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"It was three years of my, life you?" a 93-year-old William Shatner tells the Guardian when asked about playing Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series from 1967 to 1969: It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into "the category right below friend, I think". He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. "Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu," he says. Even on a grander scale, "The universe charms him with its mysteries," writes the Guardian, calling it "the key to maintaining wonder through nearly a century of life. He likes the not-knowing." You can see this at play when the TV starship captain became a real-life spacefarer in 2021: Liberated by weightlessness, he found himself utterly transformed by the rush of perspective one can only assume miles above the Earth. "It's very personal, what you see from up there, what you read into the stillness," he says. "I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life." The question of mortality hangs over Shatner, albeit not in a morbid way. He's entranced by the paradox of death, that the absolute unknowability of what happens will be inevitably supplanted by the certainty of finding out... For a man accustomed to boldly going where no man has gone before, it's all just the next phase of a single ongoing adventure. In fact, Shatner told Jimmy Kimmel Friday that he was always disappointed by the way he'd performed Captain Kirk's death. "I think you die the way you live," Shatner says. "So Captain Kirk always had these grotesque things happening... but without fear. But with joy, and love, and an opportunity to see what's better." So when performing Kirk's death, he'd imagined him actually gazing upon death itself — and looking upon it with wonder. "I ad libbed the 'Oh my'." Shatner's regret? That it "sounded fearful. And I didn't want to be fearful." "Would you like a do-over?" Kimmel asks. (Adding "I've got some debris...") And Shatner agrees, performing — one more time — the death of Captain Kirk. The video also includes an appropriate clip from a newly-released documentary about Shatner's life. "Don't do it half-heartedly," Shatner says at one point. "Whatever it is you do — do it fully. Do it passionately. Do it with your whole being."

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It was March 24, 1999 that The Matrix premiered, premembers the Wall Street Journal. "To rewatch The Matrix is to be reminded of how primitive our technology was just 25 years ago. We see computers with bulky screens, cellphones with keypads and a once-ubiquitous feature of our society known as 'pay phones,' central to the plot of the film." But the article's headline warns that "25 Years Later, We're All Trapped in 'The Matrix'". [I]n a strange way, the film has become more relevant today than it was in 1999. With the rise of the smartphone and social media, genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously. Today many people, like Cypher, would rather spend their time in the imaginary realms offered by technology than engage in a genuine relationship with other human beings. In the film, one of the representatives of the AI, the villainous Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, tells Morpheus that the false reality of the Matrix is set in 1999 because that year was "the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization." Indeed, not long after "The Matrix" premiered, humanity hooked itself up to a matrix of its own. There is no denying that our lives have become better in many ways thanks to the internet and smartphones. But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making... For today's dwellers in the digital cave, the path back into the light doesn't involve taking a pill, as in "The Matrix," or being rescued by a philosopher. We ourselves have the power to resist the extremes of the digital world, even as we remain linked to it. You can find hints of an unplugged "Zion" in the Sabbath tables of observant Jews, where electronic devices are forbidden, and in university seminars where laptops are banned so that students can engage with a text and each other. Twenty-five years ago, "The Matrix" offered us a modern twist on Plato's cave. Today we are once again asking what it will take to find our way out of the lonely darkness, into the brilliance of other human souls in the real world.

