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Science

Lab-grown Blood Given To People in World-First Clinical Trial (bbc.com) 24

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. From a report: Tiny amounts -- equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls -- are being tested to see how it performs inside the body. The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of. These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.

If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.

Comment Re:Anecdote time (Score 1) 268

Bold of you to hurl insults at everyone anonymously over the internet. Surely we will all believe your anecdotal examples, from your hidden account, in god knows where, with no accountability or references. I am sure its just well intentioned helpful friendly advice for all the unfortunate souls reading it.
AI

'Hey Siri' to Become Just 'Siri' (9to5mac.com) 92

Posted by EditorDavid from the OK-Apple dept.
"Apple is working on a big change to how its Siri voice assistant works," reports the blog 9 to 5 Mac: While you currently have to say "Hey Siri" to activate the assistant hands-free, that may not be the case for much longer. Bloomberg reports today that Apple engineers are working to drop the "Hey" part of the phrase, so you'd only have to say "Siri" followed by a command to activate the assistant...

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that this is "a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work." Apple has reportedly been working on this change for the last several months and hopes to roll it out either next year or in 2024 depending on the progress of development and testing....

Doing so would match what's offered by Amazon, where you simply have to say "Alexa" to trigger the assistant, not "Hey Alexa."
Although long-time Slashdot reader cstacy complains that already, "I can no longer discuss Amazon Alexa, because she hears just 'Alexa' and wakes up... That's not a feature, that's a bug! Not sure why Apple and Google would want to replicate that."

Submission + - Starlink introduces monthly data cap (theverge.com)

Submitted by thegarbz
thegarbz writes: Internet provider Starlink is reviving the old concept of soft data caps with the introduction of a Fair Use Policy. Users who consume more than 1TB of data per month will find their connections deteriorated. As reported on by The Verge

Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of “Priority Access” data that tracks what you’re using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you’ll be moved to “Basic Access” data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. If you want to buy more Priority Access data, you can, at the cost of 25 cents per GB, and any data used between 11PM and 7AM doesn’t count towards your Priority Access tally.

This announcement comes off the back of a recent article by Arstechnica showing that Starlinks median download speed has dropped to 62Mbps in Q2 of 2022 as the network struggles under the load of increased subscriber numbers.

Submission + - White House Invites Dozens of Nations For Ransomware Summit (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The White House is bringing together three dozen nations, the European Union and a slew of private-sector companies for a two-day summit starting Monday that looks at how best to combat ransomware attacks. The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults. A senior Biden administration official cited recent attacks such as one that targeted the Los Angeles school district last month to underscore the urgency of the issue and the summit. The official previewed the event on the condition of anonymity.

Among the administration officials planning to participate in the event are FBI Director Christopher Wray, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. President Joe Biden is not expected to attend. Participating countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
United States

New York Could Become First State With a 'Right To Repair' Law for Electronic Devices (spectrumlocalnews.com) 24

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
After passing with near unanimous support in both houses of the state Legislature, a bill that would allow New Yorkers to repair their electronic devices is all ready to become law as it awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul's signature. From a report: The bill's sponsor in the Assembly, Assemblywoman Pat Fahy of Albany, said the bill would create a system that we use for cars but for the electronic devices we use each day.

The bill, known as "Right to Repair," would force companies to provide tools and parts for independent repair shops or individuals to repair devices like cell phones. Opponents of the legislation have cited safety and cybersecurity threats as their issues with the legislation. Supporters of the bill, including Fahy, said the bill will allow for economic growth in this sector and could help the "tinkerers of today" become the "inventors of the future." The Federal Trade Commission has called the bill a milestone and has said it does not harm intellectual property rights.
Desktops (Apple)

Apple Gears Up To Launch Its Next Crop of Macs Early Next Year (bloomberg.com) 19

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, Bloomberg News reports, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter. From the report: Apple has been gearing up to launch a slew of new Macs, and now we have a clearer idea of when that will occur: early next year. I'm told that Apple is aiming to introduce the upgraded models -- including M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros -- in the first quarter of calendar 2023 and has tied the launches to the upcoming macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3. Those software updates are expected to debut between early February and the beginning of March.

