It was Magnus Carlsen's last tournament as world champion, reports CNN — and he was eliminated after a "dramatic slip of his mouse" in his online match against Hikaru Nakamura: After drawing their first two games, the duo faced off in an Armageddon clash — similar to regular chess but black has draw odds, meaning that if black draws the game they win, and black starts with less time on the clock than white — to decide who would face Fabiano Caruana in the grand final.

After a tight encounter, the match was heading to its final seconds with very little to separate the two titans of chess.

And it was a moment of unfortunate luck which separated the two when Carlsen's mouse slipped meaning he put his queen onto F6 which allowed it to be taken by Nakamura and seal the victory.

Nakamura — wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "I literally don't care" on the front — celebrated with a fist-bump while five-time world champion Carlsen could be seen exclaiming and grimacing in frustration.
On YouTube Thursday, Nakamura posted a 33-minute video titled "Dear YouTube, This Time Magnus Lost," where he explains every move down to the final queen blunder (which he calls by its YouTube nickname, a "Botez Gambit.")

In the video Nakamura admits he'd missed a possible winning position (by drawing) earlier in the game. But he also believes he would've achieved the same result simply by checking Carlsen endlessly until a draw was declared.

And Chess.com tells the rest of the story. Friday Nakamura went on to win the event's final round, defeating grandmaster Fabiano Caruana in another Armageddon-style showdown after they'd each won three out of six games.

A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that "hear" you without speaking. Engadget reports: The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud -- and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. "Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible," said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. "We're moving sonar onto the body."

The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user's speech patterns. Then, once it's ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time "with about 95 percent accuracy." The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. "We're very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy," said Cheng Zhang. "It's small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world." "The team at Cornell's Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program," adds Engadget. "They're also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements."

A video of the eyeglasses can be viewed here.

Academics in the US have developed an attack dubbed NUIT, for Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan, that exploits vulnerabilities in smart device microphones and voice assistants to silently and remotely access smart phones and home devices. The Register reports: The research team -- Guenevere Chen, an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, her doctoral student Qi Xia, and Shouhuai Xu, a professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs -- found Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa are all vulnerable to NUIT attacks, albeit to different degrees. In an interview with The Register this month, Chen and Xia demonstrated two separate NUIT attacks: NUIT-1, which emits sounds to exploit a victim's smart speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on the same device, and NUIT-2, which exploits a victim's speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on a different device. Ideally, for the attacker, these sounds should be inaudible to humans.

The attacks work by modulating voice commands into near-ultrasound inaudible signals so that humans can't hear them but the voice assistant will still respond to them. These signals are then embedded into a carrier, such as an app or YouTube video. When a vulnerable device picks up the carrier, it ends up obeying the hidden embedded commands. Attackers can use social engineering to trick the victim into playing the sound clip, Xia explained. "And once the victim plays this clip, voluntarily or involuntarily, the attacker can manipulate your Siri to do something, for example, open your door."

For NUIT-1 attacks, using Siri, the answer is yes. The boffins found they could control an iPhone's volume so that a silent instruction to Siri generates an inaudible response. The other three voice assistants -- Google's, Cortana, and Alexa -- are still susceptible to the attacks, but for NUIT-1, the technique can't silence devices' response so the victim may notice shenanigans are afoot. It's also worth noting that the length of malicious commands must be below 77 milliseconds -- that's the average reaction time for the four voice assistants across multiple devices.

In a NUIT-2 attack, the attacker exploits the speaker on one device to attack the microphone and associated voice assistant of a second device. These attacks aren't limited by the 77-millisecond window and thus give the attacker a broader range of possible action commands. An attacker could use this scenario during Zooms meeting, for example: if an attendee unmutes themself, and their phone is placed next to their computer, an attacker could use an embedded attack signal to attack that attendees phone. The researchers will publish their research and demonstrate the NUIT attacks at the USENIX Security Symposium in August.

