An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Every coast in the U.S. is facing rapidly increasing high tide floods. NASA says this is due to a "wobble" in the moon's orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels. The new study from NASA and the University of Hawaii, published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that upcoming changes in the moon's orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade. Through mapping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) sea-level rise scenarios, flooding thresholds and astronomical cycles, researchers found flooding in American coastal cities could be several multiples worse in the 2030s, when the next moon "wobble" is expected to begin. They expect the flooding to significantly damage infrastructure and displace communities.

While the study highlights the dire situation facing coastal cities, the lunar wobble is actually a natural occurrence, first reported in 1728. The moon's orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years, and they aren't dangerous in their own right. "In half of the Moon's 18.6-year cycle, Earth's regular daily tides are suppressed: High tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal," NASA explains. "In the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified: High tides get higher, and low tides get lower. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides in only one direction -- higher. So half of the 18.6-year lunar cycle counteracts the effect of sea-level rise on high tides, and the other half increases the effect." But this time around, scientists are more concerned. With sea-level rise due to climate change, the next high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before, exacerbating already grim predictions. The study says these floods will exceed flooding thresholds around the country more often, and can also occur in clusters lasting more than a month. "During curtain alignments, floods could happen as frequently as every day or every other day," the report adds. "Almost all U.S. mainland coastlines, Hawaii and Guam are expected to face these effects."

New submitter labloke11 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Intel is exploring a deal to buy GlobalFoundries (source paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would turbocharge the semiconductor giant's plans to make more chips for other tech companies and rate as its largest acquisition ever. A deal could value GlobalFoundries at around $30 billion, the people said. It isn't guaranteed one will come together, and GlobalFoundries could proceed with a planned initial public offering. GlobalFoundries is owned by Mubadala Investment Co., an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, but based in the U.S. Any talks don't appear to include GlobalFoundries itself as a spokeswoman for the company said it isn't in discussions with Intel.

Intel's new Chief Executive, Pat Gelsinger, in March said the company would launch a major push to become a chip manufacturer for others, a market dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Intel, with a market value of around $225 billion, this year pledged more than $20 billion in investments to expand chip-making facilities in the U.S. and Mr. Gelsinger has said more commitments domestically and abroad are in the works.

A Facebook engineer abused employee access to user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought, a new book said. Business Insider reports: Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees over exploiting user data for personal means, said an advance copy of "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" that Insider obtained. The engineer, who is unnamed, tapped into the data to "confront" a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing, the book said. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel.

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company's systems, he had access to "years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on," the book said. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book said, the engineer was also able to see her location in real time. Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to "cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers," the book said.

"There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users' private information," wrote Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the book's authors. They added that most of the employees who abused their employee privileges to access user data only looked up information, although a few didn't stop there. Most of the engineers who took advantage of access to user data were "men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in," the book said. Facebook told Insider it fired employees found to have accessed user data for nonbusiness purposes.

On Wednesday, Google announced it will soon offer an HTTPS-first option in Chrome, which will try to upgrade page loads to HTTPS. "If you flip this option on, the browser will also show a full-page warning when you try to load up a site that doesn't support HTTPS," adds The Verge. From the report: HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP (yes, the "S" stands for "secure"), and many of the websites you visit every day likely already support it. Since HTTPS encrypts your traffic, it's a helpful privacy tool for when you're using public Wi-Fi or to keep your ISP from snooping on the contents of your browsing. Google has been encouraging HTTPS adoption with moves like marking insecure sites with a "Not secure" label in the URL bar and using https:// in the address bar by default when you're typing in a URL. For now, this HTTPS-First Mode will be just an option, but the company says it will "explore" making the mode the default in the future. The HTTPS-First Mode will be available starting with Chrome 94, according to Google. Currently, that release is set for September 21st. And HTTP connections will still be supported, the company says. Google is also "re-examining" the lock icon in the URL bar. Google explains in a blog post: "As we approach an HTTPS-first future, we're also re-examining the lock icon that browsers typically show when a site loads over HTTPS. In particular, our research indicates that users often associate this icon with a site being trustworthy, when in fact it's only the connection that's secure. In a recent study, we found that only 11% of participants could correctly identify the meaning of the lock icon."

