An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Months have gone by, and the great resignation keeps rolling along. Some people thought that people would come flocking back to the office once generous unemployment benefits ended. Nope. Wrong. Months after Republican states cut the $300-a-week Federal benefit and other benefits expired, there has been no rush to return to the workforce. There are many reasons for this. People don't want to catch COVID-19; people are sick of bad jobs; early retirement; and the one I care about today, bosses still think they can force skilled workers to return to offices. I've said it before; I'll say it again. That's not going to happen. People with talent and high-value skills, like most technology workers, aren't returning to traditional offices. You don't have to believe me, though. Look at the numbers being reported.

A Hackajob survey of 2,000 UK tech workers and employers found not quite three-quarters (72%) of tech workers said having the ability to do remote work was very important to them. All, and by the way, just over one in five were looking for new jobs with remote work. A more recent Microsoft survey found UK techies felt even stronger about the issue. In this survey, they found over half of the employees would consider quitting if you tried to force them back into the office. It's not just the UK. The Future Forum Pulse survey found IT workers in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan all had one thing in common: Most want to work at least part of the time remotely. To be precise, 75% want flexibility in where they work, while 93% want flexibility in when they work. Why? The top reason: "Better work-life balance."

The problem? Many executives and owners haven't gotten the clue yet. 44% said they wanted to work from the office daily. Employees? 17%. Three-quarters of bosses said they at least wanted to work from the office 3-5 days a week, versus 34% of employees. Can we say disconnect? I can. And, here's the point. Today, for the first time in my lifetime, workers, not employers, are in the driver's seat. [...] But, that doesn't mean that you must give up the traditional office entirely. You don't. In the Dice State of Remote Work report, there's a remote work spectrum. Sure, some workers never want to cross the office transom again, but others like a flexible work schedule where they can work outside of the office a set number of days per week or month. By Dice's count, only one in five workers are bound and determined to never come into the office again. 75% would be fine with flex work. But, pay attention folks, only 3% want to go back to the old-school 9 to 5, every weekday at the office. I repeat a mere 3% want to return to the office as most of you knew it in the 2010s. Indeed, 7% of respondents said they would even take a 5% salary cut to work remotely.

A Philadelphia mother has given birth to what is believed to be the world's first Tesla baby: an infant delivered in the front seat of an electric smart car while it was driving on autopilot. From a report: The remarkable delivery, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, took place in September while Yiran Sherry, 33, and her husband Keating Sherry, 34, were taking their three-year-old son Rafa to pre-school. Yiran Sherry's waters broke while the family was stuck in traffic. With contractions increasing rapidly and traffic barely moving, the couple realized they were not going to make it in time.

Keating Sherry placed the vehicle on autopilot after setting the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli. He said he laid one hand gently on the car's steering wheel as he attended to his wife. "She was squeezing my hand to the point where I thought she was going to shatter it," Keating Sherry told the Inquirer. "I was [saying] 'Yiran, OK, focus on your breathing.' That was advice to myself, as well. My adrenaline was pumping." Yiran Sherry said the decision over whether to try to wait to give birth until they reached the hospital was an agonising one. However, she said, she kept glancing at their estimated arrival time and saw it was barely moving.

Before Google Wifi was announced alongside the original Pixel phone, Google a year earlier released OnHub-branded routers from Asus and TP-Link. In late 2022, Google will end support for OnHub routers that will be seven years old at that time. 9to5Google reports: At six years old, currently, Google said "a lot has changed" in the router landscape, and that it will end support for them on December 19, 2022. This is according to emails that customers (via Droid-Life) have been receiving and a new support document. Until that date, "your OnHub router will continue to work as normal," but without security updates for new software features. The last combined OnHub and Google Wifi update came in October of 2019, while Google and Nest Wifi have had several OTAs since then. That said, a year later, the Google Home app added support for managing OnHub hardware ahead of the Google Wifi companion client getting deprecated.

Google recommends you "upgrade to a new Wi-Fi setup today" and emailed a 40% off Nest Wifi offer to existing OnHub router users that will be available until March 31, 2022. After December 19 next year, the OnHub router will continue to "provide a Wi-Fi signal" but no longer be manageable through the Google Home app, which is the downside of routers that are entirely managed via the cloud/companion app and do not offer local controls. While OnHub routers will continue to work and not disrupt existing networks, Google's decision to remove the ability to change basic settings is quite aggressive. Hopefully, the 2016 Google Wifi will see a longer support period.

