An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Alex Heath: Meta plans to release its first pair of smart glasses with a display in 2025 alongside a neural interface smartwatch designed to control them, The Verge has learned. Meanwhile, its first pair of full-fledged AR glasses, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted will eventually be as widely used as mobile phones, is planned for 2027. The details were shared with thousands of employees in Meta's Reality Labs division on Tuesday during a roadmap presentation of its AR and VR efforts that was shared with The Verge. Altogether, they show how Meta is planning to keep investing in consumer hardware after a series of setbacks and broader cost cutting across the company.

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don't fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. [...] There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. In 2024, he said that Meta plans to ship a more "accessible" headset codenamed Ventura. "The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market."

During Tuesday's roadmap presentation, Alex Himel, the company's vice president for AR, laid out the plan for a bevy of devices through 2027. The first launch will come this fall with the second generation of Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses it released in 2021 with Luxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban. In 2025, Himel said the third generation of the smart glasses will ship with a display that he called a "viewfinder" for viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes, and translating text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a "neural interface" band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow. While Meta halted development of its smartwatch with dual cameras,Himel said that the company is still working on another smartwatch to accompany its 2025 glasses. "We don't want people to have to choose between an input device on their wrist and smartwatch functionality that they've come to love," he said. "So we are building a neural interfaces watch. Number one, this device will do input: input to control your glasses, input to control the functionality on your wrist, and input to control the world around you."

The Verge's Alex Heath adds: "Meta's first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world." These glasses will "won't be released to the public until 2027," but an "internal launch" for employees will begin in 2024.

As for advertising, Meta is planning to utilize its existing business model for these future devices. "We should be able to run a very good ads business," he said. "I think it's easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent."

"If we're hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business," he said. "A business unlike anything we've seen on mobile phones before."

Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn't looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software. From a report: In its KB5021751 update last month, Microsoft included a plan to scan Windows systems to smoke out those Office versions that are no longer supported or nearing the end of support. Those include Office 2007 (which saw support end in 2017) and Office 2010 (in 2020) and the 2013 build (this coming April). The company stressed that it would run only one time and would not install anything on the user's Windows system, adding that the file for the update is scanned to ensure it's not infected by malware and is stored on highly secure servers to prevent unauthorized changes to it.

The update caused some discussion among users, at least enough to convince Microsoft to make another pitch that it is respecting user privacy and won't access private data despite scanning their systems. The update collects diagnostic and performance data so that it can determine the use of various versions of Office and how to best support and service them, the software maker wrote in an expanded note this week. The update will silently run once to collect the data and no files are left on the user's systems once the scan is completed.

This week the automotive site Edmunds discussed "the pros and cons of software running your car." One advantage is that software "allows for the introduction of features that wouldn't have been possible in the past. Genesis, Hyundai's luxury arm, is using facial recognition and fingerprint scanning with its new all-electric GV60 crossover. The physical key is required to set up both functions, but after that the owner can basically operate the car as easily as a smartphone.

Established companies are jumping in as well. Last summer, Ford used software to enable its BlueCruise hands-free driving system in tens of thousands of F-150s and Mustang Mach-Es. The vehicles had the hardware for the system already installed; the over-the-air update made it complete. It applied to the cars wirelessly, without the need for a dealer visit. Maintenance is another potential advantage. These highly digital vehicles can monitor preventive and predictive maintenance and even diagnose problems from afar. It takes the guesswork out of what could go wrong and what needs to be adjusted without a visit to a mechanic shop or dealership....

The downside of this new tech.... Issues that PC users are all too familiar with can crop up in cars. It might be a touchscreen that goes blank and is inoperable while driving, glitchy operation of certain controls, or advanced driver assist features that aren't as fully vetted as they should be before being added to vehicles. The risks of software crashes and privacy breaches are real issues. It's not outside the realm of possibility for someone with malicious intentions to take over the operation of a car and cause damage. Also, some experts are both applauding the technology and advising caution as it relates to personal data privacy: the more data collected from drivers, the more potential for hacking.
Their conclusion? "Software will continue to evolve to change the vehicle ownership experience....

