Microsoft is planning to launch a public preview of its Android apps for Windows 11 next month, alongside some taskbar improvements and redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. Windows chief Panos Panay outlined the upcoming changes to Windows 11 in a blog post today, and they appear to be part of Windows 11's first big update. From a report: The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11, but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop. The upcoming Windows 11 next month will also include the weather widget returning to the taskbar, something Microsoft started testing last month. Microsoft is also redesigning its Notepad and Media Player apps, and both include dark modes and design tweaks that more closely match Windows 11.

The big new addition will be Android apps on Windows 11, though. Panay says this will be a "public preview," indicating that the feature will still be in beta when it's widely available next month. Microsoft first started testing Android apps on Windows 11 with testers in October, and the feature allows you to install a limited number of apps from Amazon's Appstore. There are a variety of workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11, but Microsoft isn't officially supporting this. Panay also shared a variety of stats about how important Windows has become over the past couple of years. Windows 10 and Windows 11 now run on 1.4 billion devices each month, and the PC market has experienced strong growth throughout the pandemic.

After years of stagnation, the PC industry has seen its best growth in a decade as people buy new laptops and desktops. But while some pandemic-fueled changes may prove temporary, Microsoft product chief Panos Panay sees the industry's return to growth as durable. From a report: "This pandemic has been a forcing function," Panay said in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, following the release of Microsoft's quarterly earnings report. The PC market got a boost as life moved online, but the question for the industry now is whether and how it can keep the momentum going. Before the pandemic, many households focused their tech spending on buying bigger TVs and upgrading their cell phones every couple of years, while trying to keep their PCs as long as possible. During COVID-19, the PC has taken on new life as a tool for remote work, distance learning and staying in touch with friends and family in a world where travel has been greatly curtailed. That drove the global shipments of laptops and desktops for the last quarter to surpass 90 million for the second year in a row, and sales for the year reached a level not seen since 2012. Microsoft reported 25% growth in the revenue it gets from having Windows installed on new PCs.

Diem, Meta's ill-fated cryptocurrency previously known as Libra, may never actually materialize. According to Bloomberg, the Diem Association is reportedly "weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members." Engadget reports: It's unclear what assets the Diem Association owns, but the report notes the group is talking to bankers about selling its intellectual property and finding "a new home for the engineers that developed the technology." If a sale were to happen, it would seem to be the final nail in the coffin for Diem, the cryptocurrency project that Mark Zuckerberg has championed. Plans to get the stablecoin off the ground have stalled for years amid regulatory pushback and lawmaker concerns. After first launching as Libra, several high-profile partners pulled out in 2019.

Last fall, Facebook started a small pilot of Novi, the cryptocurrency wallet formerly known as Calibra. But the fact that Novi was forced to launch without support for Diem -- it used a different stablecoin called the Pax Dollar -- was a sign that Diem's future remained uncertain. Longtime Facebook exec David Marcus, who oversaw the social network's crypto plans, said at the time that Facebook remained committed to Diem. "I do want to be clear that our support for Diem hasn't changed and we intend to launch Novi with Diem once it receives regulatory approval and goes live," he wrote. Marcus announced a month later that he was leaving Facebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Aaron Gordon: Not quite three years ago, I bought a Pixel 3, Google's flagship phone at the time. It has been a good phone. I like that it's not too big. I dropped it a bunch, but it didn't break. And the battery life has not noticeably changed since the day I got it. I think of phones in much the same way I think of refrigerators or stoves. It's an appliance, something I need but feel no attachment to, and as long as it keeps fulfilling that need, I don't want to spend money replacing it for no real reason. The Pixel 3 fulfills my needs, so I don't want to spend $600 on the Pixel 6, which seems to be just another phone that does all the phone things.

But I have to get rid of it because Google has stopped supporting all Pixel 3s. Despite being just three years old, no Pixel 3 will ever receive another official security update. Installing security updates is the one basic thing everyone needs to do for their own digital security. If you don't even get them, then you're vulnerable to every security flaw discovered since your last patch. In response to an email asking Google why it stopped supporting the Pixel 3, a Googles spokesperson said, "We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device."

