Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this article from Science magazine: Robots can be programmed to lift a car and even help perform some surgeries, but when it comes to picking up an object they have not touched before, such as an egg, they often fail miserably. Now, engineers have come up with an artificial fingertip that overcomes that limitation. The advance enables machines to sense the textures of these surfaces a lot like a human fingertip does....

[W]hen researchers at the University of Bristol began designing an artificial fingertip in 2009, they used human skin as a guide. Their first fingertip — assembled by hand — was about the size of a soda can. By 2018, they had switched to 3D printing. That made it possible to make the tip and all its components about the size of an adult's big toe and more easily create a series of layers approximating the multilayered structure of human skin. More recently, the scientists have incorporated neural networks into the fingertip, which they call TacTip. The neural networks help a robot quickly process what it's sensing and react accordingly — seemingly just like a real finger.

In our fingertips, a layer of nerve endings deforms when skin contacts an object and tells the brain what's happening. These nerves send "fast" signals to help us avoid dropping something and "slow" signals to convey an object's shape. TacTip's equivalent signals come from an array of pinlike projections underneath a rubbery surface layer that move when the surface is touched. The array's pins are like a hairbrush's bristles: stiff but bendable. Beneath that array is, among other things, a camera that detects when and how the pins move. The amount of bending of the pins provides the slow signal and the speed of bending provides the fast signal. The neural network translates those signals into the fingertip's actions, making it grip more tightly for example, or adjust the angle of the fingertip....

In a second project, Lepora's team added more pins and a microphone to TacTip. The microphone mimics another set of nerve endings deep within our skin that sense vibrations felt as we run our fingers across a surface. These nerve endings enhance our ability to feel how rough a surface is. The microphone did likewise when the researchers tested the enhanced fingertip's ability to differentiate among 13 fabrics.
The article points out that in testing, the artificial fingertip's output "closely matched the neuronal signaling patterns of human fingertips undergoing the same tests."

Leaders of the successful unionization drive at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island have heard from workers at 100 other Amazon facilities in all 50 states, the union's president told AFP. "We are witnessing a revolution," he added Friday.

But meanwhile, "Amazon tipped its hand" this week on how it plans to try to defeat that vote, reports the Washington Post. Specifically, yesterday Amazon filed a list of 25 objections to the election with America's National Labor Relations Board — objecting mostly to the actions of the National Labor Relations Board: The company alleged that the regional office of the agency, based in Brooklyn, "created the impression" it was supporting the union by filing a lawsuit against Amazon before the vote. Amazon also alleged the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delayed investigating "unmeritorious" unfair labor practice charges and understaffed the election. Amazon also alleges the independent Amazon Labor Union harassed employees who did not support the union, trespassed on Amazon's property and "misled employees by telling them that they would lose their benefits if they did not support the ALU," among other issues....

Labor lawyers say the company, which strongly opposed unionization, could try to delay the process of workers forming a union for years. "Amazon probably figures it has nothing to lose by exhausting every possible appeals process because time is on its side," said John Logan, chair of the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University.... A representative for the Amazon Labor Union said none of Amazon's objections had merit and called them a tactic to delay the union. "It's a blatant attempt by Amazon to interfere with and go around the democratic choice of their workforce," Amazon worker and labor organizer Connor Spence said....

The NLRB will need to certify the vote before the union can try to bargain a contract with Amazon. The objections could delay or even cancel that process, depending on what the NLRB decides. Amazon has many avenues to fight the vote results, including by refusing to bargain and forcing regulators to get involved.
The president of the Amazon warehouse's reminded AFP what happened after two Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to union in December.

More than 180 more Starbucks cafes launched unionization campaigns, and "On Friday, three more Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to unionize, taking the national total to 16."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Paramount is launching its NFT marketplace / metaverse / annoying marketing stunt that fans are already angry about with Star Trek non-fungible tokens (or NFTs.) The company partnered with Recur to create a platform called Paramount.xyz, which it says will "bring Paramount's beloved entertainment entities, brands and characters to the metaverse." Paramount is aping what's worked for big NFT projects in the past; the Star Trek NFTs will depict "algorithmically-generated starships" and can be purchased at the low, low price of $250 per pack. Packs, by the way, contain a single ship -- which only has around an 11 percent chance of looking like the Enterprise. You can (but absolutely should not) guarantee that you'll get a cool ship by buying the "Admiral pack" instead of the "Captain pack," but you can only get those if you've shelled out for a Recur pass -- another NFT that costs at least $290.

