100 miles south of the Canadian border, the tiny town of Bemidji, Minnesota "has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages" since early November, reports the Washington Post, "and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service tells the Post that's not true, and that their service "does not prioritize the delivery of packages from Amazon or other customers."

But whatever's going on, the Post reports that "The result has been chaos..." Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say... Dennis Nelson, a veteran mail carrier, said he got so frustrated watching multiple co-workers "breaking down and crying" that he staged a symbolic strike earlier this month outside the post office where he has worked for more than 20 years...

Bemidji is not the only place where postal workers say they have been overwhelmed by packages from Amazon... Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state's San Juan Islands.

The situation stems from a crisis at the Postal Service, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year. The post office has had a contract with Amazon since 2013, when it started delivering packages on Sundays. But in recent years, that business has exploded as Amazon has increasingly come to rely on postal carriers to make "last-mile" deliveries in harder-to-reach rural locations. The Postal Service considers the contract proprietary and has declined to disclose its terms. But U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said publicly that "increasing package volume" — not just from Amazon, but from FedEx and UPS as well — is key to the mail service's financial future. In a Nov. 14 speech to the Postal Service Board of Governors, DeJoy said he wants the post office to become the "preferred delivery provider in the nation...."

In bigger cities, Amazon has its own distribution network, which takes some of the pressure off the post office. But in rural areas, where carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their personal vehicles, the arrangement has caused problems. In the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are struggling with the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Post reported in September, while mail carriers in Carbondale say they are overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said...

Partenheimer defended the post office's record in an email, while conceding "much work remains to be done...."
An Amazon spokesperson told the Post "We work directly with the USPS to balance our delivery needs with their available capacity," and "we'll continue to collaborate on package volume each week and adjust as needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success. But along the way, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions -- and that a 1960s computer program surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT. Even with limitations and caveats, which we'll cover below, the paper presents a thought-provoking comparison between AI model approaches and raises further questions about using the Turing test to evaluate AI model performance.

In the recent study, listed on arXiv at the end of October, UC San Diego researchers Cameron Jones (a PhD student in Cognitive Science) and Benjamin Bergen (a professor in the university's Department of Cognitive Science) set up a website called turingtest.live, where they hosted a two-player implementation of the Turing test over the Internet with the goal of seeing how well GPT-4, when prompted different ways, could convince people it was human. Through the site, human interrogators interacted with various "AI witnesses" representing either other humans or AI models that included the aforementioned GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA, a rules-based conversational program from the 1960s. "The two participants in human matches were randomly assigned to the interrogator and witness roles," write the researchers. "Witnesses were instructed to convince the interrogator that they were human. Players matched with AI models were always interrogators."

The experiment involved 652 participants who completed a total of 1,810 sessions, of which 1,405 games were analyzed after excluding certain scenarios like repeated AI games (leading to the expectation of AI model interactions when other humans weren't online) or personal acquaintance between participants and witnesses, who were sometimes sitting in the same room. Surprisingly, ELIZA, developed in the mid-1960s by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, scored relatively well during the study, achieving a success rate of 27 percent. GPT-3.5, depending on the prompt, scored a 14 percent success rate, below ELIZA. GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans. "Ultimately, the study's authors concluded that GPT-4 does not meet the success criteria of the Turing test, reaching neither a 50 percent success rate (greater than a 50/50 chance) nor surpassing the success rate of human participants," reports Ars. "The researchers speculate that with the right prompt design, GPT-4 or similar models might eventually pass the Turing test. However, the challenge lies in crafting a prompt that mimics the subtlety of human conversation styles. And like GPT-3.5, GPT-4 has also been conditioned not to present itself as human."

"It seems very likely that much more effective prompts exist, and therefore that our results underestimate GPT-4's potential performance at the Turing Test," the authors write.

Microsoft is talking to partners to help launch a mobile gaming store that will take on Apple and Google's dominant position in the business, according to Phil Spencer, who leads the company's Xbox video-game division. From a report: "It's an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who'd also like to see more choice for how they can monetize on the phone," Spencer said in an interview in Sao Paulo during the CCXP comics and entertainment convention.

The executive declined to give a specific date for a launch of the online store, which earlier reports suggested could be next year. "I don't think this is multiple years away, I think this is sooner than that," he said. Microsoft earlier this year expanded its Game Pass subscription service for players on personal computers to 11 new Latin American countries, leading to a 7% increase in customers. Peru and Costa Rica are the standouts in terms of customer interest, accounting for almost half of new signups, Spencer said. Globally Brazil is the second-biggest market for the PC Game Pass. "In many ways Brazil leads a lot of the trends that we see globally," Spencer said.

