Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license.

Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design.
The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

"Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy.
The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS:

• There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally.

• Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features.

• Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

Google is implementing stricter measures to enforce office attendance, including tracking badge data, confronting employees who don't come in as required, and factoring attendance into performance reviews. CNBC reports: Google's chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, wrote an email to employees at the end of the day on Wednesday, which included doubling down on office attendance, reasoning that "there's just no substitute for coming together in person." "Of course, not everyone believes in 'magical hallway conversations,' but there's no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference," Cicconi's email read. "Many of the products we unveiled at I/O and Google Marketing Live last month were conceived, developed and built by teams working side by side."

Her note said the company will start including their three days per week as a part of their performance reviews and teams will start sending reminders to workers "who are consistently absent from the office." Cicconi even asked already-approved remote workers to reconsider. "For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you'll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you'll be most connected to Google's community." A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines "material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location."

In the U.S., the company will periodically track whether employees are adhering to the office attendance policy using badge data, and executives are currently reviewing local requirements to implement in other countries, one of the documents states. If workers don't follow the policy after an extended period of time, human resources will reach out about "next steps." Going forward, Cicconi said, new fully remote work will only be granted "by exception only." In a statement to CNBC, Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said, "our hybrid approach is designed to incorporate the best of being together in person with the benefits of working from home for part of the week. Now that we're more than a year into this way of working, we're formally integrating this approach into all of our workplace policies."

Lamont added that the badge data viewed by company leaders is aggregate data and not individualized.

iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma include even more privacy-preserving features while browsing the web. From a report: Link Tracking Protection is a new feature automatically activated in Mail, Messages, and Safari in Private Browsing mode. It detects user-identifiable tracking parameters in link URLs, and automatically removes them.

Adding tracking parameters to links is one way advertisers and analytics firms try to track user activity across websites. Rather than storing third-party cookies, a tracking identifier is simply added to the end of the page URL. This would circumvent Safari's standard intelligent tracking prevention features that block cross-site cookies and other methods of session storage. Navigating to that URL allows an analytics or advertising service at the destination to read the URL, extract those same unique parameters, and associate it with their backend user profile to serve personalized ads.

Long-time Slashdot theodp writes: Writing for the masses in It's the End of Computer Programming as We Know It. (And I Feel Fine.), NY Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo explains that while A.I. might not spell the end of programming ("the world will still need people with advanced coding skills"), it could mark the beginning of a new kind of programming — "one that doesn't require us to learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into software."

"Wasn't coding supposed to be one of the can't-miss careers of the digital age?," Manjoo asks. "In the decades since I puttered around with my [ZX] Spectrum, computer programming grew from a nerdy hobby into a vocational near-imperative, the one skill to acquire to survive technological dislocation, no matter how absurd or callous-sounding the advice. Joe Biden told coal miners: Learn to code! Twitter trolls told laid-off journalists: Learn to code! Tim Cook told French kids: Apprenez à programmer! Programming might still be a worthwhile skill to learn, if only as an intellectual exercise, but it would have been silly to think of it as an endeavor insulated from the very automation it was enabling. Over much of the history of computing, coding has been on a path toward increasing simplicity."

In closing, Manjoo notes that A.I. has alleviated one of his worries (one shared by President Obama). "I've tried to introduce my two kids to programming the way my dad did for me, but both found it a snooze. Their disinterest in coding has been one of my disappointments as a father, not to mention a source of anxiety that they could be out of step with the future. (I live in Silicon Valley, where kids seem to learn to code before they learn to read.) But now I'm a bit less worried. By the time they're looking for careers, coding might be as antiquated as my first PC."

Btw, there are lots of comments — 700+ and counting — on Manjoo's column from programming types and others on whether reports of programming's death are greatly exaggerated.

Roughly 800,000 Maryland drivers with license plates designed to commemorate the War of 1812 are now inadvertently advertising a website for an online casino based in the Philippines. From a report: In 2012, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, Maryland redesigned its standard license plate to read "MARYLAND WAR OF 1812." The license plates, which were the default between 2012 and 2016, have the URL www.starspangled200.org printed at the bottom. Sometime within the last year, www.starspangled200.org stopped telling people about how Marylander Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner" after watching British ships bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812 and started instead redirecting to a site called globeinternational.info, in which a blinking, bikini-clad woman advertises "Philippines Best Betting Site, Deposit 100 Receive 250."

