Despite warnings from intelligence agencies, Germany's government is set to approve a Chinese takeover of a German company's microchips production facility. Reuters reports: German outlet Handelsblatt reported Thursday that the deal -- which would see a takeover of the semiconductor production of Dortmund-based Elmos by Sweden's Silex, a wholly owned subsidiary of China's Sai Microelectronics -- was set to get the green light against security advice. The deal is currently being reviewed by the German economy ministry. A final decision on approval is expected within the next few weeks.

Elmos is one of Germany's smaller semiconductor companies, which mainly produces chips for the automotive industry. Silex plans to take over the plant for 85 million euros. Elmos will use the investment to give up its own production and instead process chips bought from contract manufacturers. The German government says that the technology Elmos uses is old and not to expect any outflow of critical know-how to China. The German security authorities, on the other hand, argued that they are not only concerned about exiting knowledge, but also that China is systematically increasing its chip production capacities. According to Handelsblatt, they advised the government to block the deal. The president of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) also recently warned that China is deliberately buying into strategic industries in order to exert pressure on other countries.

NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022, which ended last month, according to new federal procurement data. For the first time, the amount paid by the space agency to SpaceX exceeds that paid to Boeing, which has long been the leading hardware provider to NASA. Boeing received $1.72 billion during the most recent fiscal year, based on data first reported by Aviation Week's Irene Klotz. Ars Technica reports: The California Institute of Technology, which manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory field center for NASA, remains the agency's No. 1 contractor, with $2.68 billion in funding. The academic institution is responsible for operating the California-based NASA field center and distributing funding for myriad robotic spacecraft missions such as Mars Perseverance and the Europa Clipper. On the one hand, the ascension of SpaceX to the No. 2 spot on NASA's contractor list represents a major shakeup in the order of things. For a long time, NASA's human spaceflight and exploration programs were dominated by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet, Northrop Grumman, and a handful of other traditional defense aerospace contractors.

However, it should come as no surprise that a company that has recently delivered the most services -- and, arguably, value -- to NASA should start to receive a large share of its contract awards. This has been most notable with SpaceX's performance on Commercial Crew, NASA's program to buy transportation services from private companies to bring its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop their spacecraft, paying Boeing about 60 percent more. At the time, it was widely believed that the traditional contractor, with this additional money, would deliver services sooner. But it was SpaceX that first flew crew to the space station in May 2020, and the company has since launched five operational missions to the orbiting laboratory. [...] Much of the funding increase for SpaceX in 2022, an increase of about $400 million over the previous year, appears to be driven by contracts for the Human Landing System as part of the Artemis Moon Program and the purchase of additional Crew Dragon missions to the space station. (Individual contracts can be found within the Federal Procurement Data System).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: About four years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. It was a powerful perch. Congress tasked the new group with a broad mandate: to advise the U.S. government on how to advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies to enhance the national security of the United States. The mandate was simple: Congress directed the new body to advise on how to enhance American competitiveness on AI against its adversaries, build the AI workforce of the future, and develop data and ethical procedures.

In short, the commission, which Schmidt soon took charge of as chairman, was tasked with coming up with recommendations for almost every aspect of a vital and emerging industry. The panel did far more under his leadership. It wrote proposed legislation that later became law and steered billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to industry he helped build -- and that he was actively investing in while running the group. If you're going to be leading a commission that is steering the direction of government AI and making recommendations for how we should promote this sector and scientific exploration in this area, you really shouldn't also be dipping your hand in the pot and helping yourself to AI investments. His credentials, however, were impeccable given his deep experience in Silicon Valley, his experience advising the Defense Department, and a vast personal fortune estimated at about $20 billion.

Five months after his appointment, Schmidt made a little-noticed private investment in an initial seed round of financing for a startup company called Beacon, which uses AI in the company's supply chain products for shippers who manage freight logistics, according to CNBC's review of investment information in database Crunchbase. There is no indication that Schmidt broke any ethics rules or did anything unlawful while chairing the commission. The commission was, by design, an outside advisory group of industry participants, and its other members included well-known tech executives including Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy and Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Eric Horvitz, among others. Schmidt's investment was just the first of a handful of direct investments he would make in AI startup companies during his tenure as chairman of the AI commission. "Venture capital firms financed, in part, by Schmidt and his private family foundation also made dozens of additional investments in AI companies during Schmidt's tenure, giving Schmidt an economic stake in the industry even as he developed new regulations and encouraged taxpayer financing for it," adds CNBC. "Altogether, Schmidt and entities connected to him made more than 50 investments in AI companies while he was chairman of the federal commission on AI. Information on his investments isn't publicly available."

