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Max will begin a gradual password-sharing crackdown with "soft messaging" over the next few months, with a potential price increase to follow. The Verge reports: During Warner Bros. Discovery's Q3 earnings call on Thursday, chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said this initial rollout would be followed by more progress in 2025 and 2026. Wiedenfels called password sharing "a form of price rises," as the company is "asking members who have not signed up, or multi-household members to pay a little bit more." This isn't the first time we've heard about Max's interest in password sharing, but now we have more details about when -- and how -- it will all begin. [...] Wiedenfels didn't rule out the possibility of a Max price increase, either. He said that the "premium nature" of the service leaves "a fair amount of room to continue to push a price we've been judicious about." Max last raised prices across its ad-free plans in June.

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Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 following a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC. "He worked at 3News for many years as graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades, yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame." From the report: That year, Elwood received $200 from the then-unknown America Online, merely because his wife worked at a predecessor company. He was asked to simply record four voiceover lines: - "Welcome" - "You've Got Mail" - "Files done" - "Goodbye" Of course, the company better known as AOL blew up, and millions around the world would hear Elwood's voice telling them "You've Got Mail" every time they logged on to the internet. Despite his face not being visible, Elwood still achieved minor celebrity status. In 2015, he even appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to utter the famous greeting as well as other audience-suggested phrases.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...] The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State. "Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers. "Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

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U.S. Cellular has agreed to sell $1.02 billion worth of spectrum licenses to AT&T as part of its strategy to monetize its spectrum assets that were not included in an earlier $4.4 billion deal with T-Mobile. Reuters reports: Last month, U.S. Cellular agreed to sell select spectrum licenses for $1 billion to Verizon. It also signed deals with two other mobile network operators, but did not disclose the details. The latest agreement "adds a fourth mobile network operator, in addition to T-Mobile, to the list of those whose subscribers will benefit from the sale of our spectrum licenses," U.S. Cellular CEO Laurent Therivel said on Thursday. From a press release: Following this transaction, as well as those previously announced, UScellular will have reached definitive agreements to monetize approximately 55%, measured on a MHz-Pops basis, of the spectrum holdings (excluding mmWave) that were excluded from the proposed sale to T-Mobile, for a total consideration of approximately $2.02 billion. Including the proposed T-Mobile transaction, UScellular will have reached agreements to monetize approximately 70% of its total spectrum holdings (excluding mmWave), measured on a MHz-Pops basis. "After our proposed sales, we will be left with 1.86 billion MHz-Pops of low and mid-band spectrum, as well as 17.2 billion MHz-Pops of mmWave spectrum, with the substantial majority of retained value in the C-band spectrum," [said Laurent C. Therivel, President and CEO]. "The C-band licenses have a number of attributes that we believe are favorable to their long-term value. First, our C-band licenses are positioned in an attractive mid-band frequency that can deliver outstanding speed and capacity. Second, there is a substantial 5G ecosystem of equipment vendors and existing infrastructure that uses C-band. Finally, they have a lengthy build-out timeline, with first and second build-out dates of 2029 and 2033, respectively. This provides ample time and optionality for us to either monetize or deploy the spectrum in the future. We will continue to look for ways to opportunistically monetize the C-band, as well as the other remaining spectrum."

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Microsoft is introducing a feature to Notepad called Rewrite that will let you use AI to "rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content." The Verge reports: If you're a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text -- for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with. It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The head of a company specializing in cryptocurrency was kidnapped and held for ransom in downtown Toronto during rush hour Wednesday. Police were called about a kidnapping in the area of University Avenue and Richmond Street W. just before 6 p.m., says a spokesperson with the Toronto Police Service. The suspects forced the victim into a vehicle and made a demand for money, the spokesperson said. The man was later located in Centennial Park in Etobicoke uninjured. CBC Toronto has learned the victim is Dean Skurka, the president and CEO of Toronto-based financial firm WonderFi. He was released after a ransom of $1 million was paid electronically, a source close to the investigation said. Police say the investigation is ongoing and have not released any further details. [...] The alleged kidnapping happened the same day WonderFi released its third quarter earnings results, showing a 153 per cent increase compared to its third quarter in 2023.

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I had the opportunity to interview esteemed programmer Steve Yegge for the SourceForge Podcast to ask him all about AI-powered coding assistants and the future of programming. "We're moving from where you have to write the code to where the LLM will write the code and you're just having a conversation with it about the code," said Yegge. "That is much more accessible to people who are just getting into the industry." Steve has nearly 30 years of programming experience working at Geoworks, Amazon, Google, Grab and now SourceGraph, working to build out the Cody AI assistant platform. Here's his Wikipedia page. He's not shy about sharing his opinions or predictions for the industry, no matter how difficult it may be for some to hear. "I'm going to make the claim that ... line-oriented programming, which we've done for the last 40, 50 years, ... is going away. It is dying just like assembly language did, and it will be completely dead within five years." You can watch the episode on YouTube and stream on all major podcast platforms. A transcription of the podcast is available here.

