The BBC writes: Super Mario Bros: Wonder is a psychedelic take on the traditional 2D platformer that jazzes up Mario's usual Bowser-thwarting adventure with Wonder Effects that, as Polygon's Chris Plante put it, sees "the levels themselves collapse and contort, disobeying the laws established by decades of Mario games".

It's as if developers unearthed the "stuffed notebook of chaos" of every wacky idea ever rejected from the series and turned it into a single game, Plante said... [T]he game offers "so many different looks and wild hooks that the typically forgettable story simply didn't matter," said IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, who enthused: "Every frame oozes joy...." The Guardian's Keza McDonald says the game carries the sort of fun expected by Mario fans, "but with enough novelty and unexpected twists to prevent it from feeling over-familiar", and at the same time for newcomers "is a wonderful introduction to the fizzy creativity and attention to detail that has made Mario a family staple".

This is the first time the Mario developers have delved into online multiplayer in the traditional 2D space, where previously co-op play required players to share a console in person. "It feels more like you're working together," McDonald said. "Characters can revive one another if someone falls foul of a Bullet Bill or flaming pit, making the game much easier to get through as a team."
GamesRadar's Sam Loveridge added "There's also an attention to detail here that just heightens that magic playfulness. There's so much to spot, whether it's the snot bubble on a sleeping Goomba or the fact each character's face changes when they start dashing."

Although Kotaku has a suggestion. "Before you get too ahead of yourself turning Mario and company into giant elephants and whatnot, you should mess around with some gameplay settings first — especially the one that controls the Talking Flowers." Earlier this week, in another edition of Nintendo's ongoing web series, Ask the Developer, we learned that Wonder was originally going to have a live commentary feature like what you'd find in a sports game. It was scrapped, but found new life through the game's Talking Flowers characters who shout at Mario and crew whenever they walk by. Although the Talking Flowers are a cute addition to the game and make solo playthroughs a little less lonely, your mileage with them may vary. Some people think the Talking Flowers, who talk all the time, are pretty annoying, if you can believe that.

Matthew Sparkes reports via NewScientist: A prominent cryptography expert has told New Scientist that a US spy agency could be weakening a new generation of algorithms designed to protect against hackers equipped with quantum computers. Daniel Bernstein at the University of Illinois Chicago says that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is deliberately obscuring the level of involvement the US National Security Agency (NSA) has in developing new encryption standards for "post-quantum cryptography" (PQC). He also believes that NIST has made errors -- either accidental or deliberate -- in calculations describing the security of the new standards. NIST denies the claims.

Bernstein alleges that NIST's calculations for one of the upcoming PQC standards, Kyber512, are "glaringly wrong," making it appear more secure than it really is. He says that NIST multiplied two numbers together when it would have been more correct to add them, resulting in an artificially high assessment of Kyber512's robustness to attack. "We disagree with his analysis," says Dustin Moody at NIST. "It's a question for which there isn't scientific certainty and intelligent people can have different views. We respect Dan's opinion, but don't agree with what he says." Moody says that Kyber512 meets NIST's "level one" security criteria, which makes it at least as hard to break as a commonly used existing algorithm, AES-128. That said, NIST recommends that, in practice, people should use a stronger version, Kyber768, which Moody says was a suggestion from the algorithm's developers.

NIST is currently in a period of public consultation and hopes to reveal the final standards for PQC algorithms next year so that organizations can begin to adopt them. The Kyber algorithm seems likely to make the cut as it has already progressed through several layers of selection. Given its secretive nature, it is difficult to say for sure whether or not the NSA has influenced the PQC standards, but there have long been suggestions and rumors that the agency deliberately weakens encryption algorithms. In 2013, The New York Times reported that the agency had a budget of $250 million for the task, and intelligence agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden in the same year contained references to the NSA deliberately placing a backdoor in a cryptography algorithm, although that algorithm was later dropped from official standards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect -- and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement [...] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.

While the law is complex, the reason it's hated is not: It's effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes -- a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. [...] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. "Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers," [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. "If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result."