A YouTuber has published a video where he tricks ChatGPT into generating usable Windows 95 activation keys. Tom's Hardware reports: After asking Open AI's chatbot directly for Windows 95 keys, he received an expected reasoned refusal. YouTuber Enderman then asked the same thing but from a different angle. The result was a success which was somewhat limited by ChatGPT's ability to process natural language requests into formulas. [...] Some of the tested results were checked by attempting to activate a fresh Windows 95 install in a virtual machine. While the keys passed a casual inspection, it turns out that only about 1-in-30 keys seem to work as expected.

So what is the problem with these keys? Enderman complains that "the only issue keeping ChatGPT from successfully generating valid Windows 95 keys almost every attempt is the fact that it can't count the sum of digits and it doesn't know divisibility." In the five-digit string divisible by seven section, the AI appears to provide a stream of random numbers that don't pass this simple mathematical test. The report adds: "[W]hile quizzing ChatGPT about key generating may be fun, it would have probably been more productive to manipulate the AI into writing a Python script to generate a conforming key or to DIY it."

After launching My Ad Center last fall, Google is now introducing the Ads Transparency Center as a "searchable hub of all ads served from verified advertisers." 9to5Google reports: The Ads Transparency Center will let you view all the advertisements a company has run using Google's networks. Each ad includes the date it last ran, format (text, video, etc.), and what region (country) it was shown in: "For example, imagine you're seeing an ad for a skincare product you're interested in, but you don't recognize the brand, or you're curious to understand if you recognize other ads from this brand. With the Ads Transparency Center, you can look up the advertiser and learn more about them before purchasing or visiting their site."

You can search by advertiser (with approximate ad quantity noted) or website, with filters for topics, time, and country. Once an advertiser is selected, Google will show the feed of ads with the ability to select for more details. You'll be able to access it directly here or from the My Ad Center, which lets you customize advertising that appears in Search, Discover, Shopping, and YouTube.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a recent video, YouTuber EposVox reports that YouTube is finally rolling out AV1 live-streaming support to the platform, with the tech currently in a beta. AV1 will provide YouTube live streams with a substantial increase in video quality, and allow users to stream at up to 4K 60FPS with Twitch-limited bitrates. EposVox was able to get early access to a development build of OBS 29.1 to check out YouTube's live streaming AV1 capabilities. The newest addition to the AV1 rollout is YouTube live streaming support with AV1. YouTube just rolled out beta support for a new video live-streaming standard known as Enhanced RTMP, which will allow streamers to utilize several of the latest video codecs, including AV1, VP9, and HEVC (H.265) to live stream videos to YouTube.

EposVox was able to test drive Enhanced RTMP, with a development build of OBS 21.9 to stream AV1 gaming content to YouTube directly. According to EposVox, the quality difference is night and day compared to H.264. The quality jump with AV1, allowed him to drive higher quality video to his live stream, and remove pixelation altogether. Just for perspective on how powerful AV1 is, EposVox was able to run an AV1 1440P 60FPS live stream of Halo Infinite at 500kbps - a bitrate 15x lower than the Twitch limit, and the stream was still perfectly watchable. For normal use cases, EposVox found that 8mbps was the sweet spot for 1440P 60FPS, and around 15mbps for 1440P 60FPS. For a perfectly good-looking live stream with none or close to no pixelization. For users that still want to stream 1080P video, all you'll need is a 4MBps bitrate to achieve the same result. This is a night and day difference to H.264 where 8Mbps was about the minimum you want for a high-quality 1080P 60FPS video stream, and even in this situation, pixelation is still very likely to occur with a lot of streams.

"9to5Linux.com reports that the GNOME 44 desktop environment is officially released and gives a detailed look at the major new features and improvements," writes Slashdot reader prisoninmate. From the report: Code-named "Kuala Lumpur" in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2022 conference, GNOME 44 introduces a GTK4 port of the Epihaphy (GNOME Web) web browser, a file chooser grid view for apps that use the standard GTK file chooser, as well as support for adding a WireGuard VPN directly from the Network panel. GNOME 44 continues to improve the Quick Settings feature introduced in GNOME 43 by implementing a submenu to the Bluetooth button to more easily and quickly connect or disconnect peripherals, adding descriptions to buttons to easily see their status, and implementing a new feature called Background Apps via a new background monitoring service in XDG portals 1.16.0." A full list of changes are available in the official release notes. The GNOME project also published a launch video on YouTube.

