Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents
them on a single page for easy reading.
More People Are Buying Wearables Than Ever Before
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
The wearables category of consumer devices -- which includes smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality glasses -- shipped more than 100 million units in the first quarter for the first time, according to research firm IDC. Q2 2021 saw a 34.4 percent increase in sales over the same quarter in 2020. To be clear: wearables have sold that many (and more) units in a quarter before, but never in the first quarter, which tends to be a slow period following a spree of holiday-related buying in Q4.
According to IDC's data, Apple leads the market by a significant margin, presumably thanks to the Apple Watch. In Q1 2021, Apple had a market share of 28.8 percent. Samsung sat in a distant second at 11.3 percent, followed by Xiaomi at 9.7 percent and Huawei at 8.2. From there, it's a steep drop to the smaller players -- like BoAt, which has a market share of just 2.9 percent. However, analysts say upstarts or smaller companies like BoAt are driving the significant year-over-year growth for wearables. IDC's report says that the fastest growth comes from form factors besides smartwatches, such as digitally connected rings, audio glasses, and wearable patches. This grab-bag subcategory within wearables, which the IDC simply classifies as "other," actually grew 55 percent year-over-year.
Cities Have Their Own Distinct Microbial Fingerprints
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine:
When Chris Mason's daughter was a toddler, he watched, intrigued, as she touched surfaces on the New York City subway. Then, one day, she licked a pole. "There was a clear microbial exchange," says Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine. "I desperately wanted to know what had happened." So he started swabbing the subway, sampling the microbial world that coexists with people in our transit systems. After his 2015 study revealed a wealth of previously unknown species in New York City, other researchers contacted him to contribute. Now, Mason and dozens of collaborators have released their study of subways, buses, elevated trains, and trams in 60 cities worldwide, from Baltimore to Bogota, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. They identified thousands of new viruses and bacteria, and found that each city has a unique microbial "fingerprint."
They found that about 45% didn't match any known species: Nearly 11,000 viruses and 1,302 bacteria were new to science. The researchers also found a set of 31 species present in 97% of the samples; these formed what they called a "core" urban microbiome. A further 1145 species were present in more than 70% of samples. Samples taken from surfaces that people touch -- like railings -- were more likely to have bacteria associated with human skin, compared with surfaces like windows. Other common species in the mix were bacteria often found in soil, water, air, and dust. But the researchers also found species that were less widespread. Those gave each city a unique microbiomeâ"and helped the researchers predict, with 88% accuracy, which city random samples came from, they report today in Cell.
The study's main value isn't in its findings (which are mapped here) so much as its open data, available at metagraph.ethz.ch, says Noah Fierer, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved with the research. That will give other researchers the chance to delve into new questions. "Different cities have different microbial communities," Fierer says. "That's not super surprising. The question for me is, why?" Mason sees an opportunity for "awe and excitement about mass transit systems as a source of unexplored and phenomenal biodiversity." Newly discovered species have potential for drug research, he says, and wide-scale mapping and monitoring of urban microbiomes would be a boon for public health, helping researchers spot emerging pathogens early.
The Boring Company Tests Its 'Teslas In Tunnels' System In Las Vegas
Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from The Verge:
Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June. Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels -- a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.
The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it's not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half. One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It's a tight fit. There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked.
Epic Games Launches Unreal Engine 5 Early Access, Shows Massive 3D Scenes
After years of work, Epic Games is
launching early access for game developers for Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company's tools for making games with highly realistic 3D animations. VentureBeat reports:
Unreal Engine 5, which will officially ship in 2022, is the company's crowning technical achievement. The early access build will let game developers start testing features and prototyping their upcoming games. Epic isn't saying how long this took or how many employees are working on it, but it's a safe bet that a large chunk of those devs are involved in Unreal Engine 5. It's been seven years since the last engine shipped. Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said it will be effortless for game developers to use groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, which provide a generational leap in visual fidelity. The new World Partition system enables the creation of expansive worlds with scalable content.
Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences."
You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X
here on YouTube.