"All that activity meant that, at the same time Schmidt was wielding enormous influence over the future of federal AI policy, he was also potentially positioning himself to profit personally from the most promising young AI companies." Citing people close to Schmidt, the report says his investments were disclosed in a private filing to the U.S. government at the time and the public and news media had no access to that document.

A spokesperson for Schmidt told CNBC that he followed all rules and procedures in his tenure on the commission, "Eric has given full compliance on everything," the spokesperson said.

It's the tale of a company manufacuring precision card-shuffling machines for casinos — and a gang of hustlers who used a hidden video camera to film the shuffler's insides. "The images, transmitted to an accomplice outside in the casino parking lot, were played back in slow motion to figure out the sequence of cards in the deck," remembers the BBC, "which was then communicated back to the gamblers inside. The casino lost millions of dollars before the gang were finally caught."

So the company turned for help to a mathematician/magician: The executives were determined not to be hacked again. They had developed a prototype of a sophisticated new shuffling machine, this time enclosed in an opaque box. Their engineers assured them that the machine would sufficiently randomise a deck of cards with one pass through the device, reducing the time between hands while also beating card-counters and crooked dealers. But they needed to be sure that their machine properly shuffled the deck. They needed Persi Diaconis.

Diaconis, a magician-turned-mathematician at Stanford University, is regarded as the world's foremost expert on the mathematics of card shuffling. Throughout the surprisingly large scholarly literature on the topic, his name keeps popping up like the ace of spades in a magician's sleight-of-hand trick. So, when the company executives contacted him and offered to let him see the inner workings of their machine — a literal "black box" — he couldn't believe his luck. With his collaborator Susan Holmes, a statistician at Stanford, Diaconis travelled to the company's Las Vegas showroom to examine a prototype of their new machine.

The pair soon discovered a flaw. Although the mechanical shuffling action appeared random, the mathematicians noticed that the resulting deck still had rising and falling sequences, which meant that they could make predictions about the card order. To prove this to the company executives, Diaconis and Holmes devised a simple technique for guessing which card would be turned over next. If the first card flipped was the five of hearts, say, they guessed that the next card was the six of hearts, on the assumption that the sequence was rising. If the next card was actually lower — a four of hearts, for instance — this meant they were in a falling sequence, and their next guess was the three of hearts. With this simple strategy, the mathematicians were able to correctly guess nine or 10 cards per deck — one-fifth of the total — enough to double or triple the advantage of a competent card-counter....

The executives were horrified. "We are not pleased with your conclusions," they wrote to Diaconis, "but we believe them and that's what we hired you for." The company quietly shelved the prototype and switched to a different machine.
The article also explains why seven shuffles "is just as close to random as can be" — rendering further shuffling largely ineffective.

Two state legislators in New Jersey are proposing a bill that would ban car companies from "[offering consumers] a subscription service for any motor vehicle feature" that "utilizes components and hardware already installed on the motor vehicle at the time of purchase." The Drive reports: The bill has one stipulation, however. The subscription would only be unlawful if there was no "ongoing expense to the dealer, manufacturer, or any third-party service provider." In other words, if an automaker or other associated party can prove that it costs money to maintain the feature and/or service in question, then it'd be legally allowed. This would include services like OnStar and such.

The way "ongoing expense" is interpreted is going to be key here, assuming the bill makes it into law. This, obviously, is not guaranteed. In theory, a car company could claim that over-the-air updates and their associated data costs constitute an ongoing expense. That means anything to do with connected features could theoretically be charged for. Since a car needs an internet connection in order to purchase subscriptions, well, that might make this particular piece of legislation worthless. On the other hand, if the core value of the subscription is derived from the pre-installed hardware as opposed to the data connection itself, then there is probably a case to be made.