The issue was spotted by a Redditor who said "I was never a fan of having a plate celebrating the War of 1812, but I'm even more upset now that I (and tons of other Marylanders) are driving advertisements for international online gambling." Domain registration information shows that starspangled200.org has been re-registered and transferred a handful of times within the last few years. It is not exactly clear when it stopped being a website about American history. The Internet Archive shows that as recently as December 2022, the website explained that "the young United States was embroiled in the War of 1812 and the Chesapeake Bay region felt the brunt of it." A snapshot from today, however, explains that "Extremely lenient laws govern gaming," in the Philippines. "This is a result of the growing popularity of gambling among tourists and the enormous casino resorts that have recently been built."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again. "For 12 years I've been trying to get back my feet," Mr. Oskam said in a press briefing on Tuesday. "Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural." In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a "digital bridge" between Mr. Oskam's brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off. "We've captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement," Gregoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

In the new study, the brain-spine interface, as the researchers called it, took advantage of an artificial intelligence thought decoder to read Mr. Oskam's intentions -- detectable as electrical signals in his brain -- and match them to muscle movements. The etiology of natural movement, from thought to intention to action, was preserved. The only addition, as Dr. Courtine described it, was the digital bridge spanning the injured parts of the spine. [...] To achieve this result, the researchers first implanted electrodes in Mr. Oskam's skull and spine. The team then used a machine-learning program to observe which parts of the brain lit up as he tried to move different parts of his body. This thought decoder was able to match the activity of certain electrodes with particular intentions: One configuration lit up whenever Mr. Oskam tried to move his ankles, another when he tried to move his hips.

Then the researchers used another algorithm to connect the brain implant to the spinal implant, which was set to send electrical signals to different parts of his body, sparking movement. The algorithm was able to account for slight variations in the direction and speed of each muscle contraction and relaxation. And, because the signals between the brain and spine were sent every 300 milliseconds, Mr. Oskam could quickly adjust his strategy based on what was working and what wasn't. Within the first treatment session he could twist his hip muscles. Over the next few months, the researchers fine-tuned the brain-spine interface to better fit basic actions like walking and standing. Mr. Oskam gained a somewhat healthy-looking gait and was able to traverse steps and ramps with relative ease, even after months without treatment. Moreover, after a year in treatment, he began noticing clear improvements in his movement without the aid of the brain-spine interface. The researchers documented these improvements in weight-bearing, balancing and walking tests. Now, Mr. Oskam can walk in a limited way around his house, get in and out of a car and stand at a bar for a drink. For the first time, he said, he feels like he is the one in control.

An anonymous reader shares a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): The U.S. Supreme Court [Monday] declined to hear Moore v. United States, leaving in place a patchwork of lower court decisions on an important and recurring question about privacy rights in the face of advancing surveillance technology. In this case, police secretly attached a small camera to a utility pole, using it to surveil a Massachusetts home 24/7 for eight months -- all without a warrant. Law enforcement could watch the camera's feed in real time, and remotely pan, tilt, and zoom close enough to read license plates and see faces. They could also review a searchable, digitized record of this footage at their convenience. The camera captured every coming and going of the home's residents and their guests over eight months. As a result, the government targeted the home of a community pillar -- a lawyer, respected judicial clerk, devoted church member, and a grandmother raising her grandkids -- to cherry-pick images from months of unceasing surveillance in an effort to support unwarranted criminal charges against an innocent person.

Federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts have divided on the question of whether such sweeping surveillance is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. The highest courts of Massachusetts, Colorado, and South Dakota have held that long-term pole camera surveillance of someone's home requires a warrant. In Moore v. United States, the members of the full en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit split evenly on the question, with three judges explaining that a warrant is required, and three judges expressing the belief that the Fourth Amendment imposes no limit on this invasive surveillance. This issue will continue to arise in the lower courts; the ACLU filed an amicus brief on the question in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit earlier this month. "The Supreme Court's decision not to hear this case means that people across the country remain vulnerable to law enforcement's claim of unfettered authority to surveil any of us at our homes, for as long as they wish, with no judicial oversight," said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "As the cost of surveillance technology falls and its use by law enforcement expands, the need to resolve whether the Fourth Amendment poses any constraint has become all the more urgent. We will continue fighting for essential privacy protections."