"But technology-averse shoppers will likely prefer a vehicle with a more traditional design, which might include buying used."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: If you recently made a purchase from an overseas online store selling knockoff clothes and goods, there's a chance your credit card number and personal information were exposed. Since January 6, a database containing hundreds of thousands of unencrypted credit card numbers and corresponding cardholders' information was spilling onto the open web. At the time it was pulled offline on Tuesday, the database had about 330,000 credit card numbers, cardholder names, and full billing addresses -- and rising in real-time as customers placed new orders. The data contained all the information that a criminal would need to make fraudulent transactions and purchases using a cardholder's information.

The credit card numbers belong to customers who made purchases through a network of near-identical online stores claiming to sell designer goods and apparel. But the stores had the same security problem in common: Any time a customer made a purchase, their credit card data and billing information was saved in a database, which was left exposed to the internet without a password. Anyone who knew the IP address of the database could access reams of unencrypted financial data. Anurag Sen, a good-faith security researcher, found the exposed credit card records and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting it to its owner. Sen has a respectable track record of scanning the internet looking for exposed servers and inadvertently published data, and reporting it to companies to get their systems secured.

But in this case, Sen wasn't the first person to discover the spilling data. According to a ransom note left behind on the exposed database, someone else had found the spilling data and, instead of trying to identify the owner and responsibly reporting the spill, the unnamed person instead claimed to have taken a copy of the entire database's contents of credit card data and would return it in exchange for a small sum of cryptocurrency. A review of the data by TechCrunch shows most of the credit card numbers are owned by cardholders in the United States. [...] Internet records showed that the database was operated by a customer of Tencent, whose cloud services were used to host the database. TechCrunch contacted Tencent about its customer's database leaking credit card information, and the company responded quickly. The customer's database went offline a short time later. Many of the stores leaking customers' information claim to operate out of Hong Kong and were set up in the past few weeks. Some of the websites include: spraygroundusa.com, ihuahebuy.com, igoodlinks.com, ibuysbuy.com, lichengshop.com, hzoushop.com, goldlyshop.com, haohangshop.com, twinklebubble.store, and spendidbuy.com.

The New York City Department of Correction wants to stop incarcerated people from receiving physical mail inside city jails. From a report: The department, known as DOC, said the proposed changes are part of an effort to increase safety in the jail system by cracking down on illegal contraband following the deaths of 19 people last year at Rikers Island, the city's jail complex. Several of the people died from apparent drug overdoses, including at least one from fentanyl.

The main source of contraband inside city jails, though, has been corrections staff, not mail, critics of the policy change said. Instead, the move to scrap physical mail opens the door to private firms to set up surveillance systems against incarcerated people. City officials and advocates are concerned about an apparent plan to contract with a company called Securus -- a leading provider of phone calling systems for prisons and jails with a controversial past -- to digitize detainees' mail and make it available to searches.

"Contractors are explicitly advertising unprecedented surveillance," said Stephanie Krent, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, speaking about firms like Securus that specialize in prison communications. "That's surveillance that's going to fall most harshly on marginalized communities." The proposed changes follow a nationwide trend of prisons and jails moving to stop incarcerated people from receiving physical mail. Prisons in Pennsylvania stopped physical mail in 2018, and prisons in Massachusetts started sending incarcerated people photocopies of original letters. Last year, prisons in New Mexico and Florida adopted similar changes, and Texas has also limited in-person mail. There is little evidence that those changes have stopped the flow of drugs, the Vera Institute wrote in a March report: "With no evidence that these bans improve security, it's only the for-profit contractors that stand to benefit from these arrangements."

Microsoft is introducing a new consumer tier to its Microsoft 365 subscription offerings. From a report: Priced at $1.99 per month, Microsoft 365 Basic is designed to replace the 100GB OneDrive storage option with some extra features that sit in between the free option and the $6.99 a month Personal subscription. Microsoft 365 Basic will be available worldwide on January 30th with 100GB of cloud storage, an ad-free Outlook web and mobile experience, and enhanced security features. The security features include data encryption for an Outlook mailbox, suspicious link checking, and virus / malware scanning for attachments. Existing OneDrive 100GB storage customers will be automatically upgraded to Microsoft 365 Basic at the same $1.99 monthly rate. [...] The main difference between the $6.99 Personal subscription and this new $1.99 Basic one (other than the amount of cloud storage) is that Microsoft 365 Basic doesn't include access to the desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. Basic subscribers will have to use the web or mobile versions instead.

