Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead. From a report: Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead."

The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation.

Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Donald Trump said Apple CEO Tim Cook called him to discuss the billions of dollars that Apple has been fined in the European Union. Trump made the statement during his appearance on the PBD Podcast -- and said that he won't let the EU "take advantage" of US companies like Apple if reelected. "Two hours ago, three hours ago, he [Cook] called me," Trump said. "He said the European Union has just fined us $15 billion... Then on top of that, they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion." In March, the EU fined Apple around $2 billion after finding that Apple used its dominance to restrict music streaming apps from telling customers about cheaper subscription deals outside the App Store. The EU later won its fight to make Apple pay $14.4 billion in unpaid taxes.

"He [Cook] said something that was interesting," Trump said. "He said they're using that to run their enterprise, meaning Europe is their enterprise. "I said, 'That's a lot... But Tim, I got to get elected first, but I'm not going to let them take advantage of our companies -- that won't, you know, be happening.'" Trump has talked to several Big Tech executives over the past several months. "During an interview this week, Trump said he spoke with Google CEO Sundar Pichai to complain about all the 'bad stories' the search engine shows about him," notes The Verge. "Elon Musk recently spoke at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Trump over the summer 'a few times,' according to the former president."

"Some prominent privacy advocates are encouraging customers to pull their data" from 23andMe, reports SFGate.

But can you actually do that? 23andMe makes it easy to feel like you've protected your genetic footprint. In their account settings, customers can download versions of their data to a computer and choose to delete the data attached to their 23andMe profile. An email then arrives with a big pink button: "Permanently Delete All Records." Doing so, it promises, will "terminate your relationship with 23andMe and irreversibly delete your account and Personal Information."

But there's another clause in the email that conflicts with that "terminate" promise. It says 23andMe and whichever contracted genotyping laboratory worked on a customer's samples will still hold on to the customer's sex, date of birth and genetic information, even after they're "deleted." The reason? The company cites "legal obligations," including federal laboratory regulations and California lab rules. The federal program, which sets quality standards for laboratories, requires that labs hold on to patient test records for at least two years; the California rule, part of the state's Business and Professions Code, requires three. When SFGATE asked 23andMe vice president of communications Katie Watson about the retention mandates, she said 23andMe does delete the genetic data after the three-year period, where applicable...

Before it's finally deleted, the data remains 23andMe property and is held under the same rules as the company's privacy policy, Watson added. If that policy changes, customers are supposed to be informed and asked for their consent. In the meantime, a hack is unfortunately always possible. Another 23andMe spokesperson, Andy Kill, told SFGATE that [CEO Anne] Wojcicki is "committed to customers' privacy and pledges to retain the current privacy policy in force for the foreseeable future, including after the acquisition she is currently pursuing."
An Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy lawyer tells SFGate there's no information more personal than your DNA. "It is like a Social Security number, it can't be changed. But it's not just a piece of paper, it's kind of you."

He urged 23andMe to leave customers' data out of any acquisition deals, and promise customers they'd avoid takeover attempts from companies with bad security — or with ties to law enforcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Amazon might not have ChatGPT, but it has a roadmap that includes developing even more advanced forms of artificial intelligence -- including AI agents that are hell-bent on helping you buy stuff. The ecommerce company is already sprinkling ChatGPT-like AI over its website and apps -- today announcing, among other enhancements, AI-generated shopping guides for hundreds of different product categories. Executives at the company say its engineers are also exploring more ambitious AI services, including autonomous AI shopping agents that recommend goods to a customer or even add items to their cart.

"It's on our roadmap. We're working on it, prototyping it, and when we think it's good enough, we'll release it in whatever form makes sense," says Trishul Chilimbi, a VP and distinguished scientist at Amazon who works on applying the company's core AI to its products and services. Chilimbi says the first step toward AI agents will likely be chatbots that proactively recommend products based on what they know of your habits and interests, as well as a grasp of broader trends. He acknowledges that making this feel nonintrusive will be crucial. "If it's no good and annoying, then you'll tune it out," he says. "But if it comes up with surprising things that are interesting, you'll use it more." [...]