After leading CodeWeavers for 27 years, Jeremy White has decided to leave the company, prompting the transition to an employee ownership trust. CodeWeavers is known for its CrossOver software and contributions to the Wine project. Phoronix reports: CodeWeavers' President James Ramey is now taking on the CEO role while Director of Development Ulrich Czekalla in turn is stepping up to fill the President role. Jeremy White does continue to serve as Chairman of the Board at CodeWeavers. In addition to selling the CrossOver software, CodeWeavers' PortJump effort aides organizations in porting apps/games to macOS, Linux, or ChromeOS. CodeWeavers also engages in technical consulting services for organizations. Among CodeWeavers' clients is Valve in assisting them with their Steam Play / Proton effort. You can read more about the changes via the CodeWeavers blog.

The United States Supreme Court has released its opinion on The Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case, finding in favor of Lynn Goldsmith and stating that Warhol's use of her photo was not fair use. From a report: For those unfamiliar, the Warhol v. Goldsmith case has been ongoing for several years and involves photographer Lynn Goldsmith's photo of Prince and Andy Warhol's use of that photo which his Foundation argues was fair use. The details of the case to this point can be read in prior coverage, but in summary, Goldsmith had been victorious in the most recent court's decision leading up to this point. The Andy Warhol Foundation had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, who has affirmed the lower court's decision and sealed Goldsmith's win.

In an 87-page [PDF], seven-to-two opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has ruled that Warhol's use of Goldsmith's Prince photo was not transformative enough to warrant fair use and was instead a violation of her copyright. Justices Roberts and Kagan dissented. "Although new expression, meaning, or message may be relevant to whether a copying use has a sufficiently distinct purpose or character, it is not, without more, dispositive of the first factor," the court holds. "The 'purpose and character' of Andy Warhol Foundation's (AWF) use of Goldsmith's photograph in commercially licensing Orange Prince to Conde Nast does not favor AWF's fair use defense to copyright infringement."

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been ordered to report to prison while she appeals her fraud conviction and jail sentence of over 11 years for defrauding investors. She has also been ordered to pay $452 million to victims, which will be split with her former partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who was also convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison. CNBC reports: Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced CEO of Theranos, must report to prison on May 30, according to a ruling issued Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila. Holmes must report to prison no later than 2:00 p.m. local time on that day, and is expected to begin her sentence at a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas. On Tuesday, an appeals court rejected Holmes' bid to stay out of prison while she appeals her conviction. In another Tuesday ruling, Judge Davila ordered that Holmes and former Theranos executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani pay $452 million in restitution to victims. You can read more about the 'U.S. v. Elizabeth Holmes, et al.' case here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft cloud services are scanning for malware by peeking inside users' zip files, even when they're protected by a password, several users reported on Mastodon on Monday. Compressing file contents into archived zip files has long been a tactic threat actors use to conceal malware spreading through email or downloads. Eventually, some threat actors adapted by protecting their malicious zip files with a password the end user must type when converting the file back to its original form. Microsoft is one-upping this move by attempting to bypass password protection in zip files and, when successful, scanning them for malicious code.

While analysis of password-protected in Microsoft cloud environments is well-known to some people, it came as a surprise to Andrew Brandt. The security researcher has long archived malware inside password-protected zip files before exchanging them with other researchers through SharePoint. On Monday, he took to Mastodon to report that the Microsoft collaboration tool had recently flagged a zip file, which had been protected with the password "infected." "While I totally understand doing this for anyone other than a malware analyst, this kind of nosy, get-inside-your-business way of handling this is going to become a big problem for people like me who need to send their colleagues malware samples," Brandt wrote. "The available space to do this just keeps shrinking and it will impact the ability of malware researchers to do their jobs."

Fellow researcher Kevin Beaumont joined the discussion to say that Microsoft has multiple methods for scanning the contents of password-protected zip files and uses them not just on files stored in SharePoint but all its 365 cloud services. One way is to extract any possible passwords from the bodies of email or the name of the file itself. Another is by testing the file to see if it's protected with one of the passwords contained in a list. "If you mail yourself something and type something like 'ZIP password is Soph0s', ZIP up EICAR and ZIP password it with Soph0s, it'll find (the) password, extract and find (and feed MS detection)," he wrote. "A Google representative said the company doesn't scan password-protected zip files, though Gmail does flag them when users receive such a file," notes Ars.

