An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: If China were to invade Taiwan, the most-advanced chip factory in the world would be rendered "not operable," TSMC Chair Mark Liu said in an English-language interview with CNN this week. In the undated interview, Liu said that if Taiwan were invaded by China, the chipmaker's plant would not be able to operate because it relies on global supply chains. "Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military force or invasion, you will render TSMC factory not operable," Liu said. "Because this is such a sophisticated manufacturing facility, it depends on real-time connection with the outside world, with Europe, with Japan, with U.S., from materials to chemicals to spare parts to engineering software and diagnosis." The remarks were aired as tensions between China and Taiwan have escalated in recent days as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits the island. "The war brings no winners, everybody's losers," Liu said.

Liu compared a potential conflict in Taiwan to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying that while the two conflicts are very different, the economic impact to other countries would be similar. He encouraged political leaders to try to avoid war. "Ukraine war is not good for any of the sides, it's lose-lose-lose scenarios," Liu said. Liu said an invasion of the territory would cause economic turmoil for China, Taiwan and Western countries. He said that TSMC sells chips to consumer-facing Chinese companies that need the company's services and the supply of advanced computer chips. "How can we avoid war? How can we ensure that the engine of the world economy continues humming, and let's have a fair competition," Liu said. Further reading: US To Stop TSMC, Intel From Adding Advanced Chip Fabs In China

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: You wouldn't steal a car, right? So why are you pirating? With this 2004 message, the movie industry hoped to turn illegal downloaders into paying customers. This campaign eventually turned into a meme and it's not the only anti-piracy advert to miss the mark. A new research paper identifies several behavioral insights that explain common mistakes made in these campaigns. [...] The general assumption of many people is that, by adding more arguments, the message will be more compelling. That's called the 'more-is-better' heuristic but behavioral research has shown that the opposite is often true. When many arguments are presented together, the stronger ones may actually be diluted by weaker ones. So, referencing malware, fines, low quality, Internet disconnections, and losses to the industry, all while associating piracy with organized crime, is not the best idea. The reduced impact of stronger and weaker arguments is also one of the reasons why the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" campaign didn't work as planned, the researchers suggest.

Anti-piracy campaigns can also focus too much on dry numbers without putting these into context. While these statistics are vital to the industry, the average pirate will simply gloss over them. This 'mistake' can also be explained by behavioral psychology, which has shown that people identify more with a problem or victim if they feel some kind of personal connection. That's often missing from anti-piracy messages. It's worth noting that not all personal messaging is effective either. The paper mentions an Indian anti-piracy campaign where famous Bollywood actors urged people not to download films illegally, equating piracy to theft. However, the Indian public probably has little sympathy for the potential "losses" incurred by these multi-millionaire actors. In fact, the anti-piracy campaign may be seen as an extra motivation to pirate. "All videos starred well-known actors, whose net worth is estimated to be $22-$400 million dollars, in a country where the annual per capita income is a bit less than $2,000." "This can offer to pirates a moral justification: they only steal the rich to 'feed the poor', a form of 'Robin Hood effect' that makes even more sense with some cultural or sport-related goods," the researchers add.

Piracy is a widespread and global phenomenon. This makes it particularly problematic for copyright holders but emphasizing this issue in anti-piracy messages isn't a good idea. This is the third mistake that's highlighted in the article. By pointing out that people are supposed to get content legally while at the same time showing that many people don't, people might actually be encouraged to pirate. Behavioral research has shown that people often prefer to follow the descriptive norm (what people do) rather than the injunctive one (what the law prescribes). "Informing directly or indirectly individuals that many people pirate is counterproductive and encourages piracy by driving the targeted individuals to behave similarly. These messages provide to the would-be pirates the needed rationalization by emphasizing that 'everyone is doing it'," the researchers write.

Today saw the release of Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Cinnamon Edition, a long term support release (supported until 2027).

Release notes at LinuxMint.com promise that it comes with "refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable." Among the highlights: its Bluetooth manager is now Blueman (instead of Blueberry). Blueberry depended on gnome-bluetooth, which was developed exclusively for GNOME. In contrast, Blueman relies on the standard Bluez stack which works everywhere and can even be used or queried from the command line. The Blueman manager and tray icon provide many features that weren't available in Blueberry and a lot more information which can be used to monitor your connection or troubleshoot Bluetooth issues.

Out of the box Blueman features better connectivity, especially when it comes to headsets and audio profiles. In preparation for Linux Mint 21 the Blueman user interface was improved and received support for symbolic icons. Upstream, Blueman and Bluez are actively developed and used in many environments.