Computer component maker Acer built a lightweight electric bike called the Acer ebii. Electrek reports: This lightweight 35 lb. (16 kg) e-bike features a number of gadgets and gizmos we have yet to spot in the industry, such as built-in AI designed to predictively control the transmission and make use of collision detection sensors for a safer ride. There's also proximity unlocking feature that the company says "automatically locks your bike when you leave and unlocks it again when you're nearby." My Gogoro electric scooter has a similar function, though that's a highway-capable vehicle.

Tracking capabilities are built into the ebii to help keep tabs on it 24/7. If the bike is ever stolen, it can be locked remotely and tracked using its built-in GPS locator. But don't think that you won't find typical bike parts here either, as the Acer ebii still features high-end components like a belt drive instead of a chain drive, 160mm hydraulic disc brakes, and 360-degree LED lighting. Airless tires are designed to remove the chance of flats, and a lefty-style fork does double duty as a conversation piece and a fancy weight saver.

There's also a 460 Wh electric bicycle battery that is said to offer a range of up to 68 miles (110 km) per charge. A top speed of 15 mph (25 km/h) and a 250W rear hub motor look to keep the bike within European and Asian power and speed limits. There's no hand throttle, which means riders will have to rely on pedal assist that is activated when the rider spins the pedals. It appears that there's some confusion about the 2.5-hour charger included with the bike, as some in the industry seem to think it can be used to charge phones and batteries as well. In fact, it's actually the e-bike's removable battery itself that can function as a portable power station to charge up your mobile devices. Pricing and availability are not yet available. But there is a launch video to build up excitement.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.

Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award.

For Gates, VB was love at first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC.

After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right."

At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.

Rest of World reports on viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan, which snowballed into a societal phenomenon that social media users and the Japanese press have named "sushi terrorism."

It began January 9th when a video showed a customer adding a pile of wasabi onto sushi on a conveyor belt. Another video shows a giggling teenager touching sushi on a conveyor belt at the sushi chain Sushiro after first licking that finger. The stock of the parent company that owns that sushi chain drops nearly 5%. It's not over. At a Nagoya branch of Kura Sushi, a 21-year-old customer grabs sushi from the conveyor belt, cramming it into his mouth and chasing it down with a swig from the communal soy sauce bottle. The incident is filmed by his two younger friends, one of whom posts the clip online. The same day, Sushiro's operating company announces it will limit conveyor belts and move to ordering by touch screen.
Concerns continued at other sushi chains. ("Kura Sushi says it's installing surveillance cameras equipped with AI to monitor customers' behavior and catch sushi terrorists. A day later, Choushimaru announces it will switch entirely to an iPad-based ordering system by April 26.") Sushiro also moves to ordering by touch screen and promises to limit conveyor belts.

The story's dramatic conclusion? Nagoya police arrest the 19-year-old man who allegedly posted the soy-sauce-swigging video from Kura Sushi, along with his two "co-conspirators." Nagoya police declare they are holding all three sushi terrorists on suspicion of "forcible obstruction of business." The crime would carry a maximum penalty of three years in prison, if they're convicted.

T-Mobile is buying Mint Mobile, the budget-friendly mobile carrier that's partially owned by Ryan Reynolds. The Verge reports: In a post published on Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that the deal's valued at up to $1.35 billion and comes as T-Mobile looks to build out its prepaid phone offering. The acquisition should close later this year and involves a 39 percent cash and 61 percent stock purchase of Mint's parent company, Ka'ena Corporation. The price could change, however, as it depends on Mint's performance.

Once the deal closes, Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim will join T-Mobile to continue managing the brand, which T-Mobile says "will generally operate as a separate business unit." Meanwhile, Reynolds will also remain a part of Mint's branding, as T-Mobile says he will "continue on in his creative role on behalf of Mint." "I never dreamt I'd own a wireless company and I certainly never dreamt I'd sell it to T-Mobile," Reynolds said in a tweet. "Life is strange and I'm incredibly proud and grateful."

