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Submission + - Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban COVID-19 Vaccine 'Within Months' 4

Submitted by ukoda
ukoda writes: The Daily Beast has this worrying article:

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

Just glad I live in a country where the Covid vaccine is free and encouraged.

Submission + - Serbia: Technical Briefing: Journalists targeted with Pegasus spyware (amnesty.org)

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: This technical briefing documents how two journalists in Serbia were targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in February 2025. The briefing builds on the evidence of a widespread surveillance campaign against Serbian civil society that we documented in our 2024 report “A Digital Prison”.

Submission + - Reading For Fun Is Plummeting in The US, And Experts Are Concerned (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the US, which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services.

The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.

"This is not just a small dip – it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning."

The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.

Submission + - Killer AI app found: "massive personalized peruasion". (nature.com)

Submitted by Mr. Dollar Ton
Mr. Dollar Ton writes: TLDR: old and busted: post-truth. New hotness: post-reality.

Apparently, matching the language or content of a message to the psychological profile of its recipient (known as “personalized persuasion”), that is, wrapping a lie in flattery and expectations of the person lied to is "one of the most effective messaging strategies".

TFA demonstrates that the "rapid advances" in large language models like ChatGPT could accelerate this influence by "making personalized persuasion [that is, lying with a personal touch] scalable".

Using data from several studies the authors show that personalized messages crafted by ChatGPT have significantly more influence over the feeble minds than non-personalized messages.

Apparently, this worked for everything — marketing of consumer products, political appeals for climate action, personality traits, political ideology, moral foundations.

It was also all too easy — providing the LLM with a single, short prompt naming or describing the targeted psychological dimension was enough.

TFA purports to demonstrate the potential for LLMs to automate, and thereby scale, the use of directed lies for fun an profit all for your own good.

Thank you for ignoring this matter until it is too late.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Haven't seen discussion on movie and TV shows recommendations on Slashdot of late. Could the fellow readers share some movies and TV shows — and documentaries — from this year that they really liked watching?

Submission + - Iodine instead of Xenon for Ion Drives (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Tesseractic
Tesseractic writes: Chen Ly over at New Scientist reports on a Nature article on ion drives:

https://www.nature.com/article...

Dmytro Rafalskyi at ThrustMe, a space technology company based in France, and his colleagues have developed an electric propulsion system that uses iodine. They operated a small satellite and performed successful manoeuvres using the drive.

Submission + - SPAM: BlockFi Faces SEC Scrutiny Over High-Yield Crypto Accounts

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BlockFi is being scrutinized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its popular product that pays customers high interest rates for lending out their digital tokens, a development that significantly ratchets up the fast-growing crypto firm’s legal woes. The SEC review focuses on whether the BlockFi accounts are akin to securities that should be registered with the regulator, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The Jersey City, New Jersey-based firm touts annual yields as high as 9.5% on its website — a figure that dwarfs the 0.06% average interest rate for bank savings accounts.

States including New Jersey and Texas have already taken action against BlockFi, questioning whether it’s marketing illicit financial products that lack bedrock consumer protections. BlockFi and other firms are able to pay high interest rates because they can charge institutional investors that want access to coins even more. The market is one of the hottest corners of crypto, with companies saying they’ve collected more than $40 billion in deposits. [...] A key concern is that unlike bank deposits, the crypto accounts aren’t insured by the federal government. If a firm goes bust, customers could lose their funds.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Is Microsoft Stealing People's Bookmarks?

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes: From Schneier on Security

I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late. Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this is real, can some reporter write about it? (Not that “user error” is a good justification. Any system where making a simple mistake means that you’ve forever lost your privacy isn’t a good one. We see this same situation with sharing contact lists with apps on smartphones. Apps will repeatedly ask, and only need you to accidentally click “okay” once.) EDITED TO ADD: It’s actually worse than I thought. Edge urges users to store passwords, ID numbers, and even passport numbers, all of which get uploaded to Microsoft by default when synch is enabled.

Also from one comment:

Ted November 17, 2021 8:29 AM It looks like Microsoft released some documentation on “Microsoft Edge – Policies” for Enterprise on 11-9-21. It is only a 472 minute read, but there is some info on Forced Synching, for example: ForceSync Force synchronization of browser data and do not show the sync consent prompt [spam URL stripped]...


Link to Original Source

Submission + - The An0m scandal: bypassing wiretap laws (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jd
jd writes: For those who don't know, An0m was a fake phone sold by the Australian and US governments to criminals so they could spy on them more easily.

I have no doubt the US and Australian governments feel vindicated by the massive success of their fake secure phones, and it's not unreasonable to congratulate stopping murders, but data swapping via a third party to bypass the law isn't that much different from what the gangs were doing.

I'm glad they saw that weakening security for the innocent wasn't necessary after all, and that's something to keep reminding them, but ethics didn't feature heavily in this and, as the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors? It's not like the UK hasn't sent in undercover spies as honeypots or passed laws to legally arrest "potential subversives".

Submission + - homed to change the way passwords, home directory, groups, etc. are handled (techrepublic.com) 4

Submitted by Camel Pilot
Camel Pilot writes: Leannart Poettering is proposing homed to alter the way Linux system handle user management. All user information will be placed in a cryptographically signed JSON record. That record will contain all user information such as username, group membership, and password hashes. The venerable /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow will be a thing of the past. One of the claimed advantages will be home directory portability.

Because the /home directory will no longer depend on the trifecta of systemd, /etc/passwd, and /etc/shadow, users and admins will then be able to easily migrate directories within /home. Imagine being able to move your /home/USER (where USER is your username) directory to a portable flash drive and use it on any system that works with systemd-homed. You could easily transport your /home/USER directory between home and work, or between systems within your company.

What is not clear is that for portability, systems would have to have identical user_id, group names, group_id, etc.. And what mechanism is going to provide user authorization to login to a system.

Comment Re:Youtube is gonna ban this (Score 3, Informative) 236

by toed (#59780066) Attached to: WHO Raises Coronavirus Threat Assessment To Its Highest Level

If you take a look at the CDC's own materials, they say straight out that there's a balancing act they take on to maximize effectiveness while minimizing economic and social costs. Don't need a White House bogeyman.

Their "Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza â" United States, 2017":
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volum...

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