An anonymous reader shares a report: In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it's been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors by pointing out errors or inconsistencies. But now, in a surprise twist, the team that earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own seminal patents, MIT Technology Review has learned.

The decision could affect who gets to collect the lucrative licensing fees on using the technology. The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Nobelists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo's earliest patent filing didn't explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn't count as a proper invention. The Nobel laureates' lawyers say the decision is so wrong and unfair that they have no choice but to preemptively cancel their patents, a scorched-earth tactic whose aim is to prevent the unfavorable legal finding from being recorded as the reason.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software fixes are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls. That's the key finding from a decade's worth of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall data, according to an analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law. While that's a sign of growing inconvenience for drivers, the silver lining is that a software patch is usually a much quicker fix than something requiring hardware replacement. "Our analysis suggests we're witnessing a shift in how automotive recalls are handled. The growing number of software-related recalls, coupled with the ability to address issues remotely, could revolutionize the recall process for both manufacturers and vehicle owners," said a spokesperson for DeMayo Law.

In 2014, 34 of 277 automotive recalls were software fixes. The percentage of software recalls floated around 12-13 percent (apart from a spike in 2015) before growing steadily from 2020. In 2021, 16 percent of automotive recalls (61 out of 380) were for software. In 2022, almost 22 percent of recalls were software fixes (76 out of 348), and last year topped 23 percent (82 out of 356). Leading the way was Chrysler, with 82 different software recalls since 2014. Ford (66 recalls) and Mercedes-Benz (60) are the two runner-ups. Meanwhile, Tesla ranks only eighth, with 26 software recalls since 2014, which puts it on par with Hyundai (25) and Kia (25).

Electrical systems were the most common problem area, which makes sense -- this is also the second-most common hardware fix recall and would probably be the top if it were not for the massive Takata airbag recall, which has affected more than 100 million cars worldwide. The other common systems affected by recalls requiring software remedies were related to backover prevention -- whether that be reversing cameras, collision warnings, or automatic emergency braking -- airbags, powertrains, and exterior lighting. "It should be noted that not all recalls involving a software fix are to solve a software problem," notes Ars' Jonathan M. Gitlin. "Take the recent Jaguar I-Pace recall, which was triggered by battery fires caused by battery cells damaged during assembly. Jaguar's fix? A software update that sets a new, lower limit to the storage capacity of the battery pack, preventing it from fully charging to 100 percent."

Steep online discounts aren't as sweet as they used to be. From a report: The average discount offered by online retailers in the US is down to 36% so far this year, data from Centric Market Intelligence shows. That's down two percentage points from last year, and down from an average of 42% in 2019 -- a 14% drop in real terms. Finding a bargain is getting tougher for a variety of reasons, according to retail experts who spoke with Sherwood. Sellers are having to pay more for raw materials, and they're shelling out more in customer-acquisition costs to get you to order from them. Fulfilling online orders is also generally more expensive than selling items in person. All these add up to increased costs that make it harder to offer discounts.

An anonymous reader shared this story from SFGate: A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been found alive on the East Coast, a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century.

On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched...

Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966...

Decades passed.

In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back.

Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.

In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple....

When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."

"In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we'll find evidence of life on another planet..." begins a new essay by author Dave Eggers in the Washington Post.

"In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when." [A]ll evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don't find conditions for life on the moons near us, we'll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we'll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things.

And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we'll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA's next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we'll find the planets where life might exist.

To recap: For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether life is possible elsewhere in the universe, and now we're within striking distance of being able to say not only yes, but here.

And yet this is not front-page news. I didn't really know how close we were to this milestone until I visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on a hot and dry day in June...
Eggers' article is part of an ongoing series called "Who is government?" (For the series Michael Lewis also profiled the uncelebrated number-crunchers at the U.S. Department of Labor, while Casey Cep wrote about the use of DNA to identify the remains of World War II soldiers for America's Veteran Affairs' department's.) But this week Eggers wrote that the work being done at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory "is the most inspiring research and exploration being done by any humans on our planet..."

