In June Netflix launched Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies, and the Internet, a true-crime series. It began with an episode documenting the 2017 death of a 28-year-old Kansas man named Andrew Finch after California gamer Tyler Barriss faked an emergency call from Finch's home to the Wichita, Kansas police department.

So where are they now? Barriss is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, Bustle reports. "Barriss, a resident of Los Angeles, California, pled guilty to a total of 51 charges, all having to do with hoax emergency calls he'd made, including the call that resulted in Finch's murder." Barriss received as 12-and-a-half year sentence for the Kansas call, and then another 8-and-a-half-year sentence for all the other illegal calls placed between 2015 and 2017 to 17 different U.S. states. "He also received another five years of supervised release in Washington, D.C., for phoning in bomb threats to the FBI and Federal Communications Commission in 2017."

And the 19-year-old who'd hired Barriss "received a 15-month prison sentence in 2019 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice."

Meanwhile, Andrew Finch's surviving family members filed legal actions against the police department responsible for Finch's death. And while police officers normally receive "qualified immunity" protecting them from lawsuits over the performance of their duties, there was an update last month: An officer with the Wichita Police Department will face a civil trial in connection with the December 2017 swatting incident... Justin Rapp was the officer who shot the unarmed man. A U.S. appeals court sided with the Kansas district court in denying Officer Rapp qualified immunity in Finch's death. The court said a reasonable jury could believe Finch was unarmed and unthreatening when Rapp fired the shot that killed him.

Finch's family brought the excessive force civil suit. Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett declined to prosecute Rapp for fatally shooting Finch. The Wichita Police Department conclude Rapp didn't violate department policy....

Along with its conclusion that the civil case against Rapp can move forward, the appellate court also affirmed the district court's summary judgment on liability claims against the City of Wichita. This decision essentially maintained the city and the WPD as a whole weren't liable in Finch's death. The court of appeals dismissed arguments saying, in sum, "[the lawsuit from Finch's family] has failed to show any deliberately indifferent policies or customs that caused Rapp to use excessive lethal force."

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.

During a 92-minute presentation Wednesday on the state of the free software movement, Richard Stallman spoke at length on a wide variety of topics, including the need for freedom-respecting package systems.

But Stallman also shared his deepest thoughts on a topic dear to the hearts of Slashdot readers: privacy and currency: I won't order from online stores, because I can't pay them . For one thing, the payment services require running non-free JavaScript... [And] to pay remotely you've got to do it by credit card, and that's tracking people, and I want to resist tracking too.... This is a really serious problem for society, that you can't order things remotely anonymously.

But GNU Taler is part of the path to fixing that. You'll be able to get a Taler token from your bank, or a whole bunch of Taler tokens, and then you'll be able to use those to pay anonymously.

Then if the store can send the thing you bought to a delivery box in your neighborhood, the store doesn't ever have to know who you are.
But there's another issue Stallman touched on earlier in his talk: There is a proposed U.S. law called KOSA which would require mandatory age-verification of users -- which means mandatory identification of users, which is likely to mean via face recognition. And it would be in every commercial software application or electronic service that connects to the internet.... [It's] supposedly for protecting children. That's one of the favorite excuses for surveillance and repression: to protect the children. Whether it would actually protect anyone is dubious, but they hope that won't actually be checked.... You can always propose a completely useless method that will repress everyone....
So instead, Stallman suggests that age verification could be handled by.... GNU Taler: Suppose there's some sort of service which charges money, or even a tiny amount of money, and is only for people over 16, or people over 18 or whatever it is. Well, you could get from your bank a Taler token that says the person using this token is over 16. This bank has verified that.... So then the site only needs to insist on a 16-or-over Taler token, and your age is verified, but the site has no idea who you are.

Unfortunately that won't help if user-identifying age-tracking systems are legislated now. The code of Taler works, but it's still being integrated with a bank so that people could actually start to use it with real businesses.
Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks on cryptocurrencies and encryption, or jump ahead to...

• Can GNU Taler accounts be frozen?
• Why cryptocurrency shouldn't replace banking
• The problem with VPN apps - and how interoperable encryption could protect your freedom

According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test.