Like many tech companies, Amazon is looking beyond chat and turning its attention toward the potential of so-called agents, which use LLMs but attempt to carry out useful tasks on users' behalf either by writing code on-the-fly, inputing text, or moving a computer's cursor. Future AI agents might, for instance, navigate various websites to sort out a parking ticket, or they might operate a PC to file a tax return. Getting LLM-powered programs to do this reliably is elusive, however, because such tasks are vastly more complex than simple queries and require a new level of precision and reliability.

Amazon's agents are, of course, likely to be more focused on helping customers find and buy whatever they need or want. A Rufus agent might notice when the next book in a series someone is reading becomes available and then automatically recommend it, add it to your cart, or even buy it for you, says Rajiv Mehta, a vice president at Amazon who works on conversational AI shopping. "It could say, 'We have one bought for you. We can ship it today, and it will arrive tomorrow morning at your door. Would you like that?'" Mehta says. He adds that Amazon is thinking about how advertising can be incorporated into its model's recommendation. Chilimbi and Mehta say that eventually, an agent might go on a shopping spree when a customer says, "I'm going on a camping trip, buy me everything I need." An extreme, though not impossible, scenario would involve agents that decide for themselves when a customer needs something, and then buy and ship it to their door. "You could maybe give it a budget," Chilimbi says with a grin.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bismillah writes: Python New Zealand has gone through some rough times lately, with its then-treasurer stealing money from the society.. Things were looking really serious for a while, with Python NZ looking at being liquidated due to the theft of funds.

However, there is a silver lining to the story, as the free and open source movement rallied behind Python NZ and got them out of a serious pickle.
"Our friends at Linux Australia and at the Python Software Foundation went well above and beyond to support us, and save us," says Tom Eastman president of Python New Zealand, in an article from interest.co.nz.

He also says he hopes the treasure is ordered by the court to pay restitution. (In the article the treasurer confirms that he's pleaded guilty to the theft, which took place between February 2019 and October 2023 — leaving Python NZ owing conference supplies around $55,000.) "We had $26 in the bank accounts," Eastman tells the site.

The group now has new transparency and accountability measures...

Jimmy Carter reached his 100th birthday Tuesday, the first time an American president has lived a full century and the latest milestone in a life that took the son of a Depression-era farmer to the White House and across the world as a Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian and advocate for democracy. Associated Press: Living the last 19 months in home hospice care in Plains, the Georgia Democrat and 39th president has continued to defy expectations, just as he did through a remarkable rise from his family peanut farming and warehouse business to the world stage. He served one presidential term from 1977 to 1981 and then worked more than four decades leading The Carter Center, which he and his wife Rosalynn co-founded in 1982 to "wage peace, fight disease, and build hope."

"Not everybody gets 100 years on this earth, and when somebody does, and when they use that time to do so much good for so many people, it's worth celebrating," Jason Carter, the former president's grandson and chair of The Carter Center governing board, said in an interview. "These last few months, 19 months, now that he's been in hospice, it's been a chance for our family to reflect," he continued, "and then for the rest of the country and the world to really reflect on him. That's been a really gratifying time."

James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924 in Plains, where he has lived more than 80 of his 100 years. He is expected to mark his birthday in the same one-story home he and Rosalynn built in the early 1960s -- before his first election to the Georgia state Senate. The former first lady, who was also born in Plains, died last November at 96. President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter's 1976 campaign, praised his longtime friend for an "unwavering belief in the power of human goodness." "You've always been a moral force for our nation and the world (and) a beloved friend to Jill and me and our family," the 81-year-old president tells Carter in a tribute video filmed in front of Carter's presidential portrait at the White House.

