An anonymous reader shares a report: According to a recent IDC forecast, the PC and tablet markets are expected to shrink. Shipments for tablets and PCs will decline almost 12% in 2022, the research firm reported, and are expected to decline further in 2023. But excess inventory is already forcing suppliers to heavily discount products and shift from the premium segment to more mid-range products, the analysts said. On the other hand, the report states that tablet and PC shipments will continue to remain above pre-pandemic levels. But uncertain economic conditions will threaten inventory and increase market saturation next year.

"The reality is that both PC and tablet makers will struggle in the coming months as not only are volumes expected to decline, but so will average selling prices," Jitesh Ubrani, IDC's research manager for mobility and consumer device trackers, said in a release. In October of this year, IDC reported that tablet shipments were down 8.8%, signaling the fifth straight quarter of the tablet market's decline. This market contraction followed two years of massive growth, which can be mostly attributed to economic factors.

Theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma wrote a thought-provoking essay for New Scientist magazine's Lost in Space-Time newsletter: I was recently reading an old article by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta Magazine entitled "There are no laws of physics". You might think it a bit odd for a physicist to argue that there are no laws of physics but I agree with him. In fact, not only do I agree with him, I think that my field is all the better for it. And I hope to convince you of this too.

First things first. What we often call laws of physics are really just consistent mathematical theories that seem to match some parts of nature. This is as true for Newton's laws of motion as it is for Einstein's theories of relativity, Schrödinger's and Dirac's equations in quantum physics or even string theory. So these aren't really laws as such, but instead precise and consistent ways of describing the reality we see. This should be obvious from the fact that these laws are not static; they evolve as our empirical knowledge of the universe improves.

Here's the thing. Despite many scientists viewing their role as uncovering these ultimate laws, I just don't believe they exist.... I know from my 40 years of experience in working on real-life physical phenomena that the whole idea of an ultimate law based on an equation using just the building blocks and fundamental forces is unworkable and essentially a fantasy. We never know precisely which equation describes a particular laboratory situation. Instead, we always have to build models and approximations to describe each phenomenon even when we know that the equation controlling it is ultimately some form of the Schrödinger equation!
Even with quantum mechanics, space and time are variables that have to be "put in by hand," the article argues, "when space and time should come out naturally from any ultimate law of physics. This has remained perhaps the greatest mystery in fundamental physics with no solution in sight...."

"It is difficult to imagine that a thousand years from now physicists will still use quantum mechanics as the fundamental description of nature.... I see no particular reason that our description of how the physical universe seems to work should reach the pinnacle suddenly in the beginning of the 21st century and become stuck forever at quantum mechanics. That would be a truly depressing thought...!"

"Our understanding of the physical world must continue indefinitely, unimpeded by the search for ultimate laws. Laws of physics continuously evolve — they will never be ultimate."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader InfiniteZero for sharing the article!

This week the Atlantic published its list of "the 10 Most Promising Breakthrough Innovations of 2022."

"We didn't just get one 'unheard-of' cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year...." Is death reversible? It was this year for several pigs (or, at least, for their organs). By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. The technology is "very far away from use in humans," Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, told The New York Times. In the short term, scientists said, they hope that their research could help doctors preserve the organs of the recently deceased for use in transplants. But the longer-term implications of the experiment can't be ignored: If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we revive soldiers who bleed out on the battlefield? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?

These questions thrust us into the ethical realm and invoke spooky references to "The Monkey's Paw," Pet Sematary, and any number of stories about the dark side of trying to design an escape hatch from mortality. Perhaps, as this technology improves, that debate is on its way. But for millions of people who have lost loved ones to, say, a sudden heart attack or stroke, it's not remotely dystopian to imagine an injection that could reverse tragedies long considered irreversible....

The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)
This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance.... Some scientists I consulted for this project said that the results, which were published this year in the science journal Cell, were the most important scientific breakthrough of 2022.

Scientists are not close to turning stem cells into human babies that make their first gasping cries in antiseptic laboratories. But this work does suggest a major leap forward in our ability to grow synthetic organs and more closely research the relationship between embryonic mutations and developmental diseases. As Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Stat, "As soon as the science starts to move into a place where it's feasible to go from a stem cell population in a Petri dish all the way through to organ development, it's a pretty wild and remarkable time."
The article also notes that NuScale's small nuclear reactors received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and "could be running by the end of the decade." Meanwhile, the start-up Quaise is working on drilling technology "that can vaporize granite with a highly concentrated beam of radio-frequency power. If such a technology became widely available, deep drilling would be commonplace and geothermal energy would be accessible on just about any patch of land. It would be as though humankind conceived of a magic wand that, waved across the Earth, makes any square mile as energy-rich as an oil-gushing stretch of Texas or Saudi Arabia."

