An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Personalized smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers after two decades of questions about reliability and concerns they will usher in a new wave of government regulation. Four-year-old LodeStar Works on Friday unveiled its 9mm smart handgun for shareholders and investors in Boise, Idaho. And a Kansas company, SmartGunz LLC, says law enforcement agents are beta testing its product, a similar but simpler model. Both companies hope to have a product commercially available this year.

LodeStar co-founder Gareth Glaser said he was inspired after hearing one too many stories about children shot while playing with an unattended gun. Smart guns could stop such tragedies by using technology to authenticate a user's identity and disable the gun should anyone else try to fire it. They could also reduce suicides, render lost or stolen guns useless, and offer safety for police officers and jail guards who fear gun grabs. But attempts to develop smart guns have stalled: Smith & Wesson got hit with a boycott, a German company's product was hacked, and a New Jersey law aimed at promoting smart guns has raised the wrath of defenders of the Second Amendment. Glaser acknowledged there will be additional challenges to large-scale manufacturing, but expressed confidence that after years of trial and error the technology was advanced enough and the microelectronics inside the gun are well-protected. "We finally feel like we're at the point where ... let's go public," Glaser said. "We're there." "Most early smart gun prototypes used either fingerprint unlocking or radio frequency identification technology that enables the gun to fire only when a chip in the gun communicates with another chip worn by the user in a ring or bracelet," reports Reuters. "LodeStar integrated both a fingerprint reader and a near-field communication chip activated by a phone app, plus a PIN pad. The gun can be authorized for more than one user. The fingerprint reader unlocks the gun in microseconds, but since it may not work when wet or in other adverse conditions, the PIN pad is there as a backup."

"Skeptics have argued that smart guns are too risky for a person trying to protect a home or family during a crisis, or for police in the field."

A Scandinavian hotel chain that fell victim to a ransomware attack last month said it took a novel approach to recover from the incident by switching all affected systems to Chrome OS. The Record reports: Nordic Choice Hotels, which operates 200 hotels across Northern Europe, fell victim to a ransomware attack on December 2, when hackers encrypted some of its internal systems using the Conti ransomware strain. The attack prevented staff from accessing guest reservation data and from issuing key cards to newly arriving guests, as one of the hotel's guests told The Record in an interview last month. But in a press release today, Nordic Choice said that instead of contacting the hackers and negotiating a ransom for the decryption key that would have unlocked the infected devices, the hotel chose to migrate its entire PC fleet from Windows to Chrome OS.

"[I]n less than 24 hours, the first hotel was operating in the Chrome OS ecosystem from Google. And in the following two days, 2000 computers were converted all over the company consisting of 212 hotels in five different countries," the hotel chain explained. Kari Anna Fiskvik, VP Technology at Nordic Choice Hotels, said the hotel had already run a pilot program to test the tool before the attack as a way to save money by reusing old computers with a less-demanding OS. "So when we suddenly had to deal with the cyberattack, the decision to go all in and fasttrack the project was made in seconds," Fiskvik said. Nordic Choice said it plans to migrate another 2,000 computers to Chrome OS, on top of the 2,000 it migrated during the attack. The hotel chain said they expect to save $6.7 million by converting old computers to Chrome OS instead of buying new hardware.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can move forward with its latest antitrust lawsuit against Meta, a US district judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision is a significant win for the regulator, which had seen its first complaint thrown out by Judge James Boasberg last June. Engadget reports: Per The Washington Post, Boasberg now says the agency can move forward with its complaint thanks to the "more robust and detailed" evidence it presented with its amended suit, which the FTC filed in August. "Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery," the judge said.

In October, Meta asked the court to dismiss the suit, arguing the FTC had failed yet again to present a "factual basis for alleging monopoly power." The agency's amended complaint is approximately two dozen pages longer than its original one, but it puts forward many of the same arguments. Specifically, the FTC alleges Facebook used the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 to secure its dominant position in the social media market.

South Korea's telecommunications regulator said on Tuesday Apple had submitted plans to allow third-party payment systems on its App Store to comply with a law banning major app store operators from forcing software developers to use their payments systems. From a report: The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) had requested Apple and Alphabet's Google to submit compliance plans after the bill was passed in August last year and went into effect in September. Google announced its plans to allow alternative payment systems in South Korea in November to comply with the amended Telecommunication Business Act, dubbed the "anti-Google law."

