An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Take-Two Interactive has sued several programmers and enthusiasts said to be behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects. The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit. "Defendants' source code projects, known as re3 and reVC, purport to have created a set of software files (which Defendants claim they 'reverse engineered' from the original Game software) that allow members of the public to play the Games on various hardware devices, but with so-called 'enhancements' and 'modifications' added by Defendants," the complaint reads (PDF). "Perhaps most notably, Defendants claim that their derivative GTA source code enables players to install and run the Games on multiple game platforms, including those on which the Games never have been released, such as the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch." According to Take-Two, the defendants' conduct is willful and deliberate since they are well aware that they do not have the necessary rights to copy, adapt or distribute derivative GTA source code or the audiovisual elements of the games. The gaming giant adds that [defendant Angelo Papenhoff] publicly expressed concern that Take-Two would find out about the 're3' and 'reVC' projects.
[...]
Take-Two says that by willfully and maliciously copying, adapting and distributing its source code and other content, all of the defendants have infringed its exclusive rights under copyright law. As a result, the company is entitled to damages in amounts to be determined at trial or, alternatively, a maximum statutory damages award of $150,000 for each infringed work. Additionally, the gaming company says that by submitting bad faith DMCA counternotices to have the projects restored to Github, three of the defendants made misrepresentations under U.S.C. 512(f). Finally, Take-Two is seeking temporary, preliminary, and permanent injunctive relief to restrain the defendants from continuing their allegedly infringing activities. The company wants all infringing source code and games removed from the Internet and wants the defendants to hand over all materials that infringe its rights. Take-Two also wants a full accounting of "any and all sales or downloads of products or services" that infringe its rights.

A team of researchers with AMD have filed a patent application that looks toward a more efficient and reliable quantum computing architecture, thanks to a conventional multi-SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) approach. Tom's Hardware reports: According to the application, AMD is researching a system that aims to use quantum teleportation to increase a quantum system's reliability, while simultaneously reducing the number of qubits necessary for a given calculation. The aim is to both alleviate scaling problems and calculation errors stemming from system instability. The AMD patent, titled "Look Ahead Teleportation for Reliable Computation in Multi-SIMD Quantum Processor," aims to improve quantum stability, scalability, and performance in novel, more efficient ways. It describes a quantum architecture based on quantum processing regions: areas of the chip that hold or can hold qubits, lying in wait for their turn on the processing pipeline. AMD's approach aims to improve on existing quantum architectures by actually reducing the number of qubits needed to perform complex calculations -- via the science fiction-esque concept of quantum teleportation.

AMD's design aims to teleport qubits across regions, enabling workloads that would theoretically require in-order execution to become capable of being processed in an out-of-order philosophy. As a quick refresher, in-order execution features dependencies between one instruction and the next, meaning that a workload has to be processed sequentially, with later steps dependent on the previous step being fully processed and its result being known before the chip can move ahead with the computation. As you may imagine, there are chip resources (in this case, qubits) that sit idle until it's their time to perform the next calculation step. On the other hand, Out-of-order execution analyzes a given workload, figures out which parts of it are dependent on previous results and which are not, and executes every step of the instruction that doesn't require a previous result, thus improving performance via increased parallelism.

AMD's patent also includes a look-ahead processor embedded into the architecture, tasked to analyze the input workload, predict what steps can be tackled in parallel (and those that can't), and appropriately distribute the workload across qubits, using a quantum teleporting technique to deliver them to the required quantum processing, SIMD-based region. How this quantum teleportation occurs isn't described in the patent -- it looks like AMD is playing its cards close to its chest on this one.