The article also suggests one more possibility for the future. "Decades from now, millions of people may actually prefer the consistency and taste of meat that didn't come from an animal, because they'll know what they're buying when a cultivated rib eye is as consistent as an electrical gadget."

Today, Disney+ launched its ad-supported tier, "Disney+ Basic," at $7.99/month. The plan is currently only available in the U.S. and will become available in other countries sometime next year. TechCrunch reports: Netflix has its work cut out for it if it wants to compete successfully with Disney+'s new ad-supported tier. For instance, Disney+ Basic not only lets viewers stream high-quality video, including Full HD, HDR10, 4K Ultra HD, Dolby Vision and Expanded Aspect Ratio with IMAX Enhanced, but it also lets subscribers stream on up to four supported devices simultaneously. Plus, the ad plan includes Disney+'s full content catalog. Netflix's ad-supported plan, on the other hand, only supports 720p HD video quality, subscribers can only stream on one device at the same time and around 5% to 10% of Netflix's content library is missing due to licensing restrictions.

Neither Disney+ Basic nor Netflix's "Basic with ads" plan allows offline viewing or downloads. Other features not included in the Disney+ Basic plan at launch are GroupWatch, SharePlay and Dolby Atmos. A Disney spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company hopes to support this in the future, but the exact timing is unknown. Ads will range from 15 to 30 or 45 seconds long, the spokesperson added. As we previously reported, Disney+ is limiting the total ad load to an average of four minutes of commercials an hour. Preschool content has zero ads. "Today's launch marks a milestone moment for Disney+ and puts consumer choice at the forefront. With these new ad-supported offerings, we're able to deliver greater flexibility for consumers to enjoy the full breadth and depth of incredible storytelling from The Walt Disney Company," Michael Paull, president of Direct to Consumer, said in a statement.

CNN reports on the aftermath of last weekend's protests against the Chinese government: A protester told CNN they received a phone call Wednesday from a police officer, who revealed they were tracked because their cellphone signal was recorded in the vicinity of the protest site.... When they denied being there, the caller asked: "Then why did your cellphone number show up there?"

In China, all mobile phone users are required by law to register their real name and national identification number with telecom providers. The protester was also told to report to a police station for questioning and to sign a written record....

In Shanghai, where some of the boldest protests took place with crowds calling for Xi's removal on two consecutive nights, police searched residents' cellphones in the streets and in the subway for VPNs that can be used to circumvent China's internet firewall, or apps such as Twitter and Telegram, which though banned in the country have been used by protesters. Police also confiscated the cellphones of protesters under arrest, according to two protesters who spoke to CNN.

A protester who was arrested over the weekend said they were told to hand over their phone and password to the police as "evidence." They said they feared police would export the data on their phone after it was confiscated by officers, who told them they could pick it up a week later. Another protester said police returned their phone upon their release, but officers had deleted the photo album and removed the WeChat social media app.
One protester told CNN they successfully avoided being contacted by the police as of Thursady afternoon.

During the demonstration, they'd kept their phone in airplane mode.

Remittances to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) withstood global headwinds in 2022, growing an estimated 5% to $626 billion. This is sharply lower than the 10.2% increase in 2021, according to the latest World Bank Migration and Development Brief. World Bank: Remittances are a vital source of household income for LMICs. They alleviate poverty, improve nutritional outcomes, and are associated with increased birth weight and higher school enrollment rates for children in disadvantaged households. Studies show that remittances help recipient households to build resilience, for example through financing better housing and to cope with the losses in the aftermath of disasters.

Remittance flows to developing regions were shaped by several factors in 2022. A reopening of host economies as the COVID-19 pandemic receded supported migrants' employment and their ability to continue helping their families back home. Rising prices, on the other hand, adversely affected migrants' real incomes. Also influencing the value of remittances is the appreciation of the ruble, which translated into higher value, in U.S. dollar terms, of outward remittances from Russia to Central Asia. In the case of Europe, a weaker euro had the opposite effect of reducing the U.S. dollar valuation of remittance flows to North Africa and elsewhere. In countries that experienced scarcity of foreign exchange and multiple exchange rates, officially recorded remittance flows declined as flows shifted to alternative channels offering better rates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google and iHeartMedia -- the US's biggest radio station operator -- are being hit with a false advertising lawsuit for ads they ran about the Pixel 4 [...]. The FTC and four states say the companies aired "nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements by radio personalities" during 2019 and 2020, with Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine saying that "Google and iHeartMedia paid influencers to promote products they never used, showing a blatant disrespect for truth-in-advertising rules." The two companies have settled the lawsuit and will be required to pay $9.4 million in penalties.