New submitter X2b5Ysb8 shares a report from The Drive, written by Peter Holderith: Driving a 2022 GMC Hummer EV prototype back in Oct. 2021 was an eye-opening experience. [...] I did a fair amount of driving and some riding along with the vehicle's chief engineer, Al Oppenheiser. During one of our chats, Oppenheiser shared with me some of the trials and tribulations his engineering team went through while developing the vehicle. This included one unexpected capability that had to be tuned out before the massive truck was delivered to customers: wheelies. After a launch in WTF mode on the steeply banked test track at GM's Milford Proving Grounds, I told Oppenheiser that I was impressed how the truck could spin all four of its tires as it fired off the line like a shot. He went on to explain that was actually a preferred scenario as far as launches go. They used to be even more interesting when the tires came off the ground.

"In the early days when we were just trying to balance the front and rear torque, I got the front end to lift," he told me. As it turns out, so much of the car was developed digitally that, when it came time to do real-world testing, there were a few unexpected quirks. "We had to back off the torque on the front end," he added, just as he prepared the Hummer for another launch. After our final sprint to highway speeds in WTF mode, I clarified with him that the Hummer would indeed do a wheelstand if it was tuned correctly. He reiterated his point, saying "originally" that was the case, and you could theoretically still make it do so "to prove that you can." However, when it comes to the production versions of the hefty 4x4, he made it clear that for "functional safety reasons," that wouldn't be in the Hummer's big bag of tricks. Talking about feeling cheated. So yes, the Hummer EV can do wheelies, just not in stock form.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to "convince [employees] that unions suck." The campaign was called Project Vivian, and ran at Google between late 2018 and early 2020 to combat employee activism and union organizing efforts at the company, according to court documents. Google's director of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described Project Vivian as an initiative "to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck."

In his January 7 ruling, a NLRB judge wrote that Google must "immediately" produce 180 internal documents that he reviewed related to Google's Project Vivian campaign, including the document with Pfyl's description. Google has so far refused to hand over these documents to an attorney representing aggrieved former Google employees, citing attorney client privilege. The fired employees filed a subpoena for these documents as part of an ongoing NLRB lawsuit against the company. Google fired the workers in 2019 after they organized against the company's contracts with immigration detention agencies. In late 2020, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers. Google claimed at the time and maintains that it fired them for breaching security protocols. In 2019, Google employees discovered that Google had hired a union avoidance firm called IRI Consultants. IRI Consultants is known for assisting employers in anti-union campaigns by collecting information on workers' personalities, finances, work ethic, motivations, and ethnicity in order to defeat union drives. At the time, Google was facing an unprecedented wave of employee protests and activism for issues related to sexual harassment, contracts with Department of Defense and Customers and Border Protection.

In his ruling on the documents related to Project Vivian, the NLRB judge describes evidence he reviewed of a situation where a Google attorney proposed to find a "respected voice to publish an OpEd outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like, and counseling employees of FB (Facebook), MSFT(Microsoft), Amazon, and google (sic) not to do it." Kara Silverstein, Google's human resources director said that she "like[d] the idea" of the op-ed, but that it should be executed so that "there would be no fingerprints and not Google specific." IRI Consultants eventually provided a proposed draft of the op-ed to a Google attorney, according to the judge's report. The secret documents pertaining to Google's Project Vivian also reveal that "the decision to hire IRI was not made by lawyers but by a group composed primarily of non-attorneys" including Silverstein, Google's human resources director and Danielle Brown, Google's vice president of employee engagement. Project Vivian also included discussions of Google employees' "opposition to mandatory arbitration," the judge's report says. Ending forced arbitration at Google has previously been a crucial rallying point for employee activists at Google. The company agreed to end mandatory arbitration in February 2019, following employee protests. "The underlying case here has nothing to do with unionization, it's about employees breaching clear security protocols to access confidential information and systems inappropriately," a Google spokesperson said. "We disagree with the characterization of the legally privileged materials referred to by the complainants. As we've stated, our teams engage with dozens of outside consultants and law firms to provide us with advice on a wide range of topics, including employer obligations and employee engagement. This included IRI Consultants for a short period. However, we made a decision in 2019 not to use the materials or ideas explored during this engagement, and we still feel that was the right decision."