Crucial and Western Digital have recently been caught swapping the TLC NAND used for certain products with inferior QLC NAND without updating product SKUs or informing reviewers of this change. Now, Samsung was caught doing something similar. Samsung is "swapping the drive controller + TLC for a different, inferior drive controller," according to ExtremeTech. "The net effect is still a steep performance decline in certain tests." From the report: The other beats of this story are familiar. Computerbase.de reports on a YouTube Channel, which compared two different versions of the Samsung 970 Plus. Both drives are labeled with the same sticker declaring them to be a 970EVO Plus, but the part numbers are different. One drive is labeled the MZVLB1T0HBLR (older, good) and one is the MZVL21T0HBLU (newer, inferior). Peel the sticker back, and the chips underneath are rather different. The Phoenix drive (top) is older than the Elpis drive on the bottom. Computerbase claims a production date of April 2021 for the Phoenix, but if the 2110 and 2123 codes are production dates, this would seem to indicate March and June. It's possible that Samsung uses specific numerical codes for each month. Either way, the Phoenix drive is older and faster and the Elpis drive is newer and slower.

And -- just as we've seen from Crucial and Western Digital -- performance in some benchmarks after the swap is just fine, while other benchmarks crater. [...] The original 970 Plus starts with solid performance and holds it for the entire 200GB test. The right-hand SSD is even faster than the OG 970 Plus until we hit the 120GB mark, at which point performance drops to 50 percent of what it was. Real-world file copies also bear this out, with one drive holding 1.58GB/s and one at 830MB/s. TLC hasn't been swapped for QLC, but the 50 percent performance hit in some tests is as bad as what we see when it has been.

Tom's Hardware reports: Based on revenue, Samsung Electronics has reclaimed the number one semiconductor manufacturer spot on the back of a strong Q2 2021, according to the latest IC Insight's The McClean Report, which investigates the state of the semiconductor industry in several areas.

The South Korean company achieved a 19 percent increase in overall IC sales compared to Q1 2021, bringing in a total of $20.29 billion in the April-June period alone... On the other hand, Intel achieved a smaller three percent QoQ (Quarter-over-Quarter) increase that resulted in a cool $19.3 billion in chip sales. For reference, AMD, which is generally considered to have a competitive CPU portfolio compared to Intel, brought in a comparatively measly $3.85 billion...

According to the present-day report, Samsung has achieved the top spot mainly due to ascending ASP (Average Sale Price) of NAND and DRAM, with the latter being a significant high-volume advantage over Intel, which doesn't produce RAM. Samsung had last been the top manufacturer back in Q3 2018 — again on the back of strong NAND and DRAM results in the midst of a market shortage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Eating fructose appears to alter cells in the digestive tract in a way that enables it to take in more nutrients, according to a preclinical study from investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. These changes could help to explain the well-known link between rising fructose consumption around the world and increased rates of obesity and certain cancers. The research, published August 18 in Nature, focused on the effect of a high-fructose diet on villi, the thin, hairlike structures that line the inside of the small intestine. Villi expand the surface area of the gut and help the body to absorb nutrients, including dietary fats, from food as it passes through the digestive tract. The study found that mice that were fed diets that included fructose had villi that were 25 percent to 40 percent longer than those of mice that were not fed fructose. Additionally, the increase in villus length was associated with increased nutrient absorption, weight gain and fat accumulation in the animals.

After observing that the villi were longer, the team wanted to determine whether those villi were functioning differently. So they put mice into three groups: a normal low-fat diet, a high-fat diet, and a high-fat diet with added fructose. Not only did the mice in the third group develop longer villi, but they became more obese than the mice receiving the high-fat diet without fructose. The researchers took a closer look at the changes in metabolism and found that a specific metabolite of fructose, called fructose-1-phosphate, was accumulating at high levels. This metabolite interacted with a glucose-metabolizing enzyme called pyruvate kinase, to alter cell metabolism and promote villus survival and elongation. When pyruvate kinase or the enzyme that makes fructose-1-phospate were removed, fructose had no effect on villus length. Previous animal studies have suggested that this metabolite of fructose also aids in tumor growth. From an evolutionary standpoint, the findings make sense. "In mammals, especially hibernating mammals in temperate climates, you have fructose being very available in the fall months when the fruit is ripe," said one of the researchers. "Eating a lot of fructose may help these animals to absorb and convert more nutrients to fat, which they need to get through the winter."

Humans, on the other hand, did not evolve to eat the amount of fructose they consume now.