Colleagues across Ubisoft have names for the procession of developers who have departed over the past 18 months: "the great exodus" and "the cut artery." Across the company's global network of studios, which at 20,000-plus employees is one of gaming's largest workforces, many developers have decided it's time to quit. And many of their colleagues describe a flow of goodbyes that they've never seen before. Axios reports: Top-name talent is leaving, with at least five of the top 25-credited people from the company's biggest 2021 game, Far Cry 6, already gone. Twelve of the top 50 from last year's biggest Ubisoft release, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, have left too. (A 13th recently returned.) Also out are midlevel and lower-level workers as headcounts drop, particularly in Ubisoft's large and normally growing Canadian studios. LinkedIn shows Ubisoft's Montreal and Toronto studios each down at least 60 total workers in the last six months. Two current developers tell Axios the departures have stalled or slowed projects. One developer recently said a colleague currently at Ubisoft contacted them to solve an issue with a game, because no one was still there who knew the system.

Interviews with a dozen current and former Ubisoft developers cite a range of factors for the departures, including low pay, an abundance of competitive opportunities, frustration at the company's creative direction, and unease at Ubisoft's handling of a workplace misconduct scandal that flared in mid-2020. One developer with more than a decade of experience at Ubisoft before recently leaving said the company is "an easy target for recruiters," given the company's myriad issues. Said another now-former Ubisoft worker who was disappointed by directives from the company's Paris HQ: "There's something about management and creative scraping by with the bare minimum that really turned me away." Many spoke fondly of much of their time at the company, and one said they'd even consider returning, but the past year and a half was a breaking point. "Management says it's on top of it, telling Axios that attrition is up but that the company has hired 2,600 workers since April," the report adds.

"A spokesperson noted that questions in a recent companywide survey, about whether employees are happy at the company and would 'recommend Ubisoft as a great place to work,' returned a score of 74, which they said was in line with the industry average."

Apple plans to add a 48-megapixel camera lens to the iPhone next year, followed by a periscope lens in 2023, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. MacRumors reports: In a research note today with TF International Securities, obtained by MacRumors, Kuo said these iPhone camera upgrades over the next two years will help to boost Taiwanese manufacturer Largan Precision's market share, revenue, and profit. Kuo did not provide any further details, but he has previously claimed that the 48-megapixel camera will be limited to iPhone 14 Pro models and allow for 8K video recording, up from 4K currently. These high-resolution 8K videos would be suitable for viewing on Apple's AR/VR headset that is expected to launch next year, he said.

Kuo also previously claimed that iPhone 14 Pro models may support both 48-megapixel and 12-megapixel output, which would likely be achieved with a process known as pixel binning. Already in use on some Android smartphones, like Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra, pixel binning could allow iPhone 14 Pro models to shoot 48-megapixel photos in bright conditions and 12-megapixel photos in low-light conditions to preserve quality. Further ahead, Kuo reiterated his belief that at least one iPhone 15 model will gain a periscope lens in 2023, paving the way for significantly increased optical zoom. This lens would have folded camera optics, where light absorbed by the image sensor is bent or "folded," allowing for increased optical zoom while maintaining a compact design appropriate for smartphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The Biden administration has pledged to create a carbon-free energy sector by 2035, but because renewable resources generate only around 19 percent of US electricity as of 2020, climate experts warn that our transition to a green grid future needs to speed up. A group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has set out to prove that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid. Jacobson is the lead author of a new paper, published in Renewable Energy, which argues that a complete transition to renewable energy -- defined as wind, water, and solar energy -- would benefit the US as a whole and individuals by saving costs, creating jobs, and reducing air pollution and carbon emissions.

They modeled how wind turbines, tidal turbines, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, rooftop and utility photovoltaic panels, and other sources could generate energy in 2050. A host of different sources powered these projections: Jacobson used data from a weather-climate-air pollution model he first built in 1990, which has been used in numerous simulations since. Individual state and sector energy consumption was taken from the Energy Information Administration. Current fossil fuel energy sources were converted to electric devices that are powered by wind, water, and solar. This was then used to create projections for energy use in 2050. Time-dependent energy supply was matched with demand and storage in a grid integration model for every 30 second interval in 2050 and 2051. The study authors analyzed US regions and countrywide demand until the model produced a solution with what the authors called zero-load loss -- meaning, essentially, no blackouts with 100 percent renewable energy and storage. According to Jacobson, no other study is conducting this kind of modeling, which is unique in part because it checks conditions for any simulation every 30 seconds.