The lack of thumbnails for some common file types was identified as a usability issue. To address it a new Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers was started and is now featured in Linux Mint 21. The project brings support for the following mimetypes:

- AppImage
- ePub
- MP3 (album cover)
- RAW pictures (most formats)
- Webp

Automated tasks are great to keep your computer safe but they can sometimes affect the system's performance while you're working on it. A little process monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background. Whenever an automated task is running the monitor places an icon in your system tray. Your computer might still become slow momentarily during an update or a snapshot, but with a quick look on the tray you'll immediately know what's going on....

Linux Mint 21 uses IPP, also known as Driverless Printing and Scanning (i.e. a standard protocol which communicates with printers/scanners without using drivers). For most printers and scanners no drivers are needed, and the device is detected automatically.
And there's also a fabulous collection of new backgrounds.

"Two new studies provide more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan, China market where live animals were sold," reports the Associated Press, "further bolstering the theory that the virus emerged in the wild rather than escaping from a Chinese lab."

CNN reports: "All eight COVID-19 cases detected prior to 20 December were from the western side of the market, where mammal species were also sold," the [first] study says. The proximity to five stalls that sold live or recently butchered animals was predictive of human cases... The "extraordinary" pattern that emerged from mapping these cases was very clear, said another co-author, Michael Worobey, department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

The researchers mapped the earliest cases that had no connection to the market, Worobey noted, and those people lived or worked in close proximity to the market. "This is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market but then started that spread ... into the surrounding local community as vendors went into local shops, infected people who worked in those shops," Worobey said.

The other study takes a molecular approach and seems to determine when the first coronavirus infections crossed from animals to humans.... The researchers suggest that the first animal-to-human transmission probably happened around November 18, 2019, and it came from lineage B. They found the lineage B type only in people who had a direct connection to the Huanan market.
"All this evidence tells us the same thing: It points right to this particular market in the middle of Wuhan," said Kristian Andersen a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research and coauthor of one of the studies. The AP quotes Andersen as saying "I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer." Andersen said they found case clusters inside the market, too, "and that clustering is very, very specifically in the parts of the market" where they now know people were selling wildlife, such as raccoon dogs, that are susceptible to infection with the coronavirus.... Matthew Aliota, a researcher in the college of veterinary medicine at the University of Minnesota, said in his mind the pair of studies "kind of puts to rest, hopefully, the lab leak hypothesis."

"Both of these two studies really provide compelling evidence for the natural origin hypothesis," said Aliota, who wasn't involved in either study. Since sampling an animal that was at the market is impossible, "this is maybe as close to a smoking gun as you could get."
CNN notes that Worobey also had initially thought the lab leak had been a possibility, but now says the epidemiological preponderance of cases linked to the market is "not a mirage. It's a real thing.

"It's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade." To reduce the chances of future pandemics, the researchers hope they can determine exactly what animal may have first become infected and how.

"The raw ingredients for a zoonotic virus with pandemic potential are still lurking in the wild," said Joel Wertheim, an associate adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He believes the world needs to do a much better job doing surveillance and monitoring animals and other potential threats to human health.

Sky Mavis, the company that makes the online game, says the executive was shoring up funds to protect the business and help users after Ronin attack. From a report: This spring, Sky Mavis, the startup that makes the video game Axie Infinity, announced it had suffered a devastating hack. While most video games are primarily recreational, Axie Infinity's popularity relied largely on its players' ability to trade and earn crypto tokens that had financial value, and players had stashes that represented significant savings. The hack forced the Vietnam-based game developer to shut down its system for pulling tokens out of the game, essentially freezing the assets of its users before they could react to the news.

Most of them, anyway. In the hours before the announcement and freeze, a digital wallet belonging to its chief executive officer and co-founder, Trung Nguyen, made a large transaction that included about $3 million worth of Axie Infinity's main token, AXS. The tokens moved from Axie's blockchain -- a digital ledger for recording transactions -- to the crypto exchange Binance. Although the transfer was visible to anyone with an internet connection, there's nothing about the wallet that directly connects it to the person controlling it, as is true of most crypto transactions. But after being presented with analysis of public data that seemed to link the wallet to Nguyen, Sky Mavis confirmed that he controlled it. The unusual activity took place during a moment of acute stress for Sky Mavis. For months, the first version of its game had been showing showing signs of steep decline, and many players were losing faith.

