a big corporation like Meta, it would be an insane expense to offer all their apps in these new alternative app stores.

Which, of course, is the entire point. Apple doesn't want Meta, or anyone, to actually use these alternative app stores. They want everything to stay exactly as it is, so they can continue with the rake undisturbed. This poison pill is therefore explicitly designed to ensure that no second-party app store ever takes off. Without any of the big apps, there will be no draw, and there'll be no stores. All of the EU's efforts to create competition in the digital markets will be for nothing. And Apple gets to send a clear signal: If you interrupt our tool-booth operation, we'll make you regret it, and we'll make you pay. Don't resist, just let it be. Let's hope the EU doesn't just let it be. Coalition of App Fairness, an industry body that represents over 70 firms including Tinder, Spotify, Proton, Tile, and News Media Europe: "Apple clearly has no intention to comply with the DMA. Apple is introducing new fees on direct downloads and payments they do nothing to process, which violates the law. This plan does not achieve the DMA's goal to increase competition and fairness in the digital market -- it is not fair, reasonable, nor non-discriminatory," said Rick VanMeter, Executive Director of the Coalition for App Fairness.

"Apple's proposal forces developers to choose between two anticompetitive and illegal options. Either stick with the terrible status quo or opt into a new convoluted set of terms that are bad for developers and consumers alike. This is yet another attempt to circumvent regulation, the likes of which we've seen in the United States, the Netherlands and South Korea. Apple's 'plan' is a shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent -- it must not stand and should be rejected by the Commission."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek.com: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country's intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines.

De Volkskrant's investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 -- a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered -- after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country's government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman.

It's believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It's unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant's investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper's sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.