Some European carriers, including T-Mobile/Sprint in the United States, are blocking iCloud Private Relay access when connected to cellular data. As 9to5Mac reports, "This feature is designed to give users an additional layer of privacy by ensuring that no one can view the websites that they visit." From the report: Apple says that Private Relay is a feature designed to give users another layer of privacy when browsing the web. The first relay is sent through a server maintained by Apple, and the second is a third-party operator. The feature was announced at WWDC last June and initially slated for inclusion in iOS 15. Apple ultimately shipped the feature as a "public beta," meaning that it is disabled by default in the newest iOS 15 and macOS Monterey releases. You can manually enable it by going to Settings on your iPhone, tapping your name at the top, choosing iCloud, and choosing "Private Relay."

T-Mobile was among the carriers in Europe that signed an open letter expressing concern about the impact of Private Relay. The carriers wrote that the feature cuts off networks and servers from accessing "vital network data and metadata and could impact "operator's ability to efficiently manage telecommunication networks." In the UK, carriers including T-Mobile, EE, and others have already started blocking Private Relay usage when connected to cellular data. 9to5Mac has also now confirmed that T-Mobile is extending this policy to the United States. This means that T-Mobile and Sprint users in the United States can no longer use the privacy-preserving iCloud Private Relay feature when connected to cellular data. The report notes that T-Mobile appears to be "in the process of rolling it out," so some users might still be able to use the feature -- at least for now. "The situation could also could vary based on your location or plan," the report adds.

UPDATE: T-Mobile Says It Has 'Not Broadly Blocked' iCloud Private Relay, Blames iOS 15.2 Bug For Errors

Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher.
The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/
The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...)
The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults.
Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.

The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship."

"And, if so, are there circumstances under which such censorship is justified?"

The first person cited is Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fighting over whether a given speech restriction is or isn't censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. "There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be [free speech] absolutists but then basically be fine with censoring sexuality," she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there's broad consensus that censorship of Holocaust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. "I'm very wary of censorship," York says. "But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It's not that all speech is totally equal and valid." In other words, the problem York sees isn't social platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It's their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they're censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means.

David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants' power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term "censorship" to content moderation decisions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States... We're better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term "censorship" for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which "the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet," as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere...

"If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what platforms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they're doing it," Kaye said.
The Post ultimately cites three experts who agree on one point: that it's worth scrutinizing the decisions of social media platforms because of their growing influence — whether or not you end up calling it censorship. But they also cite a follow-up observation from Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project.

Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren't just passive conduits of information: Their recommendation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fueling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there's no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him.

Rembrandt's masterpiece The Night Watch "can now be viewed on computers everywhere in ultra high definition," writes The Hill.

But ultra high definition is an understatement, according to long-time Slashdot reader dr_blurb. "Some tech specs: 717 Gigapixels in a 5.6 terabyte image: 8,439 individual images, taken with a 100 megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera."

This single image is over four meters in length and three meters in height, reports Digital Photography Review: The museum also points out that the distance between 2 pixels on the image is 5 micrometers (0.0005 centimeters). This means that 1 pixel on the image is smaller than a human red blood cell. According to representatives from the museum, each photo has a depth of field of 125 micrometers (0.0125 centimeters). To ensure each image was properly in focus, the surface of the painting was scanned with lasers. Then the camera's settings were adjusted for optimal image quality. After each image was captured, a neural network scanned it for color accuracy and sharpness.

The level of detail captured, coupled with the size of the file, makes it the largest image of a work of art ever captured. It's 4 times larger than the original digitized version of "The Night Watch" that was published on the museum's website in May 2020, and that file was already 44.8 gigapixels...

It can be viewed on the Rijksmuseum museum's website.
"There were many people who thought it was impossible, and who thought the Operation Night Watch team were crazy to even attempt it," said Robert Erdmann, senior scientist at the Rijksmuseum. "We have surpassed ourselves in what can justifiably be described as a world-class achievement..."

Gizmodo writes that "It's hard to blame someone for running away from a burning building. The same can be applied to Silicon Valley, where the head of public relations at Meta, Facebook's parent company, is stepping down." His departure comes as the tech giant struggles to put out several PR fires, most notable among them the fallout from the "Facebook Papers," a series of damning reports first published by the Journal last fall that included thousands of leaked internal documents.
"The central thesis of Haugen's leaks is that that Facebook and its executives know about the problems Facebook helps ignite and proliferate, from political lies to eating disorders, and don't do enough to stop them," writes Insider.com. They add that whistleblower Haugen "has also taken aim at the company's efforts to expand encryption to increase user privacy, suggesting such a move may make it easier for Facebook to ignore countries conducting espionage on its platforms."