Besides heated seats, the bill also mentions "driver assistance." That could be a problem for systems like Tesla's autopilot or General Motors' Super Cruise, both of which are going to a subscription model. Both of these systems cost money to maintain, though, especially Super Cruise. The system requires enabled highways to be scanned with Lidar. Tesla's AutoPilot and "Full Self-Driving" are also actively updated and maintained, which costs money. If automakers don't comply, they risk "civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation," notes the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: With a few notable exceptions -- such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis -- life expectancy in the U.S. has had gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short. U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years (PDF) between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years -- the lowest it has been since 1996, according to provisional data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The drop was 3.1 years for male individuals and 2.3 years for female ones. Non-Hispanic Native American and Alaska Native peoples saw the biggest decline -- a staggering 6.6 years. But every racial and ethnic group suffered: life expectancy decreased by 4.2 years in the Hispanic population, by four years in the non-Hispanic Black population, by 2.4 years in the non-Hispanic white population and by 2.1 years in the non-Hispanic Asian population.

"Basically, all the gains between 1996 and 2019 are as if they never happened," says Elizabeth Arias, director of the U.S. life table program at the NCHS and co-author of a report on the new data. COVID deaths drove much of the decline as the country grappled with the world's worst pandemic in a century. But unintentional injuries -- largely driven by drug overdoses -- also played a significant role, the data show. Increases in deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and suicide also contributed. "This isn't supposed to happen," says Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, who studies demographic trends and inequality. "I think it's a wake-up call for us ... that we can't put public health on autopilot; that we don't have this invisible hand of development just raising living standards over time." The drop in life expectancy would have been even more stark if it had not been partially offset by declines in influenza and pneumonia deaths, which were likely reduced by pandemic-related precautions such as masking and social distancing.

Some have complained high-paying tech jobs have driven up rents in major tech hubs — creating an exodus that will later drive up rents in other cities.

But ProPublica asks whether there's another technology at work: On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company's signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. "Never before have we seen these numbers," said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company's services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

"I think it's driving it, quite honestly," answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. "As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually."

The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company's algorithm boosts profits. "The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn't have gone if you weren't using it," said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage's software in a testimonial video on the company's website. The nation's largest property management firm, Greystar, found that even in one downturn, its buildings using YieldStar "outperformed their markets by 4.8%," a significant premium above competitors, RealPage said in materials on its website. Greystar uses RealPage's software to price tens of thousands of apartments.

RealPage became the nation's dominant provider of such rent-setting software after federal regulators approved a controversial merger in 2017, a ProPublica investigation found, greatly expanding the company's influence over apartment prices. The move helped the Texas-based company push the client base for its array of real estate tech services past 31,700 customers.

The impact is stark in some markets. In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.... But by RealPage's own admission, its algorithm is helping drive rents higher. "Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%," RealPage urges potential clients on its website.
YieldStar has since swapped in a "Page Not Found" error for their web page urging landlords to "outperform the market 3% to 7%" with their software. (But the original page is still viewable at Archive.org.)

ProPublica points out that "Few tenants know that such software, owned by a privately held company, has had a hand in rent increases across the country." Yet by the end of 2020, RealPage told America's Securities and Exchange Commission that its services helped manage 19.7 million of the country's rental units. Five of America's top 10 property managers use the software.

And interestingly, RealPage discourages bargaining with renters, "and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money. One of the algorithm's developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had 'too much empathy' compared to computer generated pricing...."

"The software's design and growing reach have raised questions among real estate and legal experts about whether RealPage has birthed a new kind of cartel that allows the nation's largest landlords to indirectly coordinate pricing, potentially in violation of federal law.... RealPage acknowledged that it feeds its clients' internal rent data into its pricing software, giving landlords an aggregated, anonymous look at what their competitors nearby are charging."

Last week the Los Angeles Times published a sympathetic portrait of Robbi Jade Lew, the woman facing unproven allegations of cheating in a high-stakes poker match.