German Scientists Identify Possible Cause of Vaccine Blood Clots
Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Telegraph:
Scientists in Germany believe they have discovered why the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccines cause potentially fatal blood clots in rare cases, and claim the issue can be fixed with a minor adjustment. The authors of a new study claim their findings show that it is not the key component of the vaccines that cause the clotting, but a separate vector virus that is used to deliver them to the body (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). Both the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs use a modified adenovirus, similar to the common cold virus, to deliver the spike protein of SarsCov2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The scientists claim the delivery mechanism means the spike protein is sent into the cell nucleus rather than the cellular fluid, where the virus usually generates proteins. In rare cases, they argue, parts of the spike protein can splice inside the nucleus, creating mutant versions which do not bind to the cell membrane where immunization takes place, but are secreted into the body, where they can cause blood clots.
These claims are only one of a number of hypotheses currently being explored on why the jabs cause blood clots in some people. A rival German study led by Prof Andreas Greinacher of Greifswald University Hospital claimed the clots were being caused by EDTA, a chemical used as a preservative in the AstraZeneca vaccine. In a two-step process, the vaccine can cause an overreaction by the immune system in some people which causes too many platelets to form in the blood, Prof Greinacher argues. EDTA can cause the cells in blood vessels to become "leaky," causing platelets and proteins to flood through the body, triggering a massive immune reaction that can cause the blood clots.
A third German study released in preprint this week by scientists at Ulm University Medical Centre claims to have found unusually high levels of proteins in the AstraZeneca vaccine which it is theorized could be behind the clots. "The often-observed strong clinical reaction one or two days after vaccination is likely associated with the detected protein impurities," the authors of the study wrote. The type of proteins involved "are known to affect innate and acquired immune responses and to intensify existing inflammatory reactions," Prof Stefan Kochanek, the study leader, said. "They have also been linked to autoimmune reactions."
Tech Liability Shield Has No Place in Trade Deals, Groups Say
A coalition of internet accountability groups is warning the Biden administration
against including liability protections for tech companies in future trade agreements, saying that could hamstring efforts to hold platforms responsible for user content. From a report:
In a letter sent to President Joe Biden on Thursday, the organizations said including a legal shield in trade deals like the 2018 U.S.-Mexico-Canada accord "reflects a broad effort by the big tech platforms to use 'trade negotiations' to limit domestic policy options."
The letter was signed by 16 public interest groups focused on issues such as civil rights, democracy and the market power of tech platforms, including Public Citizen, Color of Change and the Center for Digital Democracy. The coalition came together as the advocates observed how a ratified trade deal could bake in -- and export -- increasingly controversial legal protections for internet companies, said Morgan Harper, a policy director at the American Economic Liberties Project, which also signed the letter. The groups are "sounding the alarm about this tactic by Big Tech to undermine the inevitability of domestic regulation that's coming their way," Harper said. "We expect that this will be a priority for the Biden administration."
Colorado Ditches SAT, ACT and Legacy Admissions For Public Colleges
Colorado has become the
first state to ban "legacy" admissions, a practice that gives preference to certain applicants based on their familial relationship to alumni of that institution. "The governor also
signed a bill that removes a requirement that public colleges consider SAT or ACT scores for freshmen, though the new law still allows students to submit test scores if they wish," adds NPR. From the report:
Both moves are aimed at making higher education access more equitable. According to the legislation, 67% of middle- to high-income students in Colorado enroll in bachelor's degree programs straight from high school, while 47% of low-income students do. There are also major differences when it comes to race, with white students far more likely to enroll in college.
Legacy admissions have long been a target for reform. In a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed, 42% of private institutions and 6% of public institutions said they consider legacy status as a factor in admissions. Some of the nation's largest public universities do not consider legacy, including both the University of California and the California State University systems. However, private colleges in California have reported using legacy as a way to encourage philanthropic giving and donations.
During the pandemic, many colleges backed off on using SAT and ACT scores in admissions. Research has shown -- and lawsuits have argued -- that the tests, long used to measure aptitude for college, are far more connected to family income and don't provide meaningful information about a student's ability to succeed in college. Wealthier families are also more likely to pay for test prep courses, or attend schools with curricula that focus on the exams.
Cox Appeals $1 Billion Piracy Liability Verdict To 'Save the Internet'
Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications
lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels. Now
it's appealing it. From a report:
Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages. Heavily disappointed by the decision, Cox later asked the court to set the jury verdict aside and decide the issue directly. In addition, the company argued that the "shockingly excessive" damages should be lowered. Both requests were denied by the court, which upheld the original damages award.
