Perhaps the biggest reason TVs have gotten so much cheaper than other products is that your TV is watching you and profiting off the data it collects. From a report: Modern TVs, with very few exceptions, are "smart," which means they come with software for streaming online content from Netflix, YouTube, and other services. Perhaps the most common media platform, Roku, now comes built into TVs made by companies including TCL, HiSense, Philips, and RCA. But there are many more operating systems: Google has Google TV, which is used by Sony, among other manufacturers, and LG and Samsung offer their own.

Smart TVs are just like search engines, social networks, and email providers that give us a free service in exchange for monitoring us and then selling that info to advertisers leveraging our data. These devices "are collecting information about what you're watching, how long you're watching it, and where you watch it," Willcox said, "then selling that data -- which is a revenue stream that didn't exist a couple of years ago." There's nothing particularly secretive about this -- data-tracking companies such as Inscape and Samba proudly brag right on their websites about the TV manufacturers they partner with and the data they amass.

The companies that manufacture televisions call this "post-purchase monetization," and it means they can sell TVs close to at cost and still make money over the long term by sharing viewing data. In addition to selling your viewing information to advertisers, smart TVs also show ads in the interface. Roku, for example, prominently features a given TV show or streaming service on the right-hand side of its home screen -- that's a paid advertisement. Roku also has its own ad-supported channel, the Roku Channel, and gets a cut of the video ads shown on other channels on Roku devices.

Fierce Wireless reports: Verizon is telling customers that if they're still using a 3G CDMA or 4G (non-VoLTE) phone that does not support its newer network technologies, "your line will be suspended without billing and will lose the ability to call, text, or use data."

Verizon is the last of the Big 3 wireless carriers in the U.S. to shut down a 3G network and repurpose the spectrum for newer technology. AT&T was first, shutting its 3G network down in February. T-Mobile's shuttered its 3G network over the summer.... Verizon has been working with customers — both consumers and businesses — since 2016 to ensure customers have "every opportunity" to get a device that uses either 4G or 5G, including direct outreach to customers and even sending some customers updated devices proactively, according to Karen Schulz of Verizon's Global Network & Technology Communications team.

Indeed, the company initially said it was closing its 3G network in 2019. Then they extended it to the end of 2020 and finally, to the end of 2022. In March 2021, Verizon made it clear they were sticking with the 2022 end date and advised customers still accessing the 3G network that they may experience a degradation or complete loss of service.
"Even after that, until the day before their February billing cycle, they'll still be able to use the phones for two things: calling 911 and Verizon customer service," reports the Verge: While 3G will still exist in other countries for quite a few more years, Verizon's deadline is pretty much the end of the line for it here in the US. The tech hasn't gone gentle into that good night; carriers delayed their shutdowns several times, there were tiffs between Dish and T-Mobile, and you can't just turn a network that had been around for years off without things starting to break. (Some notable examples: some connected cars and trucks have been pushed offline, as have parking meters and older Kindles. AT&T's shutdown was even blamed for delays in reporting voting results in Michigan this year.)

Part of the reason carriers are decommissioning their networks is to help build their new ones. As we saw earlier this month, T-Mobile's latest and greatest 5G tech makes use of spectrum that was once part of its 3G network.
The Verge's conclusion? "Spare a thought for the tech that helped build the mobile-first world we live in; even if this ends up being the last time you ever think about it."

"Imagine starting your work day with a fresh coconut juice perched by your laptop as you gaze over the ocean or a tropical rainforest...." writes the Conversation.

"More than 40 nations or territories now offer "digital nomad" visas to attract those able to be employed in one country while living, and spending their income, in another." Fancy the beach? A bunch of exotic islands are on the list. Prefer tropical forests? Try Brazil or Costa Rica. Looking for history? There's Spain or Greece. Love Wim Hof-style ice-bathing? Iceland beckons.