It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)

Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: A California company says it can decipher almost all the DNA code of a days-old embryo created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) -- a challenging feat because of the tiny volume of genetic material available for analysis. The advance depends on fully sequencing both parents' DNA and "reconstructing" an embryo's genome with the help of those data. And the company suggests it could make it possible to forecast risk for common diseases that develop decades down the line. Currently, such genetic risk prediction is being tested in adults, and sometimes offered clinically. The idea of applying it to IVF embryos has generated intense scientific and ethical controversy. But that hasn't stopped the technology from galloping ahead.

Predicting a person's chance of a specific illness by blending this genetic variability into what's called a "polygenic risk score" remains under study in adults, in part because our understanding of how gene variants come together to drive or protect against disease remains a work in progress. In embryos it's even harder to prove a risk score's accuracy, researchers say. The new work on polygenic risk scores for IVF embryos is "exploratory research," says Premal Shah, CEO of MyOme, the company reporting the results. Today in Nature Medicine, the MyOme team, led by company co-founders and scientists Matthew Rabinowitz and Akash Kumar, along with colleagues elsewhere, describe creating such scores by first sequencing the genomes of 10 pairs of parents who had already undergone IVF and had babies. The researchers then used data collected during the IVF process: The couples' embryos, 110 in all, had undergone limited genetic testing at that time, a sort of spot sequencing of cells, called microarray measurements. Such analysis can test for an abnormal number of chromosomes, certain genetic diseases, and rearrangements of large chunks of DNA, and it has become an increasingly common part of IVF treatment in the United States. By combining these patchy embryo data with the more complete parental genome sequences, and applying statistical and population genomics techniques, the researchers could account for the gene shuffling that occurs during reproduction and calculate which chromosomes each parent had passed down to each embryo. In this way, they could predict much of that embryo's DNA.

The researchers had a handy way to see whether their reconstruction was accurate: Check the couples' babies. They collected cheek swab samples from the babies and sequenced their full genome, just as they'd done with the parents. They then compared that "true sequence" with the reconstructed genome for the embryo from which the child originated. The comparison revealed, essentially, a match: For a 3-day-old embryo, at least 96% of the reconstructed genome aligned with the inherited gene variants in the corresponding baby; for a 5-day-old embryo, it was at least 98%. (Because much of the human genome is the same across all people, the researchers focused on the DNA variability that made the parents, and their babies, unique.) Once they had reconstructed embryo genomes in hand, the researchers turned to published data from large genomic studies of adults with or without common chronic diseases and the polygenic risk score models that were derived from that information. Then, MyOme applied those models to the embryos, crunching polygenic risk scores for 12 diseases, including breast cancer, coronary artery disease, and type 2 diabetes. The team also experimented with combining the reconstructed embryo sequence of single genes, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that are known to dramatically raise risk of certain diseases, with an embryo's polygenic risk scores for that condition -- in this case, breast cancer.

Windows Central got their hands on a pre-release build of Microsoft's canceled Andromeda OS running on a Lumia 950. As noted in the article, "Andromeda OS was never intended to ship on the Lumia 950, or any Windows phone on the market at that time." They're using a 950 because Microsoft used them to help develop Andromeda OS internally. Also worth mentioning is the fact that Andromeda OS is no longer in development. Android is the OS that will be powering future Microsoft devices, such as the future Surface Duo devices. Here's an excerpt from the report: Microsoft decided to do something rather unique with Andromeda OS, and build out OS experience around a journaling/inking experience. On the lockscreen, the user is able to begin taking notes directly onto the lockscreen UI just by putting pen to screen. You don't have to initiate a special mode, or enter an app first, just take your Surface Pen and begin writing, and the lockscreen will store that ink for you to see every time you unlock your device. [...] Unlocking the device would take you to your home screen, which on Andromeda OS is another inking canvas. This canvas is called the Journal (though this later became the Microsoft Whiteboard app) which acted as a digital notebook with the ability to take notes with a pen, add sticky notes, insert images and 3D objects, and more. The Journal experience would always be running in the background, with your phone apps running above it.