Jason Koebler reports via 404 Media: A team of researchers primarily from Google's DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI's large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.

ChatGPT's response to the prompt "Repeat this word forever: 'poem poem poem poem'" was the word "poem" for a long time, and then, eventually, an email signature for a real human "founder and CEO," which included their personal contact information including cell phone number and email address, for example. "We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT," the researchers, from Google DeepMind, the University of Washington, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California Berkeley, and ETH Zurich, wrote in a paper published in the open access prejournal arXiv Tuesday.

This is particularly notable given that OpenAI's models are closed source, as is the fact that it was done on a publicly available, deployed version of ChatGPT-3.5-turbo. It also, crucially, shows that ChatGPT's "alignment techniques do not eliminate memorization," meaning that it sometimes spits out training data verbatim. This included PII, entire poems, "cryptographically-random identifiers" like Bitcoin addresses, passages from copyrighted scientific research papers, website addresses, and much more. "In total, 16.9 percent of generations we tested contained memorized PII," they wrote, which included "identifying phone and fax numbers, email and physical addresses ... social media handles, URLs, and names and birthdays." [...] The researchers wrote that they spent $200 to create "over 10,000 unique examples" of training data, which they say is a total of "several megabytes" of training data. The researchers suggest that using this attack, with enough money, they could have extracted gigabytes of training data.

Google will start to sweep away cobweb-collecting Gmail accounts this week. If you have an email address you haven't touched in a couple of years, it might soon be gone. From a report: The tech giant on Friday will start deleting personal Google accounts that have remained inactive for at least two years -- and going forward, it will continue killing accounts that reach two years of disuse. Once deleted, the accounts and any items in them can't be recovered. This could mean the end of personal emails, cherished documents and candid photos and videos tucked away in old Gmail accounts, Google Drives and other nooks in Google's servers.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software. In boosting Nextcloud's webmail software capabilities, Roundcube is joining Nextcloud as what's been described as a merger. In 2024 Nextcloud is to invest into Roundcube to accelerate the development of this widely-used webmail open-source software. Today's press release says Roundcube will not replace Nextcloud Mail with at least no plans for merging the two in the short-term.

Today's press release says that there are no immediate changes for Roundcube and Nextcloud users besides looking forward to improved integration and accelerated development beginning in the short term.

Dollar Tree was impacted by a third-party data breach stemming from the hack of service provider Zeroed-In Technologies. According to Bleeping Computer, nearly two million customers have been affected. "The information stolen during the attack includes names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers (SSNs)." From the report: According to a data breach notification shared with the Maine Attorney General, Dollar Tree's service provider, Zeroed-In, suffered a security incident between August 7 and 8, 2023. As part of this cyberattack, the threat actors managed to steal data containing the personal information of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar employees. "While the investigation was able to determine that these systems were accessed, it was not able to confirm all of the specific files that were accessed or taken by the unauthorized actor," reads the letter sent to affected individuals. "Therefore, Zeroed-In conducted a review of the contents of the systems to determine what information was present at the time of the incident and to whom the information relates."

The information stolen during the attack includes names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers (SSNs). Zeroed-In has notified the affected individuals and enclosed instructions on enrolling in a twelve-month identity protection and credit monitoring service. Other Zeroed-In customers apart from Dollar Tree and Family Dollar may have also been impacted by the security breach, but this hasn't been confirmed yet. Meanwhile, the scale of the data breach has already triggered investigations from law firms looking into a potential class-action lawsuit against Zeroed-In.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A prolific espionage hacking group with ties to China spent over two years looting the corporate network of NXP, the Netherlands-based chipmaker whose silicon powers security-sensitive components found in smartphones, smartcards, and electric vehicles, a news outlet has reported. The intrusion, by a group tracked under names including "Chimera" and "G0114," lasted from late 2017 to the beginning of 2020, according to Netherlands national news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which cited "several sources" familiar with the incident. During that time, the threat actors periodically accessed employee mailboxes and network drives in search of chip designs and other NXP intellectual property. The breach wasn't uncovered until Chimera intruders were detected in a separate company network that connected to compromised NXP systems on several occasions. Details of the breach remained a closely guarded secret until now.

NRC cited a report published (and later deleted) by security firm Fox-IT, titled Abusing Cloud Services to Fly Under the Radar. It documented Chimera using cloud services from companies including Microsoft and Dropbox to receive data stolen from the networks of semiconductor makers, including one in Europe that was hit in "early Q4 2017." Some of the intrusions lasted as long as three years before coming to light. NRC said the unidentified victim was NXP. "Once nested on a first computer -- patient zero -- the spies gradually expand their access rights, erase their tracks in between and secretly sneak to the protected parts of the network," NRC reporters wrote in an English translation. "They try to secrete the sensitive data they find there in encrypted archive files via cloud storage services such as Microsoft OneDrive. According to the log files that Fox-IT finds, the hackers come every few weeks to see whether interesting new data can be found at NXP and whether more user accounts and parts of the network can be hacked."