Nature published an introduction to running an LLM locally, starting with the example of a bioinformatician who's using AI to generate readable summaries for his database of immune-system protein structures. "But he doesn't use ChatGPT, or any other web-based LLM." He just runs the AI on his Mac... Two more recent trends have blossomed. First, organizations are making 'open weights' versions of LLMs, in which the weights and biases used to train a model are publicly available, so that users can download and run them locally, if they have the computing power. Second, technology firms are making scaled-down versions that can be run on consumer hardware — and that rival the performance of older, larger models. Researchers might use such tools to save money, protect the confidentiality of patients or corporations, or ensure reproducibility... As computers get faster and models become more efficient, people will increasingly have AIs running on their laptops or mobile devices for all but the most intensive needs. Scientists will finally have AI assistants at their fingertips — but the actual algorithms, not just remote access to them.
The article's list of small open-weights models includes Meta's Llama, Google DeepMind's Gemma, Alibaba's Qwen, Apple's DCLM, Mistral's NeMo, and OLMo from the Allen Institute for AI. And then there's Microsoft: Although the California tech firm OpenAI hasn't open-weighted its current GPT models, its partner Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, has been on a spree, releasing the small language models Phi-1, Phi-1.5 and Phi-2 in 2023, then four versions of Phi-3 and three versions of Phi-3.5 this year. The Phi-3 and Phi-3.5 models have between 3.8 billion and 14 billion active parameters, and two models (Phi-3-vision and Phi-3.5-vision) handle images1. By some benchmarks, even the smallest Phi model outperforms OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo from 2023, rumoured to have 20 billion parameters... Microsoft used LLMs to write millions of short stories and textbooks in which one thing builds on another. The result of training on this text, says Sébastien Bubeck, Microsoft's vice-president for generative AI, is a model that fits on a mobile phone but has the power of the initial 2022 version of ChatGPT. "If you are able to craft a data set that is very rich in those reasoning tokens, then the signal will be much richer," he says...

Sharon Machlis, a former editor at the website InfoWorld, who lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, wrote a guide to using LLMs locally, covering a dozen options.
The bioinformatician shares another benefit: you don't have to worry about the company updating their models (leading to different outputs). "In most of science, you want things that are reproducible. And it's always a worry if you're not in control of the reproducibility of what you're generating."

And finally, the article reminds readers that "Researchers can build on these tools to create custom applications..." Whichever approach you choose, local LLMs should soon be good enough for most applications, says Stephen Hood, who heads open-source AI at the tech firm Mozilla in San Francisco. "The rate of progress on those over the past year has been astounding," he says. As for what those applications might be, that's for users to decide. "Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty," Zakka says. "You might be pleasantly surprised by the results."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Scientists who helped pioneer artificial intelligence are warning that countries must create a global system of oversight to check the potentially grave risks posed by the fast-developing technology. The release of ChatGPT and a string of similar services that can create text and images on command have shown how A.I. is advancing in powerful ways. The race to commercialize the technology has quickly brought it from the fringes of science to smartphones, cars and classrooms, and governments from Washington to Beijing have been forced to figure out how to regulate and harness it. In a statement on Monday, a group of influential A.I. scientists raised concerns that the technology they helped build could cause serious harm. They warned that A.I. technology could, within a matter of years, overtake the capabilities of its makers and that "loss of human control or malicious use of these A.I. systems could lead to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity."

If A.I. systems anywhere in the world were to develop these abilities today, there is no plan for how to rein them in, said Gillian Hadfield, a legal scholar and professor of computer science and government at Johns Hopkins University. "If we had some sort of catastrophe six months from now, if we do detect there are models that are starting to autonomously self-improve, who are you going to call?" Dr. Hadfield said. On Sept. 5-8, Dr. Hadfield joined scientists from around the world in Venice to talk about such a plan. It was the third meeting of the International Dialogues on A.I. Safety, organized by the Safe AI Forum, a project of a nonprofit research group in the United States called Far.AI. Governments need to know what is going on at the research labs and companies working on A.I. systems in their countries, the group said in its statement. And they need a way to communicate about potential risks that does not require companies or researchers to share proprietary information with competitors. The group proposed that countries set up A.I. safety authorities to register the A.I. systems within their borders. Those authorities would then work together to agree on a set of red lines and warning signs, such as if an A.I. system could copy itself or intentionally deceive its creators. This would all be coordinated by an international body.