"No billionaires will fund work like this because there's no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done."

Eggers emphasizes later that "doesn't mean it's intelligent life, or even semi-intelligent life. It could be bacteria, or some kind of interstellar sea cucumber. But whatever form it takes, we are close to finding it..."

Slashdot first covered Saul Justin Newman's work in 2019.

Now a senior research fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, Newman was recognized last week for research finding that most claims of people living over 105 are wrong. Newman's research was honored with an Ig Nobel Prize (awarded for research that makes people "laugh then think") — which led to a thought-provoking interview in the Conversation: Newman: In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don't stack up. I've tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can't meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the U.S. there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They're the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on. Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don't register your death. [Newman says later that "In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war..."] The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They've eaten the least vegetables; they've been extremely heavy drinkers....

With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases... According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 "living" pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997. Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.
So what's the truth on human longevity? "The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know," Newman answers (suggesting physicists "develop a measure of human age that doesn't depend on documents.") In the end the truth may be much more ordinary. "Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well."

Newman also says that if the scientific community won't acknowledge their errors during his lifetime, "I guess I'll just get someone to pretend I'm still alive until that changes."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Joe_Dragon shares a report: Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn't be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks. While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy "would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access."

The legal question presented by the case "is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet," they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday. The amici curiae brief was filed by Altice USA (operator of the Optimum brand), Frontier Communications, Lumen (aka CenturyLink), and Verizon. The brief supports cable firm Cox Communications' attempt to overturn its loss in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony. Cox petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case last month.

Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox in 2018, claiming it didn't adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers. A US District Court jury in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in December 2019 that Cox must pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels. Cox won a partial victory when the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit vacated the $1 billion verdict, finding that Cox wasn't guilty of vicarious infringement because it did not profit directly from infringement committed by users of its cable broadband network. But the appeals court affirmed the jury's finding of willful contributory infringement and ordered a new damages trial.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) says one in ten organizations in the country affected by CrowdStrike's outage in July are dropping their current vendor's products. Four percent of organizations have already abandoned their existing solutions, while a further 6 percent plan to do so in the near future. It wasn't explicitly said whether this referred to CrowdStrike's Falcon product specifically or was a knee-jerk reaction to security vendors generally. One in five will also change the selection criteria when it comes to reviewing which security vendor gets their business. The whole fiasco doesn't seem to have hurt the company much though, at least not yet.

The findings come from a report examining the experiences of 311 affected organizations in Germany, published today. Of those affected in one way or another, most said they first heard about the issues from social media (23 percent) rather than CrowdStrike itself (22 percent). The report also revealed that half of the 311 surveyed orgs had to halt operations -- 48 percent experienced temporary downtime. Ten hours, on average. Aside from the obvious business continuity impacts, this led to various issues with customers too. Forty percent said their collaboration with customers was damaged because they couldn't provide their usual services, while more than one in ten organizations didn't even want to address the topic. The majority of respondents (66 percent) said they will improve their incident response plans in light of what happened, or have done so already, despite largely considering events like these as unavoidable. The report highlights a curious finding that over half of CrowdStrike customers wanted to install updates more regularly, even though that would have been worse for an organization.

"Regardless, with the number of urgent patch warnings we and the infosec community dish out every week, it's probably a net positive, even if it's slightly misguided," concludes The Register.

Instagram has introduced new safety features that make teenage accounts private by default, enhance parental supervision, and set messaging restrictions to protect young users, requiring parental approval for changes. NPR reports: Meta said users under 16 will now need a parent's approval to change the restricted settings, dubbed "Teen Accounts," which filter out offensive words and limit who can contact them. "It's addressing the same three concerns we're hearing from parents around unwanted contact, inappropriate contact and time spent," said Naomi Gleit, Meta's head of product, in an interview with NPR. With teens all being switched to private accounts, they can only be messaged or tagged by people they follow. Content from accounts they don't follow will be in the most restrictive setting, and the app will make periodic screen time reminders under a revamped "take a break" feature. [...]

