Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights Monday -- at least 70% of its schedule for the day -- and more than 2,500 flights Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET -- at least 60% of its schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware. NPR reports: The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights called off. Other airlines have also ordered large-scale cancellations in the past week. Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline's disruptions are a result of the winter storm's lingering effects, adding that it hopes to "stabilize and improve its operation" with more favorable weather conditions. Other issues that have exacerbated the airline's struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with "connecting flight crews to their schedules," Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments.

Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, called it an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling, particularly after weather delays. But with many areas seeing clear skies on Monday, the airline would seem to have few obvious reasons to cancel so many flights. Potter calls it a "full-blown meltdown." "This is really as bad as it gets for an airline," Potter said. "We've seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there's pretty clear skies across the country." The U.S. Department of Transportation called the cancellations "unacceptable," and will be investigating the airline to see whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan (PDF).

Baidu, the Chinese internet giant that became known for its search engines, is making some big strides in autonomous driving. From a report: Starting this week, the public can ride its robotaxis in Wuhan between 7 am and 11 pm without safety drivers behind the wheel. Previously, its unmanned vehicles could only operate from 9 am to 5 pm in the city. The updated scheme is expected to cover one million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people.

Like most autonomous vehicle startups, Baidu combines a mix of third-party cameras, radars, and lidars to help its cars see better in low-visibility conditions, in contrast to Tesla's vision-based solution. In August, Baidu started offering fully driverless robotaxi rides, charging passengers at taxi rates. In Q3, Apollo Go, the firm's robotaxi hailing app, completed more than 474,000 rides, up 311% year over year. Accumulatively, Apollo Go had exceeded 1.4 million orders as of Q3. That sounds like a potentially substantial revenue stream for Baidu, but one should take such figures with a grain of salt and ask: how many of these trips are subsidized by discounts? How many of them are repeatable, daily routes rather than one-off novelty rides taken by early adopters? To juice up performance numbers, it's not uncommon to see Chinese robotaxi operators enticing the public to ride in their vehicles with perks.

The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries to gain AI prowess as well as semiconductor sovereignty, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. From a report: In addition, the number of GPU makers grew worldwide in recent years as demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and graphics processing increased at a rather unprecedented rate. When it comes to discrete graphics for PCs, AMD and Nvidia maintain lead, whereas Intel is trying to catch up.

Tens of companies developed graphics cards and discrete graphics processors in the 1980s and the 1990s, but cut-throat competition for the highest performance in 3D games drove the vast majority of them out of business. By 2010, only AMD and Nvidia could offer competitive standalone GPUs for gaming and compute, whereas others focused either on integrated GPUs or GPU IP. The mid-2010s found the number of China-based PC GPU developers increasing rapidly, fueled by the country's push for tech self-sufficiency as well as the advent of AI and HPC as high-tech megatrends.

In total, there are 18 companies developing and producing GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are two companies that develop SoC-bound GPUs primarily with smartphones and notebooks in mind, there are six GPU IP providers, and there are 11 GPU developers focused on GPUs for PCs and datacenters, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, which design graphics cards that end up in our list of the best graphics cards. In fact, if we added other China-based companies like Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin to the list, there would be even more GPU designers. However, Biren and Tianshu Zhixin are solely focused on AI and HPC for now, so JPR does not consider them GPU developers.

The U.S. Copyright Office has completed its public consultations on the use of technical measures to identify and protect copyrighted content online. From a report: For many years, U.S. lawmakers have considered options to update the DMCA so it can more effectively deal with today's online copyright issues. Many proposals have come and gone, without resulting in any significant updates. Calls to change current legislation persist, however. Following repeated nudges from Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy, the Copyright Office launched a consultation on automated tools that online services can use to ensure that pirated content is less easily shared.

The Copyright Office also asked stakeholders whether it's desirable to make certain standard technical measures mandatory for online platforms. Such measures could include upload filters to block pirated content from being reuploaded. This month the Copyright Office presents its conclusions, which are also shared with Senators Tillis and Leahy in two letters. After reviewing thousands of responses and input from stakeholders in plenary sessions, the overall conclusion is one of clear disagreement. Most parties agree that it's impossible to design an error-free takedown process but disagree on what error rate is acceptable when takedowns are automated. Opponents of filtering technology warn that fair use and First Amendment rights are at stake.