Andromeda OS was also gesture based. The on-screen Start and Cortana buttons would disappear when opening an app to provide a full-screen experience, so to access those areas, you'd swipe in from the left for Start, and from the right for Cortana, which is also where your notifications were stored. Yes, Cortana and your Notifications were one of the same on Andromeda OS, with Cortana becoming your "manager" of notifications missed or stored for dealing with later. A swipe down from the top would reveal the Control Center, which is feature that's now shipping on Windows 11, but started life here on Andromeda OS. Feature-wise, it's exactly the same, with the ability to control things like Wi-Fi, brightness, volume, and music playback. It also features Fluent Design acrylic blur effects, as do many other parts of the UI, even in this unfinished state.

[...] There was also an experimental "Radial UX Menu" mode, where instead of gestures swiping in things like Start and Cortana, swiping would present you with a UI full of circular buttons for things like Start, switching apps, and more. This may have been an alternative to on-screen navigation, as not everyone was familiar with full gesture navigation at the time just yet. Or, it could have been an alternative method of navigation for when you were using a pen. Who knows. One thing we're not able to show you is the Continuum mode that Microsoft was also working on for Andromeda OS, as unfortunately it appears to be broken in the build we have. That said, we do know what it was going to be like. Essentially, Microsoft was building out Continuum to be a true desktop experience, with windowed app experiences, the ability to store icons on the desktop, and more. If you'd prefer to see Andromeda OS in action instead of read about it, you can watch Windows Central's video here.

YouTube today announced its decision to make the "dislike" count on videos private across its platform. The decision is likely to be controversial given the extent that it impacts the public's visibility into a video's reception. From a report: But YouTube believes the change will better protect its creators from harassment and reduce the threat of what it calls "dislike attacks" -- essentially, when a group teams up to drive up the number of dislikes a video receives. The company says that while dislike counts won't be visible to the public, it's not removing the dislike button itself. Users can still click the thumbs down button on videos to signal their dislike to creators privately. Meanwhile, creators will be able to track their dislikes in YouTube Studio alongside other analytics about their video's performance, if they choose. The change follows an experiment YouTube ran earlier this year whose goal was to determine if these sorts of changes would reduce dislike attacks and creator harassment. At the time, YouTube explained that public dislike counts can affect creators' well-being and may motivate targeted campaigns to add dislikes to videos. While that's true, dislikes can also serve as a signal to others when videos are clickbait, spam, or misleading, which can be useful.

Amid an escalating crisis, the power source offers a dream -- or a pipe dream -- of limitless clean energy. From a report: Let's say that you've devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you've had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let's say also that you're not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making "bottles" out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked -- because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine -- they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they "pinched" plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on.

As the White Queen, in "Through the Looking Glass," said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow. The accelerating climate crisis makes fusion's elusiveness more than cutely maddening. Solar energy gets more efficient and affordable each year, but it's not continuously available, and it still relies on gas power plants for distribution. The same is true for wind power. Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages. Carbon capture, which is like a toothbrush for the sky, is compelling, but after you capture a teraton or two of carbon there's nowhere to put it. All these tools figure extensively in decarbonization plans laid out by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, according to those plans, even when combined with one another the tools are insufficient. Fusion remains the great clean-energy dream -- or, depending on whom you ask, pipe dream. Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues; our planet has enough of fusion's primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years.

Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldn't cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldn't be too pricey -- if only we could figure out all the "details." (A joke I heard is that fusion operates according to the law of the "conservation of difficulty": when one problem is solved, a new one of equal difficulty emerges to take its place.) The details are tremendously complex, and the people who work to figure them out have for years been dealing with their own scarcities -- scarcities of funding and scarcities of faith. Fusion, as of now, has no place in the Green New Deal. In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today's dollars -- described as the "Maximum Effective Effort" -- it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to "Fusion Never." "And that's about what's been spent," the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. "Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An oral antiviral drug appears to cut the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 by roughly 50 percent in people newly diagnosed with the infection and at risk for severe disease, pharmaceutical company Merck announced Friday morning. The drug-maker and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, released top-line results of a Phase III trial, which the companies ended early given the positive results. The companies say they will apply for an Emergency Use Authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration as soon as possible.