Meta requires users to be at least 13 years old to create an account. Social media researchers, however, have long noted that young people can lie about their age to get on the platform and may have multiple fake accounts, known as "finstas," to avoid detection by their parents. Officials at Meta say they have built new artificial intelligence systems to detect teens who lie about their age. This is in addition to working with British company Yoti, which analyzes someone's face from their photos and estimates an age. Meta has partnered with the company since 2022. Since then, Meta has required teens to prove their age by submitting a video selfie or a form of identification. Now, Meta says, if a young person tries to log into a new account with an adult birthday, it will place them in the teen protected settings.

While parental supervision on Instagram still requires both a teen and parent to opt in, the new policies add a feature that allows parents to see who their teens have been recently messaging (though not the content of the messages) and what subjects they are exploring on the app. Meta is hoping to avoid one worrisome situation: Someone who is not a parent finding a way to oversee a teen's account. "If we determine a parent or guardian is not eligible, they are blocked from the supervision experience," Meta wrote in a white paper about Tuesday's new child safety measures. [...] Meta points out that parents will be limited to viewing about three dozen topics that their teens are interested in, including things like outdoor activities, animals and music. Meta says the topic-viewing is less about parents surveilling kids and more about learning about a child's curiosities. Still, some of the new Instagram features for teens will be aimed at filtering out sensitive content from the app's Explore Page and on Reels, the app's short-form video service.

Last October Slashdot reported on René Rebe's discovery of a random illegal instruction speculation bug on AMD Ryzen 7000-series and Epyc Zen 4 CPUs — which Rebe discussed on his YouTube channel.

But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware... Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...

[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.
Rebe has been contributing to Linux "since as early as 1998," according to the article, "and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well." (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)

The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft executives have been thinking lately about the end of the world. In a white paper published late last year, Brad Smith, the company's vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer, described a "planetary crisis" that AI could help solve. Imagine an AI-assisted tool that helps reduce food waste, to name one example from the document, or some future technology that could "expedite decarbonization" by using AI to invent new designs for green tech.

But as Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. Hundreds of pages of internal documents I've obtained, plus interviews I've conducted over the past year with 15 current and former employees and executives, show that the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production -- all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions.

Although tech companies have long done business with the fossil-fuel industry, Microsoft's case is notable. It demonstrates how the AI boom contributes to one of the most pressing issues facing our planet today -- despite the fact that the technology is often lauded for its supposed potential to improve our world, as when Sam Altman testified to Congress that it could address issues such as "climate change and curing cancer." These deals also show how Microsoft can use the vagaries of AI to talk out of both sides of its mouth, courting the fossil-fuel industry while asserting its environmental bona fides. (Many of the documents I viewed have been submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a whistleblower complaint alleging that the company has omitted from public disclosures "the serious climate and environmental harms caused by the technology it provides to the fossil fuel industry," arguing that the information is of material and financial importance to investors.

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news.ÂIn its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71 per cent of adults obtained news online, compared with 70 per cent via TV -- a finding it described as "marking a generational shift in the balance of news media."

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75 per cent last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found. The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok.Â

Sharks are deserting their coral reef homes as the climate crisis continues to heat up the oceans, scientists have discovered. From a report: This is likely to harm the sharks, which are already endangered, and their absence could have serious consequences for the reefs, which are also struggling. The reef sharks are a key part of the highly diverse and delicate ecosystem, which could become dangerously unbalanced without them. The researchers tagged and tracked more than 120 grey reef sharks living on the remote coral reefs of the Chagos archipelago in the central Indian Ocean from 2013 to 2020. As reefs became more stressed, particularly during the major ocean-warming El Niño event of 2015-16, the sharks spent significantly less time there. They failed to return to normal residency for up to 16 months after a stress event.

