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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 17, 2024 is available.

A new study counters the widely held belief that standing desks are good for your health, discovering that it does not reduce the risk of diseases such as stroke and heart failure. In fact, it "found that being on your feet for more than two hours a day may increase the risk of developing problems such as deep vein thrombosis and varicose veins," reports The Guardian. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. From the report: To establish if standing provided any health benefits, the researchers studied data from 83,013 adults who are part of the UK Biobank health records database. These people did not have heart disease at the start of the study and wore devices on their wrists to track movement. The team found that for every extra 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours, the risk of circulatory disease increased by 11%. Standing was not found to reduce the risk of heart conditions such as stroke, heart failure and coronary heart disease, the researchers said. "The key takeaway is that standing for too long will not offset an otherwise sedentary lifestyle and could be risky for some people in terms of circulatory health," said Dr Matthew Ahmadi, of the University of Sydney's faculty of medicine and health. "We found that standing more does not improve cardiovascular health over the long-term and increases the risk of circulatory issues."

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wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Dane Stuckey, the former Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of big data analytics and AI firm Palantir, has joined OpenAI CISO. Stuckey served in senior security roles at Palantir for more than ten years, including 6 plus years as the company's CISO. In his new role, Stuckey said he would be working alongside Matt Knight, Head of Security at OpenAI. "Security is germane to OpenAI's mission," said Stuckey in a post on X. "It is critical we meet the highest standards for compliance, trust, and security to protect hundreds of millions of users of our products, enable democratic institutions to maximally benefit from these technologies, and drive the development of safe AGI for the world." "I am so excited for this next chapter, and can't wait to help secure a future where AI benefits us all," Stuckey added.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Robinhood launched its long-awaited desktop platform and added futures and index options trading features to its mobile app on Wednesday, as the fintech firm aims to take market share from traditional brokerages. The 11-year-old commission-free trading app, which became synonymous with mom-and-pop investors in 2021, is now seeking to mature into a full-fledged financial services provider and compete with established brokerages that serve institutional investors. The Menlo Park, California-based company said its desktop trading platform, dubbed "Robinhood Legend," will focus on active traders. The platform, available at no additional cost, will offer advanced trading tools, real-time data, as well as custom and preset layouts. Meanwhile, the app will allow users to trade futures on the benchmark S&P 500 index, oil and bitcoin, among others. Customers can also trade index options. [...] Subscribers to Robinhood's premium Gold tier will be able to trade futures for as low as 50 cents per contract, while non-Gold users will need to pay a commission of 75 cents. You can tune in to the company's live product announcement on YouTube.

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Apple is enhancing its Business Connect tool, allowing companies to customize how they appear in emails, phone calls, and payment interfaces on iPhones. The Verge reports: Each registered business can confirm its info is accurate and add additional details like photos or special offers. Collecting verified, up-to-date business information could be useful for Apple if it ever launches its own search engine or inside features for Apple Intelligence instead of sending users to outside sources like Google, Yelp, or Meta. Branded Mail is a feature businesses can sign up for today before it starts rolling out to users later this year, potentially making emails easier to identify in a sea of unread messages. Additionally, if companies opt into Business Caller ID, Apple will display their name, logo, and department on an iPhone's inbound call screen. This feature should come in handy when you're trying to figure out whether the random number that's calling you is spam, or if it's a legitimate business. It will start rolling out next year. A smaller update coming to Apple's Tap to Pay service will let companies show their logo when accepting payments instead of just displaying a category icon. You can read more about it in Apple's press release.

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According to The Verge, Meta has "begun laying off employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs." From the report: Rather than a mass, companywide layoff, these smaller cuts seem to coincide with reorganizations of specific teams. Some Meta employees have started posting that they've been laid off. Among them is Jane Manchun Wong, who gained notoriety for reporting on unannounced features coming to apps before joining the Threads team in 2023. Meta laid off 11,000 employees in 2022 and then cut 10,000 more people as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" in 2023. Further reading: Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash

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The parents of a Massachusetts student are suing his school after he was penalized for using AI in a Social Studies project, claiming it was for research purposes only. The student received a detention and a lower grade, which his parents argue could harm his college prospects. The school is defending its AI policy and fighting to dismiss the case. The Register reports: "The Plaintiff Student will suffer irreparable harm that far outweighs any harm that may befall the Defendants," their filing reads [PDF]. "He is applying to elite colleges and universities given his high level of academic and personal achievement. Early decision and early action applications in a highly competitive admissions process are imminent and start in earnest on October 1, 2024. Absent the grant of an injunction by this Court, the Student will suffer irreparable harm that is imminent." The school, however, is fighting back with a motion to dismiss [PDF] the case. The school argues that RNH, along with his classmates, was given a copy of the student handbook in the Fall of last year, which specifically called out the use of AI by students. The class was also shown a presentation about the school's policy. Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states. "RNH unequivocally used another author's language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so," the school argues. "Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted. Importantly, RNH's peers were not allowed to cut corners by using AI to craft their projects; thus, RNH acted 'unfairly in order to gain an advantage.'"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company's bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom. As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks. To many people's surprise, many of the kiosks remain operational even with the bankruptcy of Redbox's parent company, which has led some people to "liberate" DVDs from the abandoned kiosks. Reddit is full of posts by people who say they have taken dozens of DVDs from kiosks all over the country. Free DVDs is one thing. But in recent days, people have realized that they can, in some cases, get free Redbox kiosks. In an August filing, Walgreens told the bankruptcy court that it has 5,400 abandoned kiosks at its stores, and that it is spending $184,000 a month keeping them powered. "Walgreens should not be required to continue to 'store' and power Redbox kiosks across the country without any form of payment," the company wrote. And so tinkerers and reverse engineers have begun asking stores whether they can take the devices off their hands. There are also posts on Reddit by contractors who are selling them, and I was able to find various Redbox DVD kiosks being advertised for sale on Facebook Marketplace. (There are far more listings on Facebook Marketplace from people who have obtained hundreds or thousands of Redbox DVDs and are now selling them.) Recently the operating system for Redbox kiosks was dumped online, and this community is now probing it to see how it works. In a thread on Mastodon, reverse engineer Foone Turing has been posting some of her findings, which include the fact that Redbox machines contain a file that has "a complete list of titles ever rented, and the email addresses of the people who rented them, and where and when." She also found that the first six and last four digits of credit card information was logged. She said that the records on the particular unit that she was looking at contained 2,471 different transactions and had records on it dating back to 2015. Other reverse engineers have found that Redbox kiosks contained information about the physical locations of every other kiosk. The server that they communicated with is currently offline (because the company is bankrupt). But people have also been putting together information about what different error codes in the software mean (for example, the error code "0020BDT" would happen when an obstruction was detected in the machine). They have also found and dumped service manuals for different parts of the device and have found a few login passwords (one password is "US#1Choice4movierentals"). [...] There has also been discussion about how the machines could be modified to talk to a new server, or whether the operating system could be put on a DIY Redbox device. Another person installed Minecraft on their Redbox. It is still very early days, but, with the bankruptcy of Redbox's parent company, ironically these devices are being given new life.