This has been a problem with Android for as long as Android has existed. In 2015, my colleague Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai wrote a farewell to Android because of its terrible software support and spotty upgrade rollouts. Android has long blamed this obvious issue on the fact that updates need to run through the cellphone company and phone manufacturer before being pushed to the user. At the time, Google didn't make any Android phones; the Nexus line was the closest thing, a partnership with other manufacturers like Motorola and HTC (I had one of those, too). But for the past six years, Google has made the Pixel line of phones. They are Google-made phones, meaning Google can't blame discontinuing security updates on other manufacturers, and yet, it announced that's exactly what it would do. Gordon goes on to say that he's "switching to an iPhone for the first time," noting how the most recent version of iOS can be installed on phones going as far back as the iPhone 6s, which was released more than six years ago.

"Unless you routinely destroy your phone within two or three years, there's no justification from a sustainability perspective to keep using Android phones," he adds. "Of course, Apple is only good by comparison, as it also manufactures devices that are difficult to repair with an artificially short shelf life. It just happens to have a longer shelf life than Google."

An undersea fibre-optic cable which connects Tonga to the rest of the world was severed during the eruption of a volcano. From a report: New Zealand's ministry of foreign affairs says it could take more than a month to repair breaks in the 49,889km (31,000miles) of cable that serves the South Pacific. The undersea eruption - followed by a tsunami - led to Tonga's 110,000 people being cut off. A 2G wireless connection has been established on the main island, using a satellite dish from the University of the South Pacific. But the service is patchy, and internet services run slowly. The cable, which is operated by Tonga Cable, is believed to have broken about 37km (23 miles) offshore. According to Reuters, fault-finding conducted by the company in the aftermath of the volcano seemed to confirm a cable break.

he process of mending it is actually quite simple, according to principal engineer at Virgin Media, Peter Jamieson, who is also vice-chairman of the European Subsea Cable Association. "They will send a pulse of light from the island and a machine will measure how long it takes to travel and this will establish where the break is," he explained. Then a cable-repair boat will be sent to the location of the first break. It will use either an ROV (remotely-operated underwater vehicle) or a tool known as a grapnel (basically a hook on a chain) to retrieve the broken end. That will be re-joined to fresh cable on board the boat and then the same process will happen at the other end of the break. If all goes well, the whole process will take between five and seven days. It will take time to get a cable repair boat to the archipelago and the closest one is currently stationed in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea - about 4,700km (2,900 miles) away. The specialised ship, The Reliance, serves more than 50,000km (31,000 miles) of cable in the South Pacific.

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google's controversial project for replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into groups of users with comparable interests, is dead. In its place, Google today announced a new proposal: Topics. From a report: The idea here is that your browser will learn about your interests as you move around the web. It'll keep data for the last three weeks of your browsing history and as of now, Google is restricting the number of topics to 300, with plans to extend this over time. Google notes that these topics will not include any sensitive categories like gender or race. To figure out your interests, Google categorizes the sites you visit based on one of these 300 topics. For sites that it hasn't categorized before, a lightweight machine learning algorithm in the browser will take over and provide an estimated topic based on the name of the domain.

When you hit upon a site that supports the Topics API for ad purposes, the browser will share three topics you are interested in -- one for each of the three last weeks -- selected randomly from your top five topics of each week. The site can then share this with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would make for a more private method of deciding which ad to show you -- and Google notes that it also provides users with far greater control and transparency than what's currently the standard. Users will be able to review and remove topics from their lists -- and turn off the entire Topics API, too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A flying car capable of hitting speeds over 100mph (160kmh) and altitudes above 8,000ft (2,500m) has been issued with a certificate of airworthiness by the Slovak Transport Authority. The hybrid car-aircraft, AirCar, is equipped with a BMW engine and runs on regular petrol-pump fuel. It takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft. The certification followed 70 hours of flight testing and more than 200 take-offs and landings, the company said. "AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars," its creator, Prof Stefan Klein, said. "It is official and the final confirmation of our ability to change mid-distance travel forever."

In June, the flying car completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia. The company told BBC News it planned "to fly to London from Paris in near future." Dr Steve Wright, senior research fellow in avionics and aircraft systems, at the University of the West of England, said the news was "a good step down the road" for the company and made him "cautiously optimistic that I am going to see a few AirCars one day -- but I think there is still a way to go."