However, the sharks actually spent more time on a minority of the coral reefs. These reefs were healthier and more resilient, due to factors including the eradication of invasive rats and higher populations of birds, which help fertilise the reef. The researchers said this showed that increasing the protection of coral reefs from human-caused damage may help sharks remain on their home reefs. Sharks are cold-blooded and their body temperature is linked to water temperature. "If it gets too hot, they're going to need to move," said Dr David Jacoby, a lecturer in zoology at Lancaster University and the leader of the research project. "We think many are choosing to move into offshore, deeper and cooler waters, which is concerning. Some of the sharks were disappearing entirely from the reef for long periods of time. Reef sharks are already absent from nearly 20% of coral reefs globally, partly through [overfishing], and this new finding has the potential to exacerbate these trends."

Boeing's "beleaguered" Starliner spacecraft "successfully landed in New Mexico just after midnight Eastern time," reports NPR: After Starliner made a picture-perfect landing, Stich told reporters that the spacecraft did well during its return flight. "It was a bullseye landing," he said. "It's really great to get the spacecraft back...." He said while he and others on the team felt happy about the successful landing, "there's a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would've been the way we had planned it" with astronauts on board when it landed...

Now that Starliner is back on the ground, Boeing and NASA will further analyze the thrusters to see if modifying the spacecraft or how it's flown could keep the thrusters from overheating in the future.
Futurism explains why NASA wanted an uncrewed Starliner flight: While attempting to duplicate the issue at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, engineers eventually found what appeared to be the smoking gun, as SpaceNews' Jeff Foust details in a detailed new breakdown of the timeline. A Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer — a disturbing finding, because it greatly degraded the thrusters' performance.

Worse, without being able to perfectly replicate and analyze the issue in the near vacuum of space, engineers weren't entirely sure how the issue was actually playing out in orbit... While engineers found that the thrusters had returned to a more regular shape after being fired in space, they were worried that similar deformations might take place during prolonged de-orbit firings.

A lot was on the line. Without perfect control over the thrusters, NASA became worried that the spacecraft could careen out of control. "For me, one of the really important factors is that we just don't know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem," NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox said, as quoted by SpaceNews.
Now CBS News reports that "the road ahead is far from clear" for Starliner: The service module was jettisoned as planned before re-entry, burning up in the atmosphere, and engineers will not be able to examine the hardware to pin down exactly what caused the helium leaks and degraded thruster performance during the ship's rendezvous with the station. Instead, they will face more data analysis, tests and potential redesigns expected to delay the next flight, with or without astronauts aboard, to late next year at the earliest.

"Even though it was necessary to return the spacecraft uncrewed, NASA and Boeing learned an incredible amount about Starliner in the most extreme environment possible," Ken Bowersox, space operations director at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. "NASA looks forward to our continued work with the Boeing team to proceed toward certification of Starliner for crew rotation missions to the space station," Bowersox added. In any case, the successful landing was a shot in the arm for Boeing engineers and managers, who insisted the Starliner could have safely brought Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.

Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, agreed that if the crew had been on board "it would have been a safe, successful landing."
Two details about the astronauts now waiting for their February return flight from the International Space Station.

• NPR reports that "in case the space station suffers an emergency that forces an evacuation before that capsule arrives, the station's crew had to jerry-rig two extra seats in a different SpaceX spacecraft that's currently docked there."

• Space.com reports that when the uncrewed Starliner returned, "Among the gear that it carried home were the 'Boeing Blue' spacesuits that Williams and Wilmore wore aboard the capsule. The astronauts have no need for them now. "The suits are not compatible," Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said during a press conference on Wednesday (Sept. 4). "So the Starliner suits would not work in Dragon, and vice versa."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jazmin Jones knowswhat she did. "If you're online, there's this idea of trolling," Jones, the director behindSeeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. "For this project, some things we're taking incredibly seriously ... and other things we're trolling. We're trolling this idea of a detective because we're also, like,ACAB." Her trolling, though, was for a good reason. Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia Mckayla Ross did it in hopes of finding the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The popular teaching tool was released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks, a video game and software company based in California that produced educational chess, reading, and math games. Mavis, essentially the "mascot" of the game, is a Black woman donned in professional clothes and a slicked-back bun. Though Mavis Beacon was not an actual person, Jones and Ross say that she is one of the first examples of Black representation they witnessed in tech. Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opened in New York City on August 30 and is rolling out to other cities in September, is their attempt to uncover the story behind the face, which appeared on the tool's packaging and later as part of its interface.