Think of a "digital nomad" visa as a cross between a tourist and temporary migrant visa — a working-on-holiday visa. Instead of the visa giving you the right to work in the country, it's allowing you to stay so long as you're gainfully employed and bringing money into the local economy. How long you can stay varies, from 90 days in Aruba in the Caribbean to up to two years in the Cayman Islands. Most are for 12 months, with an option to renew. Some places, such as Latvia, restrict visas to employers registered in an OECD country. But generally the key requirement is that you can show you have no need to find local work and can meet minimum income requirements.

Generally, the visa conditions simplify taxation issues: you continue to pay your income tax in the country of your employer. But this varies. For example, in Greece (which offers a two-year renewable visa) you are exempt from paying local income tax only for the first six months.

A key driver of the digital nomad trend is the ability to maintain a career while ticking off other personal goals, particularly travel and the ability to experience a different way of life. Moving somewhere with a cheaper cost of living could be another motivation.
The article warns that "Living a long way away from family and friends and support networks is likely to be more challenging, no matter how idyllic your location.

"If you like predictable structure and routine, the uncertainty and inevitable inconveniences that arise may mean it isn't for you."

Remember when MIT researchers did fMRI brain scans measuring the blood flow through brains to determine which parts were engaged when programmers evaluated code? MIT now says that a new paper (by many of the same authors) delves even deeper: Whereas the previous study looked at 20 to 30 people to determine which brain systems, on average, are relied upon to comprehend code, the new research looks at the brain activity of individual programmers as they process specific elements of a computer program. Suppose, for instance, that there's a one-line piece of code that involves word manipulation and a separate piece of code that entails a mathematical operation. "Can I go from the activity we see in the brains, the actual brain signals, to try to reverse-engineer and figure out what, specifically, the programmer was looking at?" asks Shashank Srikant, a PhD student in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "This would reveal what information pertaining to programs is uniquely encoded in our brains." To neuroscientists, he notes, a physical property is considered "encoded" if they can infer that property by looking at someone's brain signals.

Take, for instance, a loop — an instruction within a program to repeat a specific operation until the desired result is achieved — or a branch, a different type of programming instruction than can cause the computer to switch from one operation to another. Based on the patterns of brain activity that were observed, the group could tell whether someone was evaluating a piece of code involving a loop or a branch. The researchers could also tell whether the code related to words or mathematical symbols, and whether someone was reading actual code or merely a written description of that code.....

The team carried out a second set of experiments, which incorporated machine learning models called neural networks that were specifically trained on computer programs. These models have been successful, in recent years, in helping programmers complete pieces of code. What the group wanted to find out was whether the brain signals seen in their study when participants were examining pieces of code resembled the patterns of activation observed when neural networks analyzed the same piece of code. And the answer they arrived at was a qualified yes. "If you put a piece of code into the neural network, it produces a list of numbers that tells you, in some way, what the program is all about," Srikant says. Brain scans of people studying computer programs similarly produce a list of numbers. When a program is dominated by branching, for example, "you see a distinct pattern of brain activity," he adds, "and you see a similar pattern when the machine learning model tries to understand that same snippet."
But where will it all lead? They don't yet know what these recently-gleaned insights can tell us about how people carry out more elaborate plans in the real world.... Creating models of code composition, says O'Reilly, a principal research scientist at CSAIL, "is beyond our grasp at the moment." Lipkin, a BCS PhD student, considers this the next logical step — figuring out how to "combine simple operations to build complex programs and use those strategies to effectively address general reasoning tasks." He further believes that some of the progress toward that goal achieved by the team so far owes to its interdisciplinary makeup. "We were able to draw from individual experiences with program analysis and neural signal processing, as well as combined work on machine learning and natural language processing," Lipkin says. "These types of collaborations are becoming increasingly common as neuro- and computer scientists join forces on the quest towards understanding and building general intelligence."

Tim Wu, a central architect of President Biden's push to clip the wings of the nation's largest companies, is leaving the White House. From a report: Mr. Wu's last day at the National Economic Council will be Wednesday, ending his 22-month tenure as special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy, the White House said. Mr. Wu told The New York Times that he would return to his previous job, as a professor at Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu is one-third of a troika -- along with Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Justice Department -- leading Washington's attempts to more aggressively check corporate giants, including the largest tech companies. He was an author of a July 2021 executive order demanding that federal agencies take steps to increase competition across the economy. Ms. Khan and Mr. Kanter have tried to block corporate consolidation using uncommon arguments in court.