The company plans to swap the lock icon with a downward-facing arrow starting with Chrome 93. Though, the "Not Secure" label will still be shown for sites that aren't secure.

An anonymous reader writes: When a team of Chinese scientists beamed entangled photons from the nation's Micius satellite to conduct the world's first quantum-secured video call in 2017, experts declared that China had taken the lead in quantum communications. New research suggests that lead has extended to quantum computing as well. In three preprint papers posted on arXiv.org last month, physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reported critical advances in both quantum communication and quantum computing. In one of the studies, researchers used nanometer-scale semiconductors called quantum dots to reliably transmit single photons -- an essential resource for any quantum network -- over 300 kilometers of fiber, well over 100 times farther than previous attempts. In another, scientists improved their photonic quantum computer from 76 detected photons to 113, a dramatic upgrade to its "quantum advantage," or how much faster it is than classical computers at one specific task. The third paper introduced Zuchongzhi, made of 66 superconducting qubits, and performed a problem with 56 of them -- a figure similar to the 53 qubits used in Google's quantum computer Sycamore, which set a performance record in 2019.

All three achievements are world-leading, but Zuchongzhi in particular has scientists talking because it is the first corroboration of Google's landmark 2019 result. "I'm very pleased that someone has reproduced the experiment and shown that it works properly," says John Martinis, a former Google researcher who led the effort to build Sycamore. "That's really good for the field, that superconducting qubits are a stable platform where you can really build these machines." Quantum computers and quantum communication are nascent technologies. None of this research is likely to be of practical use for many years to come. But the geopolitical stakes of quantum technology are high: full-fledged quantum networks could provide unhackable channels of communication, and a powerful quantum computer could theoretically break much of the encryption currently used to secure e-mails and Internet transactions.

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. From a report: The research project reveals how Google's service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences -- such as whether Beijing's Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters. Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. "Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities," Ochigame says. Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.

Just like Google's homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate. Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals "information borders" created by the way Google's search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.

phalse phace shares a report from Reuters: During an analyst call for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's quarterly earnings, TSMC chairman Mark Liu signaled that they are looking into building new factories in the United States and Japan. "TSMC said it will expand production capacity in China and does not rule out the possibility of a 'second phase' expansion at its $12 billion factory in the U.S. state of Arizona." Furthermore, "the CEO on Thursday revealed TSMC is currently conducting 'due diligence' on whether to build a fab in Japan, which would mark a strategically important geographic expansion for the chipmaker. Any Japan fab will be for "specialty technology" -- a term that usually refers to mature node chips that serve specific or niche markets, Liu said, adding that there is no final decision yet."

Delta Air Lines was sued for more than $1 billion by one of its own pilots, who claims he developed a text-messaging app for flight crews that the airline stole and used as the basis for its own app. Bloomberg reports: Captain Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade-secrets theft in Georgia state court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop his QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way to address crew communication snafus after disrupted flights. Delta turned him down but went on to launch its own identical tool, he claims. Delta "stole like a thief in the night" and defrauded its own loyal employee, Keenan Nix, a lawyer for Alexander, said Wednesday in an interview. He said Alexander, an 11-year veteran at the airline, was flying a Delta 757 "as we speak."

A five-hour power outage that resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations in August 2016 cost Delta more than $150 million. The pilot said in the suit he emailed Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian at the time saying "he had a 'solution.'" Bastian allegedly responded promptly and referred Alexander to the company's new chief information officer. Bastian and the CIO, Rahul Samant, are both named in the suit, along with four other Delta executives. Alexander claims he had several positive meetings with the airline in 2015 and 2016 in which executives made clear they were interested in acquiring his app. But Delta eventually cut off discussions and then launched its own crew app in April 2018, called Flight Family Communications. "'FFC' is a carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of Craig's proprietary QrewLive communications platform," Alexander said in his suit.