The ships are stored in what Paramount is calling "Star Trek Continuum," which is what the company describes as "an experiential hub that will house this first and all future seasons of Star Trek NFTs." Those "future seasons" will involve collecting crewmates and doing vague, unspecified missions according to Paramount's roadmap. In terms of what that "metaverse" or those experiences will actually look like, Paramount's press release has a lot of words that basically add up to a hand wave: "Recur and Paramount are building a roadmap of in-real-life utility over the course of this multi-year partnership and Continuum holders will get access to exclusive perks, events and content expanding on the utility of the NFTs digitally and in-real-life."

Ben Thompson, making a case for why Netflix should sell ads: Here Netflix's biggest advantage is the sheer size of its subscriber base: Netflix can, on an absolute basis, pay more than its streaming competitors for the content it wants, even as its per-subscriber cost basis is lower. This advantage is only accentuated the larger Netflix's subscriber base gets, and the more revenue it makes per subscriber; the user experience of getting to that unique content doesn't really matter. All of these factors make a compelling case for Netflix to start building an advertising business. First, an advertising-supported or subsidized tier would expand Netflix's subscriber base, which is not only good for the company's long-term growth prospects, but also competitive position when it comes to acquiring content. This also applies to the company's recent attempts to crack down on password sharing, and struggles in the developing world: an advertising-based tier is a much more accessible alternative.

Second, advertising would make it easier for Netflix to continue to raise prices: on one hand, it would provide an alternative for marginal customers who might otherwise churn, and on the other hand, it would create a new benefit for those willing to pay (i.e. no advertising for the highest tiers). Third, advertising is a natural fit for the jobs Netflix does. Sure, customers enjoy watching shows without ads -- and again, they can continue to pay for that -- but filler TV, which Netflix also specializes in, is just as easily filled with ads. Above all, though, is the fact that advertising is a great opportunity that aligns with Netflix's business: while the company once won with a differentiated user experience worth paying for, today Netflix demands scarce attention because of its investment in unique content. That attention can be sold, and should be, particularly as it increases Netflix's ability to invest in more unique content, and/or charge higher prices to its user base.

Germany's economy and climate ministry presented a package of measures on Wednesday to speed up the expansion of renewable energy, as the need to reduce the country's heavy reliance on Russian fossil fuels adds urgency to its green transition plans. From a report: The three parties that make up Germany's government had outlined their broad goals for expanding renewables in the coalition contract they signed last November, but Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the war in Ukraine underscored the importance of the plans. The package envisages green energy accounting for 80% of the power mix in Europe's biggest economy by 2030, up from about 40% now and a previous target of 65%. "On the one hand, the climate crisis is coming to a head. On the other hand, Russia's invasion shows how important it is to phase out fossil fuels and promote the expansion of renewables," Habeck told reporters. The legislation includes a new clause acknowledging that the use of renewables is in the interests of public security.

Thieves netting massive sums in cybercrime have limited options for laundering the funds. From a report: Many eyes in the crypto world are on a 42-character address on the Ethereum blockchain, which has unclear ownership and is currently home to the equivalent of about $600 million. Hackers stole the funds from players of online game "Axie Infinity" in a March 23 heist uncovered last week. The criminals have moved millions of dollars of assets in recent days, according to blockchain-monitoring tools, but the majority of funds remain in place, leaving victims and outside observers awaiting next moves. Crypto's transparency has turned money laundering into a perverse spectator sport. Transaction records on public blockchains give authorities a bird's-eye view of stolen funds equivalent to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, often pilfered by targeting poorly secured software bridges that transfer assets between blockchains. The openness leaves successful cyber thieves facing a key question: How do you launder a nine-figure score?