Among the signatories was Yoshua Bengio, whose work is so often cited that he is called one of the godfathers of the field. There was Andrew Yao, whose course at Tsinghua University in Beijing has minted the founders of many of China's top tech companies. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering scientist who spent a decade at Google, participated remotely. All three are winners of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing. The group also included scientists from several of China's leading A.I. research institutions, some of which are state-funded and advise the government. A few former government officials joined, including Fu Ying, who had been a Chinese foreign ministry official and diplomat, and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. Earlier this year, the group met in Beijing, where they briefed senior Chinese government officials on their discussion.

For 30 days, 17,000 AT&T workers in nine different states from the CWA union went on strike. As it began one North Carolina newspaper noted some AT&T customers "report prolonged internet outages." Last week an Emory University economist told NPR that "If it wasn't disruptive or it didn't have any kind of negative element towards customers, then AT&T, I suspect, wouldn't feel any kind of pressure to negotiate."

The 30-day strike was "the longest telecommunications strike in the region's history," according to the union — announcing today that they'd now negotiated "strong tentative contract agreements" and that workers would report to work for their scheduled shifts tomorrow. The new contract in the Southeast covers 17,000 workers technicians, customer service representatives and others who install, maintain and support AT&T's residential and business wireline telecommunications network in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Wages and health care costs were key issues at the bargaining table, and the five-year agreement includes across the board wage increases of 19.33%, with additional 3% increases for Wire Technicians and Utility Operations. The health care agreement holds health care premiums steady in the first year and lowers them in the second and third years, with modest monthly increases in the final two years.
The statement adds that "CWA members and retirees from every region and sector of our union mobilized in support of our bargaining teams, including by distributing flyers with information about the strike at AT&T Wireless stores." CWA District 3 Vice President Richard Honeycutt added "We know that our customers have faced hardship during the strike as well. We are happy to be getting back to work keeping our communities safe and connected."

There's also a separate four-year agreement covering 8,500 AT&T West workers in California and Nevada. "Union members will meet to review the tentative agreements, before holding ratification votes in each region."

AT&T's chief operating officer said the Southeast agreement will "support our competitive position in the broadband industry where we can grow and win against our mostly non-union competitors."

A Google executive told colleagues the goal for the company's then-nascent online advertising business in 2009 was to "crush" rival advertising networks, according to evidence prosecutors presented at the tech titan's antitrust trial on Wednesday. From a report: The statements underscored the U.S. Department of Justice's claim that Google has sought to monopolize markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks, and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges which sit in the middle. On the third day of the trial, prosecutors began to introduce evidence of how Google employees thought about the company's products at the time when the government alleges it set out to dominate the ad tech market.

"We'll be able to crush the other networks and that's our goal," David Rosenblatt, Google's former president of display advertising, said of the company's strategy in late 2008 or early 2009, according to notes shown in court. Google denies the allegations, saying it faces fierce competition from rival digital advertising companies. Rosenblatt came to Google in 2008 when it acquired his former ad tech company, DoubleClick, and left the following year. The notes of his talk showed him discussing the advantages of owning technology on both sides and the middle of the market. "We're both Goldman and NYSE," he said, he said, according to the notes, referring to one of the world's biggest stock exchanges at the time and one of its biggest market makers. "Google has created what's comparable to the NYSE or London Stock Exchange; in other words, we'll do to display what Google did to search," Rosenblatt said.