Meanwhile, the protest movement is steady on the ground in Tokyo. Voiction, which has been meeting with legislators to try to halt the law, plans on continuing to fight through the rest of the year and beyond. [Voice actress Yuhko Kaida] explains that the government could still decide to allow small businesses to not file 2023's consumption tax in March 2024, when taxes are due. "If we have the willpower, we can stop this law," Kaida says. "Then we can reduce the damage to people's lives."

Microsoft is discontinuing the Kinect, again. The Verge explains: The company officially stopped manufacturing the depth camera and microphone in 2017 and brought it back in a new form in 2019 as the Azure Kinect Developer Kit. Now, Microsoft is ending production of that, too, but it has partnered with some outside companies to provide options available for people who need similar types of devices.

If you want to get one of the remaining Azure Kinect Developer Kits, they'll be available to buy through the end of October or "until supplies last," Microsoft's Swati Mehta said in a post on the company's website. If you already have one, Mehta promises that you can keep using it "without disruption." "As the needs of our customers and partners evolve, we regularly update our products to best support them," Mehta wrote. "From time to time, this includes introducing new opportunities, as well as retiring products. We have made the decision to end production of Azure Kinect Developer Kit, but this is far from the end of this technology as it will continue to be available through our partner ecosystem." One alternate suggestion from Mehta is Orbbec's Femto Bolt, which uses the depth camera module found in the Azure Kinect Developer Kit.

Apple has announced a new operating system for its Vision Pro headset. Called visionOS, the operating system has been designed from the ground up for spatial computing and will have its own App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps and compatible iPhone and iPad apps. The Verge reports: The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces. The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset -- a feature Apple calls "EyeSight."

It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset. It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You'll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies -- Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show.

Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote. The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you're wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "Users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona -- a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques -- which reflects face and hand movements in real time." You can learn more about Apple's first spatial computer here. A dedicated page for the Vision Pro headset is also now available on Apple.com.

An anonymous readers shared this report from the Washington Post: Brian Hood is a whistleblower who was praised for "showing tremendous courage" when he helped expose a worldwide bribery scandal linked to Australia's National Reserve Bank. But if you ask ChatGPT about his role in the scandal, you get the opposite version of events. Rather than heralding Hood's whistleblowing role, ChatGPT falsely states that Hood himself was convicted of paying bribes to foreign officials, had pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption, and been sentenced to prison.

When Hood found out, he was shocked. Hood, who is now mayor of Hepburn Shire near Melbourne in Australia, said he plans to sue the company behind ChatGPT for telling lies about him, in what could be the first defamation suit of its kind against the artificial intelligence chatbot.... "There's never, ever been a suggestion anywhere that I was ever complicit in anything, so this machine has completely created this thing from scratch," Hood said — confirming his intention to file a defamation suit against ChatGPT. "There needs to be proper control and regulation over so-called artificial intelligence, because people are relying on them...."

If it proceeds, Hood's lawsuit will be the first time someone filed a defamation suit against ChatGPT's content, according to Reuters. If it reaches the courts, the case would test uncharted legal waters, forcing judges to consider whether the operators of an artificial intelligence bot can be held accountable for its allegedly defamatory statements.
The article notes that ChatGPT prominently warns users that it "may occasionally generate incorrect information." And another Post article notes that all the major chatbots now include disclaimers, "such as Bard's fine-print message below each query: 'Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views.'"

But the Post also notes that ChatGPT still "invented a fake sexual harassment story involving a real law professor, Jonathan Turley — citing a Washington Post article that did not exist as its evidence." Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 tipped us off to that story. But here's what happened when the Washington Post searched for accountability for the error: In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said, "When users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress...." Katy Asher, senior communications director at Microsoft, said the company is taking steps to ensure search results are safe and accurate. "We have developed a safety system including content filtering, operational monitoring, and abuse detection to provide a safe search experience for our users," Asher said in a statement, adding that "users are also provided with explicit notice that they are interacting with an AI system."

