David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder and chief technology officer of Basecamp-maker 37signals, has criticized Automattic's demand for 8% of vendor WP Engine's revenues as a violation of open source principles and the GPL license. He argues this, among other things, undermines the clarity and certainty of open source licensing, threatening its integrity beyond WordPress. He writes: Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Porch pirates across the country for months have been snatching FedEx packages that contain AT&T iPhones -- within minutes or even seconds of delivery. From a report: The key to these swift crimes, investigators say: The thieves are armed with tracking numbers. Another factor that makes packages from AT&T particularly vulnerable is that AT&T typically doesn't require signature on delivery. Doorbell camera videos show the thefts in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Texas. The details are similar: A FedEx driver drops off a box with an iPhone from AT&T. Then a person walks up -- sometimes wearing an Amazon delivery vest -- and plucks the package off the front step. The heist can be so quick that in some videos, the FedEx driver and thief cross paths. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is fighting misinformation on top of a major storm cleanup in Florida as Hurricane Milton rapidly intensifies just after Hurricane Helene rocked the state. From a report: FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a call Tuesday that misinformation around the storms is "absolutely the worst I have ever seen," according to Politico. FEMA posted a rumor response page about the hurricane, and though it's not the first time it's taken that kind of approach, Criswell said, "I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we're seeing." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Alypius shares a report from 9to5Mac: It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. What's notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement. [...] Apple famously refused the FBI's request to create a backdoor into iPhones to help access devices used by shooters in San Bernardino and Pensacola. The FBI was subsequently successful in accessing all the iPhones concerned without the assistance it sought.... [ Read it >> ]

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The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2019, Google made waves by claiming it had achieved what has been called "quantum supremacy" -- the ability of a quantum computer to perform operations that would take a wildly impractical amount of time to simulate on standard computing hardware. That claim proved to be controversial, in that the operations were little more than a benchmark that involved getting the quantum computer to behave like a quantum computer; separately, improved ideas about how to perform the simulation on a supercomputer cut the time required down significantly.... [ Read it >> ]

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Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang built his own full-frame camera and open-sourced the project on GitLab for anyone else to build upon. The camera, named Sitina S1, features a 10MP CCD sensor, custom electronics, and a 3D-printed body. Digital Photography Review reports: Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it's not finished yet. "Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off," he says. He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn't going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what's involved in building a camera from the ground up.... [ Read it >> ]

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TorrentFreak's Andy Maxwell reports: In August, New Zealand's Justice Minister authorized Kim Dotcom's immediate arrest and extradition. Dotcom's response to his followers on X was simple: "I'm not leaving." Another post mid-September -- "we are very close to disaster" -- led to Dotcom disappearing for three weeks. On his return, Dotcom said X had suspended his account, based on an extremely serious allegation. After accusing Elon Musk of failing to help, yesterday Dotcom warned that a Trump loss would see Musk indicted and "fighting for his life." Dotcom has a plan to avoid extradition; chaos like this provides the fuel.... [ Read it >> ]

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Turkey has blocked access to Discord after the messaging platform refused to share potentially illegal information with authorities. Reuters reports: Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform. The block comes after public outrage in Turkey caused by the murder of two women by a 19-year-old man in Istanbul this month. Content on social media showed Discord users subsequently praising the killing. Transport and infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said the nature of the Discord platform made it difficult for authorities to monitor and intervene when illegal or criminal content is shared.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Getting open-source and artificial intelligence (AI) on the same page isn't easy. Just ask the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI, the open-source definition steward organization, has been working on creating an open-source artificial intelligence definition for two years now. The group has been making progress, though. Its Open Source AI Definition has now released its first release candidate, RC1. The latest definition aims to clarify the often contentious discussions surrounding open-source AI. It specifies four fundamental freedoms that an AI system must grant to be considered open source: the ability to use the system for any purpose without permission, to study how it works, to modify it for any purpose, and to share it with or without modifications. So far, so good.... [ Read it >> ]

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Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements. There are a ton of changes to find with the just-released OpenBSD 7.6.... [ Read it >> ]