"One other thing readers should remember: password-protected zip files provide minimal assurance that content inside the archives can't be read. As Beaumont noted, ZipCrypto, the default means for encrypting zip files in Windows, is trivial to override. A more dependable way is to use an AES-256 encryptor built into many archive programs when creating 7z files."

Microsoft's virtual assistant Clippy "isn't making a comeback," write the Verge, "but its spirit — now animated by AI — lives on..." The words "it looks like you're writing a letter, would you like some help with that?" didn't appear at any point during Google's recent demo of its AI office suite tools. But as I watched Aparna Pappu, Google's Workspace leader, outline the feature onstage at I/O, I was reminded of a certain animated paperclip that another tech giant once hoped would help usher in a new era of office work...

New for the I/O presentation was Sidekick, a feature designed to understand what you're working on, pull together details from across Google's different apps, and present you with clear information to use as notes or even incorporate directly into your work. If Google's Duet is designed to deal with the horror of a blank document, then Sidekick seems to be looking ahead to a future where a black AI prompt box could instead be the intimidating first hurdle. "What if AI could proactively offer you prompts?" Pappu said as she introduced the new feature. "Even better, what if these prompts were actually contextual and changed based on what you were working on...?"

Sidekick was shown summarizing a chain of emails. When prompted, it was able to pull out specific details from an associated Sheets spreadsheet and insert them into an emailed response. And finally, on Slides, Sidekick suggested generating speaker notes for the presenter to read from while showing the slides.

The feature looks like a modern twist on Clippy, Microsoft's old assistant that would spring into action at the mere hint of activity in a Word document to ask if you wanted help with tasks like writing a letter. But perhaps more important is how Sidekick was shown offering this information. In Google's demonstration, Sidekick is summoned by the user and doesn't appear until they press its icon. That's important since one of the things that annoyed people most about Clippy was that it wouldn't shut the hell up. "These toon-zombies are as insistent on popping up again as Wile E. Coyote," The New York Times observed in its original review of Office 97.

Though they share some similarities, Clippy and Sidekick belong to two very different eras of computing.
Brings back memories of that Saturday Night Live skit about Microsoft Word's new assistant, Pushie the pushpin...

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from MIT Technology Review: Today, researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which they say combines the complete DNA of 47 diverse individuals -- Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups -- into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species. The new map, called a "pangenome," has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe. It was published in the journal Nature today. People's genomes are largely alike, but it's the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren't observable in conventional studies. The pangenome relies on a mathematical concept called a graph, which you can imagine as a massive version of connect-the-dots. Each dot is a segment of DNA. To draw a particular person's genome, you start connecting the numbered dots. Each person's DNA can take a slightly different path, skipping some numbers and adding others.

One payoff of the new pangenome could be better ways to diagnose rare diseases, although practical applications aren't easy to name. Instead, scientists say it's mainly giving them insight into some of the "dark matter" of the genome that's previously been hard to see, including strange regions of chromosomes that seem to share and exchange genes. For now, most biologists and doctors will stick to the existing "reference genome," the one first produced in draft form in 2001 and gradually improved. It answers most questions researchers are interested in, and all their computer tools work with it. The reason a reference genome is important is that when a new person's genome is sequenced, that sequence is projected onto the reference in order to organize and read the new data. Yet since the current reference is just one possible genome, missing bits that some people have, some information can't be analyzed and is usually ignored. Researchers call this effect "reference bias" or, more simply, the streetlamp problem. You don't see where you don't look.

Officials with NIH said they hoped the new update to the genome map would make gene research more "equitable." That's because the more different your genome is from the current reference, the more information about you could be missed. The existing reference is largely the DNA of one African-American man, although it includes segments from several other people as well. "If the genome you want to analyze has sequences that are not in that reference, they will be missed in the analysis," says Deanna Church, a consultant with the business incubator General Inception, who previously held a key role at NIH managing the reference genome. "In reality, the notion that there is a 'human genome' is really the problem," she says. "The current version is the simplest model you can make. It made sense when we started ... But now we need better models."