But it remains unclear who is responsible when artificial intelligence generates or spreads inaccurate information. From a legal perspective, "we just don't know" how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says, said Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and expert on online speech. "We've not had anything like this before."

"All right, we're going to begin this hour with a question on many people's minds these days, amid all these major developments in the field of artificial intelligence. And that question is this: How long until the machines replace us, take our jobs?"

That's the beginning of a segment broadcast on CBS's morning-television news show (with the headline, "Will artificial intelligence erase jobs?") Some excerpts:


"As artificial intelligence gets better.... job security is only supposed to get worse. And in reports like this one, of the top jobs our AI overlords plan to kill, coding or computing programming is often on the list. So with the indulgence of Sam Zonka, a coder and instructor at the General Assembly coding school in New York, I decided to test the idea of an imminent AI takeover -- by seeing if the software could code for someone who knows as little about computers as me -- eliminating the need to hire someone like him."

Gayle King: "So all this gobbledy-gook on the screen. That's what people who sit in these classrooms learn?"

"And I for one was prepared to be amazed. But take a look at the results. About as basic as a basic web site can be."

King: What do you think? You're the professional.
Zonka: Ehh.

[Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also spoke to CBS right before the launch of its OpenAI-powered Bing search engine, arguing that AI will create more satisfaction in current jobs as well as more net new jobs -- and even helping the economy across the board. "My biggest worry," Nadella says, "is we need some new technology that starts driving real productivity. It's time for some real innovation.]

King: Do you think it'll drive up wages?
Nadella: I do believe it will drive up wages, because productivity and wages are related.


At the end of the report, King tells his co-anchors "In the long term, the research suggests Nadella is correct. In the long term, more jobs, more money. It's in the short-term that all the pain happens."

The report also features an interview with MIT economist David Autor, saying he believes the rise of AI "does indeed mean millions of jobs are going to change in our lifetime. And what's scary is we're just not sure how.... He points out, for example, that more than 60% of the types of jobs people are doing today didn't even exist in the 1940s -- while many of the jobs that did exist have been replaced."

There was also a quote from Meredith Whittaker (co-founder of the AI Now Institute and former FTC advisor), who notes that AI systems "don't replace human labor. They just require different forms of labor to sort of babysit them to train them, to make sure they're working well. Whose work will be degraded and whose house in the Hamptons will get another wing? I think that's the fundamental question when we look at these technologies and ask questions about work."

Later King tells his co-anchors that Whittaker's suggestion was for workers to organize to try to shape how AI system are implemented in their workplace.

But at an open house for the General Assembly code camp, coder Zonka says on a scale of 1 to 10, his worry about AI was only a 2. "The problem is that I'm not entirely sure if the AI that would replace me is 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or 5 years from now."

So after speaking to all the experts, King synthesized what he'd learned. "Don't necessarily panic. You see these lists of all the jobs that are going to be eliminated. We're not very good at making those predictions. Things happen in different ways than we expect. And you could actually find an opportunity to make more money, if you figure out how you can complement the machine as opposed to getting replaced by the machine."

Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct. The Register reports: In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes. Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf's description in the documentary "Trillions and Trillions Served" of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like "spider" and came up with "Apache" after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said: "This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western 'romantic' presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company 'for the greater good' is as ignorant as it is offensive."

And the aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to "be careful in the words that [they] choose" by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name. In a statement emailed to The Register, an ASF spokesperson said, "We hear the concerns from the Native American people and are listening. As a non-profit run by volunteers, changes will need time to be carefully weighed with members, the board, and our legal team. Our members are exploring alternative ways to address it, but we don't have anything to share at this time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Federal Trade Commission is likely to file an antitrust lawsuit to block Microsoft's $69 billion takeover of video game giant Activision Blizzard, maker of the hit games Call of Duty and Candy Crush, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. A lawsuit would be the FTC's biggest move yet under Chair Lina Khan to rein in the power of the world's largest technology companies. It would also be a major black mark for Microsoft, which has positioned itself as a white knight of sorts on antitrust issues in the tech sector after going through its own grueling regulatory antitrust battles around the world more than two decades ago.