Despite the setbacks, Cox isn't giving up. The company believes that the district court's ruling isn't just a disaster for Internet providers. If it stands, the verdict will have dramatic consequences for the general public as well. This week the ISP submitted its opening brief at the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, hoping to reverse the lower court's judgment. The filing begins by placing the lawsuit in a historical context. "The music industry is waging war on the internet," Cox's lawyers write. First, the music companies went after thousands of file-sharers and software companies such as Napster. When those tactics didn't deliver the desired result, Internet providers became a target.
A Disturbing, Viral Twitter Thread Reveals How AI-Powered Insurance Can Go Wrong
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox:
Lemonade, the fast-growing, machine learning-powered insurance app, put out a real lemon of a Twitter thread on Monday with a proud declaration that its AI analyzes videos of customers when determining if their claims are fraudulent. The company has been trying to explain itself and its business model -- and fend off serious accusations of bias, discrimination, and general creepiness -- ever since. [...] Over a series of seven tweets, Lemonade claimed that it gathers more than 1,600 "data points" about its users -- "100X more data than traditional insurance carriers," the company claimed. The thread didn't say what those data points are or how and when they're collected, simply that they produce "nuanced profiles" and "remarkably predictive insights" which help Lemonade determine, in apparently granular detail, its customers' "level of risk." Lemonade then provided an example of how its AI "carefully analyzes" videos that it asks customers making claims to send in "for signs of fraud," including "non-verbal cues." Traditional insurers are unable to use video this way, Lemonade said, crediting its AI for helping it improve its loss ratios: that is, taking in more in premiums than it had to pay out in claims. Lemonade used to pay out a lot more than it took in, which the company said was "friggin terrible." Now, the thread said, it takes in more than it pays out.
The Twitter thread made the rounds to a horrified and growing audience, drawing the requisite comparisons to the dystopian tech television series Black Mirror and prompting people to ask if their claims would be denied because of the color of their skin, or if Lemonade's claims bot, "AI Jim," decided that they looked like they were lying. What, many wondered, did Lemonade mean by "non-verbal cues?" Threats to cancel policies (and screenshot evidence from people who did cancel) mounted. By Wednesday, the company walked back its claims, deleting the thread and replacing it with a new Twitter thread and blog post. You know you've really messed up when your company's apology Twitter thread includes the word "phrenology." "The Twitter thread was poorly worded, and as you note, it alarmed people on Twitter and sparked a debate spreading falsehoods," a spokesperson for Lemonade told Recode. "Our users aren't treated differently based on their appearance, disability, or any other personal characteristic, and AI has not been and will not be used to auto-reject claims."
The company also maintains that it doesn't profit from denying claims and that it takes a flat fee from customer premiums and uses the rest to pay claims. Anything left over goes to charity (the company says it donated $1.13 million in 2020). But this model assumes that the customer is paying more in premiums than what they're asking for in claims. So, what's really going on here? According to Lemonade, the claim videos customers have to send are merely to let them explain their claims in their own words, and the "non-verbal cues" are facial recognition technology used to make sure one person isn't making claims under multiple identities. Any potential fraud, the company says, is flagged for a human to review and make the decision to accept or deny the claim. AI Jim doesn't deny claims. The blog post also didn't address -- nor did the company answer Recode's questions about -- how Lemonade's AI and its many data points are used in other parts of the insurance process, like determining premiums or if someone is too risky to insure at all.
Industry Groups Sue To Stop Florida's New Social Media Law
Two tech industry organizations are
suing Florida over its
newly passed rules for social networks,
claiming it violates private companies' constitutional rights. The Verge reports:
SB 7072, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed earlier this week, restricts how large social apps and websites can moderate user-generated content. It makes banning any Florida political candidate or "journalistic enterprise" unlawful, lets users sue if they believe they were banned without sufficient reason, requires an option to "opt out" of sorting algorithms, and places companies that break the law on an "antitrust violator blacklist" that bars them from doing business with public entities in Florida. Notably, it includes an exception for companies that operate a theme park.