The Linux Foundation has released three new training courses on the edX platform: Open Source Software Development: Linux for Developers (LFD107x), Linux Tools for Software Development (LFD108x), and Git for Distributed Software Development (LFD109x). The three courses can be taken individually or combined to earn a Professional Certificate in Open Source Software Development, Linux, and Git. ZDNet reports: The first class, Open Source Software Development: Linux for Developers (LFD107x) explores the key concepts of developing open-source software and how to work productively in Linux. You don't need to know Linux before starting this class, as it's an introduction to Linux designed for developers. In it, you'll learn how to install Linux and programs, how to use desktop environments, text editors, important commands and utilities, command shells and scripts, filesystems, and compilers. For this class, the Foundation recommends you use a computer installed with a current Linux distribution. I'd go further and recommend you use one with one of the professional Linux distributions. In particular, you should focus on one of the three main enterprise Linux families: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu. There are hundreds of other distros, but these are the ones that matter to companies looking for Linux developers.

The next course, Linux Tools for Software Development (LFD108x) examines the tools necessary to do everyday work in Linux development environments and beyond. It is designed for developers with experience working on any operating system who want to understand the basics of open-source development. Upon completion, participants will be familiar with essential shell tools, so they can work comfortably and productively in Linux environments. In addition, I recommend you come to this class with a working knowledge of the C programming language.

Finally, Git for Distributed Software Development (LFD109x) provides a thorough introduction to Git. Git is Linux Torvalds' other great accomplishment. This source control system was first used by the Linux kernel community to enable developers from around the world to operate efficiently. In addition, thanks to such sites as GitHub and GitLab, Git has become the lingua franca of all software development. Everyone uses Git today. With this class, you'll learn to use Git to create new repositories or clone existing ones, commit new changes, review revision histories, examine differences with older versions, work with different branches, merge repositories, and work with a distributed development team. Whether or not you end up programming in Linux, knowing how to use Git is essential for the modern programmer. As ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols notes, you can take the three courses through edX in audit mode for no cost. However, you'll need to earn the professional certificate so employers will know you're capable of open-source programming.

"To do this, you must enroll in the program, complete all three courses, and pay a verified certificate fee of $149 per course."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Space Force launched two additional satellites today as part of its push for greater Space Domain Awareness, or SDA, in geosynchronous orbit some 22,000 miles away from Earth. The two satellites are part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP, and will allow Space Force to not only locate and identify objects in this distant orbit, but also maneuver close to them in order to inspect them or assess their capabilities. The launch comes as Space Force leadership continues to sound the alarm about the risks posed to U.S. satellites in orbit.

The Northrop Grumman-built GSSAP-5 and GSSAP-6 were launched today at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V 511 rocket. The first two GSSAP satellites were launched in 2014, with the second two following in 2016. Space Force has not released any details about how these two new GSSAP satellites might differ from the previous four, which were designed to operate near the belt of other geosynchronous satellites and maneuver close to them to conduct surveillance. A spokesperson for Space Systems Command stated this week that the new GGSAP satellites "will provide improved SDA data to the National Space Defense Center and other national users to enhance our ability to navigate freely and safely within the GEO belt."

GSSAP-5 and GSSAP-6 were originally scheduled to be launched in 2020, and it is not known why the launch was delayed almost two years. The GSSAP program was originally highly classified and was only revealed to the public in 2014. While the exact capabilities of the satellites are not public, it's known that they are able to capture close-up images of other satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Former Commander of Air Force Space Command Gen. William Shelton (Ret.) told Aviation Week in 2014 that the satellites are designed to drift in and out of the geosynchronous belt collecting intelligence on specific targets. The Air Force has previously used one of the satellites for Remote Proximity Operations (RPO), maneuvering close enough to inspect another Department of Defense satellite operated by the Navy that was experiencing a malfunction. The former head of Air Force Space Command, General John Hyten (Ret.), has previously said the satellites are capable of capturing some "truly eye-watering" imagery.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk has a very specific vision for the ideal factory: densely packed, vertically integrated and unusually massive. During Tesla's early days of mass production, he was chided for what was perceived as hubris. Now, Tesla's original California factory has achieved a brag-worthy title: the most productive auto plant in North America. Last year Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, produced an average of 8,550 cars a week. That's more than Toyota's juggernaut in Georgetown, Kentucky (8,427 cars a week), BMW AG's Spartanburg hub in South Carolina (8,343) or Ford's iconic truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan (5,564), according to a Bloomberg analysis of production data from more than 70 manufacturing facilities.