A lawsuit challenging the deal is not guaranteed, and the FTC's four commissioners have yet to vote out a complaint or meet with lawyers for the companies, two of the people said. However, the FTC staff reviewing the deal are skeptical of the companies' arguments, those people said. The investigation remains ongoing, but much of the heavy lifting is completed, including depositions of Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and Activision head Bobby Kotick, the people with knowledge of the investigation said. If the agency does move ahead with a case, it could come as soon as next month, said the people, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential matter.

Central to the FTC's concerns is whether acquiring Activision would give Microsoft an unfair boost in the video game market. Microsoft's Xbox is number three to the industry-leading Sony Interactive Entertainment and its PlayStation console. Sony, however, has emerged as the deal's primary opponent, telling the FTC and regulators in other countries that if Microsoft made hit games like Call of Duty exclusive to its platforms Sony would be significantly disadvantaged. [...] To a lesser extent, Google is also an opponent of the deal, according to two of the people with knowledge of the matter. The company has argued that Microsoft has purposely degraded the quality of its Game Pass subscription service when used with Google's Chrome operating system, and owning Activision would further its incentive to do so, ultimately steering hardware sales towards Microsoft and away from Google, the people said. Last month, Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer said he intends to continue to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to."

Microsoft spokesperson David Cuddy said the company "is prepared to address the concerns of regulators, including the FTC, and Sony to ensure the deal closes with confidence. We'll still trail Sony and Tencent in the market after the deal closes, and together Activision and Xbox will benefit gamers and developers and make the industry more competitive."

"Any suggestion that the transaction could lead to anticomp effects is completely absurd. This merger will benefit gamers and the US gaming industry, especially as we face increasingly stiff competition from abroad," added Activision spokesperson Joe Christinat. "We are committed to continuing to work cooperatively with regulators around the globe to allow the transaction to proceed, but will not hesitate to fight to defend the transaction if required."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot -- a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet -- has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work -- pulled from the training data -- to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there's been a strong response to news of his investigation. "Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source," he wrote. "We're hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found -- that it's not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. "But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author's copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We're looking at all these issues." GitHub's documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain "undesirable patterns" and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. "What Microsoft's GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable," he said. "Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses."

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, "AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve." He added: "An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms -- or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?"

While there is a lot of noise about the hottest programming languages and the evolution of Web3, blockchain and the metaverse, none of this will matter if the industry doesn't have highly skilled software developers to build them," argues ZDNet.

So they spoke to Ori Bendet, VP of product management at CheckMarx, a builder software that tests application security. His prediction? Automatic code generators (ACG) like Github CoPilot, AWS CodeWhisperer and Tab9 will eventually replace "traditional" coding. "Although ACG is not as good as developers may think," Bendet says, "over the next few years, every developer will have their code generated, leaving them more time to focus on their core business." As businesses turn to automation as a means of quickly building and deploying new apps and digital services, low code and no code tools will play a fundamental role in shaping the future of the internet. According to a 2021 Gartner forecast, by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will be based on low-code or no-code tools, compared to less than 25% in 2020. A lot of this work will be done by 'citizen developers' — employees who build business apps for themselves and other users using low code tools, but who don't have formal training in computer programming. In order to build a proficient citizen developer workforce, companies will need an equally innovative approach to training.

"Low code and no code tools are democratizing software development and providing opportunities for more people to build technology, prompting more innovation across industries," says Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow....

The rise of low-code and no-code will also help to further democratize tech jobs, creating more opportunities for talented individuals from non-tech or non-academic backgrounds. A 2022 survey by developer recruitment platforms CoderPad and CodinGame found that 81% of tech recruiters now readily hire from 'no-degree' candidate profiles. CodinGame COO Aude Barral believes this trend will only grow as the demand for software professionals intensifies.
Stack Overflow's CEO sees some limitations. "Without taking the time to learn the fundamentals of writing code or the context in which code is used, developers using low-code or code suggestion tools will hit a limit in the quality and functionality of their code."

How is this playing out in the real world of professional IT? I'd like to invite Slashdot's readers to share their own experiences in the comments.