NetChoice and the CCIA say SB 7072 conflicts with both constitutional protections and federal Section 230 rules. "As private businesses, Plaintiffs' members have the right to decide what content is appropriate for their sites and platforms," their complaint says. "The Act requires members to display and prioritize user-generated content that runs counter to their terms, policies, and business practices; content that will likely offend and repel their users and advertisers; and even content that is unlawful, dangerous to public health and national security, and grossly inappropriate for younger audiences." The lawsuit claims Florida lawmakers and DeSantis specifically tailored the law to punish services whose moderation policies they disagreed with, while adding the arbitrary theme park exception to pacify Disney, Comcast NBCUniversal, and a handful of other big companies.
Immunity To the Coronavirus May Persist for Years, Scientists Find
Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime,
improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived. From a report:
Together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and who were later immunized will not need boosters. Vaccinated people who were never infected most likely will need the shots, however, as will a minority who were infected but did not produce a robust immune response. Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that retain a memory of the virus persist in the bone marrow and may churn out antibodies whenever needed, according to one of the studies, published on Monday in the journal Nature. The other study, posted online at BioRxiv, a site for biology research, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least 12 months after the initial infection.
"The papers are consistent with the growing body of literature that suggests that immunity elicited by infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lived," said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. The studies may soothe fears that immunity to the virus is transient, as is the case with coronaviruses that cause common colds. But those viruses change significantly every few years, Dr. Hensley said. "The reason we get infected with common coronaviruses repetitively throughout life might have much more to do with variation of these viruses rather than immunity," he said. In fact, memory B cells produced in response to infection with SARS-CoV-2 and enhanced with vaccination are so potent that they thwart even variants of the virus, negating the need for boosters, according to Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York who led the study on memory maturation.
Humans Probably Can't Live Longer Than 150 Years, New Research Finds
Science is once again casting doubt on the notion that we could live to be nearly as old as the biblical Methuselah or Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man. From a report:
New research research [PDF] from Singapore-base biotech company Gero looks at how well the human body bounces back from disease, accidents or just about anything else that puts stress on its systems. This basic resilience declines as people age, with an 80-year-old requiring three times as long to recover from stresses as a 40-year-old on average. This should make sense if you've ever known an elderly person who has taken a nasty fall. Recovery from such a spill can be lif- threatening for a particularly frail person, whereas a similar fall might put a person half as old out of commission for just a short time and teenagers might simply dust themselves off and keep going.
Extrapolate this decline further, and human body resilience is completely gone at some age between 120 and 150, according to new analysis performed by the researchers. In other words, at some point your body loses all ability to recover from pretty much any potential stressor. The researchers arrived at this conclusion by looking at health data for large groups from the US, the UK and Russia. They looked at blood cell counts as well as step counts recorded by wearables. As people experienced different stressors, fluctuations in blood cell and step counts showed that recovery time grew longer as individuals grew older. "Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration," Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero, said in a statement.
Indonesian Government Blocks Hacking Forum After Data Leak
The Indonesian government has
blocked access inside its borders to Raid Forums, a well-known cybercrime hub, in an attempt to limit the spread of a sensitive data leak. From a report:
The ban, which the government wants internet service providers to implement, comes after a threat actor claimed in a Raid Forums post on May 12 to be in possession and selling the personal data of 279 million Indonesians. The threat actor, an individual known as Kotz, leaked a sample of one million citizens' details to prove their claims. The leaked data included citizen names, national ID numbers, tax registration information, mobile phone numbers, and for some citizens also came with headshots and salary-related information.
A Super Blood Moon Dazzles Earthlings
Australians were among those lucky enough to see it on Wednesday evening, a rare astronomical event marked by a dazzling array of sunset colors like red and burnt orange: a "
super blood moon." From a report:
From Brazil to Alaska, California to Indonesia, people with the right view of the celestial phenomenon marveled as their moon, usually a predictable, pale, Swiss-cheese-like round in the sky, was transformed into a fierce, red giant. As one Twitter user, words failing, put it: "Man I'm in love with this urghhh." The striking display was the result of two simultaneous phenomena: a supermoon (when the moon lines up closer than normal to our planet and appears to be bigger than usual), combined with a total lunar eclipse, or blood moon (when the moon sits directly in the Earth's shadow and is struck by light filtered through the Earth's atmosphere).