Mr. Wu, 50, said personal reasons were driving his departure. He has been commuting to Washington from New York, he said, requiring him to spend stretches away from his young children. "There's a time where the burden on family is too much," Mr. Wu said. "I've been feeling the balance has shifted." Mr. Wu said he had entered the job believing it to be a "once-in-a-generation chance" to reverse decades of more conservative thinking in antitrust law. The administration has notched some wins on that front -- such as enacting parts of the 2021 executive order, which led to efforts by the government to open up charging networks for electric vehicles and make hearing aids available for purchase over the counter.

For the fourth time since 2007, an internal audit shows the Department of Homeland Security isn't deactivating access cards in the hands of ex-employees, leaving its secure facilities vulnerable to intruders. From a report: A new report by Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General shows that the department is systemically failing to revoke tens of thousands of "personal identity verification" cards that allow staff to enter sensitive, secure facilities and access internal data networks, despite being warned about the problem for 15 years. The issue is made worse, the report continues, by the fact that Homeland Security's internal record-keeping is so shoddy that it was impossible to determine how many ex-staffers have working access cards they aren't supposed to.

Like many modern office workers, Homeland Security hands out office-unlocking keycards to its employees to make sure strangers can't wander in off the street. And, like most workplaces, the department is supposed to follow a standard policy: When an employee is no longer an employee, for whatever reason, their card is to be promptly deactivated. Unlike most employers, though, Homeland Security is a component of the U.S. Intelligence Community, meaning these credit card-sized badges have a "grave potential for misuse if lost, stolen, or compromised," according to the inspector general report. Unfortunately for the department -- and potentially the homeland -- the OIG's latest audit found that's exactly what's happening, and on a vast scale.

With an energy crisis hitting Europe, governments are exploring ways to recycle electricity used on social-media scrolling, conference calls and video streaming to help heat homes and offices. From a report: Electricity-hungry data centers are seeing huge growth in usage, leading to pressure from European officials to funnel the excess heat generated by their computer chips into municipal heating networks. After years of discussions about putting residual heat to work rather than simply venting it outdoors, more such projects are becoming a reality. In the last year, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have started connecting, or announced plans to connect, major data centers to district heating systems in Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Alphabet's Google says it is assessing opportunities to recover heat from its data centers across Europe.

Meta Platforms has been recovering excess heat from its data center in Odense, Denmark, since 2020. The Facebook parent is currently expanding that base, with plans to provide enough excess heat to warm about 11,000 homes as of next year. Other data-center operators are providing heat to networks, particularly in Northern Europe, including Equinix, which is expanding its district heating project in Helsinki, and working on new ones in Germany and other countries. In the Netherlands, there are 10 data centers already supplying heat, and another 15 projects being built or researched, according to the Dutch Data Center Association, a trade group. Higher energy prices, stemming from Russia's decision to effectively cut off natural-gas deliveries following its invasion of Ukraine, have boosted the financial incentive for tech companies to invest in systems necessary to sell off their excess heat, energy and tech sector officials say.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter rivalMastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform's non-profit status. Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire's running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in backing the product, following its fast growth. But he said the platform's non-profit status was "untouchable," adding that Mastodon's independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction. "Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter," said Rochko. "The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It's the difference in paradigms [between the platforms]."

Rochko is Mastodon's sole shareholder and, according to its 2021 annual report, he paid himself 2,400 euros per month last year, a figure he said has since risen by 500 euros. Mastodon will continue to rely on donations to fund the platform. The site has more than 8,500 donors on the membership platform Patreon, through which it is raising over 25,000 pounds a month. This compares with total earnings of just over 55,000 euros in the six months from June to December 2021. Rochko said his long-term ambition for Mastodon was to replace Twitter and other commercial social networks. "It's a long road ahead but at the same time, it's bigger than it ever has been."