"A new Linux malware downloader created using SHC (Shell Script Compiler) has been spotted in the wild," reports the site Bleeping Computer, "infecting systems with Monero cryptocurrency miners and DDoS IRC bots...

"The analysts say the attacks likely rely on brute-forcing weak administrator account credentials over SSH on Linux servers.... " According to ASEC researchers, who discovered the attack, the SHC loader was uploaded to VirusTotal by Korean users, with attacks generally focused on Linux systems in the same country.... When the SHC malware downloader is executed, it will fetch multiple other malware payloads and install them on the device. One of the payloads is an XMRig miner that is downloaded as a TAR archive from a remote URL and extracted to "/usr/local/games/" and executed....

The second payload retrieved, dropped, and loaded by the SHC malware downloader is a Perl-based DDoS IRC bot. The malware connects to the designated IRC server using configuration data and goes through a username-based verification process. If successful, the malware awaits commands from the IRC server, including DDoS-related actions such as TCP Flood, UDP Flood, and HTTP Flood, port scanning, Nmap scanning, sendmail commands, process killing, log cleaning, and more.

ASEC warns that attacks like these are typically caused by using weak passwords on exposed Linux servers.

YouTube's Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive's spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127x127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512x512 image.

A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you'd get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.

TechCrunch reports: Every developer knows that it's a bad idea to hardcode security credentials into source code. Yet it happens and when it does, the consequences can be dire. Until now, GitHub only made its secret scanning service available to paying enterprise users who paid for GitHub Advanced Security, but starting Thursday, the Microsoft-owned company is making its secrets scanning service available for all public GitHub repos for free.

In 2022 alone, the company notified partners in its secret scanning partner program of more than 1.7 million potential secrets that were exposed in public repositories. The service scans repositories for over 200 known token formats and then alerts partners of potential leaks — and you can define your own regex patterns, too.... However, the rollout of the service will be gradual and it will not be available to all users until the end of January 2023.
TechCrunch also notes there's alternatives (including open source GitLeaks).

Apple plans to expand its Communication Safety features, which aim to disrupt the sharing of child sexual abuse material at the source. From a report: In August 2021, Apple announced a plan to scan photos that users stored in iCloud for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tool was meant to be privacy-preserving and allow the company to flag potentially problematic and abusive content without revealing anything else. But the initiative was controversial, and it soon drew widespread criticism from privacy and security researchers and digital rights groups who were concerned that the surveillance capability itself could be abused to undermine the privacy and security of iCloud users around the world. At the beginning of September 2021, Apple said it would pause the rollout of the feature to "collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features." In other words, a launch was still coming. Now the company says that in response to the feedback and guidance it received, the CSAM-detection tool for iCloud photos is dead.

Instead, Apple told WIRED this week, it is focusing its anti-CSAM efforts and investments on its "Communication Safety" features, which the company initially announced in August 2021 and launched last December. Parents and caregivers can opt into the protections through family iCloud accounts. The features work in Siri, Apple's Spotlight search, and Safari Search to warn if someone is looking at or searching for child sexual abuse materials and provide resources on the spot to report the content and seek help. Additionally, the core of the protection is Communication Safety for Messages, which caregivers can set up to provide a warning and resources to children if they receive or attempt to send photos that contain nudity. The goal is to stop child exploitation before it happens or becomes entrenched and reduce the creation of new CSAM.

America's Transportation Security Administration "has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles," reports the Washington Post.

Their article adds that the agency "hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year." Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers' IDs to make sure they're not impostors.... You step up to the travel document checker kiosk and stick your ID into a machine. Then you look into a camera for up to five seconds and the machine compares your live photo to the one it sees on your ID. They call this a "one to one" verification system, comparing one face to one ID. Even though the software is judging if you're an impostor, there's still a human agent there to make the final call (at least for now).