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Apple has confirmed it has no plans to release a 27-inch iMac, ending speculation about a larger successor to its flagship desktop computer. The tech giant will instead focus on its 24-inch M3 iMac and Mac Studio offerings.

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With October's initial temperature data in, 2024 will rank as the first calendar year in modern record-keeping in which global average surface temperatures exceed the Paris Agreement's aspirational 1.5C guardrail. From a report:Holding long-term warming to the 1.5-degree target compared to the preindustrial era is crucial for lowering the risk of triggering climate change tipping points, beyond which potentially catastrophic impacts have a higher likelihood of occurring, studies show. Holding warming to that target is viewed as necessary for small island states and other extremely vulnerable nations to avoid being wiped out by sea level rise, drought and other threats. The data -- and proxy records such as tree rings and ice cores -- shows this year is likely to be the hottest in at least 125,000 years. Right now, the world is on track for as much as 3.1C (5.58F) of warming based on already pledged emissions cuts, assuming they are fulfilled. Copernicus Climate Change Service reported early Thursday that the year is headed for a temperature anomaly of more than 1.55C (2.79F) above preindustrial levels. Last year fell just shy of the 1.5C threshold relative to the 1850-1900 average.

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A federal agency has issued a directive to employees to reduce the use of their phones for work matters due to China's recent hack of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, WSJ reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: In an email to staff sent Thursday, the chief information officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned that internal and external work-related meetings and conversations that involve nonpublic data should only be held on platforms like Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx and not on work-issued or personal phones. "Do NOT conduct CFPB work using mobile voice calls or text messages," the email said, while referencing a recent government statement acknowledging the telecommunications infrastructure attack. "While there is no evidence that CFPB has been targeted by this unauthorized access, I ask for your compliance with these directives so we reduce the risk that we will be compromised," said the email, which was sent to all CFPB employees and contractors. It wasn't clear if other federal agencies had taken similar measures or were planning to, but many U.S. officials have already curtailed their phone use due to the hack, according to a former official.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In October, video game giant Activision said it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that affected "a small number of legitimate player accounts," who were getting banned because of the bug. In reality, according to the hacker who found the bug and was exploiting it, they were able to ban "thousands upon thousands" of Call of Duty players, who they essentially framed as cheaters. The hacker, who goes by Vizor, spoke to TechCrunch about the exploit, and told their side of the story. "I could have done this for years and as long as I target random players and no one famous it would have gone without notice," said Vizor, who added that it was "funny to abuse the exploit." TechCrunch was introduced to Vizor by a cheat developer called Zebleer, who is familiar with the Call of Duty hacking scene. Zebleer said he had been in touch with Vizor for months, and as such had knowledge of the exploit, which he said he saw Vizor using.

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Software engineer David Gomes writes in a blog post: I sometimes need to search for a website that will "convert a PNG to SVG", or "remove page from PDF" or "resize svg". And these apps are... okay. I don't really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don't work or have too many ads. So, I've been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases. I decided to try it myself for a "resize SVG" app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I've used it before, it doesn't cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now. It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it'll just go to town and try to build the app. But what's super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).

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A pre-dawn statewide alert about an officer shooting in Hall County triggered over 4,500 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. The 4:52 a.m. "Blue Alert" on October 4 awakened millions of Texans, many living hundreds of miles from the incident location, to notify them about suspect Seth Altman. Air traffic controllers, healthcare workers, and other professionals reported safety concerns from sleep disruption, according to records obtained by 404 Media. Multiple residents told the FCC they disabled all emergency notifications in response, potentially compromising public safety for future alerts.

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Plastic pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land, according to scientific analysis. From a report: Plastic must not be treated as a waste problem alone, the authors said, but as a product that poses harm to ecosystems and human health. The authors gave their warning in the days before final talks begin in South Korea to agree a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. Progress towards a treaty on plastic pollution has been hindered by a row over the need to include cuts to the $712bn plastic production industry in the treaty. At the last talks in April, developed countries were accused of bowing to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists to steer clear of any reductions in production. The discussions in South Korea, which start on 25 November, mark a rare opportunity for countries to come to an agreement to tackle the global crisis of plastic pollution. In 2022 at least 506m tonnes of plastics were produced worldwide, but only 9% gets recycled globally. The rest is burned, landfilled or dumped where it can leach into the environment. Microplastics are now everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth. The new study of plastic pollution examined the mounting evidence of the effects of plastics on the environment, health and human wellbeing. The authors are urging delegates at the UN talks to stop viewing plastic pollution as merely a waste problem, and instead to tackle material flows through the whole life pathway of plastic, from raw material extraction, production and use, to its environmental release and its fate, and the Earth system effects.