In a year when auto production around the world was stifled by supply-chain shortages, Tesla expanded its global production by 83% over 2020 levels. Its other auto factory, in Shanghai, tripled output to nearly 486,000. In the coming weeks, Tesla is expected to announce the start of production at two new factories -- Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, its first in Europe, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin. Musk said in October that he plans to further increase production in Fremont and Shanghai by 50%. [...] Once Tesla flips the switch on two new factories, what comes next? Musk has a longstanding target to increase vehicle deliveries by roughly 50% a year. To continue such growth, Tesla will need to either open more factories or make the facilities even more productive. Musk said in October that he's working on both. Site selection for the next Gigafactories begins this year.

Hacktivists in Belarus said on Monday they had infected the network of the country's state-run railroad system with ransomware and would provide the decryption key only if Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko stopped aiding Russian troops ahead of a possible invasion of Ukraine. Ars Technica reports: Referring to the Belarus Railway, a group calling itself Cyber Partisans wrote on Telegram: "BelZhD, at the command of the terrorist Lukashenko, these days allows the occupying troops to enter our land. As part of the 'Peklo' cyber campaign, we encrypted the bulk of the servers, databases and workstations of the BelZhD in order to slow down and disrupt the operation of the road. The backups have been destroyed [...]." The group also announced the attack on Twitter.

A representative from the group said in a direct message that the Peklo cyber campaign targets specific entities and government-run companies with the goal of pressuring the Belarus government to release political prisoners and stop Russian troops from entering Belarus to use its ground for the attacks on Ukraine. "The government continues to suppress the free will of Belarusians, imprison innocent people, they continue to unlawfully keep... thousands of political prisoners," the representative wrote. "The major goal is to overthrow Lukashenko's regime, keep the sovereignty and build a democratic state with the rule of law, independent institutions and protection of human rights."

At the time this post went live, several services on the railway's website were unavailable. Online ticket purchases, for instance, weren't working [...]. The representative said that besides ticketing and scheduling being disrupted, the cyberattack also affected freight trains. According to reports, Russia has been sending military equipment and personnel by rail into Belarus, which shares a border with Ukraine. @belzhd_live, a group of Belarus Railway workers that tracks activity on the 5,512-km railway, said on Friday that in a week's time, more than 33 Russian military trains loaded with equipment and troops had arrived in Belarus for joint strategic exercises there. The worker group said at the time that it expected a total of 200 so-called echelons to arrive in the coming days.

Washington DC, Texas, Washington state and Indiana announced the latest lawsuit against Big Tech Monday, alleging that Google deceived users by collecting their location data even when they believed that kind of tracking was disabled. TechCrunch reports: "Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access," DC Attorney General Karl Racine said. "The truth is that contrary to Google's representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data." Racine described Google's privacy practices as "bold misrepresentations" that undermine consumer privacy. His office began investigating how Google handles user location data after reporting from the Associated Press in 2018 found that many Google apps across iOS and Android recorded location data even when users have chosen privacy options that explicitly say they won't. The AP coordinated with computer science researchers at Princeton to verify its findings.

The lawsuit argues that Google created a location tracking system that's impossible for users to opt out of and that it misled users about how privacy settings could protect their data within apps and at the device level on Android. It also accuses Google of relying on deceptive dark pattern design to force users into making choices counter to their own interests. Racine's office is pursuing an injunction against Google as well as seeking to force the company to pay out profits that it made from user data collected by misleading consumers about their privacy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Meta said Monday that its research team built a new artificial intelligence supercomputer that the company maintains will soon be the fastest in the world. The supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster, was the result of nearly two years of work, often conducted remotely during the height of the pandemic, and led by the Facebook parent's AI and infrastructure teams. Several hundred people, including researchers from partners Nvidia, Penguin Computing and Pure Storage, were involved in the project, the company said.

Meta, which announced the news in a blog post Monday, said its research team currently is using the supercomputer to train AI models in natural-language processing and computer vision for research. The aim is to boost capabilities to one day train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte, which is roughly equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. "The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute powerand RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. Meta's AI supercomputer houses 6,080 Nvidia graphics-processing units, putting it fifth among the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Meta.

By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, Meta said. The company declined to comment on the location of the facility or the cost. [...] Eventually the supercomputer will help Meta's researchers build AI models that can work across hundreds of languages, analyze text, images and video together and develop augmented reality tools, the company said. The technology also will help Meta more easily identify harmful content and will aim to help Meta researchers develop artificial-intelligence models that think like the human brain and support rich, multidimensional experiences in the metaverse. "In the metaverse, it's one hundred percent of the time, a 3-D multi-sensorial experience, and you need to create artificial-intelligence agents in that environment that are relevant to you," said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of AI at Meta.