"When there's a hack like that, everyone is watching the wallets," said Kimberly Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, a blockchain-analytics firm. "So you better damn well know what you're going to do." The fate of the money stolen from "Axie Infinity" users, one of the largest such thefts, has become a topic of speculation. On Etherscan, a monitoring platform where users can see transactions to and from the address in question, commenters claiming to be victims, broke college students or Ukrainian refugees have posted messages asking the hackers to spread their newfound wealth. [...] Last week, blockchain analysts and amateur digital sleuths watched as ether worth about $20 million moved to crypto exchanges based in the Bahamas and Seychelles. On Monday, an additional $12 million of assets flowed into a mixer, which blends different cryptocurrencies to help obscure their sources. Mixers can have their own security compromises and are dependent on having enough crypto on hand to exchange illicit deposits for cleaner funds, said Mitchell Amador, chief executive of Immunefi, a bug-bounty platform focused on decentralized systems.

What happened after Russia blocked 80 million users of Instagram? Reuters reports: A black and white, melancholy alternative to Instagram that asks users to post sad pictures of themselves may launch in Russia this week, its creators said, to express sadness at the loss of popular services such as the U.S. photo sharing platform....

Although people can still sometimes access [Instagram] using a Virtual Private Network, domestic alternatives have started appearing, the latest being 'Grustnogram', or 'Sadgram' in English. "Post sad pictures of yourself, show this to your sad friends, be sad together," a message on the platform's website read.... "We are very sad that many high quality and popular services are stopping their work in Russia for various reasons," Afisha Daily quoted Alexander Tokarev, one of the service's founders as saying. "We created Grustnogram to grieve about this together and support each other."
Insider looks at the larger landscape now for Russia's social media apps: Rossgram joins a slate of Russian versions of major platforms that seek to mimic larger and more popular social media companies, resulting in a landscape of Russian knockoffs that often struggle to attract users while raising questions about how much access the Kremlin has to users' data.... Russia has been trying to coax internet users to turn to its own versions of popular sites, such as YouTube knockoff RuTube, for years. Authorities this year offered online creators the equivalent of $1,700 a month to move their content to RuTube, according to Coda Story, attempting to make up for its minuscule audience.

A 2021 report by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, found that YouTube is used by 37% of Russians, Instagram by 34%, and TikTok by 16%. But some native platforms hold influence too. Out of Russia's 70 million active social media users, according to research by Linkfluence, a market research platform, 83% use a social media platform similar to Facebook called VKontakte, and 55% use another called OdnoKlassniki. According to Alyssa Demus, an associate international and defense researcher at Rand corporation, Russia has long been building up an ecosystem of alternative social media platforms. But people tend to be more skeptical and cautious when using them out of fear that the government is involved in their operations and users' information isn't secure.

"Either Russia has a hand in the building of the platform from this start, or they strong arm or co-opt whatever is popular later," Demus told Insider. "I know there's significant use of platforms like WhatsApp or others that are believed to be encrypted for that very reason — so that there can be open communication without the fear of reprisal." Russia has also enacted laws to exert influence on non-Russian social media platforms, including passing legislation stating companies need to place their servers for Russian accounts on Russian territory. "Presumably so they can then sort of meddle and do whatever kind of surveillance they need to," Demus said.
Demus adds at one point that "anything Russia touches has the potential to land you in jail."

But the article also notes that younger tech-savvy Russians are using VPNs to access sites blocked by the government — ultimately resulting in a kind of "generation gap" where they're less aligned with pro-government rhetoric from state-controlled media.

Three newly released CIA reports from 1963 and 1964 investigate the Soviet Union's apparent use of extrasensory perception (ESP) and attempted development of "cybernetic telepathy." Motherboard: The documents detail conversations an agent had with Soviet scientists and a student about the USSR's interest in developing ESP. Guided by these second hand accounts, it sounds like the Soviet Union's plans of developing telepathy went as well as America's well-documented efforts. "At the moment, he does not have a clear detailed language program for this," one report said. "Rather, he has an overall goal for the future of finding out about ESP generally." The documents come courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act via the transparency site the Government Attic. They're three reports to the CIA about conversations an agent had with a Soviet cybernetics researcher and a visiting foreign exchange student.

slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of internet usage, especially given this system's eye-rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly.