As noted by T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert in a YouTube video posted on Wednesday, T-Mobile will retain the price of Mint's cheapest phone plan at $15 per month. The deal also includes Ka'ena's other companies, including Ultra Mobile, a prepaid carrier that offers international calling, and Plum, a wholesale wireless solutions provider. [...] By purchasing Mint, T-Mobile may be looking to claw back the customers it lost when it sold Boost Mobile to Dish as part of its merger with Sprint.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia released a new driver update for its GeForce graphics cards that, among other things, introduced a new Video Super Resolution upscaling technology that could make low-resolution videos look better on high-resolution screens. But the driver (version 531.18) also apparently came with a bug that caused high CPU usage on some PCs after running and then closing a game. Nvidia has released a driver hotfix (version 531.26) that acknowledges and should fix the issue, which was apparently being caused by an undisclosed bug in the "Nvidia Container," a process that exists mostly to contain other processes that come with Nvidia's drivers. It also fixes a "random bugcheck" issue that may affect some older laptops with GeForce 1000-series or MX250 and MX350 GPUs.

As media executives look to pop the stock of flagging publicly traded companies, tech advances are becoming the new gimmick to wow (even temporarily) the investing class. From a report: When Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel opened his company's earnings call with prepared remarks Feb. 28, a casual listener hearing him tout the UFC and WME might have missed the most interesting part: Emanuel wasn't speaking at all. Well, he sort of was. The words were his, and the voice was his, but rather than Emanuel speaking into a microphone (opening remarks on earnings calls are often pretaped), the comments were the product of a generative artificial intelligence firm calledâSpeechify. Indeed, artificial intelligence has been hard to avoid for Wall Street watchers this year. And it's easy to understand why: AI news has led to share price surges at companies like BuzzFeed (which uses it and saw its stock price more than double) and Microsoft (whose rise was in the high singleâdigits).

After the public release of OpenAI's large language model (LLM) chatbot ChatGPT (and the stock bounce it gave to Microsoft, which is OpenAI's tech partner), it seems that every company wants a piece of the AI action, or at least wants to send the message that it's thinking about it. Companies with close ties to media and entertainment are no exception. In his first letter to creators as CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan wrote March 1 that "the power of AI is just beginning to emerge in ways that will reinvent video and make the seemingly impossible possible," and that it will be a priority for him. Spotify, led by CEO Daniel Ek, released on Feb. 22 what it is calling an "AI DJ," powered by technology from OpenAI. The DJ takes the music a Spotify user listens to and combines it with recommendations from music experts and an AI-generated voice to create a totally personalized radio show. Snap, run by Evan Spiegel, released an assistant called "My AI," based on ChatGPT, bringing the capabilities of that LLM to Snapchat+ users.

And at small digital publishers like the Jonah Peretti-led BuzzFeed and Arena Group Holdings (the owner of Sports Illustrated), AI is being touted as a fount of new types of storytelling that "can create enterprise value for our brands and partners," per Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn. To be sure, AI's potential for transforming business is real (in a March 2 research report, Morgan Stanley called it a "$6 trillion opportunity"), but it remains just that: an opportunity, rather than today's reality. Wall Street is still very bullish on AI in the long term, with Bank of America's Haim Israel and Martyn Briggs writing in a Feb. 28 thematic report that AI is "at a defining moment -- like the internet in the '90s," but the consensus is that while big tech firms like YouTube owner Alphabet, Amazon and Apple will reap the rewards at some point, what it means for smaller companies in the present is less clear. For entertainment companies, the potential is obvious, even if the business models are not. The Morgan Stanley report noted the logic in AI recommendations on streaming services like Spotify and Netflix (Spotify's DJ is a first step in that direction), and it isn't a stretch to think that content itself can be made faster and at less cost with generative technology (applications could include special effects, which are labor intensive and costly). For companies like Endeavor and CAA, generative voice technology (like that from Speechify) and deepfake tech (like Deep Voodoo, a deepfake company from the creators of South Park that counts the CAA-affiliated Connect Ventures as an investor), could mean new opportunities for old actors (see Robert Zemeckis' upcoming movie Here, which will use AI from Metaphysic to de-age Tom Hanks).

