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New research suggests that Mars' missing atmosphere may have been absorbed by minerals in the planet's clays, in a process similar to geological reactions on Earth. It may explain Mars' loss of its atmosphere and potential to support life, with methane possibly still present and usable as an energy source. Longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes: Conditions on early Mars were highly likely to have had CO2 carried down into the ground by water, where reactions with rock resulted in iron oxide (and Mars' rust-red surface) and released hydrogen, which in turn reacted with the water to form methane that was bound in smectite clays. It's all still there, just under the surface. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Here's a post on the Google Security Blog on how switching to a memory-safe language can quickly reduce vulnerabilities in a project, even if a large body of older code persists.

This leads to two important takeaways:

• The problem is overwhelmingly with new code, necessitating a fundamental change in how we develop code.
• Code matures and gets safer with time, exponentially, making the returns on investments like rewrites diminish over time as code gets older.

For example, based on the average vulnerability lifetimes, 5-year-old code has a 3.4x (using lifetimes from the study) to 7.4x (using lifetimes observed in Android and Chromium) lower vulnerability density than new code.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Some McDonald's franchisees -- which own and operate 95% of McDonald's in the United States -- are now rolling out kiosks that can take cash and accept change. But even in these locations, McDonald's is reassigning cashiers to other roles, including new "guest experience lead" jobs that help customers use the kiosks and assist with any issues. "In theory, kiosks should help save on labor, but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts," said RJ Hottovy, an analyst who covers the restaurant and retail industries at data analytics firm Placer.ai. Kiosks "have created a restaurant within a restaurant." And in some cases, kiosks have even been a flop. Bowling ally chain Bowlero added kiosks in lanes for customers to order food and drinks, but they went unused because staff and customers weren't fully trained on using them. "The unintended consequences have surprised a lot of people," Hottovy said. Even some of the benefits of kiosks touted by chains -- they upsell customers by suggesting menu items and speed up orders -- don't always play out. A recent study from Temple University researchers found that, when a line forms behind customers using kiosks, they experience more stress when placing their orders and purchase less food. And some customers take longer to order tapping around on kiosks and paying than they do telling a cashier they'd like to order a burger and fries. Not to mention the kiosks can malfunction or break down. "If kiosks really improved speed of service, order accuracy, and upsell, they'd be rolled out more extensively across the industry than they are today," Hottovy said. Kiosks have also been threatened as a fast-food industry response to higher minimum wage laws. [...] But the quick-service and fast-casual segments of the restaurant industry continue to grow. Staffing levels were nearly 150,000 jobs, or 3%, above pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest Labor Department data. Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University who studies the effects of technology on work, said the impacts of kiosks were similar to other self-service technology such as ATMs and self-checkout machines in supermarkets. Both technologies were predicted to cause job losses. "The introduction of ATMs did not result in massive technological unemployment for bank tellers," he said. "Instead, it freed them up from low-value tasks such as depositing and cashing checks to perform other tasks that created value." Self-checkout have also not resulted in retail job losses, the report adds. "In some cases, self-checkout backfired for chains because self-checkout leads to higher merchandise losses from customer errors and more intentional shoplifting than when human cashiers are ringing up customers."

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"Looks like there's a storm brewing, and it's not good news," writes ancient Slashdot reader jd. "Whether or not the bugs are classically security defects or not, this is extremely bad PR for the Linux and Open Source community. It's not clear from the article whether this affects other Open Source projects, such as FreeBSD." From a report: A critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered, impacting all GNU/Linux systems. As per agreements with developers, the flaw, which has existed for over a decade, will be fully disclosed in less than two weeks. Despite the severity of the issue, no Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers have been assigned yet, although experts suggest there should be at least three to six. Leading Linux distributors such as Canonical and RedHat have confirmed the flaw's severity, rating it 9.9 out of 10. This indicates the potential for catastrophic damage if exploited. However, despite this acknowledgment, no working fix is still available. Developers remain embroiled in debates over whether some aspects of the vulnerability impact security.

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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 26, 2024 is available.