Rightsholders did not dispute that but noted that these issues don't play a role when full copies of copyrighted content are shared. When it comes to the implementation of voluntary measures, the Copyright Office doesn't have any concrete suggestions. Instead, it will continue to back existing initiatives, while facilitating dialogue between various stakeholders. "The public comments and the consultations confirmed that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to voluntary technical measures, and that there remains a lack of consensus in this area," the Office writes. "Nevertheless, the consultations served as valuable opportunities for dialogue among stakeholders, which may lead to further voluntary action. The Copyright Office proposed options to continue its role as convener of these conversations in the future."

The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced to switch down their facilities due to deadly blizzards. From a report: Bitcoin hashrate, the level of computing power used for mining and processing transactions, came in at 155.28 exahashes per second on Saturday, down from 253.88 exahashes on Wednesday, according to data from IntoTheBlock. A winter storm has claimed at least 32 lives across the U.S., as of Monday morning in Hong Kong, according to media reports.

Raymond Chen, writing for Microsoft DevBlogs: In the mid-1980's, Microsoft produced an expansion card for the IBM PC and PC XT, known as the Mach 10. In addition to occupying an expansion slot, it also replaced your CPU: You unplugged your old and busted 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and plugged into the now-empty socket a special adapter that led via a ribbon cable back to the Mach 10 card. On the Mach 10 card was the new hotness: A 9.54 MHz 8086 CPU. This gave you a 2x performance upgrade for a lot less money than an IBM PC AT. The Mach 10 also came with a mouse port, so you could add a mouse without having to burn an additional expansion slot. Sidebar: The product name was stylized as MACH [PDF] in some product literature. The Mach 10 was a flop.

Undaunted, Microsoft partnered with a company called Portable Computer Support Group to produce the Mach 20, released in 1987. You probably remember the Portable Computer Support Group for their disk cache software called Lightning. The Mach 20 took the same basic idea as the Mach 10, but to the next level: As before, you unplugged your old 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and replaced it with an adapter that led via ribbon cable to the Mach 20 card, which you plugged into an expansion slot. This time, the Mach 20 had an 8 MHz 80286 CPU, so you were really cooking with gas now. And, like the Mach 10, it had a mouse port built in. According to a review in Info World, it retailed for $495. The Mach 20 itself had room for expansion: it had an empty socket for an 80287 floating point coprocessor. One daughterboard was the Mach 20 Memory Plus Expanded Memory Option, which gave you an astonishing 3.5 megabytes of RAM, and it was high-speed RAM since it wasn't bottlenecked by the ISA bus on the main motherboard. The other daughterboard was the Mach 20 Disk Plus, which lets you connect 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 floppy drives.

A key detail is that all these expansions connected directly to the main Mach 20 board, so that they didn't consume a precious expansion slot. The IBM PC came with five expansion slots, and they were in high demand. You needed one for the hard drive controller, one for the floppy drive controller, one for the video card, one for the printer parallel port, one for the mouse. Oh no, you ran out of slots, and you haven't even gotten to installing a network card or expansion RAM yet! You could try to do some consolidation by buying so-called multifunction cards, but still, the expansion card crunch was real. But why go to all this trouble to upgrade your IBM PC to something roughly equivalent to an IBM PC AT? Why not just buy an IBM PC AT in the first place? Who would be interested in this niche upgrade product?

An anonymous reader writes: This column about a writer's struggle to find the perfect note-taking app resonated a lot with me. "A singular productivity tool that works for everyone is a unicorn -- beautiful, perfect, and completely fictional. Still, there has to be some sort of middle ground between an unachievable fantasy and the current landscape. I would happily settle for two, maybe three apps. Honestly, less than 10 is all I'm asking for. Until then, my phone and laptop will be a cluttered mess of productivity apps that only do half their jobs," writes Victoria Song.