Google's ads had on-air personalities give first-hand accounts of how much they liked the Pixel 4, but, to quote the FTC's press release, "the on-air personalities were not provided with Pixel 4s before recording and airing the majority of the ads and therefore did not own or regularly use the phones." Therefore the first-person claims made in the ads, like, "It's my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode," "I've been taking studio-like photos of everything," and "It's also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice-activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once," can't be true. [...] As part of the settlement, Google and iHeartMedia are barred from "misrepresenting that an endorser has owned or used, or about their experience with, certain products." The agreement is subject to a public comment period of 30 days, after which the commission will vote on whether to make the proposed consent orders final. A Google spokesperson commented to TechCrunch, saying, "We are pleased to resolve this issue. We take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards."

Perfect referees are a soccer fan's nightmare, it is increasingly appearing. From a report: The past four years have smoothed out some of those early kinks. Offside calls are now hyper-accurate and semiautomated. And VAR really has done some good: It has eliminated the worst officiating mistakes and ensured that we will not see another hand of God-type abomination, in which a particularly egregious bit of foul play somehow goes unspotted and changes the course of a match. Even so, you'd be hard-pressed to find a soccer fan who thinks VAR is great as is. The Ecuador-Qatar decision is a clear example of why. It was, in the narrowest, most annoying sense, the correct decision. To the naked eye, or even to those watching a television replay, the infraction was virtually invisible amid the chaos. But VAR spotted it.

Congratulations, officials -- you got it right. But for what? Sports are, in the end, entertainment, and officiating must always be a balance between accuracy and watchability. If the former were our only and ultimate concern, we would put every potential infraction under the microscope ... and the game would be utterly unwatchable. The plays that officials review -- that they ought to review -- are the ones where the call, if allowed to stand, would seem genuinely unfair. No one (except maybe the opposing team's fans) likes to see a legitimate-looking goal disallowed. When Valencia's header found the net, he and his teammates did not delay their celebration. The Qatari players did not turn to the referee in protest. The fans did not hesitate to lose their minds. Not even the commentators seemed to have considered the possibility that the goal might not stand, and so television audiences didn't either. No one was asking for this. Had the game proceeded, no one would have thought twice.

VAR is useful only insofar as it makes soccer better for the fans. It can do that only if it can alert them that a check is under way soon enough and return a verdict fast enough that it doesn't make celebrating goals impossible for fear of a reversal. It should rule out only those goals where, when you look back at the replay, people might reasonably think, Yeah, that's offside. Some sort of modified tie-goes-to-the-runner rule would help here by eliminating the scourge of the "toenail offside." You could even give the attacker a buffer of a foot or two.

Disney, in a shocking late Sunday announcement, said it had reappointed Iger as chief executive, effective immediately, after Iger's hand-picked successor as CEO, Bob Chapek, came under fire for his management of the entertainment giant. CNBC reports: "It is with an incredible sense of gratitude and humility -- and, I must admit, a bit of amazement -- that I write to you this evening with the news that I am returning to The Walt Disney Company as Chief Executive Officer," Iger wrote to employees in an email, which was obtained by CNBC. Shares of Disney, a Dow component, closed up more than 6% on Monday.

The dramatic upheaval comes 11 months after Iger left Disney, and days after Chapek said he planned to cut costs at the company, which had been burdened by swelling costs at its streaming service, Disney+. Earlier this month, the company's earnings vastly underperformed Wall Street's expectations. Even its theme park business, which reported a surge in revenue, delivered less than what analysts had projected. Iger will help the company's board develop a new successor, Disney said in a release.

Shares of Disney have fallen about 37% so far this year. The stock hit a 52-week low Nov. 9. Iger has signed on to work as CEO for two years, Disney said Sunday, "with a mandate from the Board to set the strategic direction for renewed growth and to work closely with the Board in developing a successor to lead the Company at the completion of his term." "We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic," said Susan Arnold, Disney's board chair. She will remain in that role.