Andorra Telecom, the only ISP in the principality of Andorra, suffered repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks during a multi-day Twitch gaming tournament. From a report: The DDoS attacks occurred during the scheduled SquidCraft Games tournament in Minecraft, one of the most successful Twitch Rivals tournaments ever broadcast. Eight or more Andorran streamers were eliminated from the Twitch tournament after the second day of attacks due to their repeated disconnects. There is some suspicion that perpetrators planned the DDoS attacks on Andorra Telecom to cheat the Andorran's of their chance to win the $100,000 pot. The SquidCraft Games was a highly anticipated Twitch streaming event designed to emulate the hit Netflix series called The Squid Game in Minecraft. As noted, it has been a viral game streaming event with a peak viewership of over a million on day two of the event. As per the TV series, this is an elimination game, and in this Twitch event, there is a healthy prize pot of $100,000 to ensure participants would be highly competitive. The event will end on Tuesday. A significant portion of the 150 SquidCraft games participants lives in Andorra. Spanish language reports of the event confirm that day one went without a hitch for all players, in terms of fairness. The games "green light, red light," and "hide and seek" ran smoothly to their conclusions.

Faster internet access has significantly weakened civic participation in Britain, according to a study that found involvement in political parties, trade unions and volunteering fell as web speeds rose. From a report: Volunteering in social care fell by more than 10% when people lived closer to local telecoms exchange hubs and so enjoyed faster web access. Involvement in political parties fell by 19% with every 1.8km increase in proximity to a hub. By contrast, the arrival of fast internet had no significant impact on interactions with family and friends. The analysis of behaviour among hundreds of thousands of people led by academics from Cardiff University and Sapienza University of Rome found faster connection speeds may have reduced the likelihood of civic engagement among close to 450,000 people -- more than double the estimated membership of the Conservative party. They found that as internet speeds rose between 2005 and 2018, time online "crowded out" other forms of civic engagement.

The study's authors have also speculated that the phenomenon may have helped fuel populism as people's involvement with initiatives for "the common good," which they say are effectively "schools of democracy" where people learn the benefit of cooperation, has declined. Other studies have shown that social media engagement has strengthened other kinds of civic engagement, for example by helping to organise protests and fuelling an interest in politics, even if it does not manifest in traditional forms of participation. However, politics conducted online has been found to be more susceptible to "filter bubbles," which limit participants' exposure to opposing views and so foster polarisation.

Facebook says it's helping millions of the world's poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use internet data free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month. WSJ: To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges. Many of the users have inexpensive cellphone plans that cost just a few dollars a month, often prepaid, for phone service and a small amount of internet data. Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.

In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent Meta Platforms acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free "breaches our transparency principle," an employee wrote in an October memo. In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook's free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to a Facebook document. Facebook calls the problem "leakage," since paid services are leaking into the free apps and services. It defines leakage in internal documents as, "When users are in Free Mode and believe that the data they are using is being covered by their carrier networks, even though these users are actually paying for the data themselves."

How exactly could Russia be deterred from invading Ukraine? The U.S. government is now "threatening to use a novel export control to damage strategic Russian industries, from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to civilian aerospace," according to Stars and Stripes (an editorially-independent newspaper for the American military). The newspaper cites administration officials as its source: The administration may also decide to apply the control more broadly in a way that would potentially deprive Russian citizens of some smartphones, tablets and video game consoles, said the officials. Such moves would expand the reach of U.S. sanctions beyond financial targets to the deployment of a weapon used only once before — to nearly cripple the Chinese tech giant Huawei. The weapon, known as the foreign direct product rule, contributed to Huawei suffering its first-ever annual revenue drop, a stunning 30% last year, according to analysts.

The attraction of using the foreign direct product rule derives from the fact that virtually anything electronic these days includes semiconductors, the tiny components on which all modern technology depends, from smartphones to jets to quantum computers — and that there is hardly a semiconductor on the planet that is not made with U.S. tools or designed with U.S. software. And the administration could try to force companies in other countries to stop exporting these types of goods to Russia through this rule. "This is a slow strangulation by the U.S. government," technology analyst Dan Wang of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Shanghai, said of Huawei. The rule cut the firm's supply of needed microchips, which were made outside the United States but with U.S. software or tools.