And they note that Facebook also lost its VP of Product Communications, Roberta Thomson.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the departure of communications head John Pinette is "creating a void at the top of the department managing the controversies surrounding the tech giant." John Pinette had overseen the company's external communications since 2019. Prior to joining what was then Facebook, Pinette handled business and philanthropic dealings for deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. He also ran communications for Alphabet Inc.'s Google in Asia and advised Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in past jobs.

America's Federal Aviation Administration "has published the list of 50 airports around which it wants Verizon and AT&T to create '5G buffer' zones..." reports PC Magazine: The Department of Transportation previously asked Verizon and AT&T to delay the deployment of their C-Band networks from Dec. 5, 2021 to Jan. 5 due to concerns about interference affecting the altimeters used by commercial aircraft. Then on Jan. 2 the FAA asked the carriers to push back the debut of their C-Band networks again so it could investigate those safety risks.

The FAA said at the time that it would "identify priority airports where a buffer zone would permit aviation operations to continue safely while the FAA completes its assessments of the interference potential around those airports." Verizon and AT&T agreed to delay the launch of their C-Band networks for two weeks and respect the buffer zones designated by the FAA.

The administration says in its announcement that "the wireless companies agreed to turn off transmitters and make other adjustments near these airports for six months to minimize potential 5G interference with sensitive aircraft instruments used in low-visibility landings...." Reuters reports that the FAA's list was informed by Verizon and AT&T's coverage maps — in some cases "5G towers are far enough away that a natural buffer exists," the FAA says, according to the report — as well as a given airport's existing capabilities.
"Traffic volume, the number of low-visibility days and geographic location factored into the selection," acknowledges the FAA's statement.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader xetdog for sharing the story!

Long-time Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket shares a new article from the technology site Inverse exploring the origin of blinking cursors.

They trace the invention to the 1960s and electronics engineer Charles Kiesling, a naval veteran of the Korean War who "spent his immediate post-war years on a new challenge: the exploding computing age." Still decades away from personal computers — let alone portable ones — Kiesling was joining the ranks of engineers tinkering with room-sized computers like the IBM 650 or the aging ENIAC. He joined Sperry Rand, now Unisys, in 1955, and helped develop the kind of computer guts that casual users rarely think about. This includes innards like logic circuitry, which enable your computer to make complex conditional decisions like "or," "and," or "if only" instead of simply "yes" or "no". One of these seemingly innocuous advancements was a 1967 patent filing Kiesling made for a blinking cursor...."

According to a post on a computer science message board from a user purporting to be Kiesling's son, the inspiration for this invention was simply utility. "I remember him telling me the reason behind the blinking cursor, and it was simple," Kiesling's son writes. "He said there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."

The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text.
The article credits Apple with popularizing blinking cursors to the masses. And it also remembers a fun story about Steve Jobs (shared by Thomas Haigh, a professor of technology history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): While he was in support of the blinking cursor itself, Haigh says Steve Jobs was famously against controlling it using cursor keys. Jobs attempted — and failed — to remove these keys from the original Mac in an effort to force users into using a mouse instead. In an interaction with biographer Walter Isaacson years later, he even pried them off with his car keys before signing his autograph on the keyboard.

"Norton 360, one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers' computers," reports security researcher Brian Krebs.

The Verge follows up: The TL;DR is that yes, Norton does install a crypto miner with its software, without making that clear in the initial setup process. But it isn't going to do anything unless you specifically opt in, so it's not a situation where you'll install the security suite and instantly start seeing your computer lag as it crunches crypto in the background.

A NortonLifeLock spokesperson also told The Verge in an email that you can completely remove NCrypt.exe by temporarily turning off Norton's tamper protection feature, and then deleting the executable. We confirmed that ourselves, and it could be good news for anyone worried about Norton remotely activating the feature.
But Krebs reports the product has drawn some bad reactions — and not just because Norton is keeping 15% of the currencies mined: [M]any Norton users complain the mining program is difficult to remove, and reactions from longtime customers have ranged from unease and disbelief to, "Dude, where's my crypto...?"

According to the FAQ posted on its site, "Norton Crypto" will mine Ethereum cryptocurrency while the customer's computer is idle. The FAQ also says Norton Crypto will only run on systems that meet certain hardware and software requirements (such as an NVIDIA graphics card with at least 6 GB of memory). "Norton creates a secure digital Ethereum wallet for each user," the FAQ reads. "The key to the wallet is encrypted and stored securely in the cloud. Only you have access to the wallet." NortonLifeLock began offering the mining service in July 2021...