[...] The new MacBook Pros will continue to look like the current models, but they'll trade their M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the first M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The M2 Max will go to 12 CPU cores, up from 10, and see its top graphics option move to 38 cores from 32. A new Mac mini remains in development, and the company continues to test versions with the same M2 chip as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as an M2 Pro chip, which hikes the CPU and graphics counts. If Apple indeed launches the M2 Pro variation, we can expect the company to probably wind down the still-available Intel model.

Submission + - Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation (theintercept.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon met on a monthly basis with the FBI, DHS, and other govt agencies to coordinate censorship operations

Under the guise of counterterrorism, the government is accelerating pressure on social media companies to crack down on speech the feds deem disinformation.
  • Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
  • DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
  • Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.
  • The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure.
  • DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August.
  • DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
  • The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.
United States

US Workers Have Gotten Way Less Productive (washingtonpost.com) 211

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done -- and there's evidence they're right to be spooked. From a report: In the first half of 2022, productivity -- the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour -- plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when "quiet quitting" -- doing only what's expected and no more -- is resonating, especially with younger workers.

Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it's down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren't as easy to measure. "It is strange," Comin said. "The data is very odd these past couple of quarters in so many different ways. It's hard to even tell a coherent story." Tech CEOs such as Google's Sundar Pichai and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said his company coined the term "productivity paranoia" to describe employers' anxieties about whether their employees are working hard enough.

Comment Re:Boo! Hiss! (Score 1) 143

by f00l82 (#63002459) Attached to: Preview App On macOS Ventura Drops Support For PostScript Files
And yet folks keep buying. All these dollar* votes count for something. There is a far and W-I-D-E difference between what apple says, and what apple does. The "it just works" mantra only still means something because once you toss your personal data into a black box who know what how when or why its happening. I'm still waiting to hear how they verified with the FBI, that they don't have any backdoors for the FBI...
Hardware

Memtest86+ Is Back After 9 Years (tomshardware.com) 60

Posted by BeauHD from the rewritten-from-scratch dept.
Memtest86+ just got its first update after 9 years. The program has reportedly been rewritten from scratch and is back in active development. The new version, 6.0, features a plethora of updates to bring the application up to date, and support the latest system hardware from Intel and AMD. Tom's Hardware reports: For the uninitiated, MemTest86 was originally created back in the mid 1990s, and was one of the earliest DDR memory testing applications for personal computers. But development stopped in 2013 once Memtest86 was split into Memtest86 and Memtest86", with the former being bought by PassMark. Officially, we don't know why development stopped. But compared to the now modern Memtest86, Memtest86+ is the open-source variant.

Needless to say, version 6.00 features a lot of updates, which were required to bring it up to modern standards compared to the 2013 version. The new version includes completely rewritten code for UEFI-based motherboards, the modern version of a BIOS, for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the application. Furthermore, the application features added support for x64 long mode paging, support for up to 256 cores, added detection for DDR4 and DDR5 memory -- since DDR3 was the latest memory standard in 2013 -- and adds support for XMP version 3.0.

CPU support has been significantly enhanced, addingdetection for all pre-Zen and AMD Zen-based processors ranging from the Ryzen 1000 series to 7000 series, and any older parts that were made after 2013. Intel support has also been added for chips up to 13th gen Raptor Lake. Finally, the last patch notes indicate version 6.0 adds support for older Nvidia and AMD chipsets - probably pre-2010 since it mentions Nvidia nForce chipsets, along with numerous bug fixes, optimizations and enhancements.
Sci-Fi

NASA Kicks Off Independent UFO Study (cnn.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the entirely-unclassified dept.
NASA's independent study to delve into the mysteries surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena kicked off today. CNN reports: The group will include experts across numerous disciplines -- including astrobiology, data science, oceanography, genetics, policy and planetary science -- as well as retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, a former fighter pilot and test pilot and retired US Navy captain. The space agency, which first announced it was forming the group in June, previously revealed that the team would be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, who is president of the Simons Foundation in New York City.