YouTube is relaxing some of the profanity rules it introduced late last year -- "with an update outlining a less restrictive policy that will allow the use of moderate and strong profanity to be used without risking demonetization," reports Engadget. From the report: The original policy, first introduced in November, would flag any video that used rude language in the first several seconds as ineligible for advertising, with little delineation between "strong" or "moderate" swearing. The policy also seemed to apply retroactively, with many creators claiming that videos they published before the updated policy had lost their monetization status. Now, YouTube is reversing course with a tweaked set of rules that allows some swearing.

Now, creators who use colorful language in the first seven seconds of a video are still eligible for advertising, with some conditions. If the profanity is "moderate," the video won't face any restrictions -- but strong profanity in those opening seconds could result in a video only receiving "limited ads." Under the original rules, the update notes, both of these scenarios would have caused a video to be completely demonetized. Creators will be able swear more frequently after the first seven seconds without fear of losing advertising revenue, though YouTube notes that excessive swearing will still put content at risk of being demonetized or limited. The update also clarifies that strong language in background, outro or intro music should not affect monetization status.

Here's something you don't see everyday: fewer ads on YouTube. Well, fewer ad formats, at least. From a report: YouTube's latest forum post says the company will be doing away with "Overlay ads" on YouTube videos. These are the old-school banner ads that pop up over the video player, obstructing the view of whatever you were trying to watch. YouTube says the ads are going away on April 6, calling them a "legacy ad format." The ads only worked on desktop, the company said, and they "are disruptive for viewers." Now the only ads in the video player will be video ads that can play before, in the middle of, or after a video. The "view product" pop-up ad is also allowed, and there will still be banner ads in the recommended video list.

Microsoft has unveiled Video Super Resolution (VSR) -- an "experimental" video upscaling feature for its Edge web browser that uses machine learning to increase the resolution of low-quality video. From a report: Announced on the Edge Insiders blog, Microsoft's VSR technology can "remove blocky compression artifacts" and improve text clarity for videos on platforms such as YouTube. The feature is still in testing and availability is currently restricted to half of the users running the Canary channel of Edge in Microsoft's Insider program. If you want to try it for yourself, there are a few stipulations: Microsoft VSR will only work on video resolutions of 720p or lower (provided both the height and width of the video exceeds 192 pixels), and the video itself can't be protected with digital rights management (DRM) technology like PlayReady or Widevine, which makes frames inaccessible to the browser for processing. That particular restriction could impact what content you can upscale with the feature, as most popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max all leverage DRM tech for copyright protection. Unlike Nvidia's RTX Super Resolution, Microsoft's Video Super Resolution feature supports both Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

The final season of Star Trek: Picard features the return of the Klingon Worf, reports Polygon, calling it "the chance to give one of sci-fi's most beloved supporting characters something that's usually reserved only for Captains and Admirals: a glorious third act."

Interestingly, back in 1987 Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had "hoped to avoid relying on familiar alien antagonists" when creating the first Star Trek TV sequel in 1987. So after a last-minute addition, "the early development of the character was left almost entirely in the hands of Dorn, then best known for a supporting role on the lighthearted police drama CHiPs." "They really didn't have a bible for Worf at all," says Dorn of those early episodes. "In fact, one of the first things I did was, I asked the producers, 'What do you want from this guy? You've just handed me a piece of paper that says Worf on it.'" With Roddenberry's blessing, Dorn set out making the character his own, giving Worf the kind of personal investment and attachment that only an actor can provide. "I decided to make the guy the opposite of everybody else on the show. You know, everyone else, their attitudes were great, and they're out there in space, relationships are forming. And after every mission they were like, Wasn't that fantastic? I didn't say anything to anybody, I just made him this gruff and surly character on the bridge. No smiles, no joking around."

