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An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikipedia's "Timeline of the Far Future" is one of my favorite webpages from the internet's pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. "Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy," he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars's moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet's surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafes across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation. Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth's axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish. Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.

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Wired: Last spring, At an event in New York City, Robert Triefus, then Gucci's CEO of Vault -- the brand's virtual marketplace -- argued the recent deflation in hype around the metaverse was just a brief hiccup. "I see it more as a correction," he told the crowd. "We're now at a much more sensible place, where you've got individuals [and] companies ... who are very serious about what they're doing." When asked how buying real estate in The Sandbox aligned with Gucci's broader goals as a brand, he responded with quasi-mystical language: "The metaverse is an opportunity to embrace the digital self." The following month, Triefus left Gucci "abruptly," according to Vogue Business. He was off "to pursue other opportunities," the brand said at the time. A month later, Vogue Business revealed that Triefus was to be the new Stone Island CEO. Immediately there was speculation on whether Stone Island would enter the metaverse. So far it has not. Triefus' public zeal for all things virtual and his short-lived tenure as the head of Gucci's metaverse strategy are both part of a broader trend that briefly convulsed the private sector starting in late 2021: the hastily recruited "chief metaverse officer." Following a wave of excitement around the metaverse as a golden new opportunity for commerce, a legion of brands rushed to launch their own virtual storefronts. Three quarters of CEOs surveyed by Russell Reynolds in 2022 said they were hiring dedicated talent to lead in the space, or expanding current roles to cover it. While the actual titles varied, their main role seemed to involve helping their respective brands devise new strategies with then-buzzy technologies such as NFTs and crypto. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has quietly shifted focus from virtual reality to augmented reality, signaling a retreat from the company's ambitious metaverse plans. At Meta's recent developer conference, Zuckerberg mentioned "metaverse" only three times in his hour-long keynote, instead highlighting AR innovations like smart glasses. The move follows a broader cooling of corporate enthusiasm for the metaverse. Luxury brands that once rushed to establish virtual presences have scaled back efforts, with some chief metaverse officers pivoting to AI-focused roles. "Many brands were quick to experiment -- there was a sense of a land grab," said Matthew Ball, tech investor and author. "They didn't want to be last, and they were excited to try and be first." Wired notes that the shift reflects disappointing user engagement with existing metaverse platforms and growing interest in more accessible AR technologies.

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Scientists have called for people to go "urban mining" after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper. From a report: The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in "drawers of doom" containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper -- including 627m cables -- enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK's planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030. Copper is essential in the drive to decarbonise the economy -- being a crucial element of solar and wind developments as well as electric cars. The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as $349m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods. "We need to start 'urban mining' and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already." Butler added that people often do not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials. "If binned or stashed, we lose everything inside them." The group is now urging everyone to check its "recycling locator" for their nearest facility.

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Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs. But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well. Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.

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Alice Ryhl has been working to enable tracepoints — which are widely used throughout the kernel — to be seamlessly placed in Rust code as well. She spoke about her approach at Kangrejos. Her patch set enables efficient use of static tracepoints, but supporting dynamic tracepoints will take some additional effort.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (cups), Oracle (e2fsprogs, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana-pcp, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (Mesa, mozjs115, podofo, and redis7), and Ubuntu (cups and cups-filters).

John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their groundbreaking work in machine learning. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the scientists for developing artificial neural networks capable of recognizing patterns in large data sets, laying the foundation for modern AI applications like facial recognition and language translation. Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory system for storing and reconstructing data patterns. Hinton, 76, invented a method for autonomous data property identification. "This year's physics laureates' breakthroughs stand on the foundations of physical science," the Nobel Committee stated. "They have shown a completely new way for us to use computers to tackle many of society's challenges." The laureates will share the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) prize.

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The first scripted Immersive Video project for Apple's Vision Pro debuts on October 10. Called Submerged, the film "invites viewers onto a WWII-era submarine and follows its crew as they wrestle to combat a harrowing torpedo attack." 9to5Mac reports: The short film was written and directed by an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. That makes it stand out from other Immersive Video Apple has produced to this point. The filmmaker, Edward Berger, is best known for films like All Quiet on the Western Front and the upcoming Conclave. You can watch the trailer with commentary from the director here.