Most kitchen products use plastics that are practically unrecyclable, yet a trade group representing major brands is pressuring regulators to allow companies to label such items as "recyclable," even though they are likely to end up in landfills. Experts warn this could worsen the plastic crisis and misleading labels could further deceive consumers about the true recyclability of these products. ProPublica reports: The Consumer Brands Association believes companies should be able to stamp "recyclable" on products that are technically "capable" of being recycled, even if they're all but guaranteed to end up in a landfill. As ProPublica previously reported, the group argued for a looser definition of "recyclable" in written comments to the Federal Trade Commission as the agency revises the Green Guides -- guidelines for advertising products with sustainable attributes. [...] ProPublica contacted the 51 companies on the association's board of directors to ask if they agreed with the trade group's definition of "recyclable." Most did not respond. None said they disagreed with the definition. Nine companies referred ProPublica back to the association.

The Green Guides are meant to increase consumer trust in sustainable products. Though these guidelines are not laws, they serve as a national reference for companies and other government agencies for how to define terms like "compostable," "nontoxic" and "recyclable." [...] The current Green Guides allow companies to label products and packaging as "recyclable" if at least 60% of Americans have access to facilities that will take the material. As written, the guidelines don't specify whether it's enough for the facilities to simply collect and sort the items or if there needs to be a reasonable expectation that the material will be made into something new. "The Green Guides have long set forth that items labeled as 'recyclable' are those which are capable of being recycled," [Joseph Aquilina, the association's vice president and deputy general counsel] told ProPublica. "Any characterization suggesting Consumer Brands is pushing for a 'looser definition' is false." But the association seemed to disregard what the FTC said in a separate document released alongside the guides, which states that a truthful recyclable claim means that "a substantial majority of consumers or communities have access to facilities that will actually recycle, not accept and ultimately discard, the product."

In its comments to the FTC, the association pushed back on that idea. The U.S. recycling system is decentralized, and manufacturers have no control over economic factors that might lead a recycler to change its mind about how it handles a certain type of plastic, the association wrote, adding that it was unrealistic to force brands to predict which products will be "ultimately recycled." The association represents sellers and will naturally seek more flexibility in its positions, Jef Richards, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, said in an email. The "problem with defining 'recyclable' as anything that MIGHT be recycled is that I seriously doubt that's how consumers define it." When consumer expectations fail to match what the advertiser is saying, "consumers are being deceived," he added. That deception has concrete impacts: Plastic bags that mistakenly end up at recycling centers can gum up machinery, start fires and contaminate bales of paper, which then can't be recycled. The problem could get worse if the FTC listens to the Consumer Brands Association and allows companies to market plastic bags as "recyclable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: South Korea's president has urged authorities to do more to "eradicate" the country's digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women. Authorities, journalists and social media users recently identified a large number of chat groups where members were creating and sharing sexually explicit "deepfake" images -- including some of underage girls. Deepfakes are generated using artificial intelligence, and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body. South Korea's media regulator is holding an emergency meeting in the wake of the discoveries.

The spate of chat groups, linked to individual schools and universities across the country, were discovered on the social media app Telegram over the past week. Users, mainly teenage students, would upload photos of people they knew -- both classmates and teachers -- and other users would then turn them into sexually explicit deepfake images. The discoveries follow the arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, after it was alleged that child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud were taking place on the encrypted messaging app. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday instructed authorities to "thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them."

"Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media," President Yoon said at a cabinet meeting. "The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers." To build a "healthy media culture," President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated. "Although it is often dismissed as 'just a prank,' it is clearly a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity," he said.

The Guardian notes that making sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention of distributing them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of $37,500.

Further reading: 1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds (Source: 404 Media)

"Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health," the New York Times reported this June, citing a study co-authored by Tim Stockwell, an epidemiologist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. Dr. Stockwell (and other scientists he's collaborated with) "are overhauling decades-worth of scientific evidence — and newspaper headlines — that backed the health benefits of alcohol," writes the Telegraph, "or what is known in the scientific community as the J-curve. The J-curve is the theory that, like a capital J, the negative health consequences of drinking dip slightly into positive territory with moderate drinking — as it benefits such things as the heart — before rising sharply back into negative territory the more someone drinks."