Over the years, I have tried Notion, Apple Notes, the good old Windows' Notepad, Roam Research, Obsidian, Google Keep, Google Docs, and OneNote among possibly many more that I am unable to recall anymore. Some support Apple Pencil, which is one of the usecases I find useful. Roam Research did not even have a native app for mobile devices for the longest time. Some applications are good, but they don't support online syncing, or support syncing with only a particular storage service. And have you noticed just how expensive some of these apps could get? As much as $15-$30 a month! Out of curiosity, and forget my usecases -- as I admit I have not mentioned many -- how do you maintain your notes for work and personal life. (I have been using physical notepads a lot more in recent months but would like an app for digital notes.)

It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes those things were documented, or at least hinted at, in blog posts that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. From a report: A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds.

Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks."

Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek: Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this."

The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.

The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

"A Microsoft employee appears to have accidentally announced that Windows 11's Notepad app is getting a tabs feature," reports the Verge: The employee, a senior product manager at Microsoft, posted a photo of a version of Notepad with tabs, enthusiastically announcing "Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!" with a loudspeaker emoji.

The tweet was deleted minutes later, but not before Windows Central and several Windows enthusiast Twitter accounts had spotted the mistake. The Notepad screenshot includes a Microsoft internal warning: "Confidential Don't discuss features or take screenshots...."

The addition of tabs in Notepad could signal a shift towards tabs appearing in more built-in Windows apps.

Ars Technica reports on a dangerously "wormable" Windows vulnerability that allowed attackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required — a vulnerability that was present "in a much broader range of network protocols, giving attackers more flexibility than they had when exploiting the older vulnerability." Microsoft fixed CVE-2022-37958 in September during its monthly Patch Tuesday rollout of security fixes. At the time, however, Microsoft researchers believed the vulnerability allowed only the disclosure of potentially sensitive information. As such, Microsoft gave the vulnerability a designation of "important." In the routine course of analyzing vulnerabilities after they're patched, IBM security researcher Valentina Palmiotti discovered it allowed for remote code execution in much the way EternalBlue did [the flaw used to detonate WannaCry]. Last week, Microsoft revised the designation to critical and gave it a severity rating of 8.1, the same given to EternalBlue....

One potentially mitigating factor is that a patch for CVE-2022-37958 has been available for three months. EternalBlue, by contrast, was initially exploited by the NSA as a zero-day. The NSA's highly weaponized exploit was then released into the wild by a mysterious group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The leak, one of the worst in the history of the NSA, gave hackers around the world access to a potent nation-state-grade exploit. Palmiotti said there's reason for optimism but also for risk: "While EternalBlue was an 0-Day, luckily this is an N-Day with a 3 month patching lead time," said Palmiotti.
There's still some risk, Palmiotti tells Ars Technica. "As we've seen with other major vulnerabilities over the years, such as MS17-010 which was exploited with EternalBlue, some organizations have been slow deploying patches for several months or lack an accurate inventory of systems exposed to the internet and miss patching systems altogether."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "metaverse" in his 1992 book Snow Crash. 30 years later, Stephenson is part of a blockchain startup "optimized for the Open Metaverse" called Lamina1. This week they announced their "first-of-its-kind fund" for investing in early stage Layer 1 blockchain projects ("largely focused" on the Open Metaverse). .

The goal is "to provide broad economic access to global accredited investors looking to support the next era of the internet," according to the announcement — and to also provide Web3 builders "a vehicle for raising capital for their Open Metaverse ventures." The fund will be led by Lamina1's co-founder Peter Vessenes (who, among other things, was the first Chairman of the Bitcoin foundation), "offering investors a chance to join him at the forefront of the emerging Open Metaverse economy..."

"Investors and builders can both apply to participate immediately." The fund launch will be closely followed by the much-anticipated launch of Lamina1's testnet.... The L1EF fund works by allowing accredited investors to access and co-invest in companies and entrepreneurs through quarterly subscriptions.

Investments will be largely focused on the technology and experiences users can access in the Open Metaverse, ranging from immersive computing to open AI at scale. To support the rapid advancement and expansion of the Open Metaverse, L1EF is simultaneously focused on investing in builders and creators who will foster the quality tech and infrastructure necessary to support the protocol, and create immersive experiences that bring Lamina1's vision of an Open Metaverse to life. Some of these early stage projects include layer 2 protocols, DeFi, GameFi, marketplaces, bridges, and many more.