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The Hera spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency on Monday, is on a mission to study the aftermath of NASA's 2022 test that successfully knocked the Dimorphos asteroid off course by intentionally crashing a probe into it. It's scheduled to arrive in December 2026. The BBC reports: The Hera craft launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:52 local time (15:52BST) on Monday. [...] The Hera mission, which is run by the European Space Agency, is a follow-on from Nasa's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) project. Dimorphos is a small moon 160m-wide that orbits an asteroid close to Earth called Didymos in something called a binary asteroid system. In 2022 Nasa said it successfully changed Dimorphos's course by crashing a probe into it. It altered the rock's path by a few meters, according to Nasa's scientists. The asteroid was not on course to hit Earth, but it was a test to see whether space agencies could do it when there is genuine risk. When it arrives in two years, the Hera craft will look at the size and depth of the impact crater created on Dimorphos. Two cube-shaped probes will also study the make-up of the asteroid and its mass.

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IT services and consulting company Cognizant engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers and should pay punitive damages to compensate employees who suffered harm, a US jury found. From a report: The verdict came after the IT firm failed to persuade a Los Angeles federal judge last month to toss a 2017 job bias class-action lawsuit when a previous trial ended with a deadlocked jury. A Cognizant spokesperson said the company is disappointed with the verdict and plans to appeal. "We provide equal employment opportunities for all employees and have built a diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes a culture of belonging in which all employees feel valued, are engaged and have the opportunity to develop and succeed," Jeff DeMarrais said in an emailed statement. Bloomberg News reported in July that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based company was among a handful of outsourcing firms exploiting loopholes in the H1-B visa lottery system. The company defended its practices, saying it's fully compliant with US laws on the visa process. Cognizant also said that in recent years it has increased its US hiring and reduced its dependence on the H1-B program.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jason Allen-a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Theatre D'opera Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition-is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office. Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney. Allen is now appealing (PDF) that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts." As Allen sees it, a rule establishing a review process requiring an Examiner to determine which parts of the work are human-authored seems "entirely arbitrary" since some Copyright Examiners "may not even be able to distinguish an artwork that used AI tools to assist in the creation from one which does not use any computerized tools." Further, Allen claims that the denial of copyright for his work has inspired confusion about who owns rights to not just Midjourney-generated art but all AI art, and as AI technology rapidly improves, it will only become harder for the Copyright Office to make those authorship judgment calls. That becomes an even bigger problem if the Copyright Office gets it wrong too often, Allen warned, running the risk of turning every artist registering works into a "suspect" and potentially bogging courts down with copyright disputes. Ultimately, Allen is hoping that a jury reviewing his appeal will reverse the denial, arguing that there is more human authorship in his AI-generated work than the Copyright Office considered when twice rejecting his registration.

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A recent relaxation of rules around apostrophes in German, permitting their use in possessive forms like "Eva's Blumenladen," has sparked criticism from traditionalists and concerns over the influence of English on the German language. The Guardian reports: Establishments that feature their owners' names, with signs like "Rosi's Bar" or "Kati's Kiosk" are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be "Rosis Bar," "Katis Kiosk," or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar. However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph ("idiot's apostrophe") has become so widespread that it is permissible -- as long as it separates the genitive 's' within a proper name. The new edition of the Council for German Orthography's style guide, which prescribes grammar use at schools and public bodies in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, lists "Eva's Blumenladen" (Eva's Flower Shop) and "Peter's Taverne" (Peter's Tavern) as usable alternatives, though "Eva's Brille" ("Eva's glasses") remains incorrect. The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer's apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an 's' is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun ("a kilo of potato's"). The new set of rules came into effect in July, and the council said a loosening of the rules in 1996 meant that "Rosi's Bar" had strictly speaking not been incorrect for almost three decades. Yet over the past few days, German newspapers and social media networks have seen a pedants' revolt against the loosening of grammar rules.