As the cost of renewables falls, researchers predict power companies and consumers will migrate to using renewables. Solar and wind are already half the cost of natural gas. Policy may also motivate adoption -- or hinder it. While the current administration has set out goals for a renewable energy grid, new permits for gas and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico counteract those same efforts. [...] The researchers quantified these benefits by looking at private costs, such as those to individuals or corporations, and social ones, which also include health and climate costs. Zero-emissions leads to few air pollution related deaths and illness, and a reduced toll on the healthcare system. [...] The model cannot address emissions from things like long-distance shipping or aviation, though the authors argue that green hydrogen could be a possible alternative to explore. They did not include nuclear energy or carbon capture, which [Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a PhD candidate in the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford and a co-author of the paper] views as "distractions from getting to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible" because the technologies are costly, unproven, or lacking in their promises. "The best path forward would be to invest in what we know works as quickly as we can," she says -- such as wind, water, and solar energy.

The UK National Crime Agency has shared a collection of more than 585 million compromised passwords it found during an investigation with Have I Been Pwned, a website that indexes data from security breaches. The Record reports: The NCA now becomes the second law enforcement agency to officially supply HIBP with hacked passwords after the US Federal Bureau of Investigations began a similar collaboration with the service back in May. In a blog post today, Troy Hunt, HIBP creator Troy Hunt said that 225 million of the compromised passwords found by the NCA were new and unique.

These passwords have been added to a section of the HIBP website called Pwned Passwords. This section allows companies and system administrators to check and see if their current passwords have been compromised in hacks and if they are likely to be part of public lists used by threat actors in brute-force and password-spraying attacks. Currently, the HIBP Pwned Passwords collection includes 5.5 billion entries, of which 847 million are unique. All these passwords are also available as a free download, so companies can check their passwords against the data set locally without connecting to Hunt's service.

In a statement shared by Hunt, the NCA said it found the compromised passwords, paired with email accounts, in an account at a UK cloud storage facility. The NCA said they weren't able to determine or attribute the compromised email and password combos to any specific platform or company.

Despite the European Union's highest court twice declaring that the United States does not offer sufficient protection for Europeans' data from American national security agencies, the social media giant's lawyers continue to disagree, according to internal documents seen by POLITICO. Their conclusion that the U.S. is safe for EU data is part of Facebook's legal argument for it to be able to continue shipping data across the Atlantic. From the report: In July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down a U.S.-EU data transfer instrument called Privacy Shield. The court concluded Washington did not offer adequate protection for EU data shipped overseas because U.S. surveillance law was too intrusive for European standards. In the same landmark ruling, the Luxembourg-based court upheld the legality of another instrument used to export data out of Europe called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). But it cast doubt on whether these complex legal instruments could be used to shuttle data to countries where EU standards cannot be met, including the U.S. The CJEU reached a similar conclusion in 2015, striking down the predecessor agreement to Privacy Shield because of U.S. surveillance law and practices. In both rulings, Europe's top judges categorically stated Washington did not have sufficiently high privacy standards. Still, Facebook -- the company at the heart of both cases -- thinks it shouldn't follow the court's reasoning.

The company's lawyers argue in the documents that the EU court ruling "should not be relied on" for the social media company's own assessment of data transfers to the U.S., because the judges' findings relate to Privacy Shield data pact, and not the Standard Contractual Clauses which Facebook uses to transfer data to the U.S. "The assessment of U.S. law (and practice) under Article 45 GDPR is materially different to the assessment of law and practice required under Article 46 GDPR," the document reads. That refers to the two different types of legal data transfer instruments under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and indicates that assessment under SCCs is different to assessment under Privacy Shield. The company also says that changes to U.S. law and practices since the July 2020 ruling should be taken into account. As an example, it cites the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a watchdog, "carrying out its role as a data protection agency with unprecedented force and vigour." Those arguments have been central to Washington's pitch during ongoing transatlantic negotiations over a new EU-U.S. data agreement. "Though companies have to take the EU court ruling into account when making their own assessments of third party country regimes, they can, in theory, diverge from the court's findings if they believe it is justified in a particular situation," notes Politico. "This means that companies like Facebook can, in theory, continue to ship data out of Europe if they can prove its sufficiently protected."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cointelegraph: Less than 1% of the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) hodlers allegedly control more than a quarter of all BTC in circulation, according to a new study. The National Bureau of Economic Research, an American private nonprofit research organization, released a study claiming that 10,000 Bitcoin investors, or 0.01% of all BTC holders, own 5 million BTC, or 27% of all 18.9 million coins in circulation. The amount of BTC held by the "one percent" is equivalent to approximately $232 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The study, which was conducted by finance professors Antoinette Schoar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics, aims to demonstrate that Bitcoin is not as decentralized as one might think. "Despite having been around for 14 years and the hype it has ratcheted up, it's still the case that it's a very concentrated ecosystem," Schoar said. According to the WSJ report, the top hodlers control a bigger share of BTC than the richest American households control in dollars. Citing data from the United States Federal Reserve, the report notes that the top 1% of U.S. households hold about a third of all wealth. The new report may sound alarming for the crypto community, as major Bitcoin advocates have been promoting decentralization as one of the Bitcoin network's biggest principles.