But Stockwell's study prompted at least one scientist to accuse Stockwell of "cherry picking" evidence to suit an agenda — while a think-tank executive suggests he's a front for a worldwide temperance lobby: Dr Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. He was the president of the Kettil Bruun Society (a think tank born out of what was the international temperance congresses) [from 2005 to 2007] and he has been reimbursed for addressing temperance movements and admits attending their meetings, but, he says, not as a member...

Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal. "Dr Stockwell's research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations," Dr Harding said. "You record people's lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it's just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own. And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them. Really, the important thing is not the epidemiology, it's the effect that alcohol actually has on the body. We know the reasons why the curve is J-shaped; it's because of the protective effect moderate consumption has on heart disease and a number of other diseases."

Dr Stockwell rejects Dr Harding's criticism of his study, telling The Telegraph that Dr Harding "doesn't appear to have read it" and accusing him of being in the pocket of the alcohol industry. "We identified six high-quality studies out of 107 and they didn't find any J-shaped curve," Dr Stockwell said. "In fact, since our recent paper, we've now got genetic studies which are showing there's no benefits of low-level alcohol use. I personally think there might still be small benefits, but the point of our work is that, if there are benefits, they've been exaggerating them."
The article notes that Stockwell's research "has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs," and that "scientists he has collaborated with on research highlighting the dangers of alcohol are in positions of power at major institutions, such as the World Health Organisation."

And honestly, the opposing viewpoint seems to be thinly-sourced. Besides Harding (the former British government scientist), the article cites:

• The head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs (which Wikipedia describes as "a right-wing, free market think tank")

• An alcohol policy specialist at Brock University in Ontario (who argues rather unconvincingly that "you can't measure when someone didn't hurt themselves because a friend invited them for a drink.")

On the basis of that, the article writes "respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research". (And that "fellow academics and experts" told The Telegraph "they read the report in disbelief.") Did the Telegraph speak to others who just aren't mentioned in the story? Or are they extrapolating, in that famous British tabloid journalism sort of way?

"Not many Americans have August 6 circled on their calendars," writes the New York Times, "but it's a day that the Japanese can't forget."

79 years after an atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, the Times visits a hospital that "continues to treat, on average, 180 survivors — known as hibakusha — of the blasts each day." The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city's 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed...

[T]he hibakusha and their offspring have formed the backbone of atomic memory. Many see their life's work as informing the wider world about what it's like to carry the trauma, stigma and survivor's guilt caused by the bombs, so that nuclear weapons may never be used again. Their urgency to do so has only increased in recent years. With an average age of 85, the hibakusha are dying by the hundreds each month — just as the world is entering a new nuclear age. Countries like the United States, China and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles. Many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling, and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening. The threat of another blast can't be relegated to history...

Kunihiko Sakuma [who was 9 months old the day of the attack]: "People died or got sick not just right after the bombing. The reality is, their symptoms are emerging even today, 79 years later. I thought all this was in the past. But as I started talking to survivors, I realized their suffering was ongoing. The atomic bomb is such an inhumane weapon, and the effects of radiation stay with survivors for a very long time. That's why they need our continued support."
The article includes this quote from Keiko Ogura, who was 8 years old at the time of the attack — and still worries she hasn't done enough to abolish the use of nuclear weapons: "As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story. 'For we shall not repeat the evil' — this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it's difficult to imagine."

Many of the stories are horrifying. But I'll note this one by Seiichiro Mise — who on the day of the atomic bomb attack was 10 years old: "I got married in 1964. At the time, people would say that if you married an atomic bomb survivor, any kids you had would be deformed.

"Two years later, I got a call from the hospital saying my baby had been born. But on my way, my heart was troubled. I'm an atomic bomb victim. I experienced that black rain. So I felt anguished. Usually new parents simply ask the doctor, 'Is it a boy or girl?' I didn't even ask that. Instead, I asked, 'Does my baby have 10 fingers and 10 toes?'