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BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fisker's Chapter 11 bankruptcy has hit a major snag, as the company buying the startup's remaining fleet of electric SUVs says it might not complete the purchase because of a surprising technical issue. The buyer, a New York-area leasing company called American Lease, says in a new filing that Fisker now believes there is no way to transfer the information connected to each SUV to a new server not owned by the bankrupt EV startup. Since American Lease needs that information to operate the vehicles after Fisker is dissolved, the leasing company has filed an emergency objection to the startup's liquidation plan. Fisker was expected to have that plan confirmed in bankruptcy court as early as this Wednesday.... [ Read it >> ]

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80% of software engineers will need to upskill by 2027 to keep pace with generative AI's growing demands, according to Gartner. The consultancy predicts AI will transform the industry in three phases. Initially, AI tools will boost productivity, particularly for senior developers. Subsequently, "AI-native software engineering" will emerge, with most code generated by AI. Long-term, AI engineering will rise as enterprise adoption increases, requiring a new breed of professionals skilled in software engineering, data science, and machine learning.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname "godfather of AI." In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student -- alluding to OpenAI's former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever -- for revolting against OpenAI's CEO. "I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students -- much cleverer than me -- who actually made things work," said Hinton. "They've gone on to do great things. I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Washington blames China's dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed "unfair trade practices." But that's just a comforting myth. China's edge doesn't come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn't been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it's come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry â" exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body -- and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity. From a report: The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors -- including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency -- seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan. "The metabolic changes are important," says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. "But they don't lead to lifespan extension." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world. From a report: In the just-released HBO film on the history of the world's biggest digital currency -- Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery -- documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback comes to the conclusion that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was none other than a long-time member of the community and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. Todd dismissed the claim in the documentary, released yesterday, and denied it again when asked by The Register. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Zoom is getting one step closer to letting AI avatars attend meetings for you. As part of a broader AI expansion, Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team. From a report: To create a digital avatar, you'll need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom's AI will use to make an avatar that looks -- and even sounds -- like you. From there, you can write the message you want your AI avatar to say and then have it do all the talking for you. This feature will only work with Zoom's Clips feature, allowing you to record brief video updates for your colleagues.... [ Read it >> ]

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9to5Mac: Following apparent photos of an M4 MacBook Pro box and a subsequent unboxing video, the unreleased model has now been offered for sale on a Russian classified ads site -- at a highly inflated price, naturally. Multiple units were advertised before the listings were removed, and it does now seem increasingly likely that the leaks are real. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The greatest tennis players in the world will be left to rage against a machine after any tight line calls at Wimbledon next year as the All England Club will break with tradition by removing line judges from all courts during the championships for the first time in its 147-year history. From a report: From 2025 onwards live electronic line calling (ELC) will be used on all courts in both the main draw at the All England Club and the qualifying tournament off-site in Roehampton. The new technology was successfully tested during this year's championships. Wimbledon's chief executive, Sally Bolton, said: "The decision to introduce Live Electronic Line Calling at the championships was made following a significant period of consideration and consultation." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nintendo has a new piece of game hardware coming in 2024. It's not the Switch 2, it's the Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo, a new motion-sensing alarm clock that will rouse you from sleep with the sounds of video games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and more. Polygon adds: The $99.99 alarm clock includes 35 wake-up "scenes" from Nintendo Switch games. Users will "experience immersive sounds and music" from those scenes, which are styled to match Nintendo's franchises. Alarmo will also track users' sleep and motion; Records will keep track of how much you move around, similar to the Pokemon Go Plus Plus sleep tracker that Nintendo released for Pokemon Go/Pokemon Sleep (and the long-promised, but seemingly abandoned QOL project). ... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI said a group with apparent ties to China tried to carry out a phishing attack on its employees, reigniting concerns that bad actors in Beijing want to steal sensitive information from top US artificial intelligence companies. From a report: The AI startup said Wednesday that a suspected China-based group called SweetSpecter posed as a user of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT earlier this year and sent customer support emails to staff. The emails included malware attachments that, if opened, would have allowed SweetSpecter to take screenshots and exfiltrate data, OpenAI said, but the attempt was unsuccessful. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AmiMoJo writes: A treaty finalized by the UK may bring about the end of the .io domain. Last week, the British government announced that it has agreed to give up ownership of the Chagos Islands, a territory in the Indian Ocean it has controlled since 1814 -- relinquishing the .io domain with it. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Three scientists won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work in predicting and designing protein structures, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. David Baker of the University of Washington shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Baker pioneered the creation of novel proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In a new 32-page filing (PDF), the Department of Justice indicated that it was considering a possible breakup of Google as an antitrust remedy for its search and advertising monopoly. The remedies necessary to "prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements," the department said in the filing. CNBC reports: The DOJ also said it was "considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features -- including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence -- over rivals or new entrants."... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers at BitEnergy AI, Inc. have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a technique that reduces AI model power consumption by up to 95% by replacing energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions. This method promises significant energy savings without compromising accuracy, but it requires specialized hardware to fully realize its benefits. Decrypt reports: L-Mul tackles the AI energy problem head-on by reimagining how AI models handle calculations. Instead of complex floating-point multiplications, L-Mul approximates these operations using integer additions. So, for example, instead of multiplying 123.45 by 67.89, L-Mul breaks it down into smaller, easier steps using addition. This makes the calculations faster and uses less energy, while still maintaining accuracy. The results seem promising. "Applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products," the researchers claim. Without getting overly complicated, what that means is simply this: If a model used this technique, it would require 95% less energy to think, and 80% less energy to come up with new ideas, according to this research.... [ Read it >> ]