Are you seeing low-code and no-code development replacing traditional coding?

The Google Assistant is losing the ability to create location-based reminders. Ars Technica reports: These were incredibly useful commands you could tell Google Assistant, like, "remind me to take the trash out when I get home," and your phone, which is always tracking your location, would ping you when you walked in the door. You could also say things like, "remind me to buy milk next time I'm at Walmart," and it would just work. Google is sending out notifications telling users the feature is dead. A message on a Google support page says: "The option to create reminders for a certain location is going away soon. You can still create reminders at a certain time and set routines for a location." Suggesting routines as a replacement is a ludicrous suggestion, since routines are, well, routine, and want to repeat after a set period of time. They also are meant to trigger smart-home automation or alarm clocks; they aren't simple notifications.

Another reminder feature getting the ax is a fairly new one, probably dying due to a lack of usage. In 2019 Google announced the ability to send reminders to other people. Actually doing this was pretty difficult, though. You would have to either be in the Google "Family" ecosystem and have them set up in the family link or have that person be someone you share an Assistant device with, like a roommate. It's not clear why the company is suddenly gutting a useful and easy-to-use feature. [...]

UPDATE: Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen have now responded to Elon Musk's suggestion to create a homeless shelter out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, "since no one shows up anyway."

And at some point over the weekend, Musk also suggested a new way that Twitter could use Dogecoin...

It all started when the newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — began tweeting new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets.

"And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Musk later offered suggestions about how to implement that subscription fee, according to the Associated Press. Musk suggested it "should be proportionate to affordability and in local currency."

And he added, "Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?" referring to Dogecoin cryptocurrency.

But moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea:

Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway.

Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.")

Sunday night Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, "a fellow billionaire, responded Sunday with a link to a report about an [8-story] homeless shelter attached to an Amazon office building, noting that a portion of Twitter's space could be converted, making it easier for employees who want to volunteer. Musk called the suggestion a "great idea...."

Homelessness is a particularly visible problem at Twitter's headquarters, located in a part of San Francisco where residents have grappled with urban decay and drug addiction.
Silicon valley entrepreneur/investor Marc Andreessen then posted his own three-word reply. Apparently in response to Bezos's suggestion that employees could volunteer more easily if if a portion of their building were a homeless shelter, Andreessen joked, "Every other desk?"

And five hours after Musk's homeless shelter poll, he'd moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea:

Delete the w in Twitter?

COVID-19 pandemic restrictions could end "soon," even as early as this year, NIAID director Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday. From a report: Fauci explained that he does not believe "we are going to eradicate this virus," but said that it will instead reach an "equilibrium." He said, "I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the COVID restrictions will soon be a thing of the past." Fauci added that he hoped restrictions would end "soon," agreeing with a suggestion that they could largely end this year. Fauci also said that as the U.S. is "certainly heading out" of a particularly difficult phase of the pandemic driven largely by Omicron, local health departments will be the ones to make virus-related decisions instead of the Biden administration.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The gorse bushes that have invaded many Scottish landscapes could produce enough protein to feed millions of people, according to the leader of a Scottish government research program. The surprising suggestion by Prof Wendy Russell, at the University of Aberdeen, comes from research on the protein content of invasive plants that have to be doused with herbicides or burned back to keep them under control. Gorse contains 17% protein and broom has 21% protein, she said, adding: "Gorse and broom were fed to cattle at times when crops failed in the past, so we think protein from these types of plants could be used as animal food. If protein isolates are produced in the correct way, so to be safe, they could be considered as human food in the future."

"The whole point about gorse is it is actively being removed from marginal lands -- it's something we can gain protein from at no extra cost," she said. "We have a huge amount of gorse all over Scotland and when we did the calculations, just by active removal from marginal land, there's enough gorse protein to easily feed [Scotland's] population." [...] Scotland has little arable land, which is why Russell examined invasive plants on marginal land. "When you make a protein isolate from gorse, 57% of the total leaf protein can be recovered at up to 95% purity," she said. "We're using about 4.5 to 6kg of CO2 to produce [a kilogram of] isolate, compared to an average for meat of 102kg of CO2."