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Indian Express calls it "the ultimate smartphone killer". (Coming soon, its laser-on-your-palm feature will display stock prices, sports scores, and flight statuses.) Humane's Ai Pin can even translate what you say, repeating it out loud in another language (with 50 different languages supported). And it can read you summaries of what's on your favorite web sites, so "You can just surf the web with your voice," according to a new video released this week. The video also shows it answering specific questions like "What's that song by 21 Savage with the violin intro?" (And later, while the song is playing, answering more questions like "This was sampled from another song. What song was that?") But then co-founder Imran Chaudhri — an iPhone designer and one of several former Apple employees at Humane — demonstrated a "Vision" feature that's coming soon. Holding a Sony Walkman he asks the Pin to "Look at this and tell me when it first came out" — and the Pin obliges. ("The Sony Walkman WM-F73 was released in 1986...") In another demo it correctly supplied the designer of an Air Jordan basketball shoe. They're also working on integrating this into a Nutrition Tracking application. (A demonstrator held a doughnut and asked the Pin to identify how much sugar was in it.) If you tell the Pin that you've eaten the doughnut, it can then calculate your intake of carbs, protein, and fats. And in the video the Pin responded within seconds to the command "Make a spreadsheet about top consumer tech reviewers on YouTube [with] real names, subscriber counts, and URLs." It performed the research and created the spreadsheet, which appears on the demonstrator's laptop, apparently logged in to Humane's cloud-based user platform. In the video Humane's co-founder stresses that its Ai Pin does all this without downloading applications, "which allows me to stay present in the moment and flow." But while it can also make phone calls and sends text messages, Imran Chaudhri adds that "Ai Pin is a completely new form factor for compute. It's never been about replacing. It's always been about creating new ways to interact with what you need. So instead of having to sit down to use a computer, or reaching in to your pocket and pulling out your phone and navigating apps, Ai Pin allows you to simply act on something the moment you think about it — letting AI do all the work for you." Or, as they say later "This is about technology adapting and reacting to you. Not you having to adapt to it." There's also talk about their "AI OS" — named Cosmos — with the Pin described as "our first entry point" into that operating system, with other devices planned to support it in the future. (Mashable's reporter notes that Humane's Ai Pin is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and writes "I was impressed with how well it worked.") The video even ends with an update for SDK developers. In the second half of 2024, "you're going to be able to connect your services to the Ai Pin using REST APIs and OAuth." Phase two will let developers run their code directly on Humane's cloud platform — while Phase three will see developers codes on Ai Pin devices, "to get access to the mic, the camera, the sensors, and the laser. We are so excited to see what you're gonna build." Humane says its Ai Pin will start shipping at the end of March, with priority orders arriving starting on April 11th.

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CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..." "File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies... It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket.... Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...." "We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there." One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..." They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."

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There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist. And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software. "The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided. So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine). The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes. Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing. As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."

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Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and others spoke at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, reports VentureBeat — and told the story of "a lost prototype of a Tetris game that was never published." But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game... Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora's Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software... Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2. Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman. In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde's talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game. De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov. "Are you kidding me?" Klanac reacted. The idea is still to survive as long as you can, according to the article — but the entire playfield was accessible. "For the first time in public, they showed the video of the prototype in action," according to the article, which also records Pajitnov reaction. "When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements. This is Tetris for like 300 IQ people." No word on yet on whether the game will ever be officially published.

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Slashdot reader christoban writes: In what may be an issue for Sun-obscuring strategies to combat global warming, it turns out that during solar eclipses, low level cumulus clouds rapidly disappear, reducing by a factor of 4, researchers have found. The news comes from the science magazine Eos (published by the nonprofit organization of atmosphere/ocean/space scientists, the American Geophysical Union). Victor J. H. Trees, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues recently analyzed cloud cover data obtained during an annular eclipse in 2005, visible in parts of Europe and Africa. They mined visible and infrared imagery collected by two geostationary satellites operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. Going to space was key, Trees said. "If you really want to quantify how clouds behave and how they react to a solar eclipse, it helps to study a large area. That's why we want to look from space...." [T]hey tracked cloud evolution for several hours leading up to the eclipse, during the eclipse, and for several hours afterward. Low-level cumulus clouds — which tend to top out at altitudes around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) — were strongly affected by the degree of solar obscuration. Cloud cover started to decrease when about 15% of the Sun's face was covered, about 30 minutes after the start of the eclipse. The clouds started to return only about 50 minutes after maximum obscuration. And whereas typical cloud cover hovered around 40% in noneclipse conditions, less than 10% of the sky was covered with clouds during maximum obscuration, the team noted. "On a large scale, the cumulus clouds started to disappear," Trees said... The temperature of the ground matters when it comes to cumulus clouds, Trees said, because they are low enough to be significantly affected by whatever is happening on Earth's surface... Beyond shedding light on the physics of cloud dissipation during solar eclipses, these new findings also have implications for future geoengineering efforts, Trees and his collaborators suggested. Discussions are underway to mitigate the effects of climate change by, for instance, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols or launching solar reflectors into space to prevent some of the Sun's light from reaching Earth. Such geoengineering holds promise for cooling our planet, researchers agree, but its repercussions are largely unexplored and could be widespread and irreversible. These new results suggest that cloud cover could decrease with geoengineering efforts involving solar obscuration. And because clouds reflect sunlight, the efficacy of any effort might correspondingly decrease, Trees said. That's an effect that needs to be taken into account when considering different options, the researchers concluded. Another article on the site warns that "Planting Trees May Not Be as Good for the Climate as Previously Believed." "The climate benefits of trees storing carbon dioxide is partially offset by dark forests' absorption of more heat from the Sun, and compounds they release that slow the destruction of methane in the atmosphere."