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A new HBO documentary claims Canadian developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin. The documentary's director, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Cullen Hoback, "comes to the conclusion by stitching together old clues and new ones," reports Politico. In the film's finale, Hoback confronted Todd and said: "It seems like you had these deep insights into bitcoin at the time?" Todd replies: "Well, yeah, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto." From the report: The admission, however, is not necessarily a smoking gun. Todd, who is a vocal backer of Ukraine and Israel on his X feed, is known to invoke the claim "I am Satoshi" as an expression of solidarity with the creator's bid for privacy. In an email to CoinDesk prior to the documentary's release, Todd reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: "Of course I'm not Satoshi," he said. If Todd is widely accepted as bitcoin's creator, the revelation would end more than a decade of speculation over the identity of a person whose work spawned a global, multibillion-dollar craze for digital currencies: a mania that has pushed back the frontiers of finance but also enabled widespread fraud and other illicit activities.... [ Read it >> ]

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Foxconn has chosen Mexico for the site of the world's largest manufacturing facility for Nvidia's GB200 superchips. These chips are a "key component of the U.S. firm's next-generation Blackwell family computing platform," notes Reuters. From the report: "We're building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet," said Benjamin Ting, Foxconn senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business group. Nvidia said in August that it had started shipping Blackwell samples to its partners and customers after tweaking its design, and expected several billion dollars in revenue from these chips in the fourth quarter. Ting said the partnership between his company and Nvidia was very important and everyone was asking for Nvidia's Blackwell platform. "The demand is awfully huge," Ting said at the company's annual tech day in Taipei, standing next to Nvidia's vice president for AI and robotics, Deepu Talla.... [ Read it >> ]

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"Alleged photos and videos of an unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip continue to surface on social media, in what could be the worst product leak for Apple since an employee accidentally left an iPhone 4 prototype at a bar in California in 2010," writes MacRumors' Joe Rossignol. From the report: The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just one day after another Russian channel shared a similar video. The clip shows a box for a 14-inch MacBook Pro that is apparently configured with an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a Space Black finish. According to the "About This Mac" software menu shown in the video, the MacBook Pro in the video is allegedly an unreleased November 2024 model. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release, Plasma 6.2." From the report: Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma's KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the "blown out" look such images can otherwise exhibit.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Months ago, 13-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael "dogplayingtetris" Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0. It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game's first near-mythical "rebirth" live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.... [ Read it >> ]

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X has been restored in Brazil after being shut down nationwide for over a month. According to court documents released today, X ultimately complied with all of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' demands. "They included blocking certain accounts from the platform, paying outstanding fines and naming a legal representative in the country," reports NPR. "Failure to do the latter had triggered the suspension." From the report: Elon Musk's X was blocked blocked on Aug. 30 in the highly online country of 213 million people -- and one of X's biggest markets, with estimates of its user base ranging from 20 to 40 million. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after a monthslong dispute with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Musk had disparaged de Moraes, calling him an authoritarian and a censor, even though his rulings, including X's suspension, were repeatedly upheld by his peers.... [ Read it >> ]