"The AI takeover of Google Search starts now," writes The Verge's David Pierce. At Google I/O today, the company demoed a new opt-in feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The new experience generates AI "snapshots" that appear at the top of the search results page consisting of an AI-generated summary about your query, with links to sources of information and shopping. From the report: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. "Why is sourdough bread still so popular?" she writes and hits enter. Google's normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase "Generative AI is experimental." A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says "corroborates" what's in the summary.

Google calls this the "AI snapshot." All of it is by Google's large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google's designers call "the bear claw," which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it's key to the way Google's AI implementation is different. "We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?"

A few seconds later, Reid clicks back and starts another search. This time, she searches for the best Bluetooth speakers for the beach. Again, standard search results appear almost immediately, and again, AI results are generated a few seconds later. This time, there's a short summary at the top detailing what you should care about in such a speaker: battery life, water resistance, sound quality. Links to three buying guides sit off to the right, and below are shopping links for a half-dozen good options, each with an AI-generated summary next to it. I ask Reid to follow up with the phrase "under $100," and she does so. The snapshot regenerates with new summaries and new picks. "This is the new look of Google's search results page," concludes Pierce. "It's AI-first, it's colorful, and it's nothing like you're used to. It's powered by some of Google's most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media."

"In the demos I saw, it's often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you'll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results."

Last week Linus Torvalds personally cleaned up the x86 memory copy code for Linux 6.4, Phoronix reports — and this week "he's merged more of his own code as he took issue with some of the code merged by Intel engineers as part of their Linear Address Masking enabling." Back during the Linux 6.2 days at the end of last year, Linus rejected the Intel LAM code at the time for various technical issues. Intel then reworked it for Linux 6.4. This time around Linus merged Intel LAM into Linux 6.4 as this new CPU feature for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. Intel LAM — like Arm TBI — can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. But this time around there were some less than ideal code that he personally took to sprucing up...

Torvalds reworked around one hundred lines of code for cleaning it up.
It's fun to read Torvalds' commit messages (included in both Phoronix articles). Torvalds begins by writing that the LAM updates "made me unhappy about how 'access_ok()' was done, and it actually turned out to have a couple of small bugs in it too..."

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water vapor around a distant rocky planet located 26 light-years away. "The water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, a discovery that could be important for our search for habitable worlds outside the solar system," reports Space.com. "However, the scientists behind the discovery caution that this water vapor could be coming from the world's host star rather than the planet itself." From the report: The exoplanet, designated GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star located 26 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet. GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked to the red dwarf, meaning it perpetually shows the same face to its star.

Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life.

That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.

If it looks like a book, feels like a book and stacks like a book, then there's still a good chance it may not be a book. From a report: Fake books come in several different forms: once-real books that are hollowed out, fabric backdrops with images of books printed onto them, empty boxlike objects with faux titles and authors or sometimes just a facade of spines along a bookshelf. Already the norm for film sets and commercial spaces, fake books are becoming popular fixtures in homes. While some people are going all in and covering entire walls in fake books, others are aghast at the thought that someone would think to decorate with a book that isn't real. "I will never use fake books," said Jeanie Engelbach, an interior designer and organizer in New York City. "It just registers as pretentious, and it creates the illusion that you are either better read or smarter than you really are."

Ms. Engelbach said she has frequently used books as decor, at times styling clients' bookcases with aesthetics taking priority over function, which is a typical interior-design practice. At Books by the Foot -- a company that sells, as its name suggests, books by the foot -- one can purchase books by color (options include "luscious creams," "vintage cabernet" and "rainbow ombre"), by subject ("well-read art" or "gardening"), wrapped books (covered in linen or rose gold) and more. The tomes are all "rescue books," ones that would otherwise be discarded or recycled for paper pulp, said Charles Roberts, the president of Books by the Foot's parent company, Wonder Book. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, remote work created increased demand for the company's services. While it mostly specializes in the sale of real books, the company has also dabbled in the world of faux ones.

The book seller has cut books -- so only the spines remain -- and glued them to shelves for cruise ships,"where they don't want to have a lot of weight or worry that the books will fall off the shelves if the weather gets bad," Mr. Roberts said. There are other, sometimes counterintuitive, uses for fake tomes as well. Although it has the capacity to hold more than 1.35 million of them, many of the books in China's 360,000-square-foot Tianjin Binhai Library aren't real. Instead, perforated aluminum plates emblazoned with images of books can be found, primarily on the upper shelves of the atrium. While the presence of artificial books in a place devoted to reading has been widely criticized -- "more fiction than books," one headline mocked -- it remains a buzzy tourist attraction. After all, the books don't need to be real if it's just for the 'gram.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points -- and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they're reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware. NTT says it's successfully tested network sharing with a scheme that starts by asking operators of Wi-Fi access points or other connections if they're open to sharing their bandwidth and allowing random netizens to connect. In return they get a share of revenue from those connections.