Disney has officially launched its password and account-sharing crackdown, rolling out what it is calling its "paid sharing program" to users in the U.S. and in many regions around the world this week. The rollout follows the company sharing plans to crackdown on unauthorized usage on its streaming service earlier this year. From a report: The paid sharing program has a couple of options for users, per a blog post published Wednesday: People sharing an account with someone outside their household can add that person as an "Extra Member" for $6.99 per month for Disney+ Basic, or $9.99 for Disney+ Premium, both discounts to the normal retail price. Only one Extra Member will be allowed per account, and it is not available as part of the Disney Bundle. In addition, users sharing an account can also subscribe to Disney+ themselves, and can transfer an eligible profile to the new account to keep their watch history and settings. The password-cracking effort has helped Netflix boost its subscribers count in recent quarters.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Amazon workers are refusing to "disagree and commit," as one of the company's famed leadership principles requires of those who aren't on board with a decision. Instead, hundreds of the online retailing giant's employees are complaining that CEO Andy Jassy's five-days-per-week return-to-office mandate, announced last week, will negatively impact their lives -- and productivity at work -- and how they hope the company will reverse course. The feedback is from an anonymous survey created by Amazon employees that was viewed by Fortune on Tuesday. Corporate employees have shared it widely via the messaging app Slack, including in one "remote advocacy" Slack channel with more than 30,000 members that a former employee created when Amazon first announced a three-day return-to-office mandate last year. As a result, employees who are in favor of remote or hybrid work may have been more likely to respond to the survey and therefore skew the findings. As of the afternoon of September 24, the average satisfaction rating related to the RTO mandate among survey respondents was 1.4 out of scale up to 5 (with 1 meaning "strongly dissatisfied" and 5 representing "strongly satisfied"). The survey's creators said in an introduction to their questionnaire that they plan to aggregate and share the results by email with Jassy and other company executives "to provide them with clear insight into the impact of this policy on employees, including the challenges identified and proposed solutions."

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Winamp, the iconic media player from the late 1990s, has released its complete source code on GitHub, fulfilling a promise made in May. The move aims to modernize the player by inviting developers to collaborate on the project. The source code release includes build tools and associated libraries for the Windows app, allowing developers to provide bug fixes and new features. However, the license prohibits distribution of modified software created from this code.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: IBM's plan to replace thousands of roles with AI presently looks more like outsourcing jobs to India, at the expense of organizational competency. That view of Big Blue was offered to The Register after our report on the IT giant's latest layoffs, which resonated so strongly with several IBM employees that they contacted The Register with thoughts on the job cuts. Our sources have asked not to be identified to protect their ongoing relationships with Big Blue. Suffice to say they were or are employed as senior technologists in business units that span multiple locations and were privy to company communications: These are not views from the narrow entrance to a single cubicle. We're going to refer to three by the pseudonyms Alex, Blake, and Casey. "I always make this joke about IBM," said Alex. "It is: 'IBM doesn't want people to work for them.' Every six months or so they are doing rounds of [Resource Actions -- IBM-speak for layoffs] or forcing folks into impossible moves, which result in separation." That's consistent with CEO Arvind Krishna's commitment last year to replace around 7,800 jobs with AI. But our sources say Krishna's plan is on shaky ground: IBM's AI isn't up to the job of replacing people, and some of the people who could fix that have been let go. Alex observed that over the past four years, IBM management has constantly pushed for automation and the use of AI. "With AI tools writing that code for us ... why pay for senior-level staff when you can promote a youngster who doesn't really know any better at a much lower price?" he said. "Plus, once you have a seasoned programmer write code that is by law the company's IP and it is fed into an AI library, it basically learns it and the author is no longer needed." But our sources tell us that scenario has yet to be realized inside IBM.

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OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board. "Chief executive Sam Altman will also receive equity for the first time in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion after the restructuring as it also tries to remove the cap on returns for investors," reports Reuters. From the report: The OpenAI non-profit will continue to exist and own a minority stake in the for-profit company, the sources said. The move could also have implications for how the company manages AI risks in a new governance structure. [...] The details of the proposed corporate structure, first reported by Reuters, highlight significant governance changes happening behind the scenes at one of the most important AI companies. The plan is still being hashed out with lawyers and shareholders and the timeline for completing the restructuring remains uncertain, the sources said. "We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone, and we're working with our board to ensure that we're best positioned to succeed in our mission. The non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist," an OpenAI spokesperson said. Earlier today, OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati announced her departure from the company. Her resignation follows the departures of founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman. Further reading: OpenAI Pitched White House On Unprecedented Data Center Buildout