The film shows the duo setting up a detective room, conversing over FaceTime, running up to people on the street, and even tracking down a relative connected to the ever-elusive Mavis. But the journey of their search turned up a different question they didn't initially expect: What are the impacts of sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation in a world where you can present yourself any way you want to? Using shots from computer screens, deep dives through archival footage, and sit-down interviews, the noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon is actually Renee L'Esperance, a Black model from Haiti who was paid $500 for her likeness with no royalties, despite the program selling millions of copies. [...]

In a world where anyone can create images of folks of any race, gender, or sexual orientation without having to fully compensate the real people who inspired them, Jones and Ross are working to preserve not only the data behind Mavis Beacon but also the humanity behind the software. On the panel, hosted by Black Girls in Media, Ross stated that the film's social media has a form where users of Mavis Beacon can share what the game has meant to them, for archival purposes. "On some level, Olivia and I are trolling ideas of worlds that we never felt safe in or protected by," Jones said during the panel. "And in other ways, we are honoring this legacy of cyber feminism, historians, and care workers that we are very seriously indebted to." You can watch the trailer for "Seeking Mavis Beacon" on YouTube.

US job openings fell in July to the lowest since the start of 2021 and layoffs rose, consistent with other signs of slowing demand for workers. From a report: Available positions decreased to 7.67 million from a downwardly revised 7.91 million reading in the prior month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS, showed Wednesday. The figure was lower than all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The decline in openings coincides with recent data that show the labor market is softening, which has raised concern among Federal Reserve officials. Job growth has been slowing, unemployment is rising and jobseekers are having greater difficulty finding work, fueling fears about a potential recession.

Policymakers have made it clear they don't want to see further cooling in the labor market and are widely expected to start lowering interest rates at their next meeting in two weeks. After July's disappointing jobs figures and a large downward revision to payrolls in the past year, Fed officials and market participants are paying close attention to the August employment data due Friday -- especially if another weak report could prompt an outsize rate cut.

Scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about the geologic process behind these large pieces of gold found in quartz rock. From a report: Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn't too tricky: Much of the world's gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth's squashed-up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets there in the first place was a mystery. Now, a new study published today in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes -- lots of them.

Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity. That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth's crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold -- and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets. "If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out," says Christopher Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of that shaking, and the team's lab experiments show that earthquakes can make gold nuggets.

The idea that gold nuggets appear because of electricity instead of a more conventional geologic process is, at first, a peculiar thought. But "it makes complete sense," says Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in England and who was not involved with the new work. Quartz veins host a disproportionate number of gold nuggets and their environments experience plenty of earthquakes.

CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S."

Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' — who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems." The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country's cyberespionage activities.

The U.S. Treasury department first warned about the tactic in 2022. Thosands of highly skilled IT workers are taking advantage of the demand for software developers to obtain freelance contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and East Asia. "Although DPRK [North Korean] IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK's malicious cyber intrusions," the Treasury department warned... North Korean IT workers present themselves as South Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Eastern European, and as U.S.-based teleworkers. In some cases, DPRK IT workers further obfuscate their identities by creating arrangements with third-party subcontractors.