"The doctor looked unsettled. But then he smiled and said it was a healthy boy. I was relieved."
The first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima was Barack Obama in 2016. The article notes he did not issue the official apology many Japanese had hoped for. But he did say "we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again...

"Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade."

The Russian Chess Federation is suspending a player who is facing jail time for allegedly trying to poison her rival with mercury during a chess tournament. Chess.com reports: Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess coach from Makhachkala in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, is accused of trying to poison her rival, 30-year-old Umayganat Osmanova. The incident unfolded during the Dagestan Chess Championship on August 2, according to a Telegram channel that first reported on the story, and is now making headlines in state-run Russian news media as well as reaching global media as well. Security camera footage shows the incident where Abakarova calmly walked over to the board where Osmanova was supposed to appear 20 minutes later. It was reported that she'd previously asked if cameras were in operation and been told that they weren't. She then smeared what is said to be potentially deadly mercury from a thermometer.

Osmanova said she began feeling unwell 30 minutes later, complaining of nausea and dizziness, prompting an immediate call for medical assistance. Doctors eventually concluded that poisoning was a likely cause. After reviewing the footage from security cameras, the arbiter reported it to the police and Abakarova was detained, rtv1.com reports. [...] Abakarova has reportedly confessed that she wanted to "knock her opponent out of the tournament," admitting "personal hostility" toward Osmanova, who had a week earlier won the Dagestan Rapid Championship above her on tiebreaks. The plan was not to harm Osmanova, but to scare her, according to a police report quoted by Russian media.

Abakarova has now been detained by police and is facing up to three years in jail, according to The Mirror. Andrey Filatov, the President of the Russian Chess Federation, has also confirmed that Abakarova is temporarily suspended from Russian chess events, pending an investigation into the incident. She is potentially facing a lifetime ban. [...] Despite falling ill, Osmanova fully recovered and continued the tournament, eventually finishing in second place and winning a prize. Abakarova was expelled after the fourth round and is unlikely to play chess again anytime soon.

America's National Football League "is the latest organization to turn to facial authentication to bolster event security," reports the Record, citing a new announcement this week: All 32 NFL stadiums will start using the technology this season, after the league signed a contract with a company that uses facial scans to verify the identity of people entering event venues and other secure spaces.

The facial authentication platform, which counts the Cleveland Browns' owners as investors, will be used to "streamline and secure" entry for thousands of credentialed media, officials, staff and guests so they can easily access restricted areas such as press boxes and locker rooms, Jeff Boehm, the chief operating officer of Wicket, said in a LinkedIn post Monday. "Credential holders simply take a selfie before they come, and then Wicket verifies their identity and checks their credentials with Accredit (a credentialing platform) as they walk through security checkpoints," Boehm added.

Wicket technology was deployed in a handful of NFL stadiums last year as part of a pilot program. Other stadiums will start rolling it out beginning on Aug. 8, when the pre-season kicks off. Some teams also have extended their use of the technology to scan the faces of ticket holders. The Cleveland Browns, Atlanta Falcons and New York Mets all have used the company's facial authentication software to authenticate fans with tickets, according to Stadium Tech Report. "Fans come look at the tablet and, instantly, the tablet recognizes the fan," Brandon Covert, the vice president of information technology for the Cleveland Browns, said in a testimonial appearing on Wicket's website. "It's almost a half-second stop. It's not even a stop — more of a pause."
"The Browns also use Wicket to verify the ages of fans purchasing alcohol at concession stands, according to Wicket's LinkedIn page," the article points out.

And a July report from Privacy International found that 25 of the top 100 soccer stadiums in the world are already using facial recognition technology.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

schwit1 writes: A U.S. appeals court on Thursday blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge. The agency voted in April along party lines to reassume regulatory oversight of broadband internet and reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 that were rescinded under then-President Donald Trump.