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BleepingComputer reports on "a new denial-of-service attack dubbed 'Loop DoS' targeting application layer protocols." According to their article, the attack "can pair network services into an indefinite communication loop that creates large volumes of traffic." Devised by researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security, the attack uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and impacts an estimated 300,000 host and their networks. The attack is possible due to a vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2024-2169, in the implementation of the UDP protocol, which is susceptible to IP spoofing and does not provide sufficient packet verification. An attacker exploiting the vulnerability creates a self-perpetuating mechanism that generates excessive traffic without limits and without a way to stop it, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the target system or even an entire network. Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication. According to the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) there are three potential outcomes when an attacker leverages the vulnerability: — Overloading of a vulnerable service and causing it to become unstable or unusable. — DoS attack on the network backbone, causing network outages to other services. — Amplification attacks that involve network loops causing amplified DOS or DDOS attacks. CISPA researchers Yepeng Pan and Professor Dr. Christian Rossow say the potential impact is notable, spanning both outdated (QOTD, Chargen, Echo) and modern protocols (DNS, NTP, TFTP) that are crucial for basic internet-based functions like time synchronization, domain name resolution, and file transfer without authentication... The researchers warned that the attack is easy to exploit, noting that there is no evidence indicating active exploitation at this time. Rossow and Pan shared their findings with affected vendors and notified CERT/CC for coordinated disclosure. So far, vendors who confirmed their implementations are affected by CVE-2024-2169 are Broadcom, Cisco, Honeywell, Microsoft, and MikroTik. To avoid the risk of denial of service via Loop DoS, CERT/CC recommends installing the latest patches from vendors that address the vulnerability and replace products that no longer receive security updates. Using firewall rules and access-control lists for UDP applications, turning off unnecessary UDP services, and implementing TCP or request validation are also measures that can mitigate the risk of an attack. Furthermore, the organization recommends deploying anti-spoofing solutions like BCP38 and Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF), and using Quality-of-Service (QoS) measures to limit network traffic and protect against abuse from network loops and DoS amplifications. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.

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America's Justice Department "is considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter." Though Assange faces trial for publishing thousands of confidential U.S. documents in 2010, this development opens up "the possibility of a deal that could eventually result in his release from a British jail," reports the Journal. Where things stand currently: A U.K. court is currently considering whether to allow a last-ditch appeal by the 52-year-old. After U.S. prosecutors charged him in 2019, U.K. law-enforcement officials apprehended him, and he has been in a London prison ever since... Britain's High Court is expected to decide within weeks whether to grant Assange a further right to appeal his extradition to the U.S. If the court rules against him, the U.S. government will likely have 28 days to come and collect Assange and bring him to face trial. But... Justice Department officials and Assange's lawyers have had preliminary discussions in recent months about what a plea deal could look like to end the lengthy legal drama, according to people familiar with the matter, a potential softening in a standoff filled with political and legal complexities. The talks come as Assange has spent some five years behind bars. U.S. prosecutors face diminishing odds that he would serve much more time even if he were convicted stateside. The discussions remain in flux, and talks could fizzle. Any deal would require approval at the highest levels of the Justice Department. Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, said he has been given no indication that the department will take a deal. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. If prosecutors allow Assange to plead to a U.S. charge of mishandling classified documents — something his lawyers have floated as a possibility — it would be a misdemeanor offense. Under such a deal, Assange potentially could enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the U.S. The time he has spent behind bars in London would count toward any U.S. sentence, and he would likely be free to leave prison shortly after any deal was concluded. U.S. authorities "gave a package of assurances, including a pledge he could be transferred to his native Australia to serve any sentence," according to the article. The Australian government, which has largely been supportive of Assange, could shorten any sentence once he landed on Australian soil, said Nick Vamos, a partner at London law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of extradition for England and Wales's Crown Prosecution Service. "I honestly think as soon as he arrived in Australia he would be released," he said.