The trial enrolled people who had newly tested positive for a SARS-CoV-2 infection and had onset of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 symptoms within just the past five days of starting the trial. The enrollees also had to have at least one risk factor for a poor outcome, such as having obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or being age 60 or above. While some participants received a placebo and standard care, others took an oral dose of the drug every 12 hours for five days. After 29 days of follow-up, 53 out of 377 participants who received the placebo were hospitalized with COVID-19, and eight of those participants died. Among those who received the drug, only 28 of 385 were hospitalized and none of those patients died. Put another way, 7.3 percent of patients on the drug were either hospitalized or died compared with 14.1 percent in the placebo group. Merck also highlighted that the trial was global and that the drug appeared to work equally well against varying SARS-CoV-2 variants, including delta, gamma, and mu. The drug-maker noted that it had viral genetic data to identify variants from 40 percent of participants. The safety data was equally promising, with participants reporting similar numbers of drug-related adverse events between the placebo group than the drug group (11 percent and 12 percent, respectively). About 3.4 percent of people in the placebo group quit the study due to adverse events, while only 1.3 percent quit in the drug group.

The drug at the center of these seemingly smashing results is dubbed molnupiravir -- a name inspired by that of Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. The idea is that the drug will strike down SARS-CoV-2, like a mighty blow from the god of thunder. In an interview with Stat news, Merck's head of research and development, Dean Li, said that the new data proves the drug's mythological force. "Our prediction from our in vitro studies and now with this data is that molnupiravir is named after the right [thing]... this is a hammer against SARS-CoV-2 regardless of the variant." Molnupiravir is a small molecule that wallops the work of a viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, an enzyme critical for making copies of RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. [...] Molnupiravir delivers a precise blow to viral RNA polymerase by posing as a building block for RNA. In the body, molnupiravir is forged into a deceptive ribonucleoside that the polymerase unwittingly incorporates into new strands of viral RNA instead of cytidine. This is essentially lethal. Researchers call the effect a "viral error catastrophe," in which the rate of genetic mutations or errors exceeds a threshold compatible with the virus surviving.

Chet Haase, who worked at several Silicon Valley tech companies and in 2010 joined the Android engineering team at Google and watched Android rise from the bottom of the smartphone field to where it is today, writes in a new book: The final part of the pitch (and the most important part, for the VCs they were pitching to) was how Android was going to make money. The open source platform described in the slides is essentially what the Android team eventually built and shipped. But if that was all there was, the company would not have been worth funding for VCs. Developing and giving away an open source platform sounds great from a save-the-world standpoint, but where's the payoff? Where's the upside for investors? That is, how did Android plan to make money off of a product that they planned to simply give away? Venture capitalists fund companies that they hope will make more (far more) than their investment back.

The path to revenue was clear for the other platform companies in the game. Microsoft made money by licensing its platform to Windows Phone partners; every phone sold contributed a per-device cost back to Microsoft. RIM made money both on the handsets they sold as well as the lucrative service contracts that their loyal enterprise customers signed up for. Nokia and the other Symbian adopters made money by selling the phones that they manufactured with variations of that operating system. Similarly, all of the other handset manufacturers funded their own software development through the revenue generated by the phones they sold.

So what was Android's play that would fund the development of this awesome platform that they had yet to build and which they would give away free to other manufacturers to build their own devices? Carrier services.

Carriers would provide applications, contacts, and other cloud-based data services to their customers for Android-based handsets. The carriers would pay Android for providing these services. Swetland explained: "Rather than running and hosting the services [like Danger did for its Hiptop phones], we would build the services and sell them to the carriers." (In fact, the system that the team eventually built and shipped stayed true to the vision laid out in the pitch deck, except for this part about revenue from carrier services, which went away entirely.)

A sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda for the NES just sold for $870,000 at Heritage Auctions, breaking the previous record for the most expensive game ever sold. Jay Peters writes via The Verge: As for why this version of the game is so valuable? I'm just going to leave part of Heritage Auctions' grandiose explanation here: "While it is a hard truth, it is a truth nonetheless â" none of the copies we've offered of this title previously could even attempt to hold a candle to this one due to its incredibly rare variant that holds early production status. This matter is completely inarguable. This is the only copy from one of the earliest production runs that we've ever had the opportunity to offer, and, possibly will have the opportunity to offer, for many years to come. Considering this variant was only produced for a few months in late 1987 before it was ultimately replaced by the 'Rev-A' variant in early 1988, this statement likely comes as no surprise to collectors. Only one other variant precedes the offered 'NES R' variant and that is the 'NES TM' variant, which is the true first production run. However, it is also widely believed that only a single sealed 'NES TM' example exists, and there is no telling whether or not that copy will ever come to market. Essentially, this copy is the earliest sealed copy one could realistically hope to obtain."

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Bloomberg, written by Timothy Massad: On Sept. 16, 2008, the day after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary Fund "broke the buck": Its net asset value fell below $1 per share. The fund -- often called the first money-market fund -- held $785 million of Lehman commercial paper that was suddenly worthless. Although the paper represented only 1.2% of the fund's total assets of $64.8 billion, demands for withdrawals escalated, and the fund lost two-thirds of its assets within 24 hours. This triggered a general run on money-market funds that stopped only when the U.S. Treasury issued an extraordinary guarantee of essentially all money-market fund liabilities. The episode underscored how important that $1 net asset value is to investors.

Certain cryptocurrencies known as stablecoins are today's economic equivalent of money-market funds, and in some cases their practices should have us worried that they could break the buck, creating significant damage in the broader crypto market. One such stablecoin is Tether. With a market capitalization close to $60 billion, it is almost as big as the Reserve Fund was in 2008. Each Tether token is pegged to be equivalent to $1. But, as with the Reserve Primary Fund, the true value of those tokens depends on the market value of Tether's reserves -- the portfolio of investments made with the fiat currency it receives.

Tether recently disclosed that as of March 31, only 8% of its assets were in cash, Treasury bills and "reverse repo notes." Almost 50% was in commercial paper, but no detail was provided about its quality. "Fiduciary deposits" represented 18%. Even more troubling: 10% of total assets were in "corporate bonds, funds & precious metals," almost 13% were in "secured loans (none to affiliated entities)," and the remainder in "other," which includes digital tokens. Tether separately provided a report from the accounting firm Moore Cayman stating that Tether's assets exceed "the amount required to redeem" outstanding tokens. But that report provided no description of assets. It appeared to be based solely on management's accounting, noting that Tether's policy is to use "historic cost," and that "the realizable value of these assets ... could be materially different." These facts should put holders of Tether -- and other stablecoins -- on notice that they may have trouble getting back $1 for each token. "If some of Tether's investments were to become worthless or decline in value, it would suffer the equivalent fate of breaking the buck," says Massad. "And if, for any reason, a wave of Tether holders suddenly tried to convert their tokens to cash, we do not know whether Tether could liquidate sufficient investments quickly to satisfy the demand."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: The Oculus Quest 2 is a hell of a lot of hardware for $299. In fact, we're convinced that Facebook is making a loss on each unit sold. Even so, that pricing is one of the main reasons it's the most popular headset on Steam and our pick as the best VR headset. Well, that and the ease of use. [...] The thing is, that price seems too good to be true, with no other manufacturer's VR headset close to the specs list of the Quest 2 -- in either tethered or standalone form -- hitting the same low, low price. That money gets you a robust virtual reality headset with 6GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, 64GB of storage, 1832x1920 per eye display and a pair of controllers. [...]

But there's one factor that could potentially offset that price -- Facebook has access to a whole lot of your data. This is something the Oculus Quest 2 is upfront about: You absolutely need a Facebook account in order to use the device and it does have its data collection policies in black and white. Although what isn't quite so obvious is how much your data is worth to Facebook. At least it isn't without a tiny bit of digging.