"We're thrilled to introduce L1EF to serve both creators and investors who are actively promoting the development of an Open Metaverse," said Rebecca Barkin, President of Lamina1. "Peter has a deep understanding and demonstrated success of growing economies around a chain, and his approach to grant builders early access to capital — right as we're preparing to place testnet in their hands — is in perfect alignment with our mission to build the open infrastructure that brings together the most powerful creative community on the planet...."

In addition to capital, projects that are part of L1EF will receive early access and support for Lamina1 developer tooling through the forthcoming Lamina1 Early Access Program.
"The team has a front row seat to all happening in the ecosystem," Vessenes said this week, "and essentially gets a 'first look' at what many of the most compelling creators and storytellers of our time are doing, building, making, and producing around the world.

"We want to share that front row seat with as many people as possible."


In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor three journalists' physical location using their IP addresses, reports Forbes, "to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company's ongoing links to China." As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.... "It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations," TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second internal email shared with Forbes. "However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data...."

"This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People's Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected," Senator Mark Warner told Forbes....

ByteDance is not the first tech giant to use an app to monitor specific users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties.... Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journalists reporting on their apps.
Ironically, TikTok's journalist-tracking project involved the company's Chief Security and Privacy Office, according to Forbes, and targeted three Forbes journalists who had formerly worked at BuzzFeed News.

It was back in October that Forbes first reported ByteDance had discussed tracking journallists. ByteDance had immediately denied the charges on Twitter, saying "TikTok has never been used to 'target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists," and that "TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested."

Forbes also notes that in 2021, TikTok became the most visited website in the world.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod for submitting the story!

Meta, Microsoft and Apple, and Google all want carbon-free power. But Google "says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities," reports the New York Times, especially those in America's Southeastern states which aren't facing a competitive market. Google's battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what's good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region's electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so. Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies....

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast. Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM....

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it's not enough. In the region, the proposed solar projects' generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration. "Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers," Mr. Norris said.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

Under the bipartisan spending bill that passed both chambers of Congress as of Friday, TikTok will be banned from government devices, underscoring the growing concern about the popular video-sharing app owned by China's ByteDance. From a report: The bill, which still has to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, also calls on e-commerce platforms to do more vetting to help deter counterfeit goods from being sold online, and forces companies pursuing large mergers to pay more to file with federal antitrust agencies.

Congress failed to pass many of the most aggressive bills targeting tech, including antitrust legislation that would require app stores developed by Apple and Google to give developers more payment options, and a measure mandating new guardrails to protect kids online. And though Congress made more headway this year than in the past toward a compromise bill on national privacy standards, there remains only a patchwork of state laws determining how consumer data is protected. Center-left tech industry group Chamber of Progress cheered the exclusion of several antitrust bills that would have targeted its backers, which include Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users' personal information. From a report: The proposed settlement, which was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday, would resolve a long-running lawsuit prompted by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the proposed settlement the largest to ever be achieved in a U.S. data privacy class action and the most that Meta has ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit.

"This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case," the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, said in a joint statement. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which is subject to the approval of a federal judge in San Francisco. The company said in a statement settling was "in the best interest of our community and shareholders." "Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program," Meta said.

b0s0z0ku writes: The European Union is proposing a law requiring easily replaceable batteries in new appliances and portable electronic devices. The law also sets targets for collection and recycling of those batteries, requiring 73% compliance by 2030. "Companies would get plenty of notice, however, as the requirement would only come into force 3.5 years after the legislation takes effect," adds 9to5Mac. "Companies will also be legally required to accept and recycle old batteries."

Additionally, the European Commission is "expected to consider outlawing the use of non-rechargeable portable batteries," though this would likely come with many exceptions and wouldn't happen before the end of the decade.

Further reading: EU Sets December 28, 2024, Deadline For All New Phones To Use USB-C for Wired Charging

The FBI is recommending the use of ad blockers, warning in an alert this week that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results to steal or extort money from victims. TechCrunch reports: In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with "minimum distinction" between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware. One of the FBI's recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands. Ad blockers don't just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history. "Of course, you can switch your ad blocker off any time you want, and even allow or deny ads for entire websites," adds the report.

"Ads are still an important part of what keeps the internet largely free and accessible, including TechCrunch (and Slashdot!), even as subscriptions and paywalls are increasingly becoming the norm."