The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.

With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."

A Nasa astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday after a US record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts to a world torn apart by war. From a report: Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan alongside the Russian Space Agency's Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, who also spent the past year in space. Despite escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Vladimir Putin's war with Ukraine, Vande Hei's return followed customary procedures. A small Nasa team of doctors and other staff was on hand for the touchdown and planned to return immediately to Houston with the 55-year-old astronaut.

Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Vande Hei said he was avoiding the subject with his two Russian crewmates. Despite getting along "fantastically ... I'm not sure we really want to go there," he said. It was the first taste of gravity for Vande Hei and Dubrov since their Soyuz launch on 9 April last year. Shkaplerov joined them at the orbiting lab in October, escorting a Russian film crew up for a brief stay. To accommodate that visit, Vande Hei and Dubrov doubled the length of their stay. Before departing the space station, Shkaplerov embraced his fellow astronauts as "my space brothers and space sister."

An anonymous reader writes: The operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com has announced that he will appeal the piracy verdict, where the RIAA won $83 million in damages. According to his attorneys, the legal process has gone off the rails, as the music companies didn't have to prove a single instance of copyright infringement. More context on the verdict, from TorrentFreak: Last October, the RIAA secured a major victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com and their Russian operator Tofig Kurbanov. A Virginia federal court issued a default judgment in favor of several prominent music companies after the defendant walked away from the lawsuit. According to the order, there is a clear need to deter the behavior of Kurbanov who failed to hand over evidence including server logs. "A less drastic sanction is unlikely to salvage this case," the judge wrote.

Following this win, the RIAA asked for an injunction to stop the sites' worldwide stream-ripping activities. In addition, the music group demanded nearly $83 million in damages. Both of these requests were taken up in a report and recommendation issued by Magistrate Judge Buchanan last December. "Defendant's Websites caused the Plaintiffs to lose profits and streaming revenue because of the enormous internet traffic to and use of the Websites' stream-ripping functions," Judge Buchanan wrote. Mr. Kurbanov's legal team opposed this recommendation, arguing that the music companies failed to provide evidence that any infringing activity actually took place in the United States. Also, if the court believes that damages are appropriate, they should be substantially lower. The RIAA predictably disagreed and asked the court to stay the course and take over the recommendation. After weighing the positions from both sides, that's exactly what happened.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft's DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix's Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD.

As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken's numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API -- from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives -- dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy.

On the other hand, Ono's demo showed that game load time wasn't improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage -- nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That's a decrease that wouldn't be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you're using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That's a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.

Firefox is finally gaining proper AV1 support. Neowin reports: According to an update made to a post on Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation is finally ready to add hardware acceleration for the AV1 video format. Developers plan to implement improved AV1 support in the upcoming release of Firefox 100, scheduled to arrive on May 3, 2022. Hardware acceleration for AV1 video brings several noticeable benefits to customers. The standard developed by Alliance for Open Media and initially released in March 2018 offers better video compression than H.264 (about 50%) and VP9 (about 20%). Shifting AV1 video processing from software to hardware improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption, resulting in better battery life on tablets and laptops. Google and Microsoft announced hardware-accelerated AV1 video in Chrome and Edge in late 2020. Mozilla, on the other hand, did not rush to introduce improved AV1 support in Firefox. While it is easy to dunk on Firefox, there is a reason why developers took their time. Hardware-accelerated AV1 video is not something you can add to any computer with Windows 10, and it requires a PC with the most recent and powerful hardware.

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

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

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

The Washington Post looks at what happened after Starlink activated its satellite-based internet service to help Ukraine: Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk's companies and European allies, which has proved "very effective," Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday. "The quality of the link is excellent," Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. "We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day...." A person familiar with Starlink's effort in Ukraine, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there are more than 5,000 terminals in the country....