"A little bit of sunlight skims the Earth's atmosphere," said Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist based at the Australian National University in Canberra, the country's capital. He said this creates the effect of "sunrise and sunset being projected onto the moon." Depending on your vantage point and the amount of dust, clouds and pollution in the atmosphere, Dr. Tucker added, the moon appears pink-orange or burned red or even a brown color. "A super poo moon doesn't really have the same ring," he said. Sky gazers in eastern Australia caught the eclipse beginning around 6:47 p.m. local time Wednesday, with it peaking by 9:18 p.m., while those in Los Angeles were to see the action beginning at 1:47 a.m. Pacific time. In Australia, some took to the skies on a special flight to see the supermoon. It left Sydney about 7:45 p.m. and was to return later that evening. Vanessa Moss, an astronomer with Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, and the guest expert on the flight, said this kind of phenomenon was exciting because it was accessible.
Clearview AI Hit With Sweeping Legal Complaints Over Controversial Face Scraping in Europe
Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that
they've filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. From a report:
The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company's method of documenting and collecting data -- including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites -- violates European privacy laws. New York-based Clearview claims to have built "the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images."
PI, NYOB, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, and Homo Digitalis all claim that Clearview's data collection goes beyond what the average user would expect when using services like Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. "Extracting our unique facial features or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users," said PI legal officer Ioannis Kouvakas in a joint statement.
Twitter Decries India Intimidation, Will Press for Changes
Twitter called the visit by police to its Indian offices on Monday
a form of intimidation in its first public comments on the matter. From a report:
The social network reiterated its commitment to India as a vital market, but signaled its growing concern about the government's recent actions and potential threats to freedom of expression that may result. The company also joined other international businesses and organizations in criticizing new IT rules and regulations that it said "inhibit free, open public conversation." Twitter will continue its dialog with the Indian government for a collaborative approach, while also advocating for change to the regulations.
The San Francisco-based company has disagreed with local government officials on a number of fronts, deeming some enforcement orders to be improper curbs on free speech. Most recently, Twitter marked several posts by accounts associated with India's ruling party as containing manipulated media -- they purported to show a strategy document from the opposition party whose authenticity has been disputed -- which prompted the police visit to its offices late Monday.
Coinbase Launches 'Fact Check,' a Section on its Blog To Combat Misinformation about the Company and Crypto World
Crypto giant Coinbase on Thursday
launched its own media operation. The company is calling it "
Fact Check" -- and giving it a dedicated section on its blog. In a blog post, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said the firm, which recently went public, will use Fact Check to combat misinformation and mischaracterizations about Coinbase or crypto being shared in the world.
"Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures. This doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest," wrote Armstrong, who in the post outlines in detail his thinking behind launching Fact Check. An excerpt from the blogpost:
In the future, we will need to move beyond fact checking, and start creating more of our own original content to communicate with our audience, and tell the stories of crypto that are happening all over the world. Many of these stories are not being told by traditional media. Fact checking is still largely reactive, but we need to move to a more proactive stance on content creation to have a true media arm. Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles. Long term, the real source of truth will be what can be found on-chain, with a cryptographic signature attached.
Google Says Rowhammer Attacks Are Gaining Range as RAM is Getting Smaller
A team of Google security researchers said they discovered a
new way to perform Rowhammer attacks against computer memory (RAM) cards that broaden the attack's initial impact. From a report:
First detailed in 2014, Rowhammer was a ground-breaking attack that exploited the design of modern RAM cards, where memory cells are stored in grid-like arrangements. The basic principle behind Rowhammer was that a malicious app could perform rapid read/write operations on a row of memory cells. As the cells would shift their values from 0 to 1 and vice versa in a very small time window, this would generate small electromagnetic fields inside the row of "hammered" memory cells. The result of these fields were errors in nearby memory rows that sometimes flipped bits and altered adjacent data. [...] In a research paper published this week, a team of five Google security researchers took Rowhammer attacks to a new level. In a new attack variation named Half-Double, researchers said they managed to carry out a Rowhammer attack that caused bit flips at a distance of two rows from the âoehammeredâ row instead of just one.
Facebook Ends Ban On Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made
Facebook has ended its ban on posts asserting Covid-19 was
man-made or manufactured, a policy shift that reflects a deepening debate over the origins of the pandemic that was first identified in Wuhan, China, almost 18 months ago. An anonymous reader shares a report:
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report. "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," Facebook said in a statement on its website Wednesday. President Biden on Wednesday ordered a U.S. intelligence inquiry into the origins of the virus. The White House has come under pressure to conduct its own investigation after China told the World Health Organization that it considered Beijing's part of the investigation complete, calling for efforts to trace the virus's origins to shift into other countries.