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Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro is struggling to attract major software-makers to develop apps for the device, a challenge that threatens to slow the progress of the company's biggest new product in a decade. WSJ: New apps released on the Vision Pro every month have slowed since its launch in January. Some of the most successful virtual-reality software developers have so far opted not to build apps for the headset. Without enough killer apps, certain users have found the device less useful and are opting to sell it. "It's a chicken-or-egg problem," said Bertrand Nepveu, who previously worked on the Vision Pro at Apple and is now an investor in this area at Triptyq Capital. Nepveu and app developers think Apple should fund app makers to give them an incentive to port over their existing apps from other headsets or to develop fresh content. This practice has become common in the industry, with headset leader Meta Platforms funding many developers and even buying several app makers. The social-media company is a formidable competitor to Apple, with a market share of all headsets reaching 74% in the second quarter this year, according to Counterpoint Research.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast. Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don't look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases -- and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia. But signatures didn't die. We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit -- even when there is no blank space for it -- because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say. "Traditions have this odd way of sticking around," said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores. Signatures had been used to verify identity and agree to financial terms for centuries. Banks kept records of customer signatures to check against, but the sheer number of transactions and advancements in technology eventually made that impractical. By the 1980s, charges could be processed electronically. Signatures were still used in cases of fraud or stolen cards. Banks could call merchants and ask them to present a signed receipt. Yet given how easy signatures are to forge, they proved limited as a fraud prevention tool. Now there are more sophisticated ways to determine whether cards are stolen or misused, according to Mark Nelsen, global head of consumer payments at Visa.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Households on individual streets will be targeted with personalised adverts under plans being rolled out by Channel 4. The channel is to use new technology which will allow brands to tailor who sees their advert by enabling them to select a demographic within a specific location down to street level. For example, someone watching Made in Chelsea on Channel 4's streaming service could be served an ad for a fashion brand in a local outlet to them if a particular fashion trend is being discussed. Advertisers can further optimise their campaign by selecting from 26 programme genres, as well as time of day and device the show is being watched on. It forms part of a wider update to Channel 4's streaming platform that the broadcaster hopes could boost revenues by as much as $13m. The company will launch a new private marketplace enabling brands to buy advertising space directly in real-time. This will allow advertisers to amend their campaigns to respond to events, whether that be real-world events such as local weather or developments in fictional storylines within TV shows. Channel 4's new ad targeting also includes more detailed data to track whether a viewer has made a purchase after seeing an ad, as well as new viewer profiles for brands to target.

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AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices' companion app is uncertain.

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smooth wombat writes: In 2013, James Howell's partner inadvertently threw out a hard drive along with other trash. Unknown to this person, this hard drive contained approximately 8,000 bitcoins. For the past decade Howell has been petitioning the town council of Newport to excavate the landfill in the hope of recovering the drive which would now hold approximately $647 million worth of cryptocurrency. Now he is suing the council in an attempt to force them to let him excavate. Should the hard drive be recovered, Howells thinks there is an 80 percent chance that the coins on it would be retrievable. If it all works out, he has offered the council 10% of the recovered Bitcoin: $65 million worth. But, citing environmental concerns, the council has rejected his proposal to dig through over a decade's worth of garbage. The council issued a report wherein a spokesperson said, "The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site."

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Version 9.0 of the Forgejo software forge system has been released. Changes include a switch to the GPLv3 license, the beginning of a quota system, the removal of go-git support, and a lot of fixes. (LWN looked at Forgejo in February).

New research challenges assumptions about decision-making, revealing people tend to believe they have sufficient information regardless of actual data at hand. A study by Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher, published earlier this month, found participants consistently overestimated their knowledge when given partial information on a hypothetical school merger scenario. Nearly 90% favored merger when presented pro-merger facts, while only 25% did when given opposing data. However, opinions shifted when full information was provided, suggesting malleability of views despite initial overconfidence. Researchers caution this bias could be exploited in today's fractured media landscape, where partial or misleading information often circulates unchecked.

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In a rather critical analysis of the 2024 Economics Nobel, commentator Noah Smith has questioned the prize's shift back to "big-think" theories. He argues that Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (the winner of the 2024 Economics Nobel) influential work on institutions and development, while intriguing, lacks robust empirical validation. From his blog: The science prizes rely very heavily on external validity to determine who gets the prize -- your theory or your invention has to work, basically. If it doesn't, you can be the biggest genius in the world, but you'll never get a Nobel. The physicist Ed Witten won a Fields Medal, which is even harder to get than a Nobel, for the math he invented for string theory. But he'll almost certainly never get a Physics Nobel, because string theory can't be empirically tested. The Econ Nobel is different. Traditionally, it's given to economists whose ideas are most influential within the economics profession. If a whole bunch of other economists do research that follows up on your research, or which uses theoretical or empirical techniques you pioneered, you get an Econ Nobel. Your theory doesn't have to be validated, your specific empirical findings can already have been overturned by the time the prize is awarded, but if you were influential, you get the prize. You could argue that this is appropriate for what Thomas Kuhn would call a "pre-paradigmatic" science -- a field that's still looking for a set of basic concepts and tools. But it's been 55 years since they started giving the prize, and that seems like an awfully long time for a field to still be tooling up. Meanwhile, making "influence within the economics profession" the criterion for successful research seems a little too much like a popularity contest. It's how you end up with prizes like the one in 2004, which was given to some macroeconomic theorists whose theory said that recessions are caused by technological slowdowns and that mass unemployment is a voluntary vacation. In recent years, that looked like it might be changing. Often, the prize was given to empirical economists associated with the so-called "credibility revolution" -- basically, quasi-experiments. Those cases include Goldin in 2023, Card/Angrist/Imbens in 2021, and Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer in 2019. And when it was given to theorists, they tended to be game theorists whose theories are very predictive of real-world outcomes -- Milgrom/Wilson in 2020, Hart/Holmstrom in 2016, Tirole in 2014, and Roth/Shapley in 2012. Even when the prize was given to macro -- a field where validity is much harder to establish -- it was given to economists whose theories have seen immediate application to pressing problems of the day, such as Bernanke/Diamond/Dybvig in 2022 and Nordhaus in 2018. In other words, the recent Nobels have made it seem like economics might be becoming more like a natural science, where practical applications and external validity are the ultimate arbiter of the value of research, rather than cultural influence within the economics profession. But this year's prize seems like a step away from that, and back toward the sort of big-think that used to be more popular in the prize's early years.