So how accurate is it? The TSA says it's been better at verifying IDs than the manual process. "This technology is definitely a security enhancement," said [TSA program manager Jason] Lim. "We are so far very satisfied with the performance of the machine's ability to conduct facial recognition accurately...." But the TSA hasn't actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches. Some of that might come to light next year when the TSA has to make its case to the Department of Homeland Security to convert airports all over the United States into facial recognition systems....

The TSA says it doesn't use facial recognition for law-enforcement purposes. It also says it minimizes holding on to our face data, so it isn't using the scans to build out a new national database of face IDs. "The scanning and match is made and immediately overwritten at the Travel Document Checker podium. We keep neither the live photo nor the photo of the ID," said Lim. But the TSA did acknowledge there are cases in which it holds on to the data for up to 24 months so its science and technology office can evaluate the system's effectiveness....

"None of this facial recognition technology is mandated," said Lim. "Those who do not feel comfortable will still have to present their ID — but they can tell the officer that they do not want their photo taken, and the officer will turn off the live camera." There are also supposed to be signs around informing you of your rights.
Here's the TSA's web page about the program. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

The U.S. Navy was found guilty of piracy and is ordered to pay a software company $154,400 for a lawsuit filed back in 2016. Gizmodo reports: The company, Bitmanagement Software GmbH, filed a complaint against the Navy, accusing the military branch of copyright infringement. GmbH claimed they had issued 38 copies of their 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo, but while they were still in negotiations for additional licenses, the Navy installed the software onto at least 558,466 machines between 2013 and 2015. In the court filing (PDF), GmbH claimed, "Without Bitmanagement's advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Go onto hundreds of thousands of computers. Bitmanagement did not license or otherwise authorize these uses of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for these uses of Bitmanagement's software."

The company sued the Navy for nearly $600 million for "willful copyright infringement" of the software which, according to the vendor's website, is a 3D viewer that "enables you to visualize and interact with state of the art 2D/3D content," and is based on digital data captured from "various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning, etc)." The court filings stated that after GmbH filed the lawsuit in July 2016, the Navy uninstalled the BS Contact Geo software from all of its computers and "subsequently reinstalled the software on 34 seats, for inventory purposes." GmbH wrote in the court filing, "The government knew or should have known that it was required to obtain a license for copying Bitmanagement software onto each of the devices that had Bitmanagement software installed. The government nonetheless failed to obtain such licenses."

"Get ready: Neurotechnology is coming to the workplace," claims IEEE Spectrum: Neural sensors are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial pilot projects that extract productivity-enhancing data from workers' brains.

These projects aren't confined to specialized workplaces; they're also happening in offices, factories, farms, and airports. The companies and people behind these neurotech devices are certain that they will improve our lives. But there are serious questions about whether work should be organized around certain functions of the brain, rather than the person as a whole.

To be clear, the kind of neurotech that's currently available is nowhere close to reading minds. Sensors detect electrical activity across different areas of the brain, and the patterns in that activity can be broadly correlated with different feelings or physiological responses, such as stress, focus, or a reaction to external stimuli. These data can be exploited to make workers more efficient — and, proponents of the technology say, to make them happier. Two of the most interesting innovators in this field are the Israel-based startup InnerEye, which aims to give workers superhuman abilities, and Emotiv, a Silicon Valley neurotech company that's bringing a brain-tracking wearable to office workers, including those working remotely....

EEG has recently broken out of clinics and labs and has entered the consumer marketplace. This move has been driven by a new class of "dry" electrodes that can operate without conductive gel, a substantial reduction in the number of electrodes necessary to collect useful data, and advances in artificial intelligence that make it far easier to interpret the data. Some EEG headsets are even available directly to consumers for a few hundred dollars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. The goal is to assess UK's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said. "The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK's exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time."

NCSC's scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231). The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet. "We're not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose," NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained. "We're beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we're doing (and why we're doing it)." The NCSC says it will "take steps to remove [any sensitive or personal data] and prevent it from being captured again in the future."