[M]any users have reported difficulty removing the mining program.

From reading user posts on the Norton Crypto community forum, it seems some longtime Norton customers were horrified at the prospect of their antivirus product installing coin-mining software, regardless of whether the mining service was turned off by default. "How on Earth could anyone at Norton think that adding crypto mining within a security product would be a good thing?," reads a Dec. 28 thread titled "Absolutely furious."

"Norton should be DETECTING and killing off crypto mining hijacking, not installing their own," the post reads....

"Norton is pretty much amplifying energy consumption worldwide, costing their customers more in electricity use than the customer makes on the mining, yet allowing Norton to make a ton of profit," tweeted security researcher Chris Vickery. "It's disgusting, gross, and brand-suicide."

Then there's the matter of getting paid.... "Transfers of cryptocurrencies may result in transaction fees (also known as "gas" fees) paid to the users of the cryptocurrency blockchain network who process the transaction," the FAQ explains... Which might explain why so many Norton Crypto users have taken to the community's online forum to complain they were having trouble withdrawing their earnings. Those gas fees are the same regardless of the amount of crypto being moved, so the system simply blocks withdrawals if the amount requested can't cover the transfer fees.
Thanks to Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy for tipping us off to the story!

Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column looks at what happened after Mozilla founder Jamie "jwz" Zawinski slammed the group for accepting donations in cryptocurrency (which Zawinski called partnering "with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.") Peter Linss, one of the creators of the Gecko browser engine on which Mozilla Firefox is based, also stepped in to back up Zawinski, saying that he was 100% with him and that Mozilla was "meant to be better than this."

When Mozilla first announced it would accept Bitcoin donations in 2014, it cited Khan Academy, Electronic Frontier Foundation, United Way, Greenpeace, and Wikimedia Foundation among its moral and upstanding cryptocurrency-accepting compatriots. Of that list, just Greenpeace has since stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations, telling the Financial Times earlier this year that "as the amount of energy needed to run bitcoin became clearer, this policy [of accepting cryptocurrency donations] became no longer tenable."
Thursday the Mozilla Foundation announced it was pausing cryptocurrency donations to review whether the idea "fits with our climate goals" — a fact the column also addresses: Mike Shaver, another Mozilla project founder, also tweeted his support, writing that he was "glad to see this reflection happening."

In a follow-up blog post to the ordeal, Zawinski doubled down on his condemnation of Mozilla's cryptocurrency acceptance, writing that "cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster, and a greater-fool pyramid scheme, but are also incredibly toxic to the open web, another ideal that Mozilla used to support" — an idea also espoused in many of the comments on the initial Twitter thread.

Meanwhile, although Mozilla says that it is pausing the ability to donate cryptocurrencies during its review, the donations page still lists BitPay among its payment methods.

Today in airports around the world, 3,189 flights were cancelled, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. And 5,155 more flights were cancelled yesterday (with another 1,345 flights also already cancelled for tomorrow).

Even in the U.S., the Washington Post reports on "an epic travel meltdown in its third week that has forced the cancellation of more than 27,000 flights since the first signs of trouble on Christmas Eve," again citing figures from FlightAware.

By January 1st the number of cancelled U.S. flights just since Christmas Eve was already at 12,000 — and now the Post reports things still haven't gotten any better: A triple whammy of robust demand for holiday travel, staffing shortages triggered by a surge in coronavirus cases and bouts of wintry weather at airline hubs has ushered in one of the worst periods for air travelers in years. More than two weeks later, the surge in daily flight cancellations has shown no signs of abating: Some airlines have announced schedule cuts through the end of the month as they fight to recover...

While the number of scrubbed flights has been the biggest obstacle for travelers, it's not the only disruption. About one-third of flights nationwide that have taken off in the past two weeks have been late, with the average delay topping 50 minutes on some days, according to FlightAware. Then there are the hundreds of suitcases and bags still to be claimed at airports — some that didn't follow passengers onto connecting flights; others that were lost when passengers were rerouted through different airports after their original flights were canceled...

Since the start of the pandemic, about 50,000 airline employees have left the industry through retirements or voluntary buyouts. When passenger demand began ramping up last spring, airlines scrambled to bring back workers. But a tight job market made recruiting more difficult, and gaps remain even as thousands of new employees have been hired.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Google marked what would've been Stephen Hawking's 80th birthday with a very special Doodle — an animated video in which the voice of Stephen Hawking speaks again, generated and used with the approval of the Hawking estate.