The world's largest chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has overtaken Chinese tech behemoth Tencent to become Asia's most valuable firm. CNBC reports: It comes as Beijing's regulatory crackdown on the country's tech sector in the past few months has slammed the valuations of Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. TSMC, a major supplier to Apple, overtook Tencent earlier in August. The Taiwanese chipmaker is now sitting at the top spot by market capitalization -- among Asia firms -- at more than $538 billion, according to data from Refinitiv Eikon as of Wednesday morning during Asia hours.

Tencent sat in second place, with a market capitalization of more than $536 billion while Alibaba was a distant third at about $472 billion. The market capitalizations of both Tencent and Alibaba were hit again on Tuesday -- losing more than $20 billion each -- after China's market regulator issued draft rules aimed at stopping unfair competition on the internet. [...] Chipmaker TSMC, on the other hand, has gotten a boost as the world faces a global semiconductor shortage driven by supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic, along with a surge in demand from industries such as automobiles and data centers. Responding to the shortage, TSMC said earlier this year it plans to invest $100 billion over the next three years to increase capacity.

Mastercard, writing in a blog post: In the early age of modern credit cards, they had to write down account information for each card-carrying customer by hand. Later, they used flatbed imprinting machines to record the card information on carbon paper packets, the sound of the swiping of the handle earning them the name, zip-zap machines. (They were also dubbed "knuckle-busters" by the unfortunate clerks who skinned their fingers on the embossing plate.) And how could clerks tell whether the customer was good for the purchase? They couldn't. Credit card companies would circulate a list of bad account numbers each month, and the merchant would have to compare the customers' cards against the list.

The arrival of the magnetic stripe changed all that. An early 1960s innovation largely credited to IBM, the magnetic stripe allowed banks to encode card information onto magnetic tape laminated to the back. It paved the way for electronic payment terminals and chip cards, offering more security and real-time authorization while making it easier for businesses of all sizes to accept cards. That thin stripe has remained a fixture on billions of payment cards for decades, even as technology has evolved. But now the magnetic stripe is reaching its expiration date with Mastercard becoming the first payments network to phase it out.

The shift away from the magnetic stripe points to both consumers changing habits for payments and the development of newer technologies. Today's chip cards are powered by microprocessors that are much more capable and secure, and many are also embedded with tiny antennae that enable contactless transactions. Biometric cards, which combine fingerprints with chips to verify a cardholder's identity, offer another layer of security. Based on the decline in payments powered by magnetic stripes after chip-based payments took hold, newly-issued Mastercard credit and debit cards will not be required to have a stripe starting in 2024 in most markets. By 2033, no Mastercard credit and debit cards will have magnetic stripes, which leaves a long runway for the remaining partners who still rely on the technology to phase in chip card processing.

Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 quotes Wired: Location data sharing from wireless carriers has been a major privacy issue in recent years... Carriers remain perennially hungry to know as much about you as they can. Now, researchers are proposing a simple plan to limit how much bulk location data they can get from cell towers.

Much of the third-party location data industry is fueled by apps that gain permission to access your GPS information, but the location data that carriers can collect from cell towers has often provided an alternative pipeline. For years it's seemed like little could be done about this leakage, because cutting off access to this data would likely require the sort of systemic upgrades that carriers are loath to make.

At the Usenix security conference on Thursday, though, network security researchers Paul Schmitt of Princeton University and Barath Raghavan of the University of Southern California are presenting a scheme called Pretty Good Phone Privacy that can mask wireless users' locations from carriers with a simple software upgrade that any carrier can adopt—no tectonic infrastructure shifts required... The researchers propose installing portals on every device — using an app or operating system function — that run regular checks with a billing server to confirm that a user is in good standing. The system would hand out digital tokens that don't identify the specific device but simply indicate whether the attached wireless account is paid up.

Medium's technology blog OneZero provides a great example of the new field of "digital humanities": Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There's something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It's as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the "continuous sense of menace" and "horror" that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes. For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.

Then a clever bit of data analysis in 2014 uncovered the reason... It turns out that Macbeth uncanny flavor springs from the unusual way that Shakespeare deploys one particular word, over and over again. That word?

"The...."