The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which had temporarily delayed the rules, said on Thursday it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules. "The final rule implicates a major question, and the commission has failed to satisfy the high bar for imposing such regulations," the court wrote. "Net neutrality is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization."

Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a number of cryptocurrency-related pledges:

• Trump promised that if elected, he'd commute the sentence of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served. "It's enough."

• Trump promised to change the top personnel at America's Securities and Exchange Commission. "On Day One, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman," Trump told the crowd, drawing a long round of applause. ("I didn't know he was that unpopular," Trump joked — then repeated his promise to appoint "a new SEC chairman who believes America should build the future, not block the future, which is what they're doing.")

• Trump also promised that "As president, I will immediately shut down Operation Chokepoint 2.0." (For context, Operation Chokepoint was an Obama-era program — ended during Trump's presidency — to scrutinize bank lending to "high-risk" merchants, mostly predatory "payday" lenders. Concerns were raised that bank regulators were pressuring banks to cut off certain businesses, and while there is no official "Choke Point 2.0," the phrase has been used colloquially to describe the possibility of bank regulators pressuring specific industries like cryptocurrency.)

• Trump also announced he'd oppose a central bank digital currency — although his wording was a little idiosyncratic. "Next I will immediately order the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to cease and desist all steps necessary — because, you know, there's a thing going on in your industry. They want to move the creation of a central bank digital currency. It's over, forget it." [Audience boos CBDC's ] "CBDC — there will never be a CBDC while I'm president of the United States." (In fact a 2023 statement from America's Federal Reserve about CBDC's stresses that "no decisions have been made at this time" and that the Federal Reserve would only proceed with a CBDC after passage of an authorizing law.)

• Trump also told the audience that "We will create a framework to enable the safe and responsible expansion of staple — stablecoins," then teased the crypto-friendly audience by asking playfully "Do you know what a stablecoin is? Does anybody know — please raise your hand." Trump promised the move would "allow us to extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers all around the world," and that "there will be billions and billions of people brought into the crypto economy and storing their savings in bitcoin."

• Toward the end Trump said that if elected, he would direct the government not to sell any of its currently-held bitcoin, keeping it instead as the core of a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile."
  
  "As you know, most of the bitcoin currently held by the U.S. government was obtained through law enforcement action — you know that, they took it from you. 'Let's take that guy's life, let's take his family, his house, his bitcoin — we'll turn it into bitcoin.' It's been taken away from you because that's where we're going now. That's where this country is going. It's a facist regime."

In a speech which lasted for over an hour, the 78-year-old former president also criticized his political opponents, touching on topics like inflation, immigration, and his promise to "drill, baby, drill."

But Trump closed by thanking the 3,000 attendees, telling them to "have a good time with your bitcoin, and your crypto and everything else that you're playing with. And we're going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth."

snydeq shares a report from CIO.com: ServiceNow has reported potential compliance issues to the US Department of Justice "related to one of its government contracts" as well as the hiring of the then-CIO of the US Army to be its head of global public sector, the company said in regulatory filings on Wednesday. The DOJ is looking into the matter. Following an internal investigation, ServiceNow said, its President and COO, CJ Desai, has resigned, while "the other individual has also departed the company." That executive, Raj Iyer, told CIO.com, "I resigned because I didn't want to be associated with this fiasco in any way. It's not my fault." CEO Bill McDermott told financial analysts in a conference call Wednesday that someone within ServiceNow had complained about the situation and that an internal probe "determined that our company policy was violated."

"Acting with total transparency, the company proactively disclosed the findings of the investigation to the proper government entities. And as a result, today, we're announcing the departure of the individual whose hiring was the subject of the original complaint," McDermott said. "We also came to a mutual agreement that CJ Desai, our President and COO, would offer his resignation from the company effective immediately. While we believe this was an isolated incident, we are further sharpening our hiring policies and procedures as a result of the situation."