Bleeping Computer has an update on the unique predicament of Compound, "an Ethereum-based money market protocol that enables users to earn interest or borrow assets against collateral." (Which "Due to an erroneous upgrade process, the decentralized finance platform ended up spilling out Ethereum assets worth $90 million to its users...") Compound's founder Robert Leshner urged users who received these Compound tokens in error to return the assets to the platform's Timelock contract. To incentivize users, Leshner stated that for their "white-hat" behaviour they may keep 10% as a reward. "Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed," threatened the founder in the same tweet... Realizing that the original wording of his tweet may not have sat well with many, Leshner revised his tone:

"I'm trying to do anything I can to help the community get some of its COMP back, and this was a bone-headed tweet / approach. That's on me," said Leshner. "Luckily, the community is much bigger, and smarter, than just me. I appreciate your ridicule and support...."

Because the Compound protocol requires a seven-day governance process before any production changes can be made, Compound's only option at this time is to wait on users, hoping they will return the assets.
CoinDesk reported Friday afternoon that "So far, two users have returned a total of 37,493 COMP tokens worth over $12 million at the time of writing." But on Saturday Leshner was tweeting out more thank-you's to additional white-hat users "returning COMP to the community." In an interview with CoinDesk, Leshner said the moral dilemma can be split roughly into two camps. "There's a lot of members of the community that view protocols like Compound as benefitting the entire ecosystem," he said. "And there are some users that don't necessarily care. The builder mindset is, 'This adds value, this is crucially important,' and the trader mindset is 'Money is money,' and that's the only ethos of crypto."

He went on: "I'm personally hopeful users will return funds to the community. It's not my property, it's not their property, it's the community's property...."
One suggestion from Twitter? "The first 5 people to return COMP get 1/5 pieces of Leshner NFT that can be combined Exodia style to summon Robert in real life." "This idea is crazy, and I'm in," Leshner tweeted, adding later that "Anyone who returns COMP to the community is an alien giga-chad; and if a squad of alien giga-chads ever summon me, I will appear."

Leshner told CoinDesk: "I want to hear other people's views on this, because it's not my decision," he said. "This is a decision every user has to make themselves, and I think most of them are taking the view of, 'Haha, f**k you guys, it's your problem.'"

Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report "missing content" on Netflix. TorrentFreak reports: There is a flurry of complaints on social media from users whose VPN services were suddenly 'blocked' by Netflix. Previously, these people couldn't play any content while using a VPN. That changed last year. Now, VPN users can still see Netflix originals while other content is hidden and blocked. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-less-annoying-to-vpn-users-now-but-some-titles-are-hidden-200618/

Netflix doesn't explain which IP addresses are blocked and why, but the most recent efforts are much broader than before. This issue was brought to our attention by WeVPN, which noticed that the updated geo-fencing system is blocking its residential IP addresses. These IP addresses are assigned to common consumer ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. While it makes sense for Netflix to put an end to these workarounds, there appears to be some collateral damage. "The collateral damage is that you have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked from accessing Netflix's local country full catalog from their home," a WeVPN spokesperson informs us. While we are unable to verify how many people are facing issues, it is clear that the measures are spilling over to regular subscribers.

While Netflix hasn't released an official comment on the situation, the company is aware of the problems. One user who complained on Twitter, got the advice to contact their ISP to see if their IP address is associated with proxy or VPN use. This is a peculiar suggestion, as the blocking is taking place on Netflix's end. WeVPN told us that the company is experimenting with a solution, which appears to function for now. CyberGhost and Private Internet Access, which were also affected by Netflix's new blockades, say they managed to route around it within a day. In an update, a Netflix spokesperson said that the company is not banning all content for VPN and proxy services. Netflix originals are still available and the streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.