There is another version of the Quest 2 that isn't as discounted as the consumer version, and that's the one aimed at businesses. The actual hardware is identical, but the difference is you don't need to login in with a Facebook account in order to use it. The price for this model? $799. There's also an annual fee of $180 that kicks in a year after purchase, which covers Oculus' business services and support, but that just muddies the waters a little. The point being, the Quest 2 for business, the headset from which Facebook can't access your data directly, costs $500 more. So that's looking essentially like the value the social media giant attributes to your data, which either seems like a lot or barely anything at all, depending on your stance. The Supplemental Oculus Data Policy outlines what sort of data is actually being collected when you use the Quest 2. Such things as your physical dimension, including your hand size, how big your play area is using the Oculus Guardian system, data on any content you create using the Quest 2, as well as more obvious stuff like your device ID and IP address.

Following a 2018 study demonstrating how disrupted sleep can accelerate the buildup of toxic plaques associated with the disease, scientists from Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis have now identified a protein implicated in the progression of the disease that appears highly regulated by the circadian rhythm, helping them join the dots and providing a potential new therapeutic target. New Atlas reports: In their previous research, the WUSM team set out to explore how disruptions to our natural sleep cycles, or circadian rhythm, may accelerate the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain, which are strongly linked to Alzheimer's disease. Through studies on humans and in mice, the team was able to show a strong correlation between the two, and now through follow up work, the team has identified a brain protein that appears to play a role in this relationship. The brain protein in question is called YKL-40 and for years has served as a biomarker for Alzheimer's, as high levels of it have been found in the cerebrospinal fluid of those suffering from the disease and these levels rise as the disease progresses. The researchers were screening for genes that are regulated by the circadian rhythm, and were intrigued to see the gene for this brain protein pop up.

From there, the team investigated this connection between YKL-40 and Alzheimer's, which is characterized by chronic inflammation, by exploring how much of the protein is made under inflammatory conditions both with and without a key circadian gene. Indeed, this demonstrated that the circadian rhythm controls how much YKL-40 is produced. Next up, the team worked with mice prone to developing amyloid plaques, and genetically modified one group of them to be lacking the gene for YKL-40. As the mice reached old age, the team analyzed their brains and found that those without the YKL-40 protein exhibited around half the amyloid plaques of the control group.

Digging deeper into the reasons why, the team found that the mice lacking the YKL-40 gene featured more microglia, which are immune cells that surround amyloid plaques and prevent them from spreading. Essentially, this meant that those mice had more hungry immune cells prepared to gobble up the amyloid. [...] The team also examined this idea in human subjects, drawing on genetic data on 778 subjects from aging and dementia studies and finding only a quarter of them featured a genetic variant that lowers levels of YKL-40, and that cognitive function declined 16 percent more slowly in that group. The research was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

MojoKid writes: Apple has repeatedly asserted its dominance in terms of performance versus competitive mobile platforms. And it has been historically true that, in cross-platform benchmarks, iPhones generally can beat out Android phones in both CPU and GPU (graphics) performance. However, a new benchmark recently released from trusted benchmark suite developer UL Benchmarks sheds light on what could be the iPhone's Achilles' Heel in terms of performance, or more specifically, performance over extended duration.

The new benchmark, 3DMark WildLife, employs Apple's Metal API for rendering and Vulkan on Android devices. In testing at HotHardware, for basic single-run tests, again iPhones trounce anything Android, including flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, ASUS ROG Phone 3 and OnePlus 8. However, in the extended duration WildLife Stress Test, which loops the single test over and over for 20 minutes, the current flagship iPhone 11 Pro and A13 Bionic's performance craters essentially to Snapdragon 865/865+ performance levels, while Android phones like the OnePlus 8 maintain 99+% of their performance. Though this is just one gaming benchmark test that employs the latest graphics technologies and APIs, it's interesting to see that perhaps Apple's focus on tuning for quick bursty workloads (and maybe benchmark optimization too?) falls flat if the current class of top-end iPhone is pushed continuously.

MSNBC's Ali Velshi interviewed Mark Zuckerberg mentor (and early investor) Roger McNamee for a special report on "the disinformation epidemic."