Federal U.S. agencies (including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) have been asked to develop a five-year "scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions." As the Daily Beast sees it, the U.S. government is signalling that it's looking into "one of the most controversial and consequential climate change-fighting tactics yet," suggesting the report will look at a technique "that essentially involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. The idea is that, once it's reflected, there'll be less heat and temperatures will go down."

It seems like that's a subset of the "solar and other rapid climate interventions" being mentioned in the federal document. But for what it's worth, here's an official statement from the American Meteorological Society on "large-scale efforts to intentionally modify the climate system to counteract the consequences of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.... now commonly referred to as climate intervention (also called geoengineering)..." Proposals to intervene in the climate system generally fall into two broad categories: 1) actively removing CO2 (and possibly other greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere, known as carbon dioxide removal; 2) exerting a cooling influence on Earth by reflecting sunlight (known as solar radiation management) or altering thermal emissions to space by thinning cirrus clouds. These proposals differ widely in their potential to reduce impacts, create new risks, and redistribute risks among nations.

Techniques that remove CO2 directly from the air would confer global benefits by directly addressing the source of the climate problem. However, it may not be feasible to rapidly remove CO2 at a scale that will significantly limit warming. The effects of CO2 removal approaches are not fully understood and could create adverse local and global impacts. Reflecting sunlight would reduce Earth's average surface temperature but would not offset all aspects of climate change and would produce a different set of risks than those resulting from unmitigated warming.

The American Meteorological Society recommends an accelerated and robust climate intervention research program, and associated governance framework, to inform public policies. This should not include the development of deployment platforms but needs to include study of the feasibility of different deployment scenarios and strategies and how they would affect climate risk.... The desired outcome is for society to have the best possible information in hand to assess different options for reducing the risks of climate change and to decide if actions should include intentional climate intervention. Comprehensive Earth system model simulations will play a critical role in quantifying the regional to global impacts of different climate intervention approaches.... Sustained monitoring of the Earth system and targeted field campaigns will be critical, not only to improve our understanding of key processes but for establishing an observational baseline of the system behavior prior to any intervention. Monitoring and field studies would also be needed for quantifying impacts should an intervention be implemented.

These studies will yield additional benefits in our understanding of atmospheric processes and the climate system, with implications beyond what is needed for decisions related to climate intervention, such as improved weather predictions and climate projections.

The climate crisis must be addressed by ending net emissions of greenhouse gases, and at the same time, adapting to changes already happening. While it is currently premature to either advocate for or rule out climate interventions, these decisions, when they are made, must be based on the best scientific and technical information. With this goal in mind, AMS calls for a robust program of research with a strong governance framework to assess climate interventions. Such a program should be designed to provide the knowledge base to support decisions that may need to be made within the next decade regarding the inclusion of climate intervention among our responses to global warming.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cstacy for submitting the article.

Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Peter is an IT manager for a technology manufacturer that got hit with a Russian ransomware strain called "Zeppelin" in May 2020. He'd been on the job less than six months, and because of the way his predecessor architected things, the company's data backups also were encrypted by Zeppelin. After two weeks of stalling their extortionists, Peter's bosses were ready to capitulate and pay the ransom demand. Then came the unlikely call from an FBI agent. "Don't pay," the agent said. "We've found someone who can crack the encryption." Peter, who spoke candidly about the attack on condition of anonymity, said the FBI told him to contact a cybersecurity consulting firm in New Jersey called Unit 221B, and specifically its founder -- Lance James. Zeppelin sprang onto the crimeware scene in December 2019, but it wasn't long before James discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the malware's encryption routines that allowed him to brute-force the decryption keys in a matter of hours, using nearly 100 cloud computer servers.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, James said Unit 221B was wary of advertising its ability to crack Zeppelin ransomware keys because it didn't want to tip its hand to Zeppelin's creators, who were likely to modify their file encryption approach if they detected it was somehow being bypassed. This is not an idle concern. There are multiple examples of ransomware groups doing just that after security researchers crowed about finding vulnerabilities in their ransomware code. "The minute you announce you've got a decryptor for some ransomware, they change up the code," James said. But he said the Zeppelin group appears to have stopped spreading their ransomware code gradually over the past year, possibly because Unit 221B's referrals from the FBI let them quietly help nearly two dozen victim organizations recover without paying their extortionists. [...]