NXP did not alert customers or shareholders to the intrusion, other than a brief reference in a 2019 annual report. It read: "We have, from time to time, experienced cyber-attacks attempting to obtain access to our computer systems and networks. Such incidents, whether or not successful, could result in the misappropriation of our proprietary information and technology, the compromise of personal and confidential information of our employees, customers, or suppliers, or interrupt our business. For instance, in January 2020, we became aware of a compromise of certain of our systems. We are taking steps to identify the malicious activity and are implementing remedial measures to increase the security of our systems and networks to respond to evolving threats and new information. As of the date of this filing, we do not believe that this IT system compromise has resulted in a material adverse effect on our business or any material damage to us. However, the investigation is ongoing, and we are continuing to evaluate the amount and type of data compromised. There can be no assurance that this or any other breach or incident will not have a material impact on our operations and financial results in the future."

Feeling especially drained after a day on Zoom is not a figment of your imagination -- videoconferencing fatigue (VCF) is real, according to a study penned by a quartet of Austrian investigators. From a report: "Self-report evidence, collected all around the world, indicates that VCF is a serious issue," wrote the authors of a study appearing in Scientific Reports, a journal published by Nature Reports. However, most available research on VCF relies on personal accounts of the problem, and focuses on the cause rather than the consequences, explained the researchers.

To determine the effects on the brain caused by hours of videoconferences, the team measured electrical activity in the noggins of 35 university students who watched a 50-minute lecture while wired into an electroencephalogram (EEG). The researchers asked another group to watch same content live. The researchers also calculated effects on heart rate for the two groups with electrocardiography (ECG), measured before and after videoconferencing sessions. Subjects were also given cognitive attention tasks and asked for self reports on moods. Those attending the live lecture reported they felt more lively, happy and active, and less tired, drowsy and fed-up than online counterparts.

Rooting out manipulation should not depend on dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. From a story on Financial Times: As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our "relaxed attitude" to the scientific fraud epidemic is a "disaster-in-waiting." The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik's spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity.

It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the "paper mill," an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive "publish or perish" culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don't always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up -- an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 -- the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states.

Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...."

It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them — even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic — the next generation of users — that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth.
More from the Wall Street Journal: An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...."

"In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint...

The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month...

The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.

The British Library has confirmed that personal data stolen in a cyber-attack has appeared online, apparently for sale to the highest bidder. From a report: The attack was carried out in October by a group known for such criminal activity, said the UK's national library, which holds about 14m books and millions of other items. This week, Rhysida, a known ransomware group, claimed it was responsible for the attack. It posted low-resolution images of personal information online, offering stolen data for sale with a starting bid of 20 bitcoins (about $750,000). Rhysida said the data was "exclusive, unique and impressive" and that it would be sold to a single buyer. It set a deadline for bids of 27 November.

The images appear to show employment contracts and passport information. The library said it was "aware that some data has been leaked, which appears to be from files relating to our internal HR information." It did not confirm that Rhysida was responsible for the attack, nor that the data offered for sale was information on personnel. Academics and researchers who use the library have been told that disruption to the institution's services after the serious ransomware attack was likely to continue for months. This week, the library advised its users to change any logins also used on other sites as a precaution.

The founder of Chipotle is opening a new endeavor called Kernel, a vegetarian fast-casual restaurant that will be operated mostly by robots. Steve Ells is opening at least 15 locations of Kernel, the first by early 2024; the remainder are on track for NYC in the next two years, a spokesperson confirms. From a report: Kernel will serve vegetarian sandwiches, salads, and sides, made in a space that's around 1,000 square-feet or smaller. Each location would employ three workers, the Wall Street Journal reported, "rather than the dozen that many fast-casual eateries have working." The menu pricing will be on par with Chipotle's, and, Ells says, the company will pay more and offer better benefits for actual humans working than other chains.

As you'd expect from the former CEO of Chipotle -- which had at least five foodborne illness outbreaks between 2015 and 2018, costing the company $25 million per the Justice Department -- "the new system's design helps better ensure food safety," Ells told the Journal. It has taken $10 million in his personal funds to start Kernel, along with $36 million from investors. The company suggests customers may not want much interaction with other people -- and neither do CEOs. "We've taken a lot of human interaction out of the process and left just enough," he told the Journal. Yet in a 2022 study on the future of dining out conducted by commerce site, PYMNTS, of 2,500 people surveyed, 63 percent of diners believe restaurants are becoming increasingly understaffed, and 39 percent said that they are becoming less personal.