As Hope and Witmore note, you'd expect Macbeth to refer to "my hand" and "my eye". By writing it as "the hand" and "the eye", Shakespeare neatly evokes the way Macbeth is beginning to be tormented by his own decisions; he disassociates from his own body. In a few acts he'll be a totally unravelled mess...

[T]his is one of my favorite examples of using data analysis to ponder literature. The field of the "digital humanities" — which often involves using data analysis to study books — can get a bad rap sometimes... But what's so delightful about Hope and Witmore's work is how it's genuinely a cyborg, centaur piece of literary analysis... They started by pondering a phenomenon that has puzzled Shakespeare fans for centuries. They did some data analysis that pointed to the word "the". But to figure out why "the" was so key, they had to go back and reread the play closely, engaging in a very rich line-by-line literary analysis. The computation existed as a set of fresh alien eyes, telling the humans where to direct their attention. But it was up to the humans to find the meaning.

"New Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is facing questions about how the company plans to use the data it gathers from its newly installed palm-reading scanners in some of the company's retail outlets," reports GeekWire: A group of three U.S. senators — Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) — sent a letter to Jassy asking a series of questions about its new Amazon One program which encourages people to make contactless payments via hand scans in its brick-and-mortar stores, such as Whole Foods. Specifically, the senators expressed concerns about Amazon's own history with its user data...

"Our concerns about user privacy are heightened by evidence that Amazon shared voice data with third-party contractors and allegations that Amazon has violated biometric privacy laws... In contrast with biometric systems like Apple's Face ID and Touch ID or Samsung Pass, which store biometric information on a user's device, Amazon One reportedly uploads biometric information to the cloud, raising unique security risks," they wrote in the letter.

Currently, Amazon is offering $10 in promotional credits to those who enroll their bank accounts in the program and link them to their Amazon accounts. Hot Hardware calls it a "slightly creepy promo," asking "What is the lowest amount you would sell your personal palm print for to a third-party?"

The Register's Richard Speed commemorates the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM Model 5150: IBM was famously late to the game when the Model 5150 (or IBM PC) put in an appearance. The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close and the 1980s began. Big Blue, on the other hand, was better known for its sober, business-orientated products and its eyewatering price tags. However, as its customers began eying Apple products, IBM lumbered toward the market, creating a working group that could dispense with the traditional epic lead-times of Big Blue and take a more agile approach. A choice made was to use off-the-shelf hardware and software and adopt an open architecture. A significant choice, as things turned out.

Intel's 8088 was selected over the competition (including IBM's own RISC processor) and famously, Microsoft was tapped to provide PC DOS as well as BASIC that was included in the ROM. So this marks the 40th anniversary of PC DOS, aka MS-DOS, too. You can find Microsoft's old MS-DOS source code here. The basic price for the 5150 was $1,565, with a fully loaded system rising to more than $3,000. Users could enjoy high resolution monochrome text via the MDA card or some low resolution graphics (and vaguely nauseating colors) through a CGA card (which could be installed simultaneously.) RAM landed in 16 or 64kB flavors and could be upgraded to 256kB while the Intel 8088 CPU chugged along at 4.77 MHz.

Storage came courtesy of up to two 5.25" floppy disks, and the ability to attach a cassette recorder -- an option swiftly stripped from later models. There was no hard disk, and adding one presented a problem for users with deep enough pockets: the motherboard and software didn't support it and the power supply was a bit weedy. IBM would resolve this as the PC evolved. Importantly, the motherboard also included slots for expansion, which eventually became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as the IBM PC clone sector exploded. IBM's approach resulted in an immense market for expansion cards and third party software. While the Model 5150 "sold like hotcakes," Speed notes that it was eventually discontinued in 1987.

Friday a CNN video offered what it calls "an exclusive look into how Space Force is defending America." CNN's Jim Sciutto reported: Inside Mission Control at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, Space Force Guardians, as they're known, fly the nation's missile warning satellites. Using infrared sensors, these satellites, orbiting 22,000 miles above earth, scour the planet 24/7 for missile launches and nuclear detonations.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "We never stop — always vigilant — and we never fail. Because that's how important this mission is to our nation. We provide decision-quality data to tactical war fighters on the ground, to save their lives."