This week the newspaper profiled the man making those accusations — Garrett Adelstein, known "as an affable guy who is known for taking even big losses in stride." "Garrett would have reacted normally if his opponent made a good, even heroic, call that cost him $100,000," said Jennifer Shahade, a pro poker player and chess champion. "I think the initial hand, the call and the situation would be suspicious under any circumstances, any gender."
In the profile we learn that Adelstein has 14 years of experience as a professional poker, and is "one of the game's best and most profitable high-stakes cash players, known to viewers of popular casino broadcasts for his loose-aggressive style of no-limit hold 'em and his willingness to buy in for enormous sums of money, bringing as much as $1 million to the table....

"On Sept. 29, Adelstein made the biggest bet of his life: risking his well-respected reputation, and possibly his poker career, when he accused rookie player Robbi Jade Lew of cheating in a $269,000 hand against him on Hustler Casino Live..." Adelstein, 36, hasn't played poker since. Whereas he once spent much of his time studying optimal strategy, reviewing past hands and appearing on streams from Hustler Casino in Gardena and Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, he is now hyper-focused on conducting his own investigation to prove his case. In a more than four-hour interview from his Manhattan Beach home on Tuesday, Adelstein said he was "extremely confident" that he was the target of a cheating ring involving not just Lew but other players and at least one member of the show's production crew. Lew, 37, denied the allegation, which she called "defamatory."

The drama has left Adelstein uncertain when he'll return to the poker table.... Adelstein says he has been cheated before. When he was 26, he was invited to a home game where he bought in for $100,000.... Adelstein said, he laid out his suspicions about the intricacies of the operation to the host and a business partner, and said he would go public with what happened. "They offered me a deal where they would refund me my money in exchange for my silence," he said. "And then they paid me in six installments, once a month, for a six-month period."

The incident, which he relayed on a poker podcast last year, showed Adelstein the darker side of poker and left him cautious.

He never played in a high-stakes home game with strangers again, choosing to exclusively play in casinos, where he reasoned cheating would be less likely. Still, "I'm always looking out for it," he said. "I'm not the world's most trusting guy when it comes to poker."
The article notes how major poker sites were busted 15 years ago for "superuser" accounts with cheating privileges — and a 2019 lawsuit in which dozens of pros sued a player and gambling hall accused of leaking info from the RFID-tagged cards uesd in their livestreams. "When it comes to stream security and these types of games, as professionals we're obviously always on the lookout so it doesn't happen again," poker player Matt Berkey said of the aftermath. "Garrett's one of the biggest players who plays on stream, so he himself is more of a potential target."

"Hustler Casino Live," the streaming show that hosted the now-infamous Sept. 29 game, also uses RFID playing cards. Since its first show aired in August 2021, it has become the world's most-watched poker stream, combining the drama of the game with huge amounts of cash, poker's top players, celebrities and other colorful personalities. "Hustler Casino Live" now has more than 1 million monthly unique viewers and 185,000 subscribers.

The show's games are streamed five days a week on a delay of one to four hours to prevent information from being passed to players live. But now its stream security has been called into question, with players saying tighter protocols need to be implemented. They've raised concerns over the number of employees who had access to the control room where hole cards were being monitored, and a few have said the stream should temporarily shut down while the investigation is ongoing....

"I thought that streamed poker was, at least by comparison to the other options, one of the last safe havens," Adelstein said. "And at this point, I have so little faith in that...."

"Live at the Bike," on which Adelstein has played several times, has been hitting him up since Sept. 29 in the hopes that he will join its stream. But he says he's not in the right headspace for it.

"There's I guess a world in the next several weeks or months where maybe I'm able to process this and want to play a poker game. But at the moment, that's not how I feel," he said.

"I'm not playing poker on a stream again unless I see tangible, noticeable, measurable differences in livestream security," he continued. "That's for my own benefit and it's for the benefit of the poker community at large."

Firefox Relay, a Mozilla service designed to hide your "real" email address by giving you virtual ones to hand out, is expanding to offer virtual phone numbers. From a report: In a blog post Mozilla product manager Tony Amaral-Cinotto explains that the relay service generates a phone number for you to give out to companies if you suspect they might use it to send you spam messages in the future, or if you think they might share it with others who will. The idea is that handing out this alternative phone number makes it easier to block spam phone calls or texts in the future. You can either block all calls or texts sent to your relay number, or just block specific contacts. Importantly it lets you keep your "real" phone number private, which is something you might want to consider if it's a number you use to receive sensitive information like two-step verification codes via SMS. Once you've signed up, the Firefox phone number masking service offers 50 minutes of incoming calls and 75 text messages a month. The phone number masking service is also more expensive at $4.99 a month (or $3.99 a month when paid annually), while the email service offers a choice between a free tier and a premium tier costing $1.99 a month ($0.99 a month when paid annually).