"My expectations were reduced to zero at 21. Everything since then has been a bonus," Hawking says in the video. "Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind."

In the video tribute, Stephen Hawking passes near a black hole on a model timeline of the universe. "We are very very small," he says. "But we are profoundly capable of very very big things.

"There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. However bad life may seem. While there is life, there is hope. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done."
"From colliding black holes to the Big Bang, his theories on the origins and mechanics of the universe revolutionized modern physics," explains the Google Doodles page, "while his best-selling books made the field widely accessible to millions of readers worldwide."

And Google's Arts and Culture blog shares a longer look at Stephen Hawking's life, including a 1979 photo of young Hawking at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. "Because of Stephen Hawking's work, the radiation emitted by black holes is now called Hawking Radiation," the biography says at one point, also remembering Hawking's best-selling book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

But they also share some more personal memories: In 1990, with lifelong friend, the physicist Kip Thorne, Stephen approached the controversial notion of whether time travel is allowed by the laws of physics. To explore this hypothesis Stephen planned a party for time travellers. He wrote invitations, set a date, time and venue and provided precise GPS coordinates.

Stephen did not send out the invitations until after the party date was over. That way, only those who could genuinely travel back in time would know of it and be able to attend.

On the due day Stephen sat politely and waited. But no-one came. And that was the point. "I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible", he said afterwards. And the champagne went back on ice....
The biography closes with this quote from Stephen Hawking. "Remember to look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe.

"Be curious, and however difficult life may seem there is always something you can do and succeed at; it matters that you don't just give up."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: AU.S. Cyber Command task force executed what is being described as its "first offensive cyber effect operation" against real-world cyber threats. While the exact nature of the operation and its target remains unknown, the event was significant enough for the U.S. Secretary of Defense to personally attend to watch the operation in action. The operation was conducted between February and August 2021 by a task force consisting of personnel from the Maryland Air National Guard's 175th Cyber Operations Group, the Delaware Air National Guard's 166th Cyber Operations Squadron, U.S. Navy's Cyber Strike Activity Sixty-Three, the U.S. Air Force's 341st Cyber Operations Squadron, and the Air Force Reserve. The task force executed the operation from February to August last year, although the Air National Guard (ANG) just announced it this week. While there have been other offensive cyber operations conducted by U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), this is the first conducted and acknowledged by this particular task force.

Details about the specific threat countered by the task force's cyber offensive are scarce, but USAF Maj. Corley Bradford, director of operations for 175th Cyberspace Operations Squadron, said the offensive cyber operation involved the security of Department of Defense information networks. "[Our] NMT was a direct contributor to [our task force] conducting a successful offensive cyber effects operation," Bradford stated in an ANG press release. "It was a lot of excitement to finally see the fruits of our labor when [our task force] delivered its first offensive cyber effects operations during this mobilization," said Bradford. Interestingly, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III was on hand to personally witness the operation. "It was a massive milestone," Maj. Bradford said, "so he wanted front row seats to see the action firsthand."

PayPal is exploring the launch of its own stablecoin as part of its cryptocurrency push, according to the company, which confirmed the development after evidence of the move was discovered inside its iPhone app. From a report: "We are exploring a stablecoin; if and when we seek to move forward, we will of course, work closely with relevant regulators," Jose Fernandez da Ponte, senior vice president of crypto and digital currencies at PayPal, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies backed and priced by the value of an existing currency or commodity.

Brussels Airlines has operated 3,000 flights without passengers this winter to avoid losing take-off and landing slots. From a report: The airline's parent company, Lufthansa Group, confirmed that 18,000 flights had been flown empty, including 3,000 Brussels Airlines services, reports The Bulletin. EU rules require that airlines operate a certain percentage of scheduled flights to keep their slots at major airports. Under these "use it or lose it" regulations, prior to the pandemic carriers had to utilise at least 80 per cent of their scheduled take-off and landing slots. This was revised to 50 per cent as coronavirus saw travel become increasingly difficult -- but airlines are still struggling to hit this target. As a result of Lufthansa Group's latest figures, the Belgian federal government has written to the European Commission, calling for a change to the rules on maintaining slots. It follows the news that European airlines are slashing their winter schedules amid a dampening of demand due to Omicron travel restrictions. Lufthansa Group, which owns the carriers Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, Austrian Airlines, and Eurowings in addition to Brussels Airlines, has already axed 33,000 flights in January and February.