This satellite dish is in touch with missile-warning satellites deployed in what's known as geosynchronous orbit. If those warning satellites detect a launch anywhere on the surface of the planet, it beams that information back down to this ground station instantaneously, at the speed of light. And then Space Force sends that information, that warning, around the world to U.S. forces deployed aboard or here on the U.S. homeland. In January 2020, these satellites sprang into action, detecting multiple missiles from Iran targetting the Al Asad airbase in Iraq. Before those missiles rained down, within minutes Space Force had delivered a lifesaving warning to units on the ground. Space Force specialist Sally Stevens was on duty. "It is lightning fast."

CNN: "Right. And quick enough to take action to protect themselves."

Stevens: "Absolutely. Especially in the Al Asad night. Not very often do we get reminded of where our end data gets to, and that night was a shocking reality."

Missile-warning satellites are just a fraction of the hundreds of U.S. government and commercial satellites monitored and defended by the Guardians of the Space Force today — defended because U.S. adversaries led by Russia and China have deployed weapons to disable or destroy them. Space Force is now an independent branch of the U.S. military due to this alarming new reality. Space, once relatively peaceful territory, is now considered a potential front in any modern war.

Colonel Matthew Holston: "Space is a war-fighting domain. It's the reason that we set up the United States Space Force as a separate service. So each and every day, we're training our operators to deter conflict, but if deterrence fails, to compete and win in space."

The U.S. has far more satellites than any other nation, some 2,500, compared to 431 for China and 168 for Russia. And a whole range of U.S. military technologies depend on them... The danger for the U.S. is that greater dependence on space equals greater vulnerability to attacks in space.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "When you're at the top, the target's on your back. Everybody's shooting for you."

China is launching kidnapper satellites with grappling arms capable of plucking satellites out of orbit. Russia is deploying kamikaze satellites, capable of ramming and destroying U.S. space assets. And Russia now has a new space weapon that Space Force dubs "the nesting doll."

General John W. Raymond, Space Force Chief of Space Operations: "Back in 2017, Russia launched a satellite, and it opened up and another satellite came out, and then it open up and a projectile came out. That projectile is designed to kill U.S. satellites. So in 2019 they did the same thing, but this time they put it up next to one of our satellites. And then we started talking about it."

CNN: "You warned them away?"

Raymond: "We described what is safe and professional behavior. And it's important. Today there's no rules in space. It's the wild, wild west."

Russia and China also have directed-energy weapons, which can damage or disable U.S. satellites from a distance. The age of lasers in space has already arrived. New satellites are being designed with greater maneuverability, shielding to block directed-energy weapons, and resiliency so that losing one or a few does not disable the entire system. Space Force commanders welcome the private sector's entry into space, since it gives more and cheaper options to get into orbit... Raymond: "I would bet on U.S. industry any day. It's a huge advantage that we have."
A CNN article summarizing the report adds that Ameria's adversaries" have already attempted to use space weapons to temporarily disable US satellites, using lasers and directed-energy weapons to blind or 'dazzle' them."

CNN's report concludes that space war "is not science fiction, but a battle already underway today," adding this quote from Space Force Chief of Space Operations, General John W. Raymond. "We would prefer the domain to remain free of conflict. But like in any other domain — like air, land, sea, and now space — we'll be ready to protect and defend."

"The moment you network IoT and hand over control to third parties, you may also give individuals the keys to a digital kingdom — and the ability to cause mischief, or worse," writes ZDNet.

For example, at a hotel where guests control the devices in their room with an iPod Touch... Speaking at Black Hat USA, Las Vegas, security consultant Kya Supa from LEXFO explained how a chain of security weaknesses were combined and exploited to gain control of rooms at a capsule hotel, a budget-friendly type of hotel offering extremely small — and, therefore, cozy — spaces to guests, who are stacked side-by-side... A neighbor, "Bob," kept waking Supa up by making loud phone calls in the early hours of the morning. While Bob had agreed to keep it down, he did not keep his promise — and the researcher set to work since he needed his sleep, especially during his vacation. The first thing Supa did was to explore his room, finding an emergency light installed for safety reasons; a Nasnos automaton center for use in controlling products in case the iPod Touch was lost; an electric motor used to manage the incline of the capsule's bed; and a Nasnos router, hidden in the wall.