Internet flows deteriorated on the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and have not fully recovered, according to data-monitoring services. But since that initial dip, connectivity has remained fairly stable, with mainly temporary, isolated outages even during heavy Russian shelling. "Every day there are outages, but generally service comes back," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which monitors global data flows.

Even before Fedorov tweeted at Musk for help, SpaceX was working on a way to get Starlink to Ukraine. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a talk at California Institute of Technology this month that the company had been working for several weeks to get regulatory approval to allow the satellites to communicate in Ukraine.
In addition, the Washington Post reports, this week on Twitter Elon Musk also "challenged Putin to a fight and followed up by pledging he would use just one hand if Putin was scared. And he told Putin he could bring a bear." Reached for comment by the Post's reporters, Elon Musk responded by telling The Post to give his regards "to your puppet master Besos," following it with two emojis.

But the Post's article also argues Starlink's technology "could have widespread implications for the future of war. Internet has become an essential tool for communication, staying informed and even powering weapons." And The Telegraph reports that Starlink "is helping Ukrainian forces win the drone war as they use the technology in their effort to track and kill invading Russians." In the vanguard of Ukraine's astonishingly effective military effort against Vladimir Putin's forces is a unit called Aerorozvidka (Aerial Reconnaissance) which is using surveillance and attack drones to target Russian tanks and positions. Amid internet and power outages, which are expected to get worse, Ukraine is turning to the newly available Starlink system for some of its communications. Drone teams in the field, sometimes in badly connected rural areas, are able to use Starlink to connect them to targeters and intelligence on their battlefield database. They can direct the drones to drop anti-tank munitions, sometimes flying up silently to Russian forces at night as they sleep in their vehicles...

Should Ukraine's internet largely collapse, the "drone warriors" of Aerorozvidka would still be able to communicate with their bases by sending signals from mobile Starlink terminals, and using ground stations in neighbouring countries including Poland.... As Ukraine's internet is inevitably degraded, Starlink will be an alternative. General James Dickinson, commander of US Space Command, told the Senate armed services committee: "What we're seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation, or a proliferated architecture, can provide in terms of redundancy and capability."
It's not all Starlink. The Telegraph points out that "The Ukrainian system benefitted from equipment given by Western countries, including radio communications which superceded Soviet-era technology, and the US has also poured in millions of dollars to protect against Russian hacking, jamming of signals and attempts to 'spoof' GPS technology."

And meanwhile, weakness in Russia's own communications infrastructure may have played a role in the killing of five senior Russian generals in the last three weeks, according to a recent CNN interview with retired U.S. army general and former CIA director David Petraeus: "The bottom line is that [Russia's] command-and-control has broken down. Their communications have been jammed by the Ukranians.

Their secure comms didn't work. They had to go single-channel. That's jammable, and that's exactly what the Ukranians have been doing to that. They used cellphones. The Ukranians blocked the prefix for Russia, so that didn't work. Then they took down 3G. [The Russians] are literally stealing cellphones from Ukranian civilians to communicate among each other.

So what happens? The column gets stopped. An impatient general is sitting back there in his armored or whatever vehicle. He goes forward to find out what's going on... And the Ukranians have very, very good snipers, and they've just been picking them off left and right.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A new study in the journal Earth's Future led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that, since Euro-American settlement approximately 160 years ago, agricultural fields in the midwestern U.S. have lost, on average, two millimeters of soil per year. This is nearly double the rate of erosion that the USDA considers sustainable. Furthermore, USDA estimates of erosion are between three and eight times lower than the figures reported in the study. Finally, the study's authors conclude that plowing, rather than the work of wind and water, is the major culprit.