The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects. "If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" [James and co-author Joel Lathrop wrote in a blog post]. "The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key." Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key. From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them. The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys. A more technical writeup on Unit 221B's discoveries (cheekily titled "0XDEAD ZEPPELIN") is available here.

1Password has announced that passkey support will be available to its customers in "early 2023," allowing users to securely log in to apps and websites without a password. The Verge reports: Passkeys are a passwordless login technology developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include most of the Big Tech companies. The tech allows users to replace traditional passwords with their device's own authentication -- such as an iPhone with Face ID -- offering greater security and protection since there's no password to steal or accidentally hand over via a phishing attack.

1Password claims its own variation, called Universal Sign On, will be superior to others by supporting multiple platforms and cross-platform syncing when it launches next year. By contrast, passkey support through companies like Apple is only built to seamlessly synchronize access on devices within the same ecosystem. A live demonstration of how passkeys will work is available for 1Password users using the latest version of its Chrome browser extension, alongside a video demo for those not using the service and a directory listing which websites, apps, and services are using passkeys for authentication. 1Password will bring full support for passkeys to its browser extension and desktop apps in early 2023, with mobile support to follow.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that he is "extremely concerned" about TikTok's operations in the U.S. From a report: "We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI's end about TikTok," Wray told members of the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing about worldwide threats. "They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose. Or to control software on millions of devices, which gives it opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices."

Wray's remarks build on those from other government officials and members of Congress who have expressed deep skepticism about the ability of the Chinese-owned video platform to protect U.S. user information from an adversarial government. TikTok has maintained it doesn't store U.S. user data in China, where the law allows the government to force companies to hand over internal information. Wray said that law alone was "plenty of reason by itself to be extremely concerned."

Google has paid out $70,000 to a security researcher for privately reporting an "accidental" security bug that allowed anyone to unlock Google Pixel phones without knowing its passcode. From a report: The lock screen bypass bug, tracked as CVE-2022-20465, is described as a local escalation of privilege bug because it allows someone, with the device in their hand, to access the device's data without having to enter the lock screen's passcode. Hungary-based researcher David Schutz said the bug was remarkably simple to exploit but took Google about five months to fix.

Schutz discovered anyone with physical access to a Google Pixel phone could swap in their own SIM card and enter its preset recovery code to bypass the Android's operating system's lock screen protections. In a blog post about the bug, published now that the bug is fixed, Schutz described how he found the bug accidentally, and reported it to Google's Android team.

Linux magazine explores how to breath fresh life into old Android devices: Every mobile device needs its own Android build because of numerous drivers that are not available in the source code. The need to maintain every version of Android for every mobile device means that many manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates. Often, smartphones or tablets that still work perfectly can no longer be used without worry because the manufacturer has simply ceased to offer bug fixes and security updates....

The LineageOS project, the successor to the CyanogenMod project, which was discontinued in 2016, proves that it is not impossible to keep these devices up-to-date. Unpaid volunteers at LineageOS do the work that many manufacturers do not want to do: They combine current Android releases with the required device-specific drivers.

The LineageOS project (Figure 1) provides Android systems with a fresh patch status every month for around 300 devices. The builds are released weekly, unless there is a problem during the build. The Devices page on the LineageOS Wiki provides the details of whether a LineageOS build is available for your smartphone or tablet....

I recommend the LineageOS project as the first port of call for anyone who wants to protect an older smartphone or tablet that is no longer maintained and doesn't receive Google security patches. The LineageOS derivatives LineageOS for MicroG and /e/OS make it even easier to enjoy a Google-free smartphone without too many restrictions.
The article also describes how to use TWRP to flash a manufacturer-independent recovery system (while also creating a restoreable backup of the existing system) as an alternative to LineageOS's own recovery tools.

And it even explains how to unlock the bootloader — although there may be other locks set up separately by the manufacturer. "Some manufacturers require you to register the device to unlock it, and then — after telling you that the warranty is now void — they hand over a code. Others refuse to unlock the device altogether."

Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for submitting the article.

Vietnam's information minister said on Friday authorities had tightened regulations to deal with "false" content on social media platforms so that it must be taken down within 24 hours instead of 48 hours previously. From a report: The new rules will enshrine Vietnam's position as one of the world's most stringently controlled regimes for social media firms and will strengthen the ruling Communist Party's hand as it cracks down on "anti-state" activity. Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung told parliament there was risk that "false news, if it is handled in a slow manner, will spread very widely." Reuters had previously reported government plans to bring in the new regulations, as well rules so that very sensitive information has to be taken down within three hours. Most governments do not have laws imposing the taking down of content on social media firms, but Vietnam's move comes amid intensifying crackdowns in some parts of the world on online content.