British organizations can opt out of having their servers scanned by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article written by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf: Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather's credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, "Why did they stop using those?" If that happens, I'll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. "Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus," the federal agency advised (PDF). "Use disposable or digital menus."

The QR-code menu -- which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone -- has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I'll be for heaven if I'm lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I'll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another's eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right -- when everyone's phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works -- they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. "You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be," Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, "but from there it's easy to start checking texts and emails." And wasn't it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study "Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions," where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones "enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted."

He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes "are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, " the ACLU has warned. "In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior."

In closing, Friedersdorf writes: "[...] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus."

"What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?"

By the time Apple introduces its much-anticipated mixed reality headset -- planned for sometime next year -- Meta Platforms will have had the advantage of selling products in the category to the public for almost seven years. But Apple's device will also have a few technological tricks up its sleeve that even the latest Meta headset can't boast of. From a report: For example, Apple's device is expected to have the ability to scan the irises of people wearing the headsets so they can quickly log into their accounts simply by putting the devices on their heads, according to two people who helped develop the Apple headset. The capability will make it easier for multiple people to use the same device and allow them to quickly make payments inside the headset, just as iPhones allow people to confirm payments using scans of their fingerprints or faces, the people said.

The planned iris-scanning features, which haven't been previously reported, fill out the details about the Apple headset that have begun trickling out over the last year or so. Apple's device is also expected to have 14 cameras, as The Information previously reported, compared to the 10 on the headset Meta announced earlier this week, the Quest Pro. The abundance of cameras is designed to better capture the body movements of people wearing the headsets so Apple's technology can more faithfully represent them through their digital avatars. The setup includes two downward-facing cameras to capture a user's legs, a feature the Quest Pro doesn't have, the people said.

In the Italian city of Naples, some climate change solutions may be as ancient as the coastal outpost itself, according to researchers who are studying how the area's historic waterways could bring relief from extreme heat as the world warms. From a report: Architects and design students in Italy and the United States are collaborating on an initiative to map ancient aqueducts and water systems in Naples. Known as the Cool City Project, the goal is to assess how this existing infrastructure -- in some cases, centuries old and hidden underground -- could combat life-threatening heat waves in one of the most densely populated parts of Europe and one of the oldest cities in the world. "Naples is sometimes called the capital of the midday sun because of where it's located in the south of Italy," said Nick De Pace, an architect and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "It's a dense city in an area that is already dealing with geothermal heating. And then on top of that, you have climate change."

[...] To start, the researchers are using laser-scanning technology to map Naples' extensive aqueduct system and underground canals. The idea is to examine if reviving these ancient waterways, or resurfacing them, could counter the urban heat island effect. "Daylighting portions of a canal could have a cooling effect in the summer, just like how you can feel a cooling effect from basements," De Pace said. "Then, you can also divert some of that water to new green spaces in the city where you have plants and other things to cool things down." Naples is a compelling place to test such ideas because the city already has a rich history with water, said Alexander Valentino, an architect and Cool City collaborator who is based in Naples.

A group of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, and Cory Doctorow, "are lending their names to an open letter protesting publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive Library, characterizing it as one of a number of efforts to curb libraries' lending of ebooks." From the report: A group of publishers sued the Internet Archive in 2020, claiming that its open library violates copyright by producing "mirror image copies of millions of unaltered in-copyright works for which it has no rights" and then distributes them "in their entirety for reading purposes to the public for free, including voluminous numbers of books that are commercially available." They also contend that the archive's scanning undercuts the market for e-books. The Internet Archive says that its lending of the scanned books is akin to a traditional library. In its response to the publishers' lawsuit, it warns of the ramifications of the litigation and claims that publishers "would like to force libraries and their patrons into a world in which books can only be accessed, never owned, and in which availability is subject to the rightsholders' whim."