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced updates to the company's Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses at Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday. [...] Meta says its smart glasses will soon have real-time AI video capabilities, meaning you can ask the Ray Ban Meta glasses questions about what you're seeing in front of you, and Meta AI will verbally answer you in real time. Currently, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses can only take a picture and describe that to you or answer questions about it, but the video upgrade should make the experience more natural, in theory at least. These multimodal features are slated to come later this year. In a demo, users could ask Ray-Ban Meta questions about a meal they were cooking, or city scenes taking place in front of them. The real-time video capabilities mean that Meta's AI should be able to process live action and respond in an audible way. This is easier said than done, however, and we'll have to see how fast and seamless the feature is in practice. We've seen demonstrations of these real-time AI video capabilities from Google and OpenAI, but Meta would be the first to launch such features in a consumer product. Zuckerberg also announced live language translation for Ray-Ban Meta. English speaking users can talk to someone speaking French, Italian, or Spanish, and their Ray-Ban Meta glasses should be able to translate what the other person is saying into their language of choice. Meta says this feature is coming later this year and will include more language later on. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are getting reminders, which will allow people to ask Meta AI to remind them about things they look at through the smart glasses. In a demo, a user asked their Ray-Ban Meta glasses to remember a jacket they were looking at, so they could share the image with a friend later on. Meta announced that integrations with Amazon Music, Audible, and iHeart are coming to its smart glasses. This should make it easier for people to listen to music on their streaming service of choice using the glasses' built-in speakers. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses will also gain the ability to scan QR codes or phone numbers from the glasses. Users can ask the glasses to scan something, and the QR code will immediately open on the person's phone with no further action required. Zuckerberg also unveiled the company's prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion, which feature a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes.

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Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation to address the challenges of the ActivityPub ecosystem and foster the growth of the Fediverse. The foundation aims to support developers, organizations, and governments through advocacy, educational materials, and infrastructure, while maintaining a decentralized approach to improving the social web. We Distribute reports: "I wish I would've started it five years ago," Evan explains in a call, "We're seeing growth of ActivityPub in the commercial sector, we want to help guide that work, especially for devs that don't know how to engage with the Fediverse, or the work that happens in private spaces. As we're seeing a lot of growth, it's important to help push that growth forward, we're really filling in the crack no other organization is doing." The foundation launches with a dedicated team of three: Evan Prodromou is the Research Director, Mallory Knodel serves as the Executive Director, and Tom Coates acts as Product Director. The trio brings a wealth of knowledge regarding protocol development, open source development, technology policy, and product development for the Web. In terms of fulfilling its goals, the organization has a few specific areas of focus: People, Policy, Protocol, and Plumbing. The SWF has deemed these areas as critical to their mission statement, and will start with these core focuses. [...] At launch, The Social Web Foundation has announced 12 partner organizations, who serve as a pool of knowledge, resources, and stakeholders. The majority of these entities are either building for the Fediverse directly, or providing infrastructure and services indirectly. Aside from Meta being an early supporter, one surprise is the inclusion of The Ford Foundation, a social justice organization dedicated to supporting next-generation solutions for the social good. At time of launch, the SWF will have access to more than 20 dedicated advisors, who will guide the organization on current problem areas their own efforts are facing, and provide insights on how to move forward and make progress. "The Fediverse is too big and too diverse for anyone to claim to speak for the Fediverse. That's not what we want to do or who we want to be," Evan says, "We may do things that people on the network disagree with, like encouraging media organizations to join the network, but what we want to do is help the mission of growing and improving the Fediverse over time."

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As of September 11th, Russia has blocked access to OONI Explorer, citing concerns over circumvention tools. This block affects Russian users' ability to access not only circumvention data but also the extensive dataset on global internet censorship that OONI provides. From a blog post: OONI Explorer is one of the largest open datasets on internet censorship around the world. We first launched this web platform back in 2016 with the goal of enabling researchers, journalists, and human rights defenders to investigate internet censorship based on empirical network measurement data that is contributed by OONI Probe users worldwide. Every day, we publish new measurements from around the world in real-time. Today, OONI Explorer hosts more than 2 billion network measurements collected from 27 thousand distinct networks in 242 countries and territories since 2012. Out of all countries, OONI Probe users in Russia contribute the second largest volume of measurements (following the U.S, where OONI Probe users contribute the most measurements out of any country). This has enabled us to study various cases of internet censorship in Russia, such as the blocking of Tor, the blocking of independent news media websites, and how internet censorship in Russia changed amid the war in Ukraine. In this report, we share OONI data on the blocking of OONI Explorer in Russia.

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OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati has announced her departure from the company, marking the latest high-profile exit from the Microsoft-backed AI firm. Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO during last year's leadership turmoil, cited a desire for personal exploration after six and a half years at OpenAI. Her resignation follows the departures of founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman earlier this year. The startup, creator of ChatGPT, is currently in talks to raise over $6 billion at a $150 billion valuation, according to media reports.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OpenAI has pitched the Biden administration on the need for massive data centers that could each use as much power as entire cities, framing the unprecedented expansion as necessary to develop more advanced artificial intelligence models and compete with China. Following a recent meeting at the White House, which was attended by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and other tech leaders, the startup shared a document with government officials outlining the economic and national security benefits of building 5-gigawatt data centers in various US states, based on an analysis the company engaged with outside experts on. To put that in context, 5 gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors, or enough to power almost 3 million homes. OpenAI said investing in these facilities would result in tens of thousands of new jobs, boost the gross domestic product and ensure the US can maintain its lead in AI development, according to the document, which was viewed by Bloomberg News. To achieve that, however, the US needs policies that support greater data center capacity, the document said. "Whatever we're talking about is not only something that's never been done, but I don't believe it's feasible as an engineer, as somebody who grew up in this," said Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy Corp. "It's certainly not possible under a timeframe that's going to address national security and timing."