If you connected to the router via a smartphone, it was then possible to control other devices on the network, and this was the setup the hotel chose to use... Supa found that two networks were connected — the hotel Wi-Fi and the router. To retrieve the router key, Supa targeted WEP, a protocol that has been known to be weak for years. Access points, each being one of the bedrooms, were found. Supa inspected the traffic and found weak credentials in place — "123" — and you can guess the rest...

By using an Android smartphone, the iPod Touch, and a laptop, the researcher created a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) architecture and inspected the network traffic. No encryption was found and he created a simple program to tamper with these connections, allowing the researcher to seize control of his bedroom through his laptop... Now that he could "control every bedroom," and Bob was still there, Supa then tampered with the lights of different bedrooms until he found the right one. He created a script that, every two hours, would change the bed into a sofa and turn the lights on and off. The script was launched at midnight. We can probably assume Bob did not enjoy his stay.

"I hope he will be more respectful in the future," Supa commented.

After a successful sub-orbital test flight last month, Virgin Galactic re-opened ticket sales for rides to space starting at $450,000 per seat. CBS News reports: But Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said fully commercial flights are not expected until the third quarter of 2022, after two more test flights of the company's VSS Unity spaceplane and extensive upgrades of Virgin's Eve carrier jet to improve durability and turnaround times between flights. While the start of commercial operations will come a few months later than had been hoped, the results of two piloted test flights earlier this year, including Branson's July 11 trip to space, show the company is close to "completing our test flight program and launching commercial passenger service in '22," Colglazier said. "And as we advance towards that goal, we are excited to announce today that we will immediately open ticket sales to our significant list of early hand raisers, prioritizing our spacefarer community who, as promised, will be given first opportunity to reserve their place to space."

He said Virgin has developed a "purposeful range of product offerings in order to satisfy the different ways people were want to share this experience." "For the private astronaut flights, our products will include a single seat, a multi-seat couples, families and friends package and a full-flight buyout," he said. "Prices for this next phase of private astronaut sales will begin at $450,000 per seat. Microgravity research and professional astronaut training flights remain priced at $600,000 on a per seat equivalent basis." More than 600 space enthusiasts made down payments on flights much earlier in the program, back when tickets were thought to be in the neighborhood of $250,000 per seat. The prices announced Thursday presumably will apply to new customers only.

Rare earth magnet recycling is about so much more than sustainable data centers. From a report: The U.S. alone generates nearly 17 percent of all used hard disk drives -- the largest share globally -- and researchers have estimated that if all of these data storage devices were recycled, they could supply more than 5 percent of all rare earth magnet demand outside of China, potentially helping meet the demand of the information technology sector as well as clean energy companies. A consortium of U.S. researchers, tech companies, hardware manufacturers, and electronic waste recyclers has recently begun exploring exactly how those rare earths can be re-harvested and given a second life.

In 2019, these stakeholders published a report identifying a host of potential strategies, including wiping and re-using entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing the magnet assemblies, grinding up old hard drive magnets and using the powder to manufacture new ones, and extracting purified rare earth elements from shredded drives. Each of these strategies has its own challenges -- removing magnet assemblies by hand is labor intensive; extracting rare earths from technology can be chemical or energy intensive and produce significant waste -- and for any of them to be scaled up, there needs to be buy-in from numerous actors across global supply chains.

Making even the relatively minor supply chain adjustments needed to place used or recycled rare earth magnets inside new drives "is difficult," said Hongyue Jin, a scientist at the University of Arizona who studies rare earth recycling. "And especially when you've got to start from some small amount with a new technology." Still, some companies have begun taking the first steps. In 2018, Google, hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate, and electronics refurbisher Recontext (formerly Teleplan) conducted a small demonstration project that involved removing the magnet assemblies from six hard disk drives and placing them in new Seagate drives. This demonstration, said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University, was the "catalyst" for the larger 2019 study in which 6,100 magnet assemblies were extracted from Seagate hard drives in a Google data center before being inserted into new hard drives in a Seagate manufacturing facility. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes it is the largest demonstration of its kind ever done.