According to Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, much of the circulating BTC supply is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. "Satoshi's coins alone make up for more than 5%," Greenspan told Cointelegraph, adding: "Over time, the ownership of Bitcoin is designed to get more distributed. For fiat, the opposite tends to happen." It's worth noting that much of BTC's circulating supply is also apparently not controlled by anyone and is likely to be lost forever. According to crypto-insurance firm Coincover, around 4 million BTC is out of circulation due to lost access.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new rule today aimed at reducing tailpipe pollution from cars and light-duty trucks -- an effort by President Joe Biden to return to the fuel economy standards put in place by Barack Obama nearly a decade ago. From a report: Under the rule, passenger vehicles would be required to achieve an average of 55 miles of travel per gallon of gasoline (mpg) by 2026 -- slightly over Obama's goal of 54 mpg, but a major increase over the 38-mpg rule put in place by President Donald Trump. The EPA estimates the new standard would prevent the release of 3.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide through 2050 and will save car owners $420 billion in fuel costs. EPA Administrator Michael Regan called it "the most ambitious vehicle pollution standards for greenhouse gases ever established," adding, "The standards are achievable, affordable, and will deliver a significant pollution reduction." The new fuel economy standards are the latest effort by the Biden Administration to reduce air pollution in the broader fight against climate change. Earlier this month, Biden signed an executive order directing the federal government to spend billions of dollars to purchase electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings, and leverage the power of the government to shift to cleaner forms of electricity.

Google's open-source team said they scanned Maven Central, today's largest Java package repository, and found that 35,863 Java packages use vulnerable versions of the Apache Log4j library. From a report: This includes Java packages that use Log4j versions vulnerable to the original Log4Shell exploit (CVE-2021-44228) and a second remote code execution bug discovered in the Log4Shell patch (CVE-2021-45046). James Wetter and Nicky Ringland, members of the Google Open Source Insights Team, said in a report today that typically when a major Java security flaw is found, it typically tends to affect only 2% of the Maven Central index. However, the 35,000 Java packages vulnerable to Log4Shell account to roughly 8% of the Maven Central total of ~440,000, a percentage the two described using just one word -- "enormous." But since the vulnerability was disclosed last week, Wetter and Ringland said the community has responded positively and has already fixed 4,620 of the 35,863 packages they initially found vulnerable. This number accounts to 13% of all the vulnerable packages.

Wildlife officials in Florida are preparing to feed manatees in the wild, an unprecedented response to the animals' mass starvation caused by the loss of seagrasses they normally eat. From a report: So far this year, 1,056 manatees have died in Florida, nearly double the average for the same period of the past five years, according to state data. While the record tally includes those killed by watercraft and other causes, malnourishment is the main reason propelling the increase, researchers say. The state's total manatee population numbered at least 5,733 in 2019, the most recent year in which officials conducted a count. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared an "unusual mortality event" along Florida's Atlantic coast this year -- a designation indicating a significant die-off that demands an immediate response. The problem can worsen in the winter when the animals congregate in warmer waters that have become devoid of food, researchers say.

"The status of manatees going into this winter is so poor that without this supplemental feeding to help get them through, we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of [them] dying," said Patrick Rose, executive director of the advocacy group Save the Manatee Club. Seagrasses are disappearing because of deteriorating water quality caused by improperly treated sewage, leaking septic tanks and runoff containing fertilizer used for lawns and agriculture, researchers say. It's part of a broader threat to other marine species, they say, and to Florida's economy, which relies heavily on visitors drawn to the state's coastline.

Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system. From a report: This was the first material to be returned to Earth from a carbon-rich asteroid. These asteroids can reveal how our cosmic corner of the universe was formed. The organic and hydrated minerals locked within these asteroids could also shed light on the origin of the building blocks of life. Ryugu is a dark, diamond-shaped asteroid that measures about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) wide. Hayabusa2 collected one sample from the asteroid's surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a copper "bullet" into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019. Then, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth and dropped the sample off in Australia last December.