According to Axios, Jason Miller, an aide and close advisor to Donald Trump, is launching a new social app called "Gettr" in the coming days. From the report: The app, which is in beta testing, appears in the Apple App Store and is described as "a non-bias social network for people all over the world." Gettr, which is still in its infancy, appears to have a few thousand users, according to follower counts of some of the more prominent, suggested accounts. Many users, however, appear anonymous, lacking much profile information. The app looks like Twitter, with a scrolling news feed with a small pencil at the bottom for users to compose a message. It has a search function and like Twitter, a trending topics function. While a quick scroll through the accounts suggests patterns pro-conservatism, there's no obvious suggestion that the app is built by Trump allies. Many of the more prominent suggested accounts, including a general news account called "Daily News" appear to have been created in May of this year. [...] It's unclear how Miller plans to debut the app, but sources tell Axios that other former Trump aides will help aide the rollout. "Data shows that almost every major conservative social network has seen a dramatic decrease in downloads since the Capitol insurrection," notes Axios.

One of the most recent conservative social media sites to be launched was FRANK, a social media site envisioned by Mike Lindell of MyPillow. It's off to a rough start though, as it not only resulted in a legal threat before being launched, but it suffered from many "amateur-hour mistakes" during its rollout. A Drupal expert described the code as "not even student work," adding that "they basically launched the site while it was still in development mode."

UPDATE: The Daily Beast notes that Gettr "is backed by a fugitive Chinese billionaire who once invited Steve Bannon to live on his yacht."
What's not made clear to Gettr's new users is that the site received initial funding from a foundation owned by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and his family... "Some of the initial seed money has come from his family foundation," Trump adviser Jason Miller said of Guo, who also goes by the name Miles Kwok...

The Trump adviser said the company was backed by a "consortium of international investors," but declined to name them, beyond the Guo foundation, or the total amount of money that has been invested in the new social-media property so far. But while Miller downplayed Guo's connection, sites associated with the billionaire have suggested that Gettr is Guo's brainchild. In a June video on GTV, a media outlet that serves as a mouthpiece for Guo, a host summarizing a recent comment Guo made about Gettr said that the social media platform was "the concentration of Miles's whole life work...."

Guo's legions of social media supporters and trolls were among the first and most vocal adopters of Gettr starting on June 14, the day the app's site went live.
Citing a report from Bloomberg, New York Magazine adds that former U.S. president Trump "is not yet desperate enough to follow one of his aides in a venture that has no financial benefit to him."

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy.

"Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.

Google's Android team supports Rust for developing the Android operating system. Now they're also helping evaluate Rust for Linux kernel development. Their hopes, among other things, are that "New code written in Rust has a reduced risk of memory safety bugs, data races and logic bugs overall," that "abstractions that are easier to reason about," and "More people get involved overall in developing the kernel, thanks to the usage of a modern language."

Linus Torvalds responded in a new interview with IT Wire (shared by Slashdot reader juul_advocate): The first patches for Rust support in the Linux kernel have been posted and the man behind the kernel says the fact that these are being discussed is much more important than a long post by Google about the language. Linus Torvalds told iTWire in response to queries that Rust support was "not there yet", adding that things were "getting to the point where maybe it might be mergeable for 5.14 or something like that..." Torvalds said that it was still early days for Rust support, "but at least it's in a 'this kind of works, there's an example, we can build on it'."

Asked about a suggestion by a commenter on the Linux Weekly News website, who said, during a discussion on the Google post, "The solution here is simple: just use C++ instead of Rust", Torvalds could not restrain himself from chortling. "LOL," was his response. "C++ solves _none_ of the C issues, and only makes things worse. It really is a crap language.

"For people who don't like C, go to a language that actually offers you something worthwhile. Like languages with memory safety and [which] can avoid some of the dangers of C, or languages that have internal GC [garbage collection] support and make memory management easier. C++ solves all the wrong problems, and anybody who says 'rewrite the kernel in C++' is too ignorant to even know that."

He said that when one spoke of the dangers of C, one was also speaking about part of what made C so powerful, "and allows you to implement all those low-level things efficiently".
Torvalds added that, while garbage collection is "a very good thing in most other situations," it's "generally not necessarily something you can do in a low-level system programming."