The results, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, not only showed that rare earth magnets could be harvested and reused at larger scale, but that there were significant environmental benefits to doing so: Overall, re-used magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones, according to the study. Frost says that this estimate conservatively took into account the energy mix of the local power grid where the data center operated. Considering Google's near round-the-clock renewable energy usage at this particular data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even lower.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [Miami has] launched its own cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, which claims to allow city citizens to earn Bitcoin "in their sleep." On Tuesday, Okcoin was the first crypto exchange to list MiamiCoin. The idea is to fill the city's coffers via speculation. People can mine the coin (which is less difficult and thus less energy intensive than mining Bitcoin or Ethereum), and revenue from the coin will be diverted to the city's treasury. As investors buy the coin, its value will ideally continue to go up, and that cash will be used to fund infrastructure projects or events in the city.

MiamiCoin, which is listed as $MIA on exchanges, is the product of CityCoins, a project that "gives communities the power to improve their cities, while providing crypto rewards to individual contributors and city governments alike." MiamiCoin is the first CityCoin to be released, though a cryptocurrency for San Francisco is on the way, too, according to the website. The project works hand-in-hand with the Miami government.

Bitcoin comes into all of this because the blockchain MiamiCoin runs on, Stacks, is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. So, MiamiCoin miners are rewarded with small amounts of Bitcoin by inadvertently contributing to the Bitcoin blockchain. Mayor Francis Suarez, who previously invited persecuted Chinese Bitcoin miners to Miami after the country cracked down on the industry, said that the coin could earn the city "millions of dollars" in an interview last week. Suarez told Fox Business that the funds could be used to help "eliminate homelessness completely" and "increasing our police force." Despite emphatically not being Bitcoin and having complex layers of mechanics, Suarez said that MiamiCoin was "like a Bitcoin." Not all Bitcoiners agree with that sentiment. "Miami would be better off converting long term treasury holdings to Bitcoin. While MiamiCoin's novelty will likely generate some traction after its launch, I think it will fade away. All the while Bitcoin will continue to grow faster than the internet itself," said Brady Swenson, Head of Education at Swan Bitcoin, an app that automates Bitcoin purchases, and the host of podcasts Swan Signal Live and Citizen Bitcoin. "MiamiCoin will not benefit from Bitcoin's global network effect, nor accrue the corresponding exponential gains in purchasing power."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Alphabet's Google asked a federal judge to order Microsoft to hand over internal documents from certain executives that Google says it needs to defend a Justice Department's monopoly lawsuit. Google said in a court filing Thursday night in Washington that Microsoft refuses to search the files of 19 executives that are relevant to Google's defense.

Microsoft is a key player in the Justice Department's lawsuit, which accuses Google of abusing its dominance in internet search. The government says Google illegally used its power in the market to thwart competitive threats from rivals like Microsoft's Bing search engine. "No third party is more central to this litigation than Microsoft," Google said in the filing. Microsoft countered in a separate filing that Google's request for documents is unreasonable and burdensome. Microsoft said it offered to collect documents from 27 individuals and that Google has proposed it provide information from an additional 28, for a total of 55. Further reading: Google and Microsoft End Their Five-Year Cease-Fire.

Chris Lee, a former staff interaction designer at Google, writes in a blog post: Chrome Home was an ambitious redesign of mobile Chrome's main UI. It brought Chrome's toolbar to the bottom of the screen and turned in into a peeking panel that could be swiped to expose additional controls. I created the original concept and pitch for Chrome Home in 2016. It was based off two insights:

1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.
2. Mobile Chrome was also growing in features - but because its minimalist interface kept everything behind a "three dot" menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.

The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. I then led a team to execute and iterate on the concept. Executing on Chrome Home required rethinking not just the toolbar, but almost all of Chrome's UI: search, bookmarks, tabs, prompts, etc. To inform our decisions, we used a variety of prototyping and testing approaches of increasing fidelity. Ultimately, such a fundamental change to a web browser required nothing short of building it into the product and testing it in longitudinal studies and live beta experiments. We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community. But for some mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well. So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch -- which took not a small amount of debate. Lee adds, "oh, and Safari in iOS 15 picked up some similar ideas and criticisms."