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"My favorite kind of science fiction involves stories rooted in real science..." writes NPR's reviewer. "[T]here is something special about seeing characters wrestle with concepts closer to our current understanding of how the universe works." The Verge calls it an "impressive" and "leaner" story than the book, arguing "it's a good one — and very occasionally a great one" that introduces the author's key ideas, though channelling "the book's spirit but not its brilliance." And Slate calls it a "downright transformative" adaptation, "jettisoning most of the novel's characters and plucking scenes from all three books," while accusing it of "making the trilogy's expansive and philosophical story into something much more pedestrian and digestible." But Reuters notes there's huge interest in China over this adaptation (by the co-creator of Mem>Game of Thrones) for the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. "The new series was trending on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Friday," reports Reuters, "with 21 million views so far." (The show came in first on Weibo's "top hot" trend rankings, they add, "despite Netflix being officially inaccessible in China. Chinese viewers would have had to watch the Netflix series from behind a VPN or on a pirate site.") So what was their verdict? CNN reports Netflix's adaptation "has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country's modern history." Among the country's more patriotic internet users, discussions on the adaptation turned political, with some accusing the big-budget American production of making China look bad. The show opens with a harrowing scene depicting Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which consumed China in bloodshed and chaos for a decade from 1966... "Netflix you don't understand 'The Three Body Problem' or Ye Wenjie at all!" read a comment on social media platform Weibo. "You only understand political correctness!" Others came to the show's defense, saying the scene closely follows depictions in the book — and is a truthful reenactment of history. "History is far more absurd than a TV series, but you guys pretend not to see it," read one comment on Douban, a popular site for reviewing movies, books and music. Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao's Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative. The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel's beginning, with the author's blessing... Various other aspects of the show, from its casting and visual effects to the radical changes to the story's original setting and characters, also attracted the ire of Chinese social media users. Many compared it to a Chinese television adaptation released last year — a much lengthier and closer retelling of the book that ran to 30 episodes and was highly rated on Chinese review platforms. The Netflix adaptation featured an international cast and placed much of the action in present-day London — thus making the story a lot less Chinese.

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: Nurturing a growing fetus requires a series of profound physical, hormonal, and chemical changes that may rewire every major organ in the body and can cause serious health complications such as hypertension and preeclampsia. But does being pregnant actually take years off your life...? Today in Cell Metabolism, scientists report that the stress of pregnancy can cause a person's biological age to increase by up to 2 years — a trend that may reverse itself in the months that follow. In some cases, the authors write, those who breastfeed their children after giving birth may end up biologically "younger" than during early pregnancy. The finding represents yet another piece of "compelling" evidence that events during and after pregnancy can have far-reaching health consequences, says Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who wasn't involved in the new study... The discovery that biological aging isn't necessarily a linear process "came as a real surprise," says Kieran O'Donnell, a perinatal researcher at the Yale School of Medicine... But blood samples from 68 participants, collected 3 months after giving birth, revealed a dramatic about-face. Although being pregnant had initially aged their cells between 1 and 2 years, says O'Donnell, their biological age now appeared to be 3 to 8 years younger than it had been during early pregnancy — with different epigenetic clocks algorithms providing slightly bigger or smaller estimates.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, pillow, and thunderbird), Fedora (apptainer, chromium, ovn, and webkitgtk), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, ffmpeg, fontforge, libuv, and nodejs-tough-cookie), Oracle (kernel, libreoffice, postgresql-jdbc, ruby:3.1, squid, and squid:4), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8 and libreoffice), SUSE (firefox, jbcrypt, trilead-ssh2, jsch-agent-proxy, kernel, tiff, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (linux-aws and openssl1.0).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: UnitedHealth Group said Monday that it's paid out more than $2 billion to help health-care providers who have been affected by the cyberattack on subsidiary Change Healthcare. "We continue to make significant progress in restoring the services impacted by this cyberattack," UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said in a press release. "We know this has been an enormous challenge for health care providers and we encourage any in need to contact us." UnitedHealth disclosed nearly a month ago that a cyber threat actor breached part of Change Healthcare's information technology network. The fallout has wreaked havoc across the U.S. health-care system. Change Healthcare offers e-prescription software and tools for payment management, so the interruptions left many providers temporarily unable to fill medications or get reimbursed for their services by insurers. UnitedHealth, which provides care for 152 million people, said on Monday that it began releasing medical claims preparation software, which will be available to thousands of customers in the next several days. The company called it "an important step in the resumption of services." On Friday, UnitedHealth said it restored Change Healthcare's electronic payments platform, after rebooting 99% of its pharmacy network services earlier this month. It also introduced a temporary funding assistance program to help health-care providers experiencing cash flow trouble because of the attack. UnitedHealth said the advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.

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Microsoft today announced a preview release of Windows Notepad, with built-in spellchecking and an autocorrect feature. BleepingComputer reports: Microsoft says they are rolling out this preview to Insiders in the Windows 11 Canary and Dev channels, but it may take some time before it's available for everyone. "With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes," reads Microsoft's announcement. "We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type." Once installed, Notepad will now show a red squiggly line under misspelled words that, when clicked, shows suggestions on the correct spelling. It's also possible to ignore words in a single text document or add them to the global dictionary so they are not shown in the future. Microsoft says that this feature will be turned off for log and source code files. This is because it's common for non-standard words to be used in these files, triggering multiple spellcheck errors. Users can control this setting globally or for specific file types in the Notepad app's settings. The autocorrect feature is a bit more seamless, automatically making small changes to grammar and punctuation as you type.