An experienced poker player lost to a relative newcomer. But then, "Somehow, the Robbi Jade Lew-Garrett Adelstein scandal diving the poker world just got weirder," reports the New York Post: An internal investigation conducted by Hustler Casino Live — which streamed the game from Los Angeles — has shown that one of their High Stakes Poker Productions employees stole three $5,000 chips from Lew's stack after the broadcast concluded on September 29. The employee, Bryan Sagbigsal, was terminated from his position after he admitted to taking $15,000 in chips from Lew's stack...

The $15,000 worth of chips taken by Sagbigsal was seen as some as him taking his cut of a cheating scam.
"There is zero evidence that I cheated," Lew posted on Twitter, "simply because I did not. I have been thrust into a bizarre situation where I am being asked to prove my innocence continually, and as of yet, there is not a single thread of direct evidence illustrating my guilt. My accusers, now having exhausted buzzing seats, camera rings, microphone water bottles, and other spy paraphernalia, have now moved on to me having an alleged conspiring relationship with someone I do not know... who, in fact, stole from me."

As a precaution the casino's technology and security protocols are now being audited — but the publicity seems good for business. Hustler Casino Live is now calling the hand "The most insane hero call in poker history," and it's already racked up over half a million views on YouTube.

Here's what I see. (Am I missing something?)

After three of the five "community" cards were dealt face up, Garrett Adelstein had four of the five cards needed for a straight flush — leaving nine clubs in the deck left to draw for a flush, and an additional six that would've at least given him a straight. But with no help from the fourth "community" card, Garrett had just a 53% chance of winning. He bet $10,000, but instead of backing down Robbi raised him by $10,000. Garrett then tried an even larger bet, daring Robbi to go all-in with her $109,000 in chips — or fold. Did she sense that this suddenly-higher bet was a bluff? With nothing but a high-card jack, Robbi refused to fold — and won the hand when the fifth card failed to help either her or Garrett.

Papa John's is being sued by a customer -- not for its pizza but for allegedly breaking the US Wiretap Act by snooping on the way he browsed the pie-slinger's website. From a report: The titan of greasy wheels is accused of falling foul of wiretapping rules by using so-called session replay software on its website. This software records and phones home everything a user does on the site, beyond what fetching pages and placing an order would submit, we're told. For instance, it tells Papa John's where the mouse is moved and clicked, and what's typed into the page, it's claimed [PDF]. This info can be used to figure out where users get stuck, bail out of a sale, get lost, and so on. Session replay tools have been a privacy concern due to their indiscriminate capturing of data, sometimes poor security, and failures to get user consent to track and store this data, not to mention having analysts going over your every move to see how they can optimize their webpages and boost sales. On the other hand, you may not see it as that much of a concern given all the other material data a website might have on you -- such as name, email and home address, date of birth, orders placed, payment details, etc etc.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is clawing its way back into wearable relevance. Today the company took the wraps off what is officially its first self-branded smartwatch: the Pixel Watch. Google started revamping its wearable platform, Wear OS, in partnership with Samsung. While Wear OS 3, the new version of Google's wearable platform, technically launched with the Galaxy Watch 4 last year, this is the first time we'll be seeing an unskinned version on a real device. First up: prices. Google is asking a lot here, with the Wi-Fi model going for $349 and the LTE version clocking in at $399. The Galaxy Watch 4, which has a better SoC, and the Apple Watch SE, which has a way, way better SoC, both start at $250. Google is creating an uphill battle for itself with this pricing.