It didn't take the show's producers long to realize that Dorn's gruff, joyless performance could effectively turn any bit of throwaway dialogue into a laugh line....

Alongside his role as the show's unlikely comic relief, however, Worf developed into one of Star Trek's most complicated protagonists. Roddenberry mandated that the show's human characters had evolved beyond the sorts of interpersonal conflicts that typically drive television dramas, but Worf, an alien, was permitted to be contrarian, hot-tempered, and even malicious.... He strictly adheres to a code of honor that does not totally overlap with that of his peers.... Yet, however many times "real" Klingon conduct clashes with his values, Worf never allows this to pollute his own sense of honor. He remains unfailingly truthful, loyal, and brave. And, over the years, other Klingons take notice of this and grow to admire and emulate him....

Dorn — along with the rest of the Next Gen ensemble — has once again been called upon to revitalize a Star Trek spinoff. The third season of Star Trek: Picard reintroduces us to Worf as a wise old master, so confident in his ability to defeat his foes in combat that he rarely needs to unsheathe this weapon. Dorn has imagined the past 20 years of his character's life in detail, taking inspiration from a source not entirely disconnected from Star Trek: the films of Quentin Tarantino. Appropriately, Dorn has patterned this version of Worf after a character from a film that opens with an old Klingon proverb: Kill Bill.

"One of the characters was Pai Mei, this martial arts killer," says Dorn. "He's gone so far in the martial arts, the next step is — he can defend himself and kill with a sword, but he can also do it with his bare hands. And with that comes calm, and the ability to know that sometimes you don't have to kill. That's how he's grown in the past 20 years. Now he can dodge ray guns...."

One way or another, the actor looks back at his untouchable tenure as Starfleet's greatest warrior with warmth and appreciation.
And speaking of appreciation, this video shows Dorn out of his Klingon makeup, joining with castmember Brent Spiner to recall a fondly-remembered prank that they'd played on Patrick Stewart (who was directing the episode).

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares his perspective on the 10th anniversary of Code.org: Remember this?" asks tech-backed Code.org on Twitter as it celebrates its achievements.... "It's the viral video that launched Code.org back in 2013!" Code.org also reminds its 1M Twitter followers that What Most Schools Don't Teach starred tech leaders Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, and Drew Houston.

But 10 years later, the promise of unlimited tech jobs and crazy-fun workplaces promoted in the video by these Poster Boys for K-12 Computer Science hasn't exactly aged well, and may serve as more of a cautionary tale about hubris for some rather than evoke fond memories.

"Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find," exclaimed Zuckerberg in the video. But ten years later, Facebook's policy is firing as many employees as it can — 11,000+ and counting. Houston, who sang the praises of working in cool tech workplaces in the video ("To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible"), went on to make remote work the standard practice at Dropbox, cut 11% of his employees, and reported a $575M loss on unneeded office space. Under pressure, Gates left Microsoft, Dorsey left Twitter, and Hsieh tragically left (Amazon-owned) Zappos, and the companies they co-founded recently unveiled plans for massive layoffs and halted ambitious office expansion plans as tech employees push back on return-to-the-office edicts.

Still, there's no denying the success of what the National Science Foundation called the "amazing marketing prowess" of tech giant supported and directed Code.org when it comes to pushing coding into American classrooms. The nonprofit boasts of having 80M+ student accounts, reported it had spent $74.7M to train 113,000+ K-12 teachers to deliver its K-12 CS curriculum, and has set its sights on making CS a high school graduation requirement in every state by 2030.

Interestingly, concomitant with Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration was the release of a new academic paper — Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship — that provocatively questions whether K-12 CS, at least in its current incarnation, is a feature or a bug. From the paper: "We are currently seeing an unprecedented push of computing into P-12 education systems across the US, with calls for compulsory computing education and changes to graduation requirements.... Although computing creep narratives are typically framed in lofty democratic terms, the 'access' narrative is ultimately a corporate play. Broadening participation in computing serves corporate interests by offering an expanded labor supply from which to choose the most productive workers. It is true that this might benefit an elite subset of BIPOC individuals, but the macroeconomics of the global labor market mean that access to computing is unlikely to ever benefit BIPOC communities at scale. [...] There are several nonprofits invested in the growth of computing, many with mission statements that do explicitly cite equity (and sometimes racial equity, in particular). Some of the larger nonprofits, though, are mainly funded by (and thus ultimately serve) corporate interests (e.g., Code. org).

Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. Electrek reports: Universal Hydrogen is celebrating today following the first successful flight of the hydrogen electric plane this morning, which took off in Grant County, Washington, at 8:41 a.m. PST and flew for 15 minutes. For this initial flight, one of the airplane's engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen's fuel cell-electric powertrain. The other standard engine remained to ensure the safety of the plane and its pilot, former US Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll.

Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight: "During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine."

Connect has secured the first US order to convert 75 ATR 72-600 planes to Universal Hydrogen powertrains with the purchase rights for 25 more. With the first successful flight complete, Universal Hydrogen kicks off a two-year testing program that is expected to enable full certification for hydrogen electric passenger flights using the aforementioned ATR 72 planes by 2025. The flight also marks the Dash-300 flying test bed as the largest hydrogen electric plane to take flight, paving the way for more hydrogen electric conversions of existing aircraft. You can watch a video of the flight on YouTube or embedded in Electrek's article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke out against a European proposal to make streaming providers and other online firms pay for ISPs' network upgrades. "Some of our ISP partners have proposed taxing entertainment companies to subsidize their network infrastructure," Peters said in a speech Tuesday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (transcript). The "tax would have an adverse effect, reducing investment in content -- hurting the creative community, hurting the attractiveness of higher-priced broadband packages, and ultimately hurting consumers," he argued. [...] "ISPs claim that these taxes would only apply to Netflix. But this will inevitably change over time as broadcasters shift from linear to streaming," Peters said at MWC. Sandvine data suggests that nearly half of global Internet traffic is sent by Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft. Online video accounts for 65 percent of all traffic, and Netflix recently passed YouTube as the top video-traffic generator.

Peters cited Nielsen data showing that "Netflix accounts for under 10 percent of total TV time" in the US and UK while "traditional local broadcasters account for over half of all TV time." Live sports account for much of that. "As broadcasters continue the shift away from linear to streaming, they will start to generate significant amounts of Internet traffic too -- even more than streamers today based on the current scope and scale of their audiences," Peters said. "Broadband customers, who drive this increased usage, already pay for the development of the network through their subscription fees. Requiring entertainment companies -- both streamers and broadcasters -- to pay more on top would mean ISPs effectively charging twice for the same infrastructure." Telcos that receive new payments wouldn't be expected to lower the prices charged to home Internet users, Peters said. "As the consumer group BEUC has pointed out, there is no suggestion these levies would be passed onto consumers in the form of 'lower prices or better infrastructure,'" he said.

Peters said Netflix's "operating margins are significantly lower than either British Telecom or Deutsche Telekom. So we could just as easily argue that network operators should compensate entertainment companies for the cost of our content -- exactly as happened under the old pay-TV model." While telcos claim companies like Netflix don't pay their "fair share," Peters pointed out that Netflix has spent a lot building its own network that reduces the amount of data sent over traditional telecom networks. "We've spent over $1 billion on Open Connect, our own content delivery network, which we offer for free to ISPs," he said. "This includes 18,000 servers with Netflix content distributed across 6,000 locations and 175 countries. So when our members press play, instead of the film or TV show being streamed from halfway around the world, it's streamed from around the corner -- increasing efficiency for operators while also ensuring a high-quality, no-lag experience for consumers." Peters also touted Netflix's encoding technology that cut bit rates in half between 2015 and 2020. While Internet traffic has increased about 30 percent a year, "ISPs have managed this increased consumer usage efficiently while their costs have remained stable," Peters said. "Regulators have highlighted this, too, calling out that infrastructure costs are not sensitive to traffic and that growing consumption will be offset by efficiency gains."