Now officials in Washington say they are working with European and Asian allies to craft a version of the rule that would aim to stop flows of crucial components to industries for which Russian President Vladimir Putin has high ambitions, such as civil aviation, maritime and high technology.... But the effort could face head winds from American and European business interests that fear using export controls could lead to Russian retaliation in other spheres — and eventually cause foreign companies to seek to design U.S. technology out of their products. That's because the extension of the rule beyond a single company like Huawei to an entire country or entire sectors of a country is unprecedented.

"It's like a magic power — you can only use it so many times before it starts to degrade," said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank. "Other countries will say, 'Oh, man, the U.S. has total control over us. We'd better find alternatives.'"
The newspaper also spoke to Paul Triolo, chief of technology policy at a global political risk research and consulting firm called Eurasia Group. His opinion "this would be weaponizing the U.S. semiconductor supply chain against an entire country."

And in more ways than one: Targeted use of the foreign direct product rule could be a blow to Russia's military, which relies on a type of chip called Elbrus that is designed in Russia but manufactured in Taiwan at a chip foundry called TSMC, according to Kostas Tigkos, an electronics expert at Janes Group, a U.K.-based provider of defense intelligence. If the United States barred TSMC from supplying those chips to Russia, as it successfully barred TSMC from supplying Huawei, that would have a "devastating effect," Tigkos said.

In a statement, TSMC said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations" and that it has a "rigorous export control system in place ... to ensure export control restrictions are followed."Analysts say that Western multinational firms probably would comply with the export controls. All U.S. chipmakers include clauses in their contracts requiring customers to abide by U.S. export rules.
The article also explores a scenario where businesses in China step in to supply Russia (citing estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics that China already builds 70% of the computers and smartphones that Russia imports).

"If Chinese firms wound up supplying Russia in violation of the rule, that would leave Washington with a major diplomatic dilemma: whether to sanction them, even if they make ordinary — not military — goods."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares this transcript of James Cameron's new interview with the BBC — which they've titled "The Danger of Deepfakes."

"Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point," James Cameron says... James Cameron: Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point. I've worked at the cutting edge of visual effects, and our goal has been progressively to get more and more photo-real. And so every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to create fake media — and we're seeing it happening now. Right now the tools are — the people just playing around on apps aren't that great. But over time, those limitations will go away. Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.

This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake. We've seen situations — you know, Arab Spring being a classic example — where with social media, the uprising was practically overnight.

You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that? You know, we have all these search tools available, but people don't use them. Understand your source. Investigate your source. Is your source credible?

But we also shouldn't be prone to this ridiculous conspiracy paranoia. People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is. So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one.

I always use Occam's razor — you know, Occam's razor's a great philosophical tool. It says the simplest explanation is the likeliest. And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren't that good, human systems aren't that good, people can't keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges. The fact that we think that they could realistically pull off these — these complex plots? I don't buy any of that crap! Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]

You know, look, I'm always skeptical of new technology, and we all should be. Every single advancement in technology that's ever been created has been weaponized. I say this to AI scientists all the time, and they go, 'No, no, no, we've got this under control.' You know, 'We just give the AIs the right goals...' So who's deciding what those goals are? The people that put up the money for the research, right? Which are all either big business or defense. So you're going to teach these new sentient entities to be either greedy or murderous.

If Skynet wanted to take over and wipe us out, it would actually look a lot like what's going on right now. It's not going to have to — like, wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves. All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.

I mean, I could be a projection of an AI right now.

"GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion," Vice writes: Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is — but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too — or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. "Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma," one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson mouthing the words "oh my god" to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.

You don't have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge...?

Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. "That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders," Phillips explains. "That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point...."

In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. "The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they're regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you're giving people," Phillips says. "Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it's clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted...."

Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn't done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to "personalised content creation", and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.
The GIF was invented in 1987 "and it's important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before," the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, "so when Facebook launched, they didn't support GIFs.... They were like, 'We don't want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website." But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.

Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, "Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again."

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Free Open Source 3D production software Blender has been released in version 3.0 (official showreel) with more new features, improvements and performance optimizations as well as further improved workflows.

In recent years Blender has received an increasing rate of attention from the 3D industry, with various larger businesses such as Epic, Microsoft, Apple and most recently Intel joining the blender foundation and donating to its development fund. Blender has seen an increasing rise in usage in various industries, such as animated feature film production, architecture and game development.