Christina Chapman, a resident of Arizona, faces fraud charges over an elaborate scheme that allegedly allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as U.S. citizens and residents using stolen identities to obtain jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies. U.S. payment platforms and online job site accounts were abused to secure jobs at more than 300 companies, including a major TV network, a car manufacturer, a Silicon Valley technology firm, and an aerospace company... According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, unsealed in May 2024, Chapman ran a "laptop farm," hosting the overseas IT workers' computers inside her home so it appeared that the computers were located in the U.S. The 49-year-old received and forged payroll checks, and she laundered direct debit payments for salaries through bank accounts under her control. Many of the overseas workers in her cell were from North Korea, according to prosecutors. An estimated $6.8 million were paid for the work, much of which was falsely reported to tax authorities under the name of 60 real U.S. citizens whose identities were either stolen or borrowed...

Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, was separately charged over a years-long scheme to create fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms and with U.S.-based money service transmitters. "Didenko sold the accounts to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean, and the overseas IT workers used the false identities to apply for jobs with unsuspecting companies," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Didenko, who was arrested in Poland in May, faces U.S. extradition proceedings...

How this type of malfeasance plays out from the perspective of a targeted firm was revealed by security awareness vendor KnowBe4's candid admission in July that it unknowingly hired a North Korean IT spy... A growing and substantial body of evidence suggests KnowBe4 is but one of many organizations targeted by illicit North Korean IT workers. Last November security vendor Palo Alto reported that North Korean threat actors are actively seeking employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world...

Mandiant, the Google-owned threat intel firm, reported last year that "thousands of highly skilled IT workers from North Korea" are hunting work. More recently, CrowdStrike reported that a North Korean group it dubbed "Famous Chollima" infiltrated more than 100 companies with imposter IT pros.
The article notes the infiltrators use chatbots to tailor the perfect resume "and further leverage AI-created deepfakes to pose as real people." And the article includes this quote from a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force turned cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig. "In some cases, they may try to get jobs at tech companies in order to steal their intellectual property before using it to create their own knock-off technologies."

The article closes with its suggested "countermeasures," including live video-chats with prospective remote-work applicants — and confirming an applicant's home address.

Denise Prudhomme, a 60-year-old Wells Fargo employee, was found dead at her desk four days after clocking in. Apparently, nobody noticed her body because of the secluded location of her cubicle and the fact that many employees were working remotely. VICE reports: Prudhomme last scanned into her office job in Tempe, Arizona, at 7 AM on Friday, and her body was reportedly discovered at 4:55 PM on Tuesday, August 20. Her coworkers did pick up that something weird was going on. They detected a weird smell but assumed it was some kind of plumbing issue.

Prudhomme's cubicle was on the third floor of the building, tucked away from any main thoroughfares that employees would use to travel between departments. On top of that, most employees at the Tempe Wells Fargo location worked remotely, significantly cutting down the chance of someone finding her body.

Tempe police and the Maricopa County Medical Examiner didn't detect any signs of foul play, but the woman's official cause of death remains to be seen. Wells Fargo has said that they're going to look into their internal procedures to make sure employees receive some kind of check-in to make sure they're not, you know, dead.

A type of genetically modified wheat developed by Argentina's Bioceres may be safely grown and bred in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Tuesday. From a report: Bioceres must still complete additional steps, including field trials, that will take years before it can commercialize HB4 wheat, modified to tolerate drought, industry group U.S. Wheat Associates said. Still, USDA's finding moves genetically modified wheat closer to production in the U.S. in a potential win for farmers grappling with drought and more severe weather, despite concerns among some consumers.

"Wherever wheat is grown in the world, drought takes its toll on yields and quality, so an innovation like HB4 holds a lot of interest for growers like me," said Michael Peters, an Oklahoma wheat farmer and past chairman of U.S. Wheat Associates. Genetic modification involves altering a plant's makeup by transferring DNA from one organism to another and is common in crops such as corn, used for livestock feed. Some consumer groups oppose genetic modification of wheat over concerns about human health since it is widely used to make bread and pasta, and therefore consumed directly by people. USDA's decision on HB4 wheat is farther than the agency has ever gone with genetically modified wheat, U.S. Wheat Associates said.