"Libraries are a fundamental collective good. We, the undersigned authors, are disheartened by the recent attacks against libraries being made in our name by trade associations such as the American Association of Publishers and the Publishers Association: undermining the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books, intimidating libraries with lawsuits, and smearing librarians," the letter states. The letter also calls for enshrining "the right of libraries to permanently own and preserve books, and to purchase these permanent copies on reasonable terms, regardless of format," and condemns the characterization of library advocates as "mouthpieces" for big tech. "We fear a future where libraries are reduced to a sort of Netflix or Spotify for books, from which publishers demand exorbitant licensing fees in perpetuity while unaccountable vendors force the spread of disinformation and hate for profit," the letter states.

The American Association of Publishers' general counsel Terrence Hart issued a statement responding to the claim that the lawsuit is an attack on libraries. He said, "That authors and publishers support libraries is not in dispute and most certainly not at issue in the infringement case against the Internet Archive, which is not a library. "On the contrary, the Internet Archive operates an unlicensed digital copying and distribution business that copies millions of literary works without permission and gives them away for free. This activity is unprecedented and outside any reasonable interpretation of the copyright law that grants to authors the decision as to whether, when, through whom, and on what terms to distribute their works to the public." He added, "If the rights holder chooses to permit the copying of print books into e-books, that is a choice they are empowered to make as to their own works. The Internet Archive robs authors and publishers of that choice."

Most mission scientists would wince at the thought of their spacecraft being smashed to smithereens. But for those behind Nasa's Dart probe, anything short of total destruction will be chalked up as a failure. From a report: The $330m spacecraft is due to slam head-on into an asteroid about 11m kilometres above the Indian Ocean soon after midnight on Monday. The impact, at nearly seven kilometres a second, will obliterate the half-tonne probe, all in the name of planetary defence. Not that Dimorphos, the asteroid in question, poses any threat to humanity. The Dart, or double asteroid redirection test, is an experiment, the first mission ever to assess whether asteroids can be deflected should one ever be found on a collision course with Earth. A well-placed nudge could avert Armageddon, or so the thinking goes, and spare humans the same fate as the dinosaurs.

"It's a very complicated game of cosmic billiards," said Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer and member of the Nasa Dart investigation team at Queen's University Belfast. "What we want to do is use as much energy [as we can] from Dart to move the asteroid." With telescopes constantly scanning the skies, scientists hope to have some notice if an asteroid were ever to present a major threat. "If we are able to see far enough in advance and know that an asteroid might be a problem, pushing it out of the way will be much safer than the big Hollywood idea of blowing it up," said Catriona McDonald, a PhD student at Warwick University. The Dart mission launched from Vandenberg space force base in November last year. On Monday night, mission controllers will hand control to Dart's software and let the probe steer itself into oblivion.

The Mars rover Perseverance was the subject of a new NASA briefing Thursday. CNET describes it as a celebration of this year's discovery of organic matter — in June NASA for the first time measured the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks — and a celebration of rock samples. (Specifically, the two samples collected from mudstone rock on Wildcat Ridge in Jezero Crater.) The rover's Sherloc instrument investigated the rock. (Sherloc stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.) "In its analysis of Wildcat Ridge, the Sherloc instrument registered the most abundant organic detections on the mission to date," NASA said.

Scientists are seeing familiar signs in the analysis of Wildcat Ridge. "In the distant past, the sand, mud and salts that now make up the Wildcat Ridge sample were deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley in a statement. "The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock — known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth — is important."

Perseverance isn't equipped to find definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. "The reality is the burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high," said Farley during the press conference. For that, we need to examine Mars rocks up close and in person in Earth labs. Perseverance currently has 12 rock samples on board, including the Wildcat Ridge pieces and samples from another sedimentary delta rock called Skinner Ridge. It also collected igneous rock samples earlier in the mission that point to the impact of long-ago volcanic action in the crater. NASA is so happy with the diversity of samples collected that it's looking into dropping some of the filled tubes off on the surface soon in preparation for the future Mars Sample Return campaign.... The mission is under development. If all goes as planned, those rocks could be here by 2033 .
The hope is that in 2033, Perseverance will meet the lander "and personally deliver the samples," the article quips. But in the meantime, Perseverance "could wander up the crater rim." And there's one more update about the smaller exploration vehicle that Peseverance carried to Mars.

"Its companion Ingenuity helicopter is in good health and expected to take to the air again."