The company was rushing to get the new version of Axie Infinity out when hackers on March 23 drained its system of cryptocurrencies that were worth over $600 million at the time. It was one of the biggest cyberattacks in the history of crypto. Anyone who knew what was going on would have had a strong incentive to sell tokens in the system before they were temporarily locked up, and moving them to the Binance exchange would have been a necessary first step toward cashing them out. But Sky Mavis says that this wasn't the reason Nguyen made the transfer. In emails, Kalie Moore, a company spokeswoman, said that Nguyen had been working to shore up the company's finances during the crisis, and had to do so in way that wasn't obvious to the broader crypto market, for the good of the overall Axie Infinity economy. By moving AXS to the exchange, said Moore, the company could provide liquidity to its users as it restored access to funds via Binance.

Developers in west London face a potential ban on new housing projects until 2035 because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support new homes, jeopardising housebuilding targets in the capital. From a report: The Greater London Authority wrote to developers this week warning them that it might take more than a decade to bulk up grid capacity and get developments under way again in three west London boroughs -- Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow. In those boroughs, "major new applicants to the distribution network... including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," according to the GLA's note, which has been seen by the Financial Times.

A recent applicant to the distribution network was told that there is not "sufficient electrical capacity for a new connection" until up to 2035, according to the note. The three boroughs accounted for almost 5,000 homes in 2019-20, equivalent to 11 per cent of London's housing supply. Stalling new projects would exacerbate a chronic housing shortage in a city which already routinely undershoots its delivery targets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Siemens and Philadelphia-based ConnectDER have partnered to debut a groundbreaking simple home EV charger connector. Previously, homeowners who wanted to install EV chargers might have had to spend thousands of dollars to modify their home's electrical panel. This new proprietary plug-in adapter will eliminate that cost and allow installation and connection in minutes. ConnectDER makes meter collars that are installed between the home's meter and the meter socket to create a single plug-and-play access point for distributed energy resources (DER) installation. In other words, the collars easily add new electrical service capacity for things like solar and energy storage. Now ConnectDER will exclusively manufacture and supply a proprietary plug-in EV charger adapter to Siemens.

The new adapter will enable electric car owners to charge their EVs by connecting chargers directly through the meter socket, which is on every home. It provides more useable capacity by monitoring total load and controlling the EV circuit to ensure the total capacity rating is within the limit. Bypassing the electrical panel reduces the EV charger installation cost by around 60 to 80% because electrical panel upgrades aren't needed. [...] Nearly half of US home electrical panels previously would have needed upgrades to allow the installation of a typical Level 2 charger, usually a 7-11kW device requiring 40-60 Amps on a 240V line. A Siemens spokesperson said that the company is still finalizing pricing, but "it will be a fraction of the cost of a service panel upgrade or other modifications often needed to make for a charger. Additionally, in some cases, the cost may be fully borne by utility programs."

The adapters themselves are expected to be available by first quarter 2023.

Human rights researcher Frankie Vetch writes via Coda Story: In early July protests broke out in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region surrounded by deserts in Uzbekistan. It turned nasty on the evening of July 1 when the police began shooting people. The state said that at least 18 people died, with hundreds of others injured. The protests, which occurred in the regional capital of Nukus, erupted in response to a proposed constitutional change that would see the Karakalpakstan shift from being an autonomous region, with the right to secede from Uzbekistan, to a province of the country. In an attempt to quell dissent, the government turned to a tactic that has become increasingly common in the region: they cut off the internet.

Reports indicate that as early as June 26, before protests began, the government was already imposing some form of an information blackout by targeting people's access to mobile internet connection. Later the state began shutting down ATMs and payment services. Since then internet connection has remained largely restricted, with a small respite last week when it was turned on again for two hours. The state of emergency has been lifted in Karakalpakstan but as of Monday it seems the internet has still not been fully restored.

According to Anastasiya Zhyrmont, a campaigner in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the digital rights non-profit Access Now, getting information out of the region is extremely difficult. "The information flow is very limited," she told me. "Since the first of July the internet has been so unstable. Even if people can get online it can take hours to upload photos, and up to five to 10 minutes to send a simple text message." For journalists and non-profits unable to access the region, this presents a significant challenge to covering the issues. Which is, of course, the purpose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Russia-linked hacking group behind the infamous SolarWinds espionage campaign is now using Google Drive to stealthily deliver malware to its latest victims. That's according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team, who said on Tuesday that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) hacking unit -- tracked as "Cloaked Ursa" by Unit 42 but more commonly known as APT29 or Cozy Bear -- has incorporated Google's cloud storage service into its hacking campaigns to hide their malware and their activities.