The pilot noted in his suit that Bastian and Samant have both bragged to investors that the app has smoothed operations. In describing the damages he's seeking, Alexander said the value of the technology, "based solely upon operational cost savings to Delta, conservatively exceeds $1 billion." Alexander is also seeking punitive damages against Delta. "To add insult to theft and injury, Captain Craig Alexander must use his stolen QrewLive text messaging platform every day while he works for Delta," the suit claims. "Each time he looks at the FFC app, he is painfully reminded that Delta stole his proprietary trade secrets, used them to Delta's enormous financial benefit." "While we take the allegations specified in Mr. Alexander's complaint seriously, they are not an accurate or fair description of Delta's development of its internal crew messaging platform," said Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) yesterday filed a complaint against Amazon over the sale of hundreds of thousands of hazardous products, including carbon monoxide detectors that fail to detect carbon monoxide, hair dryers without required protection from shock and electrocution, and flammable sleepwear meant for children. The CPSC said it sued Amazon to "force [the] recall" of the dangerous products. While Amazon has halted sales of most of them already and issued refunds, the CPSC said it isn't satisfied with how Amazon notified customers and said the industry giant must do more to ensure that the faulty products are destroyed. The dangerous products were offered by third parties using the "Fulfilled by Amazon" (FBA) program, in which Amazon stores products in its warehouses, ships them to customers, and takes a sizable cut from the proceeds. The CPSC's administrative complaint alleges that Amazon hasn't taken enough responsibility for dangerous third-party products that it ships via FBA.

The complaint didn't mention any specific incidents of injury but said the evidence supporting the charges includes "lawsuits concerning incidents or injuries involving various consumer products identified in the Complaint." It also said that CPSC staff tested the products and found that they don't meet safety requirements. Products that don't meet these requirements pose a substantial risk of injury or death to consumers, the agency said. The CPSC said its complaint "seeks to force Amazon, as a distributor of the products, to stop selling these products, work with CPSC staff on a recall of the products, and to directly notify consumers who purchased them about the recall and offer them a full refund." In a statement provided to Ars, Amazon said it has already removed the "vast majority" of the products from its online store, notified customers, and provided refunds. Amazon alleged that the CPSC hasn't provided enough information about the remaining products. Amazon's full statement reads: "Customer safety is a top priority and we take prompt action to protect customers when we are aware of a safety concern. As the CPSC's own complaint acknowledges, for the vast majority of the products in question, Amazon already immediately removed the products from our store, notified customers about potential safety concerns, advised customers to destroy the products, and provided customers with full refunds. For the remaining few products in question, the CPSC did not provide Amazon with enough information for us to take action and despite our requests, CPSC has remained unresponsive. Amazon has an industry-leading recalls program and we have further offered to expand our capabilities to handle recalls for all products sold in our store, regardless of whether those products were sold or fulfilled by Amazon or third-party sellers. We are unclear as to why the CPSC has rejected that offer or why they have filed a complaint seeking to force us to take actions almost entirely duplicative of those we've already taken."

Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.

Matt Stoller: Louis Rossmann is an important YouTube personality who talks about, among other things, the fact that big firms block their customers from repairing equipment so they can extract after-market profits with replacement parts. And he's very much noticed the Biden executive order, which calls for agencies to curtail this practice (as well as the FTC report on it). Rossmann did a series of videos on this order, one of which focused on the order calling for the Pentagon to stop contracting with firms that block soldiers from being able to repair equipment. He cited Elle Ekman's New York Times piece from 2019 on the problem. What's even more interesting than the video are the comments on it, from soldiers angry that they keep encountering this problem in the field. I pulled some of them and published them here.

A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go. From a report: The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD.

[...] Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There's a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve's numbers.

The US State Department has announced today its intention to offer rewards of up to $10 million for any information that helps US authorities identify and locate threat actors "acting at the direction or under the control of a foreign government" that carry out malicious cyber activities against US critical infrastructure. From a report: Today's announcement comes after the US has seen an increase in cyber activity targeting its critical infrastructure sectors, including a spike in ransomware incidents. Some of these attacks, such as those on JBS Foods and Colonial Pipeline, impacted US food and fuel supply for days, even creating a small panic among the US population in certain areas. Many cyber-security companies and industry experts have blamed Russia, accusing the Kremlin of tolerating and allowing these gangs to operate from its borders on the condition they don't attack Russian organizations. Other gangs have been seen operating from China, Iran, and North Korea.