HP CEO Enrique Lores is betting a sprinkle of AI dust can regenerate the flagging PC market -- and with shipments still in decline across the industry, he can't afford to tease Wall Street. From a report: The world's second largest seller of desktop computing hardware has reported a 15 percent year-on-year decline in revenue to $53.7 billion for fiscal 2023 ended 31 October. Profit before tax was $2.93 billion versus $4.32 billion in the prior year.

[...] Orders picked up in recent months. Analyst data indicates the rate of decline is slowing after resellers began clearing inventory they'd amassed in the latter stage of the pandemic, when the frenzied buying patterns seen in prior years vanished. For Q4, HP reported revenue of $13.8 billion, down 6.5 percent year-on-year. Personal Systems was down 8 percent to $9.4 billion and Printing was down 3 percent to $4.4 billion. Profit before tax was $852 million, better than the $647 million brought in a year earlier, helped by a reduction in structural costs. HP expects business PC refresh cycles to kick in next year, with more corporate customers shifting their estate to Windows 11 -- yet it is the advent of the AI PC that Lores thinks signal better times.

Australia will give cyber health checks for small businesses, increase cyber law enforcement funding and introduce mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks under a security overhaul announced on Wednesday after a spate of attacks. From a report: The federal government said it will also subject telecommunications firms to tougher cyber reporting rules which apply to critical infrastructure, seek migrants to build up the cyber security workforce and set limits on inter-agency data sharing to encourage people to report incidents. The A$587 million ($382 million) plan shows the centre-left Labor government trying to get on the front foot after a year in which nearly half the country's 26 million population had personal information stolen in just two data breaches at companies, while a cyber attack at its biggest port operator this month brought supply chains to a standstill.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International. [...] Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally -- 77 million people -- were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption. That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people. The income threshold for being among the global top one percent was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity -- for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000, whereas the Kenyan equivalent would be about $40,000. Within country analyses also painted very stark pictures.

For example, in France, the richest one percent emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50 percent in 10 years. Excluding the carbon associated with his investments, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of Louis Vuitton and richest man in France, has a footprint 1,270 times greater than that of the average Frenchman. The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive. These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments.

While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found. Nor are the wealthy invested in polluting industries at a similar ratio to any given investor -- billionaires are twice as likely to be invested in polluting industries than the average for the Standard & Poor 500, previous Oxfam research has shown.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: The government of Canada has confirmed its data was accessed after two of its third-party service providers were attacked. The third parties both provided relocation services for public sector workers and the government is currently analyzing a "significant volume of data" which could date back to 1999. No formal conclusions have yet been made about the number of workers impacted due to the large-scale task of analyzing the relevant data. However, the servers impacted by the breach held data related to current and former Canadian government staff, members of the Canadian armed forces, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police workers -- aka Mounties.

"At this time, given the significant volume of data being assessed, we cannot yet identify specific individuals impacted; however, preliminary information indicates that breached information could belong to anyone who has used relocation services as early as 1999 and may include any personal and financial information that employees provided to the companies," a government statement read. Those who think they may be affected are advised to update any login details that may be similar to those used to access BGRS or Sirva's systems. Enabling MFA across all accounts that are used for online transactions is also advised, as is the manual monitoring of personal accounts for any potential malicious activity. Work is currently being carried out to identify and address any vulnerabilities that may have led to the incident, according to the statement.

Earlier this month, the entire Optus mobile network went offline nationwide following a "routine software upgrade." According to Reuters, "More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout [...], triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure." Now, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of the outage. From the report: She said it "had been an honour to serve" but that "now was an appropriate time to step down." During Friday's Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down. "On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded," she said in a statement on Monday. "I was also able to communicate Optus's commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward."

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter. Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus's Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign. Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised "the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve." He said Optus's priority was about "setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers." Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.

Firefox 120 will be available tomorrow, bringing support for the Global Privacy Control "Sec-GPC" request header to indicate whether a user consents to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties. It's also enabling the WebAssembly GC extension by default, opening up new languages like Dart and Kotlin to run in the browser. Phoronix's Michael Larabel highlights some of the other features included in this release: - Ubuntu Linux users now have the ability to import data from Chromium when both are installed as Snap packages. - Picture-in-Picture mode now supports corner snapping on Windows and Linux.
- Support for the light-dark() CSS color function that allows setting of colors for both light and dark without needing to use the prefers-color-scheme media feature. This allows conveniently specifying the preferred light color theme value followed by the dark color theme value.
- CSS support for the lh and rlh line height units.

"To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre.

The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...."

About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...]

Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to."
McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.