Friday America's Federal Trade Commission issued an announcement on what it called "illegal business tactics that Mastercard has been using to force merchants to route debit card payments through its payment network," saying the FTC is now requiring Mastercard "to stop blocking the use of competing debit payment networks." The popularity of debit cards has been growing especially quickly for purchases consumers make using their personal devices equipped with ewallet applications such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet. Payment card networks play a critical role in those debit card transactions....

Payment card networks compete for the business of banks that issue cards and for the business of merchants that accept card payments. Mastercard, along with Visa, is one of the two leading payment card networks in the United States. The processing fees charged by networks total billions of dollars every year, affecting every purchase made with a debit card, according to the FTC. Most of these fees are paid by the merchants to the card-issuing banks and the payment card networks....

Mastercard was flouting the law by setting policies to block merchants from routing ecommerce transactions using Mastercard-branded debit cards saved in ewallets to alternative payment card networks, including networks that may charge lower fees than Mastercard, the FTC alleged. Specifically, Mastercard used its control over a process called "tokenization" to block the use of competing payment card networks, the agency alleged. Transactions commonly are "tokenized" by replacing the cardholder's primary account number with a different number to protect the account number during some stages of a debit transaction. Tokens are stored in ewallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet and serve as a substitute credential to provide additional protection for a cardholder's account number....

According to the FTC, Mastercard refuses to provide conversion services to competing networks for remote ewallet debit transactions...thereby making it impossible for merchants to route their ewallet transactions on a network other than Mastercard.

A small but growing number of universities are now blocking access to TikTok on school-owned devices or WiFi networks, in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the popular short-form video app. From a report: The University of Oklahoma and Auburn University in Alabama have each said they will restrict student and faculty access to TikTok, in order to comply with recent moves from the governors in their respective states to ban TikTok on government-issued devices. The 26 universities and colleges in the University System of Georgia are also reportedly taking a similar step.

"In compliance with the Governor's Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no university employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks," the University of Oklahoma said in an email this week. According to the email, the school will also require that university-administered TikTok accounts be deleted and "alternate social media platforms utilized in their place." Further reading: TikTok steps up efforts to clinch U.S. security deal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the Kremlin's most active hacking groups targeting Ukraine recently tried to hack a large petroleum refining company located in a NATO country. The attack is a sign that the group is expanding its intelligence gathering as Russia's invasion of its neighboring country continues. The attempted hacking occurred on August 30 and was unsuccessful, researchers with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 said on Tuesday. The hacking group -- tracked under various names including Trident Ursa, Gamaredon, UAC-0010, Primitive Bear, and Shuckworm -- has been attributed by Ukraine's Security Service to Russia's Federal Security Service.

In the past 10 months, Unit 42 has mapped more than 500 new domains and 200 samples and other bread crumbs Trident Ursa has left behind in spear phishing campaigns attempting to infect targets with information-stealing malware. The group mostly uses emails with Ukrainian-language lures. More recently, however, some samples show that the group has also begun using English-language lures. "We assess that these samples indicate that Trident Ursa is attempting to boost their intelligence collection and network access against Ukrainian and NATO allies," company researchers wrote. Among the filenames used in the unsuccessful attack were: MilitaryassistanceofUkraine.htm, Necessary_military_assistance.rar, and List of necessary things for the provision of military humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.lnk. Tuesday's report didn't name the targeted petroleum company or the country where the facility was located. In recent months, Western-aligned officials have issued warnings that the Kremlin has set its sights on energy companies in countries opposing Russia's war on Ukraine.

Trident Ursa's hacking techniques are simple but effective. The group uses multiple ways to conceal the IP addresses and other signatures of its infrastructure, phishing documents with low detection rates among anti-phishing services, and malicious HTML and Word documents. Unit 42 researchers wrote: "Trident Ursa remains an agile and adaptive APT that does not use overly sophisticated or complex techniques in its operations. In most cases, they rely on publicly available tools and scripts -- along with a significant amount of obfuscation -- as well as routine phishing attempts to successfully execute their operations..." Tuesday's report provides a list of cryptographic hashes and other indicators organizations can use to determine if Trident Ursa has targeted them. It also provides suggestions for ways to protect organizations against the group.