Using an extraordinarily sensitive GPS unit that looks more like a floor lamp than a hand-held device, the team walked dozens of transects, or perpendicular routes across the escarpment, from the untouched prairie to the eroded farm field, stopping every few inches to measure the change in altitude. They did this hundreds of times throughout the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019. Once they had their raw data, the team used historical land-use records and cutting-edge computer models to reconstruct erosion rates throughout the Midwest. What they discovered is that Midwestern topsoil is eroding at an average rate of 1.9 millimeters per year. Put another way, the authors estimate that the Midwest has lost approximately 57.6 trillion metric tons of topsoil since farmers began tilling the soil, 160 years ago. And this is despite conservation practices put in place in the wake of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. As noted above, much of the erosion was due to tillage, or plowing. "The modeling that I do shows that tilling has a 'diffusive' effect," says Jeffrey Kwang, a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amhers. "It melts the landscape away, flattening higher points in a field and filling in the hollows."

Furthermore, the USDA doesn't include "tillage erosion" in its own analysis, meaning it's drastically underestimated the rate of erosion that's occurred in the area. The team suggests that more sustainable practice, such as no-till farming and soil regeneration, "will likely be required to reduce soil erosion rates in the Midwest to levels that can sustain soil productivity, ecosystem services, and long-term prosperity."

Princeton University has a research center studying "digital technologies in public life," which runs a web site with commentary and analysis "from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp summarizes the site's recent warning on the dangers of "philanthrocapitalism," in a piece noting ominously that "The tech industry controls CS conference funding." "Research about the influence of computing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on society relies heavily upon the financial support of the very companies that produce those technologies," writes Princeton Research Fellow Klaudia Jazwinska of the dangers of 'philanthrocapitalism'. "Corporations like Google, Microsoft, and IBM spend millions of dollars each year to sponsor labs, professorships, PhD programs, and conferences in fields like computer science (CS) and AI ethics at some of the world's top institutions. Industry is the main consumer of academic CS research, and 84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding."

"Relying on large companies and the resources they control can create significant limitations for the kinds of CS research that are proposed, funded and published. The tech industry plays a large hand in deciding what is and isn't worthy of examination, or how issues are framed. [...] The scope of what is reasonable to study is therefore shaped by what is of value to tech companies. There is little incentive for these corporations to fund academic research about issues that they consider more marginal or which don't relate to their priorities."

Jazwinska concludes, "Given the extent of financial entanglement between Big Tech and academia, it might be unrealistic to expect CS scholars to completely resist accepting any industry funding—instead, it may be more practicable to make a concerted effort to establish higher standards for and greater transparency regarding sponsorship.

The New York Times looks at Mindway AI, a company that predicts future problem gambling. Built using research at Aarhus University by its founder, Kim Mouridsen, the company uses psychologists to train A.I. algorithms in identifying behaviors associated with problem gambling. One significant challenge is that there is no sole indicator of whether someone is a problem gambler, said Rasmus Kjærgaard, Mindway's chief executive. And at most casinos, human detection of problem gambling focuses on just a few factors — mostly money spent and time played. Mindway's system takes into account 14 different risks. Those include money and time but also canceled bank withdrawals, shifts in the time of day the player is playing and erratic changes of wagers. Each factor is given a score from 1 to 100, and the A.I. then builds out a risk assessment of each player, improving itself with each hand of poker or spin of the roulette wheel. Players are scored from green (you're doing fine) to blood red (immediately step away from the game)....

The trickiest step, though, according to Brett Abarbanel, director of research at U.N.L.V.'s International Gaming Institute, is taking that data and explaining it to a player. "If my algorithm flags someone, and it thinks that they're a problem gambler, I'm not going to send them a note and say, 'Hey, great news, my algorithm has identified you as potentially a problem gambler. You should stop gambling right away!'" The response would be obvious, Dr. Abarbanel said, deploying a middle finger: "That's what will happen...."

Since starting in 2018, Mindway has contracted its services to seven Danish operators, two each in Germany and the Netherlands, one global operator and a U.S. sports-gambling operator, Mr. Kjærgaard said. The online gambling giants Flutter Entertainment and Entain have both partnered with Mindway as well, according to the companies' annual reports. Since this technology is so new and there's no regulatory body setting a standard, Mindway and similar companies are, for now, essentially on their own.

On the VRChat platform, there's a fake law-enforcement agency called The Loli Police Department, reports Input magazine.