Under the scheme, netizens search for available networks and, as they connect, a contract would be executed allowing a link to be made. That contract would use Ethereum Proof of Authority to verify identities and initiate the back-end billing arrangements before allowing signed-up users and devices to join private networks. The operator of the Wi-Fi access point gets paid, the punter gets a connection, and everything's on a blockchain so the results can be read for eternity. [...] If this all scales, NTT estimates Tokyo won't need to add any more Wi-Fi access points or private 5G cells, even as demand for connectivity increases. The company also suggests it can enable networks to scale without requiring commensurate increases in energy consumption, and that spectrum will also be freed for other uses.

A draft law that aims to criminalize and prosecute those who "create conditions for online piracy" has been approved by Bulgaria's Council of Ministers. The proposed amendments are Bulgaria's response to heavy criticism from the United States, most publicly via the USTR's Special 301 Reports. It's hoped that prison sentences of up to six years will send a deterrent message. TorrentFreak reports: Last week the Council of Ministers approved draft amendments to the Criminal Code that aim to protect authors, rightsholders, and state revenue. "Crimes against intellectual property should be perceived as acts with a high degree of public danger, not only considering the rights and interests of the individual author, which they affect, but also considering the financial losses for the holders of these rights, which also affects the revenues in the state budget," the explanatory notes read.

The stated aim of the bill is to solve identified weaknesses by upgrading substantive law to counter computer-related crimes against intellectual property. The text references those who "build or maintain" an information system or provide a service to the information society for the purpose of committing crimes. The notes offer further clarification. "The bill aims to prosecute those who create conditions for online piracy -- for example, by building and maintaining torrent tracker sites, web platforms, chat groups in online communication applications for the online exchange of pirated content, and any other activities that may fall within the definition of 'information society service' within the meaning of the Electronic Commerce Act (pdf) and which are carried out with the specified criminal purpose."

The Bulgarian government notes that the amendments are part of its response to criticism in the USTR's Special 301 Report. [When countries are placed on the USTR's 'Watch List' for failing to combat piracy, most can expect years of pressure punctuated by annual Special 301 Reports declaring more needs to be done. Bulgaria was on the Watch List in 2015 when the USTR reported "incremental progress" in the country's ability to tackle intellectual property infringement, albeit nowhere near enough to counter unsatisfactory prosecution rates. In 2018 the United States softened its position toward Bulgaria, removing it from the Watch List on the basis that the government would probably deliver.] The fact that Bulgaria has been absent from the 'Watch List' for the last five years is down to "specific commitments" made by the authorities, with progress being monitored closely by the United States in respect of Bulgaria's future status. The draft approved by the Council of Ministers last week envisions sentences of up to six years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5,600. According to the draft, there is no intent to prosecute individual users who simply consume pirated content.

Cory Doctorow just wrote a new thriller "about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works," according to his publisher. Doctorow calls Red Team Blues "a book about the financial rot at the center of Silicon Valley... a kind of anti-finance finance thriller."

The publisher describes the book's hero as "a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. " He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike.

He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life.

Now he's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever agreed to before — and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
"I write when I'm anxious, and right now these are anxious times," Doctorow explained last month in Publisher's Weekly, describing what he'd learned about selling audiobooks without going through Amazon's service Audible. This time Cory got 4,080 backers to pledge $152,735 to fund an audiobook for Red Team Blues read by Wil Wheaton that his Kickstarter campaign stressed would be DRM-free. ("Every audiobook sold on Audible be wrapped in Amazon's Digital Rights Management technology, which is a felony for you to remove, even if the copyright holder asks you to. It's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine!")

Red Team Blues is the first book in a new trilogy, and Cory is now making in-person appearances to promote the book — starting today (and tomorrow) at the LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California. Tuesday he'll be in San Diego, and a week from Sunday he's appearing in San Francisco, before heading to Portland, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Gaithersburg Maryland.