Google and Samsung's partnership means the Pixel Watch is running a Samsung Exynos 9110 SoC, with a cheap Cortex M33 co-processor tacked on for low-power watch face updates and 24/7 stat tracking. This SoC is a 10 nm chip with two Cortex A53 cores and an Arm Mali T720 MP1 GPU. If you can't tell from those specs, this is a chip from 2018 that was first used in the original Samsung Galaxy Watch. For whatever reason, Google couldn't get Samsung's new chip from the Galaxy Watch 4, an Exynos W920 (a big upgrade at 5 nm, dual Cortex A55s, and a Mali-G68 MP2 GPU). It's hard to understand why this is so expensive.

The display is a fully circular 1.6-inch OLED with a density of 320 ppi (that should mean around 360 pixels across). The only size available is 41 mm, the cover is Gorilla Glass 5, and the body is stainless steel in silver, black, or gold. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, NFC, GPS, only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n support (Wi-Fi 4), and a 294 mAh battery. For sensors, you get SPO2 blood oxygen, heart rate, and an ECG sensor. It's water-resistant to 5 ATM, which means you're good for submersion, hand washing, and most normal water exposure. Usually 10 ATM is preferred for serious sports swimming, but the Apple Watch is 5 ATM, and Apple does all sorts of swimming promos. Google's black UI background does a good job of hiding exactly how large the display is in relation to the body, but a few screenshots reveal just how big the bezels are around this thing. They are big. Real big. Like, hard-to-imagine-we're-still-doing-this-in-2022 big. Other things to note: the watch bands are proprietary, it'll be able to charge to 50 percent in 30 minutes, will work with any Android phone running version 8.0 and newer, and features Fitbit integration.

"Unlike the Pixel 7, which is expanding to 17 markets, the Pixel Watch is only for sale in eight countries: the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan," adds Ars. "The watch is up for preorder today and ships October 13."

Further reading: Google Unveils Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro Smartphones

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.'s coolest professors. But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him. Students said the high-stakes course -- notorious for ending many a dream of medical school -- was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores. The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones's contract. The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department's chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a "one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college."

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing. He said the plan would "extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills," an apparent reference to parents. The university's handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement. "The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher," said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones. "In short, this one unhappy chemistry class could be a case study of the pressures on higher education as it tries to handle its Gen-Z student body," writes NYT's Stephanie Saul.

"Should universities ease pressure on students, many of whom are still coping with the pandemic's effects on their mental health and schooling? How should universities respond to the increasing number of complaints by students against professors? Do students have too much power over contract faculty members, who do not have the protections of tenure? And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"

AmiMoJo writes: First it was chess -- now top-level US poker and match fishing have been dogged by their own claims of cheating. A casino is investigating after one player stunned poker fans by making an audacious bet to win a huge pot. Meanwhile, two fishermen have been accused of stuffing their catches with lead weights in order to win a tournament held on Lake Erie, Ohio. And world chess officials are probing whether a teen talent cheated in face-to-face matches -- something he denies. A row erupted following a high-stakes game held at the Hustler Casino in Los Angeles on Thursday night. Robbi Jade Lew stunned the table by appearing to successfully call a semi-bluff by her opponent Garrett Adelstein. Lew called an all-in bet by her opponent, risking her chips with an underwhelming hand, apparently convinced her opponent was bluffing and scooping a pot that had grown to $269,000. Pundits commentating during the livestreamed match expressed their incredulity at the gambit, while Adelstein gave his competitor an icy stare.

Magic Leap's second take on augmented reality eyewear is available. "The glasses are still aimed at developers and pros, but they include a number of design upgrades that make them considerably more practical -- and point to where AR might be headed," reports Engadget. From the report: The design is 50 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the original. It should be more comfortable to wear over long periods, then. Magic Leap also promises better visibility for AR in bright light (think a well-lit office) thanks to "dynamic dimming" that makes virtual content appear more solid. Lens optics supposedly deliver higher quality imagery with easier-to-read text, and the company touts a wider field of view (70 degrees diagonal) than comparable wearables.

You can expect decent power that includes a quad-core AMD Zen 2-based processor in the "compute pack," a 12.6MP camera (plus a host of cameras for depth, eye tracking and field-of-view) and 60FPS hand tracking for gestures. You'll only get 3.5 hours of non-stop use, but the 256GB of storage (the most in any dedicated AR device, Magic Leap claims) provides room for more sophisticated apps. The base model of the glasses costs $3,299, with the Enterprise model amounting to about $5,000.