Automation Puts a Premium on Decision-Making Jobs
A new paper shows that as automation has reduced the number of rote jobs, it has led to an increase in the proportion and
value of occupations that involve decision-making. From a report:
Automation and AI will shape the labor market, putting a premium -- at least for now -- on workers who can make decisions on the fly, while eroding the value of routine jobs. David Deming, a political economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, analyzed labor data over the past half-century and found that the share of all U.S. jobs requiring decision-making rose from 6% in 1960 to 34% in 2018, with nearly half the increase occurring since 2007.
Partially as a result, a greater share of wages is going to management and management-related occupations, more than doubling since 1960 to 32% -- a trend that is more pronounced in high-growth industries. This shift has also reinforced generational disparity in the labor market. Getting better at making decisions requires experience, and experience requires time on the job. Largely as a result, career earnings growth in the U.S. more than doubled between 1960 and 2017, and the age of peak earnings increased from the late 30s to the mid-50s.
VMware Warns of Critical Remote Code Execution Hole In vCenter
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet:
VMware is urging its vCenter users to update vCenter Server versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 immediately, after a pair of vulnerabilities were reported privately to the company. The most pressing is CVE-2021-21985, which relates to a remote code execution vulnerability in a vSAN plugin enabled by default in vCenter that an attacker could use to run whatever they wished on the underlying host machine, provided they can access port 443. Even if users do not use vSAN, they are likely to be affected because the vSAN plugin is enabled by default. "This needs your immediate attention if you are using vCenter Server," VMware said in a blog post.
The second vulnerability, CVE-2021-21986, would allow an attacker to perform actions allowed by plugins without authentication. "The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a vulnerability in a vSphere authentication mechanism for the Virtual SAN Health Check, Site Recovery, vSphere Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Cloud Director Availability plug-ins," VMware said. In terms of CVSSv3 scores, CVE-2021-21985 hit an 9.8, while CVE-2021-21986 was scored as 6.5.
Dutch Court Rules Oil Giant Shell Must Cut Carbon Emissions By 45% By 2030
A Dutch court on Wednesday ruled oil giant Royal Dutch Shell
must reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels. That's a much higher reduction than the company's current aim of lowering its emissions by 20% by 2030. CNBC reports:
Shell's current climate strategy states that the company is aiming to become a net-zero emissions business by 2050, with the company setting a target of cutting its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2035. A spokesperson for Shell said the company "fully expect to appeal today's disappointing court decision." "We are investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy, including electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, renewables and biofuels," the spokesperson said via email. "We want to grow demand for these products and scale up our new energy businesses even more quickly."
The lawsuit was filed in April 2019 by seven activist groups -- including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace -- on behalf of 17,200 Dutch citizens. Court summons claimed Shell's business model "is endangering human rights and lives" by posing a threat to the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. Roger Cox, a lawyer for environmental activists in the case, said in a statement that the ruling marked "a turning point in history" and could have major consequences for other big polluters.
Long Working Hours Lead To a Rise In Premature Deaths, WHO Says
Long working hours are
leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, according to a
new study by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. The Seattle Times reports:
Working more than 55 hours a week in a paid job resulted in 745,000 deaths in 2016, the study estimated, up from 590,000 in 2000. About 398,000 of the deaths in 2016 were because of stroke and 347,000 because of heart disease. Both physiological stress responses and changes in behavior (such as an unhealthy diet, poor sleep and reduced physical activity) are "conceivable" reasons that long hours have a negative impact on health, the authors suggest.
Other takeaways from the study:
- Working more than 55 hours per week is dangerous. It is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of heart disease compared with working 35-40 hours per week.
- About 9% of the global population works long hours. In 2016, an estimated 488 million people worked more than 55 hours per week.
- Long hours are more dangerous than other occupational hazards. In all three years that the study examined (2000, 2010 and 2016), working long hours led to more disease than any other occupational risk factor, including exposure to carcinogens and the nonuse of seat belts at work. And the health toll of overwork worsened over time: From 2000 to 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease because of working long hours increased 42%, and from stroke 19%.
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