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Digital River has not paid numerous merchants since midsummer for software and digital products they sold through its MyCommerce platform. The Register: "After over 20 years of partnership with Digital River, Traction Software Ltd has been left feeling as though we've been 'rug pulled,'" Lee Midgley, managing director of Traction Software, told The Register. "For the past three months, we've experienced a complete halt in software sales revenue payments with no support, no direct contact, and only additional terms and conditions designed to delay resolution and extract more money from us. "Astonishingly, Digital River continued to take sales from our loyal customers until we removed them from the order system. It now appears they have no intention of making payments and may be entering a liquidation process under a new CEO who has been involved in similar situations before." The new CEO, Barry Kasoff, was first noted on the e-commerce biz website in August. Kasoff is also listed as the president of Realization Services, "a full-service strategic consulting firm specializing in turnaround management and value enhancement..." The privately-owned, Minnesota-based business appears to have laid off a significant number of employees, presumably the result of what its UK subsidiary describes as cost reduction initiatives implemented in late 2022.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission adopted a final rule on Wednesday requiring businesses to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it is to sign up, in the agency's last major rulemaking before the Nov. 5 election. From a report: The "click to cancel" rule requires retailers, gyms and other businesses to get consumers' consent for subscriptions, auto-renewals and free trials that convert to paid memberships. The cancellation method must be "at least as easy to use" as the sign up process. FTC Chair Lina Khan said in an interview that the rule is an overdue response to a rising number of consumer complaints about situations in which it is "extraordinarily easy to sign up for a subscription, but absurdly difficult to cancel." "Companies shouldn't be able to trick you into paying for subscriptions that you don't want," Khan said. The rule prohibits requiring consumers who signed up through an app or a website to go through a chat bot or agent to cancel. For in-person signups, companies must provide means to cancel by phone or online. "The pandemic brought to the surface just how businesses are making people jump through endless hoops," Khan said. Requiring in-person cancellations while the businesses themselves were closed "really highlighted the absurdity of these practices," she said.

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Amazon has unveiled its first color e-reader, the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, priced at $279.99. The 7-inch device, available for preorder with shipments starting October 30th, utilizes E Ink's Kaleido technology and a new display stack. Kevin Keith, head of Kindle products, claims the Colorsoft maintains Kindle's hallmark features while introducing color without compromising performance. The e-reader boasts a 300ppi screen, enhanced LED pixels, and improved light distribution for vivid colors. It offers faster page turns and book openings compared to previous models. The color screen enhances the user interface, allowing for full-color book covers and a more vibrant standby display.

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Rust, like C, has its own memory model describing how concurrent access to the same data by multiple threads can behave. The Linux kernel, however, has its own ideas. The Linux kernel memory model (LKMM) is subtly different from both the standard C memory model and Rust's model. At Kangrejos, Boqun Feng gave a presentation about the need to reconcile the memory models used by Rust and the kernel, including a few potential avenues for doing so. While no consensus was reached, it is an area of active discussion.