Though it began as a joke, after four years its Discord channel now has 11,000 members, and "The tightly run community allows members to experience a fantasy version of police life and prides itself on being a source of chaotic good in the strange world of virtual reality." Members move through the ranks — from cadet on up — based on their activity level, which is tracked via the group's Discord. Everything is carefully orchestrated to mimic IRL police.... Karet, a 29-year-old game developer and LPD captain from Texas, says that the hard work of volunteers allows users to roleplay police activities in a realistic environment. "We have some of our own worlds — like the hospital for our medical division, where we can pretend someone is getting treatment, or the jail where we put criminals," says Karet, who designed the LPD station and jail.

One of Karet's favorite things to do is mess with users at random. "Lots of people in VRChat like to sit in front of mirrors," he says. "I will go up to the mirror and do a 'mirror inspection.' Then I say it's an illegal mirror and start looking for someone to blame and arrest. They just don't know how to handle that," he laughs. There are other ways to get people into trouble, too. "I can pull out a bag of weed and make it look like it came out of someone's pocket," Karet says. "They always say it's not theirs."

Being a VRChat police officer comes with its share of challenges. Members are aware that their form of roleplay — which frames spot checks and fake drug busts as harmless fun — doesn't sit well with some members of the community....

Despite the power dynamics at play, LPD members are not moderators of the VR world and ultimately can't make much in the way of real change. "One of our new officers came to me upset because they stepped in when they saw harassment, but then they got the brunt of the attack from the harasser," says Karet. "I commended him, but it's not what we do. We're just trying to have fun. So usually when we encounter something like that, we just leave the world." Thankfully, Karet says, the LPD can help their community somewhat. "We encourage LPD officers to help out new users. It's easy to spot them, so we often go and give them a hand, show them how things work," he says. The LPD used to run events for this purpose, but they were recently brought to a halt. "The events are on hiatus because it became a bit cult-y. Everyone was trying to recruit people into the LPD."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early February a black box crammed with computer processors took a flight from California to Uganda. The squat, 4-foot-high box resembled a giant stereo amp. Once settled into place in Kampala, its job was to predict the weather better than anything the nation had used before (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The California startup that shipped the device, Atmo AI, plans by this summer to swap it out for a grander invention: a sleek, metallic supercomputer standing 8 feet tall and packing in 20 times more power. "It's meant to be the iPhone of global meteorology," says Alexander Levy, Atmo's co-founder and chief executive officer. That's a nod to Apple's design cred and market strategy: In many countries, consumers who'd never owned desktop computers bought smartphones in droves. Similarly, Atmo says, countries without the pricey supercomputers and data centers needed to make state-of-the-art weather forecasts -- effectively, every nation that's not a global superpower -- will pay for its cheaper device instead.

For its first customer, though, the Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA), Atmo is sending its beta version, the plain black box. Prizing function over form seems wise for the urgent problem at hand. In recent years, Uganda has had landslides, floods, and a Biblical plague of locusts that devastated farms. The locusts came after sporadic drought and rain, stunning officials who didn't anticipate the swarms. "It became an eye-opener for us," says David Elweru, UNMA's acting executive director. Many nations facing such ravages lack the most modern tools to plan for the changing climate. Atmo says artificial intelligence programs are the answer. "Response begins with predictions," Levy says. "If we expect countries to react to events only after they've happened, we're dooming people to disaster and suffering." It's a novel approach. Meteorology poses considerable challenges for AI systems, and only a few weather authorities have experimented with it. Most countries haven't had the resources to try.

Ugandan officials signed a multi-year deal with Atmo but declined to share the terms. The UNMA picked the startup partly because its device was "way, way cheaper" than alternatives, according to Stephen Kaboyo, an investor advising Atmo in Uganda. Kaboyo spoke by phone in February, Kampala's dry season, as rain pelted the city. "We haven't seen this before," he said of the weather. "Who knows what is going to happen in the next three seasons?" [...] Atmo reports that its early tests have doubled the accuracy scores of baseline forecasts in Southeast Asia, where the startup is pursuing contracts. Initial tests on the ground in Uganda correctly predicted rainfall when other systems didn't, according to UNMA officials.