With Stadia coming to an abrupt halt, gamers want Google to issue a software update for the controllers that unlocks Bluetooth to allow them to work wirelessly with other game systems. It would also "avoid a lot of plastic and circuit board trash," adds Ars. From the report: Stadia's controllers were custom-made to connect directly to the Internet, reducing lag and allowing for instant firmware updates and (sometimes painful) connections to smart TVs. There's Bluetooth inside the Stadia controller, but it's only used when you're setting up Stadia, either with a TV, a computer with the Chrome browser, or a Chromecast Ultra. The Google Store's page for the Stadia controller states in a footnote: "Product contains Bluetooth Classic radio. No Bluetooth Classic functionality is enabled at this time. Bluetooth Classic may be implemented at a later date." (Bluetooth Classic is a more traditional version of Bluetooth than modern low-energy or mesh versions.) That potential later date can't get much later for fans of the Stadia controller. Many cite the controller's hand feel and claim it as their favorite. They'd like to see Google unlock Bluetooth to make their favorite something more than a USB-only controller and avoid a lot of plastic and circuit board trash.

"Now if you'd just enable Bluetooth on the controller, we could help the environment by not letting them become electronic waste," writes Roadrunner571 on one of many controller-related threads on the r/Stadia subreddit. "They created trash and they at least owe it to me to do their best within reason to prevent millions of otherwise perfectly good controllers from filling landfills," another wrote. Many have called for Google, if they're not going to push a firmware update themselves to unlock the functionality, to open up access to the devices themselves, so the community can do it for them. That's often a tricky scenario for large companies relying on a series of sub-contracted manufacturers to produce hardware. Some have suggested that the full refunds give Google more leeway to ignore the limited function of their devices post-shutdown. It's worth noting that you can still plug a Stadia controller into the USB port on a Smart TV, computer, or gaming console and use it as a controller through a standard HID (Human Interface Device) connection. But, currently, it's not possible to connect the controllers wirelessly, unless you go through a lot of effort.

Zecharias Zelalem writes via Reuters: Few have been spared the effects of a nearly two-year internet and phone shutdown in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, which has been cut off since fighting erupted between Tigrayan rebels and government forces in November 2020. The conflict resumed last month after a months-long humanitarian truce, dashing hopes for communications to be restored. Even the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who hails from Tigray, said he had been unable to reach his relatives back home, or send them money. "I don't know even who is dead or who is alive," Tedros told a recent news conference in London.

As fighting continues in Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia, the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed says shutdowns are needed to curb violence, but critics accuse authorities of using the internet as a weapon of war. "Access to communications and other basic services, and most importantly humanitarian assistance, is explicitly used as a bargaining chip by the Ethiopian government," said Goitom Gebreluel, a political analyst specialising in Horn of Africa affairs. "It is used as leverage against both Tigray and the international community." In Ethiopia, sporadic internet and phone blackouts have been used as "a weapon to control and censor information," the group said, making it difficult for journalists and activists to document alleged rights crimes, and for aid to be delivered.

In Tigray's regional capital, Mekelle, emergency workarounds such as satellite phones have become a vital tool for aid agency operations. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also maintains a satellite phone service for local residents -- giving them a way to get a message to loved ones. So far this year, the ICRC has facilitated some 116,000 phone calls and oral messages "between family members separated by conflict and violence," said spokesperson Alyona Synenko. With almost half of the region's six million people in severe need of food, the shutdown as well as road blockades have hampered humanitarian aid deliveries, according to the U.N. World Food Program. The lack of mobile phone networks has also "crippled both the emergency and regular health monitoring systems," a WHO spokesperson said in emailed remarks. The only way to communicate is "via paper reports that need to be delivered by hand. All meetings have to be held in person."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A New York City man is suing an Atlantic City casino, its parent company and its online betting partner, alleging he was repeatedly disconnected while gambling online, and was given payments to prevent him from reporting the malfunctions to New Jersey gambling regulators during a nine-month span in which he wagered over $29 million. Sam Antar says he is a compulsive gambler -- a fact he says was well-known to defendants in the case including the Borgata casino, MGM Resorts International, and its online partner Entain. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in state Superior Court in Middlesex County, Antar accuses the defendants of fraud, racketeering and other transgressions. His lawsuit asserts that he experienced thousands of disconnections from the online platforms, often when he had a winning hand that was then wiped out.