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TechCrunch's Paul Sawers reports: Fledgling fintech startup OpenBB is revealing the next step in its plans to take on the heavyweights of the investment research world. The company is launching a new, free version of a product that will open its arsenal of data and financial tooling to more users. OpenBB is the handiwork of software engineer Didier Lopes, who launched the Python-based platform back in 2021 as a way for amateur investors and enthusiasts to do investment research using different datasets for free, via a command line interface (CLI). The company went on to raise $8.5 million in seed funding from OSS Capital and angel investors such as Ram Shriram, an early backer of Google. While the community-based, open source project has amassed some 50,000 users, OpenBB has also been building an enterprise incarnation called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives teams access to an interface, pre-built database integrations, an Excel add-in, and various security and support bolt-ons that would appeal to larger businesses. [...] The all-new OpenBB Terminal -- not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB Terminal that the startup sunsetted in March -- is a full-fledged web app, though it strips out many of the premium features of Terminal Pro. It's fully customizable, can run on any operating system or platform, and provides access to an AI-enabled OpenBB copilot. Like the previous OpenBB Terminal, the all-new web app is also free to use. OpenBB Terminal is perhaps something of a middle ground between the CLI centricity of the open source project and the bells-and-whistles feature set of the enterprise product. The OpenBB Terminal serves as a single end point for accessing financial information from some 100 data sources, spanning equity, options, forex, the macro economy, and more. Users can also throw all their new data into the mix -- the community has previously contributed financial datasets such as historical currency exchange rates and crypto pricing data. There are also a slew of extensions and toolkits to bring more functionality to OpenBB -- such as an AI stock analysis agent. Users are free to incorporate their own AI systems and large language models (LLMs), which might be particularly important for security and compliance use cases. But with the OpenBB Copilot, categorized as a "compound AI system," users can run natural-language queries about their data out of the box. While OpenBB has been likened to an "open-source Bloomberg," TechCrunch notes that it's not a direct competitor due to Bloomberg's massive data resources and built-in chat functionality. OpenBB, however, offers flexibility with its open-source platform and customization options. OpenBB filed for a trademark, but Bloomberg has requested an extension to potentially oppose it, despite the company asserting there's no link between OpenBB and Bloomberg's abbreviation "BBG". Lopes says the name originates from BlackBerry stock, where the founders had lost money during the meme stock craze.

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Global semiconductor sales recorded a 20.6% year-on-year increase in August to $53.1 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). The Register reports: The Americas led the way, with sales up 43.9 percent to $15.4 billion over last year to notch up what may be the highest on record for August, the SIA said. This comes on the back of swelling demand from sectors such as AI, cloud computing, and automotive. Over in Asia-Pacific sales grew year-on-year by 17.1 percent to $10.95 billion, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization, which compiles these stats for the SIA. China was up 19.2 percent to $13 billion and Japan grew two percent to $4 billion. Europe was the outlier, recording a nine percent drop to $4.7 billion. No reason was given for this decline. However, on a worldwide basis, all continents returned positive month-on-month numbers in August for the first time since October 2023, indicating that the semiconductor industry is on a path to recovery.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission gave Starlink and T-Mobile emergency authority to provide satellite-to-phone coverage in areas hit by Hurricane Helene. "SpaceX and T-Mobile have been given emergency special temporary authority by the FCC to enable Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capability to provide coverage for cell phones in the affected areas of Hurricane Helene," SpaceX said yesterday. "The satellites have already been enabled and started broadcasting emergency alerts to cell phones on all networks in North Carolina. In addition, we may test basic texting (SMS) capabilities for most cell phones on the T-Mobile network in North Carolina." SpaceX warned of limits since the service isn't ready for a commercial rollout. "SpaceX's direct-to-cell constellation has not been fully deployed, so all services will be delivered on a best-effort basis," the company said. Starlink is being used to provide wireless emergency alerts to cell phones from all carriers in North Carolina, according to Ben Longmier, senior director of satellite engineering for SpaceX. "We are also closely monitoring Hurricane Milton and standing by ready to take action in Florida," he wrote. The FCC said (PDF) the approval "enabl[es] SpaceX to operate Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) in the 1910-1915 MHz and 1990-1995 MHz frequency bands leased from T-Mobile in areas affected by the Hurricane Helene." An FCC spokesperson told Ars that the approval is for all areas affected by Hurricane Helene, although it's only active in North Carolina so far. The FCC also said (PDF) that it is granting "special temporary authorities to licensees and issuing rule waivers to help communications providers maintain and restore service, support emergency operations, and assist public safety, including search and rescue efforts." Separately, the FCC last week waived (PDF) certain Lifeline program eligibility rules to help people in disaster areas (PDF) apply for discounted phone and broadband service.