APT29 has used this new tactic in recent campaigns targeting diplomatic missions and foreign embassies in Portugal and Brazil between early May and June 2022, according to Unit 42. "This is a new tactic for this actor and one that proves challenging to detect due to the ubiquitous nature of these services and the fact that they are trusted by millions of customers worldwide," the researchers said. "When the use of trusted services is combined with encryption, as we see here, it becomes extremely difficult for organizations to detect malicious activity in connection with the campaign." Unit 42 disclosed the activity to both Dropbox and Google, which took action. In May, the group was found to be using Dropbox in a campaign targeting diplomats and various government agencies. A Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch it disabled the accounts immediately.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has listed nine cryptocurrencies that it says are securities. This was contained within a complaint arresting and charging a former Coinbase employee and two others with wire fraud. From a report: The assets were: AMP, RLY, DDX, XYO, RGT, LCX, POWR, DFX, KROM. They were each mentioned in connection with alleged insider trading. "Our message with these charges is clear: fraud is fraud is fraud, whether it occurs on the blockchain or on Wall Street," wrote the SEC in its complaint. This is one of few examples from the SEC where it has named specific cryptocurrencies as securities; it has provided little clarity over the years.

"NASA astronauts will go back to riding Russian rockets under an agreement announced Friday," reports the Associated Press, "and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the International Space Station with SpaceX beginning this fall." The agreement ensures that the space station will always have at least one American and Russian on board to keep both sides of the orbiting outpost running smoothly, according to NASA and Russian officials. The swap had long been in the works and was finalized despite tensions over Moscow's war in Ukraine, a sign of continuing Russia-U.S. cooperation in space....

No money will exchange hands under the agreement, according to NASA....

Friday's news came just hours after the blustery chief of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, was replaced by President Vladimir Putin, although the move did not appear to have any connection to the crew swap. Rogozin was expected to be given a new post.
CBS News explains the NASA-Roscosmos agreement: "The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function," the NASA statement said. "No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others..."

Russia provides the propellant and thrusters, either on the station or visiting Progress cargo ships, to change the station's orbit and offset the effects of atmospheric drag. NASA provides the bulk of the lab's electrical power, the massive gyroscopes that help maintain the station's orientation and a station-wide computer and communications network.

Russian cosmonauts are not trained to operate U.S. systems and vice versa, meaning at least one astronaut and one cosmonaut must be aboard at all times. If either side pulled out, the other likely would have to depart as well, or quickly come up with alternative systems.
"NASA wants to operate the space station through 2030," adds CBS, "but Russian cooperation is required. And it's not yet known whether Russia will go along."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Tor Project team has announced the release of Tor Browser 11.5, a major release that brings new features to help users fight censorship easier. [...] The updates in Tor Browser 11.5 focus on circumventing censorship, a process that started a year ago in version 10.5 with improving the Tor connection experience. In the new version, users no longer have to manually try out bridge configurations to unblock Tor.

Tor Browser version 11.5 comes with a new feature called "Connection Assist," which assigns automatically the bridge configuration known to work best for the user's location. "Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent)," explains the release announcement. "It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from torproject.org." Since Connection Assist is still in an early stage of development (v1.0), the Tor team welcomes user feedback and reports, which would help them iron out any kinks and improve on the system.

Another important new feature in version 11.5 is making 'HTTPS-Only Mode' the default browsing mode, so that the connection is through a secure tunnel. This ensures that all data exchange between the user and the server hosting the website will be encrypted, to defend against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and to protect users from SSL stripping on malicious exit relays. [...] The third significant improvement in Tor Browser 11.5 is a heavily revamped Network Settings menu, now called "Connection Settings," which should make it easier to find and understand specific settings. Most notably, bridge configuration and connection options have been redesigned to enable quick and easy review and management. Using emojis on the saved Bridges, the new interface offers visualization for the configuration for the first time, making it easy to identify the right bridge and select it when needed. You can download the latest Tor Browser from the official download portal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library and a massive repository of online artifacts, has been collecting mementos of the ever-expanding World Wide Web for over two decades, allowing users to revisit sites that have since been changed or deleted. But like the web, it too has evolved since its genesis, and in the aughts, it also began to offer a selection of ebooks that any internet user can check out with the creation of a free account. That latter feature has gotten the organization in some trouble. Internet Archive was sued by a suite of four corporate publishers in 2020 over copyright controversies -- with one side saying that what Internet Archive does is preservation, and the other saying that it's piracy, since it freely distributes books as image files without compensating the author. Last week, the ongoing case entered a new chapter as the nonprofit organization filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to put a stop to the lawsuit, arguing that their Controlled Digital Lending program "is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world" since "each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for." On Friday, Creative Commons issued a statement supporting Internet Archive's motion.