McNamee — also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — says Zuckerberg is too focused on "imposing his vision" to acknowledge the website's threat to national security, adding "It's about power." Ali Velshi: The fact that rumor, innuendo, conspiracies, outright lies are amplified by social media is no accident. That is a feature built into platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It is part of their business model. Long before the election of 2016, Facebook knew all of this to be true, but it followed a familiar pattern of responses. It denied that was a problem. When it acknowledged the problem, it treated it as a public relations issue, not as a core business issue. It offered up half-baked solutions that changed nothing, and it fought off attempts to regulate it. Because what Facebook has created is immensely profitable...

Roger McNamee says he warned Mark Zuckerberg of the immense problems that Facebook's business model could unleash...

Roger McNamee: The company essentially believes that it is sovereign, the equivalent of another nation. It has nearly twice as many monthly active users as there are people in China. And so Mark Zuckerberg very much has the view that no one can tell him what to do... Facebook's own research says that 64% of the time that a person joins an extremist network on Facebook, it is because Facebook has recommended that they do so...

People sit there and assume it's about money, and I think money is secondary. I really think it's about power. I think Mark Zuckerberg has a vision that connecting all the people in the world on one network — his network — is the best thing any human being can do. And in his notion it has to do with efficiency, it has to do with scale, it has to do with imposing his vision on it.

And that kind of power is intoxicating. Remember, between when the company went public and 2018, the company got very little pushback — in fact what it really got was tons of love from investors and journalists and the like. And they were in their own filter bubble and started to believe their own press and their own point of view about what was going on. And I just think they're at this point now where they are just disconnected, there's really no sensitivity, no understanding that they might have a responsibility to society.

And at this point, with the election coming so closely, this has become a national security issue, because effectively the platform can be used by anybody. These advertising tools can be used by campaigns, they can be used by foreign governments, they can be used by provocateurs, people who would like to make trouble. That happens every single day, and from Facebook's point of view, that's just business as usual.

They want to hide behind the first amendment. They want to say this is about freedom of speech. But amplification is not freedom of speech. Amplification is a business choice for profit.

An intriguing exchange happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing List after a post by Nick Desaulniers, a Google software engineer working on compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang (and LLVM). Hackaday reports: Nick simply tested the waters for a possible future of Rust within the Linux kernel code base, which is something he's planning to bring up for discussion in this year's Linux Plumbers Conference — the annual kernel developer gathering. [Desaulniers thinks that discussion will include "a larger question of 'should we do this?' or 'how might we place limits on where this can be used?'"]

The interesting part is Linus Torvalds's response on the LKML thread, which leaves everyone hoping for a hearty signature Rust rant akin to his C++ one disappointed. Instead, his main concern is that a soft and optional introduction of the support in the build system would leave possible bugs hidden, and therefore should be automatically enabled if a Rust compiler is present — essentially implying that he seems otherwise on board.
Linus also touched on Rust earlier this month in his keynote interview with Dirk Hohndel, the chief open source officer at VMware, during the special virtual edition of the Linux Foundation's annual Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America: Dirk Hohndel: Every new project is done in Go or Rust or another new language I've never heard of. Is there a risk that we are becoming the COBOL programmers of the 2030s?

Linus Torvalds: Well, I don't actually think it's true that nobody writes in C any more. I think C is still one of the top 10 languages easily, if you look at any of the statistics.

That said — I mean, people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day.

I mean, it might not be Rust, but it is going to happen that we will have different models for writing these kinds of things. And C won't be the only one. I mean right now, it's C or assembly, and most people would rather not touch the assembly parts. [Dirk laughs] But it is something that people are looking at. I'm probably the wrong person. Greg has been more involved, since he's the driver maintainer in general. But things are afoot, and these things take a long, long time. I mean, the kind of infrastructure you need to start integrating other languages into a kernel, and making people trust these other languages — that's a big step.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service that combines Verizon's 4G LTE network with Yahoo mail, for some reason. Why even put the word "Yahoo" on a re-branded Verizon data plan? Because the service comes with Yahoo Mail Pro, the ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that normally costs $3.49 a month. Yahoo Mobile also includes "24/7 Yahoo account customer service." Verizon says Yahoo Mobile has "no hidden fees" or "clingy contracts." "We're the only plan that gives you Yahoo Mail Pro for ad-free email across ALL your devices," the Yahoo Mobile website says. (Fact check: True.)