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Investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is "consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more." The Verge reports: Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox "intentionally conflates" actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company's disclosure says daily active users "are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. money transfer giant MoneyGram has confirmed that hackers stole its customers' personal information and transaction data during a cyberattack last month. The company said in a statement Monday that an unauthorized third party "accessed and acquired" customer data during the cyberattack on September 20. The cyberattack -- the nature of which remains unknown -- sparked a week-long outage that resulted in the company's website and app falling offline. MoneyGram says it serves over 50 million people in more than 200 countries and territories each year.... [ Read it >> ]

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Fourteen years after it debuted on PS3 and Xbox 360, and endless rumors later, Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PC. From a report: It will hit the Rockstar Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 29 with the Undead Nightmare standalone expansion included. Developer Double Eleven helped Rockstar with the port, which has many of the bells and whistles you'd come to expect from a PC version of a classic. Rockstar says RDR will run at up to 144Hz (no unlocked framerates, sadly) in a native 4K resolution if you have capable hardware. There's support for HDR 10 along with Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9) monitors. You'll be able to play with a keyboard and mouse too.... [ Read it >> ]

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The District of Columbia and 13 states sued social media giant TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the company of knowingly creating an addictive product and getting children hooked with "digital nicotine." From a report: D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb brought Washington's suit in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia, asserting that the app's design -- including its algorithm, "infinite scroll," push notifications, filters and in-app currency -- boost the company's profits at the expense of children's health. "TikTok's platform, designed to be dangerously addictive, inflicts immense damage on an entire generation of young people," Schwalb said in a statement announcing the suit. "In addition to prioritizing its profits over the health of children, TikTok's unregulated and illegal virtual economy allows the darkest, most depraved corners of society to prey upon vulnerable victims." More than a dozen states brought similar suits against TikTok in their courts Tuesday, including New York, California, Kentucky and New Jersey. Each stems from a national investigation into the company that a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general launched in March 2022.... [ Read it >> ]

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Veteran Microsoft engineer Larry Osterman is the latest to throw his hat into the "tabs versus spaces" ring. From a report: The debate has vexed engineers for decades -- is it best to indent code with tabs or spaces? Osterman, a four-decade veteran of Microsoft, was Team Tabs when storage was tight, but has since become Team Spaces with the advent of terabytes of relatively inexpensive storage. "Here's the thing," he said. "When you've got 512 kilobytes, and you're writing a program in Pascal with lots of indentation, if you're taking eight bytes for every one of those indentations, for eight spaces, you could save seven bytes in your program by using a tab character." ... [ Read it >> ]

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A long-shot congressional challenger in Virginia is so determined to debate the Democratic incumbent one more time that he created an AI chatbot to stand in for the candidate in case he's a no-show. From a report: Less than a month from election day, the race for Virginia's 8th congressional district is all but decided. The sitting congressman in this deeply Democratic district, Don Beyer, won handily in 2022 with nearly three-quarters of the vote.... [ Read it >> ]

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Samsung has issued a rare apology after saying it expected to post just $6.78 billion in operating profit for the most recent quarter, about $900 million short of analyst expectations. From a report: "We have caused concerns about our fundamental technological competitiveness and the future of the company due to our performance falling short of the market's expectations," reads the statement attributed to Samsung Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun. "Many people are talking about Samsung's crisis. We, who are leading the business, are responsible for all of this." Bloomberg adds: In another filing, Korea's largest company confessed to delays in delivering a key type of chip used with Nvidia processors for training AI -- allowing SK Hynix to dominate the so-called high-bandwidth memory arena. Apart from lagging SK Hynix in HBM, it's also shown little progress against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in the outsourced production of custom-made chips. Samsung warned about "inventory adjustments" by unspecified customers, as well as increasing competition from a legacy or less-advanced Chinese memory chipmaker.... [ Read it >> ]

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A Nintendo Switch modder has entered a legal battle against Nintendo without legal representation, Torrent Freak reports. Ryan Daly, alleged owner of Modded Hardware, denied all allegations in a lawsuit filed by Nintendo in July. Nintendo claims Modded Hardware offers hardware and firmware for creating and playing pirated games, as well as providing customers with pirated Nintendo titles. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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." ... [ Read it >> ]

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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. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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.... [ Read it >> ]

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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.... [ Read it >> ]

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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. ... [ Read it >> ]

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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."... [ Read it >> ]

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