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Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Yesterday when announcing the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel, Linus Torvalds asked that the kernel maintainers do a better job moving forward with their commit messages. In particular, Torvalds is hoping that kernel maintainers will do a better job using an active, imperative voice when describing the changes within their pull requests. The Linux creator explained in the 6.12-rc2 announcement: "Anyway, on a completely different note: I try to make my merge commit messages be somewhat "cohesive", and so I often edit the pull request language to match a more standard layout and language. It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have fifteen different indentation models and bullet syntaxes. I generally do it as I read through the text anyway, so it's not like it makes extra work for me. But what *does* make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative. [...]"

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Along with 343 Industries now becoming Halo Studios, future Halo games will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: Halo moving to Unreal Engine 5 is being positioned as the first step of a transformation for Halo Studios to change its technology, structure, processes, and even culture. "We're not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games," says Pierre Hintze, studio head at Halo Studios. The team building Halo will move from the studio's Slipspace Engine to Unreal, after the proprietary engine it built for Halo Infinite became difficult to use and strained development. Halo Studios has had to dedicate a lot of staff to developing the Slipspace Engine, and parts of it are almost 25 years old. "One of the primary things we're interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience," says Chris Matthews, art director at Halo Studios. "Nanite and Lumen [Unreal's rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn't seen before. As artists, it's incredibly exciting to do that work." Halo Studios isn't committing to any release dates or new Halo game announcements just yet, but the team has been building some examples of Halo running in Unreal. Dubbed Project Foundry, the work is "neither a game nor a tech demo," but more of a research, development, and training tool. It's also the foundation for how the studio is changing up the way it builds Halo games. Project Foundry has been built as if it was a shipping game so that a bunch of it can appear in Halo games in the future. "It's fair to say that our intent is that the majority of what we showcased in Foundry is expected to be in projects which we are building, or future projects," says Hintze. Project Foundry includes more detailed landscapes for Halo biomes, as well as foliage levels we haven't seen in Halo games in the past. Master Chief's armor has even been remodeled in this footage [...]. Halo Studios is now working on multiple Halo games, while the Slipstream Engine will continue to power Halo Infinite. "We had a disproportionate focus on trying to create the conditions to be successful in servicing Halo Infinite," says Hintze. "[But switching to Unreal] allows us to put all the focus on making multiple new experiences at the highest quality possible."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation. The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming -- from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns. "Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,â Chester said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's case accusing Amazon of stifling competition in online retail will move forward, though some of the states that sued alongside the agency had their claims dismissed, court documents showed. U.S. District Judge John Chun in Seattle unsealed his ruling from Sept. 30, which dismissed some of the claims brought by attorneys general in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Oklahoma. Last year, the FTC alleged Amazon.com, which has 1 billion items in its online superstore, was using an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion. Amazon has said in court papers it stopped using the program in 2019. The FTC has accused the online retailer of using anti-competitive tactics to maintain dominance among online superstores and marketplaces. Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers. The judge said in his ruling that he cannot consider Amazon's claims that its actions benefited competition at this early stage in the case.

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OpenBSD 7.6 has been released. Notable new features include work to improve suspend/resume on modern hardware, support for the arm64 Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, as well as many improvements in hardware support and driver bug fixes.

With this release all files that existed in the first commit in the OpenBSD source repository have been updated, modified or replaced at some point in time, reaching OpenBSD of Theseus.

See the changelog for all changes between OpenBSD 7.5 and 7.6.