According to The Record, New Hampshire will pilot a new kind of voting machine that will use open-source software to tally the votes. The Record reports: The software that runs voting machines is typically distributed in a kind of black box -- like a car with its hood sealed shut. Because the election industry in the U.S. is dominated by three companies -- Dominion, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic -- the software that runs their machines is private. The companies consider it their intellectual property and that has given rise to a roster of unfounded conspiracy theories about elections and their fairness. New Hampshire's experiment with open-source software is meant to address exactly that. The software by its very design allows you to pop the hood, modify the code, make suggestions for how to make it better, and work with other people to make it run more smoothly. The thinking is, if voting machines run on software anyone can audit and run, it is less likely to give rise to allegations of vote rigging.

The effort to make voting machines more transparent is the work of a group called VotingWorks. [...] On November 8, VotingWorks machines will be used in a real election in real time. New Hampshire is the second state to use the open-source machines after Mississippi first did so in 2019. Some 3,000 voters will run their paper ballots through the new machines, and then, to ensure nothing went awry, those same votes will be hand counted in a public session in Concord, N.H. Anyone who cares to will be able to see if the new machines recorded the votes correctly. The idea is to make clear there is nothing to hide. If someone is worried that a voting machine is programmed to flip a vote to their opponent, they can simply hire a computer expert to examine it and see, in real time.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article written by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf: Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather's credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, "Why did they stop using those?" If that happens, I'll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. "Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus," the federal agency advised (PDF). "Use disposable or digital menus."

The QR-code menu -- which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone -- has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I'll be for heaven if I'm lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I'll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another's eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right -- when everyone's phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works -- they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. "You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be," Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, "but from there it's easy to start checking texts and emails." And wasn't it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study "Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions," where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones "enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted."

He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes "are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, " the ACLU has warned. "In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior."

In closing, Friedersdorf writes: "[...] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus."

"What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?"

The Jerusalem Post reports that "Certain star clusters do not seem to be following current understandings of Isaac Newton's laws of gravity, according to new research published on Wednesday." (Specifically open star clusters, formed when thousands of stars are born in a gas cloud within a short time period.)

The researchers examined data on each stars' velocity, direction of motion and age using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission that allowed them to count the stars accurately for the very first time. The results? As the clusters dissolve, the stars accumulate on two "tidal tails:" one pulled behind the cluster and the other pushed forward. "According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail...."

When the researchers looked at the data, they found that it did not fit Newton's law of gravity and instead fit better with an alternate theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

"Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors," explained Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front. However, the first is much narrower than the second — so it's less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it. Newton's theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width...."

The simulations also coincided with the Gaia data in terms of how long the star clusters typically survive, which is much shorter than would be expected according to Newton's laws....

The MOND theory is controversial as modifications to Newton's laws of gravity would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics as well, although they would solve many problems facing cosmology.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story!

Nearly six years after the Pebble smartwatch was purchased by Fitbit and discontinued, a new Pebble app for Android has been released by the Rebble Alliance, a group that has kept Pebble viable for its users since Fitbit shut down Pebble's servers in mid-2018," writes Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "Pebble version 4.4.3 makes the app 64-bit so it can work on the mostly 64-bit Pixel 7 and similar Android phones into the future. It also restores a caller ID function that was hampered on recent Android versions." From the report: Most notably, the app is "signed using the official Pebble keys," with Google Fit integration maintained, but isn't available through Google's Play Store. Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, making it the steward of Pebble's remaining IP and software pieces. Katharine Berry, a key Rebble coder and leader, works on Wear OS at Google and was one of the first to tweet news of the new update, "four years after 4.4.2." That was the last Play Store update to the Pebble app from Pebble developers, one that freed up many of the app's functions to be replaced by independent servers.

That's exactly where Rebble picked up, providing web services to Pebble watches, including (for paying subscribers) voice dictation. But those services still relied on the core Pebble app to connect the watch and smartphone. If Android did make the leap to a 64-bit-only OS, it could have left Pebble/Rebble users in the lurch. Berry's post on r/pebble offers "thanks to Google for providing us with one last update!" This is, to be sure, not the typical outcome of products that have been acquired by Google, even if second-hand.