Through its announcement today, the State Department is looking for proof that these gangs are operating with some sort of help or guidance from local regimes. The reward is offered through the State Department's Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program, the same system through which the US previously offered a $5 million reward for info on North Korean state-sponsored hackers and a $10 million reward for information on any state-sponsored hackers meddling in US elections.

A new documentary film has harnessed artificial intelligence to artificially voice quotes from its subject, the late Anthony Bourdain. From a report: Details of the dubious decision are outlined in a piece in The New Yorker, and raise a heap of uncomfortable questions about whether or not it's ethical to put words in the mouths of the deceased, whether or not they penned them during their life. The lines appear in filmmaker Morgan Neville's new documentary, Roadrunner, when an email from Bourdain is initially read by the recipient, but the audio then transitions into Bourdain's own voice.

General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made. A Slashdot reader shares a report: The company said Wednesday that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries. The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said. Owners should take the steps "out of an abundance of caution," he said. The steps should be continued until GM engineers investigate and develop a repair, he said. The cars should be parked outdoors after charging is complete, GM said in a statement. "We are moving as quickly as we can to investigate this issue," the company said.

Government hackers from several countries used spyware made by an Israeli company to target victims all over the world, according to new research by digital rights watchdog Citizen Lab and Microsoft. From a report: The spyware leveraged two unknown vulnerabilities -- also known as zero-day exploits -- in Windows. Citizen Lab, which is housed at the University of Toronto's Munk School, and Microsoft worked together on the research, and published reports detailing their findings on Thursday. The company said it detected hacking attempts on more than 100 victims including "politicians, human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers, and political dissidents" in Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Spain, UK, and other countries. Citizen Lab said it was able to identify and reach out to a victim who let its researchers analyze their computer and extract the malware.

"This was someone who was targeted for their political positions and political beliefs, rather than someone who was the target of a terrorism investigation or something like this," Bill Marczak, one of the researchers at Citizen Lab who worked on the investigations, told Motherboard in a phone call. Citizen Lab concluded that the malware and the zero-days were developed by Candiru, a mysterious Israel-based spyware vendor that offers âoehigh-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets," according to a document seen by Haaretz. Candiru was first outed by the Israeli newspaper in 2019, and has since gotten some attention from cybersecurity companies such as Kaspersky Lab. But, until now, no one had published an analysis of Candiru's malware, nor found someone targeted with its spyware.

Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon.

"Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps.

SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.

Employees are waiting to hear whether their remote work plans will be approved. From a report: Google software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home as they did before the pandemic. Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president. Welle declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together."

That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.

London-listed cybersecurity firm Avast is in advanced talks with U.S. rival NortonLifeLock about a merger that would create a clear leader in consumer security software. From a report: Both companies confirmed the talks late on Wednesday, with Avast saying an offer would be in cash and shares, although it added there was no certainty a deal will be agreed. Avast, which was founded and based in Prague, Czech Republic, is a pioneer of "freemium" software, whereby basic applications are free and subscribers pay for premium features. Its Avast and AVG branded desktop and mobile software had more than 435 million active users at the end of 2020, of which 16.5 million are paying. The shift to home working during COVID-19 spurred demand for its desktop products like antivirus software, and it recorded 7.1% organic growth in adjusted billings to $922 million last year.

The company's research into a consumer mind-reading device is over, for now. Some scientists said it was never possible anyway. From a report: The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech's campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk's new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people's brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking -- tapping them out at 100 words per minute. The company's goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. "What if you could type directly from your brain?" asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. "It sounds impossible, but it's closer than you realize."