The new group won't necessarily seek to determine exactly what the UAPs, which have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the past several decades, are. Rather, the team will look to hash out exactly how it's best for NASA to approach further study of the phenomenon. The space agency has already noted that the limited number of observations of UAPs has made it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events. "Without access to an extensive set of data, it is nearly impossible to verify or explain any observation, thus the focus of the study is to inform NASA what possible data could be collected in the future to scientifically discern the nature of UAP," according to a NASA news release.

This study, expected to last about nine months, will also be entirely unclassified and within the public domain. "Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA," Zurbuchen said in a Friday statement. "Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable." Specifically, the team will look for data on "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena -- from a scientific perspective," the agency said. Unidentified aerial phenomena are of interest, NASA said, from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA emphasized during the initial announcement in June.

Submission + - Bumble Open Sourced Its AI That Detects Unsolicited Nudes (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As part of its larger commitment to combat “cyberflashing,” the dating app Bumble is open sourcing its AI tool that detects unsolicited lewd images. First debuted in 2019, Private Detector (let’s take a moment to let that name sink in) blurs out nudes that are sent through the Bumble app, giving the user on the receiving end the choice of whether to open the image. “Even though the number of users sending lewd images on our apps is luckily a negligible minority — just 0.1% — our scale allows us to collect a best-in-the-industry dataset of both lewd and non-lewd images, tailored to achieve the best possible performances on the task,” the company wrote in a press release.

Now available on GitHub, a refined version of the AI is available for commercial use, distribution and modification. Though it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology to develop a model that detects nude images, it’s something that smaller companies probably don’t have the time to develop themselves. So, other dating apps (or any product where people might send dick pics, AKA the entire internet?) could feasibly integrate this technology into their own products, helping shield users from undesired lewd content. When Bumble first introduced this AI, the company claimed it had 98% accuracy.
Earth

Plastic Recycling a 'Failed Concept,' Study Says (cbsnews.com) 207

Posted by BeauHD from the we-can-do-better dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction." Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018.

According to Greenpeace USA's survey, only two types of plastic are widely accepted at the nation's 375 material recovery facilities. The first is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is commonly used in water and soda bottles; and the second is high density polyethylene (HDPE), seen in milk jugs, shampoo bottles and cleaning product containers. These are numbered "1" and "2" according to a standardized system in which there are seven plastic types. But being recyclable in theory doesn't mean products are being recycled in practice.

The report found that PET and HDPE products had actual reprocessing rates of 20.9 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively -- both down slightly from Greenpeace USA's last survey in 2020. Plastic types "3" through "7" -- including children's toys, plastic bags, produce wrappings, yogurt and margarine tubs, coffee cups and to-go food containers -- were reprocessed at rates of less than five percent. Despite often carrying the recycling symbol on their labels, products that use plastic types "3" through "7" fail to meet the Federal Trade Commission classification of recyclable. This is because recycling facilities for these types aren't available to a "substantial majority" of the population, defined as 60 percent, and because the collected products are not being used in the manufacturing or assembly of new items. According to the report, these are the five main reasons why plastic recycling is a "failed concept": 1.) Plastic waste is generated in vast quantities and is extremely difficult to collect -- as becomes clear during what the report called ineffective "volunteer cleanup stunts" funded by nonprofits such as "Keep America Beautiful."
2.) Even if it were all collected, mixed plastic waste cannot be recycled together, and it would be "functionally impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of consumer plastic waste produced each year," the report said.
3.) The recycling process itself is environmentally harmful, exposing workers to toxic chemicals and itself generating microplastics.
4.) Recycled plastic carries toxicity risks through contamination with other plastic types in collection bins, preventing it from becoming food-grade material again.
5.) The process of recycling is prohibitively expensive. Greenpeace called on corporations to support a Global Plastics Treaty, which United Nations members agreed to create in February, and move toward refill and reuse strategies.

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