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Flexible arrays — arrays that are declared as the final member of a structure and which have a size determined at run time — have long drawn the attention of developers seeking to harden the kernel against buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. These arrays have reliably been a source of bugs, so anything that can be done to ensure that operations on them stay within bounds is a welcome improvement. While many improvements, including the recent counted-by work, have been made, one of the most difficult cases remains. Now, however, developers who are interested in using recent compiler bounds-checking features are trying to get a handle on struct sockaddr.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bcc, bpftrace, bzip2, container-tools:rhel8, grafana-pcp, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libtiff, python-gevent, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.12-urllib3, xmlrpc-c, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (puma and pypy3), Fedora (firefox), Gentoo (libgit2), Mageia (libarchive), SUSE (ghostscript, go1.22-openssl, go1.23-openssl, htmldoc, kmail-account-wizard, libarchive, libgsf, libmozjs-128-0, openssl-3, python-jupyterlab, python-mysql-connector-python, python36, and ruby2.1), and Ubuntu (cinder, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-aws, linux-azure-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency).

Malwarebytes, in a blog post: We've acquired AzireVPN, a privacy-focused VPN provider based in Sweden. I wanted to share with you our intentions behind this exciting step, and what this means for our existing users and the family of solutions they rely on to keep them private and secure. Malwarebytes has long been an advocate for user privacy (think Malwarebytes Privacy VPN and our free web extension Malwarebytes Browser Guard). Now, we're leaning even more on our mission to reimagine consumer cybersecurity to protect devices and data, no matter where users are located, how they work and play, or the size of their wallet. With AzireVPN's infrastructure and intellectual property, Malwarebytes is poised to develop more advanced VPN technologies and features, offering increased flexibility and enhanced security for our users.

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Over 60 classic Sega games are being delisted from digital stores, including Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe and Jet Set Radio. From a report: Starting on 6th December at 11:59pm PST (so, 7.59am on 7th December, for those of us in the UK), the affected games will no longer be available to purchase. Of course, if you already have a game in your library, it will remain available to download and play as and when. In a FAQ, Sega noted select individual classic titles will remain playable for those among us who have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. No explanation was given for why these changes are being made.

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Nvidia will impose a 100-hour monthly limit on its GeForce Now cloud gaming service for new subscribers starting January 2025, with existing members facing the same restriction from 2026, the company said on Thursday. The gaming giant aims to maintain current subscription prices by implementing the cap, which affects roughly 6% of users. Members can purchase additional 15-hour blocks for $2.99 on Performance tier or $5.99 for Ultimate tier once they exceed the limit. The service, which allows users to stream games from remote servers, will also rebrand its Priority membership to Performance tier, adding 1440p streaming and ultrawide resolution support. Subscribers can carry over 15 unused hours monthly or switch to basic servers after reaching the cap, Nvidia said.

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Taiwan should pour more resources into advancing chip technology and expanding its supply chain expertise to maintain global leadership, an executive from its most valuable company said hours after Donald Trump was elected to be US president for the second time. From a report: "We should accelerate research and development to ensure our standing as an indispensable member of the global semiconductor supply chain," Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Senior Vice President Cliff Hou said in remarks delivered in his role as chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association on Thursday. "We are also working with the government to see whether we can attract foreign partners to set up design and materials centers in Taiwan." The self-governing island, home to the world's biggest contract chipmaker, TSMC, lives with the constant threat of invasion by China, which considers it a breakaway territory. The imminent change in US leadership may alter its standing in global affairs. While President Joe Biden has repeatedly voiced unequivocal support for Taiwan, Trump said the island should pay the US for defending it, calling Xi Jinping "a very good friend of mine until Covid" in an interview with Bloomberg. Hou, a 27-year TSMC veteran who obtained his doctorate in the US, added that Taiwan must also aim to develop more expertise in equipment and materials, areas that are dominated by foreign businesses. Meanwhile, the close relationship Taiwan and the US have forged over the past few decades will not be affected by the election's outcome, the executive told reporters separately on the sidelines of his trade group's event in Hsinchu. [...] In October, Trump told podcast host Joe Rogan that Taiwan took away US semiconductor business and jobs. "These chip companies, they stole 95% of our business. It's in Taiwan right now. They do a great job, but that's only because we have stupid politicians," Trump said as part of a lengthy interview where he also stated he protected Taiwan from China during his first stint as president.

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