"Loneliness among adolescents around the globe has skyrocketed since a decade ago," reports the Washington Post, "and it may be tied to smartphone use, a new study finds." In 36 out of 37 countries, feelings of loneliness among teenagers rose sharply between 2012 and 2018, with higher increases among girls, according to a report released Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers used data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a survey of over 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students. The survey included a six-item measure of loneliness at school in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018. Before 2012, the trends had stayed relatively flat. But between 2012 and 2018, nearly twice as many teens displayed high elevated levels of "school loneliness," an established predictor of depression and mental health issues. (The study did not cover the period of the coronavirus pandemic, which also may have affected teen well-being.)

"It's surprising that the trend would be so similar across so many different countries," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study's lead author. "On the other hand, if this trend is caused by smartphones or electronic communication, a worldwide increase is exactly what you'd expect to see." In an earlier study, Twenge had identified 2012 as the year when smartphone ownership passed 50 percent in the United States...

In the worldwide study, school loneliness was not correlated with factors such as income inequality, gross domestic product and family size, but it did correlate with increases in smartphone and Internet use. By 2012, most of the countries in the study had reached a point where at least half of teens had access to smartphones, and that is when teen loneliness levels began to rise, Twenge said. "When it got to that saturation point where social media was virtually mandatory and practically everybody had a phone, it changed things," she said. As smartphone adoption spread in the 2010s, adolescents spent less time interacting in person and more time using digital media, the paper said, adding, "Given that digital media does not produce as much emotional closeness as in-person interaction, the result may be more loneliness in recent years...."

School administrators and teachers have noted the changes. Lunchrooms and hallways, formerly raucous places, have in recent years fallen silent as teens have turned to their devices. Some are taking action on the local or national level. In 2018, France stopped allowing smartphones at school for students in elementary and middle school.

A comprehensive new analysis published in Nature "calculates that the frequency of climate-related nuclear plant outages is almost eight times higher than it was in the 1990s," reports Ars Technica.

"The analysis also estimates that the global nuclear fleet will lose up to 1.4 percent — about 36 TWh — of its energy production in the next 40 years and up to 2.4 percent, or 61 TWh, by 2081-2100." The author analyzed publicly available databases from the International Atomic Energy Agency to identify all climate-linked shutdowns (partial and complete) of the world's 408 operational reactors. Unplanned outages are generally very well documented, and available data made it possible to calculate trends in the frequency of outages that were linked to environmental causes over the past 30 years. The author also used more detailed data from the last decade (2010-2019) to provide one of the first analyses of which types of climate events have had the most impact on nuclear power.

While the paper doesn't directly link the reported events to climate change, the findings do show an overall increase in the number of outages due to a range of climate events. The two main categories of climate disruptions broke down into thermal disruptions (heat, drought, and wildfire) and storms (including hurricanes, typhoons, lightning, and flooding). In the case of heat and drought, the main problem is the lack of cool-enough water — or in the case of drought, enough water at all — to cool the reactor. However, there were also a number of outages due to ecological responses to warmer weather; for example, larger than usual jellyfish populations have blocked the intake pipes on some reactors. Storms and wildfires, on the other hand, caused a range of problems, including structural damage, precautionary preemptive shutdowns, reduced operations, and employee evacuations. In the timeframe of 2010 to 2019, the leading causes of outages were hurricanes and typhoons in most parts of the world, although heat was still the leading factor in Western Europe (France in particular). While these represented the most frequent causes, the analysis also showed that droughts were the source of the longest disruptions and thus the largest power losses.

The author calculated that the average frequency of climate-linked outages went from 0.2 outages per year in the 1990s to 1.5 outages in the timeframe of 2010 to 2019. A retrospective analysis further showed that, for every 1 degree C rise in temperature (above the average temperature between 1951 and 1980), the energy output of the global fleet fell about 0.5 percent.