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LG has started displaying ads on TV screensavers, intensifying the proliferation of ads in smart TV software. The South Korean company quietly announced the move to advertisers on September 5, forgoing a public statement to consumers.

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Meta unveiled prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion on Wednesday, featuring a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the device's capabilities, including ingredient recognition, holographic gaming, and video calling, controlled by a neural wristband that interprets hand gestures through electromyography. Despite technological advances, Meta has shelved Orion's commercial release, citing manufacturing complexities and costs reaching $10,000 per unit, primarily due to difficulties in producing the silicon carbide lenses. The company now aims to launch a refined, more affordable version in coming years, with executives hinting at a price comparable to high-end smartphones and laptops. Zuckerberg views AR glasses as critical to Meta's future, potentially freeing the company from its reliance on smartphone platforms controlled by Apple and Google. The push into AR hardware comes as tech giants and startups intensify competition in the space, with Apple launching Vision Pro and Google partnering with Magic Leap and Samsung on headset development.

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Alphabet unit Google filed a complaint to the European Commission on Wednesday against what it said were Microsoft's anti-competitive practices to lock customers into Microsoft's cloud platform Azure. From a report: Google, whose biggest cloud computing rivals are Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, said Microsoft was exploiting its dominant Windows Server operating system to prevent competition. Google Cloud Vice President Amit Zavery told a briefing that Microsoft made customers pay a 400% mark-up to keep running Windows Server on rival cloud computing operators. This did not apply if they used Azure. Users of rival cloud systems would also get later and more limited security updates, Zavery said. Google pointed to a 2023 study by cloud services organization CISPE which found that European businesses and public sector bodies were paying up to 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) per year on Microsoft licensing penalties. Microsoft in July clinched a 20-million-euro deal to settle an antitrust complaint about its cloud computing licensing practices with CISPE, averting an EU investigation. However, the settlement did not include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and AliCloud, prompting criticism from the first two companies.

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The Vanilla OS project has published a blog post to answer questions that users have raised since the release of Vanilla OS 2. The post has information about the update strategy for the distribution, an enterprise version with support, and plans for an experimental version called Vanilla OS Vision.

We are not planning for a potential Vanilla OS 3 because it is not yet necessary. As previously explained, our focus right now is on bug fixing and making the system as solid as possible, especially in light of collaborations with OEMs. We're all excited about laying the foundation for a third version of Vanilla OS, but we have responsibilities to attend to first.

This does not mean that there will never be one, nor does it mean that Orchid will become stagnant. On the contrary, as previously mentioned, our updates not only bring fixes but also updates to system components, improvements to existing features, and updates to components like GNOME (we are planning the release of GNOME 47 soon, for example).

Hackers linked to the Chinese government have broken into a handful of U.S. internet-service providers in recent months in pursuit of sensitive information, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The hacking campaign, called Salt Typhoon by investigators, hasn't previously been publicly disclosed and is the latest in a series of incursions that U.S. investigators have linked to China in recent years. The intrusion is a sign of the stealthy success Beijing's massive digital army of cyberspies has had breaking into valuable computer networks in the U.S. and around the globe. In Salt Typhoon, the actors linked to China burrowed into America's broadband networks. In this type of intrusion, bad actors aim to establish a foothold within the infrastructure of cable and broadband providers that would allow them to access data stored by telecommunications companies or launch a damaging cyberattack. Last week, U.S. officials said they had disrupted a network of more than 200,000 routers, cameras and other internet-connected consumer devices that served as an entry point into U.S. networks for a China-based hacking group called Flax Typhoon. And in January, federal officials disrupted Volt Typhoon, yet another China-linked campaign that has sought to quietly infiltrate a swath of U.S. critical infrastructure. "The cyber threat posed by the Chinese government is massive," said Christopher Wray, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's director, speaking earlier this year at a security conference in Germany. "China's hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation, combined." U.S. security officials allege that Beijing has tried and at times succeeded in burrowing deep into U.S. critical infrastructure networks ranging from water-treatment systems to airports and oil and gas pipelines. Top Biden administration officials have issued public warnings over the past year that China's actions could threaten American lives and are intended to cause societal panic. The hackers could also disrupt the U.S.'s ability to mobilize support for Taiwan in the event that Chinese leader Xi Jinping orders his military to invade the island.

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