His lawyer, Christopher Gramiccioni, said Antar experienced a disconnection rate approaching 50% during the nine months covered by the lawsuit. He added Antar, 46, had lost "easily hundreds of thousands of dollars" during that time. "It's one thing if you have technical issues intermittently," said Gramiccioni, a former Monmouth County prosecutor. "It is quite another when you have them 50% of the time. The casino did not take corrective action as required. They kept doubling down and giving him $30,000 a month, feeding him extra money to try to avoid scrutiny by the regulatory agencies."

In his lawsuit, Antar claims he alerted numerous employees and officials with the gambling companies to the fact that there was a serious, recurring problem with disconnections, but that they knowingly kept malfunctioning games available to the public because they were too profitable to take down. He says his complaints were made to local supervisors and VIP hosts, an online complaint portal, and even to the president of the casino and the CEO of its parent company. He also claims the companies paid him near-daily bonuses totaling $30,000 a month to keep him playing and to entice him not to report problems with the games to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. [...] Antar said employees acknowledged problems with the system were affecting other customers as well. In a July 17, 2019 text and email conversation, Antar quotes one as telling him "other players are not getting anywhere near what you are getting" in terms of compensation for being kicked offline while gambling. "In 2013, Sam Antar was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for taking $225,000 in a fraudulent investment scheme" to feed his compulsive gambling habit, notes the report.

Most mission scientists would wince at the thought of their spacecraft being smashed to smithereens. But for those behind Nasa's Dart probe, anything short of total destruction will be chalked up as a failure. From a report: The $330m spacecraft is due to slam head-on into an asteroid about 11m kilometres above the Indian Ocean soon after midnight on Monday. The impact, at nearly seven kilometres a second, will obliterate the half-tonne probe, all in the name of planetary defence. Not that Dimorphos, the asteroid in question, poses any threat to humanity. The Dart, or double asteroid redirection test, is an experiment, the first mission ever to assess whether asteroids can be deflected should one ever be found on a collision course with Earth. A well-placed nudge could avert Armageddon, or so the thinking goes, and spare humans the same fate as the dinosaurs.

"It's a very complicated game of cosmic billiards," said Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer and member of the Nasa Dart investigation team at Queen's University Belfast. "What we want to do is use as much energy [as we can] from Dart to move the asteroid." With telescopes constantly scanning the skies, scientists hope to have some notice if an asteroid were ever to present a major threat. "If we are able to see far enough in advance and know that an asteroid might be a problem, pushing it out of the way will be much safer than the big Hollywood idea of blowing it up," said Catriona McDonald, a PhD student at Warwick University. The Dart mission launched from Vandenberg space force base in November last year. On Monday night, mission controllers will hand control to Dart's software and let the probe steer itself into oblivion.

New submitter cj9er writes: Considering all the privacy issues in today's online climate (all the issues with Meta right now), what is the best high-end smartphone to select?

Apple: No way they don't sell your data... Sure, they have privacy for third-party apps, but what about the data they collect from the phone itself? Consider what the revenue is on a single smartphone (say $150), how do you think they have all that cash on hand?

Google: Yeah right, Pixel is probably collecting [data] 24/7 considering their main business is selling ads on Search. They have developed the Pixel line because they probably realized they were missing out on the direct collection of data from their own hardware (cut out the middle players using Android).

Samsung: Their TVs even collect and sell data on you. I don't really understand the price premium on Galaxy phones anyways.

I have kept my data and Wi-Fi turned off on my phones for years. Initially it was for battery reasons but now add in data collection. Ultimately, if we could turn off the GPS feature at will on our phones, maybe we could prevent all tracking (except for cellular triangulation). If we then think about safety, GPS is great and now with satellite-tracking on Apple phones, even better. But then what is going on behind the scenes 99.99% of the rest of the time when you don't require those options for safety reasons?

What phone manufacturer can be trusted?