The C-type, or carbonaceous, asteroid is much darker than scientists originally thought, only reflecting about 2% of the light that hits it, according to one study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After opening the sample, scientists were surprised to find that the spacecraft collected 5.4 grams from the asteroid -- much more than the single gram they were expecting, said Toru Yada, lead study author and associate senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. In the second study, also published Monday in Nature Astronomy, the researchers determined that Ryugu is made of clay and other hydrated minerals, with a number of carbonates and organics inside the sample.

A security researcher says an internet gateway used by hundreds of hotels to offer and manage their guest Wi-Fi networks has vulnerabilities that could put the personal information of their guests at risk. From a report: Etizaz Mohsin told TechCrunch that the Airangel HSMX Gateway contains hardcoded passwords that are "extremely easy to guess." With those passwords, which we are not publishing, an attacker could remotely gain access to the gateway's settings and databases, which store records about the guest's using the Wi-Fi. With that access, an attacker could access and exfiltrate guest records, or reconfigure the gateway's networking settings to unwittingly redirect guests to malicious webpages, he said. Back in 2018, Mohsin discovered one of these gateways on the network of a hotel where he was staying. He found that the gateway was synchronizing files from another server across the internet, which Mohsin said contained hundreds of gateway backup files from some of the most prestigious and expensive hotels in the world. The server also stored "millions" of guest names, email addresses and arrival and departure dates, he said. Mohsin reported the bug and the server was secured, but that sparked a thought: Could this one gateway have other vulnerabilities that could put hundreds of other hotels at risk? In the end, the security researcher found five vulnerabilities that he said could compromise the gateway -- including guests' information.

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted. From a report: Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it's sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren't just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine. Minecraft builder "Sammyuri" spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn't the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM. Minecraft processors use the physics engine of the game to recreate the structure of real processors on a macro scale, with materials including redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, levers, and other simple machines. For a little perspective, each "block" inside the game is one virtual meter on each side, so recreating this build in the real world would make it approximately the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.

JPMorgan Chase is paying $200 million in fines to two U.S. banking regulators to settle charges that its Wall Street division allowed employees to use WhatsApp and other platforms to circumvent federal record-keeping laws. From a report: The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday that JPMorgan Securities agreed to pay $125 million after admitting to "widespread" record-keeping failures in recent years. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also said Friday that it had fined the bank $75 million for allowing unapproved communications since at least 2015. SEC officials who spoke to reporters Thursday evening said JPMorgan's failure to preserve those offline conversations violated federal securities law and left the regulator blind to exchanges between the bank and its clients.

Federal law requires financial firms to keep meticulous records of electronic messages between brokers and clients so regulators can make sure those firms aren't skirting anti-fraud or antitrust laws. The move is the latest sign of an ongoing battle between regulators, banks and employees over the use of personal devices. Policing the use of unofficial channels became even more pressing when most of Wall Street went remote during the coronavirus pandemic. Regulators in New York and London have ratcheted up enforcement of record-keeping rules recently as traders migrated to encrypted messaging platforms including WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. While phone conversations and messages on official company devices and software platforms are preserved, it's much harder for bank compliance departments to surveil communications on third-party apps.

Oracle is expected to pay more than $30 billion including debt for electronic-medical-records company Cerner, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The all-cash deal is expected to be announced later Monday and value Cerner at about $95 a share, one of the people said.

A group of Meta shareholders, along with the Campaign for Accountability, has submitted a resolution calling for an independent evaluation of the board's ability to oversee public safety on Facebook's platforms, Axios has learned. From the report: Facebook's parent company is facing pressure on multiple fronts from regulators, legislators and former employees -- and now investors. A letter sent earlier this month to Meta's corporate secretary, a copy of which was seen by Axios, says that, "Shareholders request the board commission an independent assessment of the Audit and Risk Oversight Committee's capacities and performance in overseeing company risks to public safety and the public interest and in supporting strategic risk oversight on these issues by the full board."

The letter is being submitted by the Harrington Associates and Park Foundation, both Facebook shareholders, in conjunction with the Campaign for Accountability. It aims to be included in Meta's annual proxy and submitted to a vote of shareholders. Other shareholders are also pushing similar resolutions this year, including an effort led by state investment officials in New York and Illinois. Facebook maintains it takes its responsibilities seriously, and told the Wall Street Journal that it has spent more than $5 billion this year on safety and security.

Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries. From a report: Avalanches, flooding and other effects of the accelerating loss of ice imperil residents in India, Nepal and Bhutan and threaten to disrupt agriculture for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to the researchers. And since water from melting glaciers contributes to sea-level rise, glacial ice loss in the Himalayas also adds to the threat of inundation and related problems faced by coastal communities around the world. "This part of the world is changing faster than perhaps anybody realized," said Jonathan Carrivick, a University of Leeds glaciologist and the co-author of a paper detailing the research published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's not just that the Himalayas are changing really fast, it's that they're changing ever faster."

Scientists have long observed ice loss from large glaciers in New Zealand, Greenland, Patagonia and other parts of the world. But ice loss in the Himalayas is especially rapid, the new study found. The researchers didn't pinpoint a reason but noted that regional climate factors, such as shifts in the South Asian monsoon, may play a role. The new finding comes as there is scientific consensus that ice loss from glaciers and polar ice sheets results from rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Many peer-reviewed scientific studies have identified human activity as a cause of rising global temperatures. So did a report issued in August by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said "human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s." For the new study, Dr. Carrivick and his colleagues scanned satellite photos of almost 15,000 glaciers in the region for signs of the large ridges of rock and debris that glaciers leave behind as they slowly grind their way through the valleys. Using the locations of these ancient glacial tracks, the scientists estimated the span of ice sheet coverage in previous centuries.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes a report from Futurism: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created "mini-brains" consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports.

The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity... To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of "Pong" with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle...

Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, said that while the mini-brains can't play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

"The amazing aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time," he told New Scientist. "That's really an amazing thing that biology can do."

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using "live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing," according to their website.
There's actually video of the brain cells playing Pong. The chief scientific officer told New Scientist that when the cells are in the game, they actually believe they are the paddle.

"We often refer to them as living in the Matrix."

Earlier this week long-time Slashdot reader DJAdapt wrote: According to a post on the Kronos Community Page, a cyber security incident due to a ransomware attack is affecting UKG Workforce Central, UKGTeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling. Although they are currently working with cyber security experts on the issue, they say that it may take several weeks to restore full system availability.
CNN reported: Ultimate Kronos Group, one of the largest human resources companies, disclosed a crippling ransomware attack on Monday [December 13th], impacting payroll systems for a number of workers. After noticing "unusual activity" on Saturday [December 11th], Kronos noted that its systems were down and could remain that way for several weeks.

Kronos has a long list of notable customers across the public and private sector, including the city of Cleveland, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), Tesla and MGM Resorts International. It also works with many hospitals across the country. Some employers find themselves having to make contingency plans in order to pay workers, such as shifting to paper checks. And some impacted employees have been unable to access payroll systems...

In addition to the potential payroll issues, there's also data privacy concerns. The city of Cleveland said in a statement Monday that Kronos alerted it that sensitive information may have been compromised in the attack. Employee names, addresses and the last four digits of social security numbers may have been stolen by the hackers inside Kronos's network.
Other Kronos customers include Whole Foods, GameStop and Honda, as well as state and local government agencies like the state of West Virginia, reports NBC News: John Riggi, the senior advisor for cybersecurity at the American Hospital Association, an industry group, said that he had spoken with multiple hospitals that have had to create contingency plans for getting employees paid, managing their schedules and tracking their hours. "Quite frankly, this could not have happened at a worse time. We've had a surge in Covid patients, flu patients," Riggi said. "It's a distraction to hospital administrators at a time when they don't need any additional burden or diversion of resources."
"Though it has not been confirmed, there is speculation that the notorious Log4Shell vulnerability was involved," writes CPO magazine, "given that the Kronos cloud services are known to be built on Java to a great degree...."

"Microsoft's security team has reported that ransomware attacks are already unfolding after these breaches in at least several cases."

New amendments to Malaysia's Copyright Act mean that "People who offer streaming services and devices that 'prejudicially' hurt copyright owners can face fines equivalent to $2,377 or more, prison sentences up to 20 years, or both," reports Engadget.

TorrentFreak has more details: How the amendments will be used in practice remains to be seen but the scope appears to be intentionally broad and could result in significant punishments for those found to be in breach of the law....

Those hoping to use a corporate structure as a shield are also put on notice. When any offenses are committed by a corporate body or by a person who is a partner in a firm, everyone from directors to managers will be deemed guilty of the offense and may be charged severally or jointly, unless they can show they had no knowledge and conducted due diligence to prevent the offense.