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Longtime Slashdot reader jgulla shares an announcement from Redis: Beginning today, all future versions of Redis will be released with source-available licenses. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The new source-available licenses allow us to sustainably provide permissive use of our source code. We're leading Redis into its next phase of development as a real-time data platform with a unified set of clients, tools, and core Redis product offerings. The Redis source code will continue to be freely available to developers, customers, and partners through Redis Community Edition. Future Redis source-available releases will unify core Redis with Redis Stack, including search, JSON, vector, probabilistic, and time-series data models in one free, easy-to-use package as downloadable software. This will allow anyone to easily use Redis across a variety of contexts, including as a high-performance key/value and document store, a powerful query engine, and a low-latency vector database powering generative AI applications. [...] Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. For example, cloud service providers will be able to deliver Redis 7.4 only after agreeing to licensing terms with Redis, the maintainers of the Redis code. These agreements will underpin support for existing integrated solutions and provide full access to forthcoming Redis innovations. In practice, nothing changes for the Redis developer community who will continue to enjoy permissive licensing under the dual license. At the same time, all the Redis client libraries under the responsibility of Redis will remain open source licensed. Redis will continue to support its vast partner ecosystem -- including managed service providers and system integrators -- with exclusive access to all future releases, updates, and features developed and delivered by Redis through its Partner Program. There is no change for existing Redis Enterprise customers.

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Apple has launched a new "Documentation" page to its website that provides links to user guides, repair manuals, tech specs, software downloads, and more for a variety of its products. MacRumors reports: Some of this information was previously found across separate pages on Apple's website, and it has now been combined in one place for convenient access. The page includes categories for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, HomePod, displays like the Studio Display and Pro Display XDR, accessories like the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard, and software. There is also a search tool on the page that provides links to support documents and other relevant information based on the keywords entered.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what's come to be known as "hacker summer camp," the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it's a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city's elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology. But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room's gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone. One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room's door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they're finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps. Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba. The Saflok systems are installed on 3 million doors worldwide, inside 13,000 properties in 131 countries. By exploiting weaknesses in both Dormakaba's encryption and the underlying RFID system Dormakaba uses, known as MIFARE Classic, Carroll and Wouters have demonstrated just how easily they can open a Saflok keycard lock. Their technique starts with obtaining any keycard from a target hotel -- say, by booking a room there or grabbing a keycard out of a box of used ones -- then reading a certain code from that card with a $300 RFID read-write device, and finally writing two keycards of their own. When they merely tap those two cards on a lock, the first rewrites a certain piece of the lock's data, and the second opens it. Dormakaba says that it's been working since early last year to make hotels that use Saflok aware of their security flaws and to help them fix or replace the vulnerable locks. For many of the Saflok systems sold in the last eight years, there's no hardware replacement necessary for each individual lock. Instead, hotels will only need to update or replace the front desk management system and have a technician carry out a relatively quick reprogramming of each lock, door by door. Wouters and Carroll say they were nonetheless told by Dormakaba that, as of this month, only 36 percent of installed Safloks have been updated. Given that the locks aren't connected to the internet and some older locks will still need a hardware upgrade, they say the full fix will still likely take months longer to roll out, at the very least. Some older installations may take years.

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In a Threads post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With the feature enabled, Threads users will be able to cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon. The Verge reports: Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to "search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server." There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example. Meta also can't promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on.

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couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times. CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said. CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted the first global resolution on artificial intelligence to encourage protecting personal data, monitoring AI for risks, and safeguarding human rights, U.S. officials said. The nonbinding resolution, proposed by the United States and co-sponsored by China and 121 other nations, took three months to negotiate and also advocates strengthening privacy policies, the officials said, briefing reporters before the resolution's passage. "We're sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that its more important than ever to steer by the light of our values," said one of the senior administration officials, describing the resolution as the "first-ever truly global consensus document on AI." "The improper or malicious design, development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence systems ... pose risks that could ... undercut the protection, promotion and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms," the measure says. Asked whether negotiators faced resistance from Russia or China -- U.N. member states that also voted in favor of the document -- the officials conceded there were "lots of heated conversations. ... But we actively engaged with China, Russia, Cuba, other countries that often don't see eye to eye with us on issues." "We believe the resolution strikes the appropriate balance between furthering development, while continuing to protect human rights," said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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