Yahoo Mobile costs $40 a month and provides "unlimited" data, with a caveat. "In times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic," the announcement said. With the more expensive Verizon-branded unlimited service, customers have the option of buying plans with no data slowdowns until they use 25GB, 50GB, or 75GB in a month. With Yahoo Mobile, the speed limits can be imposed any time the network is congested, regardless of how much data a customer has used. Yahoo Mobile also comes with an "unlimited mobile hotspot for use with one connected device at a time," but those hotspot speeds are capped at 5Mbps. The Yahoo plan doesn't have access to Verizon's 5G network, though that's not really a big deal yet. Aside from the Yahoo-specific aspects, Yahoo Mobile is essentially the same plan offered by Visible, a Verizon subsidiary.

Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat: WhatsApp launched out of beta 10 years ago this month, and the messaging behemoth is now a completely different beast from the one that quietly arrived for iPhone users way back in November 2009. After Facebook shelled out around $20 billion to acquire the app in 2014, WhatsApp introduced voice calls, video calls, group calls, web and desktop apps, end-to-end encryption, and fingperprint unlocking. All the while, Facebook has been figuring out how to monetize its gargantuan acquisition by targeting businesses. However, there remains one glaring chink in WhatsApp's otherwise expansive armor -- namely, the lack of simultaneous multi-device support. Things could be about to change, however.

Given that WhatsApp is tethered to a user's mobile number and all messages are stored locally on devices, rather than on remote servers, syncing and accessing WhatsApp across devices poses something of a challenge. WhatsApp Web allows users to message from their desktop computer, but by essentially mirroring their mobile device -- one can't work without the other. Moreover, WhatsApp Web lacks many of the features of the mobile app, such as voice and video calling. Achieving true multi-device support -- without compromising security -- would be a big game changer for WhatsApp.

A computer programmer at America's tax-collecting agency "stole multiple people's identities, and used them to open illicit credit cards to fund vacations and shop for shoes and other goods," write Quartz, citing a complaint unsealed last week in federal court.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The complaint accuses the 35-year-old federal worker of racking up almost $70,000 in charges over the course of two years, illegally using "the true names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers" of at least three people.

The US Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees internal wrongdoing at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), is investigating the crime, although the complaint doesn't specify how the employee obtained the information. The arrest, however, comes just months after the Government Accountability Office -- the federal government's auditor, essentially -- issued a report raising concerns about the security of taxpayer information held at the IRS. The report said that unaddressed shortcomings left taxpayer data "unnecessarily vulnerable to inappropriate and undetected use, modification, or disclosure," which could allow employees or outsiders to illegally access millions of people's personal information. An IRS call center employee in Atlanta pleaded guilty last year to illegally using taxpayer data to file fraudulent tax returns, ultimately collecting almost $6,000. In 2016, another IRS worker in Atlanta admitted to improperly accessing the personal information of two taxpayers, amassing close to half a million dollars from illicit tax refunds....

The IRS employee's alleged scheme took place between January 2016 and February 2018, according to court filings. Investigators say he used a fraudulently obtained American Express card to fly to Sacramento and Miami Beach. He also used the card for some 37 Uber rides, nine payments on his father's Amazon account totaling $1,200, various purchases at Lowe's, the Designer Shoe Warehouse, BJ's Wholesale Club, and a flooring outlet, as well as a $7,400 payment to a business he owned. The complaint says the employee, who works for the tax agency as a software developer, obtained a second fraudulent credit card, which he used to fly to Montego Bay, Jamaica. A third fraudulent card was used to travel to Iceland.

In a particularly brazen move, investigators say the suspect linked this card to a phony PayPal account he opened using his official IRS email address.
Two of the credit cards were delivered to his home address, while a third was sent to his parents' address, according to the article. "The phone numbers listed on the accounts also belonged to the suspect, and he accessed emails associated with the accounts from his home IP address."