Now the answer is in -- and it's not close at all. Four years after announcing a "crazy amazing" project to build a "silent speech" interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off. In a blog post, Facebook said it is discontinuing the project and will instead focus on an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm. "While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we've decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market," the company said. Facebook's brain-typing project had led it into uncharted territory -- including funding brain surgeries at a California hospital and building prototype helmets that could shoot light through the skull -- and into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information. Ultimately, though, the company appears to have decided the research simply won't lead to a product soon enough.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Sega's Key Master arcade game is causing problems for the company once again. A new lawsuit alleges that Key Master is intentionally rigged against players. It's marketed as a game of skill, but players claim machines bar against awarding successful runs, making Key Master more of a chance-based game. Marcelo Muto filed the lawsuit on Monday in a California court. It's a proposed class action lawsuit looking for $5 million in damages to be distributed amongst wronged consumers. With Sega, Play It! Amusements (which is owned by Sega and now called Sega Amusements) and Komuse America (which co-manufactures Key Master) are named in the suit.

Key Master has been the target of multiple court cases in the past, dating back to at least 2013. This 2021 lawsuit, as well as the others, claims these machines are rigged only to allow players to win prizes at certain times -- specifically, at intervals determined by player losses. You've probably seen Key Master machines in malls or arcades, touting prizes like iPads, earbuds, and other pricey electronics. To play, you must navigate a key towards a specific keyhole by stopping the automatic movement by hitting a button. If the key goes in, you win the prize. The problem, according to the lawsuit, is that these machines are programmed to only allow players the ability to win after a certain number of player failures. If the machine is not ready to award a prize, it's allegedly programmed to overshoot the keyhole -- even if the player hit the button at the correct time -- and force the player to lose.

The problem here is that Key Master isn't marketed as a game of chance. It's portrayed as "a simple game of pure skill with a straight-forward directive," lawyers said. However, lawyers said that the deception behind the machine -- that it won't award players until certain settings are met -- is laid out in the game's manual, which was provided alongside the lawsuit as evidence. In the manual, according to screenshots, the Key Master machine "will not reward a prize until the number of player attempts reaches the threshold of attempts set by [the] operator." Lawyers for Muto said the default setting is 700, but that each machine can be programmed by individual operators. "Key Master is no longer listed on the Sega Amusements website; instead, it's been re-named Prize Locker," adds Polygon. "It's the same design, but it's 100% skill-based, Sega said on the website."

"In the lawsuit, Muto's lawyers said Prize Locker and the conversion kit (which 'allows an operator of a Key Master game to convert the game' to a skill-based one) are offered because Sega itself has realized that 'many areas of the world aren't able to benefit from this outstanding category [of arcade game] due to local or state regulations prohibiting their operation.' Lawyers alleged that this is Sega 'tacitly conced[ing] that Key Master is rigged.'"

AmiMoJo shares a report from VentureBeat: Apple critics such as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney have complained about Apple's alleged anticompetitive behavior with the App Store. But Consumer Acquisition's Brian Bowman has frequently sounded the alarm on Apple's decision to favor user privacy over targeted ads by changing access to its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Based on Consumer Acquisition's analysis of $300 million in paid social ad spending, IDFA has had a devastating impact, Bowman said in an interview with GamesBeat. In a report issued today, Bowman said that iOS advertisers are experiencing a 15% to 20% revenue drop and inflation in unattributed organic traffic.

Starting in April, Apple began releasing iOS 14.5, which prompted users to answer whether they would allow their data to be tracked for advertising purposes. Apple believes this puts privacy front and center. But Consumer Acquisition and many of its game developer advertisers worry it will break personalized advertising. Only 20% of consumers are saying yes to Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt, which means they will enable apps to personalize ads by tracking their personal data. For the traffic Bowman's company evaluated, performance has faded. Across paid social platforms, downstream event optimization and "lookalike audience performance" is also eroding. [...] Bowman believes -- or at least holds out hope -- that Apple will roll back or soften the IDFA changes by Black Friday.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: High on Greenland's ice sheet, particle astrophysicists are this week drilling boreholes in a search for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe's most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on and below the surface, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Detectors elsewhere on Earth occasionally register the arrival of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that slam into the atmosphere at colossal speed. Researchers want to pinpoint their sources, but because the nuclei are charged, magnetic fields in space bend their paths, obscuring their origins. But theorists believe that as UHE cosmic rays set out from their sources, they spawn so-called cosmogenic neutrinos in collisions with photons and, because neutrinos are not charged, they travel to Earth as straight as an arrow. The hard part is catching them.