In 2006, Internet Archive started a program for digitizing books both under copyright and in the public domain. It works with a range of global partners, including other libraries, to scan materials onto its site (Cornell University made a handy guide on what works fall under copyright vs. the public domain). For copyrighted books, Internet Archive owns the physical books that they created the digital copies from and limits their circulation by allowing only one person to borrow a title at a time. Book publishers, namely Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House, were not keen on this practice, and they have been seeking financial damages for the 127 books (PDF) shared under copyright. Vox estimated that if the publishers win, Internet Archive would have to pay $19 million, which is about "one year of operating revenue."

In the most recent filings, the publishers accused Internet Archive of amassing "a collection of more than three million unauthorized in-copyright ebooks -- including more than 33,000 of the Publishers' commercially available titles -- without obtaining licenses to do so or paying the rightsholders a cent for exploiting their works. Anybody in the world with an internet connection can instantaneously access these stolen works via IA's interrelated archive.org and openlibrary.org websites." In its defense, Internet Archive, which is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that "libraries have been practicing CDL in one form or another for more than a decade," and that Internet Archive lends its digitized books on an "owned-to-loaned basis, backstopped by strong technical protections to enforce lending limits."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: On Sept. 5, 1992, computer engineer Laurie Houts, 25, was found fatally strangled in her car near a California garbage dump. Her boyfriend's roommate was arrested in connection with the case, but two trials -- and two hung juries -- later, a judge dismissed the case. The roommate moved to the Netherlands soon afterward. Over the weekend, the roommate -- now the chief executive of a small software company -- was arrested as he landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, according to the Santa Clara County Office of the District Attorney. John Woodward, the 58-year-old CEO and president of ReadyTech, is expected to be extradited to Santa Clara County by the end of the month, District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Monday. Once there, Woodward will be arraigned for the third time in Houts' murder by strangulation.

Houts' body was discovered by a passerby less than a mile from her office at Adobe Systems in Mountain View more than 30 years ago, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A rope was around her neck, and there were footprints on the inside of her windshield, which were called "a sign of her struggle with Woodward" by the district attorney's office. Forensic science at the time was able to match Woodward to fingerprints found outside the car, but investigators could not prove that he had been inside the vehicle. Still, when Houts' boyfriend made a call, monitored by police, to Woodward soon after the 25-year-old's death, he "did not deny" killing Houts. Instead, according to a police summary of the matter, Woodward asked what evidence the authorities had against him and suggested to the roommate that they "meet in a parking lot" to talk more.

Woodward, who had no alibi for the night Houts was killed, was arrested that same year. Prosecutors alleged that Woodward had developed an "unrequited" romantic interest in Houts' boyfriend. The theory was criticized as homophobic at Woodward's first trial by his defense lawyer in 1995, the The Mercury News reported Monday, and the jury deadlocked on his innocence, voting 8-4 for acquittal. A year later, despite a judge barring the romantic-rival argument, the jury hearing Woodward's second trial again hung itself, this time ruling 7-5. The judge soon dismissed the case for insufficient evidence. But advances in DNA technology allowed detectives to link Woodward to the rope around Houts' neck for the first time last year, Rosen's statement said. Investigators in both the Santa Clara County Crime Lab and Mountain View Police Department matched both Woodward's genetic material and fibers on his sweatpants to "the murder weapon," police said.

Earlier this week, long-time Slashdot reader ThinkPad760 wrote: How is this not news everywhere?

KDDI, Japan's 2nd largest mobile phone provider and carrier to multiple critical government agencies — including the weather service — failed for 86 hours. After failing to inform users and the government about the problems, questions are starting to be asked.
Japan's government "will set up an expert panel to compile measures to prevent a recurrence," reports Japan Today, citing Japan's Internal Affairs and Communications Minister. The network failure occurred when a router for voice calls was replaced during regular maintenance, with repair work triggering a concentration of traffic that led the company to reduce user access. During that time, the carrier experienced a cascade of technical problems that further prolonged the connection difficultie
40 million users were affected by the outage, Reuters reports — adding that it's not the first time for something like this: Japan's three big telcos have all had widespread network failures in recent years. NTT Docomo's [29-hour] outage last October affected 12.9 customers, while disruption to SoftBank Corp's network in late 2018 cast a shadow over its bumper public listing.