"Peak TV has peaked," reports the new York Times: The never-ending supply of new programming that helped define the streaming era — spawning shows at a breakneck pace but also overwhelming viewers with too many choices — appears to finally be slowing. The number of adult scripted series ordered by TV networks and streaming companies aimed for U.S. audiences fell by 24 percent in the second half of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm. Compared with 2019, it is a 40 percent drop. "The second half of the year has really gone off a bit of a cliff," said Fred Black, a research manager at Ampere.

It may take some time for that to become apparent to viewers — if it becomes apparent at all, given the glut. It is usually months and sometimes more than a year for a TV show to premiere after a network orders it.

The drop is a result of broader reckoning inside the entertainment industry. For years, television executives tossed off billions of dollars on TV series to help build out their streaming services and chase subscribers. The spending has been a boon to high-profile writers and producers, who captured eight- and nine-figure deals, as well as for the actors, directors and behind-the-scenes workers who kept the engine going. But Wall Street soured on the buy-at-any-cost strategy starting in the spring, when Netflix, the streaming powerhouse, announced that it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade. Netflix's stock nose-dived, and other entertainment companies soon watched their share prices fall, too. Hollywood companies quickly shifted, putting a new emphasis on higher profits instead of raw subscriber counts.

Then, in recent months, entertainment companies became increasingly anxious about a slowing economy, the cord-cutting movement and a troublesome advertising market. Since the summer, scores of executives have abruptly been dismissed, strict cost-cutting measures have been adopted and layoffs have taken hold throughout the industry.... Netflix also cut hundreds of jobs and introduced a cheaper advertising tier, overturning the company's longtime pledge to never allow commercials on the service. Warner Bros. Discovery, a company that was formed in April, faces a debt of roughly $50 billion, and has been in severe cost-cutting mode. There have been rounds of layoffs companywide, including at HBO and HBO Max, as well as sudden cancellations. The once-popular series "Westworld" was canceled last month — a move that surprised Hollywood — and the lesser-known, raunchy dating series "FBoy Island" was cut a few weeks ago....

There are a few outliers to this year's trend: Apple TV+ and Amazon have increased the number of adult scripted series they have purchased this year. So has Disney, according to Ampere's research. (For the second half of the year, however, Disney's buying has declined compared with the same period last year.)

On Friday, long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw wrote: Manufacturers of drones made after 16 September 2022 must, from today (16 December), ensure that those drones are "Standard Remote ID" compliant. This means that the drones must broadcast packets of data once per second (using Bluetooth or Wifi) that contain the position speed and path of the drone, a unique identifier and the operator's position including height above ground....

Already, several companies have announced their intention to build networks of receivers that will create a realtime database of all drone activity in the USA, showing the positions of the drones and their operators and flagging any non-compliant craft.

By September 16, 2023, all U.S. hobbyists must fit "broadcast remote ID" modules to their RC model aircraft or older drones which also make them Remote ID compliant (unless they are under 250g in mass or are flown in pre-approved areas called FRIAs)....

Drone and radio-controlled model aircraft users must register with the FAA [unless they weigh less than 0.55 pounds], sit (and pass) a knowledge test and soon have this Remote ID technology installed on all their craft.
"Remote ID helps the FAA, law enforcement, and other federal agencies find the control station when a drone appears to be flying in an unsafe manner or where it is not allowed to fly," argues an FAA web page. This week the top intelligence official at the U.S. Department of Defense told reporters that drones, including drones operated by amateur hobbyists and by foreign adversaries, account for many of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, according to the Washington Post.

They quote Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of America's new UFO-tracking agency, as saying that "Some of these things almost collide with planes. We see that on a regular basis...."

Federal prosecutors have charged six people for allegedly operating websites that launched millions of powerful distributed denial-of-service attacks on a wide array of victims on behalf of millions of paying customers. From a report: The sites promoted themselves as booter or stressor services designed to test the bandwidth and performance of customers' networks. Prosecutors said in court papers that the services were used to direct massive amounts of junk traffic at third-party websites and Internet connections customers wanted to take down or seriously constrain. Victims included educational institutions, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of individuals. Besides charging six defendants, prosecutors also seized 48 Internet domains associated with the services.

"These booter services allow anyone to launch cyberattacks that harm individual victims and compromise everyone's ability to access the Internet," Martin Estrada, US attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. "This week's sweeping law enforcement activity is a major step in our ongoing efforts to eradicate criminal conduct that threatens the Internet's infrastructure and our ability to function in a digital world." The services offered user interfaces that were essentially the same except for cosmetic differences. The screenshot below shows the web panel offered by orphicsecurityteam.com as of February 28. It allowed users to enter an IP address of a target, the network port, and the specific type of attack they wanted. The panel allowed users to pick various methods to amplify their attacks. Amplification involved bouncing a relatively small amount of specially crafted data at a third-party server in a way that caused the server to pummel the intended victim with payloads that were as much as 10,000 times bigger.

The U.S. National Security Agency is warning that Chinese government-backed hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in two widely used Citrix networking products to gain access to targeted networks. From a report: The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-27518, affects Citrix ADC, an application delivery controller, and Citrix Gateway, a remote access tool, and are both popular in enterprise networks. The critical-rated vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely run malicious code on vulnerable devices -- no passwords needed. Citrix also says the flaw is being actively exploited by threat actors. "We are aware of a small number of targeted attacks in the wild using this vulnerability," Peter Lefkowitz, chief security and trust officer at Citrix, said in a blog post. "Limited exploits of this vulnerability have been reported." Citrix hasn't specified which industries the targeted organizations are in or how many have been compromised.

The newly elected government in Pacific island nation of Vanuatu encountered a serious problem from the very first day of its term on Nov. 6 -- no one could use their government email accounts. But then the situation got worse. Much worse. From a report: Officials could not use any government computer services, from renewing a drivers' license to paying taxes or accessing medical and emergency information. They were forced to turn to 20th century technology -- pen and paper. That's a major problem in a nation where the population of around 320,000 people is distributed across dozens of islands north of New Zealand. "Imagine if in the U.S. or the U.K. or Australia, a new government has started and there's a whole changeover ... you can't even allocate email addresses to your new staff, you can't coordinate what's happening between ministers," Glen Craig, managing partner of the consulting firm Pacific Advisory, told NPR in a phone interview.

"We're the first country in the world that this has happened to. ... It's not a good time in Vanuatu, I can assure you," continued Craig, who also serves as chairman of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council. After more than three weeks of working on the problem, Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau told local news outlets Wednesday that services were 70 percent restored. However, the disruption continues. Vanuatu's government officials first discovered suspicious activity on their networks, many of which are centrally connected, on Nov. 6. They revealed the breach to local media several days later, but have so far been fairly tight lipped about the extent of the damage, the possible culprits, and what's being done to recover service. Some sources have suggested the attack was ransomware, in which cybercriminals break in and take data hostage in exchange for payment, though the government has not officially confirmed whether that's the case or addressed whether a ransom payment was made.

The federal government plans to invest $1.5 billion to help spur a standards-based alternative for the gear at the heart of modern cellular networks. From a report: Experts say -- and the government agrees -- that there are economic and national security risks in having such equipment made only by a handful of companies overseas, with the most affordable products coming from China's Huawei. The most likely effort to benefit from the new funding is known as ORAN (Open Radio Access Network), which uses standard computing gear to replace what has been proprietary hardware from companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei. The federal government is kicking off the program with a public comment period, which will run through Jan. 23. Funding for the effort was provided by the Chips and Science Act. The U.S. has largely banned use of Huawei's devices over security concerns amid deepening U.S.-China tensions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, a Texas-based company announced that it had successfully deployed the largest-ever commercial communications satellite in low-Earth orbit. This BlueWalker 3 demonstration satellite measures nearly 65 square meters, or about one-third the size of a tennis court. Designed and developed by AST SpaceMobile, the expansive BlueWalker 3 satellite is intended to demonstrate the ability of standard mobile phones to directly connect to the Internet via satellite. Large satellites are necessary to connect to mobile devices without a ground-based antenna. [...] Since BlueWalker3's launch in September, astronomers have been tracking the satellite, and their alarm was heightened following its antenna deployment last month. According to the International Astronomical Union, post-deployment measurements showed that BlueWalker 3 had an apparent visual magnitude of around 1 at its brightest, which is nearly as bright as Antares and Spica, the 15th and 16th brightest stars in the night sky.

For a few years, astronomers have been expressing concerns about megaconstellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink satellites. While these are more numerous -- there are more than 3,000 Starlink satellites in orbit -- they are much smaller and far less bright than the kinds of satellites AST plans to launch. Eventually, AST plans to launch a constellation of 168 large satellites to provide "substantial" global coverage, a company spokesperson said. Even one is enough for astronomers, however. "BlueWalker 3 is a big shift in the constellation satellite issue and should give us all reason to pause," said Piero Benvenuti, a director at the International Astronomical Union.

The organization of astronomers is also concerned about the potential for radio interference from these "cell phone towers in space." They will transmit strong radio waves at frequencies currently reserved for terrestrial cell phone communications but are not subject to the same radio quiet zone restrictions that ground-based cellular networks are. This could severely impact radio astronomy research -- which was used to discover cosmic microwave background radiation, for example -- as well as work in related fields. Astronomers currently build their radio astronomy observatories in remote areas, far from cell tower interference. They are worried that these large, radio-wave transmitting satellites will interfere in unpopulated areas. "We are eager to use the newest technologies and strategies to mitigate possible impacts to astronomy," AST said in a statement to Ars. "We are actively working with industry experts on the latest innovations, including next-generation anti-reflective materials. We are also engaged with NASA and certain working groups within the astronomy community to participate in advanced industry solutions, including potential operational interventions."

AST is "committed to avoiding broadcasts inside or adjacent to the National Radio Quiet Zone in the United States [...] as well as additional radioastronomy locations," adds Ars.

More than 1 billion people will be connected to 5G by the end of 2022, according to the latest mobility report from Ericsson. CNET reports: Between July and September of this year, 5G added 110 million subscribers around the world, upping the total count to 870 million, said the report, released Wednesday. That's almost double the number of 5G subscribers there were by the end of 2021, which the Swedish telecommunications equipment maker estimated to be 580 million. If 5G users hit the 1 billion this year, that means fifth-generation networks will have hit the nine-figure subscriber mark two years faster than 4G did, said Ericsson, confirming that 5G is so far the "fastest-scaling mobile connectivity generation."

4G subscriptions are still growing as well, with 41 million subscribers added between July and September. It's anticipated they will peak at 5.2 billion by the end of the year, and mobile subscriptions overall are forecast to exceed 8.4 billion. By 2028, 5G is expected to reach 5 billion subscriptions globally and make up 55% of all network subscriptions, according to the report. Overall mobile subscriptions in 2028 are expected to be more than 9.2 billion.

hondo77 writes: Two years ago, Disney Research Studios developed AI-powered tools that could generate face swap videos with enough quality and resolution to be used for professional filmmaking (instead of as questionably low-res GIFs shared around the internet). This year, the researchers are demonstrating a new tool that leverages AI tricks to make actors look older or younger, minus the weeks of work usually needed to perfect those kinds of shots.

Using neural networks and machine learning to age or de-age a person has already been tried, and while the results are convincing enough when applied to still images, they hadn't produce photorealistic results on moving video, with temporal artifacts that appear and disappear from frame to frame, and the person's appearance occasionally becoming unrecognizable as the altered video plays. To make an age-altering AI tool that was ready for the demands of Hollywood and flexible enough to work on moving footage or shots where an actor isn't always looking directly at the camera, Disney's researchers, as detailed in a recently published paper, first created a database of thousands of randomly generated synthetic faces. Existing machine learning aging tools were then used to age and de-age these thousands of non-existent test subjects